British and American English

Clark,
"anyways" sound to me as an informal version of "anyway" that's chiefly used at the end of a sentence.
Am I right?

Oops, I should have pressed Refresh more often... Sorry.

I guess it is the informal way. However, I would not say either in a formal conversation. But if I had to use one of them in an informal conversation, it would be "anyway."

Whether used at the beginning or end of a sentence, I d not think that it matters.

I very often hear "anyways" in Canada. According to Oxford American Dictionary : "anyways is incorrect."

Any guy knows M.T.A stand for Metropolitan Transit Authority.

typo : New York

The born reformer, Webster was determined to effect drastic changes, but he was restrained by necessity. 'Common sense and convenience', he averred, 'would lead me to write public, favor, nabor, hed, proov, flem, hiz, giv, det, ruf, and wel instead of publik, favour, neighbour, head, porve, phlegm, his, give, debt, rough, and well'.
But the practical businessman eventually prevailed over the theoritical idealist.Webster wanted to make money and he sought a market for his new book on both sides of the Atlantic. He was therefore advised by his publisher to modify his drastic changes considerably. Only the first two changes-public and favor-were allowed to ramain. Today, the third unabridged edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (1961) is the official spelling guide of the Government Printing Office and the accepted authority in American courts.

As the great North American Republic took shape with the attachement of French and Spanish populations, with the addition of native Amerindian tribesmen in the Middle West and with the absorbation of Chinese and Japanese who landed on the Pacific coast, so the cosmopolitan character of the United States bacame more and more accentuated. Further, negroes from Africa have come to number over twelve millions. At no time, however, has the speech of Washington and Jefferson, of Jackson and Lincoln, stood in jeopardy. Never has there existed any real danger that English might not prove capable of completely assimilating these immigrant tongues or that the children of the French in Louisiana, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Scandinavians in Minnesota, or the slavs and Italians in Mishigan might not be able to understand, speak, read, and write English in the third and fourth generations.
The literary language, indeed, has seldom diverged perceptibly from that of the 'old country'. Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, did their best in their day to write impeccable standard English. Henry James (1843-1916), Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), and Thomas Stearns Eliot(1888-1965) were born in the United States but they spent their mature lives in England and all three bacame naturalized British subjects.
Edmund Wilson, Douglas Bush, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and other eminent American critics, write not unlike their British colleagues, James Sutherland, Basil Willey, Lionel Charles Knights, William Empson and David Daiches. English literature is now worldwide : no sea or ocean bounds can be set to its glorious domain. Henceforth English letters will include all excellent and memorable writing in the English language, irrespective of political and geographical boundaries.

T.S. Eliot is really great. His name is an anagram of toilets.

Words like cablegram come from cable and telegram, rediotrician from radio and electrician, to snoopervise from snoop and supervise, to sportcast from sport and broadcast, smaze from smoke and haze (smog from smoke and fog being its British counterpart), motel from hotel and motorist, and Amerind or Amerindian from American and Indian.
Hundreds of expressions have also arisen from a revival and extension of grammatical conversation or functional shift. When you 'park' your car you are using the noun 'park' as a verb in a particular sense. Shakespeare, you may recall, used this same noun as a verb in the sense 'to confine or enclose as in a park' in Henry the sixth, IV.ii.45: 'How are we park'd and bounded in a pale!' But to park in the sense 'to place compactly in a park' was a new conversion or shift made by the British Army in 1812 at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Nearly one century later, in 1910, this same verb was adopted by American motorists into their word stock. Since then to park has come to mean 'to leave or keep in a suitable place until required' and Americans park not only their automobiles but also their children, their dogs, and their chewing-gum (P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves).

Today Americans no longer hesitate to loan (as well as to lend); to audition 'try out in an audition', especially for fitness to participate in opera, radio, or television'; to remainder (unsold or unsalable books); to service (a car or plane), to garage 'place or keep in a garage'; to blueprint 'make a key pattern of action or underlying master plan'; to contact 'to get in touch with'; to highlight 'bring out the brightest parts of main features'.

The New England dialect is more like British English in many respects. For example, the rounded vowel is kept in 'dock', the long low back vowel is retained in 'dance' and the 'r' is completely lost in 'dark'. At the same time this dialect is less homogeneous than General American. Even within its narrower confines it shows far more regional and social variations.

my apologies, chana, i guess i'm not a guy.

Sorry hp20

In spite of countless small variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, and idiom, the American dialects do not greatly differ. For three centuries American families have been constantly on the move and speech communities have seldom ramained isolated for more than one generation. It would be no exaggeration to say that greater differences in pronunciation are discernable in the north of England between Trent and Tweed than in the whole of North America.

Television and films bring the latest American slang to Britain so that even a trained observer can no longer differentiate with certainty between native and imported neologisms. Such a highly expressive phrase as 'It's up to us' sounds so very American. We take it for granted that it is American until someone reminds us that it has its origin in the game of poker, German 'pochspiel', played in Europe from time immemorial. Such a characteristic blend as 'smog' also sounds so very American. We take it for granted that it is American until someone reminds us that it was coined by a London Physician named Des Voeux, first president of the National Smoke Abatement Society, at a meeting in summer of 1905.

The preface of 'An Anglo-American Interpreter' (1939) opened with the statement made by a distinguished journalist that :

An American if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood... He would naturally ask for the nearest drugstore, and no one would know what he meant.