Separated by a Common Language

In a year like this year, it's no surprise that most of the Word-of-the-Year nominations related to politics, either directly or indirectly (like the 2016 UK-to-US WotY). Several of my correspondents have been noticing Americanisms in British political talk and Britishisms in American political talk....

I started to write a long post this morning, but have been undone by my inability to produce a sentence tree that I can post on Blogger. I was hoping to make one in MS-Word, then find a way to export it as a .gif or other picture file. (Saving the Word file as html didn't preserve all the drawing...

So I gave my induction lecture today, in which I said to the students that something or other about university-level study can be difficult to acclimate to. Afterwards, my colleague the Syntactician queried my use of the verb acclimate (stress on the first syllable), since she'd say acclimatise in...

The new students arrive this weekend, and will have a week's induction. In the US, the same activities would be called orientation week. Better Half was saying that orientation is a very American word to him, which is interesting, considering that the verb orientate is more common in the UK. Orientate...