on accident

Looking through my backlog of requests, I found this one from Neal Whitman, the Literal-Minded Linguist:
I've recently gotten a a few interesting comments on a post from a year ago [well, more than that by now--ed.]. In one of the comments to this post, I quote an ADS-list exchange between you and Ron Butters regarding a semantic distinction between 'on accident' and 'by accident'. What's interesting about the more recent comments, from two Australians and one UK resident, is that 'on accident' seems to be particular to US English. Do you hear 'on accident' from people where you live?

I've chosen this one to reply to because I can answer it in a word: 'no'. I'd call on accident a non-standard Americanism, and I refer you to Neal's discussion and the comments on it for much further rumination on the expression.

But really, I blog tonight in order to accidentally on purpose have the opportunity to thank the readers of this blog for your votes for the Lexiophiles Top Language Blogs 2009--and for all your support over the past few years. I'm absolutely (BrE) gobsmacked to find this blog at the number one spot in the 'Language professionals' category and 14th overall. Wow. I'm hono(u)red to be on the same list as the other nominees. Click on the links to see the full lists.


This blog would be nothin'/nuffink without its loyal readership--whom I've come to think of as a kind of extended family. The kind that are likely to tell you when you look fatter than the last time they saw you and that they liked your old haircut better and to say that they are planning to disown you for the way you voted in the last election (they won't), but who will also take an interest in what you're up to, help out when they can and stand up for you when you need an ally. I'm a couple of posts away from number 300, and was planning on saying something like that when I hit that milestone--but why wait? Thanks for sticking around, reading, commenting and sending me your ideas, observations and anecdotes.

Now, good night!
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the States

I've had a couple of queries lately about the States as a nickname for the United States of America--with some implication that Americans in Britain learn to say this from the British. One query was (indirectly, through their [BrE] tutor/[AmE] professor) from an American student who has come over on a summer exchange program(me). The other was from Laura, who wrote:
I worked in London for a few months last year and was surprised to hear everyone referring to the U.S. as 'the States' or 'America', both names I rarely (if ever) use. Normally I just say 'the U.S.' or even the full(er) name of 'the United States'. I did a sort of poll on this in a Livejournal community I am a part of, here at Brits-Americans. On the whole, people agreed with me that Americans do not call our country 'the States' (a few more call it 'America' though) and if they do, it is generally only after visiting/living in Britain (or a country outside the U.S., even Canada).
Laura has noticed that this isn't just a British thing, but the student, probably with less travel(l)ing experience, considered it to be BrE--and we can investigate that idea. Others seem to think it's an exchange student thing. I found this claim in a review (warning: .pdf) of Stuff White People Like:
Incidentally, every American exchange student is required by the Geneva Convention to use the term, “The States,” preferably whilst rolling his or her eyes. I did it so effectively that I developed minor eyestrain.)
The obvious reason why Americans only start calling the country America or the States when they're abroad is that an American just doesn't have as much reason to call it anything when in the US--for instance, when someone asks an American where they're from when they're in the US, they'll answer Kansas or Cincinnati, not the US of A or any such thing.

But is it used more in the UK than elsewhere? It's a bit hard to tell, but let's start by looking at where on the web some names for the US are used. Apologies for my primitive skills with html tables, but what I've done is to search for America, the States, the US, the USA, and the United States on the web in two sentential contexts in and out of the UK. First, I searched "are you from x" with the proviso that it should not include any sites that had the phrase "Where are you from"--because otherwise you're flooded with examples like Where are you from? The US. This was important because my aim here was to find uses of these names for the US that were more likely to be written by non-Americans. For the Americans, I searched for "I'm from X". The table shows the total number for the "are you from" searches, followed by the results from just the UK, followed by the proportion of world uses of a term that come from the UK, followed by UK-based writers' preference for the term--and then it repeats that for the "I'm from" searches. So, we can see here that presumed non-Americans in the UK tend to call the country (in web-based writing, at least) the US or the USA. If it were a Briticism, we'd expect UK uses in the Are you from context to be a fairly big proportion of the world uses--but that doesn't seem to be the case. The confounding factor would be if it were British, but the British considered it degrading, in which case they might use it in other contexts, but not the Are you from one.


Are you from [x]   UK  UK/World       UK%       I'm from [x]UK     UK/World   UK %
America1270181%13%32,2009223% 14%
the States313124%9%23,20013306%20%
the US709598%44%63,50028905%43%
the USA17,500402%30%30,0006872%10%
the United States127064%4%23,2008424%13%

Before looking at the American side of the table, let's consider whether it is degrading. Ben Zimmer has kindly pointed out to me this claim by 'Areff' on alt.usage.english:
[in response to someone's usage of the States] First off, you get Oy!ed for using that expression 'the States'. This is a deprecated usage outside of military and diplomatic contexts. Odd thing is, the British think Americans commonly use 'the States' (they don't), and the Americans think the British commonly use 'the States' (they do, but only because they mistakenly think that's what Americans commonly do).
A lot of people on that discussion board took issue with this claim. I've certainly never found 'the States' to be deprecating (which is all I can imagine he meant by 'deprecated'), and would think that non-diplomatic contexts would be less sensitive to such connotations in any case. But at any rate, our evidence here is that Americans in the UK use the term at a much higher rate than the British do--since it's only the 4th most common on the British side of the table, but the second most common way for Americans to refer to their home country. So I have a hard time buying that Americans in the UK are learning it from the British.

Now on to the American side of the table, we see that on UK websites Americans use 'the States' one-fifth of the time when asked where they're from, but this accounts only for 6% of the world total of people saying they're 'from the States'. But that 6% is bigger than the percentages for any of the other expressions, so perhaps it is a bit more likely in the UK.

For interest, I also checked some other anglophonic countries' sites. The numbers were very small in some cases, but I'll present here the rankings of the terms in Australian, Canadian and South African sites. The figure on the left is the ranking of the 'Are you from' result and the figure on the right is the 'I'm from' version.
Australia
you/I
Canada
you/I
South Africa
you/I
UK
you/I
America=1/31/12/13/3
the States=4/54/2=4/54/2
the US3/43/33/21/1
the USA=1/12/41/32/5
the United States=4/25/5=4/45/4


If Americans do say the States more often in the UK than elsewhere, one of my hypotheses is that it has something to do with language. When I lived in South Africa, I was conscious of referring to the US as America when I was speaking to someone whose native language was not English. One knows that America can be understood by speakers of most languages, but you need more of a grip on English to understand that the States is used as a proper noun. So, it's easier to use it with the (native) BrE speakers than with people who are speaking English as a second language. I also liked saying the States because the US comes out as 'theeyuwess', which sounds pretty mushy coming out of my mouth, and so I found myself having to repeat myself when I said it in South Africa. (The USA just sounds too [AmE] yee-haw jingoistic somehow.)

But why not in Australia? An English friend has wondered whether in the UK the States has an echo of the Colonies. Maaaayybeeeee. I'm preferring a more pragmatic solution. Larry Horn has a principle I like called 'Familiarity breeds CNTNT'--that is, familiarity breeds reduced content; the more familiar something is, the more economical you can be in referring to it. Maybe the States is more common in Canada and the UK because people there have more interaction with Americans and America than Australians and South Africans have.

But in conclusion, from this not-very-scientific investigation, it looks like the people who are most likely to say the States are Americans talking to Canadians or the British. Do we learn it from the British? Do we learn it from each other? Is it an echo of the Colonies? Hard to tell...
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midterm

Just a (orig. AmE) quickie from my lunch break:

Yesterday, during another lunch break (maybe I have lunch too often), I met a student who's at Sussex for the annual International Summer School--which as far as I can tell has just American students, but I may be wrong about that. At any rate, there are a lot of Californian science students wandering around at the moment. She's working with my friend Maverick, who introduced me as "Lynne, whose blog I was telling you about". At the end of the conversation, the student--let's call her Santa Barbara, after her home university--told me she'd be (orig. AmE) checking out the blog soon. So in order to welcome her, I'm going to point out the little communication hiccup I observed in her interactions with BrE speakers yesterday. If you're reading, Santa Barbara, say 'hello'!

SB is doing a psychology study under Maverick's supervision, but she was having trouble recruiting other students from the summer school to take part. Looking for possible explanations, she said to Maverick--"Well, it's midterm." It looked to me like Maverick was not getting the relevance of this, but happily SB carried on to say "A lot of the students are Physics students, and they have a big exam today." I watched the same thing happen again when the Blinder joined our conversation and SB had to bring her (apparently orig. AmE) up-to-speed on what had been discussed so far. She may have said in at least one case "it's midterms". Again, I could see the Blinder not really getting it, until SB continued on about the physics exam.

When SB said midterm she meant an exam or examination period. The reason for this not transferring well to BrE is that midterm examinations are not very common in higher education in the UK. At our university, if we have tests during the term, they're called coursework tests (I'm not marking that as general BrE, since I can't speak for other universities). It's only very recent that students in UK higher education have testing during the academic term. When I started at Sussex nearly 10 years ago, students had their exams at the end of the academic year for all courses--even autumn term courses that had ended 5 or 6 months before. This was frequent examination as compared to the experience of my older UK-educated colleagues, who, 30 years ago or more, had to wait until the end of their three-year degree program(me) to be tested on everything they had been taught.

I expect that when the Blinder and Maverick heard midterm, they thought (BrE) half term--which is a holiday/vacation period in the middle of a term (though Maverick would know that these students didn't get a break--it's only a six-week program(me)). They can tell us in the comments if I'm wrong about that. I've discussed half term before, so please click on the link to see more discussion and discuss more.

Because US students have midterm exams to contrast them with, end-of-term exams tend to be referred to as final exams or finals, whereas UK students (at least at my [BrE informal] uni) tend just to talk about exams.

Here's another exam-related post, in case you're interested.

And so, to conclude my lunch hour: the fruit salad was rather disappointing. Back to the coalface--which is LynneguistE for 'library'.
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at this time

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic. That was about at the time, but this one is about at this time. It started:

Reader (though he might not be a reader anymore, since it's taken me so long to get to his request) Jon wrote to ask:
I wondered if you could explain why Americans use the phrase "at this time", where a Brit would say "now", or nothing at all.

I recently returned from the US. While on a Washington State Ferry I heard over the tannoy, "Vehicle owners should return to their vehicles at this time."

It seems strange to me, but working for a US company with Americans in the
office, I hear it a lot.
I have to say, Jon, that it's not something I think of as particularly American. (But tannoy, that's British--originally a trade name. AmE would be loudspeaker or more formally public address system--which would work very formally in BrE too.)

That's as far as the draft got. I've just checked some UK and US newspaper sites and found that the Guardian (UK) website had 277,000 instances of at this time, mostly repeats of "Sorry, commenting is not available at this time. Please try again later." That seems like exactly the type of 'empty' at this time Jon was asking about. The Boston Globe (US) and the Times (UK) both had around 5000 hits for the phrase, the Chicago Tribune 12,000. Now, searching these, there's no way to know (a) how many of the examples are the use of the phrase that Jon was talking about, (b) how many are quoted American speech.

So, let's try government sites--and let's limit it to orders of the form "please * at this time" (* being the wildcard in a Google search). The.gov.uk sites immediately examples where a now (or nothing) would have sufficed:
There is currently a suspect bag in Park Place W1. Cordons are at Arlington st and Park Place please avoid at this time

Thank you for your patience and please accept our apologies at this time.

Can you please send us at this time the form of wording your officers are considering so that we can review it at an early stage

So I would be much obliged if you could please freeze the application at this time till I gather required specifications to help you assess the planning
Now, of course, one could say 'Look at all that creeping Americanism in British English'. Or you could say 'Look at all that officialese where they try to use more words to sound more formal'. Or you could say that at this time sounds less 'at this very second' than now does, and therefore sounds less bossy than now.

At any rate, I'd need more evidence of a comparative and historical nature in order to conclude that the origin of this is American--since, as we've seen many times before, just because something strikes you as new and annoying doesn't mean it's not native to your country's dialect. So, I'm putting this in the 'project ideas' file--if one of our students would like to research this using corpus data next year, they're welcome to a neat little project.

In other news...the voting is now on at the Lexiophiles site for the top 100 language blogs. Last year I made it to a respectable number 40, but this year they've added categories and a voting process--the outcome will be 50% based on readers' votes. So, if you'd like to support SbaCL this year, please click on the button!

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adverb placement

American-translator-in-Holland David wrote some time ago to say:
I've noticed that Americans often place adverbial phrases that set the scene at the start of the sentence:

At the time, I was not very interested in his work.

British writers, in contrast, are more likely to put the adverbial element in the middle of the sentence, or at the end.

I was not, at the time, very interested in his work.
I was not very interested in his work at the time.

I believe all these word orders are available in both dialects; it's a question of preference, at least in formal writing.

Indeed, all of these are available in either dialect, and Algeo's British or American English reports that some temporal adverbials occur in medial position more often in BrE than in AmE--though they most often occur in initial or final position in main clauses. He lists during the week, earlier in the week, last night/year, now, this afternoon, today and yesterday as more often occuring medially in journalistic BrE than AmE. Now, I haven't the wherewithal to do a big search, but I searched for at the time in the Guardian on-line and the Chicago Tribune on-line, and counted the first 30 main-clause-modifying at the times in each paper according to whether they occurred at the beginning, middle or end of a past-tense clause. I didn't count at the time when it was part of a longer phrase like at the time of his confinement (because the length of a clause might make it more likely to hang out at the end of the clause), and I limited myself to past tense clauses. My results:

newspaper beginningmiddle end
Guardian (UK)10614
Tribune (US)13413
The moral of the story is: if there is a difference, we're going to have to look at a lot more sentences to build up enough steam to see a significant pattern.

But I do want to note that when these adverbials occur sentence-initially, they are much more likely to be followed by a comma in AmE than in BrE. Searching the Guardian and Tribune sites again and just looking at sentence-initial At the time, 27 out of 30 Tribune instances are followed by a comma, while only 13 of 30 Guardian ones are. (You might protest that this depends on the style sheet of the newspaper and the vigilance of its [AmE] copy editors/[BrE] sub-editors, but note that each of these searches included blogs and readers' comments as well as newspaper text.) In general, British readers find AmE writing too littered with commas, while overly-literate punctuation-dependent AmE readers like me (I presume there are less punctuation-dependent readers who aren't terribly bothered) find themselves having to start sentences over again because we assume that the adverbial phrase hasn't ended yet, but then it doesn't develop into anything bigger. So I read:
At the time he...
And because there isn't a comma to stop the adverbial, I wait for the he to develop into a relative clause that modifies time (e.g. At the time he ascended to the throne, he was only 17). It doesn't matter to my reading mind that a that-less relative clause is not a likely thing to happen after a pronoun after at the time, I HAVEN'T HAD A COMMA YET! THERE ARE NO BRAKES ON THIS THING! I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP!!!

But back to word order.

Adverbials like at the time or last night tell you when something happened, and contrast with adverbs of frequency (always, often, never, etc.), which usually occur in a medial position in either dialect. However, the dialects differ in the placement of these with respect to auxiliary verbs. To quote Algeo "American has a higher tolerance for placement before the first auxiliary". So, either of the following is grammatical in BrE or AmE, but the second is more likely to occur in AmE:

She is usually at work before 9. (BrE or AmE)
She usually is at work before 9. (more likely in AmE)
Now, it's more likely in AmE than BrE, but usually is not more likely in AmE than is usually. As Algeo says, AmE just has a 'higher tolerance' for it. I've just searched for always, usually, and never in my blog posts and found that I've never put them before the auxiliary--except when I used examples because I already wrote about this phenomenon a bit with never. (I thought I was sounding familiar to myself...)


Another adverbial order difference that Algeo notes concerns adverbs of possibility, like certainly or probably. Searching in the Cambridge International Corpus, he found the following, expressed in 'instances per ten million words':


BrE
AmE
has certainly22.7
13.4
certainly has11.7
22.2
has probably21.2
14.5
probably has8.8
18.6
So, again, one can say either in either dialect, but He has certainly left his mark is more likely in BrE and He certainly has left his mark is more likely in AmE. Of course, this works with auxiliary verbs other than has as well.

In other business:
The folks at myGengo, a translation company, have put a mini-review of SbaCL on their 'translation resources' pages, so here is some free publicity for them in return. (I've not used them, so can't vouch for anything, but it looks like an interesting concept.)
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pet, stroke and limerick winner

One of my newer internet addictions is Ross Horsley's My First Dictionary, which is wicked in every sense of the word. One must (if one is me) pause here to note that the 'excellent' sense of wicked is originally AmE. Several of my UK students have assumed that they'd have to explain this trendy BrE slang to me, but I was saying wicked pissa cool with my Bostonian university mates before my current students were even born. (I had a Master's degree by the time my youngest students were born. Who is going to cure me of this senescence?) MFD makes me feel incredibly uneasy and extremely amused at the same time. I don't know if that's a good thing, but I like it. This dose of MFD, from 26 June, raised a lot of discussion of BrE versus AmE in the comments: The comments at MFD were mostly about (mostly BrE) pussy versus (mostly AmE) kitty and the use of having as a light verb in the first sentence. But what struck me, because Better Half strikes me with it all the time, is the use of stroke for where AmE speakers would use the (originally Scottish English) verb pet. So, when I say to Grover Are you petting the kitty cat? Better Half is not far behind with Stroking! Stroking the cat! (He tolerates kitty, no doubt because of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink effect of pussy.) I'm starting to say stroke in this context, in the interest of marital harmony and getting my own back later, but to my AmE ears, it sounds a bit more, um, sexy. This, of course, makes not a lot of sense, since (orig. AmE) (heavy) petting is about (probably orig. AmE) feeling people up. But why should English and my feelings toward(s) it start making sense at this late date? At any rate, I thought an introduction to a very funny website would work as an introduction to our very funny limerick competition. As promised, the judging involved a panel of my friends, whom you may know through their SbaCL-character alter-egos: the Blinder, Maverick, the Poet--and of course Better Half. (With the exception of the ubiquitous last judge, the links take you to their first appearances on the blog.) I asked each to send me their three favo(u)rites, assuming that the cream would rise to the top and there would be a clear front-runner. But there was too much cream. A few got two votes, thus limiting the field a little for my final judging. It came down to Dunce's Rubber and Richard English's Hooters, re-published here:
An eager young Yank on the make Thought he'd finally had his big break. She asked for a rubber but she wasn't a scrubber. Just had to erase a mistake. My girl has a fine pair of hooters Attractive to gentleman suitors. But don't rush too far They're both on her car And she toots them to warn slow commuters.
My decision comes down to the fact that one of these poets had other efforts in the judges' top threes. So, congratulations, Richard English! Your copy of Britannia in Brief will be on its way to you soon, and the authors have asked to reprint the winner on their blog. (Let us know if that's not ok with you!) On a last humorous note, British-Canadian singer-songwriter Luke Jackson (shouldn't he have a hyphenated name?) has sent me a link to the video for his song 'Goodbye London'. This animated treat might strike a chord for the American exchange students out there who've headed back home.
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over-the-counter observations

As I write this (which is actually a few days before I post it--connection problems at home), I am enjoying two British (or at least not-American) things about which I often ask: How did I ever live without this? Crumpets and Syndol. I’ve written about crumpets before back here, and as usual I’m eating them in a very non-British way—this time, with peanut butter and (AmE) jelly/(BrE) jam. (My other favo(u)rite and very non-British ways are with butter and maple syrup or with melted Cheddar and lots of A1 Sauce. Eating those messy concoctions requires a knife and fork.) Syndol is heaven in an over-the-counter blister pack: (AmE) acetaminophen/(BrE) paracetamol with a muscle relaxant of some kind. [Late addition: I shouldn't believe everything my drug (orig. AmE) pusher tells me. It's not a muscle relaxant. See here and the comments.] It does the trick for tension headaches—and just about anything else you want to throw it at. (Since I can’t take ibuprofen, aspirin or opiates [maybe--see comments], this is a godsend.)

Thinking (rhapsodically) about Syndol has me thinking about expressions that are used in AmE that I didn’t really understand until I had met them the BrE context—because over the counter is one of them. We say this in AmE to mean ‘non-prescription medications’, but I never understood why we say it, because in my American experience only prescription medications come from the other side of the (AmE & BrE) pharmacist’s/(BrE) chemist’s counter. The non-prescription medications are just out there on the consumer-accessible shelves in the (AmE) drugstore/(BrE) chemist’s (shop)/(AmE & BrE) pharmacy. But in the UK, a real over-the-counter category exists for things like Syndol. Plain old paracetamol/acetominophen can be found out on the shelves in many shops—and can be found in other types of shops, like supermarkets, (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations and (BrE) corner shops. But for Syndol and real Sudafed (i.e. pseudoephedrine, my other drug of choice at the pollenous moment), you must go to a pharmacy and must ask for it from over the counter. Upon doing so, you will be faced with a number of questions from the pharmacist or their assistant, such as Are these for you?, Have you taken these before? and Are you taking any [insert name of drug that might interfere]? Give the wrong answer (like that you’ve been taking something for a while and your symptoms haven’t cleared up) and they won’t sell you the good stuff, but will tell you to do something sensible, like seeing your doctor.

I presume that all medications used to be truly over-the-counter in the US too—since shopping used to be more like that in general. I don’t know if it’s just because the UK (and most of Europe, as far as I can tell) maintains the over-the-counter category and the US doesn’t, but one can get much better drugs without a prescription here—including painkillers with codeine, which I also enjoyed until my last two doses of similar-but-prescription-requiring stuff landed me (sorry, British taxpayer) in (BrE) A&E (Accident and Emergency -also known as Casualty)/AmE the Emergency Room (or ER, or, as my friend who works in a hospital insists, the Emergency Department—though I don’t know anyone outside hospital employment who uses that phrase). I only took the recommended dose, I swear! I’d just developed some kind of allergy to opiates. (At the first A&E visit, the doctor insisted that it couldn’t have been the pills that put me in so much pain--hence the second visit, that time via ambulance. Many apologies, British taxpayer! And a tip: be very careful with the phrase cold and clammy if you phone NHS Direct. Unless you want an ambulance at your house.)

I said I was thinking of expressions (plural) that involved this kind of linguistic eureka moment, though to be honest, there’s only one other that I can think of: pratfall, which I mentioned back here.

So, expatriates of one brand or another, have you had similar experiences in which your own language made more sense only after hearing it in another dialect/context? And what are the American things that British expats have become dependent on, and vice versa?


In other business:
  • I'm planning to announce the winner to the Limerick Competition tomorrow (that is, if I manage to contact all my co-judges by then). So act quickly if you have an entry to submit!
  • Lexiophiles is running their Top 100 Language Blogs again, so nominate a blog you love!
  • I'm experimenting with Google's AdSense here, having kept this a strictly not-for-profit blog for the past three years. Let me know what you think.
I'll be back soon with a real post about an actual linguistic difference!
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Win a copy of Britannia in Brief!

Welcome to the first SbaCL book review--one of many to come, I hope. Thanks to the folks at Tandem Literary and Ballantine Books, we can celebrate this first review with a chance to win the book. Read further for details.

Today's book is Britannia in Brief: The Scoop on All Things British by Leslie Banker and William Mullins (Ballantine, 2009), an American wife and British husband team. In other words, here's the book that Better Half and I could have written if we'd thought of it first and weren't so gloriously behind schedule with everything else in our lives--like the laundry. Especially the laundry.

The book does what it says on its label: it is a sort of (AmE) Cliff Notes/(BrE) York Notes for Americans wanting to (orig. AmE) bone up on Britain. The chapters cover the geography and history, social structures, arts and culture, politics and government, food and drink, language and daily practicalities of UK life. Having been here 10 years, I didn't learn a lot reading this book--but, boy, if I'd had it 10 years ago, it would have saved a lot of people a lot of explaining. When I first sat down with the book, I tested it by looking up the things that I thought should be in it. Blue Peter? (AmE) check/(BrE) tick. Newspaper slants and allegiances? √ The 1966 World Cup? √ Jeffrey Archer? √ It passed all of my tests but one...but we'll get back to that.

The parts I found most helpful (as a long-standing resident) were in the first chapter--though I'm sure that newer arrivals will find the quotidian and cultural aspects the most immediately gratifying. The section entitled 'Snapshots of British History' starts with Julius Caesar and end with the 7/7 bombings of 2005, filling in enough details on the Glorious Revolution, the Battle of Britain and the Falklands War to give an American a sense of what these things were about. The longer section on Northern Ireland similarly outlines the Troubles and gives the sage advice that "it's better not to express any opinions on the matter of Northern Ireland unless explicitly asked. [...] All in all, it's just better to say that you hope things work out."

What about the bits on language? While there is a chapter on language, there's plenty of vocabulary information throughout the book, including a very useful two-page list of acronyms toward(s) the end. (There's also a two-page glossary, which hits some important words, but whether it includes the one you'll need to look up--well, that's another matter.) The language chapter provides some names whose pronunciation needs explanation (e.g. Leicester = "lester", Berkeley = "barclay") and an introduction to Cockney Rhyming Slang. These are followed by a couple of zesty sections on words with 'dirty' meanings in BrE (but not in AmE) and ratings of how offensive "swear words" are--with handy thermometer graphics. A section on the Welsh language serves the authors' obsession with the alleged lack of vowels in Welsh. (I lost count of how many times 'unpronounceable' and 'Welsh' co-occured in the other chapters.) For the record, Welsh has plenty of vowels, it just spells them with different letters than the English use. I didn't always agree with their list of 'prevalent British names rarely heard in the US'--sometimes because I thought the names weren't particularly prevalent in the UK, but mostly because they left Nicola off the girls' list. But these are minor points.

The book ends with a quiz that should probably replace the UK Citizenship test, since it tests things that UK citizens generally know, like the name of the pub on Coronation Street and who Brenda and Phil the Greek are (unlike the real test, whose questions native-born citizens typically fail).

The book is terrifically up-to-date, which does mean it'll become outdated all the faster. And this may be its failing in the one section that I found really wanting: the 'British comic gems you may be less familiar with'. Appropriately, this starts with the Carry On films. But it then hops on to Monty Python--which (a) is not something anyone is less familiar with (as they acknowledge), and (b) overshoots The Goon Show (and particularly Spike Milligan), which was one of the first things I tried to look up in the book (and one of the greatest influences on Python). The other comedians listed are all currently practicing, and some of them have crossed the pond rather often. Rather than Steve Coogan and Catherine Tate (whom I'd run into soon enough if I were a [orig. AmE] newbie to Britain), I would have liked to have read about the Goons, Tony Hancock, the Two Ronnies and Morecambe & Wise--the types of comedians who influenced later ones and whose presence is still felt--albeit a little more obliquely than the Coogans and Tates--in the culture. In other words, with such a rich comedic history, it's a shame to have so much focus on the present.

But that's one section of one chapter in an otherwise surprisingly comprehensive book. The authors have shown a real knack for getting to the heart of Britishness and presenting it in bite-size helpings. I'd heartily recommend this book for any (North) American who:
  • is about to embark on a year abroad/work placement/move to the UK
  • is going to visit people in Britain
  • is in love with someone in Britain
  • is slightly obsessive about Britain
And here's your chance to own a copy. Your task, should you choose to compete, is to write a (preferably humorous) limerick illustrating a US/UK cultural misunderstanding. Make your submission to the comments section. (Make them clean-ish, please.) Other readers are welcome to weigh in on which they think are the wittiest and best written, which will influence the judges (three of my friends and me) when we make our decision on 30 June. In order to enter, make sure we have a way to contact you--either through your Blogger profile or by sending an e-mail to me with your e-mail details. Happy limericking!
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like-less predicates

Ben Zimmer, the man responsible for my blogging about shit, has sent me a number of BrE sentences over the past few months. Each of these did not contain the word like where an American like Ben might've expected it. And, really, that was the point of the scatological post that Ben inspired too. He'd noted that BrE speakers are more likely to say I feel shit whereas AmE speakers would have to say I feel like shit. My response then was to say that shit can act as an adjective in BrE--and that is true. After all, one can (if one is BrE-speaking) say something like What a shit film.

But it's also the case that one can say I feel [NOUN PHRASE] in BrE and mean 'I feel like [NOUN PHRASE]'. Ben's example came from The Telegraph, in a story about a man who was injured while using Twitter:
"I guess you could say I feel a right Twit," he said.
For the grammar geeks out there, I'll quote Algeo's British or American English on the topic, "A group of copular verbs (...) have predominantly adjectival complements in common-core English, but also have nominal subject complements in British more frequently than in American." In other words, in AmE or BrE, you could say I feel old (because my students told me yesterday that Brad Pitt is 'a sexy old man'). You could also say I feel like an unsexy geriatric case, because the like phrase in that case plays an adjectival role in the sentence. But in BrE, you can also forgo the like and just go straight to the nouny part of the description. [In the Twit example, we also have the BrE noun-intensifier right, but let's save that for a rainier day.)

Here are some examples showing more of this pattern:
sound: He sounded a complete mess. [Jeremy Clarke in The Independent]

look:
Joey Barton has made me look a fool. [Oliver Holt on Mirror.co.uk]

appear
: I was trying to appear a total gentleman! [on ducatisti.co.uk]

Smell and taste are not found as regularly in the 'smell/taste like' sense, but a BrE expression one can find with them (and look and sound) is to [PERCEPTION VERB] a treat. So:
The honeysuckle shampoo is just gorgeous and she smells a treat. [customer feedback for a dog grooming salon]

Do you love cooking simple, no fuss meals that taste a treat? [ad(vert) on FilmBirmingham site]

Nokia E63 Handset Looks A Treat [digital lifestyles]
And if something looks or tastes or is a treat, then it can also (BrE) go down a treat--i.e. be received well.
BSC Seminars Go Down a Treat at Health and Safety 09 Show [British Safety Council]
If we were to to say any of these in AmE, we'd probably have to put a like in (and get rid of all the other Briticisms in the examples)--i.e. it looks like a treat, made me look like a fool, etc. The one that really confuses AmE speakers is (BrE) go down a bomb, which is not only ungrammatical for us without the like, but also means the opposite of what we'd think it means. If a performance bombs in AmE, it is horrid and no one likes it. But if it goes down a bomb in BrE, it's fantastic and gets a wildly positive reception. Ben sent me an example that had to do with Susan Boyle--the now-famous also-ran in the Britain's Got Talent television (BrE) programme/(AmE) show, and he's blogged about it here.

There are other things one could say about going down in BrE (you stop that sniggering right now!)...but we'l just leave that on the ever-increasing backlog of stuff to write about.

But if you want to know what really goes down a treat, check out this review of Better Half's work from today's Guardian! Then go and buy the entire SmartPass back catalog(ue), so that we can keep Grover in shoes!
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sarcasm and irony

I’m very happy to welcome my first guest blogger, a student who’s finished the work for her Sussex degree in English Language and Film Studies, which included a dissertation comparing British irony and sarcasm to American—the latter of which has seen more academic attention. Rather than twiddling her thumbs while awaiting her result, she has graciously allowed us some insight into her work. Gentlepeople, I give you Solo:


As I’m sure you’re aware, the British are very fond of saying that ‘Americans don’t get irony’ and expressing over-inflated national pride in our astounding power of sarcasm. It of course isn’t the case that Americans don't get irony [see this past post--ed.], and while BrE applications of sarcasm can be very subtle, we’re not the unequivocal masters of the form. For example, I always thought the typically AmE expression ‘I could care less’ to be a particularly stupid grammatical error on their part, until this week when I saw it pointed out here, that the expression is in fact intended sarcastically (see also this past post, which is not so kind to Americans--ed.). Perhaps we misinterpret this because in our arrogance we Brits don’t expect sarcasm from Americans without all the attendant cues, bells and whistles. Or maybe because I’ve mainly seen it written down in novels and forums, rather than heard it said aloud.

Over the course of my research into the differences between American and British (especially English) sarcasm however, it became clear to me that the difference isn’t so much in the way we use it, as in the way we define it. While the AmE definition emphasi{s/z}es negativity and saying the opposite of what is meant, Brits seem to have a far broader definition, which includes humorous exchange, clever wordplay and affectionate insults or criticisms of others (even those we don’t know, which I think may be the most fundamental cultural difference).

To put it another way, there are things we British will do in conversation which we would call sarcastic, but which Americans would not. For example, in the irreverent media, Sir Bob Geldof, of Live Aid fame, is frequently referred to as ‘Saint Bob’. Now this is obviously not entirely sincere, but it isn’t fully contemptuous either; we are mocking his interminable altruism and campaigning, but we also respect all his charity work and dedicated parenting. So although we don’t completely mean that he is a saint, we also don’t mean that he isn’t and I think most Brits would refer to that as sarcasm, but I’m also fairly sure our American counterparts would not. Feel free to correct this flagrant generali{s/z}ation ☺

In AmE ‘sarcasm’ seems to be very much a subordinate term for a specific type of pragmatic use. (Many theorists will argue it’s a subcategory of verbal irony, but I won’t go into that here.) But in my (humble) opinion it has a much broader application BrE. Thoughts would be much appreciated.

I shall furnish this largely speculative theori{s/z}ing with some spurious exemplification:

If a friend of mine were to be self-deprecating above and beyond the call of Britishness, I might say something obvious like “Yeah, cos (=AmE ’cause--ed.) you’re the worst national award-winning photographer St. Martin’s [a top art college—ed.] has ever had,” in a heavily sarcastic tone. Equally I might agree in a very sincere sounding way with “Yeah, you are quite sh*t.” Or I might say “Don’t say that, you’re actually really good,” or “You’re not that bad”--both in a way that made it sound like I didn’t think they were good at all. Then again I might feign ignorance and comment “You were lucky to get in really,” or ask “How did you manage to pass the course?” in an ingenuous fashion.

All of these I would quite happily and definitively class as sarcastic utterances, but my research suggests that under the AmE theoretical rubric, they would fall into other categories. I think our predilection for teasing each other and continually (BrE) ‘taking the piss’ has come to be associated with sarcasm as an everyday conversational form in a way that it has not in AmE, where there seems to be more of a time and place for it.

Regional and gender differences in production of sarcasm have been quite conclusively demonstrated in the literature. Megan Dress and others (2008) carried out some research comparing attitudes to sarcasm and likelihood of use between Northern USans, from upstate New York, and Southern USans from Memphis. They found that the Northerners were far more likely to find sarcasm amusing and assume friendly intentions than their Southern equivalents and therefore much more likely to use it spontaneously. The difference was even more marked between the two sets of men. The Northern perspective seems to be much closer to the British attitude, though the sources Dress et al(.) provide suggest that the examples of use may still not be as broad as the unofficial BrE definition seems to allow. A majority of respondents in this study mentioned the negativity of sarcasm, though not an overwhelming majority. This might suggest that the insistence on sarcasm as a negative form is generated by linguists and literary types more than speakers.
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Abbr.

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