I'm American and was still completely surprised! I don't even pronounce them alike.

I like 'u's, too.

This makes me curious about among vs amoung. I always want to use the 'u', but have always been taught that it's wrong. The spellchecker in this reply even flags amoung as being the misspelling between the two.

Google wasn't any help just now, because I get gobs of results for both spellings, yet no article addressing this. Hmm.