Separated by a common language

I've been in blog-paralysis because everything I want to blog about would take a Very Long Time to write about and I'm supposed to be writing about other things. But along came Mrs Redboots on the Lynneguist Facebook page, making me blog by saying an oft-repeated falsehood about American English.  I don't mean to disrespect Mrs Redboots. Plenty of people believe this one. Even people who were educated at Cambridge and who are given Guardian podcasts to spout about American English. But I...

A short post, but this headline (courtesy of this tweeter) is worth reproducing: The headline is about an American basketball player, Jeremy Lin, who is all the rage these days. The problem is that the headline would be rather upsetting reading for a BrE-speaking Lin fan.  In BrE to top oneself is a colloquial way of saying 'to kill oneself'.  But it was the AmE meaning 'to surpass oneself/one's previous achievements' that was clearly intended by the New York Times.  It's...

Robert W. M. Greaves wrote to me (in July 2010--my [seemingly orig. AmE] backlog is huge!): I was somewhat surprised yesterday to be asked by an American woman (mid 70s from Montana) what more haste, less speed meant. She had never heard the expression before. I checked with another American friend (woman from Kentucky, in her late 50s) who also didn't really know what it meant but was aware of some younger people occasionally using it. For me (and I would have thought most people in...

Layah wrote to me about a year ago with this question: In America when you are trying to time counting seconds you often say Mississippi in between each number: "One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..." Do they have something like that in England' When Layah wrote to me,  I took the matter to Twitter, asking people to let me know what they use. And so if this post seems like a repeat, you may have read about this already. I was surprised to learn that I hadn't ...

Mwncïod ? on Twitter asked:AmE/BrE diff' Watching US sit-com "Big Bang Theory" character says "catch/caught a break" vs BrE "get/got a break"?Get a break is not so much BrE as general English. Break meaning 'a bit of good luck; a chance' is originally AmE and continues to be used there with get. The Corpus of Historical American English has its first instance of catch/caught a break in 1986, and it gained ground through the 1990s and 2000s. But it is still far outnumbered by...

JL in New York wrote recently with this observation: Last week's Economist included an article ("Executive Pay: Money for Nothing'", in the Britain section) that begins: Hard work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons believe the link between graft and gain has broken down. The word that struck me was "graft" -- in my AmE usage, it can only mean "corruption", not "hard work".  (Other than horticulturally.) The link between graft (AmE) and gain has, sadly, not...

Continuing on the backlog of emailed requests, Ron Shields writes (well, wrote--in August) with: I have noticed football commentators in Britain using the phrase just about when a player is successful as in "He just about made that pass". In AmE just about would mean "close but no cigar". Indeed, for the 'did make it, but only by a small margin' meaning, AmE could just use just: He just made it into the goal. But we might even avoid that, since that could also mean 'a moment ago'. This...

Now that the Term from Hell has finished, I'd like to get back to blogging on an at-least-weekly basis.  Toward(s) this end, I've stuck my cursor into the e-mailbox that holds the 'potential bloggables'. Since it's nearly midnight as I start this, I consider myself very lucky to have blindly picked one that I've mostly done before. [Editor's note: but since it was interrupted by a conversation about applying for primary school places for my daughter and some laundry, I'm still getting to...

Many thanks to the intrepid readers who have nominated words and phrases for SbaCL Words of the Year this year. Yesterday, kettling was announced as the BrE-to-AmE WotY. Tonight's post does the other (AmE-to-BrE) half of the job.  Unusually, both Words of the Year come from readers' nominations. Am I getting less bossy and opinionated and more generous in my old age' We can only hope so. And so the AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year is (you're going to hate this): FTW Yes, you are going to...

This year, I'm spreading the SbaCL Words-of Year announcement into two posts -- partly to make up for hardly blogging at all this autumn and partly so that I can go to bed tonight.  So, starting with the BrE-to-AmE import of the year, I give you:  kettling I'm thinking of it here mostly as a gerund (a verb made into a noun by adding -ing), but, of course, the verb itself has been imported too: to kettle - '(for police) to herd protesters/demonstrators into a restricted, exitless...