hustings and stumping

I follow the Twitterings of the candidates for our House of Commons seat and today each had a tweet that went something like this:
Really enjoyed Older People's Council hustings. Some great questions & interesting answers!
I've heard the word husting(s) at  previous British election times, but this time felt the need to look it up.  Wikipedia tells me:
A husting (called a stump in the United States) originally referred to a physical platform from which representatives presented their views or cast votes before a parliamentary or other election body.
We then have metonymic transfer to a name for the activity that traditionally went on on those types of platform.  There's a nice little explanation of the terms on this University of Texas site.  It starts:
[C]andidates for political office and an entourage of supporters, handlers, and journalists are said to go on the stump, or simply stumping.
It seems like a rather unattractive word to refer to a core activity of political campaigning – traveling from place to place making speeches in front of live audiences.
It goes on to distinguish between this sense of stump and another (orig. AmE) sense of the verb to stump: 'to befuddle' before picking up on hustings:
On the stump or on the hustings?
Sometimes when candidates are on the stump, we say that they are on the hustings. Hustings, according to The Word Detective comes from the Old Norse word husthing, meaning "house assembly."
Centuries ago rulers might convene a husthing, usually composed only of members of the immediate royal household as opposed to a larger popular assembly of constituents, in order to gather advice or issue decrees. The English later adapted the word as husting to refer to the senior court of the City of London, and later narrowed the meaning to refer to the physical platform in that court where the Lord Mayor sat.
Over time this last meaning was generalized to refer to any platform from which political candidates might address their audience, and more commonly today it refers to the campaign trail, which we also know as the stump. Notably, husting usually appears in modern English only in the plural form hustings, and then usually in the phrase on the hustings.
The presence of hustings on this American website indicates that the term is not limited to BrE--but it wasn't something I knew from my Democratic Party days.  A quick corpus search (BNC versus COCA) had hustings occurring three times as often in BrE as in AmE (I was surprised it wasn't more).  The last line of the above quotation indicates an area of difference.  On the hustings accounts for more than half of the occurrences of hustings in the AmE corpus, but less than a third of the occurrences in the BrE corpus.  The singular form husting does not occur in either corpus.  Meanwhile, AmE stump speech, i.e. the speech that a candidate makes repeatedly at different locales, occurs 45 times per 100 million words in the AmE corpus and not at all in the British corpus.

A hustings in BrE, at least, refers to an event where more than one candidate is present to debate and discuss issues with potential voters (as in the Older People's Council event that our candidates went to today). This differs from how the stump has developed--stump speeches are generally made without the presence of the other candidates.  The OED, on the topic of this sense of stump:

 14. Originally U.S.    a. In early use, the stump (sense 2) of a large felled tree used as a stand or platform for a speaker.    b. Hence, ‘a place or an occasion of political oratory’ (Cent. Dict.). to go on the stump, to take the stump: to go about the country making political speeches, whether as a candidate or as the advocate of a cause.
  In the U.S. the word ‘does not necessarily convey a derogatory implication’ (Cent. Dict.). In Britain, though now common, it is still felt to be somewhat undignified.
 And I'm just going to end here without further comment!
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finger/fork buffets

Since I'm on (AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday at the moment, I'm taking the opportunity to go through my blog inbox in order to try to reduce the backlog of requests.  Here's a year-and-a-half old one from Chas:
I was reading an Englishman's blog today and encountered the phrase "a champagne reception and fork buffet supper."

Now I have visited the UK, attended part of high school in Jamaica, have various British friends, and even do some freelance editing for a London-based publisher, for whom I beat the prose of British academics into conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style for the North American market.

But I never was invited to a fork buffet supper. The phrase gives me visions of a long table covered with dozens of glistening forks -- and nothing else.
Part of the reason for choosing this one to respond to now is that I can pretty much get away with just writing what I wrote to Chas.  So, to quote myself:
I've never seen fork buffet in the wild, but there are 24,000 Google hits for it.  It's the companion to the term I have heard a lot, finger buffet--i.e. a buffet of finger foods (51,800 hits). 
The OED can be called on to add:
fork supper (also -buffet, -dinner, -lunch(eon, etc.), a meal served at a buffet, etc., consisting of food suitable for eating with fork alone, making the provision of set places at table unnecessary.
The question that I haven't answered is 'what would this be called in AmE?'  Notice that Chas didn't offer an easy equivalent--I don't know that there is one.  I've come across the term standing buffet, but this can as easily (if not more easily) be finger foods, rather than fork-foods.  For a finger buffet, I'd imagine that an AmE invitation would say  'hors d'oeuvres will be served' or  'finger foods will be served', or some such thing.  I ask people in the US with more recent experience of these things to help out in the comments.

(Though, it must be said, I have very recent experience, since I went to a buffet lunch (with forks) after a funeral today. Unhelpfully for us, it was just called lunch.)
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washing up and doing the dishes (and digressions on showers, baths, kettles, and coffee)

Here's a topic that we've partly done before, but it heads to the top of the to-blog-about list just because most of the heavy lifting has already been done for me.  John Wells (of Phonetic Blog fame) wrote to say:
Not sure if you've written about BrE washing up / doing the washing up = AmE washing/doing the dishes.

Who's going to do the washing up?
There was some washing up on the draining board waiting to be done.


As well as a kitchen, scullery, and larder/pantry, in the house where I grew up we also had a wash-up (room devoted to washing up). We boys had to help my father with the washing up there.

Nowadays of course we use a dishwasher (a term obviously of American origin, and still in competition in BrE with washing-up machine).

You'll have heard of the British couple dismayed to be greeted on arrival at friends' house for dinner with Would you like to wash up before we eat? (= BrE 'wash your hands')

Lastly, have you noticed how in Britain we assume that you don't need to rinse the (BrE) washing-up/(AmE) dishes in clear water, while in America you do so rinse them?
Thanks for all that, John!  By the time I was old enough to help out, my parents had a dishwasher, but I still learned how to wash dishes 'properly' from my grandmother.  She taught me that the right way to do it is to first put the kettle on,* so that after you've set the dishes in the drainer, you can pour boiling water over them in order to kill any lingering germs.  My grandmother did not have OCD.  This is just the way things were done.  I doubt many Americans would do that today, but we would run some clean water over dishes to get the soap off.  When I've seen English people not doing that, I must admit, I've been [more than] a little uneasy.**


And now for your commenting pleasure, the almost entirely non-linguistic footnoted digressions!!

*And when we say put the kettle on in AmE, we almost certainly mean putting it on the (AmE) stove/(BrE) hob.  When BrE speakers say it these days, they usually mean 'switching the kettle on', as almost no home (or office) is without an electric kettle.  It's probably the case that it's our lesser interest in tea that's kept us from having electric kettles--we have automatic coffeemakers instead.  I'm in the US at the moment, and had a moment of reali{s/z}ation about the ubiquity of coffeemakers yesterday.  I was in our local nirvana of a supermarket, looking to buy a little caffeinated instant (I drink coffee so milkified it doesn't really matter).  I was initially surprised to find LESS supermarket choice for this item in the US than in the UK.  I mean, many of the UK supermarkets I use would fit (not at the same time, of course) into the produce section of more than a few of the US supermarkets that I visit.  (Supermarkets are a major tourist destination for Better Half and me.)  Given that for any other non-nation-bound product [with the possible exception of cheese] there seems to be twice to ten times as much selection in an American supermarket as in a UK one, I had expected to be able to find a small jar of caffeinated instant coffee.  (There were some larger jars, but not many.  I saw no fair trade options.  Ended up buying a box of little (AmE) packets/(BrE) sachets, but only one brand offered those.)  And then it dawned on me: nearly everyone has a coffeemaker; almost no one has an electric kettle--of course there's not much market for instant coffee.  In the UK, in any place where people gather there will always be a kettle, ready to serve tea--and almost always a jar of instant coffee as a nod to the non-tea-drinkers.

**Which just reminds me of several encounters I've had with a few older English people who aren't terribly interested in showers, preferring baths.  I recall one in particular who declared that he couldn't see how having the water wash over you would get you really clean.  I replied, in a characteristically brash American manner, that I viewed baths as an opportunity to wallow in one's own filth.  (They're lovely for a sit and a think, but not what I would use to get clean.)  He claimed that the filth would be left in the (BrE) bath/(AmE) tub.  And I countered "No, because the soap with which you remove the filth floats, and so as you raise yourself from the tub [bath], you pass the lower half of your body through a film of soap, dead skin, and dirt, which clings to your skin until your next bath rearranges it." He had no answer to this.  I like to think that he went home and took a shower.  Of course, the relative paucity of decent water pressure in British showers may be at the root of any British-held beliefs that showers are insufficient cleaners.  The combination of poor water pressure and (in some places, like where I live) very hard water does indeed slow down the removal of filth.
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protesting prepositions

For the second time in my life, I was on strike today.  I mean, really on strike as in having my pay docked for it, not like the one-woman strike I held in order to protest the rat infestation in my office at a former place of employ.  That one worked.  The rats relented.  This time, we're seeing some effect of staff and student protests and our counterproposals to the management's plan for over one hundred (BrE) redundancies/(AmE) layoffs, and I hope that will continue and that the strike draws attention to wider problems that, in my estimation, start with the government's classification of higher education as part of Business, Innovation and Skills (formerly Trade and Industry) rather that part of a department of education.  (There was such a department, but this (BrE) government / (AmE) administration turned it into a department for 'children, schools and families' and reclassified universities as part of the business world.) 


Happily, the only pay that I get for noticing AmE/BrE differences is my Google ad income, so I am free to notice them on a strike day.  That £4.50 per month will (N Amer & Irish colloquial, in this position) sure see me through the grim times.  <subliminal>Click! Click! Click! This child needs shoes!</subliminal>

And what did I notice today?  Well, this phrase in the BBC coverage of the strike, for one thing:
Hundreds of staff from the University of Sussex staged a strike in protest at job cuts, as students occupied a lecture theatre for an eighth day.
In protest at?   My first thought: 'Are the (AmE) copy-editors/(BrE) subeditors at the BBC on strike too?'  My second thought: 'What can a quick corpus search tell me about this preposition choice?'  A lot, as it turns out.

I used (as I usually do these days) Mark Davies' wonderful interface for the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and searched for in protest with six prepositions:  at, against, of, over, to, and about.  The last two only occurred at tiny rates in both corpora, so I haven't included them in the table below.  These are the results, expressed as percentages within each dialect:



   BrE        AmE
       at     703
       against     2434
       of<142
       over718

So, there you have it.  In British English, one generally strikes in protest at something but in American, there is no clear preference for a particular preposition (unless I'm not thinking of it?).  Personally, I'd edit my own writing toward(s) in protest againstAs we were just discussing the other day, American English does seem to be more of-ridden than BrE.

But another interesting aspect of this story is that the American figures represent a lot less (or fewer, if you insist) data, in spite of the fact that COCA is four times bigger than BNC.  Taking this into account, BrE uses in protest+PREPOSITION more than seven times more often than AmE does.  So I thought:  'that must mean that AmE doesn't like to use protest as an abstract noun as much as BrE does, and so we tend to use the verb.'  But searching the verb protest shows that AmE doesn't use that more than BrE does either (though the difference is not as stark as for the prepositional phrases I searched--in the BrE corpus it occurs 2427 times per million words, and in AmE it's 1968 per million).  In all uses of the noun BrE uses it more (but only 1.38 times more, not the 7x more of the in protest phrases). 


So, do the British have more to protest?  Or do Americans prefer other ways of talking about protesting?  I think I know the answer as far as higher education is concerned...
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off (of) and out (of)

Andy S wrote to say:
I'm interested in the Americanism off of which sounds very odd to British ears. I'd be interested to know more about it.
Indeed, Americans would often get off of a [much more common in AmE--in BrE it can have a more restricted meaning] couch, whereas British folk would get off the [available in AmE, but I suspect that the frequency varies regionally] sofa.  That's not to say that off of is the only way we put it in AmE, as evidenced by  Paul Simon's admonition to Gus to hop off the bus.  And Americans didn't make it up.  In the OED, one can find the following examples:

a1616 SHAKESPEARE Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1623) II. i. 98 A fall off of a Tree.
1667
A. MARVELL Corr. in Wks. (1875) II. 224 The Lords and we cannot yet get off of the difficultyes risen betwixt us.

 

Nevertheless, it came to be regarded as 'non-standard' in Britain. In AmE (according to Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1991 [via Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd edn]), off of is 'widespread in speech, including that of the educated . . . but is rare in edited writing'.
But, in a weird twist, AmE speakers are more likely to say go out the window/door than BrE speakers, who more typically go out of the window.  According to a corpus study by Maria Estling published in English Today (1999; 15:3.22-7; via John Algeo's British or American English), when going through windows or doors, BrE uses out of twice as often as out and AmE uses out more than six times as much as out of in this context.  But BrE differs a lot in spoken (72% out) versus written (80% out of).  Algeo investigated this further and found that both BrE and AmE prefer out more strongly with door, but Americans 'more strikingly so'.  BrE users are twice as likely to say out with door but AmE speakers are nine times more likely to say out the door.

Algeo goes on to list several more cases in which BrE uses out of and AmE either doesn't, or is less likely to:
  1. Algeo reports that he's found equal numbers of from King's Cross ([BrE] railway station/[AmE] train station) and out of King's Cross, but no cases of out of Grand Central.  I'm not sure if he checked more than just Grand Central though...and whether he knows that Penn Station would be a better test case (because NY Penn Station gets more than four times the traffic of Grand Central, and there are Penn Stations in other cities too).  Checking on the web, I find that trains out of Penn Station gets 901 hits, while trains from Penn Station gets 18,100, backing up Algeo's evidence for a difference.
  2. BrE says out of hours to mean 'outside normal business hours', while AmE would use after hours in most similar contexts.
  3. BrE kicks people out of the team 96% of the time in Algeo's data (versus off the team) AmE always kicks people off the team.
  4. BrE sometimes (28% of the time in A's data--the Cambridge Intertnational Corpus) has things being out of all recognition instead of beyond all recognition.  AmE always uses the latter.
Why would anyone ever use a compound preposition with of if they don't need to?  When I want to give my students an example of a really meaningless word, I use of.  I mean, what does it add to anything?  Well, it adds a preposition, and we need prepositions to glue bits of sentences together and tell us which parts go with which parts.  For instance consider the phrase:
The Chairperson of the Committee of Ministers welcomes the deposit, by the Russian Federation, of its instrument of ratification of Protocol.  [Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers]
 And without the ofs:
The Chairperson the Committee Ministers welcomes the deposit, by the Russian Federation, its instrument ratification Protocol.
The ofs tell us to process the sentence like this:


(I've tried to make the ofs go under the noun phrases they're attaching to.)

So, why do you need the glue of of if you've already got a workable preposition?  Probably (in part) because there's some ambiguity about whether out and off are prepositions.  In many situations, they are adverbial.  You can tell the difference in that prepositions require objects--i.e. noun phrases--to go [usually] after them, but an adverb modifies the verb, rather than gluing a noun to a sentence.  So:

I jumped off  [adverbial; tells something about the direction of your jumping]
   versus
I jumped off the table [preposition; indicates a relationship between the me-jumping and the table]
(For the record, the AmE part of my brain is screaming for an of in the second example.)
If we understand the off to be an adverb, then we'd need a preposition in order to glue the table onto the sentence.   But wait one (AmE) gumdanged minute!  There are other adverb/preposition pairs that don't have an of variant.  What's up with that?

Well, I don't know--I've not researched this, so this is middle-of-the-night rambling, but notice that we don't get *in of or *on of.  (* is linguists' way of marking an impossible grammatical construction.)  The of seems to signify a movement away, a 'from' meaning. (Notice we do get into and onto-- a 'toward' meaning matches on or in--so we do make compound prepositions with them too.)  Why do off and out allow of, while other 'away'-meaning preposition/adverbs, like away, down and up, use from instead? Oh, I don't know...it's past 2 in the morning--stop with the questions already!  The most likely answer is 'because that's the way people have started saying it', but I'm tempted to think it's because the others are further to the adverbial side of the preposition-adverb continuum than off and out are and that they therefore need a stronger prepositional support.  But then again I don't know that I actually believe it, so I'm going to shut up already [final positioning of already is AmE, influenced by Yiddish].  Good night!
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Separated by a Common Twitter: competition results!

Thanks to Twitter-followers who re-tweeted to me their nominations for 'most impenetrable to cross-ponder' tweet.  We have a winner, Transblawg (Margaret Marks) who sent two--one that I declare the winner, and one that I declare a runner-up.  First, the winner (I'm deleting the identities of the original tweeters, since they didn't ask to be here...):

KP v.lucky to wring that lbw decision out of Enamul Haque: that was missing off-stump by a mile! Bangladesh 163-5 and in trouble

Of course,  anything with personal initials/names is going to be hard for anyone to read, but with a little BrE knowledge, one can figure out at least what the roles of KP and Enamul Haque are.  The tweet, for anyone who needs translation, is about cricket, the only sport that Better Half follows, but still one whose scoring system has to be explained to me every single time he tries to engage me in a conversation about the game.  KP is Kevin Pietersen, who was (BrE) bowling (equivalent to pitching in baseball--except that it's done differently) and Haque must be an umpire.  'That lbw decision' refers to a leg-before-wicket call made by the umpire.  In this case, spelling out the initials doesn't help much, does it?  You have to know that the aim of the bowler in cricket is to knock the bails (little pieces of wood) from a wicket (three little poles, called stumps, with the bails on top--image from Wikipedia). The batsman (baseball equivalent = batter) tries to hit the ball, preventing it from getting to the wicket.  But the leg-before-wicket law means that the umpire can decide that the batsman is out because the ball would have hit the wicket, had the batsman's leg (or the pads on it) not been in the way.  The three stumps are called the off stump (which is on the off-side, nearest the bat) the middle stump and the leg stump (on the on-side, the leg side).  So, to translate: Kevin Pietersen is very lucky that EH decided that the ball Pietersen had bowled would have hit the stumps, since, in the tweeter's opinion, it was nowhere near the outermost stump.  The rest is the score, to be read as 'Bangladesh is 163 for 5', which means that they've scored 163 runs and lost 5 wickets (yes, I had to look that up).  In other words, you're only told the number of runs for the team that is batting.  The team that gets more runs wins, so you know from this information how many runs the other team needs to get when it's their turn to bat.  But don't expect me to tell you more than that.  Instead, I'll point you to a site where an American tries to explain cricket to Americans.

I'll ask the winner to send her address and her choice of biscuits/cookies to me directly.  Here's the runner-up that she sent:
blooming knackering. I've got a sales conference in a couple of weeks too. I liked garden leave!! boo hoo
And maybe this should have been the winner, since it's not in the jargon of a sport, but in general BrE--but since it means sending the biscuits/cookies to the same place, perhaps I'll just declare it a (BrE-prominent) draw/(AmE-prominent) tie. A glossary for the tweet:
blooming = is a bowdleri{z/s}ed version of the vulgar BrE modifier bloody--akin in this context to saying (AmE) darned.

knackering = exhausting, tiring (slang). 

garden leave (also gardening leave) is, to quote the OED: "Brit. (euphem.) suspension from work on full pay for the duration of a notice period, typically to prevent an employee from having any further influence on the organization or from acting to benefit a competitor before leaving."
Janibach sent the only American tweet among the entries, which was related to American football--and not as impenetrable for the average British reader as the cricket tweet:
Who do you want the Cleveland Browns to take in the draft. Where are they in line? #NFL
The NFL (National Football League) occasionally comes to the UK to play exhibition games, and some games, including the Superbowl, sometimes make it onto wee-hours television.  That doesn't mean that the average Briton knows much about the sport--but still, this one is fairly decipherable (It was the wrong time of year to get tweets about less transparent things like first downs and Hail Mary passes).  Cleveland Browns are pretty clearly a sports team (since they follow the code of city name + plural common noun found in many team names across the English-speaking world).  The AmE spelling of draft for draught has been populari{z/s}ed for several senses of the word even in BrE, and particularly when referring to American military conscription.  While reference to drafts in the context of selecting players for a team may not be usual in BrE, it's part of a general sense that BrE does have: "The withdrawing, detachment, or selection of certain persons, animals, or things from a larger body for some special duty or purpose; the party so drawn off or selected" (OED).  And while BrE speakers would usually say in or on the queue rather than in line, they can certainly understand it.

This probably was an unfair contest in that respect--since BrE speakers are generally subjected to more AmE than AmE speakers are to BrE, a winning tweet would probably have had to use either fairly low-frequency words or very current slang in order to be more impenetrable than the BrE entries.  Ah well.

I'm tempted to go through all the entries (as there were only six), but having spent most of my Saturday night at this already, I think I'll stop and leave the others as inspiration for future blog posts.  Thanks to all who (re-)tweeted!  Catch me in Brighton, and I'll buy you a cuppa (bring your own biscuit).
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Separated by a Common Twitter competition

I've just announced (in several <140 character parts) a competition over on the Twitter feed.

Here's what I tweeted (with added linkage for you blog-based readers):

-----------------
Competition: RT to me a tweet (not by u) that is (unintentionally) so full of Americanisms or Briticisms that it would flummox a UKer/USer.

The prize: I'll send you a packet of whatever cookies/biscuits you most miss from UK or US.

My entry to competition: RT @Nancy4Brighton...the Speaker has interrupted PMQs to ask MPs to stop 'barracking' - it puts the public off...

Competition deadline: midnight Greenwich time, Friday.

--------------

Obviously, the intended audience for this competition is expatriates who are missing their baked goodies, but if you'd like me to use the post to send you some biscuits/cookies that you could buy at your local shop/store if only you weren't too internet-addicted to get out of your chair, well, I can do that too.

(The plan is to buy biscuits/cookies in one country, carry them to other country and post locally...so while I will try to send you biscuits/cookies, I cannot guarantee that you won't get a package full of ex-biscuits/cookies, aka crumbs.)

I'll post winning entries on the blog this weekend.
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nimrods and other idiots

Tim L wrote (a long time ago) to ask about nimrod:
Have you stumbled across the difference in meanings of the word "nimrod" in American and other Englishes?  It was a surprise to me to learn that it meant something other than dimwit, and a bigger surprise to learn that it meant dimwit only in American English.  The history is mysterious
       http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nimrod
though the Bugs Bunny explanation is widely touted on the 'net.
Nimrod, as you may know, is the name of a character in Genesis--Noah's great-grandson, and based on that it can be used to refer to 'a great hunter'.  But like many Americans, I knew it first as a word for an idiot, or as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, 'A person regarded as silly, foolish, or stupid.'  It's the kind of thing that would make one giggle if one heard it in Sunday School.  I was also unduly amused when I discovered that there's a Biblical personage named Dorcas--because of the name's similarity with the American slang term dork which these days means something very much like nimrod, but has also been used to mean 'penis'.

So, coming from an American perspective, it's surprising and strange to find that in the UK it's best known as a type of military (BrE) aeroplane/(AmE) airplane.  It sounds like having a plane named (AmE) doofus or (BrE) der-brain or (BrE) div or (particularly northern BrE) numpty.  So, speaking of "Nimrod accidents" will probably bring up different pictures in the minds of British or American listeners.
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conformity and date-writing

Here's a guest post from my lovely friend, psychologist Julie Coultas, who's been seen on this blog before in the guise of 'Maverick'.  I hope you enjoy it too!

Vive la différence! As a research psychologist, I welcome the difference between BrE and AmE. Here is one of the reasons why. An American student from the University California at Santa Barbara (SB from now on) came over to work with me last year, as she wanted to extend some conformity research that I had been doing. I run experiments to find out when and how people copy each other. Why people copy each other is another matter! Many years ago one of my experiments manipulated how people wrote the date, and we discovered that people will copy the manner in which other people write the date (e.g. change from 14/5/09 to 14th May 2009). A trivial behavio(u)r you might remark – but it is a strong indicator that when we are aware that our behavio(u)r is different to the majority we often change it to fit in with the ‘group’. In my earlier experiments we found that we could get people to change from the rare behavio(u)r (14th May 2009) to the social norm (14/5/09) more easily. It was almost as if people reali{s/z}e when their behavio(u)r is not the social norm.

After lengthy discussions with SB about how we could set up an experiment to look at how much people conform, we decided to manipulate an essential difference between BrE and AmE – yes, the manner in which we write the date. Americans write the date May 14th 2009 and British write the date 14th May 2009. Now, I don’t want to get into discussion about which is the ‘correct’ way to write the date but it does seem intuitively more simple to put the day before the month as this way it is in order of increasing size of time period. Of course, I am influenced by the BrE social norm! I want to be part of my cultural group.

At the time that we were planning our experimental study, 400 American students had arrived on our British campus for 8 weeks of study. We decided to see whether we could get American students to write the date in the British manner. We manipulated the date on two forms that the students were given when they took part in our experiment. We told them that the study was about architecture and creativity and asked them to build marshmallow and (AmE) toothpick/(BrE) cocktail stick towers in a given amount of time. At the start of the experiment, they signed a consent form that had room for one signature and, importantly for this study, the date. That way we could see how the American students usually wrote the date. Then when they had built their marshmallow towers they had to sign another form in order to be entered for a prize (BrE) draw/(AmE) drawing. This form had nine forged signatures, American email addresses and dates. We manipulated these dates so that a proportion were BrE (14th May 2009) and a proportion were AmE (May 14th 2009). We did not use any numerical dates (14/5/09) as it could become confusing for the participants.

Now the question is – can we get people to change the way that they write the date? In this particular case, can we get people to change their social norm? Well, as in many psychology experiments, there was that additional variable that changed the outcome of the whole experiment! By the time we had finished planning the experiment, the American students had been in the UK for two to three weeks. A large number of students had not been outside the USA before arriving on the British campus and so were adjusting to cultural differences. In one of the classes that these students attended, a register where they wrote their name and the date, illustrated a behavio(u)ral change across the first few weeks. In the first 2 weeks, all the students wrote AmE date, in the third week, 22% were writing BrE and by week 7, 88% were writing BrE. So even without our experimental manipulation, American students were being influenced by the social norm.

Working on this study with SB (an American student) over a period of 8 weeks gave us many opportunities to remark on cultural differences. For instance, we bought (orig. AmE) cookies and drinks as an incentive for these students to take part in the study. I was strictly instructed by SB in the type of cookies and (BrE) crisps/(AmE) chips to buy – they had to be familiar to the students otherwise they would not be interested. We almost had a breakdown in communication when SB saw the (BrE) sell-by date on one of the packs of cookies! If we write the date differently, we also read it differently. We always have to be calculating is it the 7/5 or 5/7? Things like that can make a difference when buying goods or arriving on the right day for a meeting.

Finally, let me describe one finding from our study that is not related to AmE and BrE date signing. In a previous study we found that people were more likely to change from 14th May to 14/5 than from 14/5 to 14th May. You could almost argue that 14/5 is the social norm in the UK. Many people would counter that it depends on the situation in which they are writing the date. Despite these considerations, we can state quite categorically that people do change the way that they write the date dependent on how many other people write it in a certain way. In the study with the American students, SB and I found that they changed from 14/5/09 to 14th May 2009 (from the numerical to the analogical) far more than in my previous study. We call this our ‘stranger in a strange land’ phenomenon. These students were out of their comfort zone and were more likely to copy the majority behavio(u)r to fit in with the group. Or maybe American students are more conformist than British students?
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take-outs and take-aways

I've settled into Twitter by attempting a "Difference of the Day" each day, as well as passing on other (BrE) titbits/(AmE) tidbits of possible dialectal and cross-cultural interest.  There's only so much you can do in 140 characters, so most of the "differences" are over-simplified, as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends are happy to point out.  Yesterday's tweet inspired a fair amount of fine-tuning by readers.  It went:
In hono(u)r of Friday night, the Difference of the Day is AmE take-out (noun) and to-go (adj/adv) vs. BrE take-away.
Let's start with the BrE one.  Take-away is extremely flexible, both grammatically and semantically.  It can be:
A noun for the food that's been taken away:  We had a Chinese take-away.
A noun for a place that only sells prepared food to eat off-site: We went to the Chinese take-away.
An adjective for such food or place: a take-away pizza
A phrasal verb: Is that to eat here (or eat in) or take away?
On the last point: it's not really a full-fledged verb. You never hear anyone say We took out or We took out a pizza (or even worse, We took out a Chinese).  It's used mainly in the infinitive and mainly in the process of making or receiving a food order.  After the fact, you'd say We got a take-away, or some such thing.

A couple of readers pointed out that in Scottish English it would be carry-out (with the same grammatical range) rather than take-away.  I'll still call take-away BrE rather than just English English since (a) it's certainly spread that far, even if it's not the native term; there are businesses that call themselves take-aways in Edinburgh and Glasgow (though probably more that call themselves carry-outs, it's true) and (b) 'non-Scottish' doesn't necessarily mean 'English'--there are other parts of the UK tooOn point (a), there are over a million hits for each of take-away+Edinburgh and carry-out+Edinburgh, and the Glaswegian equivalents--in fact, one of the first hits is www.glasgowtakeaways.co.uk.

Damien Hall wrote to say:

I haven't checked this, but I think I've heard that this is a demonstration of a classic dialectological phenomenon, two varieties with an intermediate transition zone in between: so Southern English take-away, Scots carry-out, and I think some bits of Northern English say take-out.
Damien has remembered correctly.  I found this quotation in "The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations" by Frans Hinskens, Peter Auer, and Paul Kerswill (in their edited collection Dialect Change, Cambridge University Press, 2005):
Whenever dialect mixing leads to the stabilisation of the variants that are typical of the respective ‘pure’ lects along with additional ‘compromise’ variants, one usually speaks of fudging (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 110–118; Britain 2002, 2004). [...] a similar, more recent, example from British English, discussed by Trudgill, concerns central and southern take away, the northern variant carry out, and the intermediate take out, which is used in the southern part of northern England.
Incidentally, if you're getting fish and (BrE) chips, you generally don't need to mention that it's take-away.  As we say in Linguistics, fish and chips are unmarked for taking-away--it's far less usual to have your fish and chips in a restaurant. A (BrE) fish-and-chip shop is perhaps the archetype of British take-away establishments, and they most often don't have seating for eating-in.

On to the American: take-out does not have quite the range that take-away does, since it shares the work with to-go (which we have discussed a little bit already)A friend pointed out that he'd say carry-out for pizza or Italian food.  And you know what?  So would I.   I'm not sure why this is--it doesn't seem to be particularly regional, since my friend is from California, living in Illinois, and I'm from New York state.

The noun take-out has a very New York City feel to me, but that's probably just because I grew up in a part of the state that didn't really have take-out establishments (fast food, yes; Chinese restaurants, no) in my long-ago (1970s/80s) youth.  The fast-food places would ask if you wanted your food for here or to go.  (Indeed, I had to ask that myself during my two stints of McDonald's purgatory-on-Earth.)  The pizza places ask if you want it for carry-out (or also pick-up) or delivery.   For me in my youth, getting a take-out was what people on television did--though getting carry-out pizza was a regular treat for us.

A completely non-linguistic aside: it can be funny to reali{s/z}e how atypical one's everyday foods can be.  For me, pizza is the food of childhood (perhaps it wasn't so in other parts of the US way back then--I'm not sure. The northeast has had plenty of Italian immigration.)   Better Half was introduced to pizza when he was about 13 at Pizzaland, where they served up a half a pizza with a (BrE) jacket potato/(AmE) baked potato and cole slaw.  I still get the giggles whenever he mentions it.  (His sister's mother-in-law made it into her 70s without ever having had pasta.  She was not impressed when Sister-in-Law introduced her to it.)  I also find it funny that some English people say to me that they couldn't eat pizza often.  I reply: but you have sandwiches every day--what's the difference? It's another way of having bread with cheese, meat or veg and condiments.  (It becomes clear in most cases that we're never going to see eye-to-eye on this.  But as a conciliatory point, I really like British pizza--which is more like what one gets in northern Italy. Thin, olive-oily crusts and top-rate toppings.)

On the other hand, a few English people have asked me how curry here compares to Indian food in the US, and I have to explain that I never had Indian food until I moved to South Africa in my mid-20s--and that I have never lived in an American town that had an Indian restaurant (though some of the towns have changed by now--though their Indian places are generally fairly fancy, not the kinds of places you'd get a take-away/take-out curry from).  I still haven't acquired the British native's facility with an Indian menu. I can tell you that I like dupiazas (or dopiazas), that chicken tikka masala is supposedly the national dish of the UK and that kurmas (or kormas) are for (orig. AmE) wimps.  Other than that, I have to read all the fine print on the menus.  Here's a cheat-sheet if, like me, you need one...
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Barack Obama

Some months ago (sorry!) I had more than one request for treatment of the pronunciation of Barack Obama's name.  There was this from American Jonathan Bogart:
I've heard more than one BBC newsreader pronounce the first name of the president of the United States the way I (an American) would refer to a military quartering, approximately "BERReck." This flies in the face of the way American journalists pronounce it, the way Kenyans -- who might be said to have first dibs -- pronounce it (which is not quite the same, as the r is an alveolar flap and both syllables are equally stressed), and the way the man himself pronounces it: roughly "BuhROCK." I was wondering what the reason for this might be; is this how the BBC has decided to pronounce the name, did I happen to hear a random couple of errors, or do different newsreaders get to choose the way they pronounce the names of world leaders?

And then I had message from Damien Hall, a sociolinguist at York University, who said:
Just checked in at SBaCL again, and found a comment on the latest post about the (?former) British habit of pronouncing the new President 'BA-r@ck Obama'. [DH is using the @ to stand for the schwa sound--i.e. an unstressed, reduced vowel--ed.] I have resisted the temptation to launch into a response on it, as I predict that the response could be quite lengthy (tempting though it was, as my (American) wife and I have talked about this difference: my observation is that almost all Brits used to pronounce 'Barack' with initial stress but, once he became more familiar, many/most learned that that wasn't where the stress went; and my theory is that it just fits into BrE's usual greater tendency to nativise foreign things including stress-patterns, cf garage etc).

In response to American Anne T. at this post:
I've just come from listening to NPR (National Public Radio) on which a British reporter, didn't catch his name, was interviewing Pakistani people about what they expect from Barack Obama. BARack Obama, he said, repeatedly. With a hard first A and stress on the first syllable, instead of BaRACK with a soft first (and second) A and stress on the second syllable. Why oh why?
Which just goes to prove that this blog is not a democracy, since the poor, mispronounced man has been in office for over a year now, and I've failed to respond to what has to be the most requested topic in my inbox.  Since then, I've had further correspondence with Damien, who points out this joke at the pronunciation's expense:

Early on, when he was but a candidate for the Democratic nomination (whom people over here seemed to unanimously think would lose to Hillary Clinton, though that's only my impression, as I was in America at the time), the misperception that his name was pronounced 'BA-r@ck' gave rise to a memorable moment from Andy Parsons on Mock The Week. I can't find a video of it, but the line was essentially this:

Parsons: 'BA-r@ck'? That's a bad name for a candidate, isn't it? Imagine the scene: "Ladies and gentlemen, 'BA-r@ck' Obama!" "Whaat? Oh, OK - 'Oy! Obama! You're SHIT!'"
This is only funny if you know the BrE use of barrack as a verb that means mean 'to heckle, to shout down' (particularly with reference to politicians--see the examples here).  (And, yes, you can say shit on the BBC--but only (BrE) after the watershed.)  Damien also thinks we pronounce the surname differently, with BrE speakers more likely to reduce the first syllable /o/ to a schwa, and Americans more likely to retain a fuller [o].
My excuse for leaving this topic for so long is that, as you know, pronunciation is not my strong point.  So, I asked John Wells, author of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, what he made of this.  He reports:
In the current (3rd) edition of LPD I give the BrE pronunciation as ˈbæræk or -ək, the AmE as bəˈrɑːk or bəˈræk. I don't think it's a BBC decision. It's the usual BrE vs AmE treatment of foreign disyllables: cf cliché, café etc.
We've talked about some of these differences in various places before, especially here.  But we've also talked about the feeling that names should be pronounced as the named person pronounces them--or at least as closely as one can with the sounds at one's dialectal disposal.  Since all the sounds here are available to BBC newsreaders, it's hard for me to feel like the usual treatment of foreign disyllables should apply, since names have a lot more allowance for variation from the standard dialectal rules than non-name words do.  So, the difference is explained, but not justified in my book.

Of course, you'll be able to (indeed, I can too) point out lots of examples in which Americans pronounce British names incorrectly.  But they typically do so from a position of ignorance, rather than intention.  Since it'd be hard to miss Americans' pronunciation of their own president's name, it seems less likely that ignorance is to blame here, though it may well be inattention rather than intention.  (And, as someone with a horrible memory for learned pronunciations, I cannot lead the switch-hunt.) 

So, what do you think?  Excusable or not?  To what lengths should one go in order to accommodate the pronunciation of personal names that flout one's dialect's rules?  Do (AmE) newscasters/(BrE) news readers have different responsibilities for this than the rest of us?  Or, by attempting the 'correct' pronunciation, do they leave themselves open to mocking? (I was trying to find the Saturday Night Live clips in which Victoria Jackson tried to authentically pronounce 'Nicaragua', but apparently they are not on the web. Ho-hum.)
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named after/for and miscellaneous verbs

Finally dipping into my inbox to respond to one of the many requests that have filled it.  English reader DBT wrote a while ago to ask:
I have always said that a person or a place is 'named after' someone or something else. Boston Mass is 'named after' Boston in Lincolnshire. Just in the last years or so, particularly in written material, I've suddenly started encountering 'named for' in stead, such as 'Boston Mass is named for Boston in Lincolnshire. This sounds to my ears both odd and counterintuitive. Is it a dialectical difference or an age one, or is it simply a mark  of poor grammar?
It's a dialectal difference.  John Algeo's British or American English reports that in the Cambridge International Corpus BrE texts have 6.5 times as many afters as fors and AmE texts have 1.3 times as many fors as afters.  This goes along with my experience that both named after and named for are fine in AmE, but that named for is not used much in BrE. 

DBT's email continues:
I do not know whether people who say 'named for his father' would also say 'called for his father' meaning 'called after' rather than 'came to the door to collect him'.
I can't speak for all AmE speakers, but I would not say either called after or called for to mean 'called the same thing as'.  I'd use the verb name in this instance, or, if the name is a nickname, then might say called the same thing as or some such circumlocution.  It's also worth noting here that collecting a person has a distinctly BrE ring to it.  An American would more normally pick up someone (if said American taking said someone somewhere) or just come to get someone. Call in senses meaning 'come to, visit' is also less often used in AmE (where it sounds rather old-fashioned to me) than in BrE.  Algeo's book notes call into, as in Call into your local Post Office branch, as BrE.  Meanwhile, BrE doesn't use call as much with reference to telephones.  Americans call their mothers (on the phone), the British ring their mothers.  I'm sure neither do it as often as the mothers would like.

And as long as I've mentioned pick up...  Oh, how hilarious it is when BrE speakers express their amazement at Americans' feat of strength when they have picked up the house before guests arrive.  (That, my dear friends, is an instance of American sarcasm.)  Americans in Britain, learn fast: it's called tidying here.  That verb is not absent from AmE, but it somehow sounds too fussy.  So, we pick up or clean, but we almost never tidy.
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watershed and prime time

This post is inspired by the following quotation from darling, two-year-old daughter Grover:
"Bastard.  (BrE) Mummy said it!"
 Before she (orig. AmE) outs me as a (orig. AmE) potty mouth at her (AmE) daycare/(BrE) crèche (or nursery), I'll have to take the matter into hand and save my sparkling wit (in response to Better Half's all-too-accurate parodies of me) for (BrE) after the watershed.

Because it's late at night (or early in the morning), I'll let Wikipedians do the work for me:

United Kingdom

According to Ofcom, the watershed on standard television in the UK starts at 9:00 p.m., and finishes at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. Programmes that are 15+ are shown during this period. However, some 12+ shows can be shown before 9:00 p.m., such as The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and Doctor Who. On premium film or pay-per-view services requiring a subscription, the watershed starts at 8:00 p.m. However, 12, 15 and 18 rated films can be shown on PIN protected channels (such as Sky Movies) at any time of the day. Viewers are required to enter their PIN to view. There should be a gentle transition to adult material, and 18-rated material is not allowed to be shown before 9:00 p.m.
See also for the UK: The Ofcom Broadcasting Code - Section 1

United States

The term "watershed" is not used in this context in the United States. In the US, the "safe harbor" for "indecent" programming begins at 10:00 p.m. and ends at 6:00 a.m. the next morning (all time zones). However, content that is considered "obscene" (including explicit human sexual intercourse) is never allowed by the FCC rules for broadcast stations. Those content rules only apply to channels broadcast terrestrially and not those only available on cable. Consequently, restricted-access networks (like the premium channels HBO and Showtime and adult channels Playboy TV and Spice) have taken advantage of considerably more leeway in their programming.
The term is an extension of other uses of watershed:  'the ridge or crest line dividing two drainage areas; water parting; divide' (which some dictionaries list as 'Chiefly BrE') and later ' an important point of division or transition between two phases, conditions, etc.' (Late addition, June 2017: Michael M has pointed out that World Wide Words has a good account of the AmE/BrE difference in the watery kind of watershed.)

If I needed an equivalent for after the watershed in AmE, I think I'd say not in prime time, which isn't exactly the same thing.  The watershed is a dividing line between the times when stricter and looser 'decency' codes have to be followed, whereas prime time is the part of the evening in which television networks expect to have the most viewers and therefore where they put their choicest programming (8:00 to 11:00 or 7:00 to 10:00, depending on the time zone).  It's also when they charge the most for advertising time.  In BrE, this is more commonly known as peak time, though since the major broadcaster (the BBC) is (orig. and principally AmE) commercial/(BrE)advert-free, it's less directly about advertising revenue.  While prime time is not the only time when children might be watching, not in prime time is often used to mean 'not appropriate for a general audience'.  This gives a double meaning to the name of Saturday Night Live's original troupe, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

On American (chiefly AmE) network television (i.e. distributing programs to local affiliates; not cable/satellite), the rules are fairly restrictive at all times, so I was surprised when I first moved to the UK and saw things like Something for the Weekend (which was really horrid) or The Sex Inspectors (experts watch couples getting it on and give them pointers on improving!  The website describes it as post watershed), right there on free TV at a time when the equivalent US stations are showing the nighttime news.  (Did the US ever import this format?)  The reason why most of the good American television comes from HBO and Showtime is that those, as pay channels, do not have the same content restrictions as their free broadcast counterparts (and they've decided to use that power for good rather than evil).

At any rate, either Better Half will have to wait until the watershed from now on before he points out my pedantries and hypocrisies, or I'll have to rein in my tongue-in-cheek responses. Or else Grover will be teaching the entire pre-nursery room some choice AmE phrases.    I think I know which one is most likely.
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fancy dress and costumes

In the Weekend magazine in Saturday's Guardian, the following letter to the editor appeared:
Please reword your Q&A for Americans. Clearly, to them, "fancy dress" means "dressing for a fancy party". Why I need to know if Joyce Carol Oates would dress as a bee or a pirate I'm not sure, but I do.
Jane Jones Manchester
She's referring to a feature in each week's magazine, in which a standard set of questions is put to some famous person.  Here's the relevant question, and Joyce Carol Oates' response:
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A beautiful Fortuny gown.
I would have thought that some Americans would understand this question, just because the word costume is in it, and we go to (BrE) fancy dress parties in costume.  In fact, we rarely use the word costume for anything except fanciful disguises, unlike in BrE, where (swimming/bathing) costume is is often used to mean (AmE) swimsuit or bathing suit.   Our disguise-themed parties are thus called (AmE) costume partiesBut perhaps Ms Jones is right...have other American Guardian Q&A victims misunderstood the question?  Here's a survey:

Jared Leto:  Authentic period Genghis Khan body armour or the original Ziggy Stardust outfit.

Hugh Hefner:  My pyjamas.  [note BrE spelling; AmE is pajamas]

John Waters:  I'd never go to a costume party - I have to dress as John Waters every day.

Cybill Shepherd: Belinda The Good Witch.

Camille Paglia:  David Hemmings' Hussars uniform in The Charge Of The Light Brigade.

Eli Roth:  A turn-of-the-19-century millionaire, in a top hat and tails.

David Schwimmer:  Tuxedo, but with a cream jacket.

Mickey Rooney:  Tuxedo with tails, but I really prefer to wear shorts all year long. I'm a California-casual kind of guy.

Juliette Lewis:  A peacock.

Jorja Fox: My birthday suit.

Nathalie Merchant:  Traditional Dutch girl.

Damon Dash:  James Bond, a real cool English dude.

Now, of course, this was just a lame excuse for me to read the celebrity pages instead of doing something useful with my Friday night.  We can see that a couple of them have misunderstood and a few others are ambiguous.  We can suspect that some have spend a lot of time in the UK, or have had the question explained to them.  But, excuse me, Interviewer Person; it seems a bit cruel (or thick) to allow 'tuxedo' as an answer.  More questions are asked than published, so, for instance, we'll never know what Viggo Mortensen would be for Halloween.   So, the only possible reasons to publish that David Schwimmer would wear a tuxedo to a fancy (dress) party are (a) he was unspeakably boring in all his answers--at least this one had some detail, or (b) to make him look boring.  Possibly both.

Besides being an excuse to read about celebrities, this post is an excuse to provide a link to an article that Strawman sent me, on why it is that the British have so many fancy dress parties.  (And when in Rome...)  It starts with this story:
There is a popular urban legend about a British couple in New York who attended a black tie gala dressed as a pair of pumpkins. Turns out they had misinterpreted the host’s instruction to ‘dress fancy,’ as an invitation for fancy dress — something Americans only do once a year on Halloween. Did they burst into tears and run home? Not a chance. Being Brits, they put on brave faces, pulled their orange foam bellies up to the bar, and proceeded to get shamelessly drunk as the Manhattan glitterati swirled around them.
The Canadian author goes on to recount her inverse experience--showing up in a cocktail dress for a costume party--and has some nice observations on the phenomenon.

It's been a while since I've been invited to a fancy dress party...perhaps my friends are getting too old.  (And perhaps that'll spark some party-organi{s/z}ing!)  So tell us:  What is your fancy dress costume of choice?
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gritting, salting and blizzards

[I started this back when it was snowing...then the term started.  Eek.  Thanks to my new Twitter-followers for their recollections on grit and sand.]

A couple of Americans have remarked to me about BrE speakers' use of grit as a verb in snowy contexts like these (from a single article in the local newspaper):
Hospitals across Sussex were inundated with patients over the weekend who had broken limbs after falling on ungritted pavements.  [Ed. note: the weekend broke limbs?]
Dozens of people contacted The Argus to condemn the lack of gritting which has left many elderly people trapped in their homes.  [Ed. note: did they also condemn the lack of a comma on a non-restrictive relative clause?]
A Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman said all the authority's refuse and recycling staff were being diverted to gritting roads and pavements today.
Now, I don't believe that this use of grit is solely BrE, but in the snowy Northeastern US, one talks about salting the roads--which may include some sand--or less frequently of sanding the roads--which usually includes some salt or other de-icing agent.  In addition to sand, ash and cinders are (or at least have been) commonly used.  The "sand" that's used may be more coarse material, like the grit used in the UK.  And while gritters are used in the UK to spread grit, salters and sanders are used in northern north America for the same thing.

I come from a place where we get to talk about lake-effect snow and (orig. AmE) blizzards a lot.
And when we use the term blizzard back home, we don't mean a piddly 6 cm (2.4 inches) of snow like my local UK paper does.  It turns out that the word may be common to AmE and BrE now, but the meaning is not.  From Wikipedia:
In the United States, the National Weather Service defines a blizzard as sustained winds or frequent gusts reaching or exceeding 35 mph (56 km/h) which lead to blowing snow and cause visibilities of ¼ mile (or 400 m) or less, lasting for at least 3 hours. Temperature is not taken into consideration when issuing a blizzard warning, but the nature of these storms is such that cold air is often present when the other criteria are met.[1] Temperatures are generally below 0 °C (32 °F).
According to Environment Canada, a winter storm must have winds of 40 km/h (25 mph) or more, have snow or blowing snow, visibility less than 500 feet (150 m), a wind chill of less than −25 °C (−15 °F), and all of these conditions must last for 3 hours or more before the storm can be properly called a blizzard.

Many European countries, such as the UK, have a lower threshold: the Met Office defines a blizzard as "moderate or heavy snow" combined with a mean wind speed of 30 mph (48 km/h) and visibility below 650 feet (200 m).

Of course, even a little snow in a place like southern England (or the southern US, for that matter) grinds the place to a halt.  I've had three 'snow days' from work so far this year, and we've never had accumulation of more than a few inches.  But not only are snow (AmE) plows/(BrE) ploughs rarer than hen's teeth here, but no one has a (possibly AmE) snow shovel, few have appropriate footwear (attention: (BrE) wellies [AmE: rubber boots] are not snow boots!) and almost no one knows how to drive on icy roads.  So, we can't really blame the victims of these snows for their inability to deal with them--though that didn't stop me from less-than-sympathetically exclaiming in response to the laceration on my friend's face and talk of the bruise on another's (BrE) bum: "You people don't know how to walk on snow!"  I have since spent every outdoor moment convinced that this comment is going to come and almost literally bite me on the (AmE) ass/(BrE) arse, landing me with a broken coccyx or worse.

Final reflection: I can't believe that I just had to invent a 'weather' tag for the blog in response to this post.  I'm in England!  I'm supposed to be talking about the weather at least 74% of the time.  I hope they don't find out and revoke my citizenship.
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sick and ill

I'm pleased to welcome my former student, Solo, for her second guestblogging service here on SbaCL.  Take it away, Solo:


The Oxford Dictionary of English informs me that sick is an adjective meaning “affected by physical or mental illness,” suggesting that illness is the dominant term. Furthermore, to my BrE mind, the generic term when one is suffering from any form of malady is ill, which covers generally feeling unwell right through to serious, long-term affliction.  (The definition of ill incidentally is “suffering from an illness...”.)

I would have said the exception was poorly for the under-fives, but previous comments on this blog suggest most Britons consider poorly an old-fashioned or locali{s/z}ed Yorkshire expression to mean ‘very seriously ill in hospital’. In my personal (Southern) experience however, it’s just a word said to small children with stomach bugs.

The obvious transatlantic synonym is, of course, sick, which receives reasonable employment on this side of the pond too.  I’d argue that ill  is favo(u)red over here, however, it would seem that sick has broader meaning for AmE speakers than for BrE.

Case in point: I recently asked an American (and long-term UK resident) colleague how she was. She did seem a little under the weather. She replied “I’ve been sick.” My response to this was {sympathetic face/noise} “Oh, what was wrong?” To demonstrate the thought process here, I heard sick in an AmE accent and automatically translated to ill. If a fellow Brit had told me they’d been ill, that would probably mean they’d  had some specific, diagnosable malady.  I therefore anticipated greater explication at this stage in the conversation, e.g. “I’ve had a cold/flu/a stomach bug/malaria.” However, she simply reiterated “I’ve been sick.” As though this were explanation in itself. In my idiolect a reiteration like that would be followed with a slightly patroni{s/z}ing "haven’t I?" It therefore transpires that sick was not merely an umbrella term covering all manner of sickness, but also had some specific connotation for the AmE speaker; perhaps something akin to run down? If we say we are run down it means not feeling one’s best due to maybe working too hard, not getting enough sleep/exercise or eating badly, but without having an actual illness.

Sick in the ‘unwell’ sense does of course enjoy widespread popular use in BrE, but, I’d argue, with nowhere near the prevalence with which it is used in AmE. Exceptions would be compound phrases such as off sick (AmE equivalent: taking a sick day) and the related sick pay. Then there are sickness benefits, paid to those unable to work for health reasons. *Illness benefits would grate on British ears. So these are exceptions in which sick is used in BrE, but with very specific applications. Then there’s the very British sickie, which is the act off taking a day off (from) work claiming ill-health when actually either hungover or simply not in the mood for a day’s work. AmE phrases like sick day have become codified in the lexicon of the workplace, so on an application form one would have to state how many sick days one had taken in the last two years, but I wouldn’t use the phrase independently, I’d just say I’d had the day off, or I was off sick.  [Lynneguist’s note: I've been asked how much BrE medical leave I've taken.  Disturbingly for an American, it's legal here for a prospective employer to demand medical info.  I recently read that that may change soon...] The prevalence of AmE expressions in work practice seems to be growing exponentially, but that’s a topic for another post.

Etymologically, my highly academic sources lead me to believe that somewhere around the turn of the last century ill was the common parlance amongst the common people and should they wish to better themselves and their manner of speaking they were encouraged to employ the term sick, as was the preference of the more socially advantaged.  I’m fairly confident this is no longer a class shibboleth, in the fashion of sofa/settee, but I have noticed the BrE use of sick in this context is far more prevalent amongst more senior generations, especially the better to do thereof.

To me, the most obvious meaning is the verb phrase form to be sick (AmE equivalent presumably to get sick). Context aside, this would typically be my first interpretation of the word. I always thought this meaning was very closely linked to the mass noun use of sick, a direct synonym of ‘vomit’. Oxford however tells me the mass noun use is an informal and specifically British application, which appeared sixth in their pecking order of definitions. So do AmE speakers find this use odd or improbable?


For an example the last time I was at Thorpe Park (the UK’s secondary theme park), we were made to wait at the front of the Colossus (BrE) queue/(AmE) line, where we heard the following announcement:
Thorpe Park apologi{s/z}e for the temporary delay. This ride is closed for essential cleaning. There is sick on one of the seats and we have to clean it, or it will be on you. We would like to remind passengers to keep all food and drink inside themselves at all times whilst on the ride.
For this reason I have a lot of trouble hearing/using I’ve been sick to mean I’ve had an illness. I would always process it to mean the action in the recent past and then from context would have to work out what the speaker actually meant. Is this too broad a generali{s/z}ation, BrE speakers?

After those interpretations there is also the implication of depravity, propagated particularly by the gutter press (Ban this sick filth!), which seems to carry equal weight on both sides of the water, and lastly, though by no means leastly, in the sociolect of the kids it is also an expression of approval originating in London, which has graduated to Brighton. For example, That is sick, bruv.  Or Those alloys are well sick, and such words to that effect. I have reason to believe this employment of the word has enjoyed perennial popularity amongst the AmE adolescent populace too, but the ‘unwell’ usage carries far more weight in the US than it does here and the colloquial use is therefore far less likely to affect its salience to such an extent, though whether older or more Northern BrE speakers would find that the current slang use of sick affects their processing is not something I can judge. So with that, I’ll throw open the floor…

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centenary and centennial

In the review I just posted, I used the words sesquicentennial and sesquicentenary, which reminded me of a topic that's been on my list for some time.  It came to me from Ann S:
I'm just back from two weeks in England [...] We were over for WINGS 2009, which stands for Windsor INternational Guide and Scout camp.  The festivities included the kick-off for the centenary of Guiding (I think it's a one-year celebration and that the actual anniversary is next year). 

"Centenary" isn't the word we would use in the US; we would say "centennial".  And we would pronounce the second syllable with a short 'e', while they pronounce it with a long 'e'.
Some good observations from Ann there.  The centennial/centenary divide works as well for multiples thereof, so in Massachusetts, they've had the Darwin 2009 Bicentennial Project and at Down House, Darwin's home in Kent, they've celebrated his bicentenary.

Because the second 'e' in centennial is followed by a double consonant, it's fairly clear that it should be pronounced as a short 'e'--i.e. the second syllable is ten.  But if Americans were to say centenary, they would expect to pronounce it with a ten there too.  In fact, you can hear the American Heritage's pronunciation of it on WordNik.  I'm very bad at explaining pronunciation differences, and I can't explain this one (phonologists...help!).  It's not down to different stress patterns, as both dialects usually stress the second syllable.  I thought at first that it was the same as in plenary, then reali{s/z}ed that Americans generally pronounce it with a short 'e' and British with a long 'e' (American and Australian pronouncers can be found here) but now I've found that there's little agreement about how these are pronounced--see the comments. So, now I'm totally confused...but I've just asked my colleague Herr Doktor Phonologist, and off the top of his head he says:
This, I think, is just randomly assigning one of two possible pronunciations of the letter "e" in a borrowing from Latin; it's orthography-based pronunciation anyway, and I think the letter is ambiguous between a short and a long vowel. [...]  to be a bit more confusing: there is an old (and now mostly unproductive) rule of "trisyllabic laxing": a long stressed vowel becomes short if followed by two short vowels, hence sereene but serenity, sayne but sanity etc. Applying TSL should give you pleenum but plennary, for example, but this "rule" is pretty much only in the lexicon now and has acquired lots of exceptions.
So, BrE speakers who say 'plennary' and 'centeenary' are following the rule for plenary and not for centenary, but AmE speakers who say 'pleenary' and 'centennary' go the other way (though, I have to say, I don't think I've ever said PLEEnary in AmE, no matter what the dictionaries tell me).  And it's probably not surprising that AmE tend not to follow the rule for centenary, since it's a word we're unlikely to encounter and so rely on rules and analogy with centennial (which people of my age know well from our country's bicentennial in the 70s...and lots of other bicentennials of towns and other institutions since then).
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Review: Origins of the Specious

When a publisher sends me (unsolicited) books for review a few months before Christmas, they probably intend my review to be part of their pre-Christmas promotions.  What they haven't counted on is that I'd have no time to look at the book until Christmas break.  And so it goes for Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman's Origins of the specious: Myths and misconceptions of the English language (2009, Random House)O'Conner is the author of the popular Woe is I: The grammarphobe's guide to better English in plain English, among other titles and together they run grammarphobia.com.  The book takes on different kinds of myths about language--particularly the kinds of myths that prescriptivists (often so-called language lovers who have very little patience for language) bandy about.  The first thing to note for this audience is that it is a book based in American English, by American authors.

Now, given the theme of this blog, I wouldn't review just any book about the English language that arrives unannounced on my desk.  But this one gets in because of its first chapter, 'Stiff upper lips: or, Why can't the British be more like us?'  The main myth that this chapter discusses is a major topic of discussion here (in their words, p.4): 'If there's one thing that people agree on, it's that British English is purer than its American offshoot.'  And, of course, they show that
neither English is more proper. In some respects American English is purer than British English. We've preserved some usages and spellings and pronunciations that have changed over time in Britain.  But the reverse is also true. [...] In many cases, it's nearly impossible to tell which branch has history on its side.
They go on to give a number of examples of differences, histories and false beliefs about English as she is spoke on the two sides of the Atlantic.  These include many that will be familiar to long-time readers of this blog, including the contradictory meanings of the verb table, pronunciation of /a/-before-/s/ and post-vocalic /r/, the /h/ in herb, Webster's effects on AmE spelling, gotten, and gone missing.   It's only a 13-page chapter (supplemented by three pages of bibliographic notes at the end of the book), so some of these are just mentioned in passing.  The tone is chatty and accessible, the pace is quick and there's lots of good information.

Further myths about English are dismantled in chapters on stupid prescriptive rules (like 'don't split infinitives'), false etymologies, 'dirty' words, English's relationship with French, 'politically correct' language, the role of errors in language change and such.  The chapters are generally loose collections of examples--that's not a criticism, just a description--and it's perfectly understandable in a book of this type.  So many assorted false beliefs about English, and language in general, exist, and they defy easy categorization into chapter headings.  The themes will be familiar to most people who read language blogs or similar types of books, but most people will find new and interesting examples among the familiar ones.  The scholarship cannot be faulted.  The book is pitched toward a non-scholarly audience and so there is little source citation and no endnote reference numbers in the text, but there are bibliographic notes and acknowledg(e)ment of several linguistic scholars--which account for about 17% of the pages in the book.  (Would I have liked to have seen a suggestion that this blog is a nice source for people interested in the BrE/AmE myths?  Well, yes, but they don't cite many blogs at all, so I can't take it personally.)

Incidentally, I love the title--but so did someone else who published a book about gamers this year.  I guess it was the thing to do in the (AmE-preferred) sesquicentennial/(BrE-preferred) sesquicentenary anniversary of Darwin's On the origin of species.
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Abbr.

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