On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 11:33 PM, <wjhon...@aol.com> wrote: > I was just thinking the other day, "Is there a British-American Dictionary" > ? That would be a dictionary that has all these various words and phrases > and their translations into British English. Often I'll come upon an > article obviously written by a Brit and it will say something like "At the > market, > her trolley bumped into a right blinker and he copped her one..." > > (I just made that up), and it makes little sense at all to an American, > unless they had watched a lot of British tele.
There are dozens of books like that. In reality, there aren't all that many words in common use that are incomprehensible one way or the other. I'd venture to suggest that Brits and particularly Australians, Kiwis etc are generally more aware of American words (even if they're not sure what they mean than vice versa). Now when I speak to an American, I almost mentally load an "American vocabulary" knowledge module :) (Like you said, shopping cart not trolly, turn signal not blinker/indicator...) On a side note, I frequently find myself reverting what I believe are well-intentioned changes to spelling. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Optical_wireless&diff=310779361&oldid=277787036 That is, I don't think the people making these changes are aware they're switching from British to US spelling - I think they think they're just correcting spelling mistakes/typos. I could be wrong though. And since I'm truly rambling, on the "flea market" thing, I'm not sure we have a specific term. School fetes sometimes have "trash and treasure markets", but for permanent commercial things...I know of one that's just called the "Sunday market". *shrug* Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
