Plastic Bags

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1974750.stm

The article is more than two years old but is an immediate follow-up to something I posted a couple days ago and contains an explanation to the primary reason the Bangladeshi government banned the use of plastic bags altogether!

"In March, Bangladesh slapped an outright ban on all polythene bags after they were found to have been the main culprit during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged two-thirds of the country. The problem was that discarded bags were choking the drainage system."

English or American?

"A number of words that originated in the English of the British Isles are still in everyday use in North America, but are no longer used in most varieties of British English. The most conspicuous of these words are fall, the season; and gotten as a past participle of get. Some dialects of North American English use boughten, especially as a contrast to home-made. Americans are likelier than Britons to name a stream whose breadth or volume is judged insufficient to dignify it with the name of river a creek. The word diaper goes back at least to Shakespeare, and usage was maintained in the U.S. and Canada, but was replaced in the British Isles with nappy. Some of these words are still used in various dialects of the British Isles, but not in formal standard British English. Many of these older words have cognates in Scots."