Grandma Girl here, I'm Nion Fog Fog Fog and I'm here today with Ben Yagoda,

Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware,

and author of this fabulous new book,

Gobsmacked, Exclamation Point, the British Invasion of American English.

Ben, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you so much.

It is a honor and pleasure to be here.

Oh, it's a delight to have you here, these fabulous words.

You know, one thing I was wondering,

you know, is the British invasion of American English, but you know doesn't American English kind of start from British English like what makes a word worthy of inclusion in this book?

Yeah, I mean, flashback

250, 300 years, there were the colonies and there was Britain,

and the language was pretty much the same

of the same vocabulary same grammar and so forth but over the years they've diverged a

little bit the famous quote is that there are two countries separated by a

common language and you know every each side had slang words for new technology that came up, just new words that words pop up and

they wouldn't really pop up across the ocean at the same time.

They would tend to pop up there or here.

And then there began to be a little bit of cross-pollination,

maybe a hundred years or so after the revolution,

in the late 1800s, when things had kind of settled

in the American language and the British language.

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