grammar skills in the UK

Geezer is a normal term in the US, I used it all the time to mean an old man. Husband said it's also a London term for something else, where he wasn't even able to explain it very well. haha.

Yes to me a geezer is an old, slightly annoying man. "Good god I wish that old geezer would get the heck out of the way!"

But in London-speak it is something else....a sort of semi-tough man, the go-to guy for perhaps getting untaxed tobacco...a spiv of sorts....Jack the Lad...but not quite one of the Krays....ese tio es de abrigo...or something...

Or it's a guy who thinks he is the guy....I can't quite place it....

I think in the UK....and this is a loose theory....there is another layer in the scale from choir boy to stone cold killer that doesn't exist in the US. From my experience (and again I have never lived in New York or Chicago, nor do I make a habit of hanging out with the wrong sorts) in the US the bada$$ scale jumps pretty quickly from sort of a shady guy, but harmless, to a guy who you just don't want to be hanging around with pretty quickly. "Geezer" seems to me to be sort of in that gap.

It may be that in the US our sentencing is harsher, and our jails not quite as nice.....so you can't flit around on that criminality line (sort of the geezer zone) without risking doing time in a place where you darnsure don't want to be if you can help it.

I can recommend a couple of excellent books on this by an author well versed in the subject

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right

Both by Bill Bryson

this is also a pet peeve of mine. i've never heard such worse grammar in my life.

  Was that meant to be a joke? Have you been watching the old Morcambe and Wise shows?

for dinner when people say, "getting an indian." grammatically, it makes no sense. we put "a" or "an" after a specific thing. "getting a pizza" makes sense. but to make it general, "getting an italian" makes it sound like you are going to eat an italian person.

But honestly, English in general is just declining on both sides of the pond.

You mean the English language.

The English are the natives of England. The English language is the language of the English people: just as the German language is the language the German people, the Spanish language is the language of the Spanish people, the Italian language is the language of the Italian people, the French language is the language of the French people ect.

Some countries don't have their own language and use the language of another country i.e. the US. Some countries do have their own language but now use another countries language as their main language i.e. Wales. Over time there will be differences between the way a language is spoken in these countries and in the country whose language it is.

@Sirius "You mean the English language...The English are the natives of England. The English language is the language of the English people"

i dont really see your point here. english is an amalgam of different languages, mostly with Germanic and French influences. so obviously languages do change over time, I'm not saying this isnt the case. what i am saying is that i've noticed the grammar and english in general in England is less formal, even in workplaces, than in America. for instance, if someone were to go into an interview speaking like a "gangsta" they would likely be automatically dismissed. But here, you can speak with a rougher accent and still get a job at an office.

And just because a language changes and turns into another dialect, etc doesnt mean it has to decline. American english is an offshoot of British English, that doesnt mean grammatically it's worse. Interestingly, several articles actually point out that American English has stayed truer to "original" english than british english, which has strayed. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150715-why-isnt-american-a-language

in particular, these bits stand out: Then British English started changing in ways American didn’t. The  ‘proper’ English of the early 1600s would sound to us like a cross between the English spoken in Cornwall and Dallas; the accent has changed more in British English than in much of American. Even at the time of the American Revolution, educated speech in England fully pronounced “r” in all places, and King George III probably said after, ask, dance, glass, and path the same as George Washington did: with the same a as in hat and fat. The ‘ah’ pronunciation was considered low-class in England until after the Revolution."

and

"Throughout the19th Century there was a great dictionary competition: between Webster’s deliberately American approach (his first full dictionary came out in 1818) and the much more British-orientated approach of Nathaniel Worcester (whose first dictionary was published in 1830). Both were very popular, and such esteemed authors as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and even Noah Webster’s distant relation Daniel Webster preferred Worcester’s conservative spellings. Which won out in the end? Well, we know, don’t we? No one today has heard of Worcester’s dictionaries. The Americans opted for a distinctiveness to mark their independence. The British, seeing this rebellion by those rough Yanks, pulled in the opposite direction."

In the US, I was a technical writer. I wrote computer manuals, advertising copy, business documents, etc. Now I'm retired but still do a blog for me and a blog for my local Women's Institute, as well as the newsletter for the WI and any other print thing that needs doing. (Apparently no one else in my WI can use a computer!    But recently I've had discussions about some of my "Americanisms" with my WI friends. I found that the Oxford Style Guide (which is what was evidently taught in schools here) differs greatly from the style guides used by UK newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, and The Economist (all available online). I don't know why, but these are closer to US styles so I told the group that for my newsletter I'm using those guides. If that's not satisfactory, I'd be happy to give it up to someone else to write each month. No takers yet.

Ooh, is it AP style? The Associated Press (AP) is a group that shares articles around the world. There's an entire book devoted to spellings and rules. I've got a copy back in storage in the states, I had to learn to write in it for my Mass Communication degree.

And I've found some huge differences, it's a bit shocking and unexpected. Quotation marks vs speech marks. Brackets vs parentheses. I had to take a proof reading course so I could proof correctly over here!

Ooh, is it AP style? ....

And I've found some huge differences, it's a bit shocking and unexpected. Quotation marks vs speech marks. Brackets vs parentheses. I had to take a proof reading course so I could proof correctly over here!

No neither the Oxford nor the others are AP Style. I used that in university also. And yes, those differences can really sneak up on us! For example, I write time as 10:30, where it's 10.30 (no colon) here. And quotation marks (US) are "inverted commas" here. And when you use the name of a company, it's plural: "Microsoft ARE (not IS)..."

I did a Celta (to teach English as a Foreign Language) course in London and then taught a few sessions at a language school for adult foreign students. This all helped a bit, but I did get tripped up a few times when teaching. My disclaimer was that American English is more pervasive than British English worldwide, which is true. A proofreading course would be very valuable to me, however. I might look into that.