Peter has posted a comparison of British and American versions of the Bible on Better Bibles Blog. The funniest difference I’ve seen between the British and American English in the Contemporary English Version is found in Acts 17:5:
The British English version:
“The Jewish leaders were jealous and got some worthless louts who hung around the market place to start a riot in the city.”
Lout is not a very common word in American English. But what I found really funny was the American version:
“The Jewish leaders were jealous and got some worthless bums who hung around the marketplace to start a riot in the city.”
I remember reading the American English version to my children who have spent most of their lives outside of America. When I said, “worthless bums” they started snickering. Hee hee hee, he said bum. In their dialect of English, bum means a person’s backside.
Indeed. And thanks for this addition to my catalogue. But surely more typical American children snicker for the same reason when the story of Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem is read from KJV.
In fact the “Global Standard” CEV which I have downloaded for Paratext has “troublemakers” rather than “worthless bums”. But the version at Bible Gateway does indeed have “worthless bums”, as does the Australian edition which I picked up when I was out there.
It looks to me as if the “Global Standard” CEV is an edition slightly sanitised of colloquialisms. The reading “the Lord appeared to him in a dream” noted in my post at Matthew 1:20 is from this edition, whereas the Bible Gateway version and my Australian printing agree with CEV-UK’s “the Lord came to him in a dream”.
Great thing about being a multi-cultural kid: you get to snicker at a global collection of such phrases.