Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Book-A-Day #23 (8/9): Divided by a Common Language by Christopher Davies

This is a shortish book on the major differences between UK and US English; as such, it's mostly lists of cross-referenced words, with lots of definitions.

It's not a bad reference, but I noticed some things that are clearly wrong about American English (the author is a Briton who now lives in the USA, so I suspect he might be taking some regionalisms, or ways that his friends speak, to be generally American), so it can't be relied on 100%.

In general, I'd still recommend the much larger and more comprehensive British English, A To Zed by Norman Schur for Americans; I'm afraid I don't know of a similar book for Britons, so Divided by a Common Language may be more useful for them.

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