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There are also some full Briticisms, Americanisms, etc., i.e.
lexical units specific to the British, American, etc. variant in all
their meanings. For example, the words fortnight, pillar-box are
full Briticisms, campus, mailboy are full Americanisms, outback,
backblocks are full Australianisms.
These may be subdivided into lexical units denoting some
realia that have no counterparts elsewhere (such as the
Americanism junior high school) and those denoting phenomena
observable in other English-speaking countries but expressed there
in a different way (e.g. campus is defined in British dictionaries as
‘grounds of a school or college’).
The number of lexical units denoting some “realia having no
counterparts in the other English-speaking countries is
considerable in each variant. To these we may refer, for example,
lexical units pertaining to such spheres of life as flora and fauna
(e.g. AuE kangaroo, dingo, gum-tree), names of schools of
learning (e.g. junior high school and senior high school in AE or
composite high school in CnE), names of things of everyday life,
often connected with peculiar national conditions, traditions and
customs (e.g. AuE boomerang, AE drug-store). But it is not the
lexical units of this kind that can be considered distinguishing
features of this or that variant. As the lexical units are the only
means of expressing the notions in question in the English
language some of them have become common property of the
entire English-speaking community (as, e.g., drug-store, lightning
rod, super-market, baby-sitter that extended from AE, or the
hockey terms that originated in Canada (body-check, puck-carrier,
etc.); others have even become international (as the former
Americanisms motel, lynch, radio, cybernetics, telephone,
anesthesia, or the former Australianisms dingo, kangaroo and
cockatoo.
Lexical peculiarities in different parts of the English-
speaking world are not only those in vocabulary, to be disposed of
in an alphabetical list, they also concern the very fashion of using
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