Separated by a Common Language

I've been struck by the lack of election-related 2024 Words of the Year from the English dictionaries  (for a list, see November's newsletter). So I am here to repair that with my US-to-UK Word of the Year: landslide...which was much-used in its figurative sense to describe the result of...

UPDATE, 20 Oct 2022: The lettuce won! The less I say here about the current state of British politics, the better for all of us, but I've had some requests to write about the question: Can Liz Truss outlast a lettuce?Truss is, at the very moment I'm writing this, the UK Prime Minister. This might...

Sorry, it's been a while. I was back to teaching, which meant my Sunday blogging time went out the window because when teaching is in session, there is no spare time. I wasn't too sorry to go back to it, though. I was feeling a mighty guilt for being on leave from teaching during the pandemic, and...

 Having seen an article about the UK's new "domestic abuse tsar", I tweeted "Domestic abuse tsar" just doesn't sound like a title for someone who wants to do good things. https://t.co/UtdHXcuGr8— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) November 29, 2020As you may have noticed from my 'mental health' diatribes,...

This is the second of my 2017 Word of the Year posts. For the US>UK winner, see yesterday's post. A Pinterest page credits this photo to Josef Gelernter As I said then, there's always a choice--do I go for the (BrE) slow burner that's been wheedling its way into the other country, or...

In a year like this year, it's no surprise that most of the Word-of-the-Year nominations related to politics, either directly or indirectly (like the 2016 UK-to-US WotY). Several of my correspondents have been noticing Americanisms in British political talk and Britishisms in American political talk....

Headlines were made when Wikileaks, in their recent targeting of Hillary Clinton, released a transcript of a private speech by Bill Clinton. British news outlets (orig AmE) zeroed in on a particular passage from the speech for their headlines: It looks, especially if you speak BrE, like...

The news around Donald Trump's rapey caught-on-tape comments has seen the word lewd bandied around quite a bit, and I've seen a fair amount of complaint about its use to describe what Trump said. It didn't really occur to me that this might be a transatlantic problem when Alan Rew kindly pointed this...

David Cameron and his house in 'leafy' Holland Park Daily Express Brits sometimes tell me that the problem with American politics is that the system of checks and balances, with the separate executive and legislative branches, means that changes are hard to make. My experience of politics in the...