Separated by a Common Language

The day after the US election, it became clear to me that the UK-to-US Word of the Year would have to be the adjective gutted The verb to gut is, of course, common to both varieties of English, but in this case I'm talking about an adjectival use of gutted to refer to a feeling of disappointment...

A 2010 blog post from the Prosody Lab at McGill University was pointed in my direction last week, and judging by the reaction when I tweeted it, I'm not the only one who was surprised by the should-be-evident-but-nearly-invisible difference between British and American it reported. The post is by...

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)...

A British colleague and I were drowning our professional sorrows in a bit of bourbon whisk(e)y at a campus pub yesterday, when an American from another department stopped by our table to discuss the bad news that's affected us. Professor American expressed his dismay at our news and how it had been...

This mail from American Susanna had me chuckling:I wanted to tell you my experience with the term gutted. I've always associated it with "eviscerated", especially when applied to a human being. When applied to a document or law or something of that nature, to me it means "emptied of its important features"....

In the comments for the last post, Jo asks:(By the way, had you run into the geeky AmE "snarky" to mean sarcastic? I'd always wondered where that word had come from, and now I think I see a family resemblance.)As I said there, I love the word snarky because I find it rather evocative. But there are...