Separated by a Common Language

When I first started marking (AmE prefers grading) essays (AmE would say papers, which is more likely to mean 'exams' in BrE university-speak) in the UK, I would correct students who used the word whilst instead of while, as in Whilst the students could write 'while', they tend to write 'whilst'. My comment would be the teacherly version of (AmE) take that stick out of your ass. I quickly learned, however, that whilst is not a punishable offense in British English.

Paul Brian's Common Errors in English Usage says: 'Although “whilst” is a perfectly good traditional synonym of “while,” in American usage it is considered pretentious and old-fashioned.' Indeed, it is. I try to not let it affect me nowadays...

Previously, I'd wondered why the most English of English condiments, Branston Pickle, included the American word rutabaga on their ingredients list. I e-mailed Customer Service at Premier Foods with this question, suggesting that they might be trying to hide the fact that Branston Pickle includes swede (or Swedish turnip--BrE for rutabaga). They have responded--yes, indeed that's the reason. Swede is not a popular vegetable. They have, however, pointed out that swedes are also called rutabaga in French, and that might be the more immediate source of the word in the ingredients list, rather than American English.

In the US, a geezer is an old man--preferably one who looks something like the picture on the left.

In informal British English, however, geezer means something more like dude means in AmE. (But unlike dude, people don't go around addressing each other as geezer.) It can be used for any man, or to connote that someone is 'one of the lads' (US: guys) or a bit cheeky or laddish--i.e. a bit naughty. A diamond geezer is a great guy. A dodgy geezer is someone you're better off avoiding. Geezer used in this way has a bit of east London attitude to it.

One sometimes sees babygros (UK)/onesies (US) emblazoned with GEEZER, as in the picture on the right. Thought about getting some of these for my infant nephews, but thought they'd only cause consternation in the US.

The American past participle of get, gotten, is one of those American things that the British often express real distaste for. I get the feeling that some Brits think it sounds ignorant. Better Half is now shouting from the other room that it sounds uneducated and hillbillyish. It's an example Americans keeping an older form that disappeared in Britain. A lot has been written on this subject. I recommend the following:

For a bit more on the history, see Maven's Word of the Day.

See John Lawler (with help from David Crystal) on why British people often get it wrong when they try to use American gotten. Essentially, with the 'possession', rather than 'acquisition', sense of get, we say have got, not have gotten. This means that the following two sentences mean different things.

I've got a new hat. (= 'I have a new hat.')
I've gotten a new hat. (= 'I obtained a new hat.')

The thing that I find a bit funny about the looking-down-the-nose attitude toward gotten is that it's retained in British English in the participial verb forgotten (hardly an uncommon verb!) and in the adjective ill-gotten.


Americans also have an irregular past/past participle for fit, but this one isn't so old.

US: Before he lost weight, the jacket (had) fit him.
UK: Before he lost weight, the jacket (had) fitted him.

In my dialect (or at least my idiolect!), we do use fitted when describing making something to measure. So:

US & UK: I had that jacket fitted. The tailor fitted me for a jacket.

But according to The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style by Bryan A. Garner, I'm part of a dying breed and others are using only fit as the past tense of fit:

"Just since the mid-20th century, AmE has witnessed a shift in the past tense and past participle from fitted to fit. Traditionally, fit would have been considered incorrect, but it began appearing in journalism and even scholarly writing as early as the 1950s.
...
The traditionally correct past tense still surfaces—especially in BrE—but in AmE it is becoming rarer (and stuffier) year by year: “A most interesting item in my coin collection is a disk that fitted the pressure-spray nozzle on our apple-orchard pump some 50 years ago” (Christian Science Monitor). Although fitted may one day be extinct as a verb form, it will undoubtedly persist as an adjective fitted sheets."

Presumably the irregulari(s/z)ation of fit is on analogy with hit, which does not change its form in the past or past participle in either dialect.

Incidentally, if a tailor makes you a suit in the UK, it's said to be a bespoke suit. In the US we'd say tailored or made-to-measure, which is perfectly sayable in the UK too. Anything that's made to personal specifications can be bespoke. Checking the web, I got "bespoke vehicles", "bespoke network solutions", "bespoke mirrors", "bespoke browbands" (for horses).

Even more incidentally: Fit is also a recent BrE slang adjective meaning 'attractive'. Of course, this is more related to the 'fitness' sense of fit. I have no idea whether this has currency in the US now--I have heard it there in a British song: "Fit but you know it" by The Streets, which is full of lots of other Briticisms, which I might get around to discussing some day. Right now I'm being amused by a new antonym pairing: fit/fat.

Enough with the incidentals.

Lately, I've been losing my intuitions when it comes to knit versus knitted. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the past tense knit is most likely to be used to refer to the process of making rows of looped-together yarn (or wool as is more commonly said in the UK), and less likely to be used in other senses, like making a whole garment or 'knitting' your brow. According to the aforementioned style guide, past tense knit has taken over. As far as I can tell, I say knit for all but the figurative senses. So, I'd say: Celeste knitted her brow while she knit her scarf.

So, Friend 1 , Friend 2 and I were having a (BrE) natter tonight, when the fact of Mutual Acquaintance's stinginess came into the conversation. I exclaimed, "MA is so cheap!" and F1 said "It's so funny whenever you say someone's cheap when you mean tight. If you say someone's cheap here, it means something different."

Well, in the US it can mean that too--it's ambiguous. But, given the context most Americans would naturally have interpreted my comment as meaning that MA is careful with her money (to put a positive spin on it), rather than that she has loose morals. I know that in England I'm 'supposed' to say that such people are tight, but to me, that word has unappealing connotations when applied to a woman. This is not helped by my knowledge of British saying about stingy people, which is often applied to MA: She's tight as a gnat's chuff.

From now on, I think I'll have to resort to saying "MA is careful with her money for reasons that I don't entirely approve of."

Out for lunch Saturday with Better Half's Mum and her Better Half, when BHM'sBH declares "I hate it when English people take on American corporate jargon." I expected he was talking about thinking outside the box and investing in excellence. The latter is one of my pet peeves, as well as the current call-to-arms/pens by my university's management. ( I also hate that my university has a management team now instead of an administration.)

But no, BHM'sBH instead went on to talk about how he can tell who works for an American company when they open their mouths at Starbucks and say "Can I get a..." instead of "Can/May I have a...". If you ask to get a coffee, by his reasoning, you're asking to come (a)round to the other side of the counter and fix yourself a coffee. BH agrees with BHM'sBH that in the context of ordering a coffee can I get a means 'can I get myself a'.

Checking out can I get a on Google UK, some of the examples are:

can I get a qualification?
Can I get a regular health check at my GP surgery?
can i get a gmail invite?
Can I get a refund of unused portion of a season ticket...?
Can I get a refund on my parking permit?
Can I get a business grant to start up a new business in the Harrogate district?

Most of these are from FAQs, and are sincerely about ability ('Am I able to get a refund? How do I do it?'), rather than requests for things to be given. That's not surprising, as writing Can I get a decaf latte? on my website is unlikely to result in a hot beverage showing up beside me. (That's what yelling to BH in the kitchen was invented for.) The gmail invite example is the only one that stands out as a UK-located (but not necessarily UK) person requesting something using can i get a.

BrE speakers have no problem with saying I got a coffee on my way to work, meaning 'I took a coffee away from someplace where I ordered it'.

In can I get a, get is the converse of give:
Can I get a coffee (from you)? = Can you give me a coffee?

But it's not that the get/give opposition is American-only: on UK Google, one gets twice as many hits for get presents as for receive presents. Since one typically doesn't go and get one's presents from the giver ( one tends to passively receive them), it's clear here that British folk have the lexical/logical wherewithal to understand can I get a as a request.

I think is the real problem is that one learns early the 'polite' ways to ask for things, and this way is not in the British canon of polite requests. While get can mean a passive action of receiving, it also has other senses that are closer to take--which probably colo(u)rs people's perceptions of get's connotations. So, if you're brought up on saying can I have a, then can I get a might sound a little more greedy/impolite.

But why doesn't it sound less polite to American ears? (Especially if it's a relatively new locution there too?) Three possibilities, which don't rule one another out:

1 - Perhaps it does sound less polite to Americans too. To me can I get a sounds a little more brusque and self-cent(e)red than can I have a. (But maybe I've been influenced by my surroundings.)

2 - Perhaps it is slightly less polite in both dialects, but it's less important to sound "polite" in America. (The word polite is a bit loaded here. I'm using it to mean something like 'indirect/genteel'.) The US is known for its solidarity politeness system and for its individualistic culture. In a solidarity culture, one wants to act as if everyone's on the same social level. The UK is historically a deference culture, in which people's societal roles are more distinguished and great pains are taken not to inflict oneself on others unnecessarily. The UK has been shifting toward solidarity styles since at least the second world war, but is still not as far along that path as the US. The importation of (and unease with) can I get a may be a symptom of that shift.

3 - Or perhaps it's just that anything that sounds American grates on British ears and sounds less polite, just by association with Americans and stereotypes of Americans.

I think it's probably a combination of all of these.

Tonight Better Half asked me to lay the table. I went to get plates, then noticed that he'd already filled plates for us. Which led to a conversation about which things the 'layer of the table' was responsible for, which could almost be seen as a dialectal conversation.

My reasoning: I grew up with the job of setting the table, BH grew up laying the table. I was responsible for putting down plates, silverware (AmE), glasses, placemats and napkins. BH says that he just put down cutlery (BrE). I don't actually believe him, having been involved in table-laying exercises at his mother's house where the plates have gone down with the cutlery on the placemats, but he did say "We never had napkins. Sometimes we had kitchen towel" (AmE paper towel).

It's not unusual for napkins not to be supplied at meals served in people's homes here. In the US, it may just be paper towels, but you are generally given something to wipe your mouth with. This may be a generational thing--it's my impression that "war babies" are less likely to have something on the table for mouth-wiping.

But stranger still for an American dining in English homes is being served a meal without a drink. I eat a lot of meals in a lot of different people's homes because of the Scrabble team I'm on. While one's always offered tea after the meal, it's not uncommon to be offered nothing liquid during it. (This always happens at my team's host's house. He has in the past pronounced it strange that I drink as much as I do. I've pronounced it strange that he hasn't had kidney failure yet.) Again, this is something that I associate more with the post-war generation, so may have its roots in necessary frugality.

We all know that Americans consume more than other cultures, right down to paper napkins and milk (the staple in my house) with dinner. But as the post-war generation is replaced by people who haven't known the same privations, the rates of consumption rise in the UK as well. One can only hope that the more voluntary 'green' ethos takes hold as strongly as the effects of involuntary rationing did.

But to get back to the language...why do we set or lay a table? Despite the different words in the two dialects, they are grammatically odd in the same way, with the direct object table not corresponding to the thing that is being moved. Usually if you set or lay a thing, it involves putting it down. In the case of the table, it's already in position, and that which is being moved is left unmentioned. We often leave out mentioning semantic arguments (i.e. things involved in the action) if they're clearly recoverable from the context. For example, we don't bother to say "Did you eat food yet?", we say "Did you eat yet?"

So, do we not mention the 'what' that needs to go on the table because it is predictable in the context? On the contrary, if you're preparing to eat a meal, the table is surely more contextually stable (and thus not needing mention) than what goes on it. For instance, if you're eating soup, you need to lay/set the table differently than if you're eating sushi, and if you're eating breakfast you might put down different things than if you were having lunch. So, why don't we leave out the table and instead say "Would you set/lay the dishes?"

Perhaps it's because there is no good term to cover that which goes on the table (it's not just dishes, it's also linen and cutlery), and also because we do have a sense of doing something to the table when we prepare it for a meal. But still--why then do we use verbs that have to do with moving something (usually represented by the direct object--but not here)? Why don't we say "would you ready the table?" or "would you prepare the table?"

Wonder about things like this too long and one works up an appetite...