I'm sure there are a few idiomatic expressions either way you might not catch, but for the most part, if I'm writing Harry Potter, I'm going to write jumper instead of sweater, and lift instead of elevator. Overall, it's not really that hard.

I caught a few things like that in a Big Bang Theory story that was really good.

The author used spanner instead of wrench and two other things that stuck out.

I commented that it was a really good story and I really enjoyed it, there were just a few "Britishisms" that crept through. The author said she was Australian and asked what I meant so I told her and she fixed them.

I'm more able to let it go at this point if it's in the narrative text (it seems like there's a flood of British authors hitting AO3 and writing for US fandoms), but hearing Californian teens say something like "what are you on about?" in the dialogue makes me grind my teeth. And at this point I'm wondering if there's some way to purge the word ridiculous from the internet.

What's wrong with ridiculous?

Speaking of etiquette, I was just reading these SPN RPG character descriptions [link] and thinking they were really neat, and recognising the artists of the first two card pics, and then....got to the end of the post. Damn, man! That's so not cool, especially when you could have used photos and gotten away clean. Pretending to be polite doesn't make it better.

Which is disappointing, because they'd have been real cool if they weren't bothering the artists.

What's wrong with ridiculous?

It's not widely used as a general adjective in U.S. slang, at least in my experience, the way the British writers use it almost constantly. "Ridiculous hat," "ridiculous hair," "ridiculous face," etc. You might occasionally hear someone say "that's ridiculous!" in denial of an unlikely theory—or just one that hits too close to home—but Brits use it the way "silly" or "stupid" would normally be used here.

I had no idea. But I'm bad at the subtle stuff.

Not sure how to research that further. Hmm. All the high google hits are American, but so's most of the web.

Admittedly it's not so out-of-place that the meaning isn't clear (as it would be for your average American if words like lorry and torch were used). But it's enough of a Britishism that it throws me out of the story briefly and makes me imagine whoever's speaking as doing so in a British accent.

Ridiculous might be a regional preference. Or it might just be me.

I had no idea.

Neither did I. I use the word a ridiculous amount. Enough that I try to edit at least one out of every email or post or text. I must have picked it up somewhere.