Ahha on the wort. I did check with a Californian of my acquaintance, so I assumed it was common usage, like route (UK root, US rowt) or buoy (UK boy, US booey). It's a bunch of people on both sides of the pond unaware of botanical usage, looking at the end of the word rather than the beginning.

Curiously, on a recent program, a chap (ethnobotanist) teaching how to make remedies out of herbs started out with the wart pronounciation, met a herbal specialist of the older sort who used the wert version, started using wert himself, and then, by the end of the programme had slipped back to wart, very gradually.

And thank you for the background on "gifted". It fits with something I had noticed about the formality of the sort of cases it was used for but had been hard to define (as it was definitely leaking out). Yesterday I noticed someone on the Beeb doing the same thing with another adjective, but have mercifully forgotten which one.

Penny