I must start by assuring you: British people generally do not call the letter zee. Nevertheless, I have reasons for choosing zee this year:
It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
It is a word that comes up when people express worries that British children are "using American words", that perennial clickbait that baited a particularly large number of clicks this year. It started with The SundayTimes commissioning a survey of teachers; the results of that survey were consistently (determinedly) misinterpreted. The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention zee, but it came up often in the interviews I did after it. If you're interested, here's an episode of Lexis podcast where we talk about the survey (and its problems).
It was also the Americanisms that the YouGov polling organi{s/z}tion chose for the title of its report on Americanism use in Britain in April.
Essentially: the majority of Britons under 50 report using zee in the name Gen Z, with more than 70% of those under 24 (that is, in Gen Z) saying it. The majority of Britons over 50 say they say Gen-Zed. All age groups, however, say that the alphabet letter 'Z' rhymes with bed at rates above 70%. The younger age groups (versus the older) have more people claiming to say the alphabet with an ex-why-zee at the end, but more people say zed for the letter than say zee for the generation.
That's self-reported data, and self-reports of linguistic behavio(u)rs require corroboration. We can find that corroboration. On YouGlish, you can hear both Gen-Zee and Gen-Zed in British speakers, but it's mostly Gen-Zee, particularly among younger speakers. One of the British speakers (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard) says Gen-Zee most of the time, but does say Gen-Zed at least once in one of her videos—and it wouldn't be surprising if many other speakers are inconsistent in this particular zee/zed. If you search for British people saying zee on Youglish, you'll get mentions of people named Zee and a fair amount of Mock French ("I am zee dev-ille"), but the letter-name is only used in contrast with zed. (Searching for Z in YouGlish gets you people saying zzzzzz, rather than saying the letter name, as far as I've seen.)
My daughter "Grover," has done a little poll of her 17–18-year-old friends, who all say they say Gen-Zee (she certainly does). She also notes that if she flaunts her half-Americanness and says a zee for the letter, her English friends give her a very hard time.
But check out Generation Z: most of the speakers on YouGlish say this with zed(even younger ones). It seems that the more "formal" and semantically transparent version of the word is treated more as if the Z is the letter of the alphabet. Gen Z seems to be treated as something more opaque—a name. (Grover claims Gen Zed is "hard to say." It does sound a bit more like it might be a past-tense verb.)
The term Generation Z seems to have originated in 1993, and is not marked as American in dictionaries. Gen Z followed in 1996, and is listed as "originally N. American" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Against the evidence we've seen here, the OED lists the zed pronunciation first for BrE:
But, in keeping with the YouGlish evidence, they do not include the zee pronunciation for the full form:
Gen Z, however you pronounce them, were born between 1997 and 2012 (or thereabouts)—so the oldest Gen Zers (or Zoomers, which happens to be the 2025 Russian WotY) were 28 in 2025, and the youngest ones entered their teens. So, they've become increasingly newsworthy and we're hearing Gen Z more. Here is how often Gen Z is used in the British part of the News on the Web corpus:
I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) comeover the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...
Mike C from Shropshire asks:
Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. … Any thoughts?
Thoughts? Do I have thoughts? I am plagued by them!
Pleading and plea-ing
Let's start with a basic observation of pledversus pleaded: the use of pledis fairly particular to much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE)no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleadedinstead. So we get:
He pled guilty = real but prescriptively frowned-upon
She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
?? She pled for their forgiveness. = unnatural-sounding much less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon
As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to havepled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:
Because of this, I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.
The British history of pled
Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!
The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:
pled guilty in Hansard
I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:
The 1990s examples are all quoting or paraphrasing the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995. Since it's in the law in Scotland, it should probably be considered fairly standard there.
So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)
In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).
On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy withlead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.
At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on.
Pled guilty in speech
I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.)
The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:
pled guilty: 356
pleaded guilty: 295
I can look at these in films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA. Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:
UK
USA
pleaded guilty
.02
.02
pled guilty
—
.07
While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.
Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?
It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.
At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile. Here's more from the up-to-yesterday News on the Web corpus, where pleaded guilty outnumbers pled guilty nearly 40-fold.
How many of those are Scottish? Well, quite a few, but it would be a lot of work to sort out both 'is this in a Scottish news site' and 'if it's not on a Scottish news site, is it talking about something or quoting someone Scottish?'. But I did take a sample of 100 and did a quick (more BrE) reckoning of what was what:
53 were from Scotland
30 were from either English local news or UK national news
10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
1 Northern Irish
1 Wales
5 ?
I'd take the 30 English/UK national with a grain/pinch of salt because I didn't check whether they were about Scottish legal cases.
Is pled going up in the UK part of the news corpus: yes, but so is pleaded guilty—so it looks like there are just more legal cases in the news
pled guilty in NOW-GB
pleaded guilty in NOW-GB
Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland. (There was only one BBC hit in my NOW sample of 100.)
I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 (Scotland) and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 (Scotland) that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled).
I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showingthe fine printand the small print with a bit more grammatical context:
Before we get into the how, when, and where of this, let's start with the what. There are three uses of the fine/small print to sort out, which arose in this order:
the original, literal meaning: printed characters that small in dimension and (relatedly/therefore) light in line thickness, and therefore difficult to read
e.g. I can't read such small/fine print without my glasses.
the extended meaning the fine/small print:supplementary text to a contract or other document that expresses terms and conditions, typically printed in a small/light font
e.g. They hid the extra penalty fees in the small/fine print.
more figurative uses (again with the): important, technical/non-obvious information that one might not have paid attention to, but that might have serious repercussions.
e.g. "The fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim." (Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)
In the literal sense 1, the OED has examples of small print all the way back to the 1500s; fine printonly appears in 1761. All the first citations are from England, but all their examples of fine print from the 1850s onward are American.
In the extended sense 2 (from what evidence we have), the fine print shows up first—in an American case-law reporter in 1891. The small printis first found in a yachting manual published in London in 1900.
It's hard to say when these expressions got more figurative. The OED only gives a separate figurative sense 3 for fine print (first example, 1948) with just "also figurative" at sense 2 for small print. It's a bit annoying that the two are treated differently, but it appears to be because the figurative examples of fine print in AmE are just more figurative. In the 'figurative' fine print examples, like the Obama one above, we're looking at deeds rather than words. But the not-really-about-print examples of sense 2 for small print involve language (if not print), as in this example from the Telegraph:
1971
Some interest attaches therefore to the ‘small print’ of the Queen's speech and how far it avoids firm undertakings on some of the more controversial measures.
So, to sum up, it looks like, for some reason, AmE liked the phrase fine print more than small print for the literal stuff, and then it added an extended meaning relating to contractual language. You can see the frequency of the phrase rising as it gets more uses—and the neglect of small print in the Corpus of Historical American English:
Then after the meaning was extended, it looks like it was calqued into BrE—which is to say BrE took the idea and put it into the more familiar phrasing small print.
I wondered whether there were broader differences in the use of fine in its 'slim, delicate' linear senses in AmE and BrE. I found a few things, but they don't add up to much of a picture:
fine line: consistently more AmE than BrE hits in singular
fine lines and wrinkles: This phrase had 3x more hits in BrE than AmE in GloWbE (2012–13), but only about 1/3 more in the more recent News on the Web (NoW) corpus. It's strongest in Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, though, so maybe it originated in advertising in Asia?
draw a fine line between (two similar things): The OED's first example of that is BrE in 1848; the GloWbE corpus now has more US examples than UK, but the numbers are very small.
fine-tip, fine-point(of a pen, etc.): much more AmE in GloWbE and NoW. (The number of hits for fine nib were tiny, but more in BrE. Fine-nibbed pen had more in AmE.)
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I belong to a fantastic international writing group. There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included "tons ofsomething" (I can't actually remember what the noun was). A New Zealander in the group commented, "I suppose we'd say heaps of."
Indeed. Here are some imprecise, informal ways of expressing 'large quantities of' in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The darker the blue, the more characteristic that phrase is to that country:
Or, here's a better, but not as pretty way to report these results, as number of occurrences per million words. This makes the numbers comparable across countries (since the individual country corpora are not all the same size). Here are those figures for the three main expressions, with the numbers rounded.
expression
US
CA
GB
IE
AU
NZ
tons of
19
17
8
7
7
7
loads of
5
5
22
22
9
10
heaps of
1
1
1
1
10
11
This is saying, for instance, that the American corpus has tons of at a rate of 19 times per million words of running text. (For comparison, the phrase a lot of is around 300 times per million in each country's corpus.)
So, we can see that tons of is preferred in North America, loads of in the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand like heaps of but use loads of at nearly the same rate as heaps of. Bunches ofhad less than 1 per million in all of the country corpora. Itseems to be more often literal in all countries—lots of bunches of grapes, flowers, or asparagus, and a few bunchesof people, websites, and, in one NZ example: "small bunchesof noisy wowsers trying to tell everybody else how to live their lives."
I've only shown you the first six countries in the corpus results. After that, we get into Asian and African countries where English is spoken. Tons of dominates most of those—but, at least in the African nations, more of those tons of were literal tons of stuff, like rice or water. Of course, some of the tons in the other countries will be literal tons too—but the difference between North American and the UK/IE/AU/NZ seems to be due to the figurative usage—as in I have tons of friends/problems/blog posts.
The Oxford English Dictionary has not updated its entries for these words since their first publication, more than 100 years ago. But three of the four have been used for informal descriptions of large quantities since the 1600s, and the fourth is the most American one.
The informal usage of tons is not listed in the OED's 1913 entry for ton, though it does list several colloquial uses where ton means 100 (e.g. as a darts score or £100). The first use of tons of money in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is not until the 1920s. Tons of stuff shows up in the 1940s. Neither of those phrases is used much for decades after that, but the informal use of tons picks up quickly after the 1980s. In the COHA corpus (1800–, the top nouns after tons of are coal, steel and water, while in GloWBE (2013) they are money, people and carbon.
And that, my friends, is the shortest blog post I've written in a long time! I await bunches of comments!
PS: Maybe I should have done singulars as well as plurals, but I was worried about singular versions infecting the data. But when I checked the first 20 a bunch of, only one was literal, so maybe not:
And, of course, I should have looked up the BrE spelling tonne, but there are fewer of those:
And sh*load(s) of has come up in the comments, so you can see here that shedload is pretty British:
The first thing that made me want to write about Anglo-Saxon was my experience of French exchange students using the term to mean 'anglophone, English-speaking'. I'd warn them against the term, stating (but perhaps not explaining) that it is inaccurate and has connotations they didn't intend in British/American English. (So here comes the explanation.) The second thing is that I've been writing about the history of English and have chosen to mostly refer to Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English and I'm thinking about that choice. The third thing is that Dave Wilton (who writes the fantastic Word Origins newsletter) published a paper in 2020 on the topic that's been on my TBR pile for a while—so writing this post provided me with an excuse to take the time for it.
Anglo-Saxon v Old English
Let me address my second thing first: Why would I want to call the Germanic pre-Norman conquest language/dialects of Britain (5th–11th century) Anglo-Saxon when the name Old English feels more transparent? It's English! But it's Old!
It's that transparency that I want to resist. The name Old English makes it sound like it's the same language as we speak, just an older form. But we really have to question whether it is the same language at all. Yes, I would count Modern English as a Germanic language derived from that previous language, but the fallout of the Norman conquest so thoroughly changed English that it stopped being 'the same language'. The grammar is different, the vocabulary is different, the pronunciation is unfamiliar, the words that have survived often mean very different things today. As this Tiktoker says, you don't need footnotes, you need a translation:
Confusingly, it's common to hear people refer to old English (or Old English?) in reference to Shakespearean English—or even Dickensian. The film director Robert Eggers, whose forthcoming film Werwulf is in Middle English, has been fighting a battle against this kind of misuse:
So, just to be clear, here are the periods of English, as usually defined:
ca. 450AD/CE to 1150ish: Old English/Anglo-Saxon. from the Germanic invasions till the start of Middle English. This can be further divided into prehistoric (450–650), early (650–900) and late periods (900–1150). Beowulf is the most famous literary work from this time.
1066 to 1500ish: Middle English from the Norman (French) invasion through the Great English Vowel Shift. This also has early and late periods. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the most famous bit.
1500ish to 1650ish: Early Modern English Shakespeare times. King James Bible times.
1650ish to now: Late Modern English No more thou, no more hath, and lots more vocabulary thanks to industriali{s/z}ation and the spread of English worldwide.
The dates should be taken as severely "mushy," since change spread gradually through the Anglosphere—or through England and the British Isles, the limits of the Anglosphere for most of its history.
So, that's one use of Anglo-Saxon: to refer to the people, culture or language of the Germanic-speaking people of Britain before the 12th century. That's the most straightforward meaning.
Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?
But the Anglo-Saxons didn't call themselves Anglo-Saxon. That term didn't arrive till the 1600s. And it didn't get much traction until the 19th century. Here's a bit I wrote about it in The Prodigal Tongue:
At the height of the British Empire, English intellectuals were taken with the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon race”, tracing its roots to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain after the Romans left in the 5th century. With self-satisfaction they concluded that their “race” was something special, illustrated by the strength of their culture over that of the conquered Celts, their early codification of individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, and their break with the Roman church in the 16th century. Belief in their own good example made appropriating other peoples’ lands much easier to justify – and Americans of English stock were happy to share in this myth. But by the 20th century, talk of an Anglo-Saxon race had fallen out of fashion, and instead of genetic inheritance, it was language that seemed to unite us.
Thus we started to be called the English-speaking peoples, a term used with particular influence by two statesmen-historians, Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West and Winston Churchill in A History of the English-speaking Peoples. President and prime minister turned to this language-based description of “our peoples” because other possible descriptions had become impossible.
My French students were still using the Anglo-Saxon race to refer to 'the English-speaking peoples'. One problem in using the term that way is that "races" allegedly have a common genetic heritage, and English-speakers don't. Many Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to England. We are a transatlantic linguistic group and we share some aspects of our cultures. But it's weird to call us a race in contemporary English.
I had a look in the French Web corpus in SketchEngine (frTenTen23) and found some examples of the French usage, just so you can see what I'm talking about (the blue bits are from Google Translate):
Meanwhile in the equivalent English corpus (enTenTen21), mentions of "the Anglo-Saxon race" are much more likely to be associated with white power movements and eugenics—a big reason I wanted to steer my French students away that phrase. For example:
"The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be – with the Anglo-Saxon race ," John Knox, the president of the [Alabama] constitutional convention, said in a speech encouraging voters to ratify the document [in 1901] [source]
Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." [source]
But this isn't a blog about French/English differences. It's a blog about differences in American and British English—and I had a feeling we'd find differences in how Anglo-Saxon is used in my two countries.
WASP
I first learned the term Anglo-Saxon as a child when I asked my mother about the AmE term Wasp or WASP. The OED's first citation for that term comes from a sociology journal in 1962:
For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.
The OED notes that the term is "originally and chiefly U.S." and "frequently derogatory." The Anglo-Saxon in Wasp is meant to distinguish certain white Americans: not the Irish, nor the Scots-Irish, not the Germans, not the Poles... When I hear Wasp I think (NAmE) "old money", members of Daughters of the American Revolution, and people who claim to trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower.
It's hard to exclude the stinging insect when looking for Wasp in a corpus, but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant(s) occurs about five times per decade in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) between 1960 and 2000, and not at all in this century. That's not to say it's dead: there are 11 uses in AmE in the (much larger) Corpus of Global Web-Based English, collected in 2012–3. According to the News on the Web corpus, that was a stand-out year for white Anglo-Saxon protestant(s). The graph shows worldwide numbers. It occurs 8.7 times per million words in the American news corpus and 3.6 times per million in the British, usually in stories about the US.
Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)
We've seen a few meanings of Anglo-Saxon here, and that's what Wilton investigates in his paper by going deeper into a number of corpora:
Wilton, David. 2020. What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.425–454. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.119.4.0425.
Writing for philologists, he's concerned that trends in how the term is used in general English might be bad for use of the term in medieval studies. (For what it's worth, BrE style guides these days prefer medieval over mediaeval.) Here, I'm concerned just with whether there's a difference between British and American usage, what that's about, and whether there's risk of miscommunication between AmE & BrE.
Wilton tracks three uses of Anglo-Saxon:
Pre-Conquest: referring to the Germanic peoples of Britain before 1066
Politicocultural: "references to the politics, economics, and culture of present-day Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and especially the transnational characteristics that these nations share that are not explicitly ethnic or physiognomic." (p. 433) So: like the French usage above.
Ethnoracial: "any use of Anglo-Saxon that is applied to an individual person; that refers to physiognomy, personal appearance, DNA or genetics or ancestry; or that contrasts Anglo-Saxon with another ethnic or racial group, as well as instances of the phrase white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the acronym WASP." (p. 433)
Using those three categories, Wilton analy{s/z}ed use of Anglo-Saxon in the COHA corpus:
He notes the increase around the turn of the 20th century, when "immigration from Southern Europe peaked, Jim Crow laws were instituted, lionization of the Confederacy and the 'lost cause' began, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached its height" but that the use is still mostly not making reference to Anglo-Saxons as a "race" with physical characteristics at this point (p. 443). He supposes that this might be because whiteness is such a default at this time in American thinking that there's less need to be racially specific. The Ethnoracial usage becomes dominant after 1970, in a period that, Wilton notes, is marked by "white flight" to the suburbs. (By 1970, immigration laws had liberalized and there had been a "Great Migration" of African Americans from the rural south to northern urban cent{er/re}s.)
There is no British equivalent to the COHA corpus (a real shame), so Wilton had a look in the parliamentary record to see British use of Anglo-Saxon in the same period. It's not (as he acknowledges) a fair comparison, but it is interesting:
He notes that the ethnoracial uses in parliament are mostly about distinguishing the English from the Irish, Welsh and Scots at the national level. I want to know: why are British parliamentarians talking about ancient times so much in the 70s and 80s? I had a quick dip in to the corpus and found reference to Anglo-Saxon law and Anglo-Saxon hoards. It could be that Old English or other descriptors were used more before—but it also looks like there were various arch(a)eological finds post-1970 that might have led to more discussion of antiquities in parliament. But I don't really know.
Again, we don't have a good comparison corpus for British English, but the findings from the British National Corpus (texts from 1980–93) look like this:
Wilton followed up with the News on the Web corpus, which is more comparable across countries, comparing two short periods in each, 2012–13 and 2017–18.
(As you can see, he's also analy{s/z}ed Canada, which has its own patterns, and which I'm not covering here because that's not my beat. But do follow up with Wilton's paper if you're interested.)
So both countries have all the uses, but the UK has a lot more Pre-Conquest usage, which is not at all surprising, since you run into Pre-Conquest things in the place that was conquered—less so in the place later conquered by some people from the place that was conquered.
More notable is the division of ethnoracial versus politicocultural usage in the two countries.
In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:
One might have expected an increase in the ethnoracial uses of “Anglo-Saxon” [in the UK] since the advent of the Brexit era, but the data shows this not to be the case. Any impression otherwise is probably due to increased awareness of ethnoracial uses of the term. In other words, people are only now noticing the uses that have always been there or are now reading ethnic connotations into the term that they had not before.
Wilton goes on to show that politicocultural interpretations dominate in other English-speaking nations, except the US and Canada, where the proportion of ethnoracial uses is around half of total uses and seems to be increasing.
In The Prodigal Tongue, I quote the late Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart:
A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.
Our linguistic differences often support that impression.
So, in terms of mutual understanding, I would expect that Americans seeing BrE use of Anglo-Saxon might easily take an ethnoracial impression where a politicocultural one is intended, since AmE use is heavily skewed toward that meaning and vice versa. The differences between these two uses are sometimes hard to pick apart—Wilton acknowledges that he sometimes found ambiguity in his data and needed to pick a side for the analysis. And that makes them even more apt to fly under our "semantic difference radar".
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