The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage - Noel's ESL ...

lesbian
lend or loan These are sometimes interchangeable, sometimes not. Only lend
carries the figurative senses of adding or giving, as in lend strength to the cause or
lend color to an otherwise routine event. But for other senses, as when property or
money pass temporarily from one owner to another, either word could be used:
I’m happy to lend him my car or
I’m happy to loan him my car.
In Australian and American English, the verb loan is readily used as an alternative
to lend in such applications—but not so much in contemporary British English. A
usage note in the Australian Oxford (2004) suggests that it belongs to banking and
the world of finance, but the Macquarie Dictionary (2005) lists it with no strings
attached. The Oxford Dictionary (1989) shows that loan was well used as a verb in
earlier stages of English. This usage was presumably transported to the colonies,
but declined back home in Britain where usage commentators pushed for a division
of labor, making lend the verb and loan the noun.
Outside Britain the division of labor is much less clear-cut: loan can be either
verb or noun, and lend (apart from its verb role) serves as a noun in informal
Australian English, for example:
Can you give me a lend of your notes?
The construction could hardly appear in writing, though we might wonder why
not when it’s perfectly acceptable to say and write:
Can you give me a look at your notes?
Modern English allows many conversions of verbs into nouns (see transfers), yet
there’s still a stylistic question mark about lend as a noun. It seems arbitrary when
both loan and lend derive from the same Old English word for “loan”, which was
both a noun and a verb. Lend is a mutant of the older verb, formed in a southern
dialect of Middle English, with a change of vowel and an extra consonant added
on.
lengthways or lengthwise See under -wise or -ways.
lenience or leniency Fowler (1926) thought that there was a distinction
opening up between these, with lenience referring to a lenient action, and leniency
to a lenient disposition. Modern dictionaries do not support this, and simply
crossreference one to the other as equivalents. In Australian and American
dictionaries, leniency gets the guernsey, while British dictionaries give it to lenience.
For the differences between other pairs like this, see -nce/-ncy.
lesbian In all English-speaking countries this is the standard term for a
homosexual woman, though only in Australia is it lezzo for short. Other colloquial
abbreviations are lezzy/lezzie and lez(z). The word lesbian was until quite recently
(about 1970) written with a capital letter. This is because it originated as a
geographical adjective, meaning “of or from the Greek island of Lesbos”; and the
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