with regard(s) to

Jan 26, 2011
I've been teaching in England for 11 years now, and I've come to the point where I cannot tell whether the weird things that (some of) my students write are generational (after all, I've never taught their generational equivalents in the US) or dialectal.  For the past couple of years my pet peeve has been with regards to and in regards to -- I rarely read a student essay, dissertation, or thesis without at least one of these scratching my eyeballs more than once. Aside from the use of three words where one (e.g. concerning) would do, there's that plural regards, which sounds to me like a confusion (or, if you like technical terms, a phrasal blending) of with/in regard to and as regards.*

In fact, I got so frustrated about it in my last batch of marking that I wrote this note on Facebook:

'Regard' has three uses in common idioms.

In 'with/in regard to', it means 'attention' or 'sight'. You would not pluralize those words in this context, so don't pluralize 'regard'.

In 'as regards'. 'regard' is a verb that means 'concerns'. You'd have the 's' on either verb here as they're agreeing with an unspoken 3rd person subject.

In 'give my regards to', 'regards' means 'greetings', and like 'greetings' in this context, it's used in the plural.

Glad I got that out of my system.
(Now, I must say here that language--particularly English--is not necessarily logical. The above explanations were intended as aids for learning and remembering which versions take the plural, and are not expected to be taken as historical facts, as I didn't research those at the time.)

I spent a long time thinking that the plural regards in this context is just the product of young people not reading as much edited text as previous generations of university students. But when I complained about it to someone or other, they did the one thing that can move me to immediate dialectal research. They claimed it was the effect of American television.

Reali{z/s}ing that I could imagine with regards to much better in an English accent than an American one, I started looking around. But the more I looked, the more confusing it got. It's a mystery wrapped in a shibboleth.

At first, I could not find much British usage commentary on it. But it definitely seems to be something that annoys Americans.  For instance, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (cited here) says:
In and with regard to, regarding, and as regards are all Standard, synonymous prepositions, slightly longer and more varied than but meaning much the same as about and concerning: I spoke to him regarding [as regards, in regard to, with regard to] his future. With regards to is Nonstandard and frequently functions as a shibboleth, although it can be Standard and idiomatic in complimentary closes to letters: With [my] regards to your family…. In regards to, however, is both Substandard and Vulgar, although it appears unfortunately often in the spoken language of some people who otherwise use Standard. It never appears in Edited English.
On the other hand, neither The Economist Style Guide (UK) nor Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford UP) have anything to say about. The Guardian Style Guide (which is more relaxed about linguistic change than some of its competitors--see this debate) says:

        regard
with regard to not with regards to (but of course you give your regards to Broadway)
And the OED says that in regards to is 'regional and non-standard' but does not mention with regards to.  So...coverage of these items is patchy, which either means that it's a newish innovation or that it's not annoying everyone else as much as it annoys me. 

On to the British and American numbers. I used Mark Davies' corpus.byu.edu website, as I often do, in order to access the British National Corpus (compiled in the early 1990s) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990s-present). Using these corpora and searching with regard(s) to and in regard(s) to I found the plural 'regards' outnumbering singular in BrE, but not in AmE.


BrEAmE
with regard to:with regards to3:78:1
in regard to:in regards to1:24:1


But it turns out that this data is weird. I have no idea why the plurals are coming out so high in the BNC, but other British data don't give the same result. A possible explanation can be dismissed: maybe the 'with regards to' examples were in the appropriately plural greetings sense, as in 'I send these flowers with (my) regards to you and your mother'. But I checked, and all of the examples have the 'concerning' rather than 'greeting' sense.

John Algeo's book British or American English? reports that in the Cambridge International Corpus, the singular regard is favo(u)red 19.4:1, versus the smaller 4.3:1 ratio in AmE. So, the plural looked like it was BrE in my search, but looks AmE in Algeo's.

So, I tried another old Separated by a Common LanguageTM trick, and searched websites of American and British higher education establishments by searching the phrases on Google specifying .edu or .ac.uk sites only. Here, the picture is somewhere in between the CIC and BNC/COCA stories; both Americans and British prefer the singular, but the British are more likely than Americans to use with regards to rather than with regard to. But at the same time, the British more strongly (than the Americans) prefer the singular for the in phrase:



BrEAmE
with regard to:with regards to10:117:1
in regard to:in regards to4:12:1


The other thing to note here is that the in phrase is not as common in BrE as in AmE. According to Algeo (and the CIC), of the four combinations of in, with, singular and plural, with regard to accounts for 82% of the data in BrE, but only 68% in AmE. My .edu/.ac.uk numbers come out almost exactly the same.

The only explanation for the BNC aberration that I can think of is that most of the examples of these regard(s) to phrases in the BNC are from spoken data.  I can't know how many of the CIC instances were spoken--about 17% of the corpus overall was spoken--but much of that is the BNC spoken material.

My last search was on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), also from Mark Davies' site. This allows one to see results by decade, from the 1810s to the 2000s. I have no equivalent for BrE. But I think I have the answer to my original question: the plurals explode in the 2000s.  This jibes with my subjective experience. Thus, I'm concluding it's more a generational thing than a dialectal one.

All this, and I haven't really given you an AmE/BrE difference: both prefer the singular, and the plural seems to be picking up speed. But that's kind of the point. My initial urge was to point fingers at the British, and the British person I talked to wanted to blame it on the Americans. But it's happening everywhere, and you only really know that if you look in the right places.



* Yes, the professional linguists' line is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. But I'm not just a linguist. I am a university instructor, and one cannot be one of those [at least not on the Arts side of campus] without being a writing instructor some of the time.  I want my students to come out of our degree program(me) writing as if they are well-read, well-spoken and reasonable.  And so, I try.
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Any other business

Jan 25, 2011
I'm posting my first blog post in more than a month tonight. I thank you for coming back to see it! In the meantime, I've been seeing a couple of research projects out the door and starting the new teaching term.  I continue to be very active on Twitter, but I know that not all of you hang out there, so here are a few of the things that I mentioned there that I haven't mentioned here.  One thing that's changed here is that Google AdSense has banned me because its algorithms detected illicit activity. I have no idea what this refers to, but they turned down my appeal and took whatever money they owed me. The good news for you: back to being an ad-free blog. I hope. I still see big blank places where the ads used to be at the ends of posts. I hope they're not advertising to you without my involvement. Here, for your edification, is the story of another soul's interaction with Google NonSense.

On a happier-for-me note, I've taken the SbaCL show out on the road, giving a talk called
The degradation of the English language: who's whose fault is it?
to the Catalyst Club in Brighton. The talk had a secret punchline title (now saved for posterity in the Catalyst Club archive), which I hope blog-readers will appreciate. It was me trying to do linguistics as stand-up comedy, and I think it can be branded a success (anyone who was there is welcome to leave their opinion in the comments). My favo(u)rite post-talk comment was: "I wish I could unlearn everything you've just taught me." I now have an appetite for more, and a multimedia powerpoint that I'd love to subject others to.  So, if you'd like to book such a talk for your club, wedding or bar mitzvah, please use the 'contact Lynneguist' link on the right.  I'm scheduled to give a new talk at Catalyst in September--and you can bet I'll do something linguisticky or cross-cultural, so if you're near Brighton, come along!

In other news, the Translation Advisor website interviewed me in December on American versus British English, and you can read that here, if you like.

And in my day job, I now have this to show off:


So, not always blogging, but busybusy.

Last but not least, I received this tweet earlier this month:


I immediately, which is to say rashly, promised that I would post three blog posts this week (after my last pressing deadline) to make up for my absence. Depending on how I fare during the week, I might count this as one of them, but I'll try to post three real posts instead.

So, hello! How have you been?
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Words of the Year 2010

Dec 21, 2010
Thank you to everyone who nominated words for this year's SbaCL Words of the Year.  I needed them more than ever this year, as I had few ideas or preferences of my own on this matter.  But thanks to my kind readers, we have some winners.


Let's start with the more competitive AmE-to-BrE category.  Here we've had some nice suggestions, and the hono(u)r nearly went to primary in the sense of 'preliminary election'. Reader-in-Ireland mollymooly had suggested this at the end of 2009, noting that the Conservative party had an open primary to choose a candidate for the House of Commons seat for Totnes. Perhaps it should have beaten staycation last year--but it came to my attention a little too late.  But it was ousted as frontrunner in the last day of nominations, when SP nominated a gerund that has both been discussed in the news this year and made its way into UK news.  And that gerund, The 2010 American-to-British Word of the Year is:

shellacking

The word came into the news, of course, when President Obama said that the Democrats had taken a shellacking in the midterm elections. It made enough of an impression in its native US that it came 7th in Merriam-Webster's top 10 words of 2010.  But it required even more looking-up in the UK.  The OED lists it as 'originally and chiefly U.S.', and it also lists the plain verb, shellac (note the lack of k!), as originally and chiefly AmE (while the noun, for the varnish-type substance, is not dialectally marked).  The BBC Magazine ran an article on 'What is a Shellacking?', David Crystal discussed it on Radio 4, Michael Quinion covered it on World Wide Words, and Jenny McCartney in the Telegraph thanked Obama for 'an extremely useful addition to the lexicon'--just to name a few UK commentators on the subject. One does seem to find shellacking in the UK sports press (especially regarding [BrE] football/[AmE] soccer) before Obama brought the word to public attention, but since Obama's statement, it seems as if the frequency of that usage has increased.  For example, in the Guardian, there are seven uses in November and December, but only two in Sept/Oct.  (However, there are five during the World Cup in South Africa and other clumps of them during the year.)  A search for the word in UK political contexts shows up in colloquial contexts such as:

Like, for instance, his [Cameron's] current 'shellacking' (love that word) over a supposed lack of vision and confidence in the recent Guildhall speech. [Skol303 comment on Nick Robinson's blog]

Vince Cable being torn a new one by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight...she got him so rattled he developed a Herbert Lom-like twitch (left eye) halfway though the shellacking by Wark (I kid you not). [samandmai comment on digital spy]

So thank you, SP, for a fantastic nomination!

And on to the BrE-to-AmE winner.  This is always a tougher category--in part, because I live in the UK, but mostly because of the lesser impact that UK news and popular culture makes in the US. The winner is not a particularly 2010 word--instead, it's one that's been making steady progress in AmE over the past decade.  But in hono(u)r of the near-culmination of the Harry Potter film adaptations, the British-to-American Word of the Year is:

ginger


...in particular, the adjectival use to describe hair colo(u)r and, to some extent, the noun use to mean 'a red-haired person'. Twice this year I've heard from US parents (including Mark Allen) who have said that their children use ginger in this more British way because of the influence of the Harry Potter stories, which features the red-headed Weasley family, including Harry's sidekick Ron. (Here's my old post on the topic.)  The much-discussed new Google n-gram tool shows 'ginger hair' steadily increasing in American English books since 1995, though Harry Potter was not released in the States till September 1998.  In British English books, however, there's an increase in the Harry Potter days (after some years of decline), but what looks to be a decrease as we come toward(s) the present. It's hard to say if that's meaningful--and unfortunately I don't have access to any British corpus that takes us up to date.  In the more reliable Corpus of Historical American English, there are 8 uses between 1940 and 1979, none in the 1980s, five in the 1990s and 8 in the 2000s, which seems to show the Harry Potter effect.  It's harder for me to find incursions of the noun ginger in the meaning 'red-head' in AmE, since one must search for word strings, not meanings.  All I can think to do is to note that the Urban Dictionary entry for the noun ginger include some contributions that spell color without a u.  Further evidence is welcome in the comments.


Also welcome in the comments are your thoughts on whether I've done an effective or abominable job in choosing this year's Words of the Year.  But if you don't like them and didn't nominate any, I reserve the right to roll my eyes at you.  Through the computer.  Ouch.
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pantomime

Dec 20, 2010
How I've managed to blog through nearly five Christmas seasons without doing this one, I don't know. But here I am, finally tackling (BrE) panto, as suggested by Strawberry Yoghurt (in 2008!) and @MarianDougan via Twitter last week. 

So, you know, there's this thing called pantomime, right? Marcel Marceau did it. Man trapped in an invisible box and all that. Yes, that meaning of pantomime is found across dialects of English, though it's not what usually comes to mind in the UK. 

But it's probably not what a British person means if they say pantomime this time of year.  Instead, they are referring to (and I'm quoting the Oxford English Dictionary here):

Chiefly Brit. Originally: a traditional theatrical performance, developing out of commedia dell'arte, and comprising a dumbshow, which later developed into a comic dramatization with stock characters of Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Columbine; = harlequinade n. a (now chiefly hist.). Now usually: a theatrical entertainment, mainly for children, which involves music, topical jokes, and slapstick comedy, and is based on a fairy tale or nursery story, usually staged around Christmas; this style of performance as a genre. (Now the usual sense.)

The now-traditional English pantomime developed in the 19th cent. and was originally limited to a short opening scene to the earlier harlequinade in which Harlequin was handed his wand. Its popularity led to its extension into a full dramatized story with the harlequinade first relegated to a short scene at the end and then disappearing altogether. This process was accompanied by the development of a new set of conventional characters, typically including a man in the chief comic female role (see pantomime dame n. at Compounds 2), a woman in the main male role (see principal boy n. at principal adj., n., and adv. Special uses, and an animal played by actors in comic costume (see pantomime horse n. at Compounds 2).Recorded earliest in pantomime entertainment at Compounds 1.


This use of pantomime derives from the original sense of the word (again the OED):

Originally: (Classical Hist.) a theatrical performer popular in the Roman Empire who represented mythological stories through gestures and actions; = pantomimus n. Hence, more generally: an actor, esp. in comedy or burlesque, who expresses meaning by gesture or mime; a player in a dumbshow.

The 'man trapped in invisible box' and the 'fairytale play with cross-dressing' senses of the word are distinguished in BrE by the way they are clipped.  The former, as in AmE, is also called mime, while the latter is a panto.  Pantos are a Christmas tradition. Across the UK, most siz(e)able towns' theat{re/er}s at this time of year are taken up with traditional pantos, such as Cinderella, Aladdin, and Dick Whittington and His Cat.  The panto stories have their own characters above and beyond the traditional tales, for example Buttons in Cinderella and the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. These days, pantos are generally meant for children, but there is a parallel, newer tradition of 'adult panto' full of proper drag queens--this year  Brighton (the 'gay capital of Britain') has Dick Whittington and his Pussy.

Here are a couple of televised examples for the uninitiated.  I've only used television ones because the recording quality is miles ahead of the phone-videos from proper stage shows.
This one is from CBeebies, the television channel for preschoolers, and has a little explanation about pantos at the start.  I think it's a pretty decent example of the genre.
This one is from Paul O'Grady's (orig AmE) talk show/(BrE) chat show, and is a bit more in the 'adult' vein (as much as one can be on daytime television--before the watershed). O'Grady is the performer formerly known as Lily Savage.  It's peopled with a cast of household names in the UK who will be completely unknown in the US (including my university's chancellor) and it's studded with cultural references that will pass unnoticed by a non-UK audience.
The OED entry above gives some of the vocabulary that one needs regarding the traditional roles in a pantomime (particularly the cross-dressing roles of the dame and the principal boy). There is also an unwritten law that any conversation about pantomimes must go something like this, in imitation of some of the traditional audience-participation parts of the panto:

A:  I'm going to a panto.
B: Oh no, you're not!

A: Oh yes, I am!

B: It's behind you!!

Now, it is to my shame that I have never attended a traditional panto, even though there's more than one available to be seen in my area each Christmas time.  (The fact that I spend alternate Christmasses in the US bears some of the blame for this sad situation.)  I have, however, been in two original pantos, staged by my always-up-for-fun colleagues in my former school, COGS (Cognitive and Computing Science).  This was before university reorgani{z/s}ation put Linguistics into the School of English, where their idea of holiday fun is a staff performance of The Waste Land (I kid you not. This was our Christmas party this year. You know, "April is the cruellest month". Just the thing to send you to the bottom of a bottle for the holidays.)  Back in COGS, we did two pantos before we were cruelly torn asunder, with the Blinder as the main creative force, but, being geeks, we had our own ideas about what constituted a "traditional tale".  The first was based on the film A.I. (itself based on the Brian Aldiss story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long").  In that one, I played the love interest, ELIZA, an early chatbot. In the second, Harry Potter and the COGS Phoenix*, I played Gnome Chomsky. I could have had proper career development as a linguistic parodist, had I not been sent to the humanities. I'm only slightly bitter. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Returning to that other clipping, mime, its use differs somewhat in BrE and AmE as well.  I've been very aware of this lately, as Grover (soon-to-be three years old) is (thanks to her dad) completely obsessed with Singin' in the Rain. For those who don't know the story (which is to say, SPOILER ALERT), it takes place just as the first talking pictures are being introduced, and the (AmE-preferred) movie/(BrE-preferred) film studios are faced with the problem that some of their stars have horrible voices. So, in order to save an already-filmed picture, its soundtrack is recast with Debbie Reynolds' character singing and speaking Jean Hagen's character's parts. At the end of the première, the audience calls for a sung encore, so Reynolds stands behind a curtain and sings 'Singin' in the Rain' while Hagen ______.

How do you fill in that blank?  Better Half (and now Grover) always says mimes, while I would say lip-syncs.  And I see that the OED has the definition:

c. trans. To pretend to sing or play an instrument as a recording is being played; esp. to mouth the words of (a song) in time with an accompanying soundtrack. Also intr., with to, along with, etc.

...while none of the US dictionaries I've consulted have that specific sense.  BrE has lip-sync--in fact my sister-in-law belongs to a choir whose name plays on this term, but in everyday use, the verb mime seems to be preferred. The British National Corpus has 11 definite cases of mime='to mouth words' in its first fifty hits for the verb, and two cases of lip-sync* (*=any characters after), whereas the Corpus of Contemporary American English (which, we must note is 4.1 times bigger) has 179 lip-sync*s and only two mime='mouth words' in the first fifty hits.

Before I go... It's your last chance to nominate words for BrE-to-AmE import of the year or AmE-to-BrE import of the year on the SbaCL Words of the Year page.  I'll be announcing my picks in the next day or two.

* Inside joke: COGS Phoenix was the serious attempt by stalwarts of the school to keep the mission of the school going once it had been wiped out.
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stuffing and dressing

Dec 5, 2010
Here's a recipe
Between (US) Thanksgiving and Christmas seems like a good time for addressing the AmE use of the word dressing versus general-English stuffing.  I seem to have three requests for coverage of this. One from a Twitterer who will have to remain anonymous, as I can't find the original tweet (despite spending the entirety of QI XL trying), former-student-now-successful-speech-therapist Jodie, and mostlyharmless in Canada.

Let's start with stuffing because it's simple -- it means pretty much the same thing in BrE and AmE--a mixture of something bready and some flavo(u)rful things, stuffed into and cooked in another food, especially poultry.

Now, dressing is also general English in that it means generally what 'dresses' a food. Here's what the OED has to say:

The seasoning substance used in cooking; stuffing; the sauce, etc., used in preparing a dish, a salad, etc.

So, from this sense we get salad dressing (a general term used in both countries...but the specifics probably deserve their own post. In the meantime, some of it is covered in this old post and especially its comments). But in AmE (and according to mostlyharmless, CanE), dressing can be used specifically to mean 'stuffing'. Many of us have both stuffing and dressing in our vocabularies, which belies the claim that some dialects say one and some the other.  The Corpus of Contemporary American English has nine instances of turkey stuffing and three of turkey dressing, all from national publications.

Some people make a distinction between stuffing and dressing, with stuffing being what is stuffed into the bird (or whatever) and dressing being the same material, but cooked separately.  I've been known to make that distinction myself, but I note that the most famous US for a non-stuffed version of this foodstuff is called Stove Top Stuffing.  And there are plenty of (North American) people who stuff dressing into turkeys--I suspect that the stuffed-stuffing/non-stuffed-dressing distinction has come about because people found themselves with two words for the same thing and had the natural desire to find a distinction. As Alan Cruse once wrote, "natural languages abhor absolute synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum".
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Word of the Year 2010: nominations, please!

Nov 26, 2010
(A lightly edited version of last year's announcement for this year.)

Word of the Year season has begun. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2010, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.
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childish pronouns

Nov 15, 2010
Monica emailed me recently with this query:
Often when I'm reading something from a British person, I'll run into a statement like this: "it made a cute face."  OK, so I'm thinking someone's talking about a cute little puppy or kitten.

WRONG!

Said statement is referring to an infant or child!

This one gets my blood boiling every time, because it seems so dehumanizing.  Is that actually correct English in ANY form, and if it is, in your experience, is there indeed a difference in usage, and, am I the only American to have this reaction?  What about people from the UK?  Do they feel the same way?

Now, I was so confident that I'd already written about this phenomenon that I've spent a very long time searching past posts for it.  But apparently I haven't.

The quick answer is this: referring to a young child as it is far more common in British English than American. But. But but but.  But the practice is dying out.

And Monica, you're not the only American to have this reaction. After Grover was born, an English friend (who's in his early 60s) came to pay his regards.  He knew her sex, but he repeatedly referred to her as it. And each time, I corrected him with a her ('my child is not a thing!') I told this story to other English friends, and they found it a bit surprising that he would use it when he knew the sex of the child (it would have been more excusable to them if he hadn't known), but not very surprising--after all, they figured/reckoned, he's probably not that interested in babies and he's old enough to be old-fashioned. She's nearly three years old now, and I'm still recounting the story, so we can safely conclude that it bothers at least one American.

But it's also starting to bother some British people, as evidenced by this blog entry, where a father recounts doing the it-she correction.  What interested me, though, was one of the commenters who seemed to think it was a (BrE) storm in a teacup/(AmE) tempest in a teapot:
You know, people get SO offended when you refer to a child as "It". Even if it's your own child! I can't tell you how often my boss has yelled at me for saying something as simple as, "Yes, it's fine." Or "No, it didn't go to it's father's this weekend."

Sigh. She...it. Whatever.
 And that commenter appears to be American.  So there's no accounting for tastes.

For a more objective measure, I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus for instances of "{child/baby/infant} has {its/his/her/their}".  The numbers of hits were small enough that I could make sure that in each case the pronoun referred to the aforementioned child or baby. (The search strings containing infant got no hits in either corpus.) Of 22 hits in the American corpus, only one had its.  (Three had the gender-neutral their, and the rest had a gendered pronoun.) In the British corpus (which is a quarter the size of the American one), there were 7 hits, three with its (and zero with their).  So, 18% of the AmE cases used a gender-neutral pronoun, but only one of those (4.5% of the total) was it.  In BrE 43% of the hits were gender-neutral and all of those used it.

You could look at that and say "Well, maybe the American corpus had more instances where the writer/speaker knew the sex of the baby", but I don't think that's true. Instead, some of those gendered pronouns in AmE refer to babies/children whose sex isn't known, or to babies generally.  It's too rude in AmE to call a baby it, frowned-upon to use singular they, so parenting magazines, for instance, just pick he or she. Three of the American four baby has her examples, for instance, were general advice for parents (e.g. Your baby has her own inborn temperament). There were no BNC hits for baby has her or baby has his. 

Here's a more targetted search. I looked for "give the baby its/his/her/their own" on babycenter.com and babycentre.co.uk.On the UK site, I got only one hit, and that was for its. But, interestingly, on the AmE site I got as many its as their (three each). Now, on the internet, it could be that these people using the American site aren't actually American. But in all the contexts in which the its occurred, the baby wasn't born yet; parents-to-be were discussing what they would do about names or sleeping arrangements once their babies were born. And you know what? None of those examples bothered me. This one even began with an it in the question:

Will you be sleeping with the baby when it's born? - October 2010 .

23 Oct 2010... safety for the baby, but also so id doesnt get dependent on sleeping next to you, i think its a good idea to give the baby its own bed.
If you'd like to read more about what others say about all this, searching for the phrases "refer to a baby as it" brings up a number of discussions.  Searching "refer to the baby as it" is very depressing, as many of the hits are about how (not) to talk to bereaved parents.

And on that note, I think I'll go give Grover a kiss on her sleeping head.
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belly and tummy

Oct 30, 2010
I picked up a free copy of the Financial Times's FT Magazine in the airport, and was interested to read this bit in an article about body-part names and communication between doctors and patients.

Technically speaking, the anatomical structure the consultant was looking at was the abdomen, which is schematically divided by doctors into a three-by-three grid. From top right to bottom left the squares are named: right upper quadrant, epigastric, left upper quadrant, right flank, umbilicus, left flank, right iliac fossa, hypogastric, left iliac fossa. The organs are clustered in each square – the liver and the gallbladder reside in RUQ, for example. When a patient has RIF pain, you know to think of appendicitis.

But what doctors in England haven’t quite solved yet is how I should ask you to show me this space. The medical word, “abdomen”, is not used by many people. But “stomach” is factually wrong. (Your stomach – LUQ – is the springy bag in which your food first lands to be churned before it continues on through your intestine; most “stomach ache” is felt nowhere near the real stomach – what most people point to is their umbilicus, underneath which lies the small bowel.) “Belly” is American. “Tummy” is a nursery term, but English doctors use it in parallel with the anatomical terms. You learn to say “poo” for faeces, too. But if questions such as “Have you had your bowels open?” and “Have you passed any stool?” are met with blankness, there is not much alternative.

Belly is American?  That didn't sit right with me, as if a doctor asked me to show her my belly, I'd find it very strange--though I might suspect that the doctor spoke a different dialect from mine. I use tummy (or the anatomically-incorrect stomach).  To me, belly particularly signals a round tummy--hence (orig. AmE) beer belly.  Babies have bellies, Buddha statues have bellies, I have a belly--but let's not go there. One also hears people saying, typically while pinching more than an inch, I'm getting a belly.  In all these uses, it's not the same as tummy or non-technical stomach.  It describes a paunch (which, incidentally, used to just mean 'abdomen', without the negative connotations), but with rounder connotations.

The doctor writing in the magazine is not alone in this assumption that belly is American.  In fact, this amateur (and very defensive about it, while not trying very hard*) BrE/AmE word-lister assumes that tummy is exclusively BrE.

But, while I had my doubts about the BrE/AmE tummy/belly divide, I've often heard tummy-button in the UK (though mostly from antipodean yoga/Pilates instructors), and never in the US. So, I decided to check it out.

First, the history. Belly goes all the way back to Old English, where it originally meant a bag, but from at least as early as the 13th century, it's used to mean a human or animal stomach and from at least the 14th century, it's used for the abdomen.  So, it certainly did not originate in AmE.  Tummy (a baby-talk simplification of stomach), in contrast, is only seen in print from the 19th century.


Next, the usage.  I looked up stomach, belly, and tummy in British and American corpora of writing and speech, and calculated the percentage of the total number of instances of any of those words that was represented by any one of those words. Here are my results:

corpusstomachbellytummy
BNC BrE 70%20%10%
COCA AmE      63%33%4%

From this we can tell (a) belly is used quite a bit in BrE as well as AmE, and tummy is more frequent in BrE than AmE.  I don't think this can just be due to differences in formality across the corpora, since if the AmE corpus had more formal writing in it, we'd expect the stomach percentage to be higher.

Now, within belly in either corpus, many instances do not refer literally to human abdomens.  There are lots of instances of idioms like in the belly of the beast or a fire in one's belly.  There are also lots of belly-dancing.  To see whether the AmE bellies might be more specifically fat tummies, I looked at paunch, to see if AmE didn't need it as much--but that's not the case. In both corpora, paunch occurs between 5 and 6 times per million words.

As for the hypothesis that belly is more 'round', I note that I and my UK friends do say I'm getting/I've got a bit of a tummy, but looking in the corpora, there are a couple of instances of get/getting/got a belly in each corpus but tummy only occurs in that context in the AmE corpus.  So, in BrE, belly is used for the 'rounded abdomen' meaning, just as in AmE, and AmE uses tummy in that context too.

What about bellybutton and tummy-button? OED has the former dated to the 19th century, but the latter only in the mid-20th century.  COCA has zero instances of tummy-button, tummybutton, or tummy button.  BNC has just one.  Belly(-)button seems to be the default colloquialism for 'navel' in either dialect. In a strange turn of orthography, the joined-up bellybutton is by far the most common spelling in the BNC, but two-word belly button is very strongly the favo(u)red spelling in COCA.  This is in contrast to another observation that I've made here, that AmE joins up compound words in writing more readily than BrE does.  In that post, I noted that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary recommends pot belly, while the American Heritage Dictionary likes potbelly.

I'm writing this in the Helsinki airport, so am limited to dialect resources that are on-line--and I'm not finding them to be helpful at the moment. While the evidence does show American English using belly much more than modern British English, I still have the feeling that there is some  regional variation at work here, since it's not a word that I would use for a human abdomen outside the 'paunchy' and 'baby' experiences.  But that's my western New York State perspective.  How would you feel if your doctor asked to look at your belly? (Don't forget to tell us where you're from!)

 

*In discouraging corrections to his list, he says 'life is too short to worry'--about accuracy, presumably.  Life is also too short to spend on writing word lists without caring to do it right, I'd say.
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yuck and yuk

Oct 23, 2010
Reader Martyn wrote to me back in January with the following:
Ricky Gervais's presentation at the Golden Globes caused some discussion at the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/jan/18/ricky-gervais-golden-globes - around the meaning of "yuk", which seemed to be taken by Americans as meaning "laughter" and by Britons as meaning disgust. Wordorigins discussed it here http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/1669/ , again revealing an apparent US/UK split. It would perhaps be interesting to see what your commentators thought …
Indeed, I'm interested to see what you think as well.  But first, I'll subject you to what I think--which is backed up by some dictionaries, so I think they're thoughts worth reporting.  However, we're talking about (a) an interjection and (b) onomatopoeia/slang, and neither of those is really within the realm of truly standardi{s/z}ed language, so we should expect a lot of variation.  (Remember the problem of whoa/woah!)

So, to my American eye, there are two things here that are pronounced the same, but should be spel(led/t) differently.  The interjection of disgust is, to me, yuck, as in: Yuck! Who put Brussels sprouts in the stir fry?!  The slang, onomatopoetic term for laughter is yuk, as in: We had some yuks at the Prime Minister's expense.  (It can also be a verb, but I wouldn't tend to use it that way.) The American Heritage Dictionary allows that the spellings could be reversed, but agrees with me that the default is for the laughter one to be c-less and the interjection to be c-ful.


BrE has the disgust interjection--but often spells it yuk, as illustrated by these two British-authored children's books.  The OED lists the laughter meaning, marking it as chiefly N. Amer., but spells it yuck.  Better Half tells me he knows the meaning from The Beano (British comic book institution*)--I think he's talking about the character Baby Face Finlayson.  Wikipedia says that this character  rode around in a motorised pram [baby carriage], stealing everything that wasn't tied down, whilst shouting 'Yuk Yuk!'"  It's not actually clear to me that that's laughter--can a Beano boy elucidate?

So, even if both uses of yu(c)k are known in both countries, there's still potential for miscommunication because of reverses in spelling.

American has a couple of other yuck/disgust synonyms: ick and ew (often ewwwwww!)  Ick also gives us the adjective icky (just as yuck gives yucky).  Ick(y) and yuck(y) are often interchangeable, but have slightly different connotations.  I'd prefer ick(y) for something that was disgusting in some sweet or sticky way. Or something that gave me the (orig. AmE) heebie-jeebies, whereas yuck(y) is more likely for something that's just plain disgusting, such as poo(p).  Ew is listed by OED as 'originally' AmE, but it's still American enough for a blogging student of mine to remark upon it during a stay in Chicago this summer.  Click on the link to his BrE equivalents...but I must admit not knowing his English leeeeer. Is it something like bleugh?  BrE has ugh, which is usually pronounced just as a vowel but can be pronounced with a back-of-the-mouth fricative.  This won't be unfamiliar to AmE readers, but I think most AmE speakers would think of it as being pronounced 'ugg' and being an expression of exasperation more than disgust.


*Incidentally, The Beano is the home of the British comic book character Dennis the Menace--not to be confused with the much gentler American comic book character Dennis the Menace.  BH & I were just wondering the other day which came first, and it turns out (thanks, Wikipedia) it was the American--by five days!  I think we can put that down to coincidence, then.
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bags, dibs, shotgun

Oct 12, 2010
So, you're 10 years old, playing with your best friend.  Simultaneously you both spot a single gorilla mask abandoned on a park bench. Running toward(s) it, you shout the recogni(s/z)ed word for signal(l)ing a claim on desired objects. What is that word?

Chances are that there are dozens and dozens of ways to answer that question. The thing about childhood rituals is that they are passed among children, who tend to operate very locally--with their siblings, their schoolmates, their neighbo(u)rs.  Words are invented, misheard, re-invented, borrowed and those changes don't travel far, but may be passed down to the children who are just a little younger, who later pass it down to the ones who are just a little younger, and so on.


Which is all to say, in the American idiom: Your mileage may vary when it comes to the playground terminology I'm discussing today.

But with that feat of (AmE) ass-covering out of the way, here's how you might have answered the question.  In AmE, you'd probably shout dibs.  In BrE, at least down here in the South, bagsy would do, though it might just be bags.  (To get a feel for possible dialectal boundaries of this, see this thread at Wordwizard.) To put this in the verbal form, you can bags or bagsy something, but, as you can see from the OED examples, the spelling is hard to pin down:
[1946 B. MARSHALL George Brown's Schooldays xxi. 89 ‘What about you doing the gassing instead of me?’ ‘But I bagsed-I I didn't’, Abinger protested. 1950 B. SUTTON-SMITH Our Street i. 25 [They] would all sit..‘bagzing’. I bagz we go to the zoo.] 1979 I. OPIE Jrnl. 28 Mar. in People in Playground (1993) 129 I'm second, I just baggsied it! 1995 New Musical Express 28 Oct. 28 (caption) Mark Sutherland baggsys a window seat. 1998 C. AHERNE et al. Royle Family Scripts: Ser. 1 (1999) Episode 2. 52 Mam. I think I'll do chicken. Antony. Bagsey me breast.
A verbal form of dibs is also widely reported (I dibsed it!), but I'd be much more likely to say I've got dibs on it or I called dibs on that. 


But when I posted dibs/bagsy as the 'Difference of the Day' on Twitter, some BrE speakers questioned my translation, as they had understood (AmE) shotgun to mean the same as bags(y). But just as happens when words are borrowed from another language, the non-native users of the word have changed the meaning when they've adopted the word.  And they have adopted the word, to some extent.  Here's an example from a Twitter feed I follow:
timeshighered We hereby shotgun the rights to the phrase "I survived Twitocalypse 2010" - this time next year, we'll be millionaires!
In fact, if I had read this tweet without already having had the discussion with BrE speakers about dibs and bagsy, I doubt I would have been able to make sense of it.  What's happened? The BrE speakers have heard Americans say shotgun in a place in a situation in which they would have said bags(y), and didn't reali{z/s}e that there's more meaning to shotgun than just 'I stake a claim on something'.   Shotgun very specifically means: 'I claim the right to sit in the front passenger seat of a vehicle.'

You can see this in another tweet:
 I bet Zombies don't call shotgun on road trips.
An AmE speaker immediately knows which valuable commodity the Zombies are not interested in.  In fact, because the claimed thing is understood, it would be redundant (not to mention ambiguous) to say call shotgun on the front seat. Note also that it's not a verb.  To me, to shotgun something would be like to machine-gun something.  One calls shotgun. And once one gets the seat, one rides shotgun, which originally meant (and still can mean) 'To travel as a (usually armed) guard next to the driver of a vehicle; (in extended use) to act as a protector' (OED).

Calling shotgun could be extended and used metaphorically, as in this Canadian tweet:
Can I call shotgun on the yoga cd pls?
...but this usually is done as a sly reference to the childhood car-seat experience.

Or, at least, that's how it is for an AmE speaker of my generation.  We have a special word for that sweet seat, with its status and its anti-emetic properties, because it was a central part of our lives in childhood.  With the exception of a few urban cent{er/re}s, you'd expect any family to have a car--and more than one child to fight over the best seat in that car.  Americans can also get a (AmE) driver's license/(BrE) driving licence by age 16 in most states (as compared to 18 17 at the earliest [see comments] in the UK). So, gangs of teenagers also need ways to establish pecking orders.  But I have to wonder whether shotgun will go the way of the library card catalog(ue), since riding in a car is a completely different experience for children today than it was for children in my day.  No more cramming ten kids into the back of a (AmE) station wagon/(BrE) estate car; everyone's in car seats now, and the law determines which of those are allowed in the front seat.  While I think that's a good thing safety-wise, I'm getting rather nostalgic thinking about, for example, climbing in and out of the back seat of a moving car or cramming myself down in the foot-well when I felt like it.  So maybe the kids in America have lost or are losing the true meaning of shotgun.  *sob* You in the States can let me know whether this is the case.

By the way, I've left the Twitter window with the 'shotgun' search going. In the last hour, 50 people have used the word shotgun, often prefaced by I wish I had a.  I'll sleep less well tonight.
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the present perfect

Sep 11, 2010
This post title has been hanging around in my drafts since August 2006, when the friend who's been known on this blog as Foundational Friend mentioned some AmE bugbears as potential fodder for the blog.  The offending AmE sentence was:
Didn't you do that yet?
 And she said that in BrE it would have to be
Haven't you done that yet?

There was an echo of this when a native German speaker read a draft copy of a chapter of my new textbook, where my example (illustrating how we understand eat in some contexts to mean 'eat a meal') was:
Did you eat yet?
Now this sentence was basic to my linguistic education, as it was often used by one of my (AmE) professors/(BrE) tutors to illustrate palatali{s/z}ation (d+y becomes 'j' sound) and the extent to which a phrase can be phonetically reduced and still understood:  Jeet yet?  

But my German correspondent informed me quite insistently that my question was ungrammatical in English and should be Have you eaten yet?  I said something along the lines of "Who's the native speaker here?". But, dear reader, I changed the example, lest it put anyone else off.

A blog post on this subject by Jan Freeman spurred me to promise in public (well, on Twitter) that the present perfect would be the subject of my next post--which may help explain why I've been so long between posts.  This one (had) put me off for four years already, after all. It seemed like a lot of work.  Uh-oh, I feel a semantics/grammar lesson coming on...

So, the present perfect.  Present.  Perfect.  We use it to talk about things that (have) happened in the past, but it is itself in the present tense.  It's a past tense you say?  Look again!
I have eaten.
It's the first verb in a string of verbs that carries the tense, and this one, have, is present.  It's not had, it's have.  Of course, we can put had there, and then it would indeed be a past tense.  A past perfect, to be precise: I had eaten.

The perfect is considered to be a combination of tense and aspect.  Tense is grammatical marking of when something happened, aspect is grammatical marking of how that happening relates to time.  The perfect tells us that something is finished, but it does so from the viewpoint of a later time.  One way to visuali{s/z}e this is with a timeline.  Let's start with the past perfect (because it's the easiest one to draw a timeline for):
I had eaten by the time Don arrived:    2:00 Eating  ☚   3:00 Arriving  ☚  4:00 Speaking
In this example, 'I' am speaking at 4:00 about the state I was in at 3:00.  That state relates to an event that happened at 2:00.  In other words, I'm looking back to a time (Don's arrival at 3:00) at which eating was already in my past.

So, the perfect looks back on its event (eating, in this case) from a later vantage point (Don's arrival).  When we use the present tense, the speaking time is the same as the time that we're referring to.  So, in this case, we relate a past event to a present moment.
I have already eaten:    2:00 Eating   ☚  3:00 'already=now' Speaking
Of course, we can also do this with the future, in which case we are looking forward to a time when we'll be looking back at a time when we (from the 'now' perspective) will do something.  (And those are little fingers pointing, in case you can't tell.)
 I will have already eaten when Don arrives:
    2:00 Speaking  ☛☛☛☛☛☛ ☛4:00 Arriving  
                              3:00 Eating  ☚  4:00 Arriving
And you can put it into the progressive (I have been eating) and the passive (I have been fed) and most of the other ways in which you can play around with the form of a verb and the verb string.

So here's the story:  The adverbs already, just, and yet are taken as signals of that 'looking back from now' aspect, and in BrE they have to 'agree', so to speak, with the present perfect.  AmE has stopped caring so much about this 'agreement', which is, after all, a sort of redundant grammatical marking.  So, in AmE, you can by all means say I have eaten lunch already or I have already eaten lunch and it might sound a bit more formal, but you can also say I already ate lunch or I ate lunch already.  (If you'd like to think/comment about adverb placement, come back here.)  In general, though perhaps more in BrE than in AmE, the present perfect is used to signal recency, because it signals relevance to 'now'.  So, in either dialect, on the 10th of September 1976, one could have said Chairman Mao has died, but on 10 September 2010, we need to say Chairman Mao died (on the 9th of September in 1976).

The "death" of the present perfect in AmE has been exaggerated.  The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) reports that the BrE:AmE ratio of present perfect was 4:3 in their corpus study.  In British or American English? John Algeo reports that the perfect forms of have (have had, has had, had had) occur 1.7 times more often in BrE than in AmE.  These re not huge differences, but there's definitely a difference.  And it's been around for a while.  The Jeet yet? example mentioned above was perfectly unremarkable in my 1980s linguistics education.

Virginia Gathercole (1986) looked at Scottish and American adults' use of present perfect in speaking with young children and the acquisition of the present perfect by the children. She concluded that "Scottish adults use the present perfect construction in their speech to children much more frequently than American adults do" and "Scottish children use the present perfect construction in their speech long before their American counterparts."  Parents, of course, inevitably simplify their speech for their children.  In AmE, there's the option to simplify the past tense form to the preterit(e)* (simple past tense: ate, walked, threw) rather than complicating the syntax with the perfect (has eaten, has walked, has thrown), and parents take it.  In BrE (in this case Scottish English), that simplification option doesn't exist, and so the children are faced with the form earlier and rise to its challenge.

The conclusion I'd like to leave you with is this:  There is nothing unAmerican about the present perfect.  We can and do use it in the ways that the British do.  We just aren't restricted to it.  There is something unBritish about using the preterit(e)  with certain temporal adverbs in particular and perhaps also more generally to refer to recent-and-still-relevant events.  The difference between Did you eat yet? and Have you eaten already? is, in AmE, mostly a difference of formality, possibly also of emphasis.  However, if the two forms continue to co-exist, they might very well develop into semantically contrastive forms that signal somewhat different things.

*Preferred spelling in both dialects includes the 'e' on the end, but AmE also allows dropping of the 'e', in line with the pronunciation.  See comments (this is a postscript).
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squidgy podgy pudgy splodgy dodgy

Aug 27, 2010
Looking for something easy to blog about, I was reading through old email requests from back in the days when I was in (the) hospital, waiting for Grover to be born.  Grover's going to be three in December, so there's a little insight into just how untidy that email inbox is and how many unblogged-about topics might be lurking there.

At any rate, then-reader (are you still out there?) Catnap in the US wrote to me about some British recipes she'd been reading, including one for brownies.  She correctly surmised that brownies are not the institution in the UK that they are in the US--but they've become much better known/loved in the decade that I've lived here.  (I've never known a British non-professional-baker person to actually make brownies.  One tends to get 'gourmet' brownies here--and they can be incredible.  Like the raspberry ones made by Prosperity Brownies. Ooh, I'm getting palpitations just thinking about them.)  It's all part of this craze for importing and "fancifying" American baked goods. 

At any rate, the BrE word that Catnap noted in the recipe was squidgey, which the OED and I spell squidgy.  The older sense of this word in OED, from the 19th century, is 'Short and plump; podgy' And here we pause to note that BrE prefers podgy, but AmE uses pudgy almost exclusively.

The second sense of squidgy is the brownie sense:
Moist and pliant; squashy, soggy. Esp. of food.
The definition doesn't sound very appeti{s/z}ing, but squidgy can definitely be a positive trait in a brownie. 

This sense of squidgy is only noted since the 1970s, but squdgy, a word that looks like a typo, has been around and meaning 'soft and moist or yielding' starting with Kipling:
1892 KIPLING Barrack-Room Ballads 51 Elephints apilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek.  1919 W. DEEPING Second Youth xvii. 145 He made haste to shake Joseph Bluett's squdgy hand and escape. 1959 M. STEEN Woman in Back Seat I. v. 97 ‘Don't you like babies?’ Lavinia shook her head... ‘They're so squdgy, and they haven't got any shape!’
Looking for other -dgy adjectives that might differ, I find splodgy. OED defines it as 'Full of splodges; showing coarse splotches of colour.'  In AmE, this would be splotchy (and 'full of splotches').  The OED doesn't mark splotchy as 'chiefly American', but there are no instances in the British National Corpus, as opposed to three instances of splodgy. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, it's 78 instances of splotchy and zero splodgy.

The only other differing -dgy adjective I can think of is dodgy, which the OED has as:  
Brit. colloq. Of poor quality, unreliable; questionable, dubious.
One hears it in contexts like I have a dodgy knee or He's selling some dodgy goods on the internet.

The Lesson of the Post is thus: BrE likes adjectives ending in -dgy more than AmE does!

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then

Aug 15, 2010
Grover (now two-and-a-half) continues on merrily acquiring British English. Her first language, but not her mother('s) tongue.  I was caught off guard the other day when she sounded so exactly like her father, saying That's a pity, when told that it was too late to go to the park.  I'm also keenly aware of her Britishness whenever she urges me to follow her, for she never says C'mon without following it with then.

Sticking a then onto the end of a sentence is very much a spoken British English thing to do.  It is not the use of then about distant time (I had it then, but I haven't got it now) nor the use that's about logical consequences (If 1+3=4, then 3+1 must equal 4 too), which are universal uses of then--though BrE uses the latter twice as much as AmE does (see below). These might also occur at the end of a sentence, but they're not what I'm talking about.   Instead, let's look at some examples from the British National Corpus (BNC).
If you write to them and drop it in that's fine then .
Let's let's get straight what we are talking about then .
So that is it then .
It means something like 'in that case'.  But to use it in that way in AmE (to me at least) communicates an impatience or accusation. 

Come on then and Go on then are things one hears all the time in England, clearly talking about 'the now', rather than 'the then'.  Go on then is used for all sorts of things.  In this one, it means something like 'give it a try, I dare you':
- Yeah. I could scare you, Auntie June.
- Could ya.
- Yeah.
- Go on then
 But in this one it accepts an offer: 
- This tastes lovely! Want a taste?
- Go on then .
 In that case it means something like 'Oh, I know I shouldn't accept your offer, but yes, please'. 

In the spoken part of the BNC, question-final then occurs nearly as much as statement/request-final then (since I'm just searching by punctuation, I can't tell the difference between declarative and imperative sentences).  For example (from BNC):
What pub is that then ?
So What about this then ?
Now, I know some Americans will be reading this and saying "but I say things like that", and I don't doubt it.  It's not that Americans never put then at the end of a sentence--it's that they don't use it in all the same ways that BrE speakers do, and therefore they can misinterpret BrE intentions.  As I said above, when I hear a non-temporal then at the end of a question (or statement), it implies to my American ears an impatience or accusation--or mistrust.  But that's not what (in most cases like the above), a BrE speaker would hear.  And Americans wouldn't tend to use then in completely sympathetic sentences like the following (from the Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky):

- How was your weekend?
- Crap.
- Oh, no, why's that, then?


As for numbers, we can start with Algeo's British or American English (I've deleted his source citations for examples, since they're abbreviated to opacity).
In all positions, then as a linking adverb is nearly twice as frequent in British conversation as in American; on the other hand, so in the same use is half again as frequent in American conversation as in British. A distinctive British use of then is in terminal position: Who's a clever boy then? • Well, there you are then.
For sentence-final (or "terminal") position, I've got the following figures of occurrences per 100 million words by searching BNC and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

   BrE   AmE
then .  5824   3173
then ?  4741   1196
go on then .   142         2
come on then .   105         3
As you can see, it's not that AmE doesn't put then at the end of a sentence or question, it's that it's done a lot more in BrE.  The commonest ground between BrE and AmE is the temporal use like She was happier then, See you then, and What did you do then ('next')?  When we search in a context where the temporal meaning is much less likely (in the last two rows), we see the BrE uses of then outnumbering the AmE ones by very large margins indeed.

What do you think then?


p.s.  I know some of you haven't got(ten) into Twitter, but that's where I'm hanging out between blog posts.  I've added a Twitter feed gadget to the left, where you can see my most recent tweets, which may include the Difference of the Day.
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River X, X River

Aug 2, 2010
We start this post with an email from former (non-linguist) colleague Andy:
I discovered my Railroad Tycoon 3 DVDs today. [...]
This is an American game, so it's not surprising that it uses AmE usage. Even on European maps. In particular, it's really odd seeing "Thames River" or "Severn River" or for that matter (on the France map) "Seine River".

BrE usage is always "River x". Same in French, Italian, I can't for the moment think of the usage in German - though I bet it's a compound.

AmE is "x River". Why the change? The only countercase I can think of is the Gospel songs referring to "That Jordan River" which I suspect are actually AmE originally in any case.

In any case all of these uses sound really wrong to my BrE ear. About the only exception I can think of is "East River", but then the river's not actually called "East", is it?

An AmE countercase is of course the classic Standells track, "Dirty Water", which refers to the "River Charles". But then, it's Boston, so I guess that doesn't count as proper AmE.
Let's start at the beginning, or near enough to it.  Before the late 17th century (according to the OED), the normal way to refer to rivers was the River of X.  Here are some of the OED's examples from around that time:
1548 Hall's Vnion: Henry V f. xxxiii, Borne at Monmouth on the Riuer of Wye.
1565 in R. G. Marsden Sel. Pleas Admiralty (Selden Soc.) II. 55 Honnefleur and Rouen and other ports in the revere of Seine. a1616 SHAKESPEARE Antony & Cleopatra (1623) II. ii. 194 She purst vp his heart vpon the Riuer of Sidnis. 1652 M. NEDHAM tr. J. Selden Of Dominion of Sea 218 Those words concerning the River of Rhine. 1710 J. CHAMBERLAYNE Present State Great Brit. II. I. 323 It's watered with the pleasant River of Clyde.
From the late 17th century, the of started to be dropped, so then we get the River X, as in the River Thames, the River Clyde, the River Cam, etc.  But what else was going on in the 17th century?  Oh yeah, the English coloni{s/z}ation of North America.  So this is about the time when we'd expect to see transatlantic differences starting to develop.  If linguistic changes are happening in England, then they'll mostly stay in England, while the English speakers in America are off on their own linguistic path.

One possible scenario then, would be that BrE would come to have River Thames while AmE would still have the of: the River of Mississippi, say.  But the loss of of had already started by the time most of the colonists would have come over, so perhaps it's not surprising that it got lost in the soon-to-be US too.

It might seem odd that the loss of of would cause the nouns to swap/(BrE alternative spelling)swop places, resulting in X River, but I can think of some reasons why it isn't too odd:
  • First, consider the possessive use of of, as in a friend of my mother('s). Get rid of the of and we have to move my mother before the friend (and add a case marker, 's): my mother's friend.  So, there is an existing relation between grammatical constructions of the forms X Y and Y of X.   
  • Second, English generally puts grammatically simple modifiers before the nouns they modify.  So, unlike French, for instance, we say red chair, not chair red.  Since river is the 'head noun' in the river-name construction, it would seem most natural to put river after its descriptor.
  • A clear exception to the last generali{s/z}ation is what often happens with names of lakes and mount(ain)s: Lake Superior, Lake Titicaca, Lake Geneva; Mount Everest, Mount Rushmore.  But still, there are plenty of geographical features that put the name first: roads, streets, and lanes; seas and oceans; islands, deserts and so forth.
  • Some of what would become the original 13 colonies were first coloni{s/z}ed by Sweden and the Netherlands.  Swedish puts 'river' (älv) after the name.  Dutch (modern Dutch, at least) seems to not have a word for 'river' (rivier) as part of the name at all: it's just de Rhône, de Maas, etc.  I don't know how much linguistic influence these colonial powers might have had (not much, in the case of the Swedes, though they certainly named some things), but they're at least worth mentioning as a counterbalance to Andy's observation that the Romance languages put the 'river' first.
 The Wikipedia article on AmE/BrE differences lists some exceptions to each dialect's rules:
Exceptions in BrE include the Fleet River, which is rarely called the River Fleet by Londoners outside of official documentation, and also where the river name is an adjective (the Yellow River). Exceptions in the US are the River Rouge and the River Raisin, both in Michigan and named by the French. This convention is mixed, however, in some Commonwealth nations, where both arrangements are often seen.
Incidentally, the River Charles that Andy refers to is much more usually called the Charles River.

Another thing that might be considered an exception in BrE is what happens when the name of the river is used as a modifier for another noun.  One sees quite a few Thames Rivers in things like Thames River Authority, Thames River Police, Thames River Valley, and Thames River Cruises. Now, of course, we have the option here (especially in the last two cases) of parsing this so that Thames River is not a constituent phrase.  That is, is it:
[Thames River] Authority        or        Thames [River Authority] ?
I would suspect that most BrE speakers would vote for the latter, though that's not how I'd parse the American equivalents.

One also sees Thames River in BrE when it's plurali{s/z}ed, as in Thames Rivers Restoration Trust, which works to improve the Thames and its tributaries.  In this case, Rivers Thames would not be appropriate, since the tributaries are generally not named Thames, so in this case Thames is descriptive (like East or Yellow), describing the locations of the rivers, rather than just naming them.  Usually when referring to more than one river by name in BrE, the river+name order is maintained with river marked as plural, as in "The Environment Agency runs the rivers Thames, Nene, Great Ouse, Medway, Welland, Glen and Ancholme" (waterways.com).

BrE speakers generally use the American word order when referring to American rivers. One doesn't hear the River Mississippi much (though Julian Barnes uses it in Flaubert's Parrot), and this seems to extend to the rest of the new world--BrE prefers Amazon River (7 British National Corpus hits) over the River Amazon (2 hits), but really prefers just the Amazon (over 300 hits).   For European and African rivers, it's River X all the way.  So Germany has the river Main in BrE, but the Main river in AmE--and it's the latter that the local tourist board goes for.  Whether that's because the Germans have more affinity for AmE/American tourists or whether it's because that ordering is more natural to German I'm not sure--the German version of the website refers to it only as Der Main.  German speakers?

I've had a quick look for rivers in the US and UK that have the same name, but haven't succeeded in finding any--but we can see what happened when the English River Avon went to Canada and Australia. According to Wikipedia, the New World versions are Avon Rivers.
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    deductible and excess

    Jul 28, 2010
    Feeling a bit guilty that I haven't blogged in more than a week, but then I'm also feeling guilty that I haven't finished all the things that I need to finish.  So, here's a quick one, largely in other people's words, starting with an email from an American colleague in another department at Sussex.  The difference is in insurance terminology.  Let's say you were (BrE/AmE) burgled/(AmE) burglarized and the insurance company agreed to cover your losses.  Of course, they never cover the full amount that you claim for; there will be, say $100 or £50 (or some such number) that is not paid, as per the insurance contract.  In BrE that's the excess, whereas in AmE it's the deductible.  My colleague writes:
    It kind of comes down to how you think about it. In American English, you start with the total, e.g., £200. Then, you deduct the deductible (e.g., £50). So, you are left with the amount you can claim (£150). In contrast, in British English, you start with nothing* then, there is the excess (£50) and anything in excess of that amount you can claim (£150) towards the total (£200).
    Her footnoted comment is that the differences in perspective are not terribly surprising, given the stereotype of Americans as positive-thinking and the British as, well, not.  I'd explain excess slightly differently: you start with a claim for £200. The insurance company gives you £150, so your claim exceeds (is in excess of) the settlement by £50.  I'm not sure that this is any less 'positive' in its perspective than deductible is.

    On another insurance note, in BrE, you're more likely to see some insurance products or companies with assurance in their names, rather than insurance.  One particularly sees it in the context life assurance (vs AmE life insurance)--but this is rarer and rarer.  On the  differentiation of assurance and insurance, the OED says:
    Assurance is the earlier term, used alike of marine and life insurance before the end of 16th c. Its general application is retained in the titles and policies of some long-established companies (e.g. the London Assurance Corporation). Insurance (in 17th c. also ENSURANCE) occurs first in reference to fire (1635 in INSURE v. 4), but soon became coextensive with assurance, the two terms being synonymous in Magens 1755 (see ASSURANCE 5). Assurance would probably have dropped out of use (as it has almost done in U.S), but that Babbage in 1826 (see quot.) proposed to restrict insurance to risks to property, and assurance to life insurance. This has been followed so far that assurance is now rarely used of marine, fire, or accident insurance, and is retained in Great Britain in the nomenclature and use of the majority of life insurance companies. But in general popular use, insurance is the prevalent term. Mr. T. B. Sprague, followed by others, considers assurance, assure, assurer, etc., the proper words for the action of the company or persons undertaking the risk, insurance, insure, insurer, etc., for that of the person paying the premium. This would be in some respects a useful distinction, if it could be carried out; but it would leave the members of mutual societies at once assurers and insurers.
    That, happily, is about the extent of my experience with insurance-related terminology. If you know of any more, feel free to relate your examples in the comments.
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    Abbr.

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