So it turns out that American books use "neither' about 10% less than British ones do, which is an interesting finding (but rather far from "Americans don't seem to use 'neither'.")

I too think the "kneether" pronunciation is more common in the US—where I've heard it and used it zillions of times. I was just wondering whether the original poster Checa there was saying Americans don't use this word!

Guess that answers that! 巴别 seems to be Bābié... I wonder whether it can be used as a symbol for "confusion, misunderstanding" in casual Chinese...

What's the Chinese title? Does a reference to biblical Babel make sense to enough readers in Chinese? My YOU ARE WHAT YOU SPEAK was called something like LET ALL LANGUAGES BLOSSOM in Korean. Google gives me the subheadline as "A social history of nagging about words"! I guess that's right...

So it's a good little introduction to sociolinguistics, which I hope will do them good later on...

When I play prescriptivist to my kids, I explain that there's nothing morally, logically, theologically etc wrong with things like "haitch", but that people who actually know less than they do about most things (eg, aren't trilingual like my son) will think they are linguistic dullards.

My son is a "haitcher" after 4 years of primary school in London & I've gently tried to get him saying "aitch", both because it's my/US pronunciation and because I know how deprecated it can be in the UK, even though I know there's nothing wrong with it, it's actually logical, it's Irish etc.

I apologize for getting the order of posts wrong - Stay Carey retweeted you but on my phone and without glasses I thought you were replying to him...

Americans don’t say “neither”?

I don’t mean to disagree with the “Herb” pronunciation at all. But this is a source of quite a lot of British snobbery, and I have to admit that *that* (and not haitching the H) has always annoyed me.