Separated by a Common Language

This mail from American Susanna had me chuckling:

I wanted to tell you my experience with the term gutted. I've always associated it with "eviscerated", especially when applied to a human being. When applied to a document or law or something of that nature, to me it means "emptied of its important features". If referring to things like a burned house, it means destroyed so that nothing remains but the outer shell.

Last year I took to reading the online version of a newspaper in Scotland; I can't remember which one now but I was in the midst of a fascination with the Orkneys so it was probably in that vicinity. In the headline about a break-in and theft at a home, the newspaper said the residents were "gutted". Well! That seemed quite callous to me, to put a word that harsh in the headline. I assumed, you see, that the residents had been killed and eviscerated. So I wrote a note to the editor saying I thought it was pretty bad form.

Imagine my surprise to receive an email from a reader of the newspaper letting me know that the newspaper editor had published my email with a laughing note about the differences in American vs British English! Because, as you know, gutted in British English means some variation of "highly distressed".

I will tread very lightly when emailing non-American newspapers!

A good lesson for all of us!

To give a little more info about BrE gutted--it's a relatively recent, informal (some would say 'slang') term. It was added to the OED in its 1993 edition, with quotations going back only to 1984 (but, of course, it could be much older in speech). Their senses for it are: 'bitterly disappointed; devastated, shattered; utterly fed up'. The last of these doesn't ring true for me--I'd usually interpret it as 'devastated'--that is, a feeling as if you've been emptied out. Of course, it's used for much lesser things as well. Google "I'm gutted" and you'll get lots of sport-related exaggeration.

A while ago, I mentioned the (BrE) rugby term scrum and compared it to the AmE (regional) term dogpile. Chris E wrote today to ask a related question--which jumps to the head of the question queue because it's so simple to answer. Chris wrote:

If you are both a rugby and American football football fan, you will notice many obvious similarities between the two. I played rugby at school in England in the 70s and became familiar with the term scrummage, shortened to scrum in most usage nowadays. In the US, I have understood the word scrimmage to mean at least two things - 1. a term generic to many, if not all sports, meaning a practice game (a friendly in BrEng) 2. a specific American football term with which I'm not familiar.

Can you comment on the root or roots of these? I feel confident that they share a common heritage, but I don't know for sure.

It's simple to answer because the OED does all the work for me. (I can't claim to understand American football and am completely clueless about rugby.) In the OED, scrimmage and scrummage are treated as variations on the same word, and the etymology is given as:

[Altered form of SCRIMISH n., the ending being associated with -AGE suffix. Cf. the parallel skirmage, obs. var. of SKIRMISH n.

This is now used primarily as a sporting term. The older i-form is common in all senses, and has become predominant in American Football, whilst the u-form is preferred in Rugby Football.]

So, yes, they share a common origin. But the fun thing (for me, tireless defender of Englishes*) to notice is that we (again!) have a case of British people messing around with the language and Americans staying true to the original form--contrary to the popular stereotypes. Not that messing around with English is a bad thing, of course. After all, we wouldn't have poetry without some messing around.

* Actually, that's a lie. I'm a very tired defender of Englishes. The tiredness has little to do with the defending, though.

John Wells sent me a really concise request (well, I'm reading the request into it):

AmE I should have never done it = BrE I should never have done it
- I don't think you've discussed this one, have you?

No, I've not/I haven't discussed it, but John Algeo has in his book British or American English?

Adverbs of frequency (generally, never, usually), like those of probability, tend to occur in medial position, after the first auxiliary, if there is one. However, with these also American has a higher tolerance for placement before the first auxiliary than does British: She usually is at work from nine to five versus She is usually at work from nine to five.

Concise response!

I'd feel a bit bad about such a short post, though, so here's another never fact. Algeo lists a "distinctively British" sense of never: 'not by any means'. He gives an example from a David Lodge novel (I hear the protagonist of the latest is a linguist...): "You're never Vic Wilcox's shadow?"

A little snooping on the internet brings up an abstract for a 2008 paper by David Willis (or by Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas and David Willis) that comments a bit more on this:

There are a number of contexts in Present-Day English where never marks sentential negation rather than negation quantified over time:

(1) I never stole your wallet this morning.
(2) a. You’re never her mother. b. That’s never a penalty.
...

In (1), unavailable in standard English but widespread in nonstandard varieties of British English, never conveys pure, but emphatic, negation in the past. In (2), possible even for many speakers who reject (1), it conveys a pragmatic meaning beyond pure negation: (2a) can be paraphrased as ‘There is no reasoning by which I can reach the conclusion that you are her mother.’ (quantification over reasons rather than time). In such cases, an inference of surprise, as in (2a), or disbelief, as in (2b), may be made.

We've already looked at special BrE use of never mind, so click the link to see more on that.

So there you go. A post with no self-revelatory anecdotes or gratuitous pictures of baby and with perhaps the lowest proportion of my own words ever! I always tell my students that if they quote their sources rather than paraphrasing in their own words (and citing the source, of course!), then they've missed out on the opportunity to demonstrate to me that they actually understood what they quoted. Oh well/never mind, I hope you'll excuse me from that demonstration--it's time for bed. And I may have fit in an anecdote or self-revelation after all.

It's been a while... but here I am to wish you Happy New Year!

But how do you say it? Biochemist writes to ask:

Why do Americans put the emphasis on New - as in: 'enjoy the NOO year holiday' or 'What are you doing at Nooyers?'
Brits refer to the New Year evenly emphasised: 'I'll see you next term, in the new year....' 'Did you have a good time at Christmas and New Year?' and so on.

The 'noo' versus 'new' issue is one that I've discussed before, but the stress difference took me a while to appreciate. I said it to myself a few times and didn't hear the difference Biochemist described. Coming back to it a half-day later, I did hear the difference in my own speech--but it does underscore the point that I'm losing it, dialectally speaking.

At any rate, Biochemist asks why, and of course, the answer is: Americans say it their way because it's what they hear from other Americans, and the British say it that way because it's what they hear from other Brits. One might hope that it's part of a general rule for how to pronounce compound nouns and that the rule differs in the US and the UK, but to my knowledge no one's discovered such a rule. (Some of you may be wondering why I keep calling New Year a compound when it's two words. It may be two words in spelling, but we use it as one word--and so it is pronounced with compound stress of some sort, rather than in the way that we would pronounce new year as a phrase made of adjective + noun, in which case the stress would usually be on the noun.) Here's a bit from the abstract for a research project headed by Sabine Arndt-Lappe and Ingo Plag at Universität Siegen:

It is generally assumed that compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. bláckboard, wátchmaker). However, there is a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. apricot crúmble, Penny Láne, Tory léader) that is unaccounted for in the literature. [...] It turned out that, although making correct predictions for parts of the data, none of the structural and semantic mechanisms proposed in the literature works in a categorical fashion, and that probabilistic and analogical models are more successful in their predictions than traditional rule-based ones.

In other words, English compound stress is irregular. And where there are irregularities (or really complex regularities with different options for applying them), there's the opportunity for cross-Atlantic variability. You could say here that AmE uses the more 'typical' compound stress and BrE is doing something a little funny--if it is your wont to point out ways in which AmE makes more 'sense'. While it's probably wrong to say that one language variety makes more sense than another, it's an awful lot of fun to make that claim when you're an American living in the UK, dealing with condescension about your language on a regular basis. In any case, perhaps Arndt-Lappe and Plag or others will find something to answer Biochemist's question, but it's going to take some digging. Good luck to them! (And thanks to my colleague, Herr Dr Phonologist, for pointing me in the direction of their work.)

This wasn't my first New Year query--the last one has been sitting in my inbox since two New Years ago. It came from Justin, who's probably given up looking for answers to his questions on my blog:

what are Americans meaning when they say "Happy New Year's"? (I'm guessing at the apostrophe.) Is this "Happy New Year's Day" or is there something more interesting going on here?

First, we have to note that Happy New Year is a common expression in AmE--the possessive variation is not the only AmE version. Happy New Year's --with or without an apostrophe-- gets 9.7m Google hits, as opposed to 90.7 for Happy New Year. Of those with the 's, 97,000 are Happy New Year's Day, 678,000 are Happy New Year's Eve. My intuition is that Happy New Year's can be used to mean either of these--or both simultaneously. In other words, we might be using it in order to be vague about which bit of the holiday we're wishing you well for, since it spans two days--or, at least, an evening and a day. Of course, the version without the 's seems to wish people well for the year to follow, not just the holiday itself.

Thanks for coming back to read after my month-plus holiday from blogging. It seems perverse to call it a holiday since it was full of hard labo(u)r--a different kind from last year's. (Not that I went through a hard labo(u)r last year...but this time I was absent for the birth of a book, rather than a baby.) My schedule continues to be relentless, with deadlines smacking me in the face (I wish that they'd whoosh by me like they did for Douglas Adams, but mine are set on a collision course) and a one-year-old whose remaining moments of babydom I am savo(u)ring. So, I'll continue to aim, as I did last year, for a post a week (I may fail) and ask for your patience in waiting for me to respond to your e-mails. Happy New Year!

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:

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.

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!

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?