At 8:17 AM -0500 1/8/01, Ken Brown wrote:
Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one for a while)
The most interesting Britishism to suddenly invade our shores and spread rapidly is "gone missing." I'm now hearing this in American movies, t.v. shows, and, importantly, television news. "The hunt is on for the fugitives in Texas who have gone missing." This is definitely new to our shores; I'm surprised (and pleased) at how rapidly it has spread. "At university" and "at hospital" have not become common (though "at college" and "at school" are fully equivalent and are common).
As you said:
Fact is, both dialects of English have longer versions of the same basic word than other dialects have. Which is preferable is a matter of taste and familiarity.
and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know "Randy" is a name in the US, even if we snigger when we hear it, and any American spending more than 5 minutes in Britain UK would find out that a "fag" is a cigarette, so no harm done.
You must be a bum. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns