D3X73R

A while ago, I wrote  about a difference in AmE and BrE use of street and road , in that in BrE it's more natural to cross the road and in AmE (certainly in a town or city) it's more common to cross the street . (I've also written about in/on the street , so see that post for more on that.) That's common-noun usage, but what about the proper names of vehicular paths? There's no question that some ways of designating paths are more common in one country or the other. I've never seen a road named [Something] Trail or [Something] Boulevard in the UK (though see the comments for some counterexamples), and in the US there aren't as many Crescent s or (BrE) Close s ( pronounced with a /s/, not a /z/). But a problem for making generali{z/s}ations about such things is that the naming of streets or roads varies a lot on the local level in both countries, with different names based on regional differences, urban/rural differences, and terrain differences. Th...

It seems to happen once a week that I'm talking or listening to someone and some interesting new combination of morphemes (meaningful word-parts) is uttered. The conversation will go something like this: A:  Ooh, this cake has real taste-itude.  B: Ha! Taste-itude , is that even a word? Lynne: It is now. People are saying it, people are understanding it. It's made out of morphemes and it's not a phrase. It's a word. It might not be a word that's going anywhere, but it's a word. And I'd go so far as to say it's an English word, since it's made of English word-parts according to English rules, pronounced with English sounds, and understood by English speakers. Recently someone on Twitter took me to task for giving BrE versus AmE uses of tortilla as my Difference of the Day , protesting that tortilla isn't even an English word; that the difference is between European and Mexican Spanish, not British and American English. My response was: yes, the...