Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts

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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the c-word and gendering mansplaining

In 2011, Douglas Bigham asked me if I'd write a piece about "the c-word" for the Popular Linguistics website, which he was trying to get started at the time. He observed:
It *seems* to me that "c---" is less gendered in the UK, but can only be directed at a woman in the US.
(He didn't censor the word, but I have. I'd say it in a linguistics lecture, but putting it on a page is a bit too in-your-face for a blog that wants to be used in schools. I think I've screwed my chances with the nanny software already, though. Of course, I'm talking about the word that's an anagram of the name of a certain Danish king.)

The article never happened (I'm sorry!) and the site closed (I hope unrelatedly, but I will admit my contribution by non-contribution, if necessary). But today I am moved to write a bit about the word because of this (slightly censored for this blog) message I got on Facebook this morning:




I will come back to why I got this message and why I've hidden his full name. Let's just deal with the BrE/AmE difference first.

This message looks like it's from the USA (and his Facebook profile agrees), because he called a woman a 'dumb c-'. Looking at the GloWBE corpus, there are two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine. This is not to say that it can't refer to either sex in either country, but there are definite different tendencies, and they give the word a different feel in the two places. The shift from feminine to masculine in BrE is (of course) part of a more general tendency to use words for women (or our parts) as the ultimate way to put down a man. Which just sums up the status of womanhood in our culture rather neatly.

(The data for stupid c--- are a bit more mixed, but still tending toward(s) AmE=female, BrE=male. And, as we've seen before, the nationality of GloWBE data is probably 15-20% corrupted by the internationality of web data.)

In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like. The statistical analysis in the GloWBE corpus marks it as a particularly British word, with 1634 British uses to 467 American ones. The statistically "most British and not American" words to come before it are that, fat, black, some and the. (The American data shows up no 'strongly American' collocates.) That shows us that it's often used referentially in BrE--i.e. to talk about people rather than to address them directly, as in "Some c- of an economics analyst on BBC News 24 just tried to equate...".

The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans. And it does offend. For me in my American state-of-mind, only certain racial insults are viler than this word. It was a very long time before I could say it out loud at all (I don't think I ever even heard it till [AmE] college/[BrE] university), and I am not usually one who is shy about words.

But the intent with which words are uttered is what really matters and this reminded me of something else that happened recently:
This was in the UK, and what the man yelled (really aggressively at a woman in an open-windowed car) was "YOU STUPID COW". While cow isn't a taboo word, it can be used very aggressively (and also often playfully) to refer to women in BrE. (Worth noting here that everyday life in the UK provides ample evidence against the American stereotype that the English, as a people, are polite.)

I wouldn't claim that  cow got started as a substitute for the coarser anatomical word (women have been insulted by all sorts of animal names for centuries), but I think that in cases like this road-rage incident there's a link. The former c- word for women is now used for men, but cow provides a similar articulatory gesture.

I've seen lots of cases of women reclaiming the c-word as an anatomical term, but less so reclaiming it as a word for people, rather than people-parts. (Compare the word for a female dog, which has been reclaimed often as a word for women showing strength of character in the face of sexism.)

a bit on the mansplaining...

I'd like to say a bit about what led to this point. It started when the Linguistic Society of America shared a link on its Facebook page:

 

That's a bad piece of  (AmE) subhead /(BrE) standfirst writing. What it means is that studies are equivocal about whether bilingualism helps cognitive development. What it says is that there might not be any advantage to bilingualism. Linguists know well about these debates, and so I posted an ironic comment on the article:
"not show any real benefits"? Like speaking two languages isn't a real benefit?
I later added a smiley face. But without the smiley face  Mr Jason, above, felt the need to explain to me that there are studies that have said that there are cognitive benefits of bilingualism and other studies that have said there are not. (He deleted his explanation before I received his personal message.) I went back-and-forth in my mind a bit about how to respond to it, and I went with this comment-reply:
Sorry, is this what they call 'mansplaining'? It was a critique of the phrasing. I do know this. I do teach it!
And in the morning, I got the private message you see above. Before reporting him to Facebook and blocking him, I did get a look at his public profile. According to that, he had studied English Applied Linguistics at a Wisconsin university less than 10 years ago. I am not including his full name here, because, honestly, it's not worth whatever further abuse he might be willing to give. I have once before received a very similar Facebook message from another  young man (that one in Ohio) after I beat him repeatedly on an online game and he accused me of cheating. (I no longer play on-line games against people I don't know.) I know a male Scrabble champion who gets such cheating-accusation abuse all the time. All they needed to do was google his name to know how silly their accusations would sound. But that seems to be expecting too much of some people. So here are some helpful rules if you want to insult people on the internet.
Rule #1 for insulting people on the internet: find out who you're insulting first.
Rule #2 for insulting people on the internet: don't insult people on the internet.
(I bother with rule #1 because you might learn something interesting. )

Now, you might say here that I did not follow rule #2. I would disagree that I literally insulted, though I will admit that it seems to have had the same effect. I used the word mansplaining in order to call out a behavio(u)r. I did not call the person anything. Maybe that one needed a smiley-face too.

I had weighed whether to call it mansplaining (and even when I did, I did so indirectly), but in the end I went with it (and even got a 'like' and a supportive message about it). I've posted this Jason's message on my Facebook page and have been discussing it with my friends this morning. One (male) friend, whil{e/st} being sympathetic to my situation and angry on my behalf, said
this is why I'm not a fan of the word 'mansplaining'. Let's not taint the name of a whole gender because of these morons.
And I've got mixed feelings about that. I replied (in part):
I have had my joke explained to me three times and it has been by a man each time. Any genitals-free behavio(u)r can be done by anyone, sure, and I have used 'mansplain' at least once of a woman, but that doesn't mean it's not gendered behavio(u)r. Just like I argued two weeks ago(?) that I felt it important to call out creepy behavio(u)r as 'creepy' I think this needs to be called out for what it is. [...C]alling it out with the 'man' is to acknowledge male privilege, and I think men (and whites and straights) need it pointed out once in a while that they are coming from a position where they've assumed some things based on that privilege. I 40% agree with you, but I 60% agree with me.
The creepy thing relates to another debate with my Facebook friends. When an inappropriate appreciation of my photo was posted in the '10th blogiversary' post, I went back and forth a bit about whether to just delete the comment or to thank him for the other part of the comment, followed by "but let's keep it non-creepy, please".

In that case I got a mix of advice in both directions. I put up the "thank you for your kind comments on the blog, but please let's keep it non-creepy" comment and deleted it almost immediately (I don't know whether the post will have gone out to people who were following the thread by email) and then deleted his comment (because I do have a comments policy and I just didn't want to spend my time debating it with strangers). I found it interesting that several female friends suggested paraphrases of the comment (mostly without the warm thanks part) that changed creepy to inappropriate or that asked for "no personal comments, please" or that I not post a photo of myself. I reacted to those suggestions [in part] with:
I don't mind personal comments. I don't like creepy comments. If I'm going to [comment on] it, I'm going to say 'creepy'. [...]  'Inappropriate' doesn't tell him what was inappropriate about it. Creepy does. Some guys don't reali{s/z}e what creepy is [...]

I post pictures to be more human. Having a face isn't an invitation for somewhat sexual comments about it. I do have a comments policy where I say that I reserve the right to delete things that aren't in the spirit of helpful conversation. But I'm not interested in banning comments about appearance. If someone says "You look just like one of my cousins!" or "I think your hairstyle has got more British while you've lived there" (I don't think it has!), that can be a bit of fun.
So, as I said above, I 60% think that when unfortunate behavio(u)r is gendered, it's important to point out the genderedness of it. That way, you hope that the person who's creeped you out, or exasperated you, or insulted you might go ahead and think about their sociali{s/z}ation to act in this way and to maybe pause to think a bit more about the things they've been led to believe about the world.  Maybe before "helping"  someone who's said something that they think "needs help", they might pause to wonder whether there's another possible interpretation of what she's said (it could have been a joke) or whether she might know more about the topic than you do.

The act of explaining things to people who don't need an explanation can be done by any gender of person to any other gender of person, sure. And it is usually done with no malice. But there's a reason it's been called 'mansplaining' and it is exhausting. Women get their jokes misunderstood or explained to them because there is a cultural assumption that women aren't funny. Many men (in many cultures) are put in positions from childhood where they are listened to, treated as authority, expected not to keep quiet and play along. And so on and so forth.

The main reason not to call out genderedness of gendered behavio(u)r (the other 40%--but it's important to note that my 60/40 split sometimes reverses) is that it makes people defensive when they're treated as a phenomenon and not an individual. And so they might not learn. But if the genderedness isn't pointed out, then they might not consider everything there is to learn there. I tweeted my ironic comment (my joke, if you will) as well:


At the time I'm writing this, 30 people have retweeted it, and 80 have 'liked' it, so I think many are getting the joke. But another three men have tweeted back to 'explain' the line about 'no real benefit of bilingualism' to me. Another follower called one of them out for mansplaining, and the explainer protested that he hadn't mansplained--he just hadn't read the article. So to him, explaining an article you haven't read to a person who has read it (and made a joke about it) isn't mansplaining. To me it is a perfect example. But it may well be the naming of it as a gendered behaviour that (apparently) kept him from thinking more deeply about the matter. This is why sometimes my 60/40 thinking flips to 40/60. I could try to deal with the situation by saying "let's all be good humans and treat each other with respect", and that's what I want in the end. But I think it's hard to think about what "being a good human" means without being able to reflect on sexist privileges, beliefs, and behavio(u)rs. If you've grown up male (and comfortably masculine) in a culture where masculine power and the masculine point-of-view is the default, then your perspective on what it means to be treated badly in that culture starts from a position with a limited view.

Of course, the other reason not to point out sexism is that there are a lot of scary men out there. They send threatening messages. They call the other scary trolls' attention to you. And in Jason's land they're allowed to own guns. America has become a violent opera about the dangers of damaged masculinity. It's a complete Catch-22. Don't call out sexist behavio(u)r, and sexist behavio(u)r is allowed to thrive. Point out sexist behavio(u)r and you might have to live with more (and worse) of it.

(I'm sticking to sexism here, but I think the argument and the dangers are fairly transferable to other kinds of discriminatory structures and behavio(u)rs and the privilege they create. But that might not be for me to say!)

In case you are ever accused of mansplaining or any other kind of unhelpful 'splaining, here are some responses that you might consider:
"Whoops! Sorry about that!"
"It hadn't occurred to me that I was doing that, but thanks for pointing it out."
"Fair enough. Never mind!"
"Hm. That's given me something to think about, thanks."
If you use the last one, please note that you can do the thinking without involving the person who felt mansplained-to. Don't expect them to give you a sticker for working it out. Don't expect that they want an argument about why what you did wasn't really mansplaining. Just take it as someone else's observation on your behavio(u)r. (You don't even have to reply at all on social media.) And then, if you want to be helpful, try to see it from their side.

on  irony

And, yes, it's dangerous to try to achieve irony on the internet. Next time, I'll try to remember the smiley face. British people often comment on Americans' alleged inability to interpret ironic statements (here are two old posts about that: one two and a BBC piece on the matter). There are definite regional differences in this, however, and that may have been a factor here.  I'm a northeasterner. (It may also be relevant that I'm an academic.)  I do irony, and I enjoy it when others enjoy it too.

p.s. avoiding mansplaining

I forgot to add my easy mansplaining-prevention tips for any gender:
  1. If you feel the urge to explain something (especially to a stranger, especially on social media), pause to ask yourself: was I asked a question? 
  2. If you were asked a question, consider: might this be a rhetorical question?
  3. If you weren't asked a non-rhetorical question, there is no need for you to explain.
Regarding the second item: it's not a bad idea to avoid rhetorical questions in writing.
Regarding the third item: this doesn't mean you can't have a conversation about the topic. But rather than trying to explain, you could ask a question and find out more about the other person's relationship to the topic. You could say why you too think the topic is interesting. There are many things you could do that don't involve making yourself seem like a mansplainer...

p.p.s. I've reali{s/z}ed that you can't search for this post on the blog because I've been coy. So: cunt.
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partner

I looked at my collection of e-mails from readers that request coverage of this or that Americanism or Briticism. The collection contains just those that I've not blogged about yet and that I think have at least a little potential to be an interesting post. At my current rate of one post a week, it'll take me a year to get through them--that is, if each e-mail has only one request in it. Maybe a year and a half, then. And they just keep coming in! If you ever thought I'd be out of bloggable ideas by the third year in, you were wrong. (And we're not even counting the topics on my own lists of questions I want answered, gripes I want to air, and little jigs I want to dance on your computer.)

With such a backlog (the ones that I consider answerable go back a year now), it seems a bit unfair that I'm going to write about the one that arrived today. Blame my mother. Whenever my brother didn't get into trouble when any reasonable person could see he was guilty as sin (He really was on my side of the car seat! And besides, HE'S LOOKING AT ME FUNNY!), my mother would explain "Life isn't fair." I took logic (AmE) in college/(BrE) at university, so I figure/reckon: Life isn't fair, and I'm alive, so I don't need to be fair. Right?

Regular reader/requester Jackie wrote today to request coverage of the BrE use of partner (since some of the requests I'm ignoring in order to do this one are hers, it's not that unfair, is it?) . She sums up the situation:
When I lived in London I was forever getting confused by people referring to their heterosexual partners as their partner. In the U.S., when someone refers to his or her "partner," it usually means the other person is the same gender. Or that they are in business together, a source of frequent confusion here. I don't know if it's worth discussing, but do you know how the words acquired the narrower meaning in the U.S. (or the broader reading in the U.K.)?
I am going to come out of the closet and tell you that I LOVE partner! In the UK, it is the unmarked--which is to say normal, usual-- way to refer to the person you share your life with (but usually aren't married to). It's gender-free, works as well for gay and straight relationships, doesn't infantali{s/z}e either party. It's wonderful. In fact, I love it so much, that it's still how I refer to Better Half, even though the law has intervened and I could call him my husband now. It's just such a grown-up, practical word, and I feel grown-up saying it. (I think I'll be at least 70 before I stop getting a kick out of being an adult.)

Jackie asks how it came to be this way. How? Hard to tell without a lot of etymological research, which I haven't the wherewithal to do now. But I can tell you this: the OED has examples of partner meaning 'spouse' going back to Milton (17th century). The business sense goes back a to the 15th century. In between, the word was extended to include dancing partners and bridge partners, etc. The OED comments:

Now increasingly used in legal and contractual contexts to refer to a member of a couple in a long-standing relationship of any kind, so as to give equal recognition to marriage, cohabitation, same-sex relationships, etc.
But it doesn't say when that 'now' started. Milton notwithstanding, it does have the feeling of a modern use. I've heard older BrE speakers expressing discomfort with the term ("that's what they all call it nowadays, isn't it?"), although I think the real discomfort isn't the word partner but the fact that their children are (chiefly AmE) shacking up instead of getting married.

Why don't Americans use it so generally? Probably because gay and lesbian folk started using it, and no one wanted to be mistaken for gay/lesbian, so they avoid it--though the official story is that it 'sounds too business-y'. What do Americans use instead? All sorts of things--there just isn't an unproblematic and widely accepted equivalent. They use boyfriend/girlfriend, significant other, lover and write articles like this.

The fact that it sounds 'business-y' is part of its appeal to me. It doesn't traipse into the emotional or bedroom details of your relationship. It acknowledges that you have to work together with anyone who's such a deep part of your life, that you share goals and assets and responsibilities. And I suspect that is a reason it's found popularity in the UK--it talks about a personal part of your life without getting into the private details. That and the fact that co-habiting relationships (including same-sex relationships) are treated with more seriousness and respect in British law these days, so they require a term that can be used in officialdom as well as by someone wanting to mention the person who picks their dirty socks up off the floor (with only the pleasure of self-satisfied eye-rolling as payment).

Generally (in BrE), if your refer to someone as your partner, people will assume that you live together. But I can think of at least two committed pairs I know who don't live together but who use the term for each other. That's how I can tell when my friends have become serious about the people they're seeing--they start calling him/her 'my partner'.

By the way, I'm retiring the Canadian Count. I've had a few lately, but I've lost count and I think it was only amusing me--and less and less so.
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...no knickers

Wore my red shoes today, which always provides someone with an excuse to exclaim red shoes, no knickers! The word knickers is, of course, a dead giveaway that this is a BrE expression. The first 50 or so times I heard it, I assumed it was a comment on the raciness of the colo(u)r red and the type of woman who might call attention to herself (and her feet) by wearing red shoes, but the story is a bit less lady-of-the-evening than it seems at first.

The more common phrase--never applied to me because of my fondness for wool--is all fur coat and no knickers. Both phrases are used to refer to someone (or something) that is all flash and no substance. That is, one who's bothered with the decorations, but not with the basic necessities, like knickers (=AmE panties).

Of course, the moralistic edge of the phrase--encouraging us to have a good foundation (garment) before turning our attention to frills, is often these days overlooked, in favo(u)r of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Search (unfiltered) all fur coat and no knickers on Google Image to see what I mean, if you need to. But you don't really need to, do you?

Another faintly misogynistic (which is not to say entirely unuseful) phrase that the British have introduced me to is mutton dressed as lamb: used to refer to any woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a style that is deemed too young for a woman her age. Better Half also enjoys the phrase mutton dressed as mutton, which is to say a woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a way that is too appropriate to her age. (Thankfully, neither of these has yet been applied to me...to my face.)

The British do not have a monopoly on phrases that pass judg(e)ment on the sartorial choices of women. Muffin top, to refer to the roll of flesh that often appears at the top of some low-slung trousers/pants is an Americanism. This word has made its way into BrE, even though the types of muffins that the phrase alludes to are a fairly recent import to the UK.

[Here I must digress. The cake-like American-style muffin seems to have taken over the UK. This is the kind of muffin that a lot of my students think of first when asked to describe muffins--which they are often asked to do in my courses--rather than the type of flat, non-sweet thing that looks like what Americans call an English muffin, but which actually differs from those as well. According to United Biscuits, individually packaged muffins, such as those pictured at the right, are now 'the second largest sector in eat-now cakes' in the UK. But...there has been some semantic slippage in the transfer of this term (and baked good) to the UK: (a) The muffins that are sold in the UK as American-style muffins often lack 'muffin tops' --i.e. the mushroomy bit that has risen over the side of the muffin tin-- so I'm not sure whether the phrase muffin top is quite as evocative here when applied to love handles. I've yet to come across a home-baked muffin in the UK that wasn't made by me--though one can buy Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mix at Asda, I see. (Not that I want to admit to having been in an Asda--which is owned by Evilmart.) (b) Many of the so-called muffins I see in UK shops are, in AmE terms, cupcakes, as far as I'm concerned. One started to see (horrors!) chocolate chip muffins in the US when I was in my late teens, but to my mind, muffins have to have some whiff of healthfulness about them--bran or fruit, or at least cornmeal--and certainly no frosting. Something built around the theme of a chocolate bar, such as the Galaxy muffin above, is most definitely a cupcake. And before raising the issue of fairy cakes or otherwise taking this conversation any further on the baked goods tangent, please do have a look at the baked goods post from July.]

Back to American body-fascist misogyny! Or cultural observation...take your pick! The other AmE phrase that springs to mind (though admittedly not as widespread as the others discussed so far) is sausage casing girl, to refer to someone young and female who wears clothes in a size or two smaller than the sizing lords intended. I learned this phrase from an LA Times article this summer, and it did strike me as descriptive, though cruel. The article seems to no longer be accessible to the masses on-line, but you can read Grant Barrett's record of it here.

All of these expressions describe phenomena that exist in both countries, but the two cultures have had different priorties as to which type of woman gets judged on the basis of her behavio(u)r with reference to her appearance. As ever, we can wonder about what this says about the cultures--although one has to be careful about plucking a couple of phrases out of the culture and judging the culture on the basis of those. Nevertheless, in the spirit of sweeping generali{s/z}ation, we see in (some of) these phrases British women being mocked for not acting their age and American women being mocked for not acting their weight. And men on both sides of the Atlantic remaining relatively unscathed.
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World Cup words

England are (BrE; AmE = is) out of the World Cup competition. For people like me this means an end to excellent crowd-free shopping opportunities. It also means that I should write about the (BrE) football/(AmE) soccer words I've been noticing, before it all seems completely irrelevant.

While British people can watch football games, they're more likely to watch football matches (unless they write for BBC News Online, in which case they're oddly out of step). American English would refer to matches for tennis, but generally not for team sports. If you look up baseball match on Google, you find the source is generally Australian, European or US-immigrant.

Of course, the sport itself is referred to as a game--and not just any game, but The Beautiful Game. A well-worn cliché in these parts is Football is a game of two halves--i.e. 'don't count on things staying the same way, they might change'. This is applied to just about anything. Sometimes it retains its original sense, and other times it just means 'X has two aspects':
Attractiveness is a game of two halves. (New Scientist)

New Zealand, like football, is a game of two halves. (The Times (Ireland))

Sisters, like football, is a game of two halves. (CD review on Rate Your Music)

Your report “Virgin’s £30m German peace price” (Business, last week) reminded me of the fact that business, like football, is a game of two halves. (The Sunday Times (UK))

(I haven't found the original source of this phrase. Anybody know?)

This World Cup has seen the coining of a new tabloidific word. (And it's not tabloidific, which I just made up all by my lonesome--you can googlewhack it with any other word on this blog.) It's the acronym WAGs (pronounced [wægz]) for 'Wives and Girlfriends', but also used in the singular, where the acronym doesn't make as much sense:
For those footballer W.A.G. (Wives And Girlfirends!) wannabees, we've cherry-picked some fabulous designer goodies to have you looking as high-maintenance as Victoria, Colleen and Cheryl in no time. (Tiscali shopping site)

Presumably this term was born out of frustration with the thwarted desire to refer to Footballers' (AmE=Soccer Players') Wives--thwarted, that is, by the marital status of many of the most watched football couples. Marina Hyde at the Guardian pegs it as "what promises to be this year's most tediously predictable new OED entry" and it was last week's Word of the Week at Macmillan English Dictionary's site. It's not a very kind term, since wag also means a joker, but footballers' wives (and girlfriends) are treated as a kind of national joke anyhow.

Are there any wives of American sports figures who are famous just for being wives of sports figures and shopping a lot?
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hen nights

Describing Nicole Kidman and what's-his-name's prenuptial activities, Scott Lamb on Salon writes:
Much less interesting is the description of Kidman's bachelorette party, or as they say down under, her hen's night: "Instead of male strippers and boozing, the girls each brought a favorite recipe to discuss."

They may say hen's night in Australia (and they do, if the internet is to be trusted), but in the UK and Ireland, it's generally referred to as a hen night. While the term bachelorette party is used in the US, I've never been to one--in spite of having been a bridesmaid five times and (more recently) a sister-in-law three times--so I wonder how popular they actually are. But here, [drunken] hen nights are hard to escape, especially if you live in a coastal/touristy town like mine. I met three hen nights tonight on my post-prandial promenade. One group were all wearing glittery pink cowboy hats, one seemed to have wreaths of flowers on their heads (much more classy), then there's the ever-popular bunny ears. You can usually spot the bride because she's the one (a) with a veil, (b) with L-plates (the badge that learner drivers must display on their cars), or (c) carrying a naked, male blow-up doll or giant penis balloon. More and more popular are hen weekends--which often involve going abroad, or to touristy coastal towns like mine. There are businesses that speciali{s/z}e in organising hen trips.

Of course, older brides tend not to go for the pink cowgirl outfits or matching t-shirts with pictures of the bride. Recipe-swapping sounds like a nice alternative. But I do wonder about the rate of male take-up on a local 'paint your own pottery' business that advertises "Have your hen night/stag party here!"
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geezers



In the US, a geezer is an old man--preferably one who looks something like the picture on the left.

In informal British English, however, geezer means something more like dude means in AmE. (But unlike dude, people don't go around addressing each other as geezer.) It can be used for any man, or to connote that someone is 'one of the lads' (US: guys) or a bit cheeky or laddish--i.e. a bit naughty. A diamond geezer is a great guy. A dodgy geezer is someone you're better off avoiding. Geezer used in this way has a bit of east London attitude to it.

One sometimes sees babygros (UK)/onesies (US) emblazoned with GEEZER, as in the picture on the right. Thought about getting some of these for my infant nephews, but thought they'd only cause consternation in the US.
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cheap and tight

So, Friend 1 , Friend 2 and I were having a (BrE) natter tonight, when the fact of Mutual Acquaintance's stinginess came into the conversation. I exclaimed, "MA is so cheap!" and F1 said "It's so funny whenever you say someone's cheap when you mean tight. If you say someone's cheap here, it means something different."

Well, in the US it can mean that too--it's ambiguous. But, given the context most Americans would naturally have interpreted my comment as meaning that MA is careful with her money (to put a positive spin on it), rather than that she has loose morals. I know that in England I'm 'supposed' to say that such people are tight, but to me, that word has unappealing connotations when applied to a woman. This is not helped by my knowledge of British saying about stingy people, which is often applied to MA: She's tight as a gnat's chuff.

From now on, I think I'll have to resort to saying "MA is careful with her money for reasons that I don't entirely approve of."
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Abbr.

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