Quote:
Originally Posted by djchapple
Over here we say "he lit a cigarette". Over there it's "he lighted a cigarette"
Over here we say "my house has been burgled", Over there "my house has been burglerised" (not sure of spelling)
Let's keep the wonderful variety of all forms of the English language.
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He "lighted" a cigarette in the States would sound as though you were a non-English speaker grasping incorrectly and coming up with the wrong form. Even the least "bookish" among us would look down on that one.
I have a
very dim recollection of having run across "burglarised" in print, and could
swear the example was British! If one American said that to another it would seem comical - although "robbed" is far more common than "burgled" in the first place.
My parents' generation is used to listening to a lot of radio, where the time is always given in numbers - even in New York where they also give a sunset alert for Orthodox Jews on Fridays. My 73 year old mother would likely use numbers off an analog clock (always numbers from a digital one), except that for "quarter after" and "quarter of", and even those I'm not certain of unless I asked her as an experiment -- 18:30 would definitely be said by most of her cohorts as "six thirty".
Extending this to dates - in conversation, when asked one's birthday, in the U. K. does one expect to hear it spoken as "25th of May"?