The Doc beat me by a couple of minutes with his post on Briticisms. Myself, I am more guilty of them than most, what with four years spent and misspent in that Island Kingdom. Jennifer snickers a lot whenever I utter a (involuntarily, I swear) "it might do", or such similar idiom. "I reckon" is also a favorite. No doubt she can come up with quite a list of others. But I attempted to avoid such things, lest friends and family suspect that I was trying to become some sort of 21st century Cary Grant, or Hugh Grant mimic.

What I rather resent from that Pravda essay...I'm sorry, I meant Chronicle of Higher Education ("Nossink is wrong, nossink at all, especially vit American Higher Education!")...is the following:

Generally a Yank can get away with at most one such locution in his or her active vocabulary, for example the person I know who likes to refer to his time "at university," the university in question being a large land-grant institution. Any more than that and he would be laughed out the door, like the professor who habitually shows up at faculty meetings in a bespoke suit, Turnbull and Asher shirt, and Liberty of London tie, done in a Windsor knot.

I scorn anyone who refers to having been "at university". But let the Birckenstocked mildewed athletic color striped sock wearing Rococo Marxist soy milk latte sipping ideologically hidebound narrowminded lefty reactionary denizens of any history department in this country try and laugh me out the door when I show up with proper tailoring, and I will take a malacca cane to their hairless quivering lily white backsides until they are red, and drive them from the departmental door into the outer darkness where they can wail, gnash their teeth and do Admissions counselling.

And stay the hell off my lawn, you damn academics!

(Whew.) Nothing like a little vituperation to purge the blood.