Separated by a Common Language

When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flat in an attempt to acculturate myself. I can't remember if it was on an ad(vert) or on an early series of The Naked Chef, but I clearly remember the sentence:          ...

I have been asked many times if I've written about stodgy, and I always think I have, because I wrote a post about other BrE -odgy adjectives. I have no idea why stodgy didn't make it into that post, but I'm here to rectify the stodgelessness of this blog.I remember (early in my time in England) asking...

In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern...

UPDATE, 20 Oct 2022: The lettuce won! The less I say here about the current state of British politics, the better for all of us, but I've had some requests to write about the question: Can Liz Truss outlast a lettuce?Truss is, at the very moment I'm writing this, the UK Prime Minister. This might...

I cannot believe I've never written a post about the word flapjack. So here it is. In AmE, flapjack is a synonym for pancake, as is hotcake. Hey, it's a big country. We're allowed to have lots of words for things. Here in the south of England (at least), those things are often called American...

Baking and baked goods are a perennial source of US/UK miscommunication—in large part because most of our current baking/eating habits were only invented after the split between American and British English. We eat different baked goods with newish names and we often use the same old words in different...