Car Parks and Parking Lots
England and America are two countries separated by a common language. George Bernard Shaw - Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)
Listening to Mythbusters tonight I noted the frequent use of the term car park. It struck me that this is an example of language evolving. In the United States a car park is commonly called a parking lot where elsewhere in the English-speaking world the former term is preferred.
Then a teeny, subconscious, crass, commercial thought struck: The Discovery Channel has a financial relationship with the BBC and the producers have probably tweaked the scripts to make the show more marketable world-wide. I'll have to look for this in other shows from this network.
I'd rather think this isn't done for commercial reasons but linguistic revolution has to happen somehow, I suppose. And it's probably happened before, now that I think about it. The recent series of Volkswagen commercials feature an actor with a heavy German accent using American urban-speak (what my black friends call ebonics -- there's another story!).
Here are some of my favorite language links. Parents, I suggest you monitor your children when they use these sites for two reasons. So-called adult language appears frequently and you might learn something, too.
- Slang Dictionary (British)
- Wordorigins.org
- English to Latin Dictionary (and other languages if you work it right)
- Urban Dictionary
- List of neologisms on The Simpsons (Wikipedia)
- American Sign Language Browser
