Happy 4th of July to our American subscribers! Earlier in the week we shared a BBC article that explored whether English spelling should be made simpler. If you find yourself agreeing that English is more complicated than it needs to be, you’re not alone. Longtime readers of our blog might remember our article on the creation of Webster’s dictionary. In An Independent American Language, we wrote: 'With his dictionary and other spelling books, Noah Webster wanted to emphasise that now America was no longer under the rule of Great Britain, its language should also be independent. Many of the changes involved shortening words and changing odd-looking spellings to ...
As English is spoken in many countries worldwide, it’s moot to argue that there is only one way to pronounce a word. Take the word ‘route’ for example – here in Britain, we pronounce it ‘root’, while in America it is pronounced ‘rowt’. Even within Britain, regional accents mean that the same word can be pronounced in many ways. Because English has evolved from a variety of different languages, you can’t consistently rely on the spelling of a word to figure out how it’s pronounced. As soon as you learn a pronunciation rule, you’re presented with all the exceptions – just take a look at the following ‘ch’ wo...
Taking the biscuit. A common point of confusion in the English language is the difference between the American and British meaning of ‘biscuit’. Both refer to a delectable baked treat, but what an Englishman would refer to as a ‘biscuit’ is, in America, known as a ‘cookie’. In America a biscuit is a savoury ‘quick bread’ with a consistency similar to the English scone (the pronunciation of which is another of the age-old discrepancy of the language!). In Britain the term biscuit seems to be a much broader term, and they come in an immeasurable and array of shapes and sizes, flavours and textures. The perpetual ambiguity surrounding the ‘biscuit’ comes from the origin of the word its sel...
This week we’ll be looking at another word that has evolved multiple meanings: cookie. The Internet age has transformed the meanings and connotations of hundreds of words and even introduced new ones into our dictionary; ‘Google’ and ‘retweet’ to name a couple. The word 'cookie' comes from the Dutch 'koekje' or ‘little cake’ and made its way into American culture as a small sweet cake. What would be deemed a biscuit in England would be called a 'cookie' in the States, where a biscuit is a kind of hard-crusted bread cake – much like British scones. Despite the differences in the definition of biscuit, both cul...
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