Shall I natter on about this a bit more, then?

Julia caught a ride home from a birthday party this past weekend with a friend. "I've never heard Julia talk so much before," her friend's mother smiled at me as she helped Julia out of the car. "Her accent is adorable!" Momentarily surprised, I very nearly told her that she had the wrong child. It's Evan who is sporting quite a strong -- and definitely adorable -- British accent these days. Julia, in contrast, abruptly dropped nearly all traces of her British accent after our trip back to the States last spring ("I'm American and that's how I want to sound," she declared with a sudden sense of national pride which has surprisingly not waned since). My confusion soon passed as I realized that of course, it was Julia's American pronunciations and expressions that sounded so cute to the British ear. Here, she's the one with the accent.

The fact that Julia's speech, while normal and unremarkable to me, struck her friend's mum as charmingly different was yet another reminder of the differences between American and British English which I wrote about last week. While Denzylle may be correct that I have overgeneralized somewhat in extending the speaking patterns I've noticed among the people I've met here to the entire British population, I think few would argue that there are decidedly quite a few differences between the ways English is spoken in our countries. I still maintain that those differences include how words are put together every bit as much as how they are pronounced.

I suspect that Mobile Em may have been right on the money, however, when she suggested that my examples of verbs followed by prepositions simply indicate differences in word choice rather than actual errors, "wrong" as they sound to my ear. Thanks to Cami, therefore, for reminding me of one rule which is decidedly different; here, a group is always plural even if described as a single entity (i.e. "Waitrose do a lovely job"), whereas in American English, the entity is always singular even if it represents the group as a whole ("Watirose does a lovely job").

For those of you left wondering (Iota), yes, the problem with D was the lack of a question mark; the "please can you" construction is decidedly British (Americans would likely say "would you please" or "could you please"), but I don't think there's anything technically wrong with the sentence by American standards other than the punctuation. And for what it's worth, I hear "please can you" statements come out of Evan's mouth regularly these days and while I'll confess it sets my teeth on edge a teeny tiny bit sometimes, I'm generally (to steal yet another non-American expression) not bothered. Hell, I'm just grateful that someone's teaching him to say please. Of all my over generalizations about the British way of life, the extra emphasis on politeness is my absolute favorite. (I trust that my self mockery translates equally well into both British and American English here?)