Follow your favorite blogs!

Bloglovin' helps you follow the blogs you read by letting you know when they update.

Sign up »
separated by a common language
separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
6
Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK England and America are two countries separated by a common language. --George Bernard Shaw BrE = British EnglishAmE = American EnglishOED=Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn. [1989], unless otherwise noted)
#210217 in All

tidbits and titbits

Ive been in blog-paralysis because everything I want to blog about would take a Very Long Time to write about and Im supposed to be writing about other things. But along came Mrs Redboots on the Lynn...

29 apr 12

counting seconds

Layah wrote to me about a year ago with this question: In America when you are trying to time counting seconds you often say Mississippi in between each number: "One Mississippi, two Mississippi,...

02 apr 12

catching up and catching breaks

Mwncïod ‏ on Twitter asked:AmE/BrE diff? Watching US sit-com "Big Bang Theory" character says "catch/caught a break" vs BrE "get/got a break"?Get a break is not so much BrE as...

12 mar 12

topping oneself, topping and tailing

A short post, but this headline (courtesy of this tweeter) is worth reproducing: The headline is about an American basketball player, Jeremy Lin, who is all the rage these days. The problem is that t...

27 feb 12

graft

JL in New York wrote recently with this observation: Last weeks Economist included an article ("Executive Pay: Money for Nothing?", in the Britain section) that begins: Hard work builds chara...

30 jan 12

just about

Continuing on the backlog of emailed requests, Ron Shields writes (well, wrote--in August) with: I have noticed football commentators in Britain using the phrase just about when a player is successfu...

13 jan 12

haste makes waste / more haste, less speed

Robert W. M. Greaves wrote to me (in July 2010--my [seemingly orig. AmE] backlog is huge!): I was somewhat surprised yesterday to be asked by an American woman (mid 70s from Montana) what more haste,...

08 jan 12

zee and zed

Now that the Term from Hell has finished, Id like to get back to blogging on an at-least-weekly basis.  Toward(s) this end, Ive stuck my cursor into the e-mailbox that holds the potential blogga...

29 dec 11

2011 US-to-UK Word of the Year: FTW

Many thanks to the intrepid readers who have nominated words and phrases for SbaCL Words of the Year this year. Yesterday, kettling was announced as the BrE-to-AmE WotY. Tonights post does the other ...

22 dec 11

2011 UK-to-US Word of the Year: kettling

This year, Im spreading the SbaCL Words-of Year announcement into two posts -- partly to make up for hardly blogging at all this autumn and partly so that I can go to bed tonight.  So, starting ...

21 dec 11

Word of the Year 2011: Nominations, please!

(A lightly edited version of last years announcement for this year. There is one more week of the Term from Hell, after which there is the Marking from Hell, but I do hope to get back to regular blog...

03 dec 11

Untranslatables month: the summary

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 theres only a link, its an expression ...

06 nov 11

Intralexy

Some readers may be fed up with me for not blogging enough and seeming to spend all my time on Twitter. Those readers will probably not like this post, as its about what Im doing on Twitter. But perh...

01 oct 11

both the two of us

Jeremy H wrote me the following: I have noticed two usages which, in England, seem familiar only to journalists. One was in a headline in the Mail today: "This port aint big enough for the both o...

17 sep 11

shoes

So, shoes. Hard to believe Ive not blogged about them already!  First slide, please: [from UK shoe retailer Office] This, in BrE is a court shoe.  In AmE it would be a pump.  (Or call ...

11 sep 11

spunk and spunky

Its our last full day in the US after a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation of nearly a month.  Id thought Id catch up on blogging during this downtime, but I started to enjoy actually being on holiday...

18 aug 11

nous, gumption, horse sense

I probably unfairly privilege Ben Zimmer when he comes into my blog-suggestions inbox (which is to say, Im about to cover a suggestion of his only 13 months after he suggested it). As a lexicographer...

04 aug 11

bits and pieces

Ill put the little bits before the big piece, just so they dont get lost. Here are a couple of things Ive meant to tell you about and another waste of space on a certain journalists take on Americani...

30 jul 11

anti-Americanismi sm, part 2

As promised, heres my reaction to the second half of the BBCs list of Your most noted Americanisms. Since part 1, many others have weighed in on that BBC piece, including Stan Carey, Not From Round H...

27 jul 11

anti-Americanismi sm, part 1

In my last post, I refrained from saying much about the BBC Magazine piece by Matthew Engel on Why do some Americanisms annoy people?, pointing readers instead to Mark Liberman/Language Logs analysis...

20 jul 11

milk teeth and baby teeth

Mark Liberman at Language Log has saved you from the rant that this weekends post was to be. Oh, thank you, Mark! His post from earlier today does what needed to be done about journalist Matthew Enge...

16 jul 11

making suggestions

Im at the conference of the International Pragmatics Association in Manchester (UK) this week, and I was interested to see that theres a poster in the poster session (which is already posted, though ...

07 jul 11

its down/up to you

Fellow American-academic-in-UK @PurlHussy suggested a Twitter Difference of the Day for me, and I thought: why tweet when I could blog AND tweet? (Um, because I should be marking/grading essays? Hey,...

19 jun 11

accent attitudes

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC (American Verbal Inferiority Complex), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of...

12 jun 11

Dialect success in books -- your help?

Because of the cruelty that is marking season (AmE prefers grading over marking), I am unable to do a real post at the moment--but Id like to follow up on the last one, which opened with Im giving a ...

01 jun 11

Dialect fail in books - your help?

Something Ive been meaning to ask you: could you help me in finding material for a talk Ill be doing soon? Im giving a talk called Whose Language Is It Anyway? at the first Brighton Book Festival (&#...

22 may 11

You are no longer following . Undo?