##Divided by a Common Language

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From an email I wrote to a friend who lives in another 
country and let me know something was worded differently
(I always love hearing that stuff -- it's the micro-poetry
of life).  
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I was hoping your verbiage was different.   I'm trying to 
get away from my habit of musing every time whether the 
difference is specific to your country or shared across the
Commonwealth as it's not fair to you; you are not your 
commonwealth's keeper.  But as I say farewell to the 
musing, I want to share a thought or two on what words tend
to be different between the States and the Commonwealth.  
My methodology, of course, is watching a television show 
with my wife.  In this case it was the U.K. program 
(programme?) The Repair Shop. (I did a search to see if the
U.K. itself is technically in the Commonwealth.  I believe 
it is, though my source is Smithsonian Magazine, which is 
American . . . )  To run my experiment, I said to my wife 
"let's see how many words there are on the show that are 
different than the ones we would use".  And the grand total
was: zero.  How can this be? I thought the U.K. and America
were two nations divided by a common language, and all 
that.  

But if you think about a show like The Repair Shop, they 
are using words that were in use before modernity -- 
chisels, glue, wood, and the like.  If you think of many of
the words that are different between American and 
Commonwealth English, they tend to come out of modernity, 
with a few interesting exceptions, such as "biscuit" based 
on which language was to be drawn from (here Italian versus 
Dutch).  But how does that make sense in light of the fact 
the world was more interconnected when the modern things 
were made (and thus named) than the older times?  Well, 
obviously, it is that the relationship between the former 
colony and the motherland changed.  But what becomes 
interesting to me is that this implies the word differences 
were *selected* for psycho-social reasons rather than 
because the words were developed in parallel.  Mind, one of
the books I have on my list to read is the collected 
correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle.   I know for a 
fact, and will know more deeply, how connected people 
stayed as the words of modernity were coined.  

So, what was the process of differentiation? One large case
is when a piece of slang crossed over into the most widely 
used term.  For example, whether you call something a flat 
or an apartment, it is still a room.  Without digressing to
research, I'd say at some point the phrase was so widely 
used that the people who were the organs of British culture
-- newspapers, radio, later television -- started using the 
term.  So far, so good, but they probably had heard the 
American usage of apartment and refused it, as had 
Americans refused the term flat when they heard it.  But my
point is that they heard each other's terms, and felt 
disinclined to use them.  And I am arguing it was a feeling 
that motivated them.  

On the other hand, fast forward long enough and many U.S. 
internet terms are just accepted.  This makes me conjecture 
that there was a cultureal-historical sweet spot for when 
most of these alternate coinages came about, and that it 
was during the time that British Empire was in decline and 
the U.S. was on the rise.  One side was playing offence, 
the other defense, but both sides had an incentive to make 
the common language one that divided them and the only way 
to do that was with new things and new styles.  A very 
small set of words was emphasized to show how different 
they supposedly were.

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I'd love to hear from people.  My email is the handle minus
"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.