Separated by a Common Language

watching music channel w/ subtitles. Makes me think I shd do a blog post on Estelle's 'American Boy'. Or is it just too embarrassingly late?

Take me on a trip, I'd like to go some day.
Take me to New York, I'd love to see LA.
I really want to come kick it with you.
You'll be my American Boy.

PAMELA makes another journey round the stage with her bundle. 

We arrived at the French Riviera town of Frejus after an overnight journey on the Motorail.  

All of which makes the Jorvik Viking Centre not just the journey of a lifetime, but the most exciting journey in a thousand years.

Break your journey at Marton for a short walk to the site where Cook was born in 1728 

Journey (n) is used more in British English than American English. It means the 'piece' of travel between 2 or more points. The word journey is very rarely used as a verb.

Why is it that the (BrE) cubicles in American (BrE) public toilets never go all the way to the floor or the ceiling and there's always a huge gap that keeps the door from ever fully being closed, meaning that one can never have true privacy?

I'm gonna go snog my kids.........*snog* (love it!)

touch with the lips or press the lips (against someone's mouth or other body part) as an expression of love, greeting, etc.

Difference of the day: (orig. & chiefly) AmE 'make out' vs. BrE 'snog'. Happy Valentine's Day!

make out the act of swapping spit with your significant other... or perhaps just some hottie you met at a party, but anyway, you just sit there sucking at each other's faces for an extended period of time and if you're lucky there might even be a little romming around of the hands if ya get my drift :p

snog  1. verb; to interface passionately with another being, creating a field of physical obsession and focused arousal +centered+ on the lips, mouth and tongue.
2. verb; to play tonsil hockey

1. a little knowledge is a dangerous thing
2. WordNet should not be used as a dictionary

Would you consider polling your readership for their pronunciation of aberrant?  The OED2 gives only penultimate stress (the OED3 hasn't reached the word yet); m-w.com gives both initial and penultimate stress. My sense is that initial stress is far more common, partly because I've only heard that, and partly because of the frequent misspelling "abberant", which would be regular for initial stress.  But there may be an AmE/BrE factor at work here.

Traditionally aberrant has been pronounced with stress on the second syllable. In recent years, however, a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable has become equally common and may eventually supplant the older pronunciation. This change is owing perhaps to the influence of the words aberration and aberrated, which are stressed on the first syllable. The Usage Panel was divided almost evenly on the subject: 45 percent preferred the older pronunciation and 50 percent preferred the newer one. The remaining 5 percent of the Panelists said they use both pronunciations. 

Our stress rules for Latin and Greek words give stress on the -err- because of the geminated consonant (i.e. double in Latin and in spelling). Compare "venerate" with single r. So penultimate stress is what we expect, and the only form given in the OED.  However I have heard initial stress occasionally. I have no statistics on how widespread this might be.

Really enjoyed Older People's Council hustings. Some great questions & interesting answers!

A husting (called a stump in the United States) originally referred to a physical platform from which representatives presented their views or cast votes before a parliamentary or other election body.

[C]andidates for political office and an entourage of supporters, handlers, and journalists are said to go on the stump, or simply stumping.

It seems like a rather unattractive word to refer to a core activity of political campaigning – traveling from place to place making speeches in front of live audiences.

On the stump or on the hustings?
Sometimes when candidates are on the stump, we say that they are on the hustings. Hustings, according to The Word Detective comes from the Old Norse word husthing, meaning "house assembly."

Centuries ago rulers might convene a husthing, usually composed only of members of the immediate royal household as opposed to a larger popular assembly of constituents, in order to gather advice or issue decrees. The English later adapted the word as husting to refer to the senior court of the City of London, and later narrowed the meaning to refer to the physical platform in that court where the Lord Mayor sat.

Over time this last meaning was generalized to refer to any platform from which political candidates might address their audience, and more commonly today it refers to the campaign trail, which we also know as the stump. Notably, husting usually appears in modern English only in the plural form hustings, and then usually in the phrase on the hustings.

 14. Originally U.S.    a. In early use, the stump (sense 2) of a large felled tree used as a stand or platform for a speaker.    b. Hence, ‘a place or an occasion of political oratory’ (Cent. Dict.). to go on the stump, to take the stump: to go about the country making political speeches, whether as a candidate or as the advocate of a cause.
  In the U.S. the word ‘does not necessarily convey a derogatory implication’ (Cent. Dict.). In Britain, though now common, it is still felt to be somewhat undignified.

I was reading an Englishman's blog today and encountered the phrase "a champagne reception and fork buffet supper."

Now I have visited the UK, attended part of high school in Jamaica, have various British friends, and even do some freelance editing for a London-based publisher, for whom I beat the prose of British academics into conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style for the North American market.

But I never was invited to a fork buffet supper. The phrase gives me visions of a long table covered with dozens of glistening forks -- and nothing else.

I've never seen fork buffet in the wild, but there are 24,000 Google hits for it.  It's the companion to the term I have heard a lot, finger buffet--i.e. a buffet of finger foods (51,800 hits). 

fork supper (also -buffet, -dinner, -lunch(eon, etc.), a meal served at a buffet, etc., consisting of food suitable for eating with fork alone, making the provision of set places at table unnecessary.