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This is the second of my 2017 Word of the Year posts. For the US>UK winner, see yesterday's post . A Pinterest page credits this photo to Josef Gelernter As I said then, there's always a choice--do I go for the (BrE) slow burner that's been wheedling its way into the other country, or do I go for something that was splashy in the news? I went for the slow burner for US-to-UK because it really did seem to resonate in 2017. But I couldn't find as good a reason to promote any of the UK-to-US slowburners (and there are a lot of them--a s Ben Yagoda's been tracking ) to special status for 2017. So I'm going way back to February when I tweeted this: Shitgibbon: an early nominee for 2017 UK>US WotY? https://t.co/DlNlE6ChZw — Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) 9 February 2017 Yes, for its (ok, flash-in-the-pan) newsworthiness, I'm declaring the 2017 UK-to-US Word of the Year to be: shitgibbon   It made the news because a Pennsylvania senator tweeted: Hey @realDon...

It's that time of year again. The time when everyone's too busy doing fun things in real life to read blogs. Yet I persevere in announcing my Words of the Year here at the butt-end of the year because I don't want to be unfair to December. (And, of course, I'm doing too much teaching to even think about it any earlier.) As ever, the point of the SbaCL Words of the Year is to note the riches (or rags) that American and British English bring to each other. A SbaCL WotY is not a new word, and it may not even be a newly borrowed word, but it's a word from one of my countries that has been particularly relevant to the other of my countries in that year. Sometimes they're in the news, sometimes they've been building up a presence for years and just needed a little acknowledgement. The finalists (in my mind) for this year's US-to-UK WotY were of each of these types. The loser is mugwump : a now-obscure Americanism briefly lifted out of the shadows when lexical...

Better late than never (I hope) here is the summary of the SEVENTH 'Untranslatable October'—my annual tweeting of 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 the following does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context. Yes, it's an imperfect word for the situation. But so is nearly every other word in nearly every situation. BrE safeguarding legalistic processes for protecting vulnerable people. See Wikipedia for description. (Starting to be seen in US, but nowhere as prevalent/broad.) Suggested by @ Gnorrn AmE podunk (adj.) - There are lots of words for small towns or remote places, but podunk is interesting for its use as an adjective, describing to a place of little importance, as in: Her degree is from some podunk college.  Suggested by @kirkpoore....