Separated by a Common Language

Ben Yagoda (Friend of SbaCL and Not One-Off Britishisms blogger), who had recently noticed a US journalist saying learnt instead of learned, asked whether I'd covered the ‑ed/‑t alternation. It's one of those things that I've been putting off for a long time because it would...

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed:...

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written...

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...

 Reader Sam Fox wrote in with the question:I am an American, a Midwesterner all my life, though I have traveled quite a bit..  On a recent visit to London I was surprised to hear the word “crescent” in the tube stop Mornington Crescent pronounced with a z rather than s.  I...

 Click here for the preamble to the 2021 Words of the Year and the UK-to-US word.As I discuss in the post at that link, 2021 was a dry year for US-to-UK borrowings. Some might say that's because BrE is already saturated with them. But it feels to me like the UK is feeling a bit more insular these...

Hello from my dad's house in New York State. Not only did I survive my hotel quarantine, I (more BrE in this position) quite enjoyed it.  In the three days that I've been out, I've done several things that I haven't done since March (at least), including going into a supermarket and a restaurant....