This is what Profile Books have to say about Matthew Engel’s new book That’s The Way It Crumbles The American Conquest of the English Language Are we tired of hearing that fall is a season, sick of being offered fries … Continue reading
In her book Horrible Words: A Guide to the Misuse of English (2016), Rebecca Gowers uses the word gripers in preference to sticklers (a word I myself always associate with Lynne Truss’s famous Eats Shoots and Leaves), and in her paper at our Life after HUGE? symposium … Continue reading
There’s a piece in today’s Guardian here: Do you want fries with that? Data shows Americanization of English is rising on the use of Google Ngram Viewer to document the spread of American English. It includes a link to the … Continue reading
Below follows Jan van den Berg’s first blogpost: “American influence is busily eroding a valuable and once firm distinction in British speech and writing” (Amis 1997: 11). This is a quotation from Kingsley Amis’s usage guide The King’s English (1997). As we … Continue reading
This week, reading English Usage Book reviews, sociological issues to do with language communities, and a couple of blogs on Americanisms/Britishisms, I noticed two things: one is that, for the most part, commentators on the correct usage of English, despite … Continue reading
So the irritation is mutual! We’ve reported several times on Americanisms in British English in this blog, but if you want to read on the increase of British expressions in American English (toff, cheers, brilliant, loo), take a look at … Continue reading
One of our readers alerted us this morning to an article in the online BBC News Magazine called “Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English“. She commented: “Isn’t it interesting how it’s the opposite to what I looked at in my … Continue reading
Now that the university library at Leiden subscribes to Cambridge Histories Online, it is possible to have access to books like the Cambridge History of the English Language without having to search for the book in the English Reading Room. … Continue reading
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If today’s pet linguistic hates for BBC journalists and news writers are try and (for try to), concede defeat/victory, gone missing and Americanisms (e.g. turning nouns into verbs and attaching prepositions to verbs: hospitalize, meet with) (see elsewhere in this blog), different ones are listed in Robert Burchfield’s … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 