Separated by a Common Language

I had dinner with four Liverpudlians tonight, one of whom I initially had to ask to repeat almost everything. I took comfort in three things:

• She had to ask me to repeat almost everything too.
• By the end of dinner we could understand each other very well.
• In telling a story about her uncle she said "We can hardly understand him--he's speaks with such a Scouse accent."

It made me feel a bit less awkward to think that even Liverpudlians (with Scouse accents) can't always understand Liverpudlians with Scouse accents.

When I moved to South Africa in the 90s, I found that my American pronunciation of battery would not do when trying to buy batteries in shops. I learned to say, and somehow still say [bætri] instead of my flap-infested, three-syllable American version. Now I live in a place where the word has three syllables but no flap, yet I somehow made myself clear enough to succeed in buying a £7 battery for my watch on Saturday. Three days later, I hear a chink on the ground and it's my watch, which has irreparably broken in the place where the band is held to the watchy bit.

This is an illustration of Sod's law, which is the same law that Americans call Murphy's law ('anything that can go wrong will', etc.). The American name is older, having its origins in the first-half of the 20th century in the US military. (Stories of who the original Murphy was are best treated as apocryphal.) Sod's law came about in the 1970s, and is far more common on these shores than Murphy's law, which is nevertheless usually understood. It probably replaced Murphy's law because of the delicacy of Anglo-Irish relations. (Most Americans would claim that Murphy's law is not an anti-Irish gibe--but if your name is Murphy and you look Irish, you might have a different experience of this.)

Sod is short for sodomite and in this context is probably a play on God's law. It's commonly heard in poor sod--i.e., 'poor bastard' or in many of the places where a stronger vulgarity might be used--e.g. sod-all and sod off. As far as 'naughty' words go, this one is fairly mild these days, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of users of the word are unaware of its etymology.

When my brothers and I were small we made lots of forts, usually with the (US-preferred) couch/(UK-preferred) sofa cushions. In the winter, we made snowforts in the snowbanks in the backyard (AmE; BrE = back garden). Our cushion-forts were especially important to me during the annual televising of The Wizard of Oz. I always watched with my head peeping out of the fort so that I could duck back in quickly whenever the flying monkeys came on screen.

Meanwhile on this fair island the children were making dens. These days, child development experts are afraid that dens/forts may be going the way of tiddlywinks now that children's time is taken up with organi{s/z}ed or electronic activities. The Guardian's Family section has recently run a few articles about den-making, including some how-to tips. Bring back the den/fort!

A related BrE term is Wendy house, which Americans would usually call a playhouse. A Wendy house (after Wendy in Peter Pan) is typically not made by the child but made or bought by the parent, and is usually situated in the garden/yard.

Describing Nicole Kidman and what's-his-name's prenuptial activities, Scott Lamb on Salon writes:

Much less interesting is the description of Kidman's bachelorette party, or as they say down under, her hen's night: "Instead of male strippers and boozing, the girls each brought a favorite recipe to discuss."

They may say hen's night in Australia (and they do, if the internet is to be trusted), but in the UK and Ireland, it's generally referred to as a hen night. While the term bachelorette party is used in the US, I've never been to one--in spite of having been a bridesmaid five times and (more recently) a sister-in-law three times--so I wonder how popular they actually are. But here, [drunken] hen nights are hard to escape, especially if you live in a coastal/touristy town like mine. I met three hen nights tonight on my post-prandial promenade. One group were all wearing glittery pink cowboy hats, one seemed to have wreaths of flowers on their heads (much more classy), then there's the ever-popular bunny ears. You can usually spot the bride because she's the one (a) with a veil, (b) with L-plates (the badge that learner drivers must display on their cars), or (c) carrying a naked, male blow-up doll or giant penis balloon. More and more popular are hen weekends--which often involve going abroad, or to touristy coastal towns like mine. There are businesses that speciali{s/z}e in organising hen trips.

Of course, older brides tend not to go for the pink cowgirl outfits or matching t-shirts with pictures of the bride. Recipe-swapping sounds like a nice alternative. But I do wonder about the rate of male take-up on a local 'paint your own pottery' business that advertises "Have your hen night/stag party here!"

I was saying to my Swedish teacher yesterday (på svenska, klart) that I like the word duk ('cloth') because I can guess a lot of duk words: näsduk ('nose cloth' = 'handkerchief'), halsduk ('neck cloth' = 'scarf'), bordduk ('tablecloth'), handduk ('hand cloth' = 'towel'). Thinking about duk got me thinking about a similarly useful word in English, bin. The tricky part is figuring out in which things Americans call bins and which things the British call bins.

Bin on its own in BrE is usually short for rubbish bin--i.e. AmE trash/garbage can or waste basket. In these you put a bin liner, which in AmE is garbage/trash bag (or in some parts of the US: garbage sack). A wheelie bin is the kind with wheels that you put outside by the (US) curb/(UK) kerb. I know someone who takes part in wheelie bin protests in Brighton. I'm afraid to tell him that I'm pro-wheelie-bin. The bins are a lot less ugly than rubbish (US trash) strewn all over the pavement (US sidewalk) by seagulls. Big wheelie bins would be called dumpsters in the US, but so would the things that are called skips in Britain. (Click the links for pictures.)

In BrE, bread is stored (not thrown away) in a bread bin, which in AmE is bread box.

Another bin I see a lot in the UK, but haven't heard in the US (though maybe an oenophile will tell me it's used there too) is a wine bin, which is a stack of bottles of wine. This gives rise to the notion of a bin end, that is, the last bottles of a certain wine, which are offered at reduced price. One of the big British off-licence (AmE liquor store, and many regional variations on this) chains is called Oddbins.

Both countries have storage bins and recycling bins, but only Americans name a part of the fridge the vegetable bin. Some Americans call the same fridge part a crisper. While I have found vegetable bin in fridge specifications in the UK, I believe that it's US copy. The UK equivalents I've heard are vegetable drawer (also good in the US), vegetable tray and vegetable box.

So, the moral of the story is that bin is a very useful word, but not so useful that you can predict with confidence which things will be called bin in another English-speaking country and which things won't. Containers in general suffer a lot of transatlantic name shifting, but I'll write about pots and cartons and jugs some other time...

Getting back to the Swedish start of this entry, I ought to give a little credit where it's due. Part of the inspiration for this blog is a lovely blog on the expatriate experience called How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons. (I found this by chance when I started learning Swedish, then by chance found out that I'm two degrees of separation from its author, Francis Strand, but I've never had any contact with him.) As the name of the blog suggests, it does have a linguistic perspective, with a Swedish word of the day relating to whatever was discussed.

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):

America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.

This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:

There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?

By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:

From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.

Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

• I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.


• Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.


• I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)

*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.

We bought this piece of furniture (from a charity shop) for our kitchen last week, and I am learning to call it a Welsh dresser. It is a low cabinet with an open case of shelves on top. It has a little surface in front of the shelves where one could, say, slice bread. I was stymied in trying to find an American equivalent for this--which may go to show that I am suffering attrition of my native dialect. I've been calling it a cabinet when describing it to Americans, but the more specific name for it is hutch (as I found after searching US furniture retailers' sites). This is a word I know, but perhaps I never got to know it well enough, as I'd never lived in a house with one before now. That's my excuse for forgetting it, at least. Better Half protests "Rabbits live in hutches!" Strictly speaking, according to the furniture sellers, it's the top part that's the hutch, but since I didn't know until recently that the top and bottom halves were separable, I've always assumed that the whole thing is a hutch. (Without the top hutch part, it would be a sideboard--as long as it's in the dining room or kitchen.)

BH often reduces Welsh dresser to dresser, as in We bought a dresser for the end of the kitchen. This, to me, is weird (technical linguistic term), since I think of a dresser as belonging in a bedroom or dressing room. I suppose one could dress a chicken on a Welsh dresser...

While we're in the kitchen...the built-in work surface is called the counter or countertop in AmE, but tends not to be called this in BrE. Location-wise, it's generally referred to as the side, as in The plates are on the side or Cut the carrots on the side (which, of course, is ambiguous). You wouldn't, however, say I bought a new side for the kitchen or The side is formica. Referring to the thing, instead of the location, it can be called a worktop or work surface.

The things with doors above and below the counter/worktop are what I would call kitchen cabinets. Better Half calls them kitchen cupboards, which also works in American English. In BrE, it seems, a cabinet is free-standing.

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...