Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK
Neil W. wrote to ask: I am seeing lots of advertisements for a new film called "The Invite". (Sounds quite promising with Seth Rogen playing his usual character). Here is a review from the notoriously picky Peter Bradshaw, who quite liked it. Within this article he uses the phrase "extend the invitation of the title". So my question: is it an Americanism to use "invite" as a noun? I (Scottish)…
I’m very pleased to present a guest blog by one of my students at the University of Sussex. The author, Elize Holyoake, recently completed our English in the United States module and will be entering her third year in the BA English Language and Linguistics in the autumn. I’m grateful to her for researching and writing this post! Every four years since its inauguration in 1930, the FIFA World Cup…
In April, Jody V. sent me a link to this New York Times article with the note " I noticed the word shouty in this piece. I can’t recall having seen the word used in an American publication before." Here it is in the context of the article: But in a social media post after talks with Mr. Rutte, the president reiterated his ire and threw in Greenland for good measure: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE…
Tibs wrote to me in October 2020: A few years ago, Americans started adding “ of ” in places it didn’t occur before. It gradually spread into books, and across the atlantic to here as well. I don’t have an exact timing - less than 10 years? I find it hard to remember examples, because it’s become part of the scenery, but it’s always a case where leaving out the “ of ” leaves the meaning identical…
It's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions . It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se , but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them. PM's Question Time at UK parliament (Wikimedia commons) Because the UK has a parliamentary…
A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: "Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside ?" I hadn't noticed it at that point, but once he'd mentioned it, I felt surrounded by alongside . As this Google Books ngram shows, the word has taken off in the 21st century: Separating out the British and American books, we can see that this is a British-led trend. Alongside climbed…
The people at WordUnscrambler.pro sent me a list of "the most misspelled (BrE misspelt *) words" for the UK. I get a lot of these "we did this thing so that your blog will give us free advertising," and I usually ignore them, but I'll give this one some attention—partly because they sent a US list to Language Log (who published it), so I can do some comparison. But I first have to gripe a bit.…
I get various Google Alerts for things related to my interests, and today I got one for a story in The Sun and the Daily Express about the '20 English words the public wants to revive'. Now, if I want to read these articles, I have to pay or give them my first-born, or something like that, so I'm not rushing to read them. But I've got enough of a gist from the Google Alert (orig. AmE) blurb : The…
And t he 2025 Separated by a Common Language US-to-UK Word of the Year is (sorta kinda): zee (but mostly Gen Z ) 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…
The 2025 Separated by a Common Language UK-to-US Word of the Year is: fiddly Here's an English teacher explaining the word Someone might have recommended this to me this year—if so, please out yourself in the comments, since I cannot find a pixel trail for a recommender. But I did find it in an email conversation I had with Ben Yagoda in deciding the 2022 WotY, where he said: Interesting slate of…
I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over 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…
A great thing about being Facebook friends with linguists is that I get to benefit from their daily observations of English. Here's a recent observation from John Wells: Something I've just heard on the telly about someone who nearly drowned: "If the fisherman hadn't've spotted him, he might not have survived." I keep hearing this grammatical construction in BrE, with extra "have" ('ve) as…
A shorter (maybe), quicker and earlier post this month, since I am going to be travel( l )ing without much internet access in September and am (orig. AmE) freaking out* about how much work I have to do before the autumn/fall semester begins. In a recent Language Log post, Victor Mair points out a difference in how American and British teens might react to this shirt: Americans would tend to say I…
On my way home from work, I pass the windowless side of an end-of-terrace house , on which this sign is posted: Such signs are a common sight in England, and not immediately transparent to AmE speakers, who are more accustomed to 'No dumping' signs: from SmartSign.com (There's more we could say about these signs, but we haven't got space for that right now. For more on NO TRESPASSING , see this…
Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky : 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 , showing the fine print and 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 .…
Over on Bluesky last month, I was pulled into a conversation that went something like this: Someone tweets a screenshot of a comment with the phrase Do you baulk at the film reviews... ? Someone American asks "how long have y'all been adding a u to balk ?" And then, predictably, some respondents say it's always been there, Noah Webster took it out. That's the point where someone ( c'est moi! )…
Harry Enfield, Loadsamoney I belong to a fantastic international writing group . There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included " tons of something" (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…
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…
When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flat in an attempt to acculturate myself. I can't remember if it was on an ad(vert) or on an early series of The Naked Chef , but I clearly remember the sentence: Just bung it under the grill! I already knew grill (=AmE broiler ) from my time in South Africa. It was b ung (meaning something like 'put…
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 be a very long post. Now I've been shamed out of my laziness. In order to do this in any kind of sensible way, I feel…
I've been struck by the lack of election-related 2024 Words of the Year from the English dictionaries (for a list, see November's newsletter ). So I am here to repair that with my US-to-UK Word of the Year: landslide ...which was much-used in its figurative sense to describe the result of the UK election that ended 14 years of Conservative government. some landslide headlines in UK media Here's…
So much of the "news" this year was about female popular music stars. The year started with Beyonce going country, then Charlie XCX declared a brat summer (leading Collins dictionaries to declare brat their Word of the Year). Facebook keeps feeding me videos of Ariana Grande acting and interviewing, and an incredible number of my middle-aged (and beyond) friends went to see Taylor Swift.…
When I was growing up in New York State, a beanie was a silly kind of skull cap, mostly worn by young people. My high school gave away felt ones like this (though with different letters). At the time, it was a very retro/jokey thing to wear. The word beanie is originally an Americanism, derived from bean (also originally AmE), a slang term for 'head'. The OED entry for beanie was written in 1972…
This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table , ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema /(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the…
Congratulations to Ben Yagoda on his new book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English ! If you like this blog, you are going to like that book. I was both gobsmacked and chuffed to see that I was among the dedicatees of the book (and in wonderful company). It even has an appendix of my UK-to-US Words of the Year ! (And on that note—feel free to start nominating 2024's Transatlantic…