Separated by a Common Language

John Wells recently asked me if he was right in thinking "that BrE consistently uses transfer and AmE decal for the same thing". That's the kind of question that is perhaps best answered with a rhetorical question: Is any English vocabulary used consistently?We're talking about ways of putting images...

We've seen other cases before of Americans trying to use "cool" British words--especially slightly "colo(u)rful" words, and getting it wrong ([more used in BrE] viz. wanker, snog). Here's a lovely example from the New York Daily News (which I saw via Oliver Burkeman): There's a pile-up of Britishisms...

John Wells wrote to ask: Have you discussed BrE playing the piano/violin vs. AmE playing piano/violin? Not really, John, and it turns out that it's one of those things that's (all together now!) more complicated than you might think!  The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has...

Jane Setter recently asked me about noodles. Her take on them was that Americans can call spaghetti noodles and the British can't. My take, as ever, is: it's complicated. Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is...

It seems to happen once a week that I'm talking or listening to someone and some interesting new combination of morphemes (meaningful word-parts) is uttered. The conversation will go something like this: A:  Ooh, this cake has real taste-itude.  B: Ha! Taste-itude, is that even a word? Lynne:...

If you're looking for discussion of other (o)e or (a)e words, please click here to see/comment at the more comprehensive post on the topic. So, as we've seen in that aforementioned blog post, British and American spelling differ sometimes in the use of the ligature (connected letter) œ, or as it's...

Emma, an English friend now living in Canada, asked me: Have you ever looked at measuring tape/tape measure for UK/US? A Canadian friend said she uses the first for the bendy fabric kind and the second for the more rigid, retractable builders' kind. And I said 'That's how I do it too. What do...

This is the kind of blog topic I love -- like the soup or bacon sandwich ones -- where I'm reporting on my slowly acquired reali{s/z}ation that there are subtle UK/US differences in meanings of certain familiar words. The meanings are so similar that they often refer to the same things. What's different...

Several people have asked for my reactions to Geoffrey Pullum's piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca blog in which he claims the US and UK are 'Undivided by a Common Language'. So apologies to the person to whom I promised a post on rent versus hire (next week!), I'm following...