Words of the Year 2008

Any organi{s/z}ation with any tangential relation words seems to make Word of the Year pronouncements these days (or these years, at least). I believe there is a correlation between how early the pronouncements are made and whether the organi{s/z}ation is trying to sell you something. The American Dialect Society wait(s) until January (when they have their annual meeting). And that is as it should be--one needs some perspective on the year in order to evaluate its words. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, are keen to get their press releases out in time to serve as subliminal reminders that dictionaries make great holiday gifts.

I have nothing to sell you, but I'm going to give you the SbaCL words of the year a little early this year--just to make sure that I get them out at all while a horrible deadline, not to mention a trip to the States and winter holidays and birthdays come (chiefly AmE) careening (=careering) toward(s) me. Words of the Year will be my airbag. (That metaphor is the evidence, if you need it, that my brain is not handling the pressure well.)

So, without further ado (wait, is that a drumroll I hear?), the SbaCL British-English- to-American-English Word of the Year is:

vet (verb, transitive)

meaning:
3. To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness. (OED)

as in:
It raises the singular question of when and how well the Senator's campaign vetted the woman he named to be his running mate. (commenter on NewsTrust, 2 September 2008)
"Wait, wait!" you say. "How can you count that as BrE to AmE? It was right here in my AmE dictionary all along!" Oh, it was, but wasn't it interesting for those of us who live in the UK to see the big deal that was made of this word in the American blogosphere and press--like this article on Slate and this one by the Word Detective. In fact, it was number 2 on Merriam-Webster's top ten words of the year and has provoked a backlash from people who became tired of and even hate the word. Thus, it qualifies as a WotY in that it 'came into its own' in AmE this year.

The Slate article tells us that:
Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s [...] Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945 but only in the context of a quote from "The Anatomy of Courage," a newly published study on the psychological effects of war by the Briton Lord Moran: "A young subaltern with 'dark eyes under long lashes, a pink and white complexion' was sent to Moran for 'vetting.' " The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959 (in an article on picking a new symphony director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic), pops up once in the 1960s, and then several times in the 1980s.
But the word continues to be put in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas of the "scare quote" variety (for instance here and here), indicating that the verb is still considered a bit "foreign". (I'm not claiming here that the writers knew that vet is BrE, just that they don't feel that the word is at-home in their dialect.)

So, congratulations vet! And president-elect Obama!

Onwards and overwards to the SbaCL American-English-to-British-English Word of the Year. It's:
meh

That was rather anticlimatic, wasn't it? Let me try to spruce it up.

Ta-da! It's meh!

Maybe I should stop trying so hard. Meh is an interjection expressing indifference. While there was some debate among readers as to whether it qualifies as AmE-to-BrE, since it's most at home in a cyberspace that doesn't respect dialectal isoglosses, there's a widespread perception that it was populari{s/z}ed by that very American institution, The Simpsons. It's not the kind of word that British grandmothers are going about using (or American grandmothers, for that matter), but it made a splash recently when the Collins dictionary people announced that it would be included in their next edition, and their PR people ensured that the newspapers took up the story. I've since noticed my students using it, particularly on Facebook--one suspects that all the press attention has spread meh's popularity--or at least has made me more sensitive to it.

So, hurrah for meh and meh to hurrah!

Thanks to all who took the time to nominate a word. (Unlike last year, I've actually selected a nominated word. I'm softening up to you people.) Happy Word of the Year, and happy holidays!
Read more

the dreaded lurgi

I have the lurgi. Better Half has the lurgi. Grover is recovering from the lurgi.

Lurgi, the lurgi or the dreaded lurgi (also sometimes spelt lurgy) rhymes with Fergie and is a lovely informal BrE word with comedic (and possibly dialectal) origins that can now refer to an annoying (but not serious) illness that hangs around and makes one feel miserable. World Wide Words does a lovely job of recounting its history. Wiktionary has more on its meanings. In addition to meaning 'flu-like symptoms' it has a playground use that is somewhat equivalent to AmE cooties, which you can learn more about here or in the following video:


But that's all from me now, 'cause I've got the lurgi.
Read more

Down('s) syndrome

Another quick post as I desperately try to meet deadlines...

In September Virtual Linguist wrote about 'How Down's syndrome got its name' (from Dr John Langdon Down, as it happens). I responded in her comments, saying that I'd been taught that the "correct" name is Down syndrome. It turns out that this is a BrE-AmE difference that I hadn't known about. As VL replied:
In the book 'Dr John Langdon Down and Normansfield' by O Conor Ward MD, Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics at University College, Dublin [...], there is this sentence: 'From 1992 the alternative term Down syndrome was adopted in the United States'.
Actually, the date should be 1974, according to several sources, including the site Down Syndrome: Health Issues by Len Leshin, MD:
Many medical conditions and diseases have been named after a person; this type of name is called an eponym. There has been a long-standing debate in the scientific community over whether or not to add the possessive form to the names of eponyms. For quite a long time, there was no established rule as to which to use, but general usage decided which form is acceptable. So you saw both possessive and non-possessive names in use.

In 1974, a conference at the US National Institute of Health attempted to make a standard set of rules regarding the naming of diseases and conditions. This report, printed in the journal Lancet, stated: "The possessive form of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder."(Lancet 1974, i:798) Since that time, the name has traditionally been called "Down syndrome" in North America (note that "syndrome" isn't capitalized). However, the change has taken longer to occur in Great Britain and other parts of Europe, for reasons that aren't quite clear to me.

One can see the adoption of Down syndrome in progress by looking at bibliographies on the topic, like this one, in which Down syndrome starts to appear in 1983. The term used in the names of conferences sponsored by National Down Syndrome Congress (US) shift from Down's to Down in 1978. (The NDSC was founded in 1973 under a different name, but their online history doesn't include the original name.)

Interestingly, though, the 'not using 's in medical eponyms' rule doesn't seem to have had as much of an impact for other conditions. Almost no one says Crohn disease and I don't recall ever hearing Alzheimer disease (although it's more frequent on the web than Crohn disease).

The "American version" of the term does appear occasionally in the UK. For example, the Portsmouth Down's Syndrome Trust morphed into Down Syndrome Educational Trust in 1997 (and changed its name to Down Syndrome Education International in 2008). But in the main, UK organi{s/z}ations use Down's. While the American medical establishment and people involved with the syndrome tend to use Down, Down's is certainly used a lot by American laypeople too.
Read more

Words of the Year 2008 - nominations

Word of the Year season has begun, with bloggers calling for Word of the Year nominations and publishers showing little faith in the word-generating power of December. 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
I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim. I'd like your nominations for the main categories. The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2008, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year.

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. So click away for 2007's nominations and results and 2006's nominations and results.

Fire away! Please!
Read more

some onomatopoeia

The requests for treatment of various topics are still coming in much faster than I can deal with them. So here's one that goes back almost a year. Roxana wrote to say:
I teach English in Italy, and the books we use come from the UK. The other day I was a bit surprised to read a sentence in "English Files" that went like this: "Do you hoot if the driver in front of you is slow?" (not "toot") I would have said "honk".
Have you come across this?
Yes, cars in the UK hoot (among other sounds) and in the US they honk (among other sounds), and those are but a couple of examples of the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia (words whose sounds imitate what they refer to). "The arbitrariness of onomatopoeia?" I hear some of you thinking. "Surely not!" But I reply "Surely, surely."

Onomatopoeia is always raised by some student when I teach the notion of 'the arbitrariness of the sign'--i.e. the notion that there is no causal connection between the form of a sign (e.g. a word) and its meaning. For example, it's just a social convention that the word for that thing in the middle of your face is nose. You had to learn to associate that combination of sounds with that body part because there's no other way to know that those sounds symboli{s/z}e that thing. And people who speak Zulu had to learn to match a different set of sounds to that thing because there's nothing in nature forcing us to use those sounds for that thing.

But surely, my student reasons, onomatopoeia does involve a natural relation between meaning and form (sound). We call the sound of a gun bang because guns go bang and so forth. Except, of course, that they don't. That's the way that the sound is represented in English, but in French it's pan (with the 'n' pronounced as nasali{s/z}ation on the vowel). And in Icelandic, apparently, it's búmm. While onomatopoeia is iconic, it still relies on the particular sounds that belong to one's language and it relies on some conventionali{s/z}ation. In English, our guns go bang and our bombs go boom because that's what we've learned from other English speakers, not just because that's what guns and bombs sound like. So there's some room for variation among languages, and even within languages, on onomatopoetic matters.

So it is with car horns. In both BrE and AmE, one might imitate the sound as beep, but (especially as verbs for making the sound) BrE likes hoot, which Americans reserve for owls, and toot too, and AmE likes honk (which can also be used for goose noises--OED marks this as 'orig. N. Amer.').

Here I must mention an absolutely charming website, bzzzpeek, on which children from around the world say the sounds of animals and vehicles. If you don't believe me on UK/US differences in onomatopoeia, check with the children. (The UK is the first country on each page, the US is the last--so it takes some clicking to get to.)

Here is a selection of onomatopoeia that I've come across in day-to-day existence. It's mostly come to the fore as Better Half and I clash in our sound effects for the song "Grover Murphy had a farm" (also "Grover Murphy had a bath", "Grover Murphy had some lunch" and anything else I can think to do sound effects for--but of course we use her real first and second name, which, as luck--or possibly careful onomastic planning--would have it, is metrically identical to "Grover Murphy" and "Old MacDonald").

donkeys: in AmE they say hee-haw, but in BrE eeyore--which is basically pronounced like hee-haw without the aitches (the penny drops for many Pooh fans--see the comments here)

frogs: the verb is to croak in both dialects, but in AmE (originally and chiefly, says OED) they say ribbit. This may have made it across the ocean now--Better Half was surprised to learn it's originally AmE, but the British bzzzpeek child has frogs saying croak croak.

emergency vehicles: in BrE children (or adults talking to children) sometimes call these nee-naws after the sound they make, which (traditionally) in Britain is a two-tone sound that's different from the sirens of the US (which are sometimes represented as woo-woo--but I've never heard that used as a noun to represent the vehicles, like nee-naw is). This one is not a case of the dialects representing the same sounds differently, but of having different sounds to represent. One might make the argument that hoot and honk are the same sort of thing--the British drive little cars that go hoot and Americans drive big ones that go honk. Except that the OED has BrE hoots and AmE honks back in the early 20th century, when the size of the cars would have been about the same in the two countries.

trains: we've already discussed the AmE origin of choo-choo and the BrE alternative puff-puff, which seems to be a bit old-fashioned now. BH doesn't use puff-puff, but does use (BrE) puffer train as an equivalent to (AmE) choo-choo train. Grover and I take the train to work/crèche, and as we wait for it, I find myself saying "Here comes the choo-choo train" then feeling ridiculous for doing so, since the train makes a kind of electric hum rather than anything 'puffy' or 'choo-choo-y'.

The thing that's struck me in thinking and talking to BrE speakers about these onomatopoetic items is that the American ones are mostly well-known here, but few people seem to reali{s/z}e that they were originally AmE. Considering how much disdain is felt for some AmE words in BrE, it's interesting that this section of the vocabulary seems somewhat resistant to that kind of prejudice. Or have I just missed it? And have I missed more onomatopoetic differences?
Read more

stabilizers / training wheels

It's been a killer week work-wise, so here's a very short post.

Flatlander wrote to ask:
I was watching “Supernanny” the other day (it’s voyeurism, I know) and she made reference to removing the “stabilizers” from a child’s bicycle, meaning the “training wheels”. Is this a common BrE term or just a one-off?
It's not a one-off--one often hears stabilizers (and often reads stabilisers) for these things in BrE. Looking it up on the web, I've also found it on American sites, but particularly where training wheels would not be an appropriate term--for example wheels for balance-impaired adult cyclists for whom training wheels would be a misnomer.

Training wheels doesn't seem to be in the OED, so I'm having a hard time finding out if it was originally AmE. It is used currently in BrE (14,100 hits on UK Google), but I get the feeling that (a) stabilizers is the more usual way to refer to the things on children's bicycles, and (b) training wheels is more likely to be used metaphorically. Training wheels is a more transparent metaphor than stabilizers is, since the word stabilizer is pretty ambiguous--can refer to a food additive, something to keep dye from running, parts of various types of vehicle/craft, etc. For example, a headline from the Times Higher Education Supplement (14 Feb 2003) reads:

Diversity bike wobbles as the training wheels come off

For more on z versus s in BrE spelling, see back here.
For more on bicycles, see this one.
Read more

condiments

Steve Jones wrote to ask me a question--which was kind of confusing, as I know three Steve Joneses. Turns out he's none of them, but he still has a good point:

From an off topic post on a practice US nationality test on one of the web's leading technology sites is this statement.

-What condiment applies to French-fried potatoes?
-Vinegar... no, mayonnaise... no wait, it's that red stuff.

No credit for not being able to name the red stuff. Negative points for even thinking of the words vinegar or mayonnaise.

Now even in the sixty comments nobody mentioned salt and pepper which is what I would use. Is there a difference in the meaning of the word condiment between British and American English?
Better Half and I have visited this particular transatlantic chasm. I'm struggling to remember the details, but it involved him claiming to have put out condiments on the table, and me saying something like "You can't call it condiments when there's only a jar of mustard there", and him retorting that there was mustard and salt and pepper. At which point we began a particularly pointless argument about whether salt and pepper can be called condiments. It's at these points in a mixed marriage at which a spouse like me can do one of two things:
  1. Attribute his use of the word to his adorable Englishness.
  2. Assume he's a culinary cretin who just doesn't know the proper meaning of the word.
Then along comes Steve to save BH from fate (2). BH didn't even know that he has such a guardian angel.

To me, salt and pepper are seasonings but not condiments, and condiments are things that are usually wet and require a recipe to make. Let's compare some BrE and AmE dictionaries to see whether they differ on this point, starting with the British:
a substance such as salt, mustard, or pickle that is used to add flavour to food.
(Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd edn)

Seasoning added to flavour foods, such as salt, or herbs and spices such as mustard, ginger, curry, pepper, etc. ...
(Dictionary of Food and Nutrition, Oxford University Press)

any seasoning for food, such as salt, pepper, sauces
(Collins on-line)
All of the British sources I checked explicitly mention salt and often pepper. And the American?
A substance, such as a relish, vinegar, or spice, used to flavor or complement food.
(American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edn)

something used to enhance the flavor of food ; especially : a pungent seasoning
(Merriam-Webster on-line)
While the AmE definitions could apply to salt and pepper, neither dictionary mentions them.

Searching online for the phrase "salt, pepper and condiments", I got 1,550 hits. Searching UK sites only (using Google.co.uk), there were four. So, it is looking like the urge to separate salt and pepper from condiments is not a particularly British urge.

Why is it this way? I don't know. I can't think of any seasoning-related behavio(u)r that would make salt/pepper more or less prominent in any group's collective mind. In fact, the only salt/pepper cross-cultural difference that I can think of has to do with the number of holes in the containers in which they're served. In the US, a (AmE) salt shaker has several holes, whereas the shaker for ground pepper has fewer holes. In the UK (and elsewhere) a salt-cellar (a term also found in AmE, but not as frequently; see the comments for corrections re this term) has one biggish hole and the (BrE) pepperpot has several smaller holes. Thus, those visiting one country from the other almost invariably put the wrong condiment/seasoning on their food on the first try. But in both countries, salt and pepper are expected to be found on a table and are provided on restaurant/cafe tables--except for those restaurants in which the waiter presents a huge pepper-dispensing phallus, generally after you've had the first bites of your food and when you're in the throes of a really interesting conversation, troubling you to ask "Fresh Ground Black Pepper, Miss?" (you can hear the capital letters there). Obviously, we mere consumers are not to be trusted with the Pepper God fetish. But that happens in both countries too.

There's a strange disagreement between the British and American dictionaries on the etymology. While Collins and Oxford give the Latin condire as meaning 'to pickle', AHD and M-W give it as 'to season'. You'd think it'd be the other way (a)round, given the interpretations of condiment in the two countries.
Read more

...and one to grow on

RWMG, in wishing me a happy birthday, asked:
Any differences between UK and US birthdays you want to let us in on?
Funnily enough, a difference came up in Max's list of Americanisms from Anne Tyler's Back when we were grownups:

Biddy was using the butane torch to light the candles on the cake --an actual one hundred candles, as Rebecca had insisted, plus an extra to grow on.

Max asked about this extra to grow on business. It's not a tradition I've thought about in a long time, but there's a tradition in the US in which you spank a child on his/her birthday (but I've also seen it with adults--usually the term sexual harassment comes to mind). The birthday girl/boy gets a light spank on the bottom for each of their years (counted loudly), then just when you think the ordeal is over the spanker will give you an extra "one to grow on" (i.e. a spank to help you grow). A more pleasant variation on this is to give the person an extra candle on their cake.

The phrase has taken on a life of its own, used in situations where something extra is given, especially something that's supposed to help/force you to grow (up) a bit. For example, here's a bit from Time magazine in 1956, about a reporter who has taken recently merged labo(u)r unions to task for various 'sins':
On the first birthday of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. merger, one of the U.S.'s top labor reporters, New York Timesman A. H. Raskin, gave the "brawling infant" one to grow on in the Times's Sunday Magazine.
I asked Max if there's anything similar in the UK, and he replied:
The nearest thing to your birthday spanking is "the bumps" which schoolboys subject one another to on birthdays. One holds the victim's arms and another the legs, and they "bump" the victim on the ground (not hard) for the appropriate number of times, plus maybe "one for luck". You "give someone the bumps".
I'm sure you'll let us know if these traditions are still practi{c/s}ed among children today and what variations on these themes are out there...

Read more

dogs

There are some things about the English that I almost don't want to understand. I mean, I find these things so strange that I am afraid I won't still like the English if I think too much about them. And one of those things is the way in which animals often come above people in a significant portion of Englishfolk's priorities. Kate Fox in Watching the English notes that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded long before the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which "appears to have been founded as a somewhat derivative afterthought." Another case in point: there's a donkey sanctuary in Devon that gets over £13 million pounds a year in donations. (I was trying to find a recent article I read about it, but now I can only find this 2003 one.) That's more than MenCap (the leading charity for those with [BrE] learning disabilities), Age Concern (leading charity for 'older people') and the Samaritans (mental health/suicide-prevention hotline). Donkeys. Better Half's sister and her (BrE-ish) partner have just returned from a well-enjoyed (BrE) holiday in Cornwall, but reported that visiting the donkey sanctuary on the way back was the highlight of the (BrE) fortnight. Donkeys.

But that's the same sister-in-law who refers to her two dogs as my baby daughter's "cousins". She takes no notice of me cring(e)ing when she does so. Or maybe she gets a thrill from it. I don't want to think about it too much. I do think of this bit from The Xenophobe's Guide to the English (and similar bits from most of the other books about the English on my shelf):
For while [the English] are not always very good at talking to each other, they excel in conversation with their animals. Although they are not often successful in forming tactile bonds with their children, they continually chuck the chins of their lap dogs and whisper sweet nothings into their hairy ears. (p. 23)
People who feel that animals are fine--outdoors, in the jungle, not bothering me--had better be quiet about it, since:
If our pet takes against someone, even if we have no reason at all to dislike the person, we trust the animal's superior insight and become wary and suspicious. People who object to being jumped on, climbed over, kicked, scratched and generally mauled by English animals who are 'just being friendly' also clearly have something wrong with them. (Watching the English, p. 236)
On that note, we turn to the following correspondence from British reader Bill:
I used the expression "dog's breakfast" in a comment on an American blog, and the bloke said he'd never heard it before. The day before, I saw some Americans misunderstanding the British meaning of a dog's basket - apparently they'd have said "dog's bed". I understand that Americans are reluctant to use "bitch" in its literal meaning. Are we separated even in woofer-related matters?
All of my brothers and my good friends in the US have dogs. They also have full-time gainful employment. Meanwhile, in the UK I know people who would love to have a dog, but who feel that it would be cruel to leave a dog at home while they go to work and can't understand people who do that. I think we are separated especially in woofer-related matters.

So, on to Bill's phrases, and some more. I was surprised to find that I'd not mentioned (BrE) dog's breakfast before, since it was one of the non-translating metaphors/costumes at my Metaphorty party, and I wrote about those back here. But it seems I left out my sister-in-law's costume. Being a petite person (like all of Better Half's family), she was able to cut arm holes into an economy-size dried dog food bag (Baker's Complete, I believe it was) and call herself 'the dog's breakfast'. Dog's breakfast means 'a mess'.  [Postscript, 12 Sept 2011: Mark Liberman at Language Log points out that this is originally AmE! See the 3rd comment on this post of his for those details.]

This is not to be confused, The Phrase Finder tells us, with (BrE) the dog's dinner, meaning 'dressed or displayed in an ostentatiously smart manner':
Why a dog's breakfast is synonymous with mess or muddle and dog's dinner with smartness isn't at all clear. It appears that the two phrases were coined entirely independently of each other.
'Dog's dinner' is first cited in ‘C. L. Anthony's play 'Touch Wood', 1934:
"Why have you got those roses in your hair? You look like the dog's dinner."
And then there are (BrE) the dog's bollocks, with bollocks being informal BrE for 'testicles' (= balls). On its own, bollocks can be used as roughly equivalent to (AmE) bullshit--i.e. a load of (AmE) garbage/(BrE) rubbish. But when they're the dog's bollocks, it means "as good as it could be, the best of its kind, the Rolls-Royce of its type" (Jeremy Paxman, The English, p. 236). So, human testicles = rubbish, refuse; canine testicles = the best thing in the world. See what I mean about priorities?

Back to Bill's list, I'd not have thought of dog('s) basket as particularly BrE, but I searched for it on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com and found that the former shows dog beds (many, but not all, involving basket-y structures) and the American site shows baskets for carrying your pet on your bicycle--so perhaps there is a difference there. I'd have to use dog bed in AmE if there was no wicker involved, but I'd be happy to say basket if an actual basket was part of the structure.

And as far as bitch goes, I don't know anyone in either country who uses the word a lot in its literal meaning. Both of sis-in-law's dogs are female, but she refers to them as girls, not bitches. In my experience, bitch is used by those who breed dogs and those who hunt with them. And since I avoid both populations to the best of my ability (or at least avoid engaging them in animal talk), I haven't got a clear notion that Americans do use it less. On the contrary, bitch appears over 500 times on the American Kennel Club website, but only once on a document at Kennel Club UK and 16 times on the Crufts site--though since I don't know how those sites compare size-wise, it's not a very useful comparison.

Having revealed my lack of enthusiasm for dogs (at least as compared to people), I expect that I'll go down in many a reader's estimation. But they already liked dogs better than me, so I won't let it faze me. I've concentrated on the English here, with no claims about the rest of the British, but it should be noted that the Scottish have a famous monument to dog loyalty. Maybe that's just there to bring English tourists across the border, but I don't think so...
Read more

stemware and other wares

My now-retired colleague Max has time to read novels. He not only has time to read them, he has time to note the Americanisms in them and send them to me. I have more than 20 years until retirement. Do you think it's too early to start counting the days?

Here's one of the passages he sent me from Anne Tyler's Back when we were grownups:
Alice Farmer washed stemware so silently and morosely that she might have been hung over, except that she didn't drink.
Max correctly surmised that AmE stemware means 'glasses with stems', and avers that BrE has no term for this collection of things. One would probably say wine glasses in most cases, but, of course, not all wine glasses have stems and not every stemmed glass is a wine glass--some are champagne flutes or brandy (AmE) snifters/(BrE) balloons. (You can debate whether these are 'wine glasses', but in my world, they don't count.)

This word had fallen onto my own 'to be blogged about' list back in July 2007, when Better Half and I did the legal deed and got an embarrassment of stemware. We'd actually asked for gifts to charity, but plenty of folks felt they couldn't not give us stuff, so we received five sets of wine and/or champagne glasses. We'd just got two boxes of champagne flutes for Christmas and a set of stemless red wine glasses as an engagement present. If only there were enough room in our (BrE) flat/(AmE) apartment to have a large enough party to use them all. Or, if only we had a working fireplace, so that we could make dramatic toasts and throw our glasses at the fire. But I'm getting away from my point, which was this: a friend was taking down the gifts and givers for our thank-you note list, and I'd call out "stemware from [insert your name here, if you gave it to us]" and half the room said "Whaaa?" (Incidentally, one set had no card with it. So, if you gave us wine glasses and never got a thank you, then I thank you now! We will use them all eventually, I'm sure, as we do tend to break them even without dramatic toasts.)

Stemware is but one of many -ware terms that Americans are fond of using. Another is silverware, which in AmE can apply to any of what BrE would call cutlery. In my AmE experience, the more common use of cutlery (not that it's a common word) is to refer to cutting instruments--e.g. knives and scissors (what was traditionally made by a cutler). (Both the 'cutting instruments' and 'knives, forks and spoons' meanings are included in American Heritage; strangely, the latter sense has not yet made it into the OED.) The bleaching of the meaning of silverware is evident from the fact that the phrase "plastic silverware" gets more than 39,000 Google hits. If one wants to talk about the silver silverware, you can leave off the -ware. Or, do as my mother does and say "(AmE) set the table with the real silver". Of course, the people selling you the stainless steel stuff would get into trouble if they called it silverware, so another term for this stuff in AmE is flatware.

Hardware, the pre-computer meaning (i.e. metal things), is a useful word in both BrE and AmE, but hardware store is originally AmE. The traditional BrE equivalent would be ironmonger('s shop), though these days one might also hear hardware shop. (Google tells me that hardwareshop is "Australia's premier online hardware and home improvement store".)

Some other -ware words that I thought might be AmE are not AmE according to the OED. But then the OED doesn't mark stemware as AmE, and I've yet to meet a BrE speaker who uses the term. So, whether or not words like tableware and stoneware and so forth are AmE, I get the feeling that AmE speakers are a bit happier using the -ware suffix than BrE speakers are. In fact, when I asked BH which -ware words he thought were particularly American, he said, "All of them." The one other 'originally AmE' one that I've found in the OED is barware. Are there more?
Read more

going places...going times?

Regular reader Robert WMG wrote in the autumn/fall with the following (and I'm rushing to respond to it before I have to shame myself by writing 'last autumn/fall'):
While talking to a Canadian friend, I said "It's gone five" (meaning "it's after five o'clock" but with definite connotations, depending on context, of "it's later than I thought" or "we're going to be late" or "we're late"). She said that without very strong contextual clues this would be incomprehensible in N. America. Any comments?
Robert describes the situation well. One issue that's not clear is what the 's stands for. You almost always hear it with the 's contracted: it's gone five rather than it has gone five or it is gone five. (See this post for further discussion of it's gone in BrE and AmE.) So, which is it, is or has? Either, it seems. Perhaps BrE speakers out there can enlighten us as to whether they can see any difference in meaning or dialect in the following examples (I searched for the past tense because it was easier):
It was gone four o'clock by the time we left the restaurant so whatever the hell we were talking about it must have been good. (from 'Star Blog')

With that cheeky grin she wished me a happy birthday (it had gone 12 o'clock by now) and that was it, and pardon the pun but for me it was a 'perfect day'. (from kirstymaccoll.com)
(For what it's worth, London-born Better Half thinks the was gone version sounds 'just wrong', but concedes that it might set up things a bit differently in a narrative.)

BrE speakers can also use gone for peoples' ages (with mostly the same connotations as Robert gave for the time-telling gone), i.e. He's gone 60 ('he's over sixty already'). Algeo's British or American English? counts both of these uses of gone as prepositions. If it's a preposition, then you'd use it with a form of the verb to be, but if it's a past-participle form of the verb to go, then you'd generally use it with a form of to have. Of course, the preposition is historically the same word as the participle, but it's drifted away from it to a different (more grammatical/functional) part-of-speech--that is to say, it has undergone grammaticali{s/z}ation.

Another BrE-particular temporal gone is the use of gone as a post-nominal (i.e. after the noun) modifier that means 'ago', as in this example from kultureflash (London):
With Batman a decade gone, Spiderman and Daredevil hits, and Ang Lee's Hulk promising to smash, it's a KA-POW comic book dreamworld just now.
You might hear this in AmE, but then the gone would almost certainly mean 'dead', and it would be found in newspaper memorials (advertisements placed by mourners to remember their dead) and the like (e.g. a decade gone, but not forgotten).

Another use that I believe is mostly BrE (having a hard time confirming its dialect, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this) is post-nominal gone to mean 'pregnant', as in this travel(l)ing-while-pregnant story from The Times:
Four months gone, over the sickness and constantly hungry, I was delighted to find that they had one restaurant serving European and Egyptian specialities and another specialising in modern Indian which satisfied my cravings for spicy food and yoghurt.
I used this on occasion while pregnant, but it always seemed to me to have an unpleasant connotation that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It reminded me of (BrE) up the duff, in that it sounded to me like pregnancy was somehow foisted upon me and that it was not a socially acceptable state to be in. I would love to hear from folks who use X months gone more naturally than I do on whether it has those connotations for you. So...comment away!
Read more

partner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the way, I'm retiring the Canadian Count. I've had a few lately, but I've lost count and I think it was only amusing me--and less and less so.
Read more

be/have nothing to do with

Reader Tim wrote recently to ask:
I noticed the phrase "are nothing to do with" in David Crystal's The Fight for English (p168) and it seemed peculiarly British to me. I would have used "have nothing to do with" instead. Google backs me up, saying its relative frequency is 10 times higher on UK websites than on the Internet in general:

"are nothing to do with"= 115,000 / "have nothing to do with" = 8,700,000 = 1:76

"are nothing to do with" site:.uk = 21,000/ "have nothing to do with" site:.uk = 156,000 = 1:7

Is it a well-recognized regionalism?
Now, I love queries that come with the homework already done. Farrrr superior to the ones with no greeting, no signature, no please and no thank you that demand that I explain why their spouse says such-and-such or why other people are idiots who say this-and-that. (I'd write "you know who you are", but such lack of self-consciousness in making demands of complete strangers is evidence of a lack of, well, self-consciousness.) And Tim did a good job of comparing the two phrases...except for one little problem. Can you spot it?

Before we get to the methodological issues, I'll answer his question. No, it's not a well-recogni{s/z}ed difference between BrE and AmE. Every source I've checked lists the two phrases as variations on each other, without noting anything about dialect, and sources on BrE/AmE differences (like Algeo's British or American English?--my usual [chiefly AmE] go-to book for verb variations like this) don't mention it either. But I share his intuition that are nothing to do with sounds "less American" than have nothing to do with. Note that here we're only talking about the use of these phrases when they're describing states and not when they're describing intentional behavio(u)r. So, if I want to proclaim that something has no impact on me, I could say (if I felt equally comfortable with either phrasing): It is nothing to do with me or It has nothing to do with me (or it's nothing to do with me, which hides whether it's a be or a have--but see this post for BrE/AmE differences in contractions). But if we're talking about shunning someone, it has to be have and not be: She'll have nothing to do with me since I insulted her pig.

Back to the methodology: Tim has made do with the limitations of the internet in studying US versus UK: comparing the UK to the whole world and assuming that anything peculiarly BrE will stand out in the .uk sites. It's hard to get around that, since few US URLs end in a reliable country code. What one can do instead is to search something like .edu versus .ac.uk or .gov versus .gov.uk, or search a couple of reasonably similar newspaper sites, but Tim's .uk versus 'the whole world' analysis is telling...except for one little problem.

The problem is comparing are and have. Both are the plural forms of their respective verbs, but have is also the base form. So, many of the have examples have their equivalent in be nothing to do with rather than are nothing to do with (as in it could be/have nothing to do with). So, let's try re-running the searches with the third-person singular forms is and has, which won't have this dual purpose (remembering that some of the has examples will have the 'shunning' meaning):


all sites .uk sites
is nothing to do with
1,440,000 85,900
has nothing to do with
13,400,000
333,000

ratio
1:9
1:4


So, the difference here is not as dramatic as Tim's figures would suggest, but what hasn't changed is that he's right in his intuition that be nothing to do with is more common on .uk sites than in the rest of the world. But much of the rest of the world is speaking Britishoid Englishes. To try to get out that influence, let's try it once more with .edu versus .ac.uk:


.edu sites .ac.uk sites
is nothing to do with
4340 1140
has nothing to do with
232,000
2030

ratio
1:53
1:2

Now there's a big difference! (Not quite as big as Tim's original difference, but big enough.) I suspect that the 'shun' meaning is less common on academic sites than on general sites, which include lots of places where people can be relatively free about declaring whom they are shunning--so I believe this might be a truer reflection of the relative Britishness of be nothing to do with.

So, well done, Tim! (Despite my methodological quibbles, which we in the educational establishment call a "teaching opportunity". At least that's what we call it when we want to show off a bit.)
Read more

zwieback, rusks--and more on biscuits

We're back in the UK, dealing with a very jet-lagged baby. During our US visit, I had reason to think about another BrE/AmE difference in baby paraphernalia terminology, since Grover's got her first two teeth and is working on her next two: (AmE) zwieback (toast) and (BrE) (teething) rusk.

These refer to essentially the same thing (when it comes to the baby product), although rusk can also be used in BrE to refer to a kind of bready stuff that's added to sausages. Zwieback rhymes with 'lie back' or 'lie Bach' (if Bach has a hard /k/ sound at the end) in my dialect, but American Heritage lists a number of alternative pronunciations. It comes from the German for 'twice baked', as that's what they are: first baked as a loaf, then sliced and baked again. In other words, they're biscotti for babies. (In South Africa, rusks are used just like biscotti--eaten by all ages, dunked into coffee or tea.)

Strangely, we weren't able to buy any of this staple of babyhood in the US, although we searched for it in supermarkets and (AmE) drug stores (=BrE chemist's shop, more or less) in three counties. Sometimes we found the empty space on the shelf where they were supposed to be, sometimes not even that. I searched on the web for signs of a recall or shortage, but found no information, except that, like all finger foods apparently, Gerber zwiebacks now carry stern warnings that they should not be given to children who cannot yet crawl with their stomachs lifted off the ground. They've made them part of their 'Graduates for Toddlers' range, suggested for age 10+ months. But, of course, you need them when the baby is cutting her front teeth, long before toddlerdom. Meanwhile, I just ordered some rusks from my UK on-line grocery and found them label(l)ed 'suitable from 4 months'. (Granted, they do give a recipe for making a sort of porridgy thing from them, so that's probably what's suitable for a 4-month-old.) I have to assume that the warnings on baby foods are the product of the litigious culture...but the warnings are so uniform across the brands/products that I wonder whether they're legally required. (Do any of you know?)

Though we didn't find zwiebacks, we did find some non-zwieback teething biscuits (and ignored age and crawling requirements), which Grover loves (and handles very well, despite being completely uninterested in crawling, since crying for Mum/Mom and Dad to pick her up and carry her wherever she wants to go has worked so well for her thus far). This made me return to thinking about biscuits. As we've discussed before, BrE biscuit is and isn't equivalent to AmE cookie, but in discussions comparing those two words, we tend to only mention the AmE sense of biscuit that refers to a scone-like (in appearance, at least) thing. We should acknowledge areas of overlap with BrE biscuit. Americans do use biscuit in the names for some cookie-like things: teething biscuits and dog biscuits. In both cases, these kind of biscuits are hard--harder than normal (BrE) biscuits/(AmE) cookies. I wonder whether these AmE uses of biscuit remain closer to its etymological meaning 'twice cooked', since teething biscuits (at least) typically are twice-baked (perhaps dog biscuits used to be twice-baked, too?). But note that in both of these cases, biscuit in AmE is used as part of a compound. We don't use biscuit alone to refer to crunchy things like these.

Pressing deadlines mean that I have to reduce my posting even further, I'm afraid. I have told myself that I can only blog once a week now, though it pains me to type that. I promise to work on that backlog of requests from kind readers.
Read more

slutty

While it would be great if (BrE) pupils/(AmE) students in schools could read this blog, I am fairly certain that I've already run afoul of any nanny software worth its code, what with my repeated references to f(a)eces and genitalia. So I might as well report today's SbaCL moment.

We're in the US at the moment.  In a restaurant (BrE) car park/(AmE) parking lot with the Ginger Nut and her family, I had just pointed out that her 15-year-old daughter had a fair amount of her dinner on her (AmE) tank top/(BrE) vest. GN suggested that her daughter ride with us in order to direct us to our next destinations. Better Half teasingly shouted "We don't want that slutty teenager in our car!"

I don't think he'd finished the sentence before I rushed to inform everyone in earshot: "That means 'slovenly' in British English!" (Though the OED tells us that it's now dialectal.) Nowadays, of course, it can also be a not-nice way of describing someone as promiscuous, and that's the only meaning I've ever experienced in the US. The OED has only added that sense in 2004, with examples going back only to 1970--as opposed to c.1400 for the 'slovenly' sense.

From here
The noun on which this adjective is based, slut, was originally used of "A woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance" (OED), but the "woman of a low or loose character" sense came hot on its heels. While I've not heard women called sluts for being unkempt, I have heard the adjective slutty used to convey that meaning within BH's London-born family. And the next time they come to America, I'll warn them against shouting that other people's children are slutty.
Read more

the big list of vegetables

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I feel shame when I do a post that's mostly just listing "they say this, we say that". There are plenty of sites around that do that kind of straight word-for-word listing. But I get enough requests for vegetable names that I'm just going to try to get it over with right now. Where there are links, that's because I've already written about some of these at greater length elsewhere. I've also already written about veg/veggie and various herbs (and the pronunciation thereof). So please click on those links to discuss those issues in greater detail.

And now, the list (which has no particular order):

BrEAmE
aubergineeggplant
courgettezucchini
rocket (sometimes roquette)arugula
mange toutsnow peas/sugar peas
spring oniongreen onion/scallion
swederutabaga
beetroot (treated as a mass noun)beet (count noun)
sweetcorncorn
chicoryBelgian endive
pepper (sweet pepper if it's not green; one occasionally hears the AusE capsicum)(bell) pepper



chick-peachickpea/garbanzo bean
haricot beannavy bean
broad beanfava bean
runner beanstring bean
cos lettuceromaine lettuce

In addition, some names for groups of vegetables are different. BrE pulses = AmE legumes (though, technically, legume is a broader category). In AmE I'd refer to cruciferous vegetables, meaning broccoli and cauliflower collectively, but in BrE I hear Brassica, the Latin name of the family (which includes cabbage and Brussels sprouts).

Squash are another matter. One easily finds acorn and butternut squash (and courgettes/zucchini) in both countries, but otherwise the varieties of squash tend to be different. Marrows will be known to fans of Wallace and Grommit, but the term is not much used in the US. It refers to "any of various kinds of squash or gourd which are chiefly the fruits of varieties of Cucurbita pepo, eaten as a vegetable; esp. one of the larger round or cylindrical kinds with green, white, or striped skins and greenish-white or (occas.) yellowish pulpy flesh" (OED June 2008 draft rev.), so courgettes/zucchinis are technically small marrows. In the UK I've never seen what we call summer squash* (aka yellow squash--is this a regional difference? Not sure) or spaghetti squash (which was something of a fad in the US in the 1970s, I think, but I haven't seen it lately). The OED lists pattypan (squash) as 'chiefly N. Amer.', but I've only seen it for sale in the UK and South Africa. Pumpkin is generally only used of the orange-rinded variety (for making jack o'lanterns) in AmE, but in BrE the term applies more generally to gourd-y squashes with orange flesh. (Jack-o-lantern pumpkins have become more available in the UK as Halloween celebrations have become more popular.)

The British talk about more kinds of shelled peas (garden peas, petits-pois [for younger, sweeter peas]) than Americans do. (Click on the link for the mushy variety.)

As can be seen in the examples presented here, BrE tends to be more influenced by French and AmE shows some Italian influence, which is not surprising since Britain has a lot of contact with France and its cuisine, and popular cuisine in the US has been greatly affected by Italian (and other) immigrants. Those who read Menu Italian may not recogni{s/z}e arugula for Italian rucola, but arugula was the dialectal version of the word that immigrated to America. (Just as rutabaga is not the general Swedish word for that kind of turnip, but a dialectal term for it. Click on the link above for more on that.)

I await the first comment that points out a completely obvious one that I've left off the list!

*Summer squash for me has two meanings. Either the general term that refers to any thin-skinned squash, or the specific one that refers to yellow squash that are picked at the same time as courgettes/zucchini.
Read more

pudding

I've avoided doing a post on how BrE pudding is used to mean (AmE) dessert because it's one of those AmE/BrE differences that is known by most people with any interest in the two countries. (And way back in the beginning, I said that this blog wasn't about those things that are well-covered in lists of AmE/BrE differences. This has led me to drag my feet, or perhaps my knuckles, in responding to requests for this topic from American readers Cathy and Jacqueline.) The pudding/dessert equation has been mentioned in passing here and there on the blog. But there are angles on this issue that deserve further discussion. So what the hell, here are some observations on them.

This comes up naturally, since I'm in the US at the moment, and the first 'new' AmE/BrE difference we taught my linguistically insightful five-year-old niece on this visit was "dessert is called pudding in England". Her immediate question was the same as reader Cathy's:
If any dessert can be called pudding, what is [AmE] pudding called [in BrE]?
But before I get to that, let's start with a fine-tuning of the general American understanding of the meaning of pudding in BrE. Yes, it can be used to refer to the sweet course of a meal, served after the main course. But in addition to referring to a course, it can also refer to a particular kind of dish, as it does in AmE. But there's still a translational problem, in that it doesn't refer to the same type of dish in the two dialects. In BrE, the dish-sense of pudding is:
A baked or steamed sponge or suet dish, usually sweet and served as a dessert, but also savoury suet puddings (e.g. steak and kidney). Also milk puddings, made by baking rice, semolina, or sago in milk. (Bender & Bender, A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition, Oxford UP, 1995)
Here's a photo of a Christmas pudding, from Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency. It's kind of like a fruit cake, but it's cooked by steaming. I know Anglophiles who buy and eat Christmas puddings in the US, but other such puddings are very rare in the US. My personal favo(u)rite is Sticky Toffee Pudding, and I consider it my duty to sample as wide a variety of STPs as possible in order to try to identify the best. Nominations on a postcard, please! (AmE speakers should usually mentally translate toffee in BrE contexts to caramel.)

In AmE, pudding nowadays refers particularly to creamy, custard-like desserts. Wikipedia treats this better than other dictionaries I've consulted (BrE translations in brackets are mine):
The second and newer type of pudding consists of sugar, milk and a thickening agent such as cornstarch [=BrE corn flour], gelatin, eggs, rice or tapioca to create a sweet, creamy dessert. These puddings are made either by simmering on top of the stove [=BrE on the hob; AmE stove = BrE cooker] in a saucepan or double boiler or by baking in an oven, often in a bain-marie. They are typically served chilled, but a few types, such as zabaglione and rice pudding, may be served warm.
As the Wikipedia bit indicates, the steamed, cake-ish kind of pudding is older than the 'milk pudding' sense, but it's not the oldest. Originally pudding referred to more sausage-like things. Hence black pudding, a blood sausage that is far more common in Britain (especially in the north of England--at breakfast time, for godsakes) than in the US.

On the grammatical angle, note that the BrE dish-sense of pudding is often a count noun (e.g. I made enough sticky toffee puddings to feed an army) because the puddings are items with well-defined boundaries, whereas in AmE it's usually a mass noun (e.g. I made enough pudding [not puddings] for everyone) since it refers to a substance. (Throughout English, we have the ability to make count nouns out of mass nouns and vice versa, so in this case I'm talking about the natural state of these words when referring to the food as it is prepared, rather than the senses "a portion of X" or "a smear of X", etc.)

So, what do BrE speakers call the creamy stuff that Americans call pudding? I think the best answer is that they don't call it anything in particular. There is no such thing as Jell-o pudding (the form in which most Americans encounter this substance) in the UK. The closest thing to that, although it's more 'mousse-like' is probably Angel Delight. A baked custard is a kind of pudding-y thing that is found in both countries (though not very popular in either place now, I think, except in the more exotic Spanish/Mexican incarnation, flan--which Kevin in the comments reminds us is usually called crème caramel in BrE. See the comments for more on what flan means). But in the UK custard usually refers to pouring custard, which Americans might occasionally come across under its French name crème anglaise. (This was discussed before, back here.) Both countries have rice pudding and the less creamy bread pudding.

(Incidentally, Better Half and I were grocery-shopping here the other day, and we happened down the Jell-o [US trade name, used generically to mean 'flavo(u)red gelatin', i.e. BrE jelly] aisle. BH was flabbergasted by the range of little boxes to be found there, which included two brands (Jell-o and Royal) and both gelatin/jelly and (AmE) pudding mixes. The Kraft Foods website lists 20 flavo(u)rs of regular Jell-o, 12 of sugar-free Jell-o, 17 of instant regular Jell-o pudding, 9 of instant diet Jell-o pudding, and 9 of the regular and diet cook-and-serve pudding mixes. So that's 67 products before we even start counting the ones that Royal makes. I've lived abroad long enough that instead of celebrating such a range of products, I am exhausted by the thought of it and look forward to getting back to a more sensible shopping experience. But only after I've loaded up my suitcase with A1 sauce, low-calorie microwave popcorn and New York State maple syrup.)

Returning to the course-sense of pudding, the term dessert is heard in BrE. The first sense below from the OED has been around in BrE since the 17th century at least, while the second, more general sense is noted as more American, but increasingly found in BrE:

1. a. A course of fruit, sweetmeats, etc. served after a dinner or supper; ‘the last course at an entertainment’ (J.).
b. ‘In the United States often used to include pies, puddings, and other sweet dishes’ (Cent. Dict.). Now also in British usage.
Other BrE terms for this course are the more colloquial afters and sweet, which is often found in lists of 'non-U' terms. Pudding is the least socially marked of these terms.

I believe that the pudding/dessert course is the one that diverges most, food-wise, in the two countries. That is to say, there are lots and lots of British puddings that aren't found in the US and American desserts that aren't found in the UK. And, of course, some of these are sources of amusement--particularly the name of the British dish spotted dick.

Finally (and not entirely unrelatedly), pudding is sometimes clipped to pud (rhymes with wood), which disturbs me when I see it in writing since I first learned pud as a slang term for a woman's genitals that rhymes with bud and is derived from pudendum. But BrE also has a genital-slang pud, which means 'penis'. This one rhymes with wood, since it is derived from pudding. (The OED notes that this is chiefly used in the masturbatory phrase pull the/one's pud.)
Read more

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

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