Separated by a Common Language

On Twitter, I usually post a 'Difference of the Day' between British and American English every weekday. But for the past four Octobers, I've done something different: the Untranslatable of the Day. Each year I've wondered: can I really keep this up for (another) month? Are there that many concepts...

John Wells wrote to ask: Have you discussed BrE playing the piano/violin vs. AmE playing piano/violin? Not really, John, and it turns out that it's one of those things that's (all together now!) more complicated than you might think!  The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has...

Jane Setter recently asked me about noodles. Her take on them was that Americans can call spaghetti noodles and the British can't. My take, as ever, is: it's complicated. Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is...

I've been to two conferences in the past two weeks, presenting studies on British and American use of the word please. It was a blog post here that inspired this new research direction: three years ago I posted about whether one says please when ordering in restaurants (click that link for lots of...

In blogging, I rely a lot on the Global Web-Based English corpus, GloWBE, which has millions of words of internet data categori{z/s}ed by the country of the website. It's divided into excerpts from 'blogs' (which includes comments on blogs) and 'general', which includes all sorts of things, even...

Yesterday, The Syntactician was asking me questions about semantic terminology in relation to particular uses of the verb know, as one does. And so, as one does, I looked for know in the indices of various books about verbs that I have, hoping to find a term that would suit her particular purposes....

A while ago, I wrote about a difference in AmE and BrE use of street and road, in that in BrE it's more natural to cross the road and in AmE (certainly in a town or city) it's more common to cross the street. (I've also written about in/on the street, so see that post for more on that.) That's...

It seems to happen once a week that I'm talking or listening to someone and some interesting new combination of morphemes (meaningful word-parts) is uttered. The conversation will go something like this: A:  Ooh, this cake has real taste-itude.  B: Ha! Taste-itude, is that even a word? Lynne:...