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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

It would be “pulling birds” in BrE with no preposition.

Verb objects (and transitive/intransitive) are another difference between the dialects. In AmE you can say “I wrote Grandma yesterday”; in BrE that would be “I wrote to Grandma yesterday”.

A lot of AmE usage is becoming commonplace in Britain thanks to the Internet, though. You’ll now see commercials in Britain that implore you to “Search ‘Fred Insurance’ for full details”. Five years ago that would have been “Search _for_ ‘Fred Insurance’”.

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> A lot of AmE usage is becoming commonplace in Britain thanks to the Internet, though.

My girlfriend and I were watching the Harry Potter movie cast reunion, and I noticed how the younger cast members let a lot of Valley-Girl-isms slip into their speech. "So I was like" (introducing a quotation), and "totally" (meaning very, extremely), and so forth. Quite different from how I expect a British person to talk. The younger generation of Brits seem to have fully embraced what Stephen Fry called "Buffy talk, Sabrina the Teenage Witch talk" and "the language of the Sunny Delight generation": https://youtu.be/xs5fH1ECzWc (Note that Fry was specifically addressing the related phenomenon of AQI, a.k.a. "uptalk", but he diverts into things like "I was like" to introduce a quotation.)

As actors, they've probably all spent a lot of time in Southern California or working with people from there, so it shouldn't be surprising that they would pick up some of the speech patterns.

I think these features are more general young-isms, not really regional. Older Americans don't use them either, right?

They were regional (localized to the USA and possibly Canada) until recently.

> You’ll now see commercials in Britain that implore you to “Search ‘Fred Insurance’ for full details”. Five years ago that would have been “Search _for_ ‘Fred Insurance’”.

But in many forms of commercials it's advantageous to have a short text: you can use a bigger font while paying for the same size advertisement / poster / pop-up window. So maybe that was more a "shortism" than an Americanism.

I remember clearly it was "pulling FOR birds". I wonder why the difference. Perhaps it was because my anecdote took place in the 80's. Language does shift over time.

Odd, since the pulling would be the act of chatting-up-and-convincing-someone-to-sleep-with-you, so "pulling a bird", "pulling some birds", "out on the pull", etc. Much less common than it used to be in any case.

‘Agree’ is the other way around, more often than not takes a preposition after in AmE as opposed to BrE

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