The Gaming Den

Hopefully this can help other folks too. Feel free to jump in.

I've been seeing a lot of "different to" constructions recently. Absent some specific exception, I had thought the correct construction was "different from" (because something 'differs' from some other thing, therefor it is 'differ-ent' from whatever).

Most of the folks who use 'different to' do so consistently though, and I notice it especially with folks I know are from Commonwealth nations.

Am I just wrong? Is this an American English issue? What's up here?

Another thing, completely unrelated:
The US sometimes sells things to other countries. Sometimes, those things come with documentation. Sometimes we actually have that documentation on hand; sometimes it gets sold, and then we peons have to scramble to actually generate that documentation after the fact. Sometimes there are even innocuous little clauses in the contract demanding, roughly, that documentation be delivered in the Queen's English (i.e. 'colour' vice 'color').

So, uh, apropos of completely nothing, are there resources for translating from American English to British English?

Spellcheckers can be set to American or British, which should handle all those 'u' issues. Dunno for actual word swaps.

Search for britpicking resources.

TiaC wrote:Search for britpicking resources.

Nice. Thanks; I would never have guessed that one.

I write weekly and monthly columns for marketers in the UK, so this isn't something I'm unfamiliar with. I use this list of American words that the UK doesn't use much, and this list of British slang terms to occasionally put in my text to make them more culturally incognito. If I'm feeling really brave, I'll pull something from here, too, but that doesn't seem applicable to what you're doing.

Essence wrote:I write weekly and monthly columns for marketers in the UK, so this isn't something I'm unfamiliar with. I use this list of American words that the UK doesn't use much,

Good list.


But as a quibble, I did catch that it misses the Sport/Sports distinction:

Here in 'murika I am into Sports, and my newspaper has a Sports section. On the other side of the pond, those blokes are itno Sport and their papers generally have the same news in the Sport section.

Apparently we had to put the s from Maths somewhere.