Separated by a Common Language

Yesterday I announced the US-to-UK Word of the Year (click for details!), and so today is the turn of the UK-to-US WotY. The 2018 US-to-UK WotY has been moving to the US for quite a while—but Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy) makes the case for us recogni{s/z}ing it in 2018. And the word is: whilst ...that...

I have a little file of things I've looked up and should blog about some day, and in it is this: ...as you can see, BrE has hit and miss, but AmE is more hit or miss. But while that was mo(u)ldering away in my desktop folder, Lauren Gawne aka Superlinguo actually did something about it. You...

Jeremy H wrote me the following: I have noticed two usages which, in England, seem familiar only to journalists. One was in a headline in the Mail today: "This port ain't big enough for the both of us". I have never heard "the both" uttered in BrE. The other is "You and me both". Starting with...

Better Half and I spent the first part of the long Easter weekend (two bank holidays, woo-hoo!) in the picturesque village of Rye, East Sussex. The first day, we made the mistake of having a big lunch, which left us uninterested in dinner until too late to do anything about it, so the next day we...

Robert wrote last week to say: Watching a film called The Holiday yesterday evening, I was astonished to hear Jude Law, playing a British character, say, "Me, either" in reply to something Cameron Diaz had said. To my [...] Southern British ears that sounds very American. I would say "Neither/nor...

When I first started marking (AmE prefers grading) essays (AmE would say papers, which is more likely to mean 'exams' in BrE university-speak) in the UK, I would correct students who used the word whilst instead of while, as in Whilst the students could write 'while', they tend to write 'whilst'. My...