D3X73R

I suffer. I do. At this point, the pollen people tell me it's alder trees. But it's always something. Alder catkins, via Wikipedia I complained about this on Facebook last night with the status " Hay fever ? Already?" and this led a former (British) student, now working in New York to ask: They don't really say that here do they? More just ' allergies ' in general. I grew up with hay fever in Upstate New York, and much of my family suffers, so I'm used to hearing the phrase in American English. But, of course, I had to look it up. I found on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English more mentions of hay fever in Britain than America and more of allergies in North America than in Britain. But allergies wins overall in both countries. Of course, allergies can refer to more than just pollen allergies, so that's not totally surprising. (The darker the blue in these tables the more a phrase is associated with a particular country in this corpus. The...

Being a parent has opened my eyes to differences I probably wouldn't have otherwise noticed. Not so much because of interactions with my English child, but because of the situations in which I see English parents. I have already noted the well done/good job divide, which was very apparent at preschool level. Nowadays, I have to interact with other parents while taking Grover to school (in BrE, I'm doing the school run ) . In the 500 meters/metres between our house and the school, we face a constant stream of parents (known and slightly known) heading in the other direction. (Yes, we're always among the last to arrive. Neither G nor I are morning people.) And, minus conversation between Grover and me about who has the smallest hands in her class, here's approximately how the school run went: Hello_Kitty Evie's dad*:  Good morning. Me:  Hello! Rosie's dad: Morning! Me: HELLo! Somebody's (BrE) mum : G'morning! Me: helloooooo Me: Hello! Teacher at the gate...