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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error.

(OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)

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>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'.

Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".

I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."

I've heard it used that way in the UK too, but the first meaning is traditional. Wiktionary has some examples:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot

I expect the US meaning will eventually become standard everywhere.

It sort of means both simultaneously, doesn't it (we could discuss it but it's inconsequential), but we do tend to use it in that formulation most.

There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.

Once you start going in that direction, a lot of things that British people say can require some amount of translation, see e.g. this table: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/0*0Fs1...

Honestly it's not the first time I read such comments, and... they're not about the British as much as they are about the Americans, I'd say.

I think almost all of the expressions in the left-hand side have direct, almost literal equivalents in French for example, with the same meaning as they have for the British, including being very context-dependent.

Also works for Flemish by the way, although the Dutch are supposed to be more literal so maybe Flemish/Dutch is to be seen the same way as British/American.

Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)

I use it in different senses all the time.

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