Abbas rejigs Palestinian govt as emergency ends

I am a US reader. I often read news through Yahoo, which gets feeds from Reuters. The article, “Abbas rejigs Palestinian govt as emergency ends” from Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:32PM EDT, uses the word rejig in the headline and the story. If you look this word up in the on-line, Merriam-Webster dictionary, you will see that this work is “chiefly British.” This story is for a US audience. While I applaud creativity in journalism and headline, I criticize this particular word usage.

Could you help assure that future articles are clear by matching British language to British audiences, and American language to American audiences?

G.P.

We do try to use chiefly American English in our news products aimed at U.S. audiences, but increasingly, words and phrases which began on one side of the Atlantic are now understood by readers on both sides, which I think is the case here. The word rejig is very common in the U.S.; indeed, in the dictionary.com definition, the example used is from an American newspaper: GBU Editor