D3X73R

Some years ago a survey went (a)round from the University of Ghent on English vocabulary knowledge. I recall doing the survey and I believe I shared it on social media. Perhaps you did it too. Last week I read the published results: Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas by Marc Brysbaert and colleagues. The point of the research was to establish how well known various words are in order to help psychologists (etc.) choose words for experiments. I was pleased to see that it included a table showing words that differed most for AmE and BrE speakers. So, my plan is to write two blog posts where I go through the lists of unevenly known words and see what I can say about them (or what I have already said about them). I'm starting with the words that were much more familiar to Americans and I'll put them into categories, rather than going down the list as published. Here's the (half) table. (Sorry it's not very clear. All the words will be mentioned below.) The u...

UPDATE: This post has become too much of a spam magnet, so I'm closing comments. If you have something you want to say to me about this, please use email.  I am moving this PS to the top, as I want to be sure it's read! P.S. I'm happy for everyone to discuss what they're interested in in the comments, but I should emphasi{s/z}e (before I waste anyone's time!) that what I'm looking for are specific anecdotes and witty quotations (etc.) to give  'colo(u)r' to the discussion. I already know what aspects of language the book covers and the relevance of the fields I've mentioned to those aspects. I can't promise that anything offered will be used in the book, but I will be grateful for any stories/quotations /etc. offered. Please do so in the comments here and not on email, unless there are privacy issues to consider with regard to the story. It's much easier for me to keep track of things if they're all together here. I hope you will ...

John Wells recently asked me if he was right in thinking "that BrE consistently uses transfer and AmE decal for the same thing". That's the kind of question that is perhaps best answered with a rh etorical question: Is any English vocabulary used consistently? We're talking about ways of putting images onto other things. In that semantic area, I have both the words transfer and decal in my AmE vocabulary, so I was tempted to say "No, decal means something different from transfer in AmE." But then I thought I should find out if that's just me. It's not just me. But it is complicated.   The word decal is definitely more AmE than BrE.  GloWBE corpus But what are decals ? Some possibilities:  1.   Images that can be ironed on to fabrics . E.g. on (orig. AmE) t-shirts or (orig. AmE) tote bags. 2 .   Images on paper that can be transferred to other thin gs when wet . This was what John was thinking of—he recalled ones from his youth for decorati...