Separated by a Common Language

Soon after the Brexit vote, I started writing a blog post about the different usage of the term racial in AmE and BrE. This followed an incident that the UK press had label(l)ed 'racial abuse' against a North American in Manchester. I thought it odd that being abusive to an American counted as 'racial...

The news around Donald Trump's rapey caught-on-tape comments has seen the word lewd bandied around quite a bit, and I've seen a fair amount of complaint about its use to describe what Trump said. It didn't really occur to me that this might be a transatlantic problem when Alan Rew kindly pointed this...

Gemma wrote some time ago to ask about jail and prison, starting with: I would (as a British person) use them interchangeably (is this the norm in the UK, or is it just me?) but I've had the impression on several occasions that an American author has expected me to understand that one (jail?)...

So the other day, when I decided to avoid difficult questions and not decide between my top two US-to-UK words of the year, I laid the groundwork for general indecisiveness. So, I might as well not be decisive about the UK-to-US words either. It works out well (I re(-)assure myself) because in the...

Tonight (22:00/10pm) people in the UK (and maybe abroad?) will be able to hear a new instal(l)ment of The Verb "Radio 3's cabaret of the word". [It's downloadable for the next 7 days.]  I was invited to talk about a piece I'd written a few months ago about American attitudes to dictionaries and,...

JL in New York wrote recently with this observation: Last week's Economist included an article ("Executive Pay: Money for Nothing?", in the Britain section) that begins: Hard work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons believe the link between graft and gain has broken down. The...

This year, I'm spreading the SbaCL Words-of Year announcement into two posts -- partly to make up for hardly blogging at all this autumn and partly so that I can go to bed tonight.  So, starting with the BrE-to-AmE import of the year, I give you:  kettling I'm thinking of it here mostly...

Still buried deep beneath teaching. For your amusement, here are the 'untranslatables of the day' posted on Twitter last month, as promised in my last post. Where there's only a link, it's an expression that I've already written about in some detail. Please click through to see (or take part in)...

Grover and I went out for a lovely lunch with our friend Maverick the other day, and now I find that her pseudonym creates a linkage problem. Do I link to her blog (as is my usual courtesy to people-I-mention-who-have-blogs) or to our previous discussion of AmE/BrE differences in the use of the word...