Prevalence of words in US and UK

[mkenuk]

You're right, mkenuk, kabob is certainly a weird spelling. It's normally كَبَاب‎
 

Touche!
Although I spent a fair bit of my working-life in the Arabic-speaking world, I never got round to learning to read the script.
One thing I did learn is that vowels are not normally written (except in the Q'uran) so that differences in spelling can occur when words are transliterated into English. The country Oman and the Jordanian city Amman look identical in written Arabic  apparently.

[pat]

It was interesting to see that chiropody isn't much known in the US. Presumably the same would apply to chiropodist (a practitioner of chiropody). What word do Americans have for the treatment of feet?

[mkenuk]

re kwanza / Kwanzaa

Both words are in the COD, the Angolan currency kwanza with a small 'k' at the beginning and a single 'a' at the end.
Kwanzaa, on the other hand, the African-American holiday is written with a capital 'K' and a double 'aa' at the end.

The word in the original 'Separated by a Common Language' article is most definitely Kwanzaa, written with a capital 'K' but that may just be because it's the first word in a sentence.

[mkenuk]

It was interesting to see that chiropody isn't much known in the US. Presumably the same would apply to chiropodist (a practitioner of chiropody). What word do Americans have for the treatment of feet?

podiatry /podiatrist I believe.

[pat]

Ah yes. It's also called that here, interchangeable with chiropody. In fact a quick check has just informed me that podiatry is actually a more modern name. It will always be chiropody to me though.

[Hobbit]

We do have the 9 Out Of 10 Cats Countdown here which is very funny.

I agree Val.  I love Jon Richardson so I enjoy it best when he & Sean Lock are team captains.

[anonsi]

I easily knew all of the American list. Of the British list, I only knew 3, and that's only thanks to Chi.

[lilys field]

Were I a more diligent type, I would cite many of the words found in forum banter that are unheard of in my New York vocabulary. I enjoyed appropriating one in a recent post. It’s easy to guess the meaning of knackered in context of two tuckered out pooches But I don’t recall ever hearing it spoken. So many other delightfully oddball (no offense) expressions and words have snagged my attention here.

[mkenuk]

I think the word is from 'knacker', the slaughter-man who was responsible for disposing of large animals such as horses and cattle that were unfit for human consumption. The carcasses would be dismembered and turned into pet food or glue. Not a very nice profession, but, as they say, somebody had to do it. Orwell uses the word in 'Animal Farm', referring to the fate that awaits Boxer, the loyal, hard-working carthorse.

The secondary meaning of 'knackers' ('testicles') apparently may be from a dialect word meaning 'castanets'. 

[jancsika]

“but not watched much American TV”

or should that be “American telly” 

Actually “telly” came up again in yesterday’s 7-by-many and although usually I try to get a “rosette” with no mistakes and no rare words (something I’ve only achieved once so far) I always make an exception for “telly”. It’s so deeply ingrained into British colloquial discourse that I feel it is my patriotic duty to enter it, even though I know it will be marked as “rare”!

[lilys field]

OMG, Mike that’s an impressive explication. My apologies to the universe for the glee I took in using the K word.  Not because of the testicle meaning....but Orwell‘s. —Paula

[Calilasseia]

I'm surprised to see Tilapia being listed as more prevalent in the USA than the UK, but my 35+ years as a tropical fishkeeper has probably skewed my view on this.

Though I have to admit that my first introduction to these fishes came courtesy of an American fishkeeping book, spoken of in hushed tones among those in the know as "the venerable Innes book", after its author, William T. Innes. The book in question, Exotic Aquarium Fishes, was the first truly scientific treatise on tropical fishkeeping, dating back to 1931, and even though some of its contents are obsolete today, it's rightly recognised as setting a standard that subsequent authors struggled to match.

The entry therein on Tilapia mossambica is interesting to read in its own right.

However, the Genus Tilapia was used as a sort of taxonomic dumping ground for many years, and subsequent revision has moved many of its former members to their own Genera. Tilapia mossambica itself was moved to the Genus Sarotheordon as far back as the late 1970s, after the pioneering work on Cichlid phylogeny by the late Dr Humphrey Greenwood. It's now been moved to Oreochromis, along with several other commercially important food fishes that were formerly in Tilapia.

Many members of the "Tilapia assemblage" are too big to be practical aquarium fishes, except among specialist keepers prepared to build extra large tanks for them. However, some of them have beautiful markings - Oreochromis tanganicae is a beautiful shimmering turquoise with scarlet fin edges, though at 17 inches as a fully grown adult, it's a candidate for a specialist (and very large!) aquarium. Sadly, several of the species in the Genus Coptodon are critically endangered.

[birdy]

I knew biro, yob, gazump (but only because my English friends were gazumped), abseil, naff (I knew this one before my English-friend-living-too-long-in-the-US did), kerbside, plaice, korma (but with a different spelling), bolshy, brolly, chaffinch (I am a birder!) - many of them thanks to my trash reading!
 
I could guess at judder and chiropody.

 

[Alan W]

The lists presented in this topic reveal a number of words that probably should be reclassified from common to rare in our lexicon. I'll begin with the words that are better known in the US than Britain. As I said in my initial post:

Of these words, the Chihuahua list classes as common garbanzo, acetaminophen, tamale, kielbasa, provolone, staph and luau.

I feel confident in saying all these should be made rare on the grounds of being little known in Britain and other places outside America. I thought provolone and staph are better known in Australia than the other words, and that's borne out by the News on the Web corpus which shows each of these as more frequently used in Australia than in Britain, but not as frequently as in the US. I'm changing all these words to rare.

I think, logically, I should also make paracetamol rare: this is the word used instead of acetaminophen outside North America. (Of course neither of these words is anywhere near as well-known as proprietary names such as Panadol, Tylenol, etc.)

I'll consider the words that are not well known to Americans on a later occasion.

[birdy]

I'm surprised to see Tilapia being listed as more prevalent in the USA than the UK, but my 35+ years as a tropical fishkeeper has probably skewed my view on this.

I think Tilapia is common in the US because the farm-raised version is seen both on many restaurant menus and in our supermarkets.