Separated by a Common Language

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  

For instance: not that big [of] a deal ... as ordinary [of] a childhood as possible (this one from The Boys on Netflix)

My apologies, Tibs, for making you wait so long. Here we go!

• an adverbial element (e.g., as, how, quite, so, this/that, too) that's indicating 'measurement' of the adjective
• a gradable adjective  (i.e. the ones that can go with those 'measurement' expressions)
• of  [which is not there in the older form]
• an indefinite noun phrase: usually one starting with a or an like an idea or a child; more unusually, you can find it with an indefinite (i.e. bare) plural or, even more rarely, a bare non-count noun [see examples 3 and 4 below, respectively]. 

1. cacao provides habitat that is of as high of a quality as their natural forests (wisc.edu)
2. Seems like I took too long of a break.(ER [tv])
3.  no matter how great their sacrifice or how big of heroes they might be (comment on a CNN blog)
4. I asked him about how big of threat is ISIS to America's national security (CBS Face the Nation)

     In analogical change, one pattern or piece of the language changes to become more like another pattern or piece of the language, where speakers perceive the changing part as similar to the pattern or piece that it changes to be more like. (2020: 87)

      How much of a problem is that going to be? Too much of a problem.

Harold Allen named The Big of Syndrome in the mid–late 1980s (he had died in 1988 before his [AmE linguist-speak] squib was published in American Speech). Allen had noticed expressions like this big of a crowd and that nice of a day ("an innovating syntactic aberration") in the Minnesota speech around him, and urged linguists to study it further. Linda Rapp took up the call and published another short article in 1991. 

Rapp found several examples from 1943 in Harold Wentworth's 1944 American Dialect Dictionary. Wentworth's examples seem to be from West Virginia and central Florida. Another early-ish example (1962) comes from The Andy Griffith Show, which takes place in a (fictional) small town in North Carolina. So those seem like hints that it might have come from the inland southeast. 

But since, unlike Rapp, I'm working in the Age of Linguistic Corpora, I've been able to find it in some earlier examples. These are from the Movie Corpus.

I had a quick look for the screenwriters' birthplaces—The Death Kiss = Alabama and Hungary and The Little Princess = California and Wisconsin. No one will admit to writing Lure of the Surf (which was apparently mocked for promoting sea fishing while sensible people were worried about U-boats), but the 'self-narrator' was from the Bronx. So, only one of those writers fits with the inland-southeast origin story. All of this is pointing to it being widespread in spoken American English even earlier. If people were saying it in (orig. AmE) movies without comment in the 1930s, it must have felt at least somewhat natural by then. 

Still, before the 1980s, the corpus examples are few and far between. Allen wrote about the "syndrome" just as this pattern was finding real purchase in published English as well as spoken, with how big of a deal leading the way:
     Tibs thought he'd only heard the pattern in the past decade. That could be a case of Recency Illusion, or it could be that people in Britain just didn't hear it (or read it) much until the internet age. Sticking with big and deal (because the numbers are easiest to see), we can see it really taking off in the 2000s in published and performed American English. (Sorry, the text in these screenshots is not very clear, but know that the darker the blue, the more typical of a decade the phrase is. We can see big of a deal strongly associated with the 2000s, and much more so the 2010s. Neither of these corpora go into the 2020s.)

Just to underscore the Americanness of the expression: at the right end of the Movie Corpus screenshot, it shows that 145 of the examples came from a North American film. Only 4 came from British or Irish films. 

The of has been coming to Britain, as Tibs noted. The table below shows how often big of a deal/difference occur per million words in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (collected in 2012–13) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-now). In the news corpus, the BrE rate is 4 times lower than the AmE rate for each expression. The news data has a lot fewer of these expressions, presumably because the corpus has more professionally composed and edited text. The British news sources use the expressions at a quarter of the rate of the American news.

• possessives: X's Y versus the Y of X
• of in university names
• off (of) and out (of)
• more on off (of)

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. 

The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration. 

So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?

For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government. 

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 in British usage throughout the 20th century. American English suddenly decided to (orig. AmE) play catch-up in the 21st century.

This trend is observable in other corpora too. The News on the Web corpus, for example, shows more than double the rate of alongside in British news sources versus American ones. 

• "BrE has kerb for the edging alongside a road" (curb/kerb, May 2020)
• "British pigs in blankets are small sausages wrapped in bacon (and cooked!). They are delicious. They're traditionally served alongside turkey as part of Christmas dinner."  (pigs in blankets, Feb 2020)
• "I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside 'learning should be fun!'" (grammar is not the enemy, May 2016)
  
  

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. Here's the methodology:

            We analyzed Jan 1, 2025 - Dec 17, 2025 search data from Google Trends for "How do you spell" and "How to spell".

That's not a method for discovering the "most misspelled words." That's a method for discovering the most looked-up spellings. This is the kind of (BrE) jiggery-pokery makes me hate headlines.  If you think to look up a word, then you might be insecure or curious about its spelling. But that's keeping you from misspelling it. I'm betting that when they're not looking up spellings like these, those people are out in the world (like the rest of us) are confidently spelling accommodation with one m and letting spellcheck catch it for them (or not).

Nevertheless, the WU.pro folks showed admirable linguistic sensitivity in not declaring the Americanisms on the list "misspelled." Instead, they note repeatedly that both the US and UK variants "are correct". 

United Kingdom's most misspelled words queried spellings:

1.     Colour - 109 200 searches - Both colour and color are correct.

2.     Favourite - 82 900 searches - Both favourite and favorite are correct.

3.     License - 59 000 searches.

4.     Diarrhoea - 58 700 searches - Both diarrhoea and diarrhea are correct.

5.     Jewellery - 56 400 searches.

6.     Definitely - 53 000 searches.

7.     Auntie - 50 400 searches - Both auntie and aunty are correct.

8.     Weird - 48 000 searches.

9.     Business - 46 800 searches.

10.   Behaviour - 40 800 searches - Both behaviour and behavior are correct.

11.   Neighbour - 39 600 searches - Both neighbour and neighbor are correct.

12.   Country - 29 000 searches.

13.   Queue - 22 800 searches.

14.   Gorgeous - 22 600 searches.

15.   Necessary -  23 000 searches.

I've added the blue to show which ones are also on the US top 10, which I've copied at the bottom of this post.† (Not sure why the UK got a top 15 and the US a top 10. Nor why necessary has more searches but is lower on the list than queue.) 

Some of these are definitely difficult—others, like country, surprised me. But let's have a little look at whether people do misspell them, using the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I'm using that one even though it's 13 years old now because web-based English is more likely to include misspellings than the published writing in other comparative corpora.) I won't try to cover all of them, just the ones that strike me as transatlantically interesting.

Postscript : On the same day as I wrote this post, another company released its (much better) analysis of British misspellings. See the bottom of this post for more on that. 

In that vein, the following graph shows that there's probably more AmE writing on UK websites than BrE writing on AmE websites—which is not so surprising, since there are presumably about 5 times more US than UK writers on the internet and text from American wire services and other companies might be reprinted wholesale on UK sites.

License is a tricky one because it's the correct spelling for BrE, when it is a verb. But it is licence in BrE when it is a noun (s in AmE for both).  The first chart here shows a lot of (incorrect for BrE) license as a noun in the GB corpus—but that will, again, be partly due to American writing on British websites, rather than British writers misspelling it. It's hard to know how much each factor contributes.

I was surprised not to see practice/practise on the UK misspelling list. You can read more about that at an older post, if you'd like to.

(The crossed-out ones are names that happened to be caught on my search for "diarr*a". I don't envy them their diarr-a names.)

The later jewellery spelling seems to have derived from jeweller + y ('the stuff that the jeweller makes'—analogous to pottery) while jewelry derives from jewel+ry ('products created from jewels'—analogous to pastry, balladry). In 1901, the OED commented (about BrE usage): 

     In commercial use commonly spelt jewellery; the form jewelry is more rhetorical and poetic, and unassociated with the jeweller. But the pronunciation with three syllables is usual even with the former spelling.

So, we might consider jewelry to be AmE and old-fashioned BrE.

It's been my perception that weird is more a problem in UK spelling, and GloWbE bears that out a little bit, with wierd a greater proportion of the UK forms (about 3%) than the US (about 2%):

The word is much more common in BrE, but hard to spell everywhere. And yet, people seem to mostly get it right. Leaving off the final e sometimes happens, but really not much:

The Q spelling might be an abbreviation, rather than a misspelling. But it's striking that the cue homonym is absent from the British entirely. These people know a queue's a queue.

I'm going to leave it there! But feel free to comment on these or the other words on the lists. 

* The fact that misspelled/misspelt has two spellings complicates the old joke: Which word is always misspelled? Misspelled!   (Or is it misspelt?)  Anyway, I have an old post on -ed versus -t past tenses. 

† The American list, via Language Log:
America's most misspelled words:

1. Definitely – 33 500 searches.
2. Separate – 30 000 searches.
3. Necessary – 29 000 searches.
4. Believe – 28 500 searches.
5. Through – 28 000 searches.
6. Gorgeous –  27 000 searches.
7. Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
8. Business – 24 200 searches.
9. Favorite – 23 000 searches.
10. Restaurant – 22 500 searches.

    Around 530 million spelling attempts from 936,926 pupils across the country were examined by education platform EdShed to draw their results, determining which words schoolchildren find most tricky. (The Independent)

Their list has only two overlaps with the WordUnscrambler one:

1. Sketch
2. Mischievous
3. February
4. Couldn't
5. Mustn't
6. License
7. Definitely
8. Indefinite
9. Convenience
10. Preferred

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:

 And the 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: 

1. It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
2. 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 Sunday Times 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).
3. 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.

• Zee and Zed
• Sesame Street
• Anti-Americanismism, Part 2
• Zebra
• Introducing Grover: Can you believe that she is 18?! She's gone from minor to major.

The 2025 Separated by a Common Language UK-to-US Word of the Year is:

fiddly 

     Interesting slate of UK to US candidates, especially “soccer.” Didn’t realize about shrinkflation. Fiddly definitely.

fiddlyadjectivefid·​dly ˈfi-dᵊl-ē chiefly British: requiring close attention to detail : fussyespecially : requiring an annoying amount of close attention… the tiny control buttons on the back are fiddly.—M. J. McNamara  

As a -y adjective, it's a little odd, since -y is usually added to nouns. Fiddly derives (according to the OED) from the verb fiddle 'To make aimless or frivolous movements' (OED), not the noun. That verb does ultimately come from the noun fiddle, but that's not what's relevant to a suffix that usually attaches to nouns. The suffix wants something that's a noun now, as in cinnamon-y or snowy.  But the OED tells us of -y adjectives:

Later new derivatives tend in a large measure to be colloquial, undignified, or trivial,as bumpy, dumpy, flighty, hammy, liney, loopy, lumpy,  ungy, messy, oniony, treey, verminy, vipery; some are from verbs, as dangly. 

Fiddly only came into being in the early 20th century, the period of "colloquial, undignified, or trivial" -y adjectives. And indeed the OED marks fiddly as "colloquial". 

I'll be happy to have it in AmE, as it is undeniably useful. The Collins thesaurus offers some synonyms:

     pernickety (=AmE persnickety), tricky, detailed, fine, exacting 

I think tricky would work best for some of the things I call fiddly, but tricky seems to connote a challenge, rather than a hassle. Fiddly is all hassle, dexterity, and attention to detail.

Congratulations, fiddly. You've made it. 

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?

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is 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 pleaded instead. 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 have pled 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.

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:

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

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.)

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants.  But.

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 with lead-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. 

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 

• 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 ?

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 compared with the standard "...hadn't spotted...". But I have never come across any comment on, or discussion of, this usage.

In the comments, some people claim it's much used in the US, but it soon becomes clear that there's some confusion with a different construction than Wells was talking about. So, let's look at it. 

I'm using the News on the Web corpus (because my usual go-to GloWbE corpus isn't co(-)operating in giving me the contractions). There I searched for "had n't have VERB" and got it with a range of verbs:

So, it's looking pretty British, but in Caroline McAfee's 'Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland', she says "as in American English". (Bold = my emphasis, so it's clear which [more BrE] bits of the example we're talking about.)

In Scottish speech, as in American English, there is a sequence had – (ENCLITIC NEGATIVE PARTICLE) – have PAST PARTICIPLE. The identity of the second have, which appears as a weak or enclitic form, is problematic (as witness the writers who spell it of):

 

‘Ah wouldnae of came if Ah had of knew,’ he insisted (Helen W. Pryde, the First Book of the McFlannels, 1947: 24)

Adams (1948) suggested that it was a survival of English dialectal y- before past participles, reinterpreted as have via the latter’s weak form a. The occurrence of the form in Scotland and the USA is compatible with diffusion from Ulster. Fodor and Smith (1978) offer a purely synchronic analysis, seeing the first have as a modal and the second as the auxiliary of the perfect.

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 wouldn't be caught dead in it but BrE speakers would more likely say I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

To me, these bring up different images, since caught is a more dynamic verb than seen. Those who are caught are generally trying not to be caught. I wore the t-shirt, but I wanted to avoid being seen in it. But those who are seen can't help being seen. If you say 'I wouldn't be seen dead in it', it sounds to me like you fear someone putting the t-shirt on you after you've died. But maybe that difference in imagery is just me. Most people aren't so literalist about their idioms.

Anyhow...what's the history of these phrases? The OED has American caught dead from 1870 and American seen dead in 1887, then a Scottish-authored found dead in 1923, followed by British seen deads in the 1930s. So it's likely it started in the US, but then got translated a bit in UK.

from the OED
 Other 'be caught ADJECTIVE' phrases are also more American. (In this corpus result, the Token 1 column is number of hits in the US corpus, and the Token 2 column is UK).

So, generally, caught is used with adjectives to describe being in a situation you're not prepared for. With a noun, we also have caught by surprise (more than 2x more US hits in GloWbE). 

But not all caught + adjective phrases with connotations of unreadiness are more American. Caught red-handed has more UK hits in the GloWbE corpus (less than 2x more), and that makes sense since red-handed is from Scotland in the early 1800s. (The red is the blood of the person you've just murdered.) That's a more literal caught, though—being caught by the police (or someone).

*I've only really just appreciated that anything that looks bold when I'm in the blogger editor doesn't look bold when the post is published—at least not on my browser. So, I'm going to start putting bold things in another colo(u)r just to underscore the difference. If anyone wants to give me a tip on how to retroactively change the font across the blog to make the bolds stand out more, please let me know via gmail (lynneguist). 

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:

(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 old post on AmE POSTED signs.) 

The Brighton sign is an official local-government sign, while anyone can buy those US examples. The equivalent anyone-can-buy it signs in the UK might have both the terms tipping and dumping:

Tipping (first cited UK early 1800s), like dumping, relates to tipping, and thereby releasing, the contents of a truck or cart into an area for waste, hence BrE tip for what AmE would call dump: a (probably official) place where the waste from a particular area can be left (for processing, piling up, burial, etc.). The verb dump ('to fall with sudden force') goes back to Middle English, but it's only in the late 1700s, in the US, that it starts to be used transitively to refer particularly to getting rid of waste.  (See this old post for more on AmE dumpster. See the comments of this old post for discussion of dump truck.) 

Tipping or dumping could be legal, but fly-tipping is specifically 'illegal dumping'. Why fly? It's not to do with the insects that inevitably follow illegal dumping. It's the fly in the expression on the fly: that is, in motion or 'on the wing'. Dumping/tipping that is "on the fly" is without prior arrangement and probably surreptitious. You're taking a load of waste away from where it's not needed, and you just leave it someplace that is conveniently unobserved. The term fly-tipping is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s, and the back-formed verb fly-tip only comes up in the 1980s.

On the fly developed different uses in BrE and AmE in the mid-1800s. In BrE it could be a slang term for begging (or committing crimes) while moving about/around town. (See Green's Dictionary of Slang.) With that extension, fly-tipping makes some sense as a term for an illegal activity. In AmE, on the fly became a description of a baseball that's been hit, but has not yet touched the ground—so you want to catch the other team's ball on the fly. (The term fly ball comes some decades later, as a result.) 

If you know that fly-tipping is illegally dumping waste "on the fly", then it's easier to see what BrE fly-posting means: putting up posters on the move—all over town.  (Often, but not necessarily, illegally.) If you don't make the on the fly connection, you might think it's about posting (orig. AmE) flyers (late 1800s). But since flyer also comes from that same 'quickly, while moving' sense of fly, you're not far off.

An earlier term for this is bill-sticking (late 1700s, esp. in 1800s), which one occasionally still sees in the UK, especially the agentive noun bill-sticker. We rarely call flyers or posters bills or handbills these days, but that's what they were from the late 1700s and into the 20th century.

While it's possible to find uses of fly-posting in the US, it's a much rarer term there. Instead of signs saying No Flyposting you might see a stencil(l)ed Post No Bills. 

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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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)

1. 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.

• 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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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.

The Oxford English Dictionary has it as balk. Since it comes from Old English, it only got a 'u' after French had influenced (I am tempted to say 'infected') the spelling system. The 'u' came into the word in the 1600s and 1700s, and today the spelling is very mixed in BrE.  British National Corpus has 21 baulked/13 balked, more recent Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 71 baulked/93 balked in BrE.  Cambridge, Chambers & Collins Dictionary all list balk first as does the Guardian Style Guide.

Most u/non-u variations in BrE and AmE involve an o—as in words like colo(u)r and mo(u)ld. The variation can probably be blamed on Samuel Johnson as much as Noah Webster. In the 18th-century, not all British dictionaries put a u in words like colo(u)r, but Johnson did, and his dictionary became far more famous than the others, so the u form eventually became standard in BrE. I write about the ou/o spellings at this old post (and much more and much better in in The Prodigal Tongue). But even Johnson spelled balk without the u.

My attention to the -o(u)- words in the book meant I overlooked balk/baulk—but I used the word balked in chapter 7:

...please seemed inappropriate in the small request situation, and so Americans balked at it.

The British copyeditor did not bat an eyelash—or a blue pencil—at it.

Given the dictionaries' agreement, we can say that balk is the "standard" spelling of the verb in BrE. Given the corpus numbers, we can say that it is the "normal" spelling. Given the word's history, we can say it is the "original" spelling.

But those corpus numbers aren't so distinct, and given the conversation on Bluesky, it seems that some BrE writers really want to spell it with a u (and to believe that that is the "standard/normal/original" way to spell it). This may well be another instance of British spelling changing in recent decades in order to fight against perceptions but not realities of a British/American spelling difference.*

Confusion about its spelling is understandable, though, since there is a noun that is more usually spelled/spelt baulk. It's part of a billiard-type game table, and the term is used in several terms in several such games.

I searched for several of these terms as either balk or baulk in Corpus of Global Web-Based English and got only the u spelling—with none of them in AmE:

(Britannica.com has it as balk. They're owned by the same company as Merriam-Webster. Is the ghost of Noah W. removing U's in the encyclop[a]edia?)

So, in general, if it's a [billiards] noun, it's baulk and if it's a verb it's balk. They both come from the same Old English word, with a Germanic ancestor.

The one other -aulk word in current English is caulk (used much more in AmE than BrE, which tends to say seal/sealant instead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquer in the 1500s.

The post-Norman urge to stick a U in balk also affected talk and stalk in the 1600s, but not, apparently walk. For me, the mystery is: why has the urge to stick a U in persisted for baulk and not the others?

----

*I say 'another' instance of spelling change due to perceptions of 'Americanism' because I discuss the main instance of that phenomenon in detail in The Prodigal Tongue:

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 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. 

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.

• 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.

    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.

• une politique audacieuse pour défendre la langue et la culture française qui se trouvent aujourd'hui particulièrement menacées par l'invasion de la langue anglaise et de la culture anglo-saxonne .
  a bold policy to defend the French language and culture, which are today particularly threatened by the invasion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture.

• L'hôpital a mis en place un concept qui vient des pays anglo-saxons nommé "Kids friendly".
  The hospital has implemented a concept that comes from Anglo-Saxon countries called "Kids friendly". 

• cette brutale franchise, qui caractérisent la race anglo-saxonne .
  that brutal frankness, which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race.  
  
  
• Cette ardeur chrétienne est-elle particulière à la race anglo-saxonne ?
  Is this Christian ardo(u)r peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race?

• "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]

    For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.

  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.

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)

    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.

    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.

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 bung (meaning something like 'put forcibly, carelessly') that struck me. It seemed such an unattractive word, and yet it was being used about some food that was supposed to be wonderful after the bunging. Was this telling me something about British attitudes to food and cooking? Was it supposed to make the dish-making seem so sloppy anyone could do it? The questions clearly stuck in my mind, because the phrase has stayed with me for 25 years.

Bung was the first thing to come to mind when Maryellen Macdonald wrote to me:

You have a long post about cooking word differences, but I don’t think it contains a discussion of “add” vs. “tip”. US recipes say things like “add the carrots” to the pan, whereas UK recipes say “tip in the carrots”.  My husband, the better cook in the household, asked me, “What do they mean tip the carrots? They’re cut up!” Hmm, maybe this little observation-ette isn’t quite sufficient for a post, but, perhaps you can use it somewhere.

I'm not sure which cooking-word difference post she was thinking of, since there are LOTS of them. But it made me think about "recipe verbs". Words like bung and tip are not necessarily cooking words—you can bung or tip a lot of things. But they are the kinds of words one finds in recipes or cooking programmes/shows. 

I started asking my friends for other recipe-verb differences they had noticed. One friend (thanks, David!) pointed me to this parody cooking series, Posh Nosh, in which Richard E. Grant and Arabella Weir are minor aristocracy with an upscale restaurant brand. This particular nine-minute episode includes many great (fake) cooking verbs, instructing you to interrogate (clean?) then later to thrill open your mussels, to pillage some bones and to "gently gush [some AmE broth/BrE stock] until it completely obsesses the rice."

My friends weren't great at coming up with verb differences. (Several nouns were suggested.) Thank you to Ben, Björn, David, Jason, Michèle, Wendi for their suggestions. To complement these, I ended up doing an Advanced Search in the Oxford English Dictionary for region-marked cooking verbs. This post then got stupidly long and AmE biased; the OED is not good at marking words that are general to British English but not to North American. 

For the following, I am marking things as AmE or BrE if either the OED or corpus results fairly firmly put the verb on one side of the Atlantic or the other. But you might know some of the "the other country's" words, especially if you ingest a lot of recipes and cooking programmes/shows. These things have been moving rapidly with mass media.

• AmE broil v BrE grill is (part of) the topic one of my first blog posts.  Also: 
• AmE charbroil = cook over charcoal (not very frequent, more common in the modifier form charbroiled)
• AmE panbroil = cook [meat/fish] in pan with very little fat 
  
  
• AmE grill v BrE toast comes up in a long post about cheese sandwiches (BrE toasties)
  
  
• AmE grill v BrE barbecue comes up in a post from the 4th of July
  
  
• orig. AmE nuke & zap: (informal) to microwave
  
  
• orig. AmE pot-roast: to slow-cook meat (esp. beef) in a covered pot/dish
  
  
• orig. AmE stir-fry (but this has been in BrE for most of your lifetimes)
  
  
• AmE plank: From OED: "Originally and chiefly North American. To prepare (meat, fish, etc.) by cooking it on a board over an open fire; (in later use) to cook on a board in an oven"
  
  
• AmE shirr:  to poach (e.g. an egg) in cream rather than water. (I knew the word, but not what it meant!)
  
  
• orig. AmE flip: Not really a recipe verb, but...from the OED:
  

transitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. To cook (items of food) by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle. Now typically with the implication that the subject has a job in a fast-food restaurant (chiefly in to flip burgers).

• roast v roasted (of potatoes, chickens, etc.)—that post also mentions corn/corned beef, which has another post. 
  
  
• skim v skimmed (of milk)
  
  
• minced/ground
  
  
• mashed & smashed:  I've written about mashed potato(es), which BrE can call just mash (now we're back into nouns). A related AmE verbal adjective is smashed. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (2013), North Americans have the collocation smashed potato(es); there are none in the British data. The distinction between mashed and smashed is that a smashed potato is less thoroughly mashed—it will still have some (orig. AmE) chunks of potato in it—and may well include the potato skins. 
  
  These days, you definitely see smashed on BrE menus—sometimes in front of potato but much more often in front of avocado. This Google ngrams graph shows that smashed avocado (blue line) surpassed mashed avocado (green line) in UK books around 2019, but the phrase has not taken off in the US (red line) in the same way, where people just talk about avocado toast without an adjective. (You hear that in BrE too, but it's not as prominent as in AmE.)

• BrE bung: to put forcibly, without delicacy. It's very informal word, but that goes with the vibe of a lot of British cooking shows. The closest equivalents are probably stick or throw (both General English), as in stick/throw it in the oven/pan, but bung feels the most informal and dismissive of the bunch. Here are some Google Image results for "bung it in the oven", which show the phrase applied to simple, quick recipes and the people who cook them:

• BrE tip in means, essentially 'pour in', but it's often used for solids. It can apply to chopped carrots, as in Maryellen's example, because you're assumed to be tipping the chopping board over the pan and 'pouring' the carrots in. The magazine that just came with my grocery order has tip in its first two recipes: bread dough is tipped onto a floured surface. Cooked spinach is tipped into a sieve. 
  
  
• add: Mrs Redboots suggested this one. Add is General English, of course, but she notes a different usage:

        American on-line cooks "add" ingredients to an empty pan.  Can you add something when there is nothing there?

• pop: British people are always popping—popping in, popping out, popping to the shops—so I suspected that pop it in the oven would also show up as more BrE, but no. It looks like General English in the GloWbE corpus. Google Books has pop it in the oven becoming more common after the 1990s, with BrE use of the phrase overtaking American from 2014. 
• AmE does seem to like to pop open various things, and BrE doesn't so much. This can include food/drink packaging (pop open a beer), but is often used of doors, the (BrE) bonnet/(AmE) hood or (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk of a car, etc. Pop probably deserves it own post someday.

• (BrE) blitz: It sounds a bit slangy, but blitz is nearly the standard verb in BrE for using a blender, especially for short blasts—to the extent that some people call any kind of blender a blitzer. (I did not succeed in finding out how common this is, because the data is overrun with people named Blitzer and sports blitzers, etc.).  Blitz looks like it might be making it into US website recipes.
  
  
• a wooden reamerwhisk: This is general English, but only in BrE (and rarely) have I seen it used to refer to the action of using an electric mixer (with whisk-y attachments). It's thus used a lot more in UK recipes. 
  
  
• beat [added 18 Mar 25]: I am looking at two cook(ery) books now, and see that Americans are always beating their ingredients where British bakers are whisking them. Neither word is particular to one nationlect, but the rates of usage seem quite different. (Click for an ngram of beat the eggs.)
  
  
• (orig. AmE) rice to press through a holey surface or mesh to create very small pieces; some people have special ricers for this. Especially used with boiled potatoes to make mashed potato(es). 
  
  
• (AmE) pull: to "stretch and draw" a mixture (usually AmE taffy) until it is aerated and ready to set. OED has this as "chiefly" AmE.
  
  And then there is the pull in pulled pork, pulled chicken, etc. OED has this as "chiefly U.S. in the late 20th century" (but it seems to have come back to the UK with US-style pulled pork).
  
  
• (AmE) ream to juice a citrus fruit, using a device that you twist in the halved fruit. 

• frost/ice: See this old post.
  
  
• (BrE) knock up (a crust): to seal and finish the crusts of a pie. (Here's an online discussion of it.) This is no doubt related to uses of the phrase in other crafts. Here's the first OED sense definition for knock up:

To drive upwards, or fasten up, by knocking; spec. in Bookbinding, etc. to make even the edges of (a pile of loose sheets) by striking them on a table; in Bootmaking, to cut or flatten the edges of the upper after its attachment to the insole.

          AmE knock up is a more general expression for 'prepare quickly'. So if you knock up a pie (or a three-course meal or anything else) in AmE, that's talking about the whole process of preparing it, from start to finish.

• proof / prove In BrE, you prove dough and (traditionally) in AmE you proof it (unless you've watched lots of GBBO).

• can v tin/bottle: Say you have tomatoes that you blanch and put into jars for use later in the year, in AmE that would be canning even though the tomatoes are going into a glass jar. You could also talk about canning if you were putting things in a jar to pickle, I think—it's just our general word for what to do when you have a glut of some fruit or vegetable that needs saving for later. The OED suggests tin (for putting things in metal containers) and bottle as BrE equivalents, but I think maybe for putting things in jars more general-English words like preserve and pickle might be more used? (Let us know in the comments.) Bottle would be used in AmE if you were putting things, like sauces or liqueurs, into bottles, but not usually for jars.
  

• French: this one (not in my vocabulary) I got from the OED:

transitive. Cookery (now chiefly U.S.). To prepare a joint by partially separating the meat from the bone and removing any excess fat.

• tenderize orig. AmE, but has been in BrE since the 1970s

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 like I need to explain some things about the past tense in English. I'll try to introduce terms gently, with links to sites with deeper explanations. At points I will be a bit sloppy and use more familiar (and less precise) terms (like past-tense). And I'm going to be very sloppy about phonetic spelling, both because not everyone knows the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and because if I tried to use the IPA we'd have to get into not-especially-relevant differences in pronunciation of many of these words. 

Let's start by thinking a bit more about ‑ed. Old English had different categories of verbs that were put into past tense (preterite) in various ways. The so-called strong verbs were those that changed their internal vowel. Some of those are still 'strong' in Modern English, like drink/drank and write/wrote. 

Those that ended with the (then multiple) suffixes that would eventually become ‑ed are weak verbs. They don't undergo an internal change to make past tense; a suffix is just stuck on the end.

Nowadays, we think of strong verbs as "irregular verbs" and ‑ed verbs as "regular" verbs, but back in Old English the verbs that we now think of as "irregular" fell into regular patterns in a more complex system. 

For centuries, English has been bending toward verb weakness. Many Old English "strong" verbs are now made past-tense with ‑ed, like starved (rather than something like storve) and baked (not boke). 

• stopped, stoked, passed, slashed, torched = "stopt", "stokt", "past", "slasht", "torcht"
• strobed, flogged, buzzed, judged, blamed, pinged = "strobd", "flogd", "buzzd", "judjd", "blamd", "pingd"

That is, each of these past tense forms is pronounced with one syllable. The ‑ed does not represent a vowel+consonant combination. Buzzed isn't "buzz-ed", it's "buzzd". 

If you don't hear the difference between those, think about learned in these two contexts:

I learned a fact versus a learned scholar 

The first has one syllable ("lernd"), the second as two distinct syllables with a distinct vowel in the ‑ed. That two-syllable learnéd (sometimes spelled/spelt with the accent mark) is a special case; it's an adjective, rather than a verb. We're going to stick to verbs, not adjectives in this post, but that adjective is handy for illustrating what we're not doing in words like buzzed. We're not pronouncing a vowel in ‑ed.

Some other ‑ed verbs do have a pronounced vowel in ‑ed:

• tasted, boarded, dated, padded, minded: each has two syllables.

If you start from the spelling, you might think that buzzed is buzz+ed and the E has got(ten) lost. But language doesn't start from spelling, it starts from sounds. Instead of the suffix being ‑ed, with some weird places where the vowel is dropped, it makes more linguistic sense to see the suffix as ‑d and to observe that we have rules for what to do when that [d] rubs up against other sounds in pronunciation. The rules are:

• The [voiced] -d becomes [voiceless] ‑t when it follows a voiceless consonant sound. (We say it assimilates to voicelessness. Assimilation makes things easier to say quickly.)
• A vowel is inserted (epenthesized) when we try to attach the suffix ‑d to a /t/ or a /d/ sound. These consonants are pronounced by tapping the gum ridge behind the teeth with the tip of your tongue (they're alveolar plosives). and if we tried to pronounce them together, you'd not be able to hear them both. (In English, we would pronounce padd the same as pad.) So, inserting the vowel makes the doubled alveolar consonants pronounceable for the speaker and hearable for the listener. 
• In all other cases, the suffix remains ‑d in pronunciation.

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.

Here's how it it's been showing up in British news sources: 

Though the Google Books data is not as up-to-date, it shows a general increase in the term in BrE, starting at the turn of the 20th century, but speeding up from the 1980s. (It's possible that has something to do with the 1975 hit song "Landslide" by the Anglo-American band Fleetwood Mac.) I'm not too worried about the dip in the 2000s. Most words I look up in Google ngrams dip in the 2000s for some reason.

The first OED citation for landslide (which it marks as "Originally U.S.") is from 1822; early citations are hyphenated, but the hyphen was soon lost. (That OED entry was updated in 2021.) The BrE word landslip, by comparison, dates back to at least the 1670s. While the OED marks landslip as 'also figurative' none of its examples are figurative uses (but that entry has not been updated since 1901; it is irregularly hyphenated into the 19th century). Here are the definitions:

landslide   1. The sliding down or subsidence of a large mass of earth, rock, etc.; a landslip; esp. a collapse of earth or rock from a mountain or cliff. Also figurative.  2. An overwhelming majority of votes for one party or candidate in an election; a victory achieved with such a majority.

landslip The sliding down of a mass of land on a mountain or cliff side; land which has so fallen. Also figurative and attributive.

In the last one there, the headline says landslip, but landslide is in the first line of the article.

To me, landslide sounds much bigger than landslip, and that might be reflected in the large in the former definition. Around here in the South of England, landslips occasionally close down rail travel between Brighton and London. In that case, it'll be that some earth has washed down from the slopes along the (BrE) railway line/(AmE) train tracks. There, I don't tend to hear landslide, and sure enough, those headlines tend to be about landslips.

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. Album-of-the-year lists are filled with female solo artist megastars. 

It is Ms Swift who gives us our UK-to-US Word of the Year:

fortnight

painfully losing to Bill Belichick and Brady over the past fortnight.  [nfl.com, 21 Dec 2021]  

Since their [Korean band BTS's] fortnight in L.A., which turned out to be a mere reprieve for artists and fans [Hollywood Reporter, 29 Dec 2021]

...as NYC is currently recording 3,761 daily Covid infections, a 55% increase in a fortnight [deadline.com, 10 Dec 2022]

By 2023, far more of the American fortnights seem to be homegrown. Many of those are about sport(s) and many of those are about European football (AmE: soccer). But a good few (like the nfl.com one above) are about US sports. It's possible that the sports pages, "a NOOBs hotbed" are the entry point for the current fortnight trend. 

One could think that the sports connection is what made Swift aware of the term—but I think it's a word that poetically minded and well-travel(l)ed Americans would often know. So I'm not going to bet that the inspiration for the word use was Swift's involvement with an NFL player. 

The song ends with some American geographical detail:

Thought of callin' ya, but you won't pick up
'Nother fortnight lost in America
Move to Florida, buy the car you want
But it won't start up till you touch, touch, touch me

It feels like the juxtaposition of fortnight and America is a nod to the unAmericanness of fortnight. 

Linguistic Americanness/Britishness depends on how you define Americanism and Britishism. This one is British because it died out in the US, not because it was never used there. Its new American fame is a tiny drop compared to its early-US use:

Note that fortnight been going down-down-down in the UK too. British people are saying two weeks more than fortnight since around the 1970s:

Some people call that Americani{s/z}ation. I'm not so sure. It's not like two weeks is a phrase an English speaker would have to learn from Americans. It wasn't Americani{s/z}ation when English speakers stopped saying sennight (='seven nights', like fortnight = 'fourteen nights') in the 17th century in favo(u)r of one week or a week. It's just using another, more transparent expression that your language allows, and allowing the more old-fashioned-feeling one to fall away. 

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At this point, I am not certain there will be a US-to-UK Word of the Year 2024. If you're reading this before I post one, you're still welcome to nominate! 

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 and has not been updated since. All its examples hint at felt hats—not necessarily silly ones like the one in the picture, but small hats worn toward the back of the head:

At some point after I moved to the UK in 2000, I started noticing British folk using beanie for what I had called a winter hat, others call a stocking cap, and Canadians (and some Americans) would call a toque (or tuque). It's a knit(ted) hat that might be rolled up at the bottom. Soon after that, I started noticing Americans using beanie (in) this way. So I was never sure where this use of beanie had originated. Nevertheless, it's definitely the predominant sense of the word now.

Google Image Search results for beanie
For some reason, I was thinking about beanies yesterday, and so I tweeted about them on Bluesky (yes, I'm reclaiming the word tweet). Monika Bednarek, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, replied that she thought the knit(ted) hat usage was Australian. Aha!

Now, I have no access to Australian dictionaries, and as we've seen, the OED is out of date on this. On top of that, there's no option to look at Australian sources only in Google Books ngrams. But Wikipedia says:

In New Zealand and Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a toque in Canada and parts of the US, but also may apply to the kind of skull cap historically worn by surf lifesavers and still worn during surf sports.

The lifesaver's beanie is much more like the silly American school cap. This photo comes from a National Post article about Australian lifesavers choosing (some years ago) to continue to wear the hat despite it being "uncool". 

But surfers seem to like to wear knit(ted) hats, so perhaps it was the association with surfing that transferred the meaning to the knit(ted) kind? Maybe? At any rate, it does look Australian in the 2013 Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

Since there are a lot of meanings of beanie (and use in proper names, like Beanie Baby), I checked again with kn* before beanie to capture knit(ted) beanies, and Australia still dominates:

Now, whether the new use of beanie spread directly from Australia to both US and UK is another question. I suspect it probably travel(l)ed by many routes. Initially, it does look like the new use took off more quickly in the UK (around 2005), and it remains higher there.

The first ngram graph also shows beanie hat in greater numbers in the UK than in the US. This is also true in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

This falls into a pattern with goatee beard and chocolate brownie, where originally AmE words are sometimes two-word compounds in BrE, presumably because the addition of an 'old' word helps people to interpret the less-familiar word. 

So, an Americanism turned Australianism which was then populari{s/z}ed in US and UK. If English is any one thing, then it is a mutant.

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.screenshot from examplesof.net 

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuəs/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

            Analog(ue) = /ˈanəl*ɡ/  +  -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/  [dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [ɔ] or [ɑ] & BrE [ɒ])

            Analogy = /əˈn*lədʒi/   +  -ous  =  analogious >  /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

            Analogu(e) + /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + ous  =  analoguous  > /əˈnaləɡjuəs/ [non-dictionary]

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kənˈteɪdʒəs/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdʒəs/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdʒəs/ and AmE /prɛˈstidʒəs/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdʒous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.

(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous­ words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.

The moral of the story: soft-g analogous is a bit weird—which is to say, a bit interesting.

If you liked this post, you might like:

-og and -ogue

-ousness

conflab

High school graduation parties are generally not held in England—partly because there one does not graduate from high school. Graduation is only for those who get a degree from a university. But even when people graduate with a degree, family parties like this are not common. Generally, Americans do a lot more of this kind of party-throwing and gift-giving to mark life transitions (and help out a bit). See the earlier post about showers. 

Meanwhile, my 16-year-old (aka Grover) has recently finished secondary school in England. (Her secondary school, as it happens and unusually for England, has high school in its name.) Before school finished, she took 27 exams over 6 weeks in 9 subjects—this is what's known as the GCSEs (General Certificate[s] of Secondary Education). (NB: Many of the educational issues that come up here have been described in previous blog posts—rather than clicking on each link here, you might want to save your efforts for the 'related posts' links below.) Grover won't know her results in those exams till late August, when she'll be able to enrol(l) in the sixth-form college that's accepted her. (Though she's accepted to the college, she won't know until she has her exam results whether she's met the prerequisites for the A-level subjects she's chosen.) 

Her status has been difficult to explain to her American family. Sixth-form college is not what Americans think of as college, which would be called university in BrE. In England, sixth-form (and many other diverse things!) counts as further education—after secondary school, but not degree-level study. In an effort to translate her status, she's started telling Americans that she's graduated. Her reasoning for this is that (a) they had a little ceremony in an assembly on their last day of school, (b) she's going to something called college, and (c) she's had a prom (an imitation of the American tradition for these younger students). But since she doesn't even know whether she's passed her exams,* it can't really be counted as "graduating", can it? I have suggested to her that she may be misrepresenting her situation. She doesn't mind. It might yet pay off...

What she is, in Britain, is a school leaver. Instead of getting a mortar board and gown, she got a (orig. BrE) hoodie. (Pic here from an Etsy shop. Grover's hoodie is back in Brighton.)

*Oh, I'm sure she's passed. Whether she's got the prerequisite grades is another matter, so it's all a bit stressful. 

So, I want to say: Congratulations to our BA English Language and Linguistics and BA English Language and Literature graduates of 2024! Here's the outfit you didn't get to see me wear.

Related posts:

Types of schools and school years 
(the one that's linked-to a LOT above!)

2021 UK-to-US Word of the Year: university

Academic titles and address

And lots of others with the Education label

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:

I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.

Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old.  (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:

• Hypothesis 1:  Conflab has always been more British than American.
• Hypothesis 2: Conflab started in the US, and subsequently withered there, but not before it had been taken up in the UK.