Separated by a Common Language

The linked piece and video are very amateurish attempts to explain what has been well-studied by reputable linguists. We can do better. American linguist Lynne Murphy, married to a Brit and working as a linguistics academic in the UK for many years (and with a stint in South Africa) has a fantastic blog and book on the subject. Very easy to read and nobody has covered the subject better. https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

For folks who are genuinely interested in the relationship between British and American English, it's worth checking out https://theprodigaltongue.com/ The author has a blog that is no longer as active as it once was: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

You might enjoy this blog: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

Just looking around and this seems like it's a US-UK english difference: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2015/08/noodles.html And the reason I figured this would be weird is that long pasta is easy to eat with a fork. Probably not worth dwelling on this though as it's offtopic so people are downvoting :D

Diary in UK English can mean “Planner” or “Datebook”, and the article is from the BBC. https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diaries-and-da…

Singular "dice" is common in UK English. This article discusses it, and refers to a 2006 article, coincidentally about this book, also in The Guardian: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2006/09/die-and-dice.h…

Whether frequent use of "please" comes across as condescending or polite seems to be a difference between BrE and AmE: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/08/saying-please-…

This article details both the different regional definitions of graft, as well as the reasons it's spelled as it is: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/01/graft.html Spoilers: US usage is always negative, Australian usage mostly matches US, British is mostly positive, India is both. Someone asks the same spelling question, and gets the answer that it is because the word was only written down in either meaning quite late.

> Much more significant (and confusing) are the idiomatic divergences There are a bunch of Janus words and phrases. Things like "table a motion" mean totally different things. http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/to-table.html But see also moot point which is used similarly in both places, but which also has a specific and different English usage. http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/moot.html

It's not if you go to the regular URL: http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/nominate-woty… The extra ?m=1 on the submission seems to put it into a print or mobile specific version.

People have always used fillers (aka filled pauses) in speech. There is no evidence to suggest they have become any more or any less common. For example, http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2008/05/uh-er-um-erm.ht… cites a play by Agatha Christie (who dies in 1976) which is full of um's (using the British spelling of erm).

Hm. Maybe I made myself unclear - I was meaning to be specifically in response to the parent post, who said that only knowing 10% made him feel empowered. I was meaning, in a sense, that it's better to have a language which doesn't have such a complex history, undefined behaviour, and weird syntactic trivia. The simpler the language, the less unexpectedness occurs, and the more you can concentrate on the actual logic and meaning. For instance, in English, "homosexual" = attracted sexually to those who are the same ("homo") gender as yourself. But "homophobic" does not mean hating/fearing those the same gender as yourself. The rules are complex, with history, weirdness, and are confusing. The same with programming languages, I feel. Take JS, for instance. >>> (0 == []) true >>> typeof (0 + 0) "number" >>> typeof ([] + []) "string" There is no reason on earth I want to know that stuff or operator precedence rules. I can never remember those if I need to do a `x * y + 2 z --` and so always write in brackets explicitly. But the language can accept such things, and make an order from them. Going back to C (sorry for jumping around), yes, it's simple compared to C++, or many other languages, but it does have a lot of history, undefined behaviour, and stuff you simply need to be aware of. And it's that stuff that makes life complex for C beginners (and allows bugs for C of all experience levels). There's a reason I didn't list C as a…