Showing posts with label SAfE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAfE. Show all posts

shoes

So, shoes. Hard to believe I've not blogged about them already!  First slide, please:



[from UK shoe retailer Office] This, in BrE is a court shoeIn AmE it would be a pump.  (Or call them high heels wherever you are.)  Next slide, please!


[also from Office] In AmE this is a flat, more specifically a ballet flat.  In BrE this is a pump. More specifically, a ballet pump.  Very confusing. (And don't forget that ballet is pronounced differently in AmE & BrE.) What BrE & AmE pumps have in common is that they are low-cut--baring the top of the foot--but I think that the AmE definition is now so closely associated with heels that you can probably find AmE 'pumps' that aren't low-cut. (In fact, you can.)  Next slide, please!

[Office] This is a trainer in BrE. (Yes, people who train people are also called trainers in BrE.) In AmE, it's a bit more complicated:

This map from Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey shows the distribution of words for that kind of shoe in the continental US. Red = sneakers, light blue = tennis shoes, green = gym shoes. (Click on the link for the other colo(u)rs.)

These terms for the red shoe above can also be applied to this one:
[From the UK site for the US brand Keds] But in BrE, they can also be called plimsolls, (which Marc L wrote to ask about recently--thanks).

Next slide, please!


These kinds of things can be called flip-flops in BrE or AmE (sidenote: in South Africa, they're slip-slops). But in AmE (and AusE too, I believe), they can also be called thongs. I suspect that that term is being used a lot less these days because usage has mostly shifted to this.


I've had some correspondence with Erin McKean about whether the meaning of kitten heel differs in BrE and AmE. There are definitely two meanings out there, but dictionaries tend not to be very specific about kitten heels, so the AmE definitions are about the same as the BrE ones. Looking at on-line retailers, I have found both senses in both countries. The sense I use (and which I think Erin's agreeing with me about--so definitely an AmE sense) refers to this kind of thing [from Mandarina shoes]:


The heel is very short, very slim and is inset from the end of the shoe. It might also flare out a bit at the bottom.  But one also finds any stiletto with a moderate heel label(l)ed kitten heel in some places, like this one, which comes from (UK retailer) L.K. Bennett's 'History of the Kitten Heel':

I couldn't call this a kitten heel. To me, it's a not-ridiculously-high pump/court shoe with a stiletto heel.  But when I try to research these things on the internet, the clever-clever shoemakers won't let me compare their UK and US sites, forcing me back into the UK ones, so some avenues of research are not available.  I share Erin's feeling that the first sense is AmE and the second one BrE, but I've not been able to ascertain whether it's not so much a difference as a change-in-progress.  Feel free to let us know which sense is more natural in your dialect (please don't forget to tell us what your dialect is!).
 

If you'd like to enjoy some transatlantic shoe shopping, remember, that the sizes are different. Wikipedia has comparison charts and explains what the sizes are based on.

The last shoe-related thing relates to an email from Peregrine in 2008 (*blush*), who wrote:
I was reading (as I do from time to time) an English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary yesterday. 
What came up was the Japanese for shoe and variants of it.  What it said was, essentially
Variant a = AmE low shoe, BrE shoe
Variant b = AmE shoe, BrE boot
Variant c = AmE boot, BrE high boot
For reference this was the Sanseido Gem 4th edition.  I can't find a date but it's definitely post-War, I would guess from the '50s. 

[P.S. but see his addition to the comments section to see how I've misinterpreted his note] Low shoe is not something I'd ever heard of, but I did find it in reference to a Rockport shoe on amazon.co.uk. Checking on Rockport's site, though, they didn't use the term. It'd be easy to dismiss the Japanese dictionary as finding differences that native speakers wouldn't, but there is the question of whether boot or shoe really mean the same thing in AmE/BrE even if they refer to the same ranges of things in the two dialects.  This relates to a point that I made months ago on a post about 'prototypical soup', which I quote here so that I can go to bed sooner:
As far as I know, not much work has been done on regional variation in prototypes. The only example I can think of is a small study by Willett Kempton (reported in John Taylor's Linguistic Categorization) on Texan versus British concepts of BOOT, showing that even though both groups considered the same range of things to be boots, there was variation in their ideas of what constituted a central member of the BOOT category, with the Texan prototype extending further above the ankle than the British one.

And undoubtedly I've forgotten or missed some footwear differences. But that's what the comments section is for!

Late addition--thanks Anonymous in the comments! Just a few days ago, this was my Twitter Difference of the Day, but I somehow forgot to mention BrE football boots. In AmE these are cleats or soccer shoes. Perhaps this is what the distinction in the Japanese dictionary was about. In BrE, my Converse Chuck Taylors are referred to as basketball boots, where I would call them (AmE) high-tops.

Another P.S. (13 Sept 11): I forgot mary janes!  This was originally a trademarked term in AmE for  a brand of girls' shoe, which came in patent leather and had a strap like this:

According to the OED, this is still a proprietary term in BrE--so it often has lower-case initials in AmE but should have upper-case (and be more restricted in application) in BrE. I've had to explain the term to BrE speakers a couple of times, making me think it's more common in AmE.  These days, of course, it's used for any shoe with that kind of low-cut front and a strap across--even if it involves a heel, an asymmetrical or double strap, velcro. Mary janes (I kind of want to hyphenate that--some people make it one word) are very, very Lynneguist.

A couple of notes before I go:
  1. I had a great time discussing how English and American folk "do" politeness at The Catalyst Club this week. Great audience, great night out!
  2. I am about to begin The University Term from Hell. The (orig. AmE) upside is that I don't have to teach in the spring. The (orig. AmE) downside is that it's unlikely that I'll get much blogging in. But I will try!
Read more

trucks and lorries

Three years ago when I started this blog, I wrote:
Dictionaries of British/American English mostly cover well-known variants like truck/lorry and elevator/lift But these are just the tip of the iceberg. What I intend to cover here are words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis.
But as we've seen already with chips and crisps and jumper and sweater, it's often the case that the relationship between these 'well-known variants' is far more complex than the cross-dialectal dictionaries and word lists give credit for. Such is the case for AmE truck and BrE lorry, as Molly discovered recently. She writes:
I teach translation from Italian to English to language majors [in Italy]. I am lucky this term to have three women in my class on the Erasmus project [EU student exchange system--ed.] who are from the UK. They told me today that British English for "pick-up truck" is "pick-up truck". I asked them "What about a lorry?" and they told me that a lorry is much bigger.
I hope they told Molly that a lorry is much, much bigger, as many of the things that AmE speakers call trucks are not lorries in BrE. This is a lorry (from freefoto.com):


And so is this (also from freefoto.com--henceforth the links will be put in the text):


The really big kind of BrE lorry is an articulated lorry, which has several names in AmE--but I've covered those before, so have a look back here.

An AmE speaker will start to go wrong with their general lorry-for-truck translation rule when they get to this:

This is a (BrE) van--but never an AmE van.

Think of it this way, if it's referred to as a lorry, you'd need to have a special (AmE) driver's license/(BrE) driving licence to drive it, whereas the kind of thing that you could (AmE) rent/(BrE) hire in order to move your worldly belongings from point A to point B would have to be called a van in BrE. [But maybe not--see comments for details!] But in BrE, you might instead opt to hire a man with a van to do your moving for you.

In AmE, van is limited to referring to things like this:


And it refers to those things in BrE too--though they may be called transit vans (after the Ford Transit). In the UK, the white variety of these vehicles (as pictured) are the typical vehicle driven by tradespeople, and a stereotype has arisen for the (BrE) white van man as an unsavo(u)ry character. You can read more about that here.

While/whilst this next vehicle would be called a van or a minivan in AmE, it would be more likely to be called a people carrier in BrE:


As Molly was informed, there's no particularly BrE word for (orig. AmE) pick-up trucks, but then again, there are few pick-up trucks in the UK. Now don't--please don't--get me started about people in the US who use comically large pick-up trucks to do little more than drive to work and through the Taco Bell (orig. AmE) drive-thru. I've lived in Texas. If I start, I might not be able to stop. (But the BBC h2g2 site has a fairly good take on it.) I have only seen one of these monsters in the UK, and if you don't think they look silly in their American context (in [AmE] parking lots/[BrE] car parks full of similar things), then you'll just have to come and see one in the UK. They're hilarious. Or wrist-slittingly depressing. Something like that.


An antipodean P.S.: In South African English, a pick-up truck (just about always a little Japanese model) is a bakkie.
Read more

zwieback, rusks--and more on biscuits

We're back in the UK, dealing with a very jet-lagged baby. During our US visit, I had reason to think about another BrE/AmE difference in baby paraphernalia terminology, since Grover's got her first two teeth and is working on her next two: (AmE) zwieback (toast) and (BrE) (teething) rusk.

These refer to essentially the same thing (when it comes to the baby product), although rusk can also be used in BrE to refer to a kind of bready stuff that's added to sausages. Zwieback rhymes with 'lie back' or 'lie Bach' (if Bach has a hard /k/ sound at the end) in my dialect, but American Heritage lists a number of alternative pronunciations. It comes from the German for 'twice baked', as that's what they are: first baked as a loaf, then sliced and baked again. In other words, they're biscotti for babies. (In South Africa, rusks are used just like biscotti--eaten by all ages, dunked into coffee or tea.)

Strangely, we weren't able to buy any of this staple of babyhood in the US, although we searched for it in supermarkets and (AmE) drug stores (=BrE chemist's shop, more or less) in three counties. Sometimes we found the empty space on the shelf where they were supposed to be, sometimes not even that. I searched on the web for signs of a recall or shortage, but found no information, except that, like all finger foods apparently, Gerber zwiebacks now carry stern warnings that they should not be given to children who cannot yet crawl with their stomachs lifted off the ground. They've made them part of their 'Graduates for Toddlers' range, suggested for age 10+ months. But, of course, you need them when the baby is cutting her front teeth, long before toddlerdom. Meanwhile, I just ordered some rusks from my UK on-line grocery and found them label(l)ed 'suitable from 4 months'. (Granted, they do give a recipe for making a sort of porridgy thing from them, so that's probably what's suitable for a 4-month-old.) I have to assume that the warnings on baby foods are the product of the litigious culture...but the warnings are so uniform across the brands/products that I wonder whether they're legally required. (Do any of you know?)

Though we didn't find zwiebacks, we did find some non-zwieback teething biscuits (and ignored age and crawling requirements), which Grover loves (and handles very well, despite being completely uninterested in crawling, since crying for Mum/Mom and Dad to pick her up and carry her wherever she wants to go has worked so well for her thus far). This made me return to thinking about biscuits. As we've discussed before, BrE biscuit is and isn't equivalent to AmE cookie, but in discussions comparing those two words, we tend to only mention the AmE sense of biscuit that refers to a scone-like (in appearance, at least) thing. We should acknowledge areas of overlap with BrE biscuit. Americans do use biscuit in the names for some cookie-like things: teething biscuits and dog biscuits. In both cases, these kind of biscuits are hard--harder than normal (BrE) biscuits/(AmE) cookies. I wonder whether these AmE uses of biscuit remain closer to its etymological meaning 'twice cooked', since teething biscuits (at least) typically are twice-baked (perhaps dog biscuits used to be twice-baked, too?). But note that in both of these cases, biscuit in AmE is used as part of a compound. We don't use biscuit alone to refer to crunchy things like these.

Pressing deadlines mean that I have to reduce my posting even further, I'm afraid. I have told myself that I can only blog once a week now, though it pains me to type that. I promise to work on that backlog of requests from kind readers.
Read more

controversy

Jan Freeman, in her The Word Blog, reacted to the zebra post by writing:
What with my near-daily dose of BBC News on the radio, I thought I was pretty current on British-American pronunciation differences: furore with three syllables (and an extra letter), vitamin with a short I (VITT-a-min), con-TROV-er-sy with a different stress, and so on.
...which made me remark to myself with surprise that I've never got(ten) (a)round to blogging about controversy, since (and this is the crucial thing about my blogging, isn't it?) I have an anecdote. (I think I didn't do it earlier because I was going to write a lot more about stress patterns in Latinate words, but in my new working-mother-on-the-go incarnation, I'll do this word now, and a hundred other words a hundred other times.)

And now, the anecdote you've managed to live without so far (but how?):

When I lived in South Africa, I had the altogether ego-enriching experience of being a relatively big [linguistic] fish in a relatively little [language-fascinated] pond, and so I had the pleasure of being a panel(l)ist on the SAfm (sort of the equivalent of BBC Radio 4 or NPR) program(me) Word of Mouth (which is like Radio 4's Word of Mouth or a bit less like KPBS/NPR's A Way with Words). Listeners write to the show with their language-related questions, and a couple of language experts join the host, John Orr, to answer them. Not once but THREE TIMES during my experience with WoM, some member of the South African native English-speaking population wrote in to complain that South African English was going to the dogs because people had started pronouncing controversy as conTROVersy (there's a short 'o' in the stressed syllable), rather than CONtroversy, and THREE TIMES they blamed this on the influence of American English.

Now, I only answered that one on-air once, but when I did, I did so with great glee as I pointed out (as I seem always to be pointing out) that just because something is annoying and new, it doesn't mean it's American. No, this "perversion" of the English language has its home in SAfE speakers' linguistic motherland. To quote Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition, 1996):
controversy. The mood of the moment is to challenge orthodoxy by placing the main stress on the second syllable. This stressing is often used by newsreaders and also, in my [editor R.W. Burchfield's] experience, by many scholars and lexicographers, not to go any further. My verdict is that the traditional pronunciation with initial stressing is at risk, but is still, just, dominant among RP speakers in the UK. In AmE the stress is always placed on the first syllable in this word.
I believe I read this on the radio--but since I no longer own a working cassette recorder, I doubt I'll ever hear those old program(me)s again.
Read more

uh, er, um, erm and eh

When I was young, some of my favo(u)rite books were by British authors. The title of one, Five Dolls and a Monkey, I was interested to find, is (until I publish this post) cited only once on the web. Am I the only person who loved that book? After I grew out of Five Dolls, I made my way through Agatha Christie's oeuvre. And in one or the other of these books I first encountered er and erm, as in this transcription of a comedy sketch (please keep in mind that this is an example of the English poking fun at themselves—as they do so well—and not poking fun at African Americans):
CLIVE (playing an interviewer):
Erm, I think it can be truly said that the Americans have, er, their soul singers, and we English have ars-oul singers. And, er, Bo is one our leading, er, soul singers.
DEREK (playing 'Bo Duddley'):
Arsehole singers, yes.
CLIVE:
Bo, I-, I wanted to ask you first of all, erm, .....
DEREK:
Yes.
CLIVE:
This is obviously a sort of, er, boogie, er, .....
DEREK:
This is a boogie, erm, .....
CLIVE:
What? Jive stuff, is it?
DEREK:
Jive boogie woogie song, erm, and, erm, it is-, it is a, a story of ..... well, shall I, shall I sort of go through it?
CLIVE:
Yes, I-, I-, I was thinking that some of the lyrics for, er-rm, English speaking audiences might be a little obscure.
DEREK:
Absolutely. Well let me .....
CLIVE:
I wonder what the-, what-, what-, what it really is all about?
DEREK:
Well, let me-, let me just go through it, erm, for you. Ah: (sings and plays piano:) "#Mamma's got a brand new bag!" Er, "Mamma's got a brand new bag", er, this means, erm, that the-, the Harlem mother has gone out into the bustling markets of Harlem .....
CLIVE:
Yes.
DEREK:
..... er, to buy a gaily coloured plastic bag. Erm, and there's a certain amount of pride in this: Mamma's got a brand new bag.
CLIVE:
I-, I suppo-, I suppose a gaily coloured plastic bag is, er, a bit of status symbol in Harlem.
DEREK:
It certainly is. Certainly is. Obviously, er, you know, sign of a birthday or something like that.

Now, when I was a 12-year-old reading British novels, I liked to read them out loud, in my best "English" accent, probably gleaned from Dick Van Dyke's murder of Cockney. One of the unfortunate effects of this was that I pronounced Hercule Poirot as something like "Ercule Pirate" (never mind that he's Belgian—he was in England and so must speak as my 12-year-old self believed the English to speak). But another effect was that I believed that when British people paused in speech, they made sounds that rhymed with my American pronunciations of her and worm. And for much of my life, I continued to believe that there were millions of English-speaking people somewhere (or somewhen) pronouncing /r/s in their hesitations. 

 But then I had a baby, and the penny dropped. I regret to say that this is not because motherhood has made me smarter/cleverer. It's because you spend a lot of time watching tv with the subtitles on while trapped under a baby. Watching in this way, I've become addicted to Eggheads, but when it's not 6 p.m., I often end up watching Friends or Scrubs, since one or the other seems to be on at all times. And it was only when seeing er and erm in the subtitles for American characters in these American sitcoms that I reali{s/z}ed: it's not that the British put different sounds into their filled pauses, it's just that they typically spell those pauses er and erm instead of uh and um. Since many BrE dialects do not pronounce the /r/ after vowels in such contexts, the /r/ here is just to indicate that the vowel is not a proper 'e' but a long schwa-like vowel. And before any of you complain that I should not have been allowed to have a doctorate in Linguistics if it took me this long to figure out something this basic, let me tell you: I've thought the same thing myself. I think the technical term for this is: Duh! When I mentioned a few posts ago that I'd be covering er/erm/uh/um soon, reader David Up North (as I'll call him to differentiate him from the other Davids I've mentioned before) wrote to ask:

I was interested to see in the comments to your latest blog that you were planning an article on 'er' and 'erm'. I wondered if you'd be covering 'eh?' as well? It's often pronounced (or possibly replaced by) 'ay?' (or something like that – rhymes with 'hey', but I don't recall ever seeing anyone writing either as 'eye dialect' representations of the sound, they usually use 'eh?'). It came to mind because I've occasionally seen Americans transcribe the sound as 'aye?' – which is obviously wrong.

I can't imagine why an American would transcribe eh as aye (pronounced like I in every dialect I know) and haven't seen it happen, myself. I speak a northern AmE dialect that, like Canadian English, ends many sentences with eh? (Famously parodied by the Great White North sketches on SCTV: How's it going, eh?) And when we write that, we spell it eh and pronounce it to rhyme with day. (I was happy to discover upon moving to South Africa that SAfE has the same kind of interjection, but it's pronounced hey. It was very easy to adjust to. Much better than when I moved to Massachusetts and was mocked relentlessly for the ehs that I'd never noticed myself saying.) 

 The problem we're seeing here is that these interjections are usually spoken and generally only written when one is trying to represent natural speech. Since they're not part of the written language (since they're not needed in the same way when the language isn't immediately interactional), people aren't used to spelling them, and thus the spellings have been slower to become standardi{s/z}ed than the spellings for nouns and verbs. Even within AmE, I find that the informal version of yes is spelt in different ways (yeah, yeh, yea, ya) by different people. To me, yeah is informal 'yes', and yea is pronounced 'yay' and is a positive vote, yay is what you say when you're giddy and ya is what South Africans say instead of yeah. I believe that my spellings are the 'standard' spellings for AmE, but, as I say, I've seen a lot of variation and it's hard to 'correct' such spellings, since the 'standard' is not as well-established for these mostly-spoken sounds. It's worth noting that all of these discourse particles have meanings, though they can be hard to put into words. My favo(u)rite quotation from the OED's entry for er is:

1958 Aspects of Translation 37 The really astute Englishman..must feign a certain diffident hesitation, put in a few well-placed — ers.
The interjections' meanings are generally the same in AmE and BrE, but what may differ, as indicated by the above quotation, is how often and why people use them. One reason to use er/uh is to feign hesitation—to make it seem like you're reluctant to say something. Another reason is to hold your place in the conversation—to indicate that although you're not saying anything at this very second, you intend to finish your thought, so no one should interrupt you. It may be that people in different places from different backgrounds use these sounds for these purposes at different rates and in different situations. I believe that the stereotypes would have it that the British use er/erm to hesitate--not to rush into committing themselves to any proposition--and that Americans use um/uh because they're inarticulately rushing to commit themselves to all sorts of opinions. Nevertheless, both American uh/um and British er/erm have the potential to be used in either way by individuals.
Read more

toasty and toastie

Back in the comments for the milk and tea post, a debate has arisen about toast racks. Since mine is the only opinion that reflects the One Real Truth, I repeat my contribution here, so that everyone may benefit (again):
Toast racks are evil. The entire point of toast is that it should be warm. That way, the butter melts into it and it's yummy. The toast rack is the most efficient way to make toast cold fast.

The American way is to serve toast piled up, sometimes wrapped in a cloth napkin in a basket, so that the heat is retained. Many British people find this horrible. They say "but the toast gets soggy!" I do not understand this fear of soggy toast--and I believe that the sogginess of piled-up toast is much exaggerated. (I like it soggy with butter, after all.)

But cold toast, that is something to be feared!
Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast. I have a toast-based lifestyle. I have at least one friendship that is built on toast. And now I've thought of a linguistic angle on the toast rack issue, giving me a legitimate excuse to cast blame on toast racks again and more.

The linguistic angle is the adjective toasty, meaning 'warm and co{s/z}y'. Although the OED does not mark this as AmE, I've had to explain it to English folk a number of times and all of the OED's examples for this sense are American, so I think we can safely say that it is 'chiefly AmE'. (The OED offers another sense, 'having a slightly burnt flavour', which is particularly used by tea [chiefly AmE] buffs regardless of dialect.) So, why does BrE lack this evocative adjective of comfiness? It must be the toast racks! Since toast-racked toast is cold and cardboard-like with a coating of waxy butter keeping the jam at a safe distance from the bread, one would never associate it with the lovely feelings one has when, say, wrapped in a (AmE) comforter (duvet) by an open fire with a mug full of cocoa (= hot chocolate) while snow gently falls outside. Or when one puts one's feet into slippers that have been left near a radiator. Ooooh, lovely.

I've had to explain toasty to BrE speakers on a number of occasions because of its comparative form toastier, which is a relatively frequent eight-letter (AmE) bingo/(BrE) bonus word in the world of competitive Scrabble. In fact, it's probably more often played not as a bingo/bonus, but as part of a cross-play in which one adds the R at the end of an already-played seven-letter bingo/bonus, toastie. This one is a word that Americans might have to ask about (although they might mistakenly assume that it's an alternative spelling of toasty). A (BrE) toastie is a toasted sandwich; so, you might (or I might) go to the (BrE) tea bar or café and order a cheese toastie. In AmE this would be a toasted cheese (sandwich) or a grilled cheese (sandwich). For me, the AmE terms differ in that a toasted cheese is made under the (AmE) broiler/(BrE) grill, but a grilled cheese is made in a frying pan (which may be called a skillet in AmE)--although I've met AmE speakers who don't make that distinction. If it were made in one of those sandwich-press things, I think I'd call it a grilled cheese, but I can't be sure about my intuition on that--one doesn't see those machines as often in the US. In the UK (Land of Sandwiches), every tea bar has them, and they make toasties. Making such sandwiches in frying pans is not so common--I've introduced my in-laws to the wonders of the grilled (i.e. fried) sandwich through what I like to call the Three C Sandwich: cheddar, chicken and cranberry sauce. (Make it with half-fat cheddar (Waitrose's is best) and diet bread, and it can be done for under 200 calories. Be sure to put the cranberry sauce between the cheese and chicken, so that it doesn't soak the bread.)

And while this probably should be a separate post, another thing to note about toasties/toasted sandwiches is the order in which their fillings are listed. In the US, I'd have a toasted cheese or a toasted bacon and cheese, whereas in the UK, I'd be more likely to have a cheese and bacon. In both countries, it would be cheese and tomato (though, of course, the pronunciation of tomato would differ). These are what is known in the linguistics trade as "irreversible binomials": two words on either side of a conjunction (and in these cases) that idiomatically occur in a particular order. So, one says bread and butter rather than butter and bread and gin and tonic rather than tonic and gin. A generali{s/z}ation that one can usually make about such food binomials is that the first item is the one that's more "substantive"--the "meat", as it were, in the formula (hence meat and potatoes/meat and two veg, not potatoes and meat or two veg and meat). So, the gin is the stronger item in gin and tonic and it goes first, and bread is the heart of the bread-and-butter combination. BrE and AmE agree that in cheese/tomato combinations, the cheese outweighs the tomato in importance, but often disagree in the combination of cheese and meat. Better Half (although vegetarian) says that he'd say cheese and bacon but ham and cheese, but the latter may be AmE-influenced. Cheese and ham is heard in the UK (and it was all I heard in South Africa), but in the US ham and cheese is irreversible. Because it's not quite as irreversible in the UK, I'd say that there's some unsureness about which item is the 'important' bit in a ham/cheese or bacon/cheese sandwich (the cheese because it's basic to the toasted sandwich experience, or the ham because it's meat?), whereas in the US meat reliably trumps cheese.

The photo of the toast rack, in case you're the type of perverted soul who wants a toast rack, is from the website of an American company, The British Shoppe (I take no responsibility for the [chiefly BrE] twee spelling), where it's listed as 'Toast Rack (English style)'.
Read more

totting and toting

JHM wrote in September to ask the following:
A [Financial Times] column used the phrase "tot up" which the context implied was a shortened form for what I would write as "sum up," in other words, to find the total amount. My questions are: 1) Is this a common usage? 2) Would a typical Englishman pronounce "tot up" to rhyme with "tote up?" a) If so, why wouldn't it be spelled "tote up"? b) If not, mightn't it sound more like "taht up," in which case it would it risk being confused with "tart up?"
I'll take JHM's questions in turn:
1). Yes, tot up is BrE meaning 'to add/sum up'. The OED lists it as colloquial, but the fact that it's used in the Financial Times probably means that it's not seen as being particularly colloquial these days. In AmE one is more likely to see/hear tote up. A fixture on American telethons (orig. and chiefly AmE) and other fund-raisers is the tote board, i.e. a representation of how much money has been pledged/collected so far (represented either just as a total figure or a 'thermometer', etc.). Tote boards are also used at racetracks, to show how much the return on a particular bet is. Of course, you have these things in British fund-raisers/racetracks too, but I haven't heard them called tote boards here (and they're not called tot boards either!). The OED lists the related noun tote 'now dialectal' and as originally Australian, with the noun form being short for totalizator--a proprietary name for a kind of machine that tallies numbers up. (In Australia and New Zealand, apparently, the Totalizator Agency Board is the official non-racetrack place where you can bet on horse races--i.e. the equivalent of American Off-Track Betting.)

2-a) Tot up rhymes with hot up, not with tote up. Both verb forms tot up and tote up come from total in some way or another--with the former looking more like it relies on the spelling of the abbreviation of total for its form/pronunciation, and the latter being a clipping of the (pronounced) word total. A similar shortened form is tut to mean tutorial (we used that in South Africa--is it used in British universities that still have tutorials?). It's pronounced to rhyme with hut, rather than like the first syllable ('toot') in the word it stands for, tutorial. So, the spelling of the shortened form has influenced its pronunciation.

b) In (at least southern standard) BrE, tot up and tart up ('to dress in a showy/gaudy manner') have very different vowels. The problem with explaining this to AmE speakers is that AmE generally doesn't have the vowel that's in BrE tot. So, if an American says tot up, it may sound like tart up to a BrE speaker because they're not using the vowel that a BrE speaker would expect to hear. But if a BrE speaker (at least the ones down here in the south) says tot or tart it would be very clear to another BrE speaker which one they're saying. I discussed this vowel back here, where there's a link to recordings of it.
Tote has another, unrelated meaning that is originally AmE: 'to carry'. Of course, the meaning has spread wider than AmE now, especially through the compound tote bag. The etymology of this tote is something of a mystery. It goes back to the 1600s at least, and is often claimed to be of African origin, but there's evidence of it being used that early in parts of America that didn't have many Africans. So, despite a lot of etymological attention to the word, it's still a mystery.
Read more

diapers, nappies and verbal inferiority complexes

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those of you (particularly the American yous) who like signage discussions will probably enjoy it.

But there was a comment in the post that got me a bit down. Orac shows a photo of a sign for a "Baby Nappy Changer Unit" in a public toilet/restroom (which funnily uses the more Canadian washroom in the sign--it's at the Tower of London, so perhaps they're going for the most transparent term, given the tourists). About this sign, Orac says:
It sounds so much more civilized that [sic] "diaper."
And my question is why? Nappy, the modern BrE equivalent to (AmE) diaper, is a baby-talk version of napkin--though no one these days calls the things that you put on babies napkins.* So, nappy, etymologically speaking, is on a par with other baby-talk words like doggy, horsie, and choo-choo. The OED's (draft 2003 definition) first citation for it in print comes from 1927, and it's hardly complimentary of the word:
1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 7 Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).
Diaper, on the other hand comes from a Latin, later French, with a root meaning 'white'. The first citation for it is from the 14th century, where it refers to a type of cloth, and it has its place in Shakespeare (probably not referring to a baby's napkin in that case, but to a napkin or towel). So, why does a babyfied word sound more 'civilized' to an educated AmE speaker than a good, old latinate word? Methinks that this is a symptom of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

AVIC strikes Americans from all walks of life. It's why my mother thinks that it's "pretty" when an Englishperson rhymes garage with carriage. It's why Americans think people with English accents are more intelligent than they are. It's why I get e-mails from Americans who despair of their fellow citizens' diction and thank me for championing the 'correct ways'. (I e-mail back and explain that I'm doing no such thing and that their reasoning on the matter is flawed. I wonder why they never send a reply...) Of course, there's a similar syndrome affecting some BrE speakers: British Verbal Superiority Complex; however, I've not found this to be quite as evenly distributed through the population as AVIC is in the US.

Now, there are times to think that some (uses of) language is(/are) better than others. One thing that Orac and commentators on his blog praise is the directness and honesty of certain signs. I don't always agree with their examples, but directness and honesty are admirable qualities in signs. (One that is pictured on the blog, but that I've never understood, is the BrE convention of putting polite notice at the top of a sign that orders people around. What's wrong with please?) Other things that make some (uses of) language arguably better than others are consistency within the system (e.g. in spelling) and avoidance of ambiguity. But these are issues about the use of the language, and both BrE and AmE can be (and often are) used in clear, consistent, direct, honest ways.

So, back to my old mantras:
  • 'Different' doesn't mean 'better' or 'worse'.
  • 'British' doesn't necessarily mean 'older' or 'original'.
  • 'Older' doesn't mean 'better' either!
  • Let's enjoy each other's dialects AND our own!

(One can be obnoxiously preachy in either dialect too.)

Happy Labor Day to the Americans out there. (I won't re-spell it Labour, since it's a name.) And I will admit my prejudice that American Monday-holidays generally have better names!


* I can't resist a few side-notes on nappy and napkin.
  • AmE uses sanitary napkin for a feminine hygiene product, while BrE uses sanitary towel.
  • Then there's the AmE meaning of nappy, which derives from the more general sense of 'having a nap'--as fabric can (BrE: can have). In AmE this also refers to the type of tightly curled hair that is (pheno)typical of people of sub-Saharan African ancestry--particularly when said hair is not very well cared for. This was the meaning in play when (orig. AmE) shock-jock Don Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". When the news story was reported in the UK, there was some confusion (see, for example the comments here), with some people thinking that Imus was claiming that the women wore diapers or napkins on their heads (Ă  la Aunt Jemima).
  • Then there's the old napkin versus serviette drama in BrE and related Es. In some (e.g. South African and some BrE speakers), the former is reserved for cloth table napkins, and the latter for paper. Elsewhere, serviette just marks you out as being 'non-U'--i.e. not upper class. Serviette is virtually unknown in AmE.
Postscript (8th September): Found a lovely example of AVIC (and its cure, in this case) in last week's Saturday Guardian Review section, in an article by AM Homes about American writer Grace Paley:
Grace often retold the story of how, at 19, desperate to be a poet, she took a course taught by WH Auden. When she used the word "trousers" in a poem, Auden asked why she was writing in British English - why didn't she just say "pants"? Paley explained that she thought that was just what writers did, and then never did it again.
Read more

cheers

The hardest thing to cope with for an English learner of Swedish is not the gender system in nouns, nor the voiceless palatal-velar fricative, nor the verb-second syntax. No, the toughest thing to learn is how to make do without a word for 'please'. I end up saying Tack ('thank you') in all sorts of places, just in order to make some polite noise when I don't know what else to do.

How often one should thank others is something that differs from culture to culture, and something that people tend to notice as over- or under-present in cultures that are not their own. British expats in America are often heard to say that they miss people saying please and thank you. For what it's worth, as an American in Britain, I miss people saying (AmE) Excuse me or sorry when they knock into me in shops or on the street. (Whenever my mother comes to England, she has cause to exclaim But I thought the English were supposed to be polite!) The worst case of this involved a 9-year-old American guest who was shoved to the floor when she was unfortunate enough to get between a Londoner and an open Tube train door. There's no explaining away that kind of behavio(u)r, that was just rude. Otherwise, my theory is that the reason that British people apologi{s/z}e less often than Americans when they knock against you in a public place is that they're in denial about having made physical contact with a stranger. (See the discussion of notions of privacy in the comments back here.)

One hears a lot more thank yous in Britain during a typical exchange at a (AmE) store check-out counter/(BrE) shop till. Somehow, I've caught on to this, and when I'm working at the charity shop/thrift store, I say thank you when the customer gives me an item to ring up, when they give me their money, and at least once at the end of the transaction. The customer says thank you at least when I give them their change and when I give them their purchase. So, that's a minimum of five thank yous per transaction, but in real interactions, I've counted up to eight. An American encounter would typically have two or three, mostly toward(s) the end of the interaction, and would not include the initial thanks for putting the item-to-be-purchased on the counter. Perhaps because they say thank you more, the British have more ways to give their thanks. One informal means of giving thanks is to say ta, which the OED says is "An infantile form of ‘thank-you’, now also commonly in colloq. adult use." Another is cheers (which is the word I started out intending to write about, since I had a request months ago from Ben Zimmer).

Cheers is interesting because it is so flexible. In AmE, it is simply used as a salutation in drinking (or sometimes with a mimed glass in hand, as a means of congratulations). In BrE it has this use, but is also used to mean 'thank you', 'goodbye' or 'thanks and goodbye'. I first learned these uses of cheers in South Africa, where my American colleague and I learned to pronounce it as chizz, following the example of our South African colleague Chaz (Charles). Using cheers to simply mean 'goodbye' is probably more South African than British (the OED doesn't note this sense, and notes that the 'thank you' meaning is as recent as the mid-1970s), but I find it very useful for those situations in which one wants to close an e-mail with thank you for something that hasn't been done yet. A British colleague noted recently noted with incredulity that Swedes often close e-mails with thanks in advance, wondering whether that was a direct translation from Swedish. It is (tack i förskott), but I had to point out that Americans write this too (whether or not we have knowledge of Swedish!), as we (or at least some of us) have been taught that it is presumptuous to thank someone for something they've been asked to do but haven't done yet. Since cheers is ambiguous between Hail, good person! and Thank you!, I use it to express gratitude while avoiding the feeling that I'm breaking that letter-writing rule that I learned from Miss Pitrella back in whatever grade/year that was. (If anyone is watching me from the Beyond, it's Miss Pitrella.) However, it was Ben Zimmer's impression that cheers "always struck me as UK-derived, yet my sense is that in email context it's used more in the US than the UK." This is not my experience at all, but you can side with Ben in the comments if you like.


So, cheers from Sweden! Or as I tend to think of it, Heaven on Earth (at least when the weather is as gorgeous as it has been this week). Heading back to the UK tomorrow (which, according to the Swedish newspaper I was reading today, is smutsig).

Postscript (the next morning): Woke up this morning reali{s/z}ing some the things I hadn't said in this post. One is that the reason why please and thank you are a little more important in Britain is that Britain is more on the 'deference' side and the US more on the 'solidarity' side on the scale of politeness systems. I discussed this a little back here. This means that Americans start out assuming that everyone's equal/friendly, whereas the British start out assuming some status distinctions between people, and therefore treat strangers (and expect to be treated by strangers) with a bit less familiarity and a bit more polite caution. (Note that this doesn't mean that there aren't big social differentiations in America--just that in many situations we feel it's more polite not to make a big deal of them.) This doesn't directly explain the lesser amount of excuse me behavio(u)r when bumping into people, which is why I had to come up with my little theory above.

Another place where the English say thank you more often is when travel(l)ing by bus or coach (in AmE, they're both bus--we don't differentiate lexically between the cross-town and more comfy long-distance types). If the exit of the bus is by the driver's seat, then one says thanks or thank you to the driver. In Watching the English (if I'm remembering correctly), Kate Fox describes this as insincere English behavio(u)r. Personally, having heard American friendliness described as 'insincere' by many non-Americans, I have a real problem with outsiders describing others' behavio(u)r as 'insincere'. (Kate Fox is an insider, but as an anthropologist, she was taking the outsider's role.) Non-Americans often say to me that they can't abide the insincere way in which Americans are so friendly and complimentary with people they don't even know. I don't think this is insincerity, but optimism and enthusiasm--which can seem unseemly in cultures in which earnestness is unseemly (see Kate Fox again).

I'll stop there before I write another post's worth!
Read more

drink/drunk driving and pot plants

James Henry wrote to say:
I had a hard time believing that an utterance such as 'He was cited for drink-driving,' wasn't a typo, or some other error. Apparently it is standard usage, and I'm left wondering if there are 'drink tanks' in the UK.
If there aren't (AmE) drunk tanks in the UK, I'd guess that it has at least as much to do with a tolerance for public drunkenness as with linguistic considerations (though they seem to be warming to the idea of American-style 'tanks' in Scotland). But (BrE) drink-driving does take a lot of getting used to for those accustomed to (AmE) drunk driving. Incidentally, the crime of drink/drunk driving is known in different ways in different parts of the US: either DWI 'Driving While Intoxicated' or DUI 'Driving Under the Influence'--though these days most people in most places know both terms.

Drink-driving and drunk driving are both compound nouns (never mind whether there's a space in it--it is a compound). While the first words of those are morphologically related (i.e. they're both derived from the word drink), they differ in grammatical category; that is, drunk is an adjective, based on the participial form of the verb drink, and drink (in this case) is the base form of the verb. How can I tell that drink in drink-driving is a verb, rather than a noun ['a drink']? Because its origins are in the phrase drink and drive--both verbs. In early days (the 1960s) it was sometimes called drink-and-driving.

This is far from being the only case in which BrE and AmE make compounds of the 'same' words in different grammatical guises. One that creates misunderstandings is AmE potted plant (participle + noun) versus BrE pot plant (noun+noun) for a plant that's been planted in a pot. In AmE, pot plant is understood to involve the slang noun pot (orig. AmE) meaning (AmE-preferred) marijuana/(BrE-preferred) cannabis. So, when British (or South African, etc.) speakers talk of tending their pot plants, AmE speakers can be expected to raise eyebrows.

Just within the topic of intoxicants, one can find more examples of morphological mismatch between the dialects. For instance a BrE headline (on what is probably an American wire story) reads (after I've corrected the punctuation and capitali{s/z}ation problems in it):
Britney Spears 'No Drink Or Drug' Problem
Now, if BS were to cop to (AmE slang, = 'to admit to') such a problem, she'd probably say that she has a (AmE) drinking problem (particple+noun), rather than a (BrE) drink problem (noun+noun). (The article itself uses the more dialect-neutral noun+noun alcohol problem.)
But drug problem in that headline is interesting too, as in BrE one often sees/hears drugs problem, which sounds strange in AmE. Here's another headline from another British source:
Britney Spears' Ex-Hubby: She Had 'Drugs Problem' With Me
The quotation marks/inverted commas in both of these headlines are amusing, since, being in the wrong dialect, they are clearly not quoted speech from Britney Spears, Kevin Federline or "their people". I'm collecting such dialectally incorrect quotations for a future post. It's not so surprising when they're in headlines, in which the notion of quotation is taken very loosely indeed, but they also occur in the main text in most newspapers. If you have other examples of quotations that are dialectally suspicious, please e-mail them to me.

And as long as I'm on bloggy business at the end here... Apologies for my recent (comparatively) low posting volume. If you're wondering why that is, see here. I'll be working (and blogging) more reasonable hours during my Easter break from teaching.

And THANK YOU for nominations to Metro's blog award. While I don't think that I have a serious chance of winning an award (not with the likes of Phileas Blog in the competition), they have noted your enthusiasm for this blog (and your ability to understand self-serving hints). Thanks very much--it means a lot to me! I'll nominate you for the Best British Blog Readers awards, whenever Metro gets around to having that competition.
Read more

sounding English/American

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):
America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.
This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:
There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?
By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:
From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.
Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

  • I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.

  • Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.

  • I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)


*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.
Read more

(h)erbs and (h)aitches

Just as it makes Americans giggle to hear English people say reckon, I've elicited numerous gasps and giggles with my American pronunciation of herb (more like urb). In fact, I've had to take up saying it the English way, with the /h/, so as to maintain any kind of credibility as an educated person.

[Update, 14 June 2006: As is often the case, Americans have the older form of the word--the British used to say 'erb too. It just happened to be mentioned in the Guardian's Weekend magazine this week. See Michael Quinion's World Wide Words for more...]

[Update, 3 September 2014: I've now done a proper post on herb.]

A common response to an American pronunciation of herb is: "Are you a Cockney, then?" Dropping aitches is a definite marker of lower social class--and these days it's fairly rare. In fact, aitches get inserted sometimes in the name of the letter, i.e. haitch. This is heard in the semi-humorous admonision to not 'drop your haitches' (and thus sound 'common'), but is heard unironically in many people's everyday speech, although it is not considered to be 'standard' usage. The story is that it's the Irish pronunciation, and I've read in various places that haitch marks Catholics in Northern Ireland and the Catholic-educated in Australia. I've noticed no such associations here, and neither have friends of mine, though one did suggest that it might be a marker of region rather than religion here. Indeed, my haitch-saying friend is from Liverpool, whose dialect (Scouse) is influenced by Irish immigrants.

As long as I'm talking about herbs...there aren't many that differ in name between the US and UK. Americans call the green part of the coriander plant cilantro, while the British call it coriander. Americans use coriander to refer to the spice made by drying and grinding the plant's fruit. Presumably the difference exists because Americans were introduced to the herb in Mexican cooking, whereas the British know it from South/Southeast Asian cooking. Once, reading a British recipe in Texas, I got confused. I knew that British coriander wasn't meant to refer to the powder in my coriander jar, but could only remember that the American translation also started with C. So I put a whole lot of cumin into my chicken soup. I ate about three bites before I decided that there was nothing to do but toss it out.

Oregano differs in pronunciation, with Americans saying oREGano and the British saying oreGANo. In South Africa (where I first started picking up 'commonwealth English'), they use oreGANum.

As for other herbs and spices, I have been asked "Why do Americans put cinnamon on EVERYTHING?" I can only answer (ignoring the hyperbole): "Because it's tasty."
Read more

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

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