Separated by a Common Language

I'm in the US at the moment, where two of my nephews have recently finished (mostly now AmE in this sense) high school. That is to say, they (AmE) graduated from high school. Though their graduation ceremonies were in June, they are still in the midst of graduation party season—and we arrived...

Some years ago a survey went (a)round from the University of Ghent on English vocabulary knowledge. I recall doing the survey and I believe I shared it on social media. Perhaps you did it too. Last week I read the published results: Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas by Marc Brysbaert...

Finally, the last of my Words of the Year. I declared two US-to-UK words this year because both (awesome and bake-off) seemed very much 'of 2014'. In the case of the UK-to-US words, I also gave up on deciding between two excellent nominations, though the case for '2014ness' is not quite as strong....

Two matters for this belated blog post:  Words of the Year nominations and the Untranslatables Month summary. WotY Nominations Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now: 1. Best AmE-to-BrE...

I've been doing 'Untranslatables October' on Twitter for the second time (made slightly easier this year by the fact that I've given up tweeting on weekends). I'll do a summary at the end of the month. An American 'Untranslatable' was visit with, which had been suggested by Ros Clarke. I defined...

What do the following expressions have in common? sleepover slumber party pajama party Yeah, right, they all refer to the same kind of thing. But look more closely--what else do they have in common? OK, I'll tell you. They are all American ways of describing the same thing--all of which are known...

Still buried deep beneath teaching. For your amusement, here are the 'untranslatables of the day' posted on Twitter last month, as promised in my last post. Where there's only a link, it's an expression that I've already written about in some detail. Please click through to see (or take part in)...

I feel the need to mark the royal wedding (lower case, please! The Guardian Style Guide says so!) on this blog, because I think American readers will expect me to say something. But I have very little to say about it. Having married in the UK, I can tell you that there are not a lot of linguistic differences...

How I've managed to blog through nearly five Christmas seasons without doing this one, I don't know. But here I am, finally tackling (BrE) panto, as suggested by Strawberry Yoghurt (in 2008!) and @MarianDougan via Twitter last week.  So, you know, there's this thing called pantomime, right?...

So, you're 10 years old, playing with your best friend.  Simultaneously you both spot a single gorilla mask abandoned on a park bench. Running toward(s) it, you shout the recogni(s/z)ed word for signal(l)ing a claim on desired objects. What is that word? Chances are that there are dozens and...