D3X73R

Headlines were made when Wikileaks, in their recent targeting of Hillary Clinton, released a transcript of a private speech by Bill Clinton. British news outlets (orig AmE) zeroed in on a particular passage from the speech for their headlines: It looks, especially if you speak BrE, like Clinton was making a claim about the sanity level of Jeremy Corbyn (current leader of the UK Labour Party). This is a bit of headline evil . Three things conspire here to give Clinton's statement an 'insane' interpretation in the headlines and many of the articles: AmE uses mad to mean 'angry', but BrE doesn't so much.  The maddest is before the noun. Some of British newspapers seem to be withholding the American meaning from their readers.  So let's take those in turn. 1. The difference in mad Mad can mean 'insane' or 'angry' in AmE, but is not as often used to mean 'angry' in BrE. It's one of those word-uses that America preserved and Britain...

I'm feeling a bit of pressure to put nice pictures at the start of my blog posts because the new homepage layout features whichever picture is first. Corpus tables make boring pictures, so I am using this as an excuse to share with you a delightful animation, Choir Tour : CHOIR TOUR from Atom Art on Vimeo . So, with that out of the way, @gwynf has asked me about preach to the choir versus preach to the converted , which was a nice coincidence because I'd recently looked it up myself. Either phrase means 'pointlessly make an argument to those who already agree with your point of view'. I felt like I've always said converted and that I'd learned choir in the UK. I think the first of those feelings is accurate (I do believe converted is what my mom said and it is what I say), the second probably isn't, since choir is clearly the preferred American phrasing: From GloWBE corpus Preach to the congregation is also found in BrE, but in much, much smaller n...

As previously announced , this was the 6th October during which I tweeted an 'British–American untranslatable' (that is, item lexicalized in one national dialect and not the other) on each weekday. If you'd like to complain that any of these does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context. This year's was a bit British-heavy, though in looking back on previous years, I noticed that some had more American ones, so perhaps it all works out in the end.  BrE rough sleeper   'homeless person who's sleeps outside, as opposed to in a shelter or other temporary accommodation'.  Suggested by John Kelly ( @mashedradish ) BrE gongoozler originally, 'an idler who watches canal activities', now more broadly, 'a person who stares for long periods'.  Suggested by Andy M. (on Facebook) source AmE to t-bone '(for a motor vehicle) to crash into another vehicle perped...