Separated by a common language …

…Belloc vs. the Anglosphere | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I landed. The first phrase of popular speech I heard was incomprehensible, the more incomprehensible because I expected it to be in my own idiom; much the more incomprehensible because it was incomprehensible through a manner and spirit of diction more than through verbal form. The new speech rapidly grew familiar to me; in a day or two I could make myself understood with repetitions and talking slowly, while, with great care, I could understand at the first saying most of what was said to me in the streets. But the impression of strangeness was the more accentuated by that experience of learning. It was astonishing that, with what I had always thought to be our own English language, such a process should be necessary! 

Yet he had "visited America four times before his 30th birthday." And he only noticed this on his fifth visit? Hard to believe.