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Comment by mst | Hacker News Reader

Being English-as-in-UK I often run into situations where my dry/sarcastic humour completely fails to be clear to USians.

Then again from the UK POV the leftpondians barely count as native English speakers anyway ;)

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Yet you'll find sources that claim spoken American English is closer to historical British English, because of some aspects like rhoticity. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

Those are all claims about the accent (my understanding of said claims is basically "sounds reasonable but also I have no idea what I'm talking about").

I was more thinking about the words/grammar/idiom etc.

(also as a Lancastrian I find e.g. Deep Somerset barely comprehensible, especially when the speaker is a few pints in, but their wording is still usually closer to mine than the USians' is)

Hmm. As a born Britisher I used to have this attitude until I read 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson. He's an American who moved to the UK and has a good handle on the differences between American and British english.

(So I guess "Rightpondia" would be Airstrip One?)

We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia.

So strange. As a non-brit, every comment I read uses John Oliver or Diane Morgan as an internal monologue and is incredibly witty and sarcastic.

To be fair, I'm probably less informed for doing so.

You would likely be better with, say, Ian Hislop for me in terms of sarcasm, though while he's definitely a wit, no matter how hard I try I only ever seem to get half way.

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