Holiday and vacation

Today is my last full working day before having two weeks off (and yes I *am* writing this at work during my coffee break). Being quite happy about this I mentioned this in the HYT friend chat yesterday evening, after which a fellowhyter corrected me, stating that I should say "I will have two weeks holiday" where I said "I will have two weeks vacation". A short discussion broke loose about what was right and what was wrong in english. I followed the discussion but in the end just shrugged my shoulders and went to bed.

But in the back of my head, the question stayed with me.

So this morning I googled "when do you use holiday and when do you use vacation in english".

I got a nice read on a site about proper use of english language, a stackexchange so it's all comment-thread-like and that makes it a very entertaining read of course. I learned that proper use differed per country: in British english one is supposed to go on holiday and in Usanian english one is going on vacation. It's a minor thing, but still a fun fact to learn from my fellow-hyters!