Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts

sir, miss (at school)

In my last newsletter, I reacted to this news story:

Guardian headline: London school drops ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’ honorifics to fight cultural misogyny

The article is about addressing teachers as sir or miss, which happens in American schools too (I'm sure there's a lot of variation in that across schools and regions). But in the newsletter I mentioned BrE referential use of the words when talking about the teacher (rather than talking to the teacher). I said: "I’m often taken aback when my child (like any ordinary English child) refers to her teachers as Sir and Miss"—which she often does.

My former colleague David replied to say that he found this odd, since as "a moderately ordinary English child in the north of England in the 1960s," he addressed his (all male) teachers as Sir, but would refer to them by name or description (e.g., our English teacher). He concluded that "referring to teachers as Sir and Miss may be either more recent or more southern."

While the usage may have been new in the 1960s, it definitely existed then, apparently even in the north.

The OED's first citation for that use of Sir is from 1955 in a novel by Edward Blishen, who hailed from London: "‘The cane,’ said Sims vaguely. ‘Sir can't,’ said Pottell...’" A few other quotations can be seen in the OED snippet below (note their nice new layout!)  




On to MissThe first referring-to-(not addressing)-a-teacher citation for Miss is from 1968 in a book by an author from Salford (in the northwest). (You'll spot another Miss example from that book in the Sir examples above. I've reported the error.)


Did Miss really only appear a decade after referential Sir? I doubt it. We have to rely on written records, usually published ones, and there aren't a lot of written records in the voice of schoolchildren. Fiction helps, but it has its biases and gaps. 

And then, of course, there was the 1967 British film To Sir, with Love, in which Sir is used as if it is the name of the teacher played by Sidney Poitier. Is it a term of address there, or referential?  Well, the title always seemed weird to me—certainly not a way I'd address a package. This Sir seems halfway between address and reference. We could label packages with the second-person pronouns that we usually used to address people, i.e., "To you", but we tend to use the third person: "To David". Rather than addressing the recipient, it seems to be announcing the recipient. 

This past academic year, for the first time, I was addressed as Miss a fair amount (no name, just Miss). This came from a new student who apparently was carrying over school habits to university, and so my colleagues were all Miss as well. I thought often about saying something about it to the student, but I also thought: I know what they mean, so why bother? I get to correct people enough in my job, I don't have to take every opportunity to do so and certainly don't need to make a big deal out of what I'm called. (Just don't call me late for dinner.) One picks one's pedantic battles. It's not a million miles from how I feel about my students calling a lecture or seminar a lesson, which I've written about back here.

If you're interested, here's more I've written on:
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garden birds

This was going to be a post where I tried to cover the many different bird names between US and UK that I've covered on Twitter, but I now reali{s/z}e that I don't have enough blogging hours in a day to do that, so consider this Part One in a series of bird-related posts. This one focus(s)es on (BrE) garden birds—i.e. songbirds and the like. The kind of thing that might nest in a tree, near you. (Note that yardbird is not AmE for garden bird!) Photos are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise stated, and are generally of adult male birds.

The naming of birds in North America

North America and Europe differ in their native bird species a fair amount, and so there are different birds to name. But when English-speakers first encountered birds in America, they often used familiar words for the unfamiliar species.

A great source on AmE/BrE bird-name differences is British Names for American Birds by Cecil H. Brown in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 2 (June 1992). If you want to read it, but find a paywall, then do contact your public (or school/university) library, which might have access through JStor , you should be able to register to read it without paying. (See vp's comments below for info.)

Brown discusses four main patterns of application of British names to American birds:
  • A. A British monomial [i.e. single name] or base name [i.e as part of a compound] for British species X is used to label the same species occurring natively in America.
  • B. A British monomial or base name for British species X is used to label species Y occurring natively in America when (1) species X does not occur natively in America, and (2) species X and Y are of the same genus.
  • C. A British monomial or base name for British species X is used to label species Y occurring natively in America when (1) species X does not occur natively in America, (2) the genus to which species X belongs does not occur natively in America, and (3) species X and Y are of the same family.
  • D. A British monomial or base name for British species X is used to label species Y occurring natively in America when (1) species X does not occur natively in America, (2) the genus to which species X belongs does not occur natively in America, (3) the family to which species X belongs does not occur natively in America, and (4) species X and Y are of the same order. (Brown 1992: 33)
In other words, A-named birds have the most similarity between the places, and D birds the least.  We'll notice the differences most between the names for the C and D categories.

Of the 87 British bird names that Brown studied (for all kinds of birds, not just the types in this blog post), 52 were in category A (i.e. same bird, same name + expansions of the name ), 15 in B, 10 in C, 3 in D, and 7 were exceptions to these categories. 

Robin
BrE robin
AmE robin
American robins and European robins are both brown with red breasts, but otherwise they look very different. The robin found in UK is Erithacus rubecula (left). The one in US is a type of thrush: Turdus migratorius (really; pictured right). Brown categorised this as type C, but this doesn't seem to take into account that the British robin is no longer considered a thrush, but a type of Old-World flycatcher.


It must be said: the UK robin is much (orig. AmE in this sense) cuter. They can also be quite sociable—probably because they're very keen on asserting territorial rights, so they will come and sit quite near you if you're relatively still. I'm sure when I read The Secret Garden as a child, I imagined the American type, but it's much more realistic to imagine the British type.

Both serve as symbols in their cultures, but of different things. In the UK, robins appear on Christmas cards. This is not because you see them more at Christmas(time). It seems that Victorian postmen were called 'robins' because of their uniforms, and so early Christmas cards had red-breasted birds with letters in their beaks as a kind of adorable visual metaphor. 

In the US, the robin is known as a first sign of spring, but it seems that's a bit of a myth too, since they don't actually migrate all that far during the winter. 

from Bizarro Comics—the joke doesn't work in UK

The bird is named after people—Robin being a variant of Robert. Originally, the British bird-name was redbreast, and one often hears robin redbreast as if it's the bird's first and last name.

In the US, Robin is usually a girl's name now (which might be spel{led/t} in different ways), whereas in the UK, Robin is more usually a boys' name and Robyn the female variant. 

Blackbird (late addition)

Commenter Bardiac notes that that word is used differently in AmE & BrE. Indeed, UK blackbirds are thrushes, often not all that black.  They thus look like AmE robins, fairly drab. New World blackbirds are of the same family as New World orioles, about which see below, and often more spectacular looking. Click on links for pics. 

Tit/titmouse/chickadee

Blue tit (UK)
The UK has many types of titmouse, which have often been called tit. The name is probably from Scandinavia, where the birds have similar names, and it is thought to be in imitation of the birds' chirp. Earlier and dialectal forms include chit and tomtit—again from the trend of giving birds human-like names. Calling them tits is a bit newer-fangled than calling them titmice. The OED says:

In Britain ‘tit’ has largely superseded the earlier name of titmouse, though the latter is still used for several American species. Most tits were traditionally placed in the genus Parus, but this has recently been split into several other genera.


One of the American species is more commonly called the (black-capped) chickadee, again an onomatopoetic name, after its alarm call. Some people assume that Americans don't call these birds tits because of alleged prudery, but this is almost certainly not the case, since Americans do call other birds titmice — the shortened tit form would not have been so common when colonists were originally naming these things. The chickadee naming could have come about because (a) it was seen as being different enough from European tits to warrant a new name, (b) the name was more evocative, or (c) it seemed silly to call a bird a titmousesimilar to AmE preferring ladybug over (BrE) ladybird for description's sake.  Nevertheless, as I say, there are other species called titmouse in the US like the tuffed titmouse below, so I think it was just that the name chickadee appealed more. Titmouse counts as Brown's category B.




                        Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse (N Am)







Speaking of Christmas cards, American ones are sometimes illustrated with the black-capped chickadee or the cardinal, neither of which are found in the UK/Europe. The cardinal, of course, is red and cheery. I don't know if the chickadee is particularly Christmassy, or if it's just a cute bird that allows American cards to imitate the British robin ones (since the US got the Christmas-card tradition from the UK in the Victorian age). (See comments for further info.)

Google image search


Goldfinch

If someone says they have a goldfinch in their garden, it'll be the left one in the US (Spinus tristis) and the right one in the UK (Carduelis carduelis). This is Brown's category C.



A bit about cardinals and jays

The (northern) cardinal lives in the eastern half (and a bit) of the US. A recent Twitter discussion I
Cardinal (NAm)
saw questioned whether Catholic cardinals were so-called because they wear red like the bird. Worth noting that this is backwards. Americans often don't reali{s/z}e that their wildlife isn't everyone's wildlife (as another Twitter discussion about raccoons reminded me last week). The birds were so-named (originally cardinal-bird) because they're red like a cardinal's robe, not the other way (a)round.




Blue jay (NAm)
I always think of cardinals and blue jays together, as they are always a welcome flash of crested colo(u)r in our northeastern US (AmE) backyard/(BrE) garden.

I didn't know what the bird was when I snapped the picture below in Brighton, but it turns out it is also a jay, a Eurasian jay, which has some blue in it. So perhaps when Europeans hear Americans talk about blue jays, some imagine this. Jay belongs to Brown's category C.

Eurasian jay


Oriole
Here is Brown's category D. New-World orioles [right] belong to the blackbird family. As Wikipedia says: "Unrelated to Old World orioles of the family Oriolidae, they are strikingly similar in size, diet, behavior, and strongly contrasting plumage, a good example of convergent evolution." There are a lot of different kinds and they're all pretty, so click through to Wikipedia to see more pics.
Baltimore oriole (NW)



Black-naped oriole (OW)












Starling (late addition)

I'm slipping this one in even though the name doesn't mean different things in the two places, just because I want to note that starlings were imported to the US from Europe, reputedly as part of an effort to ensure that all birds mentioned by Shakespeare lived in the US. While starlings do very pretty things on our local sea front in Brighton, in the US they turned out to be a big pest that ousted native species. This is a great fact for Americans to be armed with when asked to answer for the problem of grey squirrels in Britain.

 Sparrow (late addition)

I had just assumed that sparrow meant the same in both countries because the sparrows I know in the two places look pretty much the same. But as I was preparing to write the next instal(l)ment of this bird series, I noticed that Brown marks sparrow as category D—applying the British name to a different family of birds. It turns out that I think they're the same because, like the starling, the European house sparrow (Passer domesticus, family Passeridae) is a successful transplant to the Americas. But before that happened, English-speakers in North America had applied the name to birds from another widespread family, Passerellidae
These are what birdwatchers call LBJs 'little brown jobs' or sometimes LBBs 'little brown birds', because they're all over the place and hard to distinguish. (I can't find where LBJ originated, though the job in it is probably closest to a the sense 'A thing of a type specified or evident from the context', which the OED marks as 'orig. U.S.'.)  So it's not entirely surprising I hadn't noticed the differences. There are a lot of different species with different looks, but

European house sparrow



American tree sparrow

 

Parakeet

Ok, parakeets are generally not thought of as garden birds, but I'll include them here because there are plenty in English gardens. They're especially numerous around south London (and so they're sometimes called Kingston parakeets), but they've been spreading out—even into Scotland, it seems. I love watching them in my mother-in-law's garden.

But there is a meaning difference for parakeet. AmE uses that name for the little birds that are kept as pets, what BrE (and some US pet bird enthusiasts) call budgerigars or budgies, for short. The ones in London are rose-ringed parakeets, or ring-necked parakeets. These would also be called parakeet in AmE, because that's what they are, but Americans have less need to talk about them, as they are not living in public parks. See the comments for info about areas of the US where feral parakeets are found.

AmE parakeet; BrE budgie
Feral parakeet in London



















Bird-related vocab

Bird table is used in BrE to describe some kinds of bird feeder where seed lies on a flat surface. One doesn't find this term so much in AmE—they're just listed as 'bird feeders' in online shopping hubs.

Google image search for "bird table"

The dawn chorus

Recently one of my Twitter Differences of the Day involved the BrEism the dawn chorus, meaning 'early morning birdsong'. Someone asked me why I thought the British invented a special term for this and AmE apprarently didn't, and I flippantly replied "Sentimentality". But there is probably more to it than that.

It is pretty hit-{and/or}-miss which concepts get lexicali{s/z}ed in a language/dialect, but in this case, I think Britain has two things going for it. First, its relative geographical homogeneity: no deserts, temperate climate throughout, no one more than 70 miles from the coast, and no one higher than about 1500m above sea level. (It's even more homogeneous if we only consider England, where most of the media discussed below comes from.) Some birds will be more common in some places than other places, but the particular sound of birds singing at dawn is not going to be a very local phenomenon. Second, there's a lot of nature programming on television and radio. These two facts together make for a lot of garden programming and other kinds of national attention to nature-in-your-immediate area. And so if they talk about something like the dawn chorus, it'll be (a) immediately familiar to anyone paying much attention and (b) spread very easily around the country. In the US, I'd expect there's a lot more variation in what the morning sounds like. We are not 'a nation of gardeners'—which is not to say that Americans don't garden, but there's less of a national identity built around it. And the US is in general less sentimental about local nature—probably because nature is often less cuddly and Beatrix-Potterish in the US. To my mind, there is nothing cuter than the North American chipmunk, but Americans have to hold nature at more of a distance, because some of it is deadly in its own right (rattlesnakes, crocodiles, grizzly bears), some of it is unpleasant (skunks), and much of it can carry rabies. And it's so populous. If we in my part of New York State were to stop and say "Look! A squirrel!" every time we saw one like my in-laws (and now my child) do here in the southeast of England, we'd never get out of our own (AmE) driveways.

Final fun fact

When I was researching The Prodigal Tongue, I was really struck by how much influence publishing laws (and their circumvention) have had on life. Here's an example. Audubon's Birds of America (1827–1838) had no text in its first edition just pictures, because if there were text (and they distributed it in the UK), they'd be required to provide free copies to public libraries in England. The text was printed in a separate book, so that the relatively inexpensive all-print books could be provided separately from the expensive-to-print pictures.


P.S. Apologies for some formatting problems here. Blogger has changed its interface and (a) a lot of things that used to be easy are now harder, (b) the html-editing page is considerably harder to read, (c) captions seem to easily come unfixed from their images. I might fix some things later, but I've already spent FAR TOO LONG on this post today!
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Barbados & the Caribbean

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotel
is rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton home
As I mentioned in the last post, and as I have been wont to mention at any opportunity, I got to go to Barbados recently. It was my first time in the West Indies and it was fabulous—even if I did spend much of it in a windowless conference room.

In the weeks before I went there, I was wont to mention at any opportunity that I was going to Barbados soon. And this is when my (obviously jealous) English friends started pointing out (or was it mocking?) that I didn't say Barbados like they say Barbados. I (in my American way) say the last syllable as if it is the word dose. Theirs sounds like (BrE) doss  or the acronym for 'disk operating system': DOS. In saying it they use the 'rounded short o' vowel that Americans like me don't have.

I was gratified to learn, in the welcoming speeches at the conference, that Barbadians pronounce the last vowel in Barbados like I do, more like the Spanish number dos than like doss. I tweeted about this discovery, and one of my longtime blog correspondents emailed to note (as others had) that in olden times it was often Barbadoes in English, suggesting the "long", or more accurately "tense" o pronunciation that I use. She added "the modern spelling suggests the '-oss' ending".

To which I had to respond—well, the modern ending might suggest '-oss' for you, but not for me. Barbados is part of a partial pattern of difference between BrE and AmE. For my American English, I see the -os in kudos or pathos and I say it with the tense /o/. They rhyme with dose, not doss. But the standard pronunciation of these in Britain is with the -oss sound. And that kind of pronunciation has bled into Barbados. The name Barbados comes from either Portuguese or Spanish for 'bearded ones' (probably because of a tree with beard-like foliage). It's not related to the Greek-derived words pathos and kudos, but the spelling leads us to treat them similarly.

This varies in the US, though. Merriam-Webster gives the doss-type pronunciation first for kudos and pathos (though, of course, with the kind of short-o that Americans use, see link above). American Heritage's first choice for kudos rhymes with doze. But my kudos rhymes with dose. That pronunciation is in both dictionaries, but further down their lists. They both give the dose-type first for Barbados, though. (And they don't give a 'doss' type, but do give a schwa pronunciation more like "Barbaduss".) I suspect that the dose pronunciation for Barbados is preserved in the US because it looks like Spanish, and Americans are used to pronouncing the Spanish o in the tense/long way. (For more on AmE/BrE approaches to Spanish words, see this old post & its comments.)


Thanks to previous UK comment on/mockery of my pronunciation, I went to Barbados also nervous about saying Caribbean. Natural-me says caRIBbean. English people (and now me-when-I'm-speaking-to-English-people-and-wanting-to-avoid-mockery) say caribBEan.  I again heard "my" pronunciation during the opening speeches of the conference. Professor Jeannette Allsopp, co-namesake of the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography, put her stress on the -rib-. I thought: if she does it, I can do it too. Then I noticed other staff and students from the University of the West Indies (UWI) putting their stress on the -be-. This is what Oxford Dictionaries says on the matter:
There are two possible pronunciations of the word Caribbean. The first, more common in British English, puts the stress on the -be-, while the second, found in the US and the Caribbean itself, stresses the -rib-
The 'first' in this quotation is made especially weird by the fact that it's the rib-stressed pronunciation that is listed first in their entry for the word. Phonetician (and frequent travel[l]er to the Caribbean) John Wells tells me that indeed the rib-stressing pronunciation is traditionally the more common in the area. The fact that I heard a lot of younger UWI folk using the more BrE pronunciation is an interesting counterexample to the oft-heard claims that English is being Americanized all over the world. In this case, decades after Barbadian independence, a British pronunciation seems to be making inroads.

The competition between these pronounciations comes from the fact that Caribbean has two possible etymologies. It's either Carib(b)+ean or Caribbee+an. Both Carib and Caribbee are apparent anglici{s/z}ations of the Spanish Caribe (which is probably an adaptation of an Arawak word). Caribbee has pretty much died out now, but it and Carib are both found in the earliest days of European reporting on "the New World". 


So, I'm happy now to say Barbados and Caribbean in my natural way even with British friends who might mock me because (a) they're not wrong, and (b) I GOT TO GO TO BARBADOS AND THEY DIDN'T. 😎
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Theresa and other sibilant names

The appointment of a new Prime Minister in the UK has led to both national and international crises in pronunciation. How do you say Theresa?

The national crisis, within the UK, is the problem of whether the second syllable is pronounced 'ree' or 'ray' ('ree' it turns out, for this particular Theresa) and whether the first syllable is truncated (no), as this passage from a Buzzfeed article (helpfully jpegged by author @jamesrbuk) explains:


Language Log looked at that vowel yesterday.

The international crisis is: what's going on with that 's'?  In American English, the 's' means /s/, but note that the Buzzfeed article didn't even mention the possibility of (mis)pronouncing it with an /s/. In British English, it's a /z/.

Theresa is not alone. There are other s-ful names that British English routinely pronounces with /z/, and American English usually pronounces with /s/. These include:

  • Denise
  • Leslie / Lesley (which British folk will tell you is the feminine spelling--Americans don't follow that distinction) and the truncated form Les
  • Wesley
  • Lisa sometimes (hear here - this is the only UK voice I've found on name-pronouncing sites)
  • Joseph sometimes (compare here)
  • Louisa? (I only recently learned that other people say LouWEEza, whereas I always said lewISSa. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I'm an American weirdo. Here's some discussion. About Louisa, not about whether I'm a weirdo. That matter has been settled.  Louise has a /z/ in both countries.)
For comparison, here are a British and an American actor saying Wesley. The American /s/ is very pronounced, the British consonant less so:




But—and this is a big BUT—these are names, so anything can happen. Names are subject to fashions and to individual whimsy. In particular, I suspect that the /s/ in the 'sl' names varies in America. In fact, I know it does in Wesley. The name (for the same character) is pronounced on Big Bang Theory with a definite /z/. Since the /s/ pronunciation is used by the character's own mother, this just seems disrespectful. ;)




In on-line conversations, I've seen Americans calling the /z/ version of 'Theresa' "posh". (They were American, so maybe posh isn't the word they used, but it was the meaning.) That may be because of the association with British accents or the Frenchness of the /z/ (as in Thérèse).


I can't say that I ever noticed any /z/ pronunciations of Theresa while growing up in America. Mother Theresa had an /s/ and so did the Theresa I went to school with. She used to ask if she could carry my lunch box for me to show that we were friends. When we'd get to the corner where we should part ways, I'd ask for my lunchbox back and she would laugh and cross the street that I wasn't allowed to cross and run away with my lunchbox. Yes, the use of habitual verb forms there indicates that it happened more than once. She always promised that it wouldn't happen again if I just trusted her...

 Alicia and Marcia are another couple of names that often throw me when I hear them in the UK. Whereas the Alicia I grew up with was "aLEEsha", in the UK it's "aLISSeeya". There is bound to be variation in the US on these, especially since in Spanish Marcia would have a "seeya" pronunciation.

There are, of course, many other names that are pronounced differently in the two countries. On the theme of national leaders' names, I have another post on Barack Obama. You might find discussion of some of the others by clicking on the names tag.  Important to note here that the /z/ in these names is not particularly related to the /z/ that's used in a lot of British nicknames. While Theresa may become Tezza, the z in that case is coming (believe it or not) from the /r/, just as it does for Jeremy —> Jezza. I've another post on that phenomenon.


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Descriptions in Twitter profiles


When Twitter tells me I have new followers, I can see their name and self-description before I can see their location (if they've given any). So I play a little game of 'guess which country they're from' before I click through to see it.  I seem to be good at picking out the Americans (or at least North Americans--the Canada/US distinction is hard to make here--sorry Canadians), based on the style of the name and self-description. To be fair, I'm probably guided by the photos too. (Pick out the Americans at the airport is another fun and not-too-difficult game. There, you can see the red maple leaf patches on all the Canadians' bags, which save them from the lumping-together.) But I'm a linguist, so I like to think it's the language I'm sensitive to.

(A postscript on 27 Oct 2014: In the comments, Dorothy Bishop reminds me of a post she did three years ago that was in the back of my head when I started this, but I failed to find it in my preliminary search. I didn't want to take the chance of you missing that if you don't read the comments. So, if you like this post, you'll love this one.)

Because I probably should have been doing something else, I decided to try to test 'what marks an American (versus British) Twitter profile'. Here's my method:
  • I worked backwards from recent followers using the 'Who Unfollowed Me' (Pro) list of followers whom I don't follow back. I used this because it does the opposite of Twitter: it shows me the location, and I have to click through for the description.
  • For each follower who (a) was a person, not a company, and (b) unambiguously listed their location as being in the US or UK, I recorded:
    • country: I only included people whose locations were unambiguous, so no London-Islamabad-Hong Kong multiple locations and no indications of internationality in the descriptor, such as An American in London
    • gender: by name/photo/description (female, male, unknown/other)
    • Twitter handle: does it reflect their name? Three possible values:
      • Yes/name: the handle is some version of their name or their name + numbers, e.g.  @lynne_murphy, @LynneM34, @Lynney, etc.
      • Mixed: part name/part descriptor, e.g. @LynneLinguist, @LynneEdits, @LordLynne, @CrankyLynne
      • Not name: e.g. @poltroonish, @LinguistYay, @subjunctiverobot
    • Number of self-descriptors: this is the tricky one. Basically, I counted nouns or verbs that constituted separate descriptions of the person, so:
      • Writer, teacher, blogger, linguist, parent, feminist, Scrabble player:  counts as 7.
      • Loves cooking, dreaming, whittling, singing: counts as 4.
      • Teacher of ESL, EFL and Intercultural Communication counts as 1--the main identity is 'teacher'.
      • Dreams are sometimes songs: counts as 0, since if it's label(l)ing the person, it's very indirect. 
      • An empty description also counts as 0, but I had a separate sub-category in which I distinguished the content-ful and content-less zero scores.
    •  Caveats: I also kept track of who said things like "RTs are not endorsements" or "All views are my own", but there were some in each nationality and not enough of these to warrant further analysis.
  • I did this for two notebook pages for each nationality, which totals 64 from each country. More would have been better, but I can only justify a certain amount of procrastination per day.

A big caveat here is that I'm only sampling my own followers, which is to say it's probably people with an interest in language or US/UK issues, possibly a bit older and educated than average.  So this might not be generali{s/z}able to US/UK Twitter users generally. The other caveat, of course, is that I'm equating location with culture. For all I know, half of the people who listed their location as 'London' are exchange students who aren't mentioning that they're from Iceland. But I'm working with what I've got, and we can only hope that the rate of 'false positives' in one country's data is matched in the other country's data.

All examples in this post are made up, mimicking profiles I read. I don't want people to feel like I'm giving any individuals a hard time. Or to [orig. AmE] out them to their friends and family as someone who follows me.  If it so happens that I've made up a handle or a profile that actually exists, that's accidental.

So this is what I found:

Gender
Overall the sample had more women than men, which is to be expected because 62% of Twitter users are female (according to one study).  (For this sample it's 56% female. The table below has raw numbers.) The gender breakdown was similar across nationalities, so whatever we see here is more likely to be a national effect rather than a gender effect.


gender
      F     M    O

US     37     26     1
UK     34     25     5
Total        71     51     6


Handle = name?
I was interested in the name versus pseudonym issue because, as we've seen before, Americans introduce themselves by name earlier in conversation than Brits do. So, I wondered, are the British more careful about giving out names on Twitter? The caveat for this result is that I have no way of knowing whether the handles people use are their real names. If someone's name was presented as 'Gemma Thornton-Baker' and her handle is @gemmatbkr, then the fact that the handle matched the name meant that I counted this as a name, rather than a pseudonym.  If their name was presented as 'Hunky Cloud' or their handle was @rottenweather, then I took it for granted that their name wasn't really Rotten Weather.

But after all this preamble, I'm not even going to bother to put together an HTML table of results because the numbers were exactly the same for US and UK.  So, hypothesis that Brits would be less apt to use their name as a handle was not supported.

Self-descriptions
On to the meat of what I wanted to look at. Remember, I'm not testing word-count of the self-descriptions, but the number of separate descriptions given--a single description may be one or ten words long. So, this isn't about how much one says, but how many different things one says. My hypothesis was that Americans list more different things, divulging more about themselves.

The result favo(u)red the hypothesis, in that Americans listed, on average, 3.58 descriptors and the British 2.78.  The range was exactly the same: 0 to 14 descriptors. The US median was 3 and the UK median was 2.

But although the numbers were in the right direction for the hypothesis, they are only significant at p=.100, which means, basically, that there's a 10% likelihood that the difference is down to chance. We'd probably have a better answer if I'd looked at more than 64 people per country. Which is why I'm going to point this out to our students who are currently looking for research projects to do...
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Henny Penny, Chicken Little, Chicken Licken

While writing the other day, I wondered whether it would be widely understood if I used Chicken Little as a metaphor for a certain kind of language peever. It felt right, but I also knew the name Henny Penny (of the main character in the story--see comments for variations), both from my American childhood and from my child's English childhood. Then I got an email informing me that my Survey Monkey subscription had been auto-renewed for the next month. Which is to say, I had failed to notice the note in my (BrE) diary/(AmE) planner on Tuesday that said "UNSUBSCRIBE FROM SURVEY MONKEY". At that point, I decided to get my money's worth from this unintended subscription, and so I devised something called the Famous Chicken Survey. Because I'd read another name, Chicken Licken, on Wikipedia, I threw that into the survey.

(Now I know, with a bit more research that Hen-Len is another name, found for instance in a UK-published version from 1849.  For that and more, see this site, which catalog[ue]s Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 20C folktales.)

156 people from the US (n=80) and UK (n=76) had answered by tonight (and small numbers from other places, not to be analy{s/z}ed here), and 146 of those answered the key question:

So there we have it, Chicken Licken (orange) is BrE, Chicken Little (blue) is AmE.  While there's some Chicken Little in the UK answers, that's only 9 people on that blue bar. They might have been affected by the Disney films by that name (1943 and 2005).

I thought that perhaps Henny Penny was old-fashioned, but it's found across the age groups. That one may just depend on which book you had in your house (or your preschool). I don't have a historical corpus for BrE at home (and I doubt I have a big enough one for this job), but the Corpus of Historical American English has 2 Henny Pennys between 1880 and 1909, and 26 Chicken Littles, so that's clearly not a very new name.

It would not be surprising to find that Chicken Little is a corruption of Chicken Licken, since all of the story's other names rhyme: Cocky-Locky, Goosey-Loosey, etc.  It also would not surprise me if the Little corruption and the alternative Henny Penny arose from a Victorian desire to avoid the association with licking. At least, that's what I'd want to avoid, since Chicken Licken sounds like a (BrE) dodgy (orig. AmE) fast-food joint to me. But that might be because it is a fast-food (orig. AmE) chain in South Africa, where I used to live. Not to mention that the Victorians wouldn't have heard of it.



The Wikipedia page for the South African Chicken Licken funnily enough refers to the Henny Penny Corporation (USA), which supplies equipment to chicken-frying businesses. I can see why these companies wouldn't want little in their names, but they're clearly not worried about associating their businesses with muddle-headed paranoia.

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America and Americans (p.s. England, Britain & UK!)

Here's an argument that doesn't fit well in 140 characters, but I'm constantly being confronted with it on Twitter (and in real life), so I hope you'll excuse me getting it out of my system so that I can just send people a link from now on.

This is the kind of thing I get:

I suggest you stop calling yourselves American. It is arrogant of people from the United States to call themselves Americans because America is a whole continent. They should be called [insert long-winded or whimsical epithet here].

So, let's break that argument down...

I suggest... It is arrogant...
Individuals from the USA call themselves American because that's the word we have. They typically don't have an imperialist agenda intent on taking over or obliterating other people in the western hemisphere, they're (we're) just using the word that's at hand. But let's unpack this a bit more.

Let's say I meet a young man named Tom Jones. Would it be appropriate for me to say to him "It is arrogant of you to call yourself Tom Jones because there's another one who's older and a much better singer than you!"?  Or "How arrogant of your parents to name you Tom Jones when there already was one!"?

That is, you're telling people from another country what to call themselves, and you think they're the arrogant ones?


America is a whole continent
On the model of continents generally taught in English-speaking nations, America is two continents: North America and South America.  In today's English, these are typically referred to collectively as the Americas. (And loosely, the term Western Hemisphere is sometimes used to refer to the same set of continents, though technically parts of Europe are in that hemisphere too.) There are some contexts in which American is used to refer to people/things from the Americas, as in the Organization of American States--but even they use the plural when referring to the continents: "Today, the OAS brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas" on their English site and (interestingly--is this just because of translation from English?) similar plurals on the Spanish, Portuguese and French pages.

All this is based on the seven-continent model that is generally used in the English-speaking world (and some other places too), but other models are taught in other countries. Another more geologically motivated six-continent model joins Europe and Asia into Eurasia, but still holds North America and South America to be different because they are on different tectonic plates.  The use of models that are more regional, perhaps, than geological, probably accounts for why it's often people from other European countries who write to me to complain about my use of America. (I had wondered why they had so much invested in it.) Wikipedia clarifies:
North America and South America are treated as separate continents in the seven-continent model. However, they may also be viewed as a single continent known as America. This viewpoint was common in the United States until World War II, and remains prevalent in some Asian six-continent models. This remains the more common vision in Latin American countries, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Greece, where they are taught as a single continent. From the 19th century some people used the term "Americas" to avoid ambiguity with the United States of America.

If the word refers to continent(s), it can't also refer to a country
Most words have more than one meaning. For instance day can mean a 24-hour period or the part of that 24-hour period when the sun is up. We don't insist that people use it in only one way, because it rarely causes us trouble and when there is trouble we have ways around it. Similarly, thinking of other place names, there are two New Yorks, a state and a city. When it matters, we distinguish between them. When it doesn't, we don't. Upstaters like me sometimes get annoyed when people say New York to mean the city and not the state, but we mostly get over it.

(When I travel, and people ask where I'm from, I say New York. They believe city; I mean state.  They don't mess with me; I don't make them listen to a geography lesson. No one suffers.)

So while there's nothing wrong with America or American having more than one meaning, we should acknowledge the fact that it has a dominant meaning, associated with a particular country. (And there are good reasons why that's the dominant meaning. We need to talk about the country more often than we need to talk about the two continents together, at least in English. And also, it's the name of the country--see below.)

Thus, the following uses of America/n are weird in English:

A: I went to America last summer.
B: Oh really? Where?
A: Venezuela.
B: ??
or
Brazil has a population of over 200 million people, almost all of them American.

People from the USA should be called...
This statement is usually concluded with something that no one knows how to pronounce, like USan or USAn or States(i)an or something. More importantly, it's a word or phrase that no one uses, so it'll be hard for anyone to understand your meaning if you start using it to avoid using American. On Twitter, because I need to pack a lot of meaning into a few characters, I do use the abbreviations USer and UKer, which I say in my head as 'you-ESS-er' and 'you-KAY-yer', but I have yet to say them outside my head. (And I sometimes get a little grief for it on Twitter.) I'm more tempted by UKer because of the geographical problems presented by British (see below).


The problem with all this is...
that the name of the country is America to the same extent that the name of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is Luxembourg and the name of the Republic of South Africa is South Africa. That is, official country names are generally the country's name + some description of the political organi{z/s}ation of the country. The description usually (in the English renderings of the name) precedes the country name, so I'll call it a 'prefix'. 

The US and the UK are a bit odd in that the prefixes to the country names are commonly used as names for the countries. So we hardly ever refer to Egypt as the Arab Republic of Egypt and we never refer to it just as the Arab Republic; we call it Egypt. But we do that kind of prefix-only reference to the United States and the United Kingdom. If anything's not fair, I'm going to say it's that. Mexico is also a United States. And United Kingdom is just plain sexist. But we'll muddle through because people understand what we mean when we use those terms (and the UK's proper name is just too much of a mouthful).

(I won't go into the States because I've blogged about that already.)

So I've gone (BrE) off piste in that this is not a US-UK difference. It's not even a bit of American usage that I hear British complaints about. (In fact,  Americans chastise me about it more than Brits do.) I could have just sent you to this Slate post about the same kind of thing. But thank you for letting me get it off my chest. 


[green part added May 2016]
It's just occurred to me that negro is an interesting comparison case. Negro or negro person is now considered offensive in reference to people in English. It is considered, as far as I can tell, as a neutral way to refer to people in some national varieties of Spanish. To quote Wikipedia:

In Spain, Mexico and almost all of Latin-America, negro (lower-cased, as ethnonyms are generally not capitalized in Romance languages) means 'black person'.
In English and in Spanish, then, the situation for negro is different, though the word ultimately comes from the same source. But as an English speaker, I have no right to insist that Spanish speakers stop using this word to refer to people in Spanish. It's just a way of saying something in Spanish, and I need to adjust my English sensibilities accordingly when listening to Spanish. It would be arrogant (and possibly unforgivable) to suggest that "Spanish people are racist for using the word negro because when I hear it it offends me".

If in another language, where America refers to a continent, the meaning of  American{o/a} is more associated with the continent than with a country (or, if at least it is more ambiguous in that situation), then that language will need a more specific way to refer to people from the US in that language. English-speakers will have to learn that America and Americano/a don't mean 'United States' and instead we should say [insert other language's word here]. And speakers of that language would have the right to get annoyed if English speakers forgot that lesson. 

But to say that because it's problematic in Spanish (or Portuguese or French), American cannot mean 'of the United States' in English — that is a problem. Just as we don't share the history that makes negro more offensive in one place than in another, we don't share the history/geography that makes America refer to different things. I'm happy to agree that literal translations of American won't work in Romance languages.  But what I've provided here is an argument about its use in English.

To argue that the status quo in Romance languages should guide the usage in English is to say that people from one place should be able to dictate what people in another place call themselves. A friend from South Dakota visited me the other day and used the word Indian about Native Americans he knew. He quickly explained "That's what they prefer". That, as far as I'm concerned, is the end of the story. If people call themselves something and want you to call them that too, there aren't many good reasons for calling them something else.

(I'd be interested, if anyone knows: do Indians in India ever protest the use of Indian for American peoples? And in that case, I'm using American as an adjective covering the Americas. Because words can have more than one meaning!)

P.S.  I'm sure someone would like to point out American misuse of England, British, etc. I'll just pause first to say: there are an awful lot of misuses of British and English in the UK as well and certainly a lot of misuses from countries other than America too. It's complicated. When these issues come up, I send folks to this video:

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introducing yourself

Here is a favo(u)rite passage of mine from Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette:
Don’'t ever introduce yourself. The “Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama” approach does not go down well in British pubs. Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness. If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible. Sorry, but that'’s how it is. The British quite frankly do not want to know your name, or shake your hand – or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established (like maybe when you marry their daughter). You will have to adopt a more subtle, less demonstrative approach.
In her book Watching the English (which I don't have with me at the moment--so this is from memory), Fox quotes the reaction of an American couple who were clearly upset and puzzled by this British behavio(u)r. They felt that it was some kind of cruel game for the British to withhold that basic information about themselves. The thing to understand here is this: the British sense of personal privacy is very different from the American one. Asking someone's name, even implicitly by offering yours, is a premature violation of that privacy until some goodwill has already been established between you.

I observe this all the time on the playground. The British parents strike up conversations, and may ask about each other's children's names (which they can then use to encourage their children to play together), but they don't introduce themselves. If you've got(ten) along very well, then maybe--but probably not the first time you've met--you might say 'By the way, I'm [your name here]' before you part company. Maybe.

I saw Better Half speak on two occasions with the mother of a little girl who is close to Grover's age. After the first time, he said "I think she might be someone I worked with years ago." Only at the end of the second (long) conversation did they do the "By the way, I'm..." thing, at which point they discovered that they had worked together and both had recogni{z/s}ed each other, but were afraid to approach the topic in case they were wrong. Contrast this to me meeting another American at a party--within five minutes we've established our names, where we're from, who we work for, and several points of common experience--places we've both been and people we've met who the other might have met. And I am an awkward American. I hate small talk. But establishing these similarities is de rigueur for American conversation (recall our previous discussion of compliments). Because I am awkward, and hyper-aware of certain interactional markers of foreignness in British conversations, I am completely tongue-tied on the playground. I know how not to start a conversation in a British context, but I consider the most common acceptable ways to start a conversation (commenting on the weather or the busyness of the playground) too boring/obvious to start with, so I get stuck.*

It was reassuring, then, to see some quantitative research backing up my own impressions and Fox's observations in Klaus Schneider's new (in-press) paper 'Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English' in the Journal of Pragmatics. Schneider compared the openings of small-talk conversations between teens at parties in Ireland, the US, and England. The majority of English teens (56.7%) start with a greeting only (e.g. Hi), while Americans prefer greeting + identifying themselves (60%) and sometimes explicitly asking for the other person's name. The Irish teens prefer greeting + what Schneider calls an 'approach' (73.3%), in which they refer to the context and evaluate it (almost always in a positive way). His example of an approach is Great party, isn't it?**

Looking at the elements of an opening separately, Americans are more likely to introduce themselves than to greet you with a hi or hello.  In the graph below DISC-ID means 'disclose identity'--i.e. introduce yourself.


(The figure is about a subset of the data, so the numbers don't match the more general analysis of the data in my earlier paragraph. The numbers don't add up to 100% because there are other things you might do besides these three--but these are the most frequent.)

While the data is from teens, it feels pretty representative of what adults do.

So, please, go to some parties and experiment with this and report back here. Just don't do your experiments on me. I'll be standing in the corner, pretending to notice something remarkable in my drink, trying to avoid all the pitfalls of small talk.

And in other news: 
  • I've been pathetic about blogging here, haven't I? So I completely didn't deserve to be in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top 25 Language Bloggers this year, and I wasn't. (For the first time. I feel duly punished!) But have a look at the link for the good ones.
  • The voters and the judges were kind to my Twitter account (even though they didn't identify me by my Twitter handle in the voting--it was strange). I made it to #9 there. Here's the full list.
  • But I haven't been completely neglecting my writing-about-AmE/BrE vocation. Since the last blog, I've talked at TedXSussexUniversity on American/British politeness norms and at Horsham Skeptics in the Pub. I'll link to the TedX talk when it's on-line. The SitP talk is reviewed here. But don't read the review if you want to see me give the talk (too many spoilers!). I'm doing it again at the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub in October. A few other things are in the pipeline...


*In a cross-cultural communication course I used to teach, one of the readings was about Finnish culture, and the point that really stuck with me was that Finns are often puzzled (or maybe annoyed) by English speakers' need to state the obvious. Why say Nice weather!, for instance, when everyone can see what the weather's like? It made Finland sound like some kind of anti-small-talk Nirvana that I'd want to live in, but it's also made me super-critical of myself when I interact with Finns. There is no hope for me--I am awkward in every culture.

** Schneider also notes the predictability of the Great party! line:
Great is clearly preferred by speakers of IrE, but speakers of AmE make use of a wider range of lexical items. These include great, good, nice, especially cool and also fun, as, e.g.in Fun party, huh?
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Abbr.

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