[WikiEN-l] "I should know this, I worked on the Wikipedia article..."

[Steve Bennett]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 11:33 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> I was just thinking the other day, "Is there a British-American Dictionary"
> ?  That would be a dictionary that has all these various words and phrases
> and their translations into British English.  Often I'll come upon an
> article obviously written by a Brit and it will say something like "At the market,
> her trolley bumped into a right blinker and he copped her one..."
>
> (I just made that up), and it makes little sense at all to an American,
> unless they had watched a lot of British tele.

There are dozens of books like that. In reality, there aren't all that
many words in common use that are incomprehensible one way or the
other. I'd venture to suggest that Brits and particularly Australians,
Kiwis etc are generally more aware of American words (even if they're
not sure what they mean than vice versa). Now when I speak to an
American, I almost mentally load an "American vocabulary" knowledge
module :) (Like you said, shopping cart not trolly, turn signal not
blinker/indicator...)

On a side note, I frequently find myself reverting what I believe are
well-intentioned changes to spelling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Optical_wireless&diff=310779361&oldid=277787036

That is, I don't think the people making these changes are aware
they're switching from British to US spelling - I think they think
they're just correcting spelling mistakes/typos. I could be wrong
though.

And since I'm truly rambling, on the "flea market" thing, I'm not sure
we have a specific term. School fetes sometimes have "trash and
treasure markets", but for permanent commercial things...I know of one
that's just called the "Sunday market". *shrug*

Steve