Separated by a Common Language

When Twitter tells me I have new followers, I can see their name and self-description before I can see their location (if they've given any). So I play a little game of 'guess which country they're from' before I click through to see it.  I seem to be good at picking out the Americans (or at...

I've been unwell (which is a very BrE way to put it, see this old guest post) a lot this winter, which seems to be the price one pays for procreating. They say that minor illnesses are good for developing children's immune systems, so I try not to resent the germs that infect poor little Grover. But...

Frequent contributor Marc wrote to say that he:received this comment about a draft letter I prepared:"Can you please put in I AM WRITING TO YOU NOT I AM WRITING YOU..this is amercian and bad english."Comment is from an England-born Australian.I am willing to admit that this may be American English...

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic. That was about at the time, but this one is about at this time. It started:Reader (though he might not be a reader...

The comments on this are now closed, since the student's project is long over. If you'd like to comment on the topic, please see the link to a fuller blog post at the end of this post.  This is for an MA student at our university. Here's her plea: For my dissertation, I'm looking at the recent...

My first out-of-North-America experience was when I moved to South Africa at the age of 27, in order to take up a post at a large, English-medium university there. I'd been teaching for three years at my (AmE) graduate school by that time, and my teaching in South Africa was going fairly well, but...

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th edn) recently made the news for deleting a lot of hyphens that had been in the previous edition. According to the AskOxford website: Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000...