dull and blunt
This item ran as a Twitter Difference of the Day back in September, and I've been meaning since then to explore it a bit more. My thanks to Colin Fine , who pointed out a Canadian tale of 'the customer isn't always right' story, in which the writer consistently used dull where (British) Colin would have used blunt . Since gradable adjectives are my favo(u)rite kind of word ever, I've been thinking about it on and off since. 'The most important tool' by Simeon Berg , shared under a Creative Commons licen{s/c}e I hadn't noticed that British folk talk about blunt knives and not dull knives because Americans can talk about blunt knives too. Hearing blunt knife hadn't bothered me (and I hadn't noticed the lack of dull knives ), because I hadn't (BrE) twigged that it means something different in the UK than it means to my American mind. It's one of those differences that can easily hide. In AmE, blunt is generally used to refer to thing...