In the “Vernacular Spectacular” blog feature, I compare the American and Australian way of saying something, and offer my winner.  The “Australian” way may be a more broadly “Commonwealthian” way, or more uniquely Australian way, but regardless it’s not how we do things in the United States.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep going or not.  Downside is that it might have been a more amusing idea in the abstract than in practice.  Upside is that the differences are bountiful and having opinions about them is irresistible, so these posts are easy to knock out.  We have a goal of trying to have something from one or the other of us between Beckie’s daily photos, because the death of this blog could go one of two ways: Beckie stops posting her daily photo, or all there is on the blog is one happy “Daily Photo” after another, which would be beautiful but sad.

Anyway, doing them makes it clearer to me that I should have some standard for what makes something the “winner.”  Am I just saying it’s what I prefer, or think sounds coolest, or something else?

So, I’ve decided on a criterion that I will here make explicit: Imagine that globalization leads to the elimination of local ways of saying things, and one of the two variants in questions is the one that survives to be used both in American and in Australia.  Which would I pick?