Thursday, September 08, 2011

Add these to your trolley


One of my students forwarded to me this link to an interesting BBC Magazine article on Americanisms that some Brits find annoying. Just as interesting are the 1295 comments.

7 comments:

John said...

Oh dear! If only they'd take time out (!) to read Jean Aitchison, the former, dare I say it, Rupert Murdoch Professor of of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford.
She wrote, quoting Wilhelm von Humbolt: 'There can never be a moment of true standstill in language, just as little as in the ceaseless flaming thought of men (sic). By nature it is a continuous process.' And, as we say over here, you'd have to be off your trolley not to recognise it!

Mr. Verb said...

Nice. I just discovered, to my horror, that Separated by a Common Language is not on our blog roll. That will be fixed!

lynneguist said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Ouch. Why can't the BBC EVER get anything right about language?

lynneguist said...

Odd that my post was removed by me, but the post I put in its place wasn't here!

At any rate, I was to thank you for adding me to your blog roll and to point out that I did write a multi-part response to this silliness, which can be found in the July archives.

Mr. Verb said...

I'm alarmed that you weren't already ON our blog roll!

lynneguist said...

But now I'm at the top of the list...so maybe it's not a bad thing to be a late addition! :)