Separated by a Common Language

At some point in my American education, I learned that judgment was an American spelling and judgement was the preferred British spelling. Ditto acknowledgment and acknowledgement. But then I moved to England and grew up (possibly in that order) and reali{s/z}ed that nothing is ever...

I have left my leave. In the spring of 2020 I was on university-funded leave. Then I took unpaid leave to go be an NEH Public Scholar for six months. Now I'm returning to my university job six weeks early so that someone else can go on sick leave. (Then I'll go back on unpaid leave in April and finish...

This was the fourth year that I declared October Untranslatables Month on my Twitter feed. (Here's 2011 , 2012, and 2013.) Instead of offering a 'Difference of the Day', I offered an 'Untranslatable of the Day' every weekday.  Last year, I swore that I wasn't going to do it again. In part...

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,...

David C wrote this week to ask:I know the English use 'redundant' where we USns would say 'laid off' but the question came up whether they would use 'redundant' where we would say 'obsolete' in reference to, say, a 5-year old computer.Let's back up a bit and discuss what David's taken for granted....

I looked at my collection of e-mails from readers that request coverage of this or that Americanism or Briticism. The collection contains just those that I've not blogged about yet and that I think have at least a little potential to be an interesting post. At my current rate of one post a week,...

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...

One thing that I like about British English is the range of verbs and phrasal verbs for various interactions with public welfare institutions. I don't know why I have such fondness for them--maybe it's just my fondness for the public welfare institutions. When asked by British folk what I like about...

Ooh, I'm cruising through the backlog of requests now. We're in June now, with Simon writing to request treatment of the verb table, an example of a Janus word in BrE and AmE meeting lingo.In the US, meetings are often held according to Robert's Rules of Order, a popular guide to 'parliamentary...

I've had a couple of requests (from Dennis in May and Marc in June) for coverage of the BrE phrase fingertip search, and more specifically for the AmE equivalent of the term. It's a term that comes up a lot in the news and in one of the UK's great cultural exports, the murder mystery novel, and thus...

On to April's queries--with the goal of getting through them before the term starts. On a visit to Colorado, Chris was puzzled: Lining the roads were expanses of trees, and every so often I'd see a sign nailed to a tree that said "Posted." Nothing else. We have signs like this in my native New...

The spellchecker will out me. I was writing an e-mail about Examination Board procedures. (Exam boards are a blight on British academic life, and unheard of in the US. I've mentioned them before, here.) In doing so, I typed the word recuse, as in Anyone with a personal relationship with a student...

Someone some time ago asked about moot. This is a real source of miscommunication in BrE and AmE, as it has opposite meanings when used as an adjective, as in the phrase a moot point. My first experiences of this word were in relation to moot court scenes in The Paper Chase (that [AmE] show/[BrE]...

As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television...

When I moved to South Africa in the 90s, I found that my American pronunciation of battery would not do when trying to buy batteries in shops. I learned to say, and somehow still say [bætri] instead of my flap-infested, three-syllable American version. Now I live in a place where the word has three...