Why cannot Americans say "laboratory"?

Well, actually, don't Brits really say "laborat'ry"? It seems that each pronunciation swallows a syllable--it's just that we don't all swallow the same one. However, some Americans do pronounce that word the British way. And some of us also say "comfortable"--one stressed syllable followed by three unstressed ones.

isn't that where you go to take a wizzer?

Why were the British so infatuated with the French in the 1700s that they added the letter U to many words such as colour, flavour and neighbour? Then they further bemoan the the US spelling does not include the extra letter U and is not proper French, whoops English.

We speak American, and given the wide range of accents in your tiny country you're the last people to not understand it.

There is more than one valid way to pronounce it. Now piss off.

Why cannot people from the UK grasp that the USA is a large sovereign nation, with a language that differs from yours? The correct pronunciations and spellings of words in our language are just as acceptable as the correct pronunciations and spellings in yours. Indeed, in our own country, the American English spellings are more acceptable.

Why can't the Brits learn to spell?

They can, they just don't. Its called dialects and adds to the richness of language.

And their version sounds way better.

I just shorten it even more and say "lab" :)

Americans can say it, and many say it quite carefully. I wonder why RP Brits say three syllable Lit Ra CHOOR instead of four syllable literature. Probably for a similar reason. Chumbley for Cholmondeley or Sinjin for Saint John puzzles me. Even people from Savannah sometimes say Tolliver instead of Taliaferro.

http://taliaferrocountyga.org/.

we just don't really fully pronounce the "o" in "labor"
it ends up being kind of like "labratory" lol
it's just different ways of pronunciaton...

The "o" is silent. Either that, or la-bra-tory is just the way we say it.

It doesn't matter, as long as the meaning is conveyed and received.

Anyone that has a accent called cockney has no right to criticize pronunciation.
It sounds like the UK version of ebonics.

The same reason we cannot say Con-cord. We say Conquered. It is how accents work.

Well, the word "laboratory" is derived from the breed name of the first chemist's favorite dog (=a Labrador retriever), so it's natural that we pronounce it that way.

I personally find it embarrassing the way English people are always talking about toilets. I think they could be a bit more discreet.

Dexter can

Mainly because they don't get the confusion! People from the US do not use the word 'lavatory'. They might say 'john' or, as I discovered when flying over the Pacific and the pilot asked us to fasten our seat belts because we were flying into turbulence, a US guy got up from his seat. The Hostess asked him to remain seated and he said, 'I have to go to the bathroom.' I've flown three times round the globe and I have never been in a plane on which the WC was big enough to swing a new-born kitten in!

Aluminium is the word, but we say aluminum. I don't know why. Also - cumfterbull, not comfortable. Maybe you can tell me why Brits insist on saying maths, when math is a collective noun? Saying "can you help me with my maths?" is like saying "do I need a baths?"

Unfortunately, it's the same with "comfortable". Americans just say "comf-terble". I guess it's just how we're raised to say so? I just force myself to include all of the vowels...