Separated by a Common Language

In my last newsletter, I reacted to this news story:The article is about addressing teachers as sir or miss, which happens in American schools too (I'm sure there's a lot of variation in that across schools and regions). But in the newsletter I mentioned BrE referential use of the words...

My obsession with the word please keeps leading me to new discoveries. This time: a spelling difference!One particular use of please is to be dismissive of something someone else has said or done, as in:      Please! You don't really imagine we want to read about please...

I've studied the word please off and on for a few years now.* Currently, I'm trying to finish up a study that I started an embarrassing number of years ago. Now that I've returned to it, I have the pleasure of reading all the works that have been published on related topics in the meantime....

I got this by email from a reader named Robbie:A while ago I watched several episodes of the US children's show "Bubble Guppies" and found myself getting more and more annoyed with them. As in many preschool shows, the characters speak directly to the audience and encourage them to get involved with...

credit: twistynoodleFifteen years! That's how long this blog has been going. Happy anniversary to me! And thank you all coming along with me on this. I've just decided, since I really should be going to bed, that a 15th anniversary calls for a blog post, so I thought I'd share with you something...

Last week at Corpus Linguistics 2017, Rachele De Felice and I presented our research on thanking in US and UK corporate emails. We'll be writing that up for publication in the coming months. In the meantime, here's a tiny aspect of what we found, supplemented by some further thoughts. Our main question...

This is one of those posts where I'm going to let someone else do most of the writing. I got this message from Justin a couple of weeks ago: I’m from Malaysia, where BrE dominates in schools but AmE is prominent in pop culture (so too CanE and AusE). I was British educated there, before moving...