Separated by a Common Language

We're four months into a major renovation project and the walls (at least) are finished, so we're getting our brains around painting them. So far, one wall is painted so that the radiator can be (more BrE) fitted (in AmE, I'd say installed) this week. I've marked the same space as 'same wall' on the...

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...

When I don't know what I want to blog about, I stick a virtual pin into the email inbox and choose the first do-able request/suggestion that I find. This is supposed to be a fair method, though perhaps not as fair as 'first come, first served'. Truth be told, many of the oldest ones in the inbox are...

Here's a topic that we've partly done before, but it heads to the top of the to-blog-about list just because most of the heavy lifting has already been done for me.  John Wells (of Phonetic Blog fame) wrote to say: Not sure if you've written about BrE washing up / doing the washing up = AmE...

Finally dipping into my inbox to respond to one of the many requests that have filled it.  English reader DBT wrote a while ago to ask: I have always said that a person or a place is 'named after' someone or something else. Boston Mass is 'named after' Boston in Lincolnshire. Just in the last...

A colleague who teaches French knocked on my door today to ask about an Americanism that his student had encountered in a translation exercise: dishpan hands. The student was imagining someone with hands shaped like dishpans. Oh no! Dishpan hands are hands that have spent too much time in the dishwater--i.e....

Tonight Better Half asked me to lay the table. I went to get plates, then noticed that he'd already filled plates for us. Which led to a conversation about which things the 'layer of the table' was responsible for, which could almost be seen as a dialectal conversation.My reasoning: I grew up with...