Separated by a Common Language

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended...

While Grover takes/has her nap, a little reflection on her bi-dialectal language acquisition. She's six weeks short of being two, and (orig. AmE) talking up a storm. I'd wondered whether she'd get any Americanisms from me, but (a) I tend to use BrE words when in the UK and (b) I'm just her mother....

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic.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...

Sometimes I find myself censoring myself before I use a word just because I have a feeling that it might be an Americanism. (I know I've blogged about this feeling before--but I can't find where!) The thing is, I'm not entirely sure why I get that feeling about words I've never used (nor heard the...

How to choose among the dozens and dozens of unfulfilled requests? I just clicked blindly in my inbox and found American ex-pat Liz being driven crazy/mad (in 2007!) by her British colleagues spelling window cill rather than sill. Liz works in architecture, so perhaps the UK specialists use cill...

I'm essentially an idealistic and optimistic person, if one can judge by thoughts that go through my head like "Sure, I can work on the blog tonight and still meet all my other deadlines." But I have a very healthy morbid streak (as the hypochondriac child of a funeral home should have), as evidenced...

I've started several longer posts, but keep putting them aside in favo(u)r of topics that I can whip up a post for with very little research. I'd claim that this is an effect of having an 11-week-old child, except the real truth is that I'm congenitally lazy. I'm afraid that little Grover has inherited...

Better Half has been unwell (which sounds fairly BrE--I'd usually say sick in AmE) for more than a week now. The doctor says he has a chest infection, but an American doctor might've preferred to say bronchitis. It's not that bronchitis is an AmE word--just that people talk about being diagnosed with...

Today's post was going to be a serious examination of sensitive subjects that affect many lives. But the Blogger ate my homework. So let's talk about hair some more! (So what if this means just giving a straight catalog(ue) of lexical differences (ho-hum)? It's what the blogger gods want, apparently.) As...

This entry is mostly an excuse to post a picture of the pretty (and, in person, pretty imposing) Christmas tree at Rockefeller Centre, which Better Half and I visited a week ago. This was the first time I'd been to New York City during the (AmE-preferred) holiday/(BrE-preferred) festive season, and...

Do not take cold and flu medications while operating this blog entry. One of the "surprise hits" of the UK music charts around last Christmas was a folky song by Nizlopi. It's from the point of view of a five-year-old who feels safe and co{s/z}y while skipping school in order to ride around with...

Standing outside a bookshop today, Better Half pointed out the Where's Wally books, and wondered why the man called Waldo in America is Wally in the UK. No one seems to know. The Wally/Waldo books are the invention of an Englishman, so I am assuming (just because there's precious little info on this...