American English Has Become Way More Emotional Than British English
Mood Madness Intgr via Wikimedia CommonsA study comparing mood-related words in U.S. and British books shows that Americans increasingly use emotional words more often. If you pick up a British book, a few cultural differences might easily differentiate it from a member of the American canon -- a penchant for spelling words with an extra "u," an unfamiliar slang word...and perhaps the literary equivalent of a stiff upper lip. According to new research, over the last half a century, American writing has shown a significant uptick in emotional words compared books written by our friends across the pond. A study published in PLOS ONE this week examined books from the last century in Google's Ngram Viewer, a database that visualizes the frequency of certain keywords in more than 5 million tomes, and found that since the mid-century, American and British word usage has diverged. Tracing the usage of...