Written on Thursday, October 11, 2007 by Jessica
Frequently used words are less likely to evolve or mutate over time.
...The entire family of 87 Indo-European languages spoken today are thought to share a common origin reaching back some 10,000 years.
Very commonly used words — two or water, for example — remain recognizably related across this vast linguistic spectrum, they found. But others words that occur less frequently in daily speech, even if they are hardly obscure, have changed profoundly over centuries and millennia.
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Written on Monday, December 12, 2005 by Jessica
I read the BBC's news website from time to time and I'm always amused by differences in terminology between American English and Standard [British] English. I recently stumbled across an article about the flu-jab nonshortage, and I must say that I infinintly prefer "flu jab" to "flu shot."
Last week I read an article about how "dummies reduce cot-death risk." American translation? "Pacifiers reduce SIDS risk" or "pacifiers reduce crib-death risk."
And today, I found a reference to sticky plasters. I can only assume this refers to the casts used to help heal broken bones. In the same article, I discovered the word "paracetamol," which is the British word for acetaminophen.
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