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'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...

Twitter has been my main internet stomping ground since 2009, but I've been withdrawing my labo(u)r from it since October, when it became much more volatile for some reason. The New York Times Spelling Bee has been my morning-coffee activity for some of those years, and since November 2020 I've...

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...

At some point in my American education, I learned that judgment was an American spelling and judgement was the preferred British spelling. Ditto acknowledgment and acknowledgement. But then I moved to England and grew up (possibly in that order) and reali{s/z}ed that nothing is ever...