A 61-year-old holidaymaker....

I've not heard that.

Do they still spell jail gaol?

Sometimes I think the Brits are having us on.

My grandparents were Czech and many I heard from them. I suspect multiple origins.

My mom had a couple of Gaelic terms that she inherited from her grandmother. Aumadan (not sure about the spelling) was one we heard now and then.

Kitty-corner meaning diagonally across a road, usually an intersection.

Rob

But that is used in other places than the British Isles.

There are enough movies that everybody has heard it!


Angeline

"whippersnapper, clodhopper, cantankerous, hornswoggle, hankering, skedaddle, and calaboose", I remember from Westerns and

"hoosegow, shenanigans, and doozy" from my Bohemian granny.

Discombobulatin' the cattle, dagnabit!

cabood- {desire}

,.

Just be grateful they don't "have a go at you"

Leg pull, meaning a tease or deliberate misdirection comes from the tradition of the "short drop" form of hanging common at Tyburn through the 18th and 19th Century. A person being hanged would encourage all his friends to run up and put their whole weight on his legs to shorten the time of strangulation. In Brentwood (meaning Burnt Wood from a fire in about 1200), a posh suburb of London where Madonna looked for a house there's still a road called Hanging Tree Hill. It's a nice scenic road.

Rob

A person being hanged would encourage all his friends to run up and put their whole weight on his legs to shorten the time of strangulation.

British humour...I love it.

but I didn't know "aeroplane" was still in use.

motorway (not highway) Belisha Beacons and Pedestrian Crossing (not Crosswalks), dual carriageway (two lane highway), flyover (not overpass), D'you reckon? (not Do you think so?), surgery (not Doctor's office), Aluminium, Pharmacy (not Drug Store), aeroplane, aeroport, aerodrome, tube and Tube stop or Tube Station (not Subway and Subway Station), in Essex and parts of London garridge (not garage), flat (not apartment), Tower block (not High Rise).

There's a word for a townhouse or row house which escapes me at the moment, equally I can't remember the proper word for a supermarket.

Freehold (no American equivalent), there are houses which one can buy, but on which you must then pay rent for the land it rests on. Pub (not bar), Cinema not Movie Theatre, theatre not theater. Close, a narrow relatively short usually dead end street, Mews, a back laneway normally accessing carriage houses which have been converted for occupancy.
Mount, an isolated steep hill. Clink (a gaol) from the ecclesiastical gaol on Clink Street (it's still there) where actors were often encarcerated. It's quite close to the site's of the Rose Theatre, the site of The Globe theatre and various stews (brothels) in the theatre area. All of this activity had to take place outside the city limits of London, which was only on the north side of the Thames, therefore all the theatres, Clink Street Gaol, the brothels, the bear baiting pits and gambling dens were on the south shore along with Saint Saviour's Church, Southwark Cathedral and The George Inn (still there, but rebuilt in the early 1600's) a coaching inn on the way to Canterbury (Pilgrims Way) All the actors drank there in Elizabethan times, including Shakespeare, the plays were often put on in the courtyard of the inn with audiences on the balcony of the second floor.

Many of the changes in spelling (or vs our, er vs re occurred in the early 19th Century under Webster as a means of differentiation from British usage.

This was true into the 60's but doesn't seem to be true any more, connexion vs connection. I was able to get my relatives to send me Pan paperbacks of all the English war books like The Dam Busters, Fontana, for Reach for the Sky, Faber and Faber for The Great Escape. I forget who published The Colditz Story probably Pan.

Rob