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It's the end of the year, and time to declare the Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year. As ever, I've got two categories: US-to-UK and UK-to-US. In other words: I'm interested in borrowings between these national dialects. To be a SbaCL WoTY, the word doesn't have to have been imported precisely in that year—it just needs to have been noticeable in some way. For past WotYs, see here . I'll post the US-to-UK word soon; this post is for UK-to-US. I've been noticing a lot of Britishisms in American English this year (and, as ever, Ben Yagoda is recording many of them at his Not One-Off Britishisms [NOOB] blog ). I've decided to go with one nominated by Neil Dolinger last month. The UK-to-US SbaCL Word of the Year is: knock-on The relevant sense is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: Being a secondary or indirect consequence of another action, occurrence, or event It's most commonly found in the phrase knock-on effect , which is first r...

Welcome to the final review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019 , I explain what I'm doing. The 'week' has turned out to be eight days. If you're perturbed about that, I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your subscription fees for this blog. On with the show. Today's book is: Because Internet Understanding the new rules of language (US subtitle) Understanding how language is changing (UK subtitle) by Gretchen McCulloch Riverhead, 2019 (N America) Harvill Secker, 2019 (UK) Gretchen McCulloch describes herself as an internet linguist: writing about internet language for people on the internet. She actually does a lot more than that, with daily blogging at All Things Linguistic for years and being one half of the Lingthusiasm podcast team and writing on all sorts of linguistic themes for all sorts of publications. So, I expect many readers of this blog will already know her and have heard about this book.  US Cover I expected Because Inter...