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  I love epigraphs, so I use them as often as possible in books I write. The Prodigal Tongue has one for each of its subsections. I do think I chose very good ones for in the book (buy/borrow it just for the epigraphs!), but I still have a file full of quotations that I didn't have space for. So, in the spirit of "reuse and recycle", behold the remaining contents of that file, collected during the years of research for the book. If you don't see it here (Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, The Simpsons...), then it probably made the cut and is in the book. What I've not done here (because I cannot be spending that much time on it) is give the full bibliographic info for each quote. Please note that I collected these to illustrate various ideologies that I'd be discussing in the book. None should be taken as my point of view.   If you want to quote them, I'd recommend you first read up  on any unfamiliar authors before you do...

 I have a note above my desk that says "Next blog post: roast(ed)". It's been there for three years, since Melissa L wrote to say: Dear Lynne, I teach English in Germany and enjoy your blog. I am a native speaker of American English. Most of my teaching material uses British English. I spend a lot of time thinking about and paying attention to the differences between AmE and BrE (though maybe not as much as you). Anyway, in an exercise about dishes on the holiday table, there was roast turkey and roast potatoes. I would say roasted potatoes.   Roasted is an adjective made out of the participial form of a verb . We make such modifiers all the time—as we say in linguistics, it's a productive morphological process . You could have a written resignation letter, a fried dumpling , a worn path. So, roasted vegetables or roasted turkey don't need much explanation: we're just using the tools that English gives us. The question more is: what's going on w...

It's not often that I review a book in the same week that it comes into my house, but I'm happy to go directly to recommending this one. It's The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos. You can probably think of someone who needs a present for these "Oh my god it's getting dark early and the world is full of germs" times. This is it! Alex Bellos writes a puzzle column for the Guardian and has written a few other puzzle books, with mathematical puzzles a particular special(i)ty (among other things he writes). For this book, he has mined the riches of the Linguistic Olympiad movement , a great program(me) through which secondary school teams compete nationally and internationally on linguistic problems. One thing I love about the book is how responsible Bellos is in giving credit where credit is due. The puzzles are of many types. There are straightforward vocabulary quizzes, some word games that you might have seen in newspapers (like word chains a...

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know . This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended to know and American ones didn't: All of the terms will be discussed below, but not necessarily in the order given in the table. Instead, I'll group similar cases together. The unknown items from AmE were overrun with food words—that's less true here, though there are some. Stationery items The first two items are generici{s/z}ed brand names for office supplies. Tippex is correction fluid, known in AmE by brand names Wite-Out and Liquid Paper . Tippex is used as both noun (for the fluid) and as a verb for the action of covering things over—literally with correction fluid or figuratively. Here are a few examples from the GloWBE corpus that show some range: Her co...