Separated by a Common Language

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written...

More than once, I think, veteran or (the noun vet) has been nominated  for US>UK Word of the Year. Dru, who nominated it for 2022, felt that it was appearing more often in UK contexts:The word I’d propose is ‘veteran’ in the US sense of a former soldier. Some may dispute...

Last month Linguist Laura wrote a blog post congratulating the students who were graduating from her program(me). She discusses graduate, then moves on to alumni, excerpted below. I've highlighting the bit that was news to me. When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another...

Have been very taken up with marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading...yes, it seems interminable to me too. Not finished yet, so just dipping my toe back into Tuesday night blogging with a short one. Liz B in the UK emailed to ask me how to interpret English...

How I've managed to blog through nearly five Christmas seasons without doing this one, I don't know. But here I am, finally tackling (BrE) panto, as suggested by Strawberry Yoghurt (in 2008!) and @MarianDougan via Twitter last week.  So, you know, there's this thing called pantomime, right?...

I've avoided doing a post on how BrE pudding is used to mean (AmE) dessert because it's one of those AmE/BrE differences that is known by most people with any interest in the two countries. (And way back in the beginning, I said that this blog wasn't about those things that are well-covered in lists...

It must be school dance season, because two people have written to me about (AmE) proms. This is usually translated into BrE as school dance, but a prom is a specific kind of school dance--a formal dance (that is, the clothes are typically formal, not the dancing) that happens in high school in either...

American reader Jackie e-mailed to say that after some time living in London: "I can't tell you happy I am to be back in [a] country in which veg is a verb." Now, I trust that Jackie has some happy memories of London as well, but you can understand a girl's homesickness for a comfy verb like veg....

Foundational Friend (I'll call her that because it was through her that I met much of my English social circle--including Better Half) stayed over last night and had the misfortune of seeing me this morning. Never a pretty sight--but particularly nasty today as I was horribly sneezy and snotty. I...

On the erroneously (or is it aptly?) named Yahoo Answers, a yahoo recently asked: Why do Americans shorten our language - is it because they only have half a brain?I've heard this one before, and it came to mind when Grant Barrett sent me the following quotation from The Observer (a UK Sunday newspaper;...

It's conference season on campus, so there are lots of people walking around with nametags. One can often guess the nationality of delegates by the first names. I saw a nametagged Clay the other week, and thought 'That's got to be someone from the southern US'. Since I didn't have the satisfaction...