Separated by a Common Language

I (thoroughly English, living in the US) rather like ‘I could care less’. It is surely ellipsis for something like ‘I could care less, but it wouldn't be worth the effort’. Or perhaps it's a weird form of litotes:

It's a bit ironic that so many British people berate Americans for their supposed inability to understand sarcasm, and then have a go at "I could care less".

This may be work in progress.

re Scotch-Irish

The OED carries alternatives but cross references them thus

Scottish-Irish = Scots-Irish cf Scotch-Irish

Scots-Irish
2. Of or belonging to the Ulster Scots (Ulster Scot n. 1); descended from the Ulster Scots but living elsewhere, esp. in North America. Also: of mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry.
The more usual term in North America is Scotch-Irish adj. 2.

When the Scotch-Irish originally left Ireland, it would have been even more salient than today that they were the descendants of settlers from Scotland.

(The original Scots came from ireland, but this is book history — without any folk memory.)

I don't have access to the OED (wish I did) but I can do a quick check using etymonline.com.

"38. My worst horror is expiration, as in "expiration date". Whatever happened to expiry? Christina Vakomies, London"

According to etymonline "expiration" in the sense of "termination, close, or end" is attested from the 1560s and "expiry" meaning "close or termination" is attested from 1752.

How is this an Americanism?

Just to note--the first five comments here come from a premature publishing of this post, when only the first item had been responded to. Thanks for your eagerness to contribute! Anonymous, you deserve some credit for influencing my response to the last item--give me a name/handle and I'll credit you properly.

Isn't the problem with how one says 1,500,000 caused by grammatical uncertainty and nothing to do with different sorts of English on different sides of the Atlantic? In 'a million miles' is 'million' an adjective that behaves oddly or a noun that behaves oddly?

You can't say 'a fifteen miles'. Nor is there an ordinary counting context where you can say 'a fifteen'. Likewise, you can't say 'a fifteen and a half miles'. You can only say 'fifteen and a half miles'. So it looks to my non-linguistically trained eyes as though 'fifteen' is an adjective.

You can, though, use 'a million' and 'a half' on their own, in which case they are more like nouns. 'Hundred', 'thousand' and the rarer 'lakh' appear to behave in a similar way.

I prefer 'one and a half million' and I can see that 'a million and a half' logically should mean 1,000,000.5 but I'd not hear it that way. It isn't causing confusion.

Much more hazardous is the need to check whether people understand the same thing by words like 'billion' and 'half five'.

Anyway, the one that really sets my teeth on edge is 'one half of one per cent', as in 'interest rates have risen by one half of one per cent'. It may be a bit unclear what is the correct way of saying this. I think it should be 'half a per-cent', and to avoid confusion will accept 'by half a percentage point' - but never 'one half of one per cent'. It's a nonsense. Nobody would say anything other than 'three and a half per cent'.

It would be easy for me, as an English person, to assume this outrage is a nasty transatlantic immigrant which I can condemn with effortless old world superiority. But I don't think it is. The only place I've heard it - far too often - is on the BBC. I assume that's the source of this horror and it ought to know better.

Sterling work again. There appears to be a strong correlation between linguistic peeving and being unwilling to do a little research. I suppose people prefer to hold on to their pet hates and poke them now and then like a sore tooth, rather than risk having them dissolve into relative meaninglessness.

On a side note, the phrase "double-u-eks-why-and-zee" gave me a moment's pause; being Irish, I'm used to sounding and hearing the h in wh-.

Madam Author

I don't have access to the OED (wish I did)

That's what I thought until somebody told me about access through local libraries. If you're very lucky (as I am) you have an online membership number for use with your local library — which can also be used to log on to OED Online.

The OED entry for burglarise starts with a quote from 1871 describing the word as 'a Yankeeism'. However, it's presented as forming a set with two words that we Brits now take entirely for granted: donated and collided.

(Actually, looking elsewhere in the OED indicates that the 1871 writer must have been wrong about collide, although donate does seem to be a nineteenth century coning.)

The dislike of "Scotch-Irish" might be the fact that "Scotch" and "Erse" as terms for the Scottish and Irish have both ridden the dysphemism treadmill - they're considered offensive in the UK, and younger generations won't even have heard them as a result.

@Dru: If in the middle of airing your pet peeve you find yourself writing It may be a bit unclear what is the correct way of saying this. I think it should be [...] then you may be very sure that you have lost the battle.

Yes - Scots-Irish is surely the preferable term Scotch, as I understand it, refers to whisky or sticky tape, but never, ever to people (one is Scottish or Scots, or even a Scot).

An Americano is so not the same thing as a filter coffee - pet peeve of my son-in-law; an Americano is a diluted expresso and tastes quite different. I like both!

Mrs Redboots

Does anybody really use the term Scots-Irish? Surely we'd do better to use Scotch-Irish for those who went to America and Ulster Scots for those who stayed behind.

Of those people saying "I could care less", what percentage are thinking

"Well, I ought logically to say 'I couldn't care less, but I think I'll be IRONIC and say the opposite, heh heh..."

My guess: 0.001%


The remaining 99.999% are merely repeating an opaque idiom whose origin was doubtless phonological erosion of the unstressed "'nt" syllable of "I couldn't care less".

@David Crosbie:

I don't have access to the OED (my local library is too stingy). Does it really have an entry for "burglarise" rather than "burglarize"? That would be a reversal of its practi{c|s}e in all the other "-i{z|s}e" words.

vp

I always understood that it was an OUP thing. Other publishers prefer -ise on the whole, and so do I.

Of the six quotes in the entry, one is spelled burglarise:

1883 Talmage in Chr. Globe 13 Sept. 829/2
The man who had a contempt for a petty theft will burglarise the wheat-bin of a nation.

@David Crosbie:

Yes, but doesn't the OED only give the "-ize" forms in its headwords?

In which case it's inaccurate to say that the OED has an entry for "burglarise": it doesn't.

"48. "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you?"

I've been known to say "I didn't get this for free, but I got it for cheap." All right, it's a lightly humorous phrasing, but it's certainly understandable.

Anyway, English is hardly bound by perfect logic.

I'm surprised you didn't point out that "that'll learn you" is alive and well in certain British dialects, though I agree that it in contemporary American use it has the element of playfulness/intentional grammatical incorrectness to soften the sentiment.

As for the sarcasm of "I could care less", it's certainly there even if some uses are a result of unthinking repetition. I was a bit shocked to hear Americans accused of being abject failures at irony and sarcasm, as I find it very common in humor and general social interactions. (It is, perhaps, something that has more cultural variation in the US, but it's certainly a near-default mode of communication for many Americans.)

Regarding the possible sarcasm of "Could care less", I don't think a speaker needs to be aware of the sarcasm of a common phrase. I might use "Fat Chance" and unless I actively think about it, I wouldn't know that I am being sarcastic, but the meaning of the phrase being the opposite of what it actually says is well understood.

Likewise when someone is complaining and I respond "Tell me about it!" I actually mean that they don't need to tell me about it, because I already know. This meaning is well known, but it's paradoxical relationship to the actual words spoken is not thought about when said.

I heard someone say they could care less on TV the other day and the only reason I noticed it was because of this BBC list. What the speaker meant was instantly understood.

Of course this is just my unofficial thinking, I am by no means a linguist.

vp

In which case it's inaccurate to say that the OED has an entry for "burglarise": it doesn't.

I could care less.

At the risk of saying the obvious, language changes. Many people in England and other parts of the UK use American expressions. Many people in the US use British expressions. Do speakers of one dialect use more of the others'? Does it matter? I think it only matters to peevologists.

How footling most of those objections are! Most of them are hardly worth answering. As for, "My worst horror is expiration, as in "expiration date", that person must have led an unusually sheltered life.
"Scotch-Irish": if that is what those people call themselves, then that is up to them, and Scotchmen in Scotland can simply use the expression or not, as it pleases them.

"It may be a bit unclear what is the correct way of saying this. I think it should be [...] then you may be very sure that you have lost the battle."

No. I'm being deferentially polite, but I actually think I'm right.

Going back to one of the other phrases under discussion, I've certainly heard 'learn' used as a transitive verb more as 'teach' is normally used in RP. But I'd regard it as rustic, pertaining to dialect.

While it's far from my favorite word, 'deliverable' is a specific and useful piece of jargon in politics and diplomacy. It stands for something tangible that will be offered rather than just platitudes or 'moral support'. It can be funding or food aid, for example.

I certainly heard it as often in Whitehall as I did in Washington, DC.

@Dru: All right, then let's try to find out what you meant. I honestly don't know which of the following you would consider correct, incorrect, more correct, less correct ...

half a per-cent
half of a per-cent
one half of a per-cent
half a percent
half of a percent
one half of a percent
half a per cent
half of a per cent
one half of a per cent

Is your main point that "per cent" must be a prepositional phrase rather than a noun?

My own issue here is one that has come up while listening to the radio (so it has nothing to do with spelling differences: percent versus per cent; I never thought of maybe per-cent). I find that some (but not all) news announcers say things like "one half of a percentage point", seemingly careful to avoid using "percent" (never mind how it is spelled) as a noun. This makes the nitpicker in me sit up and take notice that I have sometimes used it as a noun. It also makes the thoughtful person in me sit up and recognize how it could come about that it gets understood as a noun: expressions like "interest rates rates increased by 3 percent" can sound as if they are formed just like "the water rose by 3 feet".

On the whole my view is that through such a process "percent" has morphed into a noun, and there's no point in fighting it, maybe not even any point in resisting a tendency to use it that way myself.

But your issue/complaint/peeve/point may be something rather different.

Even by the not very exacting standards of the BBC comment thread, No. 39, Scotch-Irish, is utter nonsense: cf, for example, Nancy Mitford in Noblesse Oblige (1956) 'I have a game I play with all printers; I write Scotch, it appears in the proofs as Scottish. I correct it back to Scotch. About once in three times I get away with it.'

The Wikipedia article you link to lists two 19th-century citations for "Scots-Irish," but it didn't become really current until the past thirty years or so. I've written a good deal about the Scotch-Irish, and "Scots-Irish" strikes my ear and eye as pedantic, "politically correct" in the silly sense, and linguistically mistaken. However, this is the peeve of an American of a certain age. Rodger Cunningham

My maternal grandfather emigrated from Belfast to the US in the early 20th century. He described his origin as Scotch-Irish. This usage is particularly American and correct in this context, regardless of how Scots call themselves today in the UK.

The earliest use of scotch whisky quoted in the OED is from 1793. The earliest citation of Scotch Irish (with its modern meaning) is from 1690.

Hike also does mean to raise. Hike up a skirt, hike up your pants. Nothing whatsoever to do with hikers. But the complainer certainly was rambling. Get picked up hitch- hiking... Ok, maybe not that one.

Thank you for all this, it's been enlighteningizing.

@Dru I too prefer "one and a half million" to "a million and a half" for 1,500,000, but I am not convinced that the use of "a" has anything to do with the matter. Does "a hundred and a half" mean 150? Nor does the use of "a" have anything to do with which numerals may be nouns and which may be adjectives. Both "fifty" and "a hundred", say, may replace X in "I invited X", "X people", "we were X" (meaning there were X of us).

The analogy with "an hour and a half", "a length and a half" etc. fails because hour and length (in the horse-race sense) are units, which may be qualified by numerals, whereas "a million" is itself a numeral.

Now it would be different if we couldn't say "a hundred people" and "two hundred people" but had to say "a hundred of people" and "two hundreds of people". But we can, so it isn't.

As for "a half of one percent", there's always "a half percent". "Half a percentage point" won't do as a substitute. Percent and percentage points have distinct usages. If a rate goes up from 5% to 6%, it has gone up by one percentage point. That states the amount of the rise. You may also say that it has gone up by 20%. That states the factor by which it has gone up; another way to say the same thing is to say that it has gone up by a fifth.

Richard Sabey

The analogy with "an hour and a half", "a length and a half" etc. fails

Quite clearly it doesn't. You think it should fail, but that's another matter.

One of the things that always amazes me about these discussions is that nearly everyone involved - both the Brits and the Americans - view British English as being "older" than American English. Even Grant Barrett in that BBC piece uses the metaphor of "firstborn sibling", when surely a moment's reflection should reveal that the one is just as old as the other...

"Firstborn" can only be meaningful in the sense that British English existed as an entity before American English did. But the age of both languages - the length of time that they have been developing - is obviously exactly the same, which is why absolutely no one should be suprised to find that some of these Americanisms are older than their British equivalents. If these languages are "sibling children", then they are twins.

I personally don't use "I could care less", being British, but know what it means and assume, for my own purposes, that it is essentially a contraction of "[As if] I could care less" rather than a contraction of "I could[n't] care less".

"Deliverables" seems a perfectly cromulent word. It has a precise meaning in the film industry, for instance - you don't just make a film, you also have to create a bunch of specific deliverables. They're those contractual items a film production has to deliver to a distribution company: various technical film & sound materials, like a cut negative and mixed soundtrack; legal documents such as Chain of Title and proof of rights to talent and music tracks; and publicity materials such as cast and crew and on-shoot photos, biographies, on-set reports.

re: Scotch -v- Scots

"Scotch" should (nowadays, in Scotland) only be used for that which can be bought, such as whisky, pies and politicians.

The Wikipedia article "Scotch (adjective)". seems authoritative.

I would just like to add that (as a Brit) I am appalled by the small-minded, ignorant peeving of (some of) my fellow countrymen.

@ Joe1959:
None of my professors would agree with you. Wikipedia is not to be considered authoritative, ever. It is always to be taken with a grain of salt, until a real authoritative source can be accessed.

If I'd been asked to pick one British publication with standards high enough to preclude Engel's brand of fact-free ranting, it would have been the Financial Times.

Sadly, I would have been wrong.

@vp: Your link didn't work for me, so I searched for Engel's name on FT's website, and found what I believe is what you were linking to--only to be told again that the page is unavailable. Is it working for anyone? Did FT decide it was too silly to post?

Someone with a Scottish accent, referring to the adjective 'Scottish' might appear to be saying something between 'Scorch' and 'Scotch'.

Finally got to the Engel article. http://on.ft.com/rk7qU9 (Free registration required.)

Engel writes:
"In the aftermath of my programme I am now being regularly abused as anti-American, or worse. Rubbish (or trash). I lived there, have many friends there; I adore baseball."

Ah, the ol' "some of my best friends are xx" defen{c/s}e. The 'or worse' he's failed to detail is that he's been accused of being a bad journalist for writing things about language without researching them. Wonder why he didn't mention that part more directly. Hm...

@Lynne:

Sorry: I forgot that the FT tends to put up a paywall. You can usually get past it by using Google News. Try this search".

ø I'd better try and reply. Although the next topic has started, I'm following Lynne's request with the previous one and keeping my reply on this one

First of all, I'm not very interested in spelling and don't care whether per cent is one word, two words or a hyphenated word.

Second, my real objection is to the phrase 'one half of one ....'. As far as I know, nobody describes 1½% as 'one half of three per cent', or 2½% as 'one half of five per cent.

So on your list.

"half a per-cent" - OK
half of a per-cent - possibly just about OK but not really.
"one half of a per-cent" - No
"half a percent" - OK
"half of a percent" - possibly just about OK but not really.
"one half of a percent" - No
"half a per cent" - OK
"half of a per cent" - possibly just about OK but not really.
"one half of a per cent" - No

"Is your main point that "per cent" must be a prepositional phrase rather than a noun?" - No.

You didn't ask, but, if you had done, "half per cent" with or without a hyphen and one word or two, also OK

Re. "Scotch-Irish"

As has already been pointed out, many Scots find the use of "Scotch" in this context derogatory at best. I'm afraid the "you may find it offensive but it's what we've used here for years" argument just doesn't wash. We can all think of derogatory terms for other people, look in the dictionary and find many of them were in common currency for generations, but that doesn't make them any more acceptable today.

Except, Kelv, that there's a big difference between random folks calling Scots people "Scotch" and a specific ethnic group identifying themselves as "Scotch-Irish" when they started doing so before Scotch became the wrong word.

But, in truth, these people aren't Scots, or "Scotch-Irish", but Americans with some (often very distant) Scottish ancestors. If the Scottish part of their family tree was as important to their sense of self as I'm sure they'd claim, then one would expect them to know not to use a term which the majority of those in "the Old Country" found offensive.

@David Crosbie - Thank you for that "Scots/Scotch-Irish" definition! As someone whose family tree includes Scot-Irish (the term I use, as I'm familiar with the "but Scotch is a drink!" objection), Welsh, AND English - among many others(!) - I was brought up with the understanding that my S-I ancestors were Scots who lived in Ireland. Whether I was taught correctly or not, it absolutely is a legitimate term for a historical immigrant group.

@Lynne - I rather love you. It amuses me no end when a Brit complains about some "Americanism" invading the language and it then turns out that the US word is an older, formerly British term (and therefore "more correct").

As others have said, language evolves. To at least some degree, we have to go with the flow and enjoy the flexibility of our shared language. I use a lot of Brit terms because I prefer them; what's the harm in Brits using US terms?

@Kelv: American ethnic politics and British regional/national politics are two different things, and IMHO Americans are under no obligation to keep referring to post-Revolutionary developments in the latter, as if it were somehow THE reality and America only a reflection. RC

More specifically: The Scots rejected "Scotch" because they associate it with the English and had a word in their own language to replace it. In America we simply don't think about the English--why should we? We got rid of them, and Americans of English ancestry don't call themselves "English-Americans" but (still on occasion) "THE Americans"--and the Scots language survives only as an attenuated substrate in Scotch-Irish (ahem)speech. RC

Kelv

The Scottish nature of their ancestry is not uppermost in their minds, and never was. They know their ancestors came from Ireland. So they're Irish. But they also know that their ancestors weren't 'ordinary' Irish. What sort of Irish were they? They were Scotch-Irish.

We don't tell the Cajuns to call themselves 'Nova Scotians' because the land they left is no longer called 'Arcadia'.

Incidentally, why did the last case of Cutty Sark I looked at say "Scotch Whisky" on the sides and "Scots Whisky" on the ends? RC

@Kelv:

What if the word "English" were very offensive to those now living in the Angeln peninsula of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany?

Would we change the name of our language to "Jutish"? :)

If the Scottish part of their family tree was as important to their sense of self as I'm sure they'd claim, then one would expect them to know not to use a term which the majority of those in "the Old Country" found offensive.

Why do those people get to have the opinion about what THESE people call themselves?

They're not connected to modern-day Scotland. They're connected to their ancestors, who had no objection to the term Scotch and used the term on themselves.

@Dilsnik

I understand why your professors want you to use and cite original sources, but this is "separated by a common language", not your finals ;-)

With hindsight however I misspoke; I should have said "gives, in the opinion of an Englishman with an interest in language and history who has been resident in Scotland for 20 odd years, a reasonable summary of the rise and fall of the of the use of the word 'Scotch', as used to describe the people of Scotland, for those of you who don't have the time/motivation to read anything else on the subject", rather than use a loaded word like "authoritative".

why did the last case of Cutty Sark I looked at say "Scotch Whisky" on the sides and "Scots Whisky" on the ends?

The Cutty Sark website explains that a (overcompensating?) Scottish artist, James McBey, designed the original label..

Thanks. I should know by now that everything has an answer on the Web, at least every trivial question. RC

Surely the definitive British word on the correct usage of "that'll learn 'em" was spoken in 1908.

" 'I'll learn 'em to steal my house!' he cried. 'I'll learn 'em, I'll learn 'em!'

'Don't say "learn 'em," Toad,' said the Rat, greatly shocked. 'It's not good English.'

'What are you always nagging at Toad for?' inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. 'What's the matter with his English? It's the same what I use myself, and if it's good enough for me, it ought to be good enough for you!'

'I'm very sorry,' said the Rat humbly. 'Only I THINK it ought to be "teach 'em," not "learn 'em."'

'But we don't WANT to teach 'em,' replied the Badger. 'We want to LEARN 'em—learn 'em, learn 'em! And what's more, we're going to DO it, too!' "

If it was good enough for Wind in the Willows, it's good enough for me.

Oh, thanks for that, DRK! Wonderful!

Medal as a verb? I've never heard this and if I did it would hurt my ears as much as reading it hurts my eyes. Anyone who uses it that way is just plain goofy.
- From western NY, USA

Boy, things are getting a tad testy around here!

BTW, on this comment:
"We don't tell the Cajuns to call themselves 'Nova Scotians' because the land they left is no longer called 'Arcadia'."

It actually was known as l'Acadie ... Acadia, NOT Arcadia ... when the ancestors were expelled by "les Goddams" the English, starting in 1755.

Some of my relatives by marriage are Scotch-Irish ... well, that mixed with Chickasaw or Choctaw and a smattering of English ... and that's how they've always referred to themselves.

On hike: I'm a copy editor (sub editor in BrE), and "hike" to me is headlinese ... On a one-column hed with a tight count, "hike" might fit where "increase" or even "raise" won't.

About Home counties centered linguistic fanaticism, with a twist http://proper-english-foundatio.yolasite.com/
You probably already know the website but I couldn't resist.

Take a deep breath, Anonymous. Not until you've begun to get used to the verb "medal" will we tell you about the verb "podium".

Actually, I have heard "I got it for cheap" more frequently than I would like to think possible. Language is nothing if not fluid. By metonymy with "on purpose", more and more people in my area say they did something "on accident." Whether grammatical or not, it's a regionalism that won't seem to go away.

Thousand and million started out as an ordinary noun, and we used to say twenty millions of men and ten thousands of pounds. By the middle of the 19th century, one could say "a thousand men" or "a thousand of men", but "a million men" was considered non-English still. A century and a half (not meaning 100.5 years) later, thousand and million are number words with an unusual ancestry.

"Ø said...

Take a deep breath, Anonymous. Not until you've begun to get used to the verb "medal" will we tell you about the verb "podium"."

I've seen "medal" used as a verb ... in sports references ... especially as in "he medaled in three events."

"To DVR" something has entered the language, but "to podium"????? Oh, dear lord!

Be careful ordering any "regular" coffee in parts of the US. Such an order will include two cream(s) and two sugar(s). Best to order "black" coffee. Coming from the Western US, I was shocked during my first visit to New York City when a regular coffee arrived diluted by milk and sugar. Regular seems to be a word used to denote the custom or standard rather than an actuality (hence the safety in a black coffee).

On points 31 and 45:
While I now understand 'rate hike' as newspaperese for a price increase, in my native BrE I might hitch up my skirt to go hiking.
Yes, having an 'issue' instead of a 'problem' may be irritating, but when I arrived in N America in 1979 to hear people saying 'I have a problem with that', it took a while before I translated it back to 'I don't understand that' or 'I can't cope with this'.

Another wonderful installment. This whole brouhaha has provided a great deal of mirth.

I grew up knowing exactly what the term "Scotch-Irish" meant in American (and before that Irish) history. But, upon further consideration, it would be most impolitic to share me dear Da's thoughts on the matter.

Sincerely,
A Shanty SACC (Spotted American-Celt Catholic)

I rather like 'already', but I take unusual pleasure in yiddish phrasing.

I'm reminded of the punchline to a joke in a Tom Stoppard play (a British playwrite, no less!): "Tarsus-shmarsus, I'm Paul already."

We "french" use "liverable" for deliverable. "liverable" in project management is anything you can fr/"livrer" or En/"deliver" . BTW In French it's definitely correct.

If we turned this around to Americans hating Briticisms, purely based on this article, I would have to say that my 1. pet peeve is British saying pet hate..... That was just plain annoying! But seriously, in regards to Zee instead of Zed, and bi-weekly instead of fortnightly and period instead of full-stop, are just ignorance to the fact that they do not know that Americans do not know these terms. It does not bother me when they use them because I know that in their "language" they are accurate.

One of the perils of re-reading this blog is the temptation to comment again!

I must admit, I prefer "to medal" than "to podium", but would not use either myself.

There are two American turns of phrase I find a bit clunky, although I'm quite prepared to accept that this is modern American usage. The first is the insertion of "of" where I don't find it necessary, for example: "I'm not that good of a skater". And the second is the use of "would have" where I would use "had": "If I would have practised more..." (I'd say "Had I practised more", or perhaps "If I had practised more".

mrs. Redboots,

I never really thought about the of in there. Or would have (would've). It is just what sounds natural to me. I guess we do not really need thoes words. But It does sound strange to my ears without them.

Period for the little dot at the end of a written sentence is likely to provoke tittering in the classroom outside North America because it also refers to menstruation. Perhaps this euphemism is why full stop is preferred.

When South Africa switched over from the imperial system to metric in the 1960s the notation changed as well (the only example in the world I believe, which strikes me as delightfully pedantic). The dot as a decimal separator was dropped in favour of the comma and the comma separating groups of digits in large numbers was replaced with a space.

Therefore two and a half written as a decimal changed from 2.5 to 2,5. Twenty-two thousand changed from 22,000 to 22 000.

I think this is the scientifically preferred notation, especially the space as it is unambiguous given the fact some countries use a dot and some a comma to write large numbers.

As an American, I had never heard the . (period) called a full stop growing up, I only heard it called this a few years back actually, so I went the first 30 years of my life, not knowing that it could possible be called anything other than a period.

I have to respond to this one,
" 50. "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they're trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

Unless they're trying their hand at irony, of course. But Americans couldn't do that, could they? At any rate: old post on could care less and old guest post on irony."

the first time I heard this said I too thought it wrong, until I considered the intonation: The AmE is indeed not a bad attempt at irony, with the intonation as a rhetorical question.

Above, Lynne had written, "[D]on't be tempted to think that Americans have added syllables to burgle, as both words are derived (burgle by back-formation and burglarize by adding a suffix) from burglar."

It's worse than you think, Lynne. Try as we might, we Americans just can't seem to win on this front and we deserve a least a little credit here.

The earliest usages of "burgle" found to date appeared ca. 1865. They're all American. And it's pretty clear that "burgle" is an American invention because British writers ca. 1870 commented on the peculiarity of this (American) form [1].

The American form "burglarize," which now predominates in the U.S. over the meeker "burgle," goes back at least to 1840. And yet "burglarise" can be found in British English at least as early as the end of 1839, though its use over there became rarer as the century wore on. Still, as of this writing, it's apparent that the earliest sightings of "burglarize" and its British cousin are roughly contemporaneous [2].

To shorten "burglar" or to lengthen it? Well, AmE has done both. "Burgle" is an American backformation, not a British one. And, honestly, I don't think 19th-century Americans can be much blamed for "burglarize" when their British counterparts were simultaneously experimenting with their own suffix-added form.

[1] http://bit.ly/1pIp1iZ (ADS-L message)

[2] http://bit.ly/1pVlWrl (ADS-L message)

Using "full stop" for "period" in the US would likely make some people think you were talking like you were reading a telegram--if they were old enough to have seen a movie with someone reading a telegram.
And for Ed, who mentioned South African numeric notation, a quick perusal of American, UK, and German websites shows such prices as:
$11,500
$1332.50
£1,099.96
1.767,75 E (couldn't copy the Euro symbol)
I think I've seen " " being used as a placeholder but not in the US.

In my experience, in typical American usage the comma is used for financial notation but not for large numbers in other contexts, where things are typically rounded off to the nearest thousand, million, or billion.
Oh, and when reading a number, it's always "point", as in three point one four one five nine. I'd have to assume it's the same in the UK. I've got to wonder whether the South Africans would say "three comma one four one five nine".

I've got to wonder whether the South Africans would say "three comma one four one five nine"
I don't know about South Africans, but the French, whose use of commas and decimal points is exactly the inverse of ours, most certainly do.

Referring back to the comments about "eatery", I wonder about the prevalence of its (presumably) younger cousin "sitooterie" which is probably mostly found in Scotland or among expat Scots as a tongue-in-cheek expression for an outside dining area or terrace attached to a catering establishment, derived from "sit oot" i.e. "sit out". I'd be astonished if this has found its way across the Atlantic, but I'm sure everyone in Scotland would have known what it meant even the first time they heard it (and smiled).

I love this blog because I'm always finding interesting posts from the vast back-catalogue :-D . Something I haven't seen in the comments regards 'bi-weekly'. The biggest problem with this word is that it's ambiguous in American English. It can either mean twice a week or every other week. It's strange that 'fortnightly' hasn't made the jump, as it serves a useful purpose! (But, for clarity, it doesn't offend me – reading through the list from the original article made me glad I don't know any of those people.)