Grammar girl here, I'm Mignon Falkerty and this week I have some delightful differences

between British English and American English and a meaty middle about the difference between

the words bad and badly. But first a quick and dirty tip about the phrase meaty middle.

German on Facebook doesn't know what I'm talking about when I say one of the segments

is a meaty middle so I'm sure he's not the only one. First I'm saying meaty middle,

meaty like beefy or full of meat. Besides meaning full of meat, meaty can mean full of

substance. The segment I call the meaty middle is almost always the longest, most serious

segment of the show. The middle part has become something of a misnomer though because

it's not always the middle anymore. When I came up with the name the show had three

segments and the meaty middle was always the middle segment. But now sometimes I'll

have two segments so there isn't a middle. Anyway for those of you who've been wondering

or confused that's the deal with the meaty middle. If something is substantial you can

call it meaty. Next I want to share with you some of the interesting differences in English

I noticed when I visited the UK over the summer. Most of us know about the big differences

such as American spelling color without a U and the British spelling color with a U. But

these were differences I didn't know about before I visited. First I noticed that what

I'd call an RV park was called a caravan park in England. Caravan sounds much more romantic

to me than RV which stands for recreational vehicle. A caravan sounds like something merchants

would use to deliver spices or nobles would use to travel the countryside. Whereas recreational

vehicle sounds like a term a government office would have made up to classify the kind of

license plate you need. Caravan is the much older word. Dictionaries disagree but recreational

vehicle came in to use some time between the 1940s and the 1970s. I may also feel more

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