Horizon

Well, at least vocabulary borrowing is better than grammar borrowing. I've heard a number of strange UK-style mismatchs of noun phrases ("drugs company") or subject-verb agreement ("the team are") lately. No problem when done by a Brit, of course, but it's not a usage I'd like to see creeping into US english.

Six years of arguing with Brits in writing and I do commit both of Ben's bugbears. Gets up me nose, innit?

Prof. Yagoda is also co-author of The Art of Fact, a lovely journalism anthology that seems mainly written as a textbook but it's good casual reading.

BTW was there something in the last few years about U.S. club kids imitating "tough" British accents and jargon?

I sometimes get confused about what's British and what's American. In fact, a few of Yagoda's examples sound perfectly American to me: "go missing", "booking" a room. And I've been known to use the plural form of the verb with singular nouns before.

The British seem to coin a lot of ungainly but nicely rhythmical phrasal words (sell-by, lead up, chat up), whereas Americans seem to prefer adopting or inventing single words, usually Latinate, vaguely official-sounding, and often ugly. Do Americans tend more toward the French/Latin side of English and the Brits toward the Germanic? ("Chat" is obviously from French, but generally....)

I feel the same way about the two examples you gave, though I hope that I manage to avoid the syntactical changes.

I've also found my vocabulary shaped by my own microculture -- when you work with the same couple of dozen people for years, you develop a communal vocabulary composed partly of in-crowd references, but partly of the ideosyncracies of one member of the group. Since my own coworkers include some Scots and Ulstermen, in addition to our strange technical vocabulary (like "idempotent"), we have great regional words like "tartle" and "spacker". Both of these, of course, come in incredibly handy in a software company.

I buy the Latinizing US vs. Germanizing UK theory, in part because of the way that pronunciation of foreign words is Anglicized in the UK and OZ. It's really startling to hear an Australian pronounce "fajitas", for example. Also, all the verb examples you mention are characteristicly Germanic verb-preposition compounds, which are rare in the Romance languages.

That's true. I suppose they're really the same thing as German separable verbs like "abschließen", except that in German, for some reason, the preposition gets tacked onto the beginning of the verb in some cases, but more often is removed and put at the end of the sentence.

AmE has lots of phrasal verbs too, but I think they are generally pretty old. And UK English seems to have quite a bit more common phrasal nouns, like "way out" for "exit" or "washing-up" for "dishes".