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Before our irregularly scheduled blogpost, a couple of announcements: First, I'm on a (BrE) one-off Radio 4 program(me) tomorrow morning (10:30): Americanize! Why the Americanisation of English is a good thing , presented by Susie Dent . It should be available on iPlayer Radio after that. Second, this blog has been nominated for the annual bab.la Top Language Lovers award 2017. If you'd like to support it (or even if you wouldn't) you can click on the logo and vote :  And now on to the show. What preposition goes before hindsight ? This was a recent Twitter Difference of the Day , and a conveniently simple thing to blog about during (BrE academic) marking season . I'd asked an American lexicographer to (BrE) have /(AmE) take a look at the chapter about (among other things) lexicography in my book manuscript. I had written with hindsight in my book manuscript and he queried whether I'd "gone native" with my preposition. Indeed, it seems I had. A...

If you have any interest in the doctor-patient relationship, I very much recommend Dariusz Galasiński's blog . He writes thought-provokingly about various things that he and I have in common: being immigrant linguist patients or linguist immigrant patients or immigrant patient linguists. But probably not patient linguistic immigrants. Anyhow, we're rather different in how we are/do all those things, but I am really enjoying the commonalities and the thought-provocations. He wrote recently about a term that's always struck me when I've heard it in BrE. Here's a snippet from the relevant blog post, On 'medical language' : ...I was asked about ‘the history’ and told about my strabismus. The optometrist (or doctor) responded with something like: OK, so you had a squint . I didn’t react the first time, but after a second time, I politely but firmly said I hadn’t – it was strabismus, to which she said, it was one and the same thing. And I somewhat more firmly ...