Separated by a Common Language

Congratulations to Ben Yagoda on his new book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English! If you like this blog, you are going to like that book. I was both gobsmacked and chuffed to see that I was among the dedicatees of the book (and in wonderful company). It even has an appendix of...

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed:...

I have been asked many times if I've written about stodgy, and I always think I have, because I wrote a post about other BrE -odgy adjectives. I have no idea why stodgy didn't make it into that post, but I'm here to rectify the stodgelessness of this blog.I remember (early in my time in England) asking...

Long ago, I was asked about so fun versus such fun. Martin Ball, this one's for you! So, fun started out in English (1600s) as a verb meaning to 'trick, cheat, deceive'. You could fun someone out of their money. Then by the 1700s, it had become a noun meaning 'light-hearted enjoyment'....

Having let the year run its course, I'm now am ready to declare the Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year for 2022. As ever, there are two categories: US-to-UK and UK-to-US.  To be a SbaCL WoTY, the word just needs to have been noticeable in some way that year in the other country. For...

 I have a note above my desk that says "Next blog post: roast(ed)". It's been there for three years, since Melissa L wrote to say: Dear Lynne,I teach English in Germany and enjoy your blog.I am a native speaker of American English. Most of my teaching material uses British English. I spend a...

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended...