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 Email: [log in to unmask] Website: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33 Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/