write a poem, win a book!

A few days ago I was heard to tweet:
You can thus tell how sensible I find Oliver Kamm on the matter, since I seem to have accidentally bought two copies of his Accidence will happen: the non-pedantic guide to English. (No publishers' freebies here. Just a poorly organi{s/z}ed bookcase and an eagerness to support my local independent (BrE) bookshop/(AmE) bookstore.)



What's more fun than taking a spare book to the (BrE) charity shop? Having strangers attempt to amuse me in an effort to win a free book, that's what.

I've had a competition before where I asked for limericks on the subject of British/American linguistic differences. You can't beat a rhyme. But that was seven years ago, so I think I can dare to almost repeat myself.

For a chance to win a copy of the paperback edition of Kamm's book, please write a humorous poem on the topic of American/British differences/miscommunication.

Rules of the contest

  1. Entries may be submitted as comments on this blogpost. Poems received by other means will not be considered.
  2. Poems should be no longer than 15 lines. (To repeat what I constantly say to my students: that is a limit, not a goal. I'd rather read 5 good lines on their own than 12 lines with 5 good ones within.)
  3. Be funny, but don't be mean. 
  4. No plagiarism. 
  5. The differences don't have to be strictly linguistic, but considering who the judge is, you might be well advised to address communication in some way.
  6. Please sign your work (whatever handle you use on the internet is fine; I just want to avoid confusing seven Anonymouses). 
  7. Please don't give other personal details (address, etc.) with your poem in the comments, but do check the blog in mid-September to see who's won, as I'll have to have you (orig. AmE in this sense) contact me in order to arrange (for) delivery of the book.
  8. Deadline for submission: 12 September 2016.   
I'll start the judging on my way home from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders conference. If it's very hard to choose, I may pick a shortlist and ask readers to vote. In the meantime, readers are welcome to (politely) express preferences in the comments here.

If you already have a copy of the book, but are good at writing poems, do feel free to enter. It can be you who takes the book to the charity shop. :)
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if I'm honest, to be honest, honestly!

Fellow American-linguist-in-Britain Chris Kim mentioned to me the British use of If I'm honest as a discourse-commentary-type idiom, where she would more naturally say To be honest. By 'discourse-commentary-type idiom', I mean: it's a set phrase that the speaker uses to indicate their stance with respect to what they're saying in the rest of the sentence. As in:
I think to be honest, like most people would be, he was extremely p***** off with the idea of being ill so soon after retiring! [Mirror.co.uk]
"It makes me a bit nervous, to be honest, and I am handling her with little gloves at the moment because I am not sure how far to push.”[Brendan Cole on Victoria Pendleton in The Telegraph]

I reckon I see about one production of it every year. Most of them, if I’m honest, aren’t great. But they keep being staged: audiences can’t seem to get enough of Greek tragedy.  [Natalie Haynes in The Independent]
I'd very much been 'out' as a former geographer. If I'm honest, I'd outed myself many years earlier. [comedian Rob Rouse]

There's also the variant with being:
I'm fairly happy being both English and British. I don't feel that I need to choose.
If I'm being honest, and with apologies to the other nations of this country, I think that's because I see the two identities as very much overlapping - the vast majority of British people are English, and being English and being British have very similar implications. [Comment on a Guardian article]
But if I'm being honest I had never thought about the spear tackle rules. [sporty person talking about a sporty thing in The Independent]
The I'm phrases are sometimes--much less often--found in the full form I am.

The examples above were all found through the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE). Wiktionary defines these phrases as equivalent, and frankly is offered as a synonym. But frankly doesn't sit quite right with me in all of the contexts. In the examples I've given, the first of each pair has the speaker/writer 'being honest' about something other than themselves. There, I might say frankly. In the second examples, they are admitting something about themselves. In those cases, I get a sense of 'I'm ashamed to say', not just 'frankly'. I tend to interpret the BrE ones with I as having more of this personal reading to it, but I'm not a native user of that form, so my intuitions may be off.

Chris is right that Americans say to be honest and not if I'm honest (though it is the name of a country album), but what's interesting is that the British seem to say all of these phrases more.

I searched for to be honest followed by a comma or a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period in order to avoid counting things like I asked you to be honest with me. This might slightly undercount British examples, because Brits are less apt to use commas after sentence pre-modifiers than Americans are, but oh well. (There are some false hits in the numbers with non-idiomatic use of these words, but not many.) The * in the other rows indicates that I've included numbers for I am and I'm. (Keep in mind that this is data from the web, so I expect 15-20% of the data to NOT be by people from the dialect in question.)


AmE BrE
to be honest {,.} 2700 5483
if I *m honest 91 713
if I *m being honest 35 99

One has to wonder: why are these such popular idioms in BrE? And then one has to wonder: is it because most of the time people are expected NOT to be honest, so it has to be marked up where people are being honest? There may be something to that--the British, after all, have an international reputation for not saying what they mean. (English Spouse is not impressed with this explanation.)

But: against that hypothesis is the fact that one can kind of say the same thing with the simple adverb honestly, and that's more common as a word in AmE than BrE:


AmEBrE
honestly 1860012307

Hidden in the honestly numbers are the use of Honestly! as an exclamation of exasperation--a word that English Spouse uses (it feels like) constantly. He says it when the child hasn't put her shoes on when asked, when Jeremy Hunt is on the radio, when he thinks we're going to be late because I can't find my sunglasses. It's not clear whether he's an easily exasperated man or whether he lives in an excruciatingly exasperating climate (i.e. in a house with me).

This is harder to check in a corpus, because corpora are not particularly rich in situations where children haven't put their shoes on after repeatedly being asked. Where one can find standalone Honestly! in GloWBE, it's hard to tell if it's an assurance of honesty or an exclamation of exasperation. There are cases that look like the Honestly of exasperation in both the American and British data, but the largest number are in the 'hard to tell without hearing the person' category:

Not the Honestly of Exasperation: It is for sure one of the MOST beautiful things I have ever read. Honestly! It is the gospel lived out in its purest form.  (GloWBE-US)
Probably the Honestly of Exasperation:
"Honestly! You can't REALLY expect me to believe that?" (GloWBE-US)
Could easily be read more than one way:
I just started laughing -- honestly! it's been 6+ months since we talked. (GloWBE-GB)
"Style not dynamic enough", the guy said. Honestly!!!  (GloWBE-US)
 'Yuck! Pass me the sick bag I want to vom!? Honestly!' (GloWBE-GB)

 So, this is the kind of thing that I can't tell whether:
(a) It's more common in British English than American
(b) It's not particularly more common in BrE (there's lots of individual variation), but I notice it more in BrE because my spouse (and his mother) are avid users of it.

Nevertheless, there are more standalone Honestly! in the British data than  in the American in GloWBE (86 v 52).

Honestly!

P.S. (the following day)
Commenters are doing a good job of specifying the connotations and contexts of these phrases, so do have/take a look!

One thing some commenters have mentioned is that some would like an adverb before honest in to be honest. Here's what the top 10 adverbs look like (just looking at the phrase followed by a comma):

The list stretches to 40 different adverbs, but many have just one or two hits. In total, with an adverb the AmE (287) & BrE (293) numbers are virtually the same, but as you can see, some adverbs are more nationalistic than others. (Who knew the British were so brutal?)

In related 'honesty' news, @grayspeeks on Twitter asked whether Americans use the expression (no,) I tell a lie when correcting themselves. The answer is 'no' (GloWBE has 22 in UK, 0 in US), but several US tweeters responded that they'd say that's a lie or no, I'm lying for the same thing. It's harder to give accurate numbers for these, because they could be used for other purposes--so I have to look at them with the no in front, and that creates more (punctuation) problems.  Doing that, no, I'm lying has 3 UK hits and 1 US, as does no, I lie. No, that's a lie has 2 UK hits and 1 US one. Those numbers are small enough that I can check by hand: there are no false hits.  Trying without the no gives more false hits than 'good' ones: e.g. people accusing others of lying for that's a lie or people lying down for I'm lying.  I'm not going to go through hundreds of examples to try to count whether AmE is saying these phrases more--just not with no--because there's just too much guesswork in judging them. So, it's not a clear picture, but the evidence we have has BrE using all the lie phrases more than AmE.

One that Americans do seem to use more is to tell (you) the truth , (thanks, Zouk Delors, in the comments). US hits = 366, UK = 188.  

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alumni

Last month Linguist Laura wrote a blog post congratulating the students who were graduating from her program(me). She discusses graduate, then moves on to alumni, excerpted below. I've highlighting the bit that was news to me.


When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another Latin word. It's plural, in that form, and pedants will have know[n] that the singular is alumnus or alumna, depending on whether you're male or female. Again, this is a bit annoying for English speakers who don't really bother that much with gender other than pronouns, [...]

Normal procedure when removing gender distinction is to go with the male for everyone: actors and actresses become actors, lady doctors become doctors, and so on. With alumni, we're taking to using the plural form for everyone. You're an alumni once you graduate. This ever so slightly grates on me but I am a good linguist and a descriptivist and do not go around correcting people. I don't know why we use the plural. We're familiar with this in words like cactus/cacti so we might have used alumnus as the singular; we just didn't. Perhaps it's because we use alumni in the plural way more often than the singular and, as it's not that common a word, that's the one that stuck.
I am not sure who the we is here. Laura's department? English speakers? It seems to me it's British English speakers, as in my experience Americans haven't adopted the plural as a singular.

First, Americans use the gendered singulars. I looked for an alumn* of in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE) in order to get only singular instances:

(I checked the one that says alumni* and it's by a graduate of The Open University [UK] who uses the word maths, so I have mentally flipped it into the GB column.)

In AmE singular alumni amounts to about 9% of the total, but in BrE it's about 22% (and in Canadian English, it's 35%). Note the lack of alumna in BrE.

When Americans want to avoid the gendered Latin terms, we often hack off the Latin suffix. I am an alum of the University of Massachusetts. I am friends with many of my fellow alums.

The word looks odd and is hard to pronounce if you don't know that it's a clipped form. It is not a homophone with the astringent chemical alum. The chemical is A-lum, the graduate is a-LUM, following the stress pattern of the suffixed form. I've also seen it spel{led/t} alumn and I kind of like that better. (There are 6 instances of alumn in GloWBE, 5 American and one that is classifed as GB, but when you look it's from an organi{s/z}ation in New York. None of these is in the phrase an alumn of, so they aren't included the numbers below.)

An alum of gets 10 hits in the US and 2 in GB (all legitimate; plus one Canadian hit, for those keeping track). If we add these to the numbers in the chart above, we get the following proportions:

a ___ of AmE BrE
gendered singular alumna/us 81% 75%
plural-form singular
alumni
8% 21%
clipped singular
alum
11% 4%
total number 88 52


Now, if you worked at a college/university in the US, I am quite sure that you would hear alum much more than you'd hear singular alumni. I had a quick look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which showed twice as many an alum of as an alumni of (though the numbers were small--21 in total).

So, a few points of unseemly defensiveness after all this:
  • Americans are able to and do use the Latin gendered suffixes. I mention this because there seems to be some belief that the British know Latin better than Americans do.  One of the interviewees in Jones's book on English expats in the US says she felt "she got to win a lot of arguments" because Americans assume “I [have] this great level of culture [and speak] and read fluent Latin” though of course she didn't. Similarly, I've had it said to me that Americans make barbarous "false" Latin words because we aren't close enough to the language. An British commentator on early American accents wrote that "Americans do not, however, speak or pronounce English according to our standard; [...] probably from a want of any intimate knowledge of Greek or Latin." I can't see much evidence for thinking the contemporary British folk have some access to Latin that contemporary Americans don't. Latin comes and goes in both American and British schools. Yes, the fancy public (i.e. private) schools of Britain do tend to offer Latin, but so did my run-of-the-mill American high school. Very few schools anywhere require it (or even offer it) any more--though apparently it's popular with American home-schoolers.
  • If you see Latin plurals masquerading as singulars, it's not a case of "American political correctness" coming over and "ruining" the language. The British are very capable of being sensitive to gender discrimination and changing the language themselves.  
The other thing to notice is that Americans use these words more. In fact, Americans have a great head start on using them. This is not necessarily a bragging point. The reason Americans needed these words earlier is that American universities have long depended on their graduates' generosity.

That was not an issue for British universities, which until recently were funded mainly through government grants. While I've lived in the UK, I've seen tuition fees go from 0 to over £9000 per year. And it was only once the government stopped directly funding university teaching that universities needed to step up relations with their graduates in the hope of getting donations and bequests. That's when my university got an Alumni Relations Office, something any American university would have had decades earlier.

Americans, I would say, have a keener sense of alumnihood. They have stickers identifying their alma mater in the back windows of their cars. The phrase alma mater is about four times more common in AmE than BrE (in GloWBE). They go to homecoming. They follow their institution's sports teams for the rest of their lives. (The need to keep alumni involved is a big reason for American universities having so much sporty activity.) They might even know their college's/university's song. That's in general, of course. I can't say I do any of those things. But I know many more Americans than Britons who do. 
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)