Herb is right about the new verb 'sort' in British English.  It has emerged
in the last ten years or so in situations where 'sort out' would have been
used before.  It is far more common now to hear people say 'We'll sort it'
instead of 'We'll sort it out'.

A popular borrowing (no doubt from US police TV soaps) is 'Listen up!'.
This was never heard ten years ago, but now has developed a smart cachet
from the scenes where the always-to-be-successful detective gathers his or
her assistants together.  Earlier British English would just have been
'Listen everybody!'  So the British TV detective now uses it (even one who
prides himself on his old-fashioned ways, Detective-Inspector Frost).

We still 'fill in' a form and not 'fill one out'.

One curious usage that is now very common indeed in non-standard British
English is to add 'of' after 'off":  e,g, "I saw her when I got off of the
bus.'  I don't suppose this has crossed the Atlantic.  It is very difficult
to suggest a reason for this entirely unnecessary and confusing coupling.

Do you say 'We didn't hit it off' for "We didn't get on'?  It is quite
normal in Standard British English.

I doubt if 'Think on!' for 'Consider the matter seriously!' has emigrated.

Do you say 'He's done for' for 'He's dead' in where the situation is
catastrophic?

Another borrowing, nothing to do with prepositions, now well established, is
to pronounce 'harass' and 'harassment' with the stress on the second
syllable, whereas twenty years ago the stress was on the first syllable with
the second 'a' reduced to a 'schwa' (as was the 'e').  The American
pronunciation of these words again is heard frequently in US TV police
soaps.  There is a similar pressure on 'temporarily' which normal British
English emphasizes the first syllable only;  and also 'incomparable', in
which the stress on the second syllable was normal, not on the third (now
becoming increasingly common).

Similarly, resulting from the popularity of an Australian TV soap,
'Neighbours', pupils (and some English teachers) now pronounce the name of
the letter H as 'haitch'.  British TV stations still stick to 'aitch' (see
the programme 'Countdown' on Channel 4 in which an Oxford-educated woman,
Carol Vorderman, has to call out the names of the letters as she puts them
up on a board).

Edmond  


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

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Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
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