Separated by a Common Language

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended...

I've now remembered what I meant to cover and forgot in my last post. That post is already too, too long, so here's another post about bedding. Years ago, my former colleague Max sent a list of presumably AmE terms that were new to him when he read Jane Smiley's Ten days in the hills. It included...

If you want to know how to buy bed sheets in the US or UK, then the last post (on bed sizes) is the best place to start, since the sizes of beds affect the sizes of sheets and related things. But now let's talk about what we call the bed linen or bedclothes or bedding-- starting with those collective...

British correspondent PurpleClaire was having trouble buying bedding on-line to be used in the US, so she tweeted "what on earth is a full-size bed?" I gave her a tweet-sized answer...but here is a fuller version of the story--with lots of help from Wikipedia. The short version: the basic sizes for...

I've got a few posts brewing in my head that require me to (a) take my camera out with me and (b) remember to take pictures of the relevant things when I get to them. So far, I've only managed (a), which, it must be admitted, is pretty pointless without (b). But there's a lot of pointless activity...

This entry is inspired by a BBC News headline about a court case regarding a tragic event here in Brighton: Reversing dustcart 'caused death' The headline left me with a touch of cognitive dissonance, since in AmE carts tend to be small, relatively powerless things--like the cart that a donkey...

I'm embarrassed by how much television I've been watching lately. On further reflection, perhaps that's not true--maybe I'm just embarrassed by how much television I've found myself admitting to watching. But it does raise lots of bloggable issues, so here I go again with the admitting.Better Half...

Growing up, we always had a ceramic nativity scene (made by my Aunt Connie) on our mantel at Christmastime, and we always called it the nativity or the nativity scene. As I got older, I discovered that most other families called these things their (AmE) crèches. Until I moved away from the US (or...

We bought this piece of furniture (from a charity shop) for our kitchen last week, and I am learning to call it a Welsh dresser. It is a low cabinet with an open case of shelves on top. It has a little surface in front of the shelves where one could, say, slice bread. I was stymied in trying to...