Separated by a Common Language

In the meat post, I mentioned making Nigel Slater's recipe for 'ginger cake with clementine frosting'--which appropriately raised the question of why I hadn't marked frosting as AmE. I've changed it now to 'orig. AmE'; since Slater is a BrE speaker one can see that frosting has made inroads here. But...

Back in the comments for the milk and tea post, a debate has arisen about toast racks. Since mine is the only opinion that reflects the One Real Truth, I repeat my contribution here, so that everyone may benefit (again): Toast racks are evil. The entire point of toast is that it should be warm. That...

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th edn) recently made the news for deleting a lot of hyphens that had been in the previous edition. According to the AskOxford website: Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000...

Today on a Catalan open-source dictionary discussion list, one of my immediate colleagues asked whether a particular word was American, and someone else on the list recommended my blog to him (which he then forwarded to me, knowingly). Does that mean I'm two degrees of separation from myself? The...

Last time, I mentioned a (BrE) fancy dress/(AmE) costume party at which everyone was to come as a metaphor they'd been accused of being. I learned that among my friends are three dark horses, one social butterfly, a piranha with manners and an 40-year-old trapped in the body of an 8-year-old (that...

The American Heritage Dictionary lists bollard as 'Chiefly British', and indeed this is a word that I hadn't encountered before I lived here, though I'd certainly encountered the things before. A bollard (in its most frequent sense in BrE) is a post that is used to get in the way of traffic--for instance...

Nancy e-mailed to ask about AmE cater to versus BrE cater for. This is where the book that I got for my birthday comes in handy. In it, John Algeo writes:In CIC [the Cambridge International Corpus], cater for is more than 100 times as frequent in British texts as in American; cater to is 3 times...

A quick dispatch from the British Matchplay Scrabble Championships in Staffordshire. (Don't ask me how I'm faring.)In the pub last night, it was said of someone "Oh, she's a really jammy player." I've heard jammy used in this way before, but this time I just had to swallow my pride and ask Just what...

A problem in writing about the differences between American and British English is that it can be hard to notice the Americanisms if you're an American. As long as people understand you, you go along happily saying American things until the time that someone doesn't understand them and a metalinguistic...

You can buy this I've just come from Scrabble club, where I often have to suffer the indignity of people putting down completely silly misspellings of words and saying "Maybe the Americans spell it like that." (The Association of British Scrabble Players started playing to the international Scrabble...

There are a couple of vowels that most distinguish my accent from those around me. One is the 'short a' sound before /s/. So, while I watch the [græs] growing ([æ] = the vowel in bat), everyone else is watching the [gras] growing ([a] = the first vowel in father)--or not growing, as the case may...

A few days ago, I read Better Half a bit of something I'd been writing about cooking terms, and my mention of a roiling boil completely flummoxed him. Not sure whether I'd stumbled on a dialectal difference or whether BH just had a poor vocabulary when it came to cooking, I asked my boss, a historical...