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How NOT to sound American

by Aaron Hotfelder (RSS feed) on Oct 11th 2009 at 1:00PM

If you're as fascinated by language as I am, especially by the differences between American and British English, you may want to head over to the "Americanisms" section of the Economist's style guide.

The erudite London-based mag offers its journalists tips for how to make sure their prose doesn't sound too American, including the following:

"Hikes are walks, not increases. Vegetables, not teenagers, should be fresh. Only the speechless are dumb, the well-dressed smart and the insane mad. Scenarios are best kept for the theatre, postures for the gym, parameters for the parabola."
"Use senior rather than ranking, rumpus rather than ruckus, and rumbustious rather than rambunctious." [Rambustious? That's a new one.]
And most importantly, "Gubernatorial is an ugly word that can almost always be avoided."

And who says the Economist is without a (very dry) sense of humor? Check out this tip:

"Try not to verb nouns or to adjective them."

This, in a nutshell, is the British sense of humor.

Whole thing here. [via Chris Blattman]

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Filed under: Arts and Culture, United Kingdom, United States

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