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@arnoldgoldman has just suggested shift gears versus change gears for today's Twitter Difference of the Day . I've noticed this one before without being able to put my finger on which one belonged to which dialect. It turns out there's good reason for my confusion--you hear both in both dialects. So what's the story? Is one 'an Americanism'? Looking in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English , I found more of both in American and more of shift in both dialects.  change shift American 98 153 British 42 53 Using a web-based corpus is possibly a bit funny for this, since authorship isn't known and they might be writing for an international audience (among other reasons). So, what happens when we look at books published in US and UK? I checked out Google Books --which also has a lot of problems in classifying data, but we hope that the sheer amount of well-classified data limits the effect of the poorly classified examples. (E.g. I once f...

Have been very taken up with marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading/marking/grading...yes, it seems interminable to me too. Not finished yet, so just dipping my toe back into Tuesday night blogging with a short one. Liz B in the UK emailed to ask me how to interpret English cucumber in an American recipe. And I replied with something like (but I've edited it now): an English cucumber is just the kind you'd buy normally in a British supermarket as 'a cucumber'. They differ from the ones usually sold in the US, which are shorter, thicker- and smoother-skinned, and have bigger seeds. So, here's what's called a cucumber in the UK and an English cucumber or seedless cucumber or even burpless cucumber in the US: image: http://www.smartkitchen.com/resources/temp-hot-house-cucumbers And here's what's called a cucumber in the US, which I've never seen in Britain so I don't know that it's called anything in the UK:   ht...

Since I presented four Words of the Year in four posts, I thought it might be useful to have one post that lists all four. Then I thought: why not have a look at all of the US-to-UK and UK-to-US Words of the Year since I started doing them in the first year of the blog?  Yeah, why not?  So here's a (orig. AmE) round-up of the words to date, followed by some reflection/critique of my picks to date. From US to UK I've declared these Words of the Year (click on them to be taken to the original post): 2006: muffin-top 2007: cookie 2008: meh 2009: staycation 2010: shellacking 2011: for the win - FTW 2012: wonk 2013: Black Friday  2014 (adjective): awesome 2014 (noun): bake-off From UK to US I've declared these Words of the Year: 2006: wanker   2007: (baby) bump 2008:  to vet (e.g. a candidate) 2009: to go missing   2010: ginger ( redhead ) 2011: kettling 2012: bollocks 2013: bum 2014 (adjective): dodgy 2014 (noun): gap year My thoughts on these: I think I'v...