D3X73R

Grover and I like to play a bit of (BrE) cod -Pictionary, using the cards from a UK edition of Cranium . She's 8 now, and I've been pretty impressed by her ability to communicate in pictures. So recently we were playing and she drew these two things (here kindly re-drawn for your benefit, as I misplaced the original). Have you got(ten) it? I recogni{s/z}ed the first thing as a dandelion with its seeds blowing away and the second thing as a clock face. So I just kept saying "Dandelion time?", to Grover's increasing frustration, until the timer ran out.  The answer was dandelion clock , leading me to ask: "What's that supposed to mean?"  Turns out that's a British name for the head of a dandelion once it's gone to seed. It's also the name of a game played with such dandelions. To quote Wiktionary : A children 's amusement in which the number of puffs needed to blow the filamentous achenes from a dandelion is supposed to tell the ti...

I was reading the print version of Ernest (No. 4, I think, which I received a while ago as a gift for speaking at Brighton's Catalyst Club ) and one of the short bits at the front was about a Yankee dodge . This was what British surgeon Robert Liston called the use of ether as an an(a)esthetic . Yankee because the method was developed in the US. First use of ether in dental surgery, from the Wellcome Collection Within the US, yankee can mean more specifically "New Englander" or at least "northerner". Was this a yankee dodge in both the regional and national senses of the word? The first published-about use of inhaled-ether-as-an(a)esthetic was in Boston, Massachusetts in 1846 by William T. G. Morton (pictured right), and that's what got the attention of Liston. Morton was a Yankee for sure, in all senses of the word. But he spent the rest of his life defending his reputation as the "inventor" of an(a)esthesia because Crawford Long , a surgeo...

The news around Donald Trump's rapey caught-on-tape comments has seen the word lewd bandied around quite a bit, and I've seen a fair amount of complaint about its use to describe what Trump said. It didn't really occur to me that this might be a transatlantic problem when Alan Rew kindly pointed this tweet in my direction: Photo via CNN . Sorry, I needed a picture. Does 'lewd' mean something different in the U.S.? Opening celebrating sexual assault isn't 'lewd' as we use the word in the UK. Abhorrent? — Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) 8 October 2016 ...because I'm sympathetic to the idea that lewd is not bad enough a word for something that actually suggests and promotes sexually assaulting women. It seemed not-right-to-me in either dialect. But then Garrett Wollman pointed out: @oliverburkeman @lynneguist "Lewd conduct" is what the prosecutor charges when there's not enough evidence to convict on assault or rape. — Garrett Wollman ...

Last week, Allan Metcalf wrote about commas disappearing from around vocatives . A vocative is a direct address to a person, such as the reader in the following examples: Reader, let me tell you something about commas. Let me tell you something about commas, reader. If you think, reader, that I'm not going to tell you about commas, think again. I used commas here to separate reader from the rest of the sentence, because reader isn't a grammatical part of the sentence. It floats on a different plane from the subject and predicate. Metcalf was noticing that many people were not using commas, and I got a good dose of noticing that today when I received birthday messages on social media. What I wondered was: do British people use the comma less? I have good reason for asking the question with that particular bias. Americans use a lot more commas than Brits do. Like that first comma in the blog post ( Last week , ). Americans are much more likely to put a comma after an adverbial ...

On Twitter, I usually post a 'Difference of the Day' between British and American English every weekday. But for the past five Octobers, I've done the Untranslatable of the Day. The moment I start tweeting about 'untranslatables' I expect to receive tweets and emails complaining about the concept, particularly that 'nothing is untranslatable'. That's why I write this self-plagiarizing introductory blog post each year.  Yes, 'untranslatable' is not a very useful concept. I use it because it's shorter and more familiar than what I really mean: 'Lexicalized in a particular variety of English, but not another' That is, the concept may be expressable in the other English, but it hasn't been packaged as a lexical item—i.e. a word or an idiom—in every variety of English. Comparing which concepts warrant lexicalized (belongs-in-a-dictionary) expressions in a language can be interesting from a cultural perspective. They tell us thin...