Separated by a Common Language

Last week I had two emails from fans of the recent British-made television versions of Miss Marple mysteries, which are apparently playing in North America at the moment.  As is often the case with British costume dramas and mysteries (those things that a certain class of American anglophiles like[s]), it is co-produced by British (ITV) and American (WGBH Boston) television companies.  (In a reversal of the stereotype of the original-series-producing television channels in the two countries, the British ITV is a commercial channel, while WGBH is part of the US's Public Broadcasting System.)  WGBH has a long history of Anglophilia; it is the home of Masterpiece Theatre (now just 'Masterpiece') and Mystery! (rebranded as 'Masterpiece Mystery!').  The former was originally introduced by 'Letter from America' broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and the latter by Vincent Price, and they are iconic program(me)s in the States to the extent that Sesame Street created a long-running parody, Monsterpiece Theatre (hosted by Alistair Cookie) and a parody mystery program(me) hosted by Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.  Of course, the only reason I mention this is to have the excuse to post one:



But that has nothing to do with Miss Marple, does it?  Both of my Miss Marple correspondents (American Judy and @mikcooke) have lived in the UK, but watched Miss Marple in North America and were surprised by apparent Americanisms and anachronisms in the script.  Apparently these recent re-tellings of the Miss Marple stories are known for playing fast and loose with the original Agatha Christie texts.  From Wikipedia:

The show has sparked controversy with some viewers for its adaptations of the novels. The first episode, The Body in the Library, changed the identity of one of the killers and introduced lesbianism into the plot; the second episode explored Miss Marple's earlier life; the third episode contained a motive change and the fourth episode cut several characters and added affairs into the story and emphasized a lesbian subplot that was quite discreet in the original novel. The second series also saw some changes. By the Pricking of My Thumbs was originally a Tommy and Tuppence story, while The Sittaford Mystery was also not originally a Miss Marple book and the identity of the killer was changed. The third series has two adaptations that were not originally Miss Marple books: Towards Zero and Ordeal by Innocence. The fourth series continues the trend with Murder is Easy and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?. The fifth series does the same, with The Secret of Chimneys and The Pale Horse.

@mikcooke points out the following:

Happy 4th of July, which, apparently, is a good enough name for a holiday, since EditorMark, over on Twitter, informed us today that:

“Independence Day” is more descriptive, but “Fourth of July” is the name given in the 1938 act that extended pay for the federal holiday.

Here at SbaCL Headquarters, we're more about co-dependence than independence, but in hono(u)r of the holiday, my Twittered Difference of the Day^TM was:

BrE 'the American War of Independence' vs. AmE 'Revolutionary War'.

In more formal contexts, I should add, you're likely to find American Revolution in AmE. 

But then I read this New York Times article (pointed out by Not From Around Here) in which the English historian author writes of the War of American Independence.  Oh no, I thought, I got it wrong.  Or did I?  Google gave me nearly ten times as many War of American Independences (1.3 million) as American War of Independences (144k).  Searching just .uk sites, the difference is still there: 69k American independences and 16k American wars. But it still didn't ring true for me, or, it turns out, at least one of my Twitter followers, so I re-checked it in the British National Corpus, which gives us (among its 100 million words) 23 American War of Independences and 3 War of American Independences.  Now, the BNC texts are from the 1980s and early 1990s, and of course most web text is later than that.  And the web is not a reliable corpus, since it isn't balanced between different types of texts and it includes a great amount of repetition.  But still, one has to wonder whether the adjective-placement tide has changed.

Incidentally, the (Anglo-American) War of 1812 is sometimes known as the Second War of American Independence.  It's one of those things that every American schoolchild will have to learn about, but  you'll be hard-pressed to find an English person who's heard of it.  Why? Well, the Americans won it, so they have the bragging rights, but more importantly, for the English, it was just an annoying thing that was going on in the colonies during (and as a consequence of) the Napoleonic Wars.  It'll be those conflicts that English schoolchildren will encounter (in year 8, according to the National Curriculum).

As an aside, revolutionary is typically pronounced differently in US and UK. In AmE it has six syllables: REvoLUtioNAry.  In BrE, it may drop the 'a' (revolution'ry) as part of a general pattern of reduction of  vowel+ry at the ends of words--thus it has one main stress (-LU-) and one secondary stress (RE-), unlike the two secondaries in AmE.  Also, in BrE 'u' may be pronounced with an on-glide (see this old post for explanation).  Both of those "BrE" pronunciation features are not found throughout BrE.  I'd consider them to be features of RP ('Received Pronunciation'), but I'm sure others (you, perhaps?) can comment better on geographical distribution.

I hope that wherever you are and whatever you're celebrating, you're having a lovely fourth of July.  I usually try to (orig. AmE) cook out to mark the day, but I discovered yesterday that our* (AmE) grill/(BrE) barbecue** has been murdered by scaffolders.  My beloved Weber! And this is how I came to celebrate American independence by eating a Sunday roast dinner complete with Yorkshire pudding and parsnips at a pub (with lime cordial and soda).  As I said, co-dependent, not independent.

*Oh, who am I kidding? It's mine. Vegetarian Better Half could not care less.
** I mark this as BrE because in AmE a barbecue is generally the event (this sense also found in BrE) or the food (as in I miss good barbecue--it is a mass noun, and particularly used in the South). When I say it refers to 'the food' I emphatically do not mean overcooked burgers and sausages, the scourge of British summer entertaining.  What constitutes barbecue varies regionally in the US--in some places it's specifically pork, in others beef.  And it will involve smoking and special sauces.  And it will be tender and tasty.  Where you are when you order some barbecue will in large part determine where on the sweet-to-spicy continuum the barbecue will fall.

Still active on the Twitter feed, but having a hard time re-introducing myself to the world of blogging.  I am starting to think that the internet, with its 140-character limits, 60-second games, and instant 'friend'ship, has robbed me of my attention span. But since I keep writing books (have I mentioned that this is the year [August to August] of three book deadlines?), I must have some attention span left.  It just gets used up on the day job.  (And why do I call it my "day job" when it doesn't seem to let me get any work done till night?)

At any rate, my attention span held out for several tweets on a single topic tonight, and that's just cheating.  That's trying to make Twitter do what the blog does, and doing it a lot worse.  So, in true blogger spirit, I hereby embark on a long exposition on something I know almost nothing about.  I'm back!!


I'm disqualified from writing this one on at least three levels:  

1. I have never seen the (AmE) TV show/(BrE) programme Glee.
2. I have never voluntarily belonged to a choir.  ('Chorus' class in school was my living purgatory.)
3. I have consistently found excuses to leave early when required to attend choir concerts.
4. I hated that Journey song the first time (a)round, and I hate it even more now that it's re-released in a form that is mind-bendingly more over-earnest than the original.  

Oops, that was four.  I got a little carried away there.  I might very well like Glee —several people whose taste I respect are addicted to it— but I'm not a choral music person and I just can't afford a new television addiction at the moment (see paragraph one, parenthetical comment one).  But I assure you: I could never like it enough to get over my horror at the Journey cover.  Never ever.

At any rate, my interest was piqued by this Guardian article about Glee, which includes the line (emphasis added): 

The comedy-musical show charts the story of a group of teenagers in a US high school show choir, or glee club.

Not knowing a lot about the subtypes of choirs, I had to look these things up.  Wikipedia (best that I could do) said this about show choir:

A show choir (originally called 'swing choir') is a group of people who combine choral singing with dance movements, sometimes within the context of a specific idea or story.
Show choir traces its origins as an activity in the United States during the mid-1960s, though cultural historians have been unable to determine the date and location of the first "true" show choir group [...]. Two groups of touring performers, Up with People and The Young Americans, traveled extensively throughout the country in the 1960s, performing what could be called the show choir concept. When students and directors of the day saw these organizations, they would, in turn, start similar groups at their high schools.

So, show choir is original to AmE, but used in BrE now too.  But the definition of show choir didn't particularly sound like the glee clubs that I remember from my school and (AmE) college/(BrE) university days.  In particular, I don't remember them dancing.  So I looked up glee club.  The OED says:

glee-club, a society formed for the practice and performance of glees and part-songs

Wikipedia expands on this a bit:

A glee club is a musical group, historically of male voices but also of female or mixed voices, which traditionally specializes in the singing of short songs—glees—by trios or quartets.

And that's what I remember. The Wikipedia article goes on to say:

Although the term "glee club" is still used in some places, including the American TV series Glee, glee clubs have largely been replaced by the show choir in schools throughout the United States. Show choirs tend to be larger and more complex than the traditional glee club.

What I'm less clear on —and I'm sure you Gleeks out there can help me— is (a) whether it's ever called a show choir on Glee and (b) whether the meaning of glee club shifted pre-Glee to mean something more like a show choir.  (I suspect not--Glee is a really good title for television, so I would think it might be an opportunistic appropriation of the term.)  

The meaning of glee club has certainly shifted now in the UK at least, since schools (see the Guardian article) are leaping on the Glee bandwagon and re-naming their choirs glee clubs (or is that Glee clubs?). What's interesting (to word-nerdy dual citizen me, at least) is that although the Guardian felt the need to explain the term glee club to its UK readership, it is an originally BrE term. Here's Wikipedia again:

The first named Glee Club was founded in Harrow School, in London, England, in 1787.^[1] Glee clubs were very popular in the UK from then until the mid 1850s but by then they were gradually being superseded by choral societies. By the mid-20th century, proper glee clubs were no longer common. However, the term remained (and remains) in use, primarily for choirs found in Japanese and North American colleges and universities, despite the fact that most American glee clubs are choruses in the standard sense and no longer perform glees.

The term didn't entirely die out in the UK, but the only recent pre-Glee uses of it that I can find are figurative uses or plays on the term (referring to the emotion glee, rather than the song type).  For example, the headline of a 2001 Simon Hoggart column, "Two-party disharmony with the Tory glee club", describes this group of Conservative Members of Parliament:

John Redwood rocked gently with happiness. Eric Forth's tie, a modest effort of only six or seven colours, seemed to wink at us as he too rolled about in pleasure. And Ann Widdecombe does a wonderful fake laughter turn. She throws back her head, waves her arms in the air, and opens her mouth as wide as you do at the dentist, in order to imply that she might otherwise implode with the sheer effort of keeping all that hilarity inside.

Now it's back in UK consciousness, but with a different meaning again.

As a cultural side note, I was thinking about the fact that I've known several adults in England and South Africa who belong to non-church choirs.  In the US, I  was never aware of non-church, non-school choirs, with the exception of gay choirs (and I never lived in a city big enough to sport one of those).  I've also been known to opine that clubs are more popular in  England than the US.  (In a small city in Texas, I had to travel 90 miles to get to a Scrabble club. In England, I moved to a not-large city that had two.) And I'm not alone in that--commentators on Englishness like Jeremy Paxman and Kate Fox have noted this tendency, since there seems to be a clash between Englishpeople's "obsession with privacy and [their] 'clubbability" (Fox, Watching the English). Kate Fox has this to say about English club-joining:

If you do not have a dog, you will need to find another kind of passport to social contact. Which brings me neatly to the second type of English approach to leisure [...] — sports, games, pubs, clubs and so on. All of these relate directly to our second main method of dealing with our social dis-ease: the 'ingenious use of props and facilitators' method. (Watching the English)

So, I was wondering whether there seem to be more choirs here because choral music is more popular here (it definitely is in South Africa and Wales) or because there's a greater tendency to join organi{s/z}ed groups. And then it hit me.  It's that non-church bit.  It's not that Americans don't join things.  They do. They join churches (and other religious groups, but mainly churches), and with that comes all sorts of activities, clubs, and committees.  UKers are less likely to  organi{s/z}e their hobbies and social needs around a church, because they're less likely to go to church, and it's generally more socially acceptable not to go to church in the UK.  (This site has church attendance at 44% in US and 27% in UK. According to this site, 53% of Americans consider religion to be very important in their lives, versus 16% of Britons.)  It may be that gay men's choirs became so strong in the US because of a need for joinable singing groups among people who were less likely to turn to the community church to fulfil(l) that need.  The rest of the US population might dip into church to satisfy their need to sing, but in the UK there are plenty of other outlets.  (In fact, my old reflexologist belonged to a non-religious Gospel choir--they just like the style of singing, not the religious message.)

Come to think of it, I do know Americans who belong to non-religious community singing groups, but these are (orig. AmE) barbershop quartets.*  Am I wrong about community choir-joining?  Should barbershop quartets count as choirs, when the things I'm thinking of in the UK have far more singers?  Let me have it in the comments...

*OED notes that barber(-)shop as a name for a haircutting establishment is not originally AmE, but is "chiefly North American" nowadays.  I'm not quite sure whether there's a replacement in the UK--Better Half just talks about going to the barber's and we both marvel all the time that yet another hair-cutting place is taking over yet another place that used to be a nice shop.  Do other people in Brighton get their hair cut every two weeks? Do people travel for miles for a Brighton haircut?  How can the population possibly support this many hair stylists?

Thanks for your patience while I was not-really-blogging for the past month.  During that time, I've been working in five UK cities/towns and two other EU countries (Germany, Malta)--not to mention preparing for all those meetings and (BrE) marking/(AmE-also) grading my brains out end-of-year essays/term papers and exams.  Now I just have lots more student work to read and the page proofs of this book to correct and the collaborative book to finish...and...and...and...and should  I really be blogging now?  (Best not to think too hard about that.)

But how to get back into the blogging groove?  Doing 'Differences of the Day' on Twitter has kept me and the groove on a nodding acquaintance, but which of the multitude of un-blogged-about topics should I start with?  It's inbox roulette time again.  This post's winner is Astro Brat, who wrote to ask:

Is the British version of "token" different than the American one?
I ask because in the last few days I've run across the term used by Brits that sounds more like where my mid-western US dialect would say voucher or perhaps coupon?

One was in a television show and I just assumed it meant the same -
"I hope you like this gift, because honestly it's either this or tokens"

But when I read this later in the week:
"it’s not a book that would have been top of my reading list, but I was in a bookshop and I had some book tokens so you know how it is!"

Where I come from token is a kind of coin used for amusement parks or kid's restaurant sort or things.  It can also be a little small gift, a token present.  Does Britain give out specific-use coins for bookstores?

AB has correctly surmised that in BrE a token is a kind of (AmE) gift certificate/(BrE) gift voucher.  These days, one most often hears token in this meaning for one of two things: National Book Tokens or Theatre Tokens.  These are sold at bookshops/box offices, but usable at almost any (BrE/AmE) bookshop/(AmE) bookstore or (BrE/sometimes AmE) theatre/(AmE) theater, not just the one at which it was purchased.  For shop/store-specific gifts, I more often hear voucher, rather than token in BrE, but the OED has examples (latest from the 1980s) of shop-specific tokens, so there's not (historically, at least) a hard-and-fast meaning difference. 



My two are really Grover's.  They're paper ones with a value of £1 each, given to children in schools and (BrE) nurseries on National Book Day.  I can't tell you how many books I've bought while holding the wallet/purse that holds those book tokens.  I generally think of them about 10 minutes after the purchase, even if I've stepped into the bookshop with the specific goal of spending the tokens.  So, Grover gets books and I contribute £2 more than I'd intended to the recovery of the retail sector.

(I also want to mention Bookstart, a lovely UK institution, which gives children free books (through their local libraries or at health check-ups) at three points in their preschool years.  I've only just missed mentioning them on National Bookstart Day (11 June this year). Bookstart is a charity, funded by the government and book publishers.  Given the slash-and-burn approach of the new (BrE) government/(AmE) administration, I am crossing my fingers for it.  Not to mention for all jobs in higher education. *sigh*)

The notion of a token as a coin is not foreign to BrE.  The OED has this sense-definition (though it includes subway tokens under the same sense as gift token):

 11. a. A stamped piece of metal, often having the general appearance of a coin, issued as a medium of exchange by a private person or company, who engage to take it back at its nominal value, giving goods or legal currency for it.
  From the reign of Queen Elizabeth to 1813, issued by tradesmen, large employers of labour, etc., to remedy the scarcity of small coin, and sometimes in connexion with the truck-shop system. bank-tokens, silver tokens for 5s., 3s., 1s. 6d., were issued by the Bank of England in 1811

You might need metal tokens in the UK for use in amusement parks or cloak-room lockers or such things--I don't know of any public transport systems using them here at present, but I'm happy to be informed otherwise.

Most other uses of token seem to be the same in the two dialects, though a draft addition to the OED marks this sense as US:

[3.] c. A nominal or ‘token’ representative of an under-represented group.

Does this mean that the joke of the South Park character Token's name has gone over some British heads?  (Say it ain't so!)

And on that note, welcome back to my blog.  I've missed you!

I love this blog. I love writing this blog. I wish I were doing it now.  I feel even more guilty about my deadline-imposed neglect of the blog considering this:



and this:





Thank you, my dear readers, for all your support. I am not worthy!


(BrE) Have/(AmE) Take a look at the other blogs on those lists if you'd to find some new languagey diversions.

OK, so I said I wasn't blogging, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to paste this onto my page:



Voting closes on 24 May.  Of course, there are lots of other lovely blogs to vote for too!

The title of this post makes reference to a pet peeve that several (English) readers have wanted me to know about. I'm not going to defend it; I'm just going to use it as I think it means more than 'where I am'.  (Discuss.)

I've not blogged yet this month, and I'm just here to say that I probably won't.  I am so absolutely swamped by things that aren't as fun as blogging but which Must Be Done, and I'm dashing off here and there and everywhere for conferences and meetings.  Expect to see me again, a bit, in June--after the marking lets up a bit and the conferences are out of the way.

In the meantime, I am still tweeting.  I can manage 140 characters on BrE/AmE differences on most days as a distraction from the horror of my early-summer deadlines.

At one point last month, I tweeted:

watching music channel w/ subtitles. Makes me think I shd do a blog post on Estelle's 'American Boy'. Or is it just too embarrassingly late?

I was encouraged to take on this project by an American boy (if he'll put up with me calling him 'boy') called NativeTexanZach, and promised him that I'd dedicate the resulting post to him.  So, feeling a little guilty that I might be disappointing the youth of America, I went back to find out what it was that I'd promised to blog about -- and all I found was the unimpressive tweet that you see before you now.  I found the lyrics of the song, and, you know, there's just not that much to it.  I mean, there are Americanisms, but why did I think that the song cried out for its own blog post?  Was it just the inversion of the usual American-women-think-English-men-are-sexy stereotype?

(Incidentally, if you are an American woman and take the advice of this eHow piece on 'How to date a British man', I hope that you will live up to another American stereotype and sue the site for its utter uselessness.  They seem to have got their idea of British men entirely from Hugh Grant [AmE-preferred] movies/[BrE-preferred] films.  "Expect to be called duckie"?  Reader, I married him, and the only animal name I've been called is (BrE) miserable cow, which, I have been told, is used with affection.)  

So, rather than taking you tediously line-by-line through the song, let's just home in on one word, found in the first line of the chorus: trip.

Take me on a trip, I'd like to go some day.
Take me to New York, I'd love to see LA.
I really want to come kick it with you.
You'll be my American Boy.

I'm not saying that Estelle is saying anything that wouldn't be natural in either dialect--this is just a convenient way to pay my debt to NativeTexanZach while writing about something I've decided I want to write about.  The difference for trip is that Americans use it more often than the British do, and more often than journey.  BrE, on the other hand, uses journey as much as it uses trip.  To illustrate, the British National Corpus has roughly equal numbers of trip and journey (4432 & 4620/100 million words), whereas the Corpus of Contemporary American English has two-and-a-half times as many trips as journeys (8063 & 3131/100mw).

I was drawn to writing about trip because my use of it was commented upon by an Englishperson who will remain anonymous only because I can't remember who he/she/it was.  That person claimed that BrE retains the original sense of a trip being a particularly short journey.  However, the BNC data doesn't immediately bear this out.  Among the BrE examples are trips to the Arctic, the States and the moon (and many more like that).

The more I look at the data, the more it becomes evident that the difference isn't it trip, it's in journey.  Here are some of the BrE journeys where I would say trip in my native AmE:

PAMELA makes another journey round the stage with her bundle. 

We arrived at the French Riviera town of Frejus after an overnight journey on the Motorail.  

All of which makes the Jorvik Viking Centre not just the journey of a lifetime, but the most exciting journey in a thousand years.

There are also five BNC examples of break your journey, but none in the four-times-larger COCA:

Break your journey at Marton for a short walk to the site where Cook was born in 1728 

In AmE one would make a stopover rather than break a journey.

My impression was that Americans are more comfortable than BrE speakers in using trip to refer to just the journey portion of the travels--for example in Have a good trip!  The only problem with that impression is that, again, the corpus data don't support it.  BNC has 20 cases of Have a [adjective] trip and only 15 of Have a [adjective] journey.   But, once again, the data do support the difference being American non-use of journey.  COCA has 96 cases of Have a [adjective] trip, but only 19 of Have a [adjective] journey.  (COCA is four times the size of BNC, so the trip rates aren't very different from the dialect-comparison perspective.)

Of course, if I weren't a native English speaker, I wouldn't have needed to go through all this Googling and corpus-searching, since by this time my teacher would have given me a nice 'common mistakes in English' handout that tells me:

Journey (n) is used more in British English than American English. It means the 'piece' of travel between 2 or more points. The word journey is very rarely used as a verb.

ESL teachers: 1
Lynneguist: 0

The linguistic difference of the day is inspired, as they often are, by a non-linguistic difference.  Better Half returned to our table at a restaurant to complain about the men's room. (For more on what else men's rooms might be called, see this post on toilets.)  The complaint, formed as a rhetorical question, went something like this:

Why is it that the (BrE) cubicles in American (BrE) public toilets never go all the way to the floor or the ceiling and there's always a huge gap that keeps the door from ever fully being closed, meaning that one can never have true privacy?

As is often the case with cross-cultural rhetorical questions, there is a hyperbole-coated grain of truth here.  But first, the vocabulary.  You'll have noticed that I marked BH's cubicles as BrE.  I learned about this at Scrabble Club, when I had cause to mention a little sub-room in the ladies' room that contains a single toilet.  I emerged from said room and informed someone that "There's no paper in the second (AmE) stall", at which point a competitor loudly exclaimed, "What, you were at the theat{re/er} in there?"  And so I defensively asked "What would you call it then?"  Ta-da! I give you cubicle.

This is of course, of course, of course not to say that AmE doesn't have the word cubicle (we use it for, among other things, the partitioned areas in open-plan offices), nor that BrE doesn't have the noun stall.  Each dialect just prefers a different one for the little doored privacy areas within (more BrE than AmE) lavatories.  Stalls, as noted above, is more often used in BrE to refer to an area of theat{re/er} seating (or the people occupying those seats) in front of the orchestra pit (or a similar place in venues without orchestra pits). 

Back to BH's non-linguistic observation--it is more common in the UK than in the US to find fully enclosed sub-rooms for toilets in public conveniences, rather than the airy screened-area-with-a-door version (though these are also found).  And I do think it's more common in the US to have to turn a blind eye because you can see someone within the stall/cubicle through a crack between the door and its frame.  So, the fully-enclosed sub-room version is superior in terms of privacy.  But in favo(u)r of the flimsier version, at least there's better air circulation and you can always tell which ones are occupied.  There's also the opportunity to ask one's neighbo(u)r for a bit of paper if you find yourself in need.  The stranger-asking-for-paper scenario is one I've never experienced in England--and I'm sure that many of you will find this an advantage while others will think it's a worry.

And with this we say 'good-bye' to our (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation in the US, and 'hello again' to less frequent blogging!

Eek!  The Wordnik List of the Day yesterday was titled "Hugonyms" and was explained as "Anything hugging related".  The Facebook announcement of this included several people excited about learning the new-to-them BrE (though not marked as such) word snog.  One went so far as to comment:

I'm gonna go snog my kids.........*snog* (love it!)

Eek!  Eek!  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!  Eeky eekness!

Because it's a BrE slang word, it's not in most of the dictionaries that American-based Wordnik uses.  So, if one clicks on snog in the "Hugonym" list, the only "definition" one gets is from WordNet. But WordNet is not a dictionary--it's a lexical database that is closer to being a thesaurus.  It links words together into "synsets"--i.e. synonym sets.  So the "definition" that we get for snog is essentially a definition for the central word in its synset, kiss: 

touch with the lips or press the lips (against someone's mouth or other body part) as an expression of love, greeting, etc.

But one would not snog a person in greeting.  Well, I wouldn't, and I'm betting most of you wouldn't either.  (Did I mention eek?!)

Snog happened to be fodder for my Valentine's Day Difference of the Day tweet:

Difference of the day: (orig. & chiefly) AmE 'make out' vs. BrE 'snog'. Happy Valentine's Day!

Commenters on that tweet differed on whether making out required activities other than deep, passionate kissing (which, eek, is the meaning of snog).  But compare Urban Dictionary definitions:

make out the act of swapping spit with your significant other... or perhaps just some hottie you met at a party, but anyway, you just sit there sucking at each other's faces for an extended period of time and if you're lucky there might even be a little romming around of the hands if ya get my drift :p

snog  1. verb; to interface passionately with another being, creating a field of physical obsession and focused arousal +centered+ on the lips, mouth and tongue.
2. verb; to play tonsil hockey

Parents:  please do not snog your children.  Or announce that you will do so on the internet.

Lessons of the day:

1. a little knowledge is a dangerous thing
2. WordNet should not be used as a dictionary

 I'm going to go wash my eyeballs now.

Regular reader/commenter John Cowan wrote a few weeks ago to ask:

Would you consider polling your readership for their pronunciation of aberrant?  The OED2 gives only penultimate stress (the OED3 hasn't reached the word yet); m-w.com gives both initial and penultimate stress. My sense is that initial stress is far more common, partly because I've only heard that, and partly because of the frequent misspelling "abberant", which would be regular for initial stress.  But there may be an AmE/BrE factor at work here.

Unlike John, I only really know the penultimate stress version (aBERrant rather than ABerrant).  Just to prove me exceptional (doesn't that sound better than wrong?), my mother has just pronounced it with first-syllable stress.  On other recent occasions, I've heard the ABerrant pronunciation and assumed it to be from someone who's less than familiar with the word.  I know it, and have feelings about it, because  I had to learn for vocabulary quizzes in (AmE) 9th grade.  Last week I went to the funeral of the teacher who made me so judg(e)mental about other people's pronunciations.  Rest in peace, Mrs(.) Biddle!

I was interested to read the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel's take on the matter:

Traditionally aberrant has been pronounced with stress on the second syllable. In recent years, however, a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable has become equally common and may eventually supplant the older pronunciation. This change is owing perhaps to the influence of the words aberration and aberrated, which are stressed on the first syllable. The Usage Panel was divided almost evenly on the subject: 45 percent preferred the older pronunciation and 50 percent preferred the newer one. The remaining 5 percent of the Panelists said they use both pronunciations. 

 So, that's America.  What about the UK?  The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation offers the older pronunciation only--but the fact that the word has made it into the guide probably indicates some insecurity about how it should be pronounced.  John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists both (older first) with no comment.  He's graciously responded to my email on the topic, saying:

Our stress rules for Latin and Greek words give stress on the -err- because of the geminated consonant (i.e. double in Latin and in spelling). Compare "venerate" with single r. So penultimate stress is what we expect, and the only form given in the OED.  However I have heard initial stress occasionally. I have no statistics on how widespread this might be.

So, what do you say (if you say it)?  Please remember to say where you're from when you answer!

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!

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.)

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	70	3
against	24	34
of	<1	42
over	7	18

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 against.  As 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...

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).

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.

From:






Thanks!

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.