The dictionaries have announced their words of 2018 — the Oxford dictionary picked “toxic” — and Lynne Murphy, Sussex university linguistics professor and chronicler of British and US English, named the biggest lexical movers across the Atlantic.
Prof Murphy, US-raised, a dual citizen and author of The Prodigal Tongue: the Love-Hate Relationship between British and American English, named “whilst” as the British word that Americans adopted in 2018 and “mainstream media”, or MSM, as the expression the UK had taken from the US.
But I have been tracking another US import into British English and I believe that 2018 was its year: adding “for” to the verb “advocate”, as the Financial Times did in its report on the death of the Israeli writer Amos Oz, where we said that he “rose to prominence as an author and peace activist, advocating for a two-state solution”.