American English -An article on its eccentricities.

[Dingus]

Here's a nice article on the interesting rift between American and British English. For those who wonder what happened to the language they were taught, by their English elementary teacher.

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/d.../d0081550.html

[gre_nidhi]

Nice article dingus....just wondering have u already given ur GRE??? If not then when is the G-day for u??

[Erin]

Interesting article. I particularly liked this observation in the end:

The USA has its own standard grammatical forms, spellings, and pronunciations, and these are taught to young Americans with rather more conviction than standard English is taught to young Britons.

I actually agree with this--I think most American English teachers, at least the ones I've seen and the ones I hear about from my students, are too convinced of the correctness of what they are teaching. I have to spend a lot of time and energy disabusing my students of certain erroneous concepts. Here are a few that have come up in the last couple of days:

• Passive voice is always wrong!
• Never start a sentence with because.
• Never end a sentence with a preposition.

Yuck!