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Today I got to hear myself on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth talking with host Michael Rosen and anti-Americanism-ist Matthew Engel. This is just a picture. Click HERE for the program(me)! Biggest regret: that I completely blanked on the fact that sidewalk is originally a British word. Had to go home and read about it in my own book manuscript. I also regret that they cut a bit I said about British music artists singing in their own accents. ( So please read this instead. I think the producer/editor might have thought that the reference to grime music would be too much for the Radio 4 [orig. AmE] listenership .) But listening now to Engel repeatedly saying that American English influence on British is constantly increasing, I wish I'd pointed out this: The 20th Century is often called "The American Century". The 21st Century is looking a lot less American. To be sure, it's not looking like the British century either. That came the century before. American culture ...

As I mentioned in the last post, I was at the BBC ( on ) Monday recording a Word of Mouth episode with Man Who Cries "American English is ruining Britain" Matthew Engel. One of his examples of Americanisms taking over was people in the UK saying poop instead of poo . I wish I'd known then what I just looked up in the OED. My answer at the time was, basically, words for f(a)eces are the type of thing that would change often, because of what Steven Pinker calls " the euphemism treadmill ". "Polite" words for a taboo subject become impolite once they have been associated with the taboo for too long. Some Americans are using poo more now because it sounds "less dirty" than poop , and perhaps poop sounds a bit more "fun" and a bit less graphic in for some BrE speakers. (Or maybe not. If you've switched your poo(p) word, let us know why.) I doubted whether poo had been around long enough for Engel and Michael Rosen (the host) to...

I have a little file of things I've looked up and should blog about some day, and in it is this: ...as you can see, BrE has hit and miss, but AmE is more hit or miss . But while that was mo(u)ldering away in my desktop folder, Lauren Gawne aka Superlinguo actually did something about it. You can read her blog post on the subject here , but here's an extract. Google n-gram confirmed variation in UK and US English, with and being the preferred form in the UK these days, and or found in US English. This didn’t appear to always be the case - hit or miss was also more common in UK texts in Google’s corpus until a couple of decades ago. [ see her blog for the picture !] The OED has hit or miss going back to at least the early 1600s, while the earliest hit and miss is 1897, which also fits with the n-gram viewer. I wish I'd been thinking about this yesterday, when I recorded an episode of BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth with Matthew Engel , who is writing a book about t...