Separated by a Common Language

I’ve written about off of on this blog before, in reaction to British complaints about it as a horrid Americanism. In my day job, I’m writing about it again from different angles, so I was thrilled to see that some researchers in Helsinki and Stockholm have undertaken much more wide-ranging and in-depth...

Our university's website provides helpful information for students about research and writing. It says things like this: Another big mistake is to try and write an essay at the last minute. I look at that and itch to edit it, just like early in my time in England, when my department head sent round...

This is NOT a serious post. Nothing here stands up to particularly good academic standards. But I just wasted some time in the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE) and thought I'd share this with you in order to make me feel better about the time-wastage. I wanted to see who blames whom for...

I've written a new blog post, but it's not here. So if you're interested in thinking about whether dictionaries (and the written word in general) play different roles in the US and UK, then follow this link to OxfordWords, the Oxford dictionaries blog. Also, as long as I'm here, I've got another...

I'll put the little bits before the big piece, just so they don't get lost. Here are a couple of things I've meant to tell you about and another waste of space on a certain journalist's take on Americanisms. Introduction to British small talk, for Americans I've done a guest post at the Macmillan...

As promised, here's my reaction to the second half of the BBC's list of 'Your most noted Americanisms'. Since part 1, many others have weighed in on that BBC piece, including Stan Carey, Not From Round Here, and on the BBC website (huzzah!!) Grant Barrett. The commenters at the BBC site, you may discern,...

In my last post, I refrained from saying much about the BBC Magazine piece by Matthew Engel on 'Why do some Americanisms annoy people?', pointing readers instead to Mark Liberman/Language Log's analysis of the so-called Americanisms that annoy at least identified by Matthew Engel. Today the BBC website...

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking.  Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether...

Andy S wrote to say: I'm interested in the Americanism off of which sounds very odd to British ears. I'd be interested to know more about it. Indeed, Americans would often get off of a [much more common in AmE--in BrE it can have a more restricted meaning] couch, whereas British folk would get off...

When a publisher sends me (unsolicited) books for review a few months before Christmas, they probably intend my review to be part of their pre-Christmas promotions.  What they haven't counted on is that I'd have no time to look at the book until Christmas break.  And so it goes for Patricia...