People ranked in an orderly sequence and waiting for something will be called a “line” in the US and a “queue” in the UK. In Britain, violators who don’t take their turn are “jumping (or barging) the queue.” In North America, those who cheat are “cutting in line.”
So it goes.
According to McCartney, when he and Lennon first played him their new song “She Loves You,” his father suggested that they not use the Yank term “yeah” (as in yeah, yeah, yeah) because it wasn’t British. Luckily, they ignored him.
Now these are interesting! I’m a “sample of one” American English speaker, but I do use these two words, burnt and dreamt. I don’t believe I’d usually say “the toast is burned,” or “I dreamed about cookies,” but instead say “toast is burnt” and “dreamt about cookies” (well, more likely “I had a dream about cookies”). I think for either of those it depends on the sentence construction, whereas I don’t ever use “learnt.” Learnt just never got into my vocabulary.
There are a few more of these types of words that have at least some American English usage, according to this Glossophilia article. Slept seems to be one; spilt is another (who says “no use crying over spilled milk?”). Then there is knelt. A link in that article’s comments goes to a page with a chart for a few more irregular verbs of the same pattern: smell (smelled/smelt), deal (dealt), feel (felt), keep (kept), leave (left), and sweep (swept); all are the Past Simple and Past Participle forms.
And the words spilt, dreamt, and burnt are referenced in the Glossophilia article in an asterisked footnote:
Lee Wright on Quora makes an interesting point about the irregular past forms of spill , dream and burn : “[T]hese three specific voiced sounds can have an “irregular” form: “spilt,” “dreamt”…, “burnt,” etc. Both forms are accepted, but in American English, the irregular form is usually reserved for adjectives: “spilt milk,” “burnt toast,” etc. Americans tend to say, for example, that Joan of Arc was “burned at the stake,” but her flesh was “burnt.”
If I think about all this too much, I’ll get a headache!
@Wombat-metal but my point is that UK English, is English. Others are variations on the original theme. If Word were written by a UK company (the only UK IT company I can think of is (was) Amstrad !), there would probably be no other options.
Now I’m in a quandary because I used double parenthesis. Any minute now I will deploy the Oxford comma and run the wrath of a Grammar Nazi.
Take a trip to Roatan in the Carribean, where they speak English with an entirely different cadence and you’d think it’s a foreign languauge.
As a writer, I find these discussions amusing because outside of France, with the Academie Francais whose goal is to protect the purity of the language, it’s all fair game, and shifts with time.
I mean is it soccer or football? Soccer is a word originated in the UK for the sport. So isn’t proper UK English, Soccer?
French descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul.
My point was that French also evolved as a Romance language. So I didn’t understand the statement:
Each of the many Romance languages evolved with its own regionally-flavored, inherently messy words, dialects, inflections and pronunciations, including French.
@Wombat-metal I agree French should remain stuck in the 1850’s, English is an evolving language, which is why they add 50-80 new words and meanings a year - having a gay day is not what it used to be.
Soccer is indeed UK slang for football. Rugby football has largely dropped the football to be generally known as Rugby (it’s the place it was first played for the uninitiated) but then comes along American football to confuse the rest of the world, which is a strange mix of football and rugby. Have you ever seen Australian rules football ? that’s a game that resembles brutal school yard games…
