Separated by a Common Language

I'll be off-line for a few days, so here's something to discuss amongst yourselves.Fatherhood has made Better Half go all musical--he's constantly making up songs to sing to little Grover. I've been keeping track of some of the rhymes that he makes that wouldn't rhyme at all if I were to say them:garden...

Language Log has a discussion by Mark Liberman, reacting to a BBC News Magazine article on whether a certain country should be called Burma or Myanmar, that is relevant to our on-going observations about the contrast between 'r' in BrE orthography (spelling) versus its Received Pronunciation in post-vocalic...

When I was young, some of my favo(u)rite books were by British authors. The title of one, Five Dolls and a Monkey, I was interested to find, is (until I publish this post) cited only once on the web. Am I the only person who loved that book? After I grew out of Five Dolls, I made my way through...

I'm still trying to get a project done during my limited computer time. I can type with a sleeping baby on my chest, but not with a wakeful baby...and sometimes (ok, nearly constantly) one needs to use sleeping-baby time for laundry and sterili{s/z}ing and (joy of joys!) sleeping. So, the blog has...

I found myself doing something that I take others to task for: assuming that a usage that differs from my own is 'wrong'. Well, at least I had the good sense to look it up before blogging about it. You see, I was reading along (belatedly as ever) in the 22/29 December 2007 issue of New Scientist,...

Being too lazy to make myself a sandwich today, I went out for a so-called Reuben. There in the bagel shop what looked like a mother and daughter were having a disagreement. The daughter was pronouncing castle like I would--with the same 'a' sound as in bat. The mother took her to task for this--saying...

Howard at the UK/US forum e-mailed to request discussion of BrE arse and AmE ass. It seems Howard has come across at least one American wondering why the British "put an /r/ in ass", when, of course, the real question is why Americans have taken the /r/ OUT of arse. There are many useful discussions...