Why can’t the English ... speak as we do?
Aug 10, 2018
2 minutes
When he was in college in the United States, my English father-in-law told a woman he’d met: “I’ll knock you up sometime.” She slapped him. In British English, to means to call on someone, particularly to wake a person by knocking at the door. (In the Victorianwas a living alarm clock, going door to door to rouse people so they made it to work on time). In American English, of course, it means to get a woman pregnant. He thought he was proposing a date; she imagined a lot more than that. This is perhaps my favorite proof that Britain and the US are “two countries separated by a common language.”
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