Specialty Speciality and Specialness

Ergh. I've been staring at the word Specialty all day while updating contact information for the gas project I am working on and just now I finally got to sending out the email to the 30 or so suppliers I've chased all day. And believe you me, I looked and looked through the email, saw nothing amiss, and sent it out. Composed initially by my colleague and teammate, and altered twice by me, I thought to myself, in lower case letters (because one is always more interesting when one thinks in lowercase), 'there ain't no mistakes here, no siree.' But then when the email showed up in my boss' inbox, and she sits right behind me, I noticed it said 'speciality gases' instead of 'specialty gases.' mortified i asked her if there was any chance speciality was the proper British way to say it. She abstained from answering, not wanting to incriminate herself, having been burned before in the past what with the different way her people and my people flaunt the English language to each other.

I looked it up on the internet (oh the internet) and both words DO exist. Slightly different uses, of course. But I was not necessarily wrong in not catching and correcting that extra i. All I can say is that the word special has ABSOLUTELY NO MEANING for me whatsoever, and I do not think it will for a very long time.