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I was tweet-talking with Lane Greene this morning about whether Americans' love for/Britons' indifference to optional commas can be quantified. And so I did a little experiment. And so I'm going to tell you about it. For this I'm comparing t he British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English . (They're not 100% comparable, but they'll do.) In the BNC, there's on average 1 comma for every 20 words written. In COCA, it's 1:15. So, there are a lot more commas in the American corpus. (I tried this on the GloWBE corpus too, and got about 10% more commas in AmE than BrE–but it's harder to know in GloWBE that the writers are from the country that they're categori{s/z}ed in.) That doesn't tell us that Americans like optional commas more, though. That could mean that Americans like the grammatical constructions that require commas more than Brits do. Or it could mean that Americans write longer lists than Brits do. To really ...

It's the last morning of my (BrE) holiday /(AmE) vacation —off to the airport in less than two hours. But Will W just pre-wrote for me most of a blog post, so I'm going to take advantage and get another post up before I land back in work reality. Here's what Will wrote: Struggling to see the screen, holding my iPad at arm's length, I looked up 'long sighted' on Wikipedia, and it unexpectedly delivered me to 'far-sightedness'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Far-sightedness Further consults with Dr Google, ignoring variations in spelling or hyphenation, suggested a national tendency to interpret the phrases metaphorically or literally. And then he put his findings into a table, with ?? in some boxes. I've taken the ??s out and filled in the terms and meanings he didn't know (and made a few other editing changes for my own happiness). I've also added the OED's date of first citation for each of them, so you can see ho...

Will Fitzgerald has asked me more than once to cover British use of the adjective sorted . It has made an appearance on the blog before, as part of an Untranslatable October . But that short bit on it does not really give it its due. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English , the word sorted is found more than three times more frequently in British than in American English. It's definitely a word to know if you interact with British people. The OED has three UK-particular meanings for it in their 2001 draft additions. I'm going to cheat share the fruits of their defining, with some fresh examples. The first sense , and by far the most frequent one, is illustrated in a current British Transport Police campaign, with posters like that at the right.   a. Chiefly Brit. slang . Of a state of affairs, etc.: fixed, settled, secure; arranged, prepared, dealt with. Chiefly used predicatively and (esp. in earlier use) frequently indistinguishable from the past participle of th...