top-ups and refills

Dec 26, 2009
Christmas is a time for dealing with family, and when you have a transAtlantic family, many dialectal conversations arise.  But this time, it wasn't my family.  Grover's little best friend is a little girl who lives in our (very AmE-sounding) neighbo(u)rhood/(more BrE-sounding) area with her American parents, and they came to our Christmas eve do with the mother's (French) mother and her Brooklynite beau.  Many Briticisms were commented upon during the course of the party, but the one that stuck with me was top-up,  to which I've become so inured that I wouldn't have immediately thought of it as a Briticism.

The context was mulled-wine serving--about which we must first have an aside.  You don't get it as much at Christmastime in the US--probably because we have our standard Christmas drink, egg nog, instead.  But when I moved to the Midwest, home of many Scandinavian-descended peoples, I did come to know it well.  And, whenever we served it (back in the days when I was living with a Scandinavian-descended person), we served it in hot drink vessels--coffee mugs or the like.  In restaurants, it might be in the kind of glass mug in which you'd be served a caffe latte.  But whenever it is served in the UK (in my now-extensive experience of southern English Christmas parties), it is served in wine glasses.  Is this a universal difference between the US and the UK, I wonder?

But back to our party: Better Half asked whether anyone would like a top-up (of mulled wine) and the Brooklynite commented (something like): "Now there's a linguistic difference.  We'd say refill."  

And I thought, "Oh yeah, we would, wouldn't we?"  Americans refill drinks, the British top them up.  In the UK, the common American experience of (orig. and chiefly AmE) bottomless coffee (i.e. free refills) is not common at all, but in the US, the (AmE, often jocular) waitron will flit from table to table, coffee pot in hand, asking "Can I get you a refill?" or "Can I warm that up for you"?  If this were to happen in the UK, it would be most natural to ask if the customer would like a top-up. 

But the other common use of top-up these days is what you do to a pay-as-you-go (BrE) mobile/(AmE) cell phone.  (The picture is a common site in the windows of (BrE) corner shops and (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations in the UK.) Which led me to wonder: what do Americans say for that?  Pay-as-you-go phones are much more common in the UK than in the US, but from what I can gather from the interwebs, refill is used in this context too.  Here's a 2004 news release about an American "prepay" phone service:
As always, Verizon Wireless prepay service allows customers to refill their minutes over the phone, at a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, online, as well as at RadioShack, Circuit City and other authorized agents.
You could also in the UK use top(-)up for a number of other things that are refreshed by the addition of more of something.  For instance, you could get a top-up loan (well, maybe not in the current economic climate), a top-up dose of an(a)esthetic and you can top up your tank with petrol/gas.  The phrasal verb top up is only cited from 1937 in the OED, and the noun top-up only from 1967, explaining why it's not as common in AmE.  American readers, what would you use in these contexts?
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icing and frosting

Dec 23, 2009
In the meat post, I mentioned making Nigel Slater's recipe for 'ginger cake with clementine frosting'--which appropriately raised the question of why I hadn't marked frosting as AmE. I've changed it now to 'orig. AmE'; since Slater is a BrE speaker one can see that frosting has made inroads here.

But the AmE frosting = BrE icing equation is one of those things that is more complicated than one might assume. That's because icing is AmE too--it just refers to something more specific (at least for me and some others, as we'll see below). To illustrate, here are the ingredients lists (though I have abbreviated the measurements) from two recipes in my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

Creamy White FrostingPowdered Sugar Icing
1 cup shortening
1.5 tsp vanilla
.5 tsp lemon extract
4.5 to 4.75 cups sifted powdered sugar
3 to 4 Tbsp milk		1 cup powdered sugar
.25 tsp vanilla
Milk


First thing to note is powdered sugar, which is also called confectioner's sugar in AmE, but is called icing sugar in BrE. (I'd say powdered if it were on a doughnut, but confectioner's if I were using it in a recipe. According to the British Sugar website, powdered sugar is not as fine as icing sugar.) Second thing to notice is that the frosting recipe has a big hunk of fat in it (butter is usually used, cream cheese is another option), and the icing recipe doesn't. Now, I do not claim that this is always the case in every AmE speaker's use of icing and frosting, but it is the distinction the (orig. AmE) cookbook (BrE cookery book) seems to make, as neither of the icing recipes has any fat other than some in the milk. Without investigating the recipe, I can tell the difference between frosting and icing (in my dialect, at least) in that frosting (due to its fat content, no doubt) isn't hard or smooth. A glaze would have to be an icing, not a frosting. The UK also has a hard kind called royal icing and makes much more use than US of soft, roll-out fondant icing—all of which would be frosting in my dialect.

CakeSpy has an excellent article on the topic in which they take issue with the many (even expert) claims out there that frosting = icing. Here's an excerpt--remember, this is referring to American English:
This idea is backed up in a Williams-Sonoma release simply entitled Cakes, in which it is noted that icing is "used to coat and/ or fill a cake...similar to a frosting, and the terms are frequently used interchangeably"...but ultimately "an icing is generally thinner and glossier" than frosting, which is "a thick, fluffy mixture, such as buttercream, used to coat the outside of a cake." Of course, the book even goes on to even differentiate a glaze from the two as being "thinner than either a frosting or an icing"...which makes the slope all the more slippery--but does further define the difference between these sweet toppings.

I think that frosting the word is making its way into BrE because frosting the (fatty) thing is making its way in too. The standard cake topping in AmE is a buttercream frosting--but not so in BrE, where one of the most 'classic' cakes, the Victoria sponge, has jam and whipped cream in the cent{er/re}, but just some sugar on top. Christmas cake has royal icing, which is made with egg whites. The UK has taken to many American treats in recent years, such as the (orig. AmE) cupcake (click on the link if you want to bemoan the fate of the (BrE) fairy cake) and cream cheese frosting on carrot cake. I think that the more frequent use of frosting on these shores reflects an appreciation that it's a different kind of thing from icing, and therefore deserves a different name.

Before I go (to bed), a few items of 'any other business':
  • I'm finally making use of my Twitter account (lynneguist), which I'm going to use for linguisticky/cultury kinds of reflections/observations/incidents (saving the other stuff for Facebook). Having followers means something much more mundane these days than it did a decade ago, doesn't it? At any rate, you're welcome to become one...
  • My tweets today were about the fact that I was on (AmE) tv/(BrE) the telly--BBC One, no less--for a few minutes in the context of an hour-long documentary on Scrabble. If you're in the UK and interested, it's one of the better representations of Scrabble on the screen and can be seen on BBC iPlayer for the next week. (Of course I have my quibbles, particularly that they couldn't spell my name right. Sigh. But it was possible for even Scrabble scenesters to learn something from the international perspective in this one.) Rest of World readers, I'm afraid the site won't let you watch, as you don't pay into the BBC pot. (When are they going to stop linking (BrE) Television Licences to television ownership, I wonder?)
  • A sweet side note on Grover's linguistic development: She's a big fan of Cookie Monster, and sings 'C is for Cookie' with gay abandon, but it only struck me the other day how English my little girl is. She helped me cut out Christmas cookies, and when they were baked was eager to have one. She took her first bite and said with wonder '(BrE) Biscuit!' I don't know what she thought cookies were before this point, but now she's able to translate it into her own dialect. (Second birthday coming up in four days--wayhey!)
  • Merry/happy Christmas!
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Words of the Year 2009: staycation and go missing

Dec 16, 2009
My thanks to everyone who has engaged in the nominations and debate on Words of the Year for 2009. Here's a reminder of the rules (I'm a Libran with Virgo rising/ascendant, I've gotta have rules):
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
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2009, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.
And now, without further ado...

The 2009 SbaCL Best American English to British Import is...

staycation

Yes, the recession has hit the UK and it's become both stylish and necessary to forgo a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation in Thailand or Morocco and instead brave the British weather in a seaside town or scenic valley. But wait...what's that you say? That's not what it originally meant in American English? All the better for proclaiming it the best AmE to BrE import of the year!

The word is eminently American--the British do not use vacation to refer to something that one can 'go on'. (They do use it to refer to the time in which, say, university is out of session--but not for the non-work activities that one does while free from one's term-time duties. That's your holiday.) And while more British alternatives, like home-iday and holistay have been proposed, they have not caught on:

CoinageGoogle hits
on .uk sites
Broliday1
homeliday73
holistay445
home-iday613
staycation16,000

Word Spy's early AmE citations have it squarely as staying in your own home during one's time off--making a vacation/holiday of being at home (which may include doing the local touristy things or indulging oneself in other ways). WordNik's more current quotations show its use as being more 'vacationing/holidaying close to home'. In BrE it generally has the latter sense, and one's staycation might not be all that close to home, as long as it's in the UK. (Then again, many US states take longer to cross than the longest journeys in the UK, so 'close' is always relative...)

Why did it catch on? First, there was definitely a need for it. The British discuss holidays/vacations a lot more than Americans do, since they generally get a longer vacation/holiday period from their employment. And many of them use that time to go abroad. Abroad is pretty close, for one thing, and many people are keen to get some sun. (They ought to be. Did you know that "in the UK, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in all adults is around 14.5%, and may be more than 30% in those over 65 years old, and as high as 94% in otherwise healthy south Asian adults"?) Second, the euro strengthened while the pound weakened and other financial calamities. Third, the papers still had their travel sections and supplements to fill and, boy, do they like portmanteau words (or blends, as we linguists tend to call them).

But all of this doesn't tell us why the AmE one was preferred over the BrE equivalents. This may be a matter of taste, but I would say that it's just because staycation sounds better. Unlike home(l)iday, there's no unclarity about how to spell or pronounce it. Unlike holistay it doesn't sound like it should have TM after it. And unlike Broliday, you can immediately recogni{s/z}e the ingredients in the blend.

Thanks to Emmet for nominating this, and to the commentators on the nomination, who helped to seal its fate as AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year.



So, on to the BrE-to-AmE WotY. It's not a particularly new borrowing, but it generated a fair amount of discussion this year. Ladies and germs, I give you:

go missing

And now I brace myself for the complaints that "It's not a word!" Well, that depends on how you define word, and "Lexical Item of the Year" just doesn't have the same ring to it. And I make up the rules, so why am I having to answer to you, Little Commenter Voice in My Head?

At the Dictionary Society of North America conference this year, Garrison Bickerstaff of the University of Georgia gave a paper on the rise of go missing and its various forms (went, gone, going, etc.). His research, based on newpaper data from the past 10 years, shows that the form has steadily gained momentum in US newspapers. Meanwhile, it's also increased in frequency in UK newspapers--indicating that it is less and less seen as 'too informal' for the news. Here are some numbers from the first and last year in Bickerstaff's study. Each represents the number of forms of went missing (the most common form) per ten million words of his corpus:


19982007
AmE0.77014.675
BrE53.25398.400

So, while it is still not used in AmE at anything like the rate at which it's used in BrE, we can see that it has made definite inroads.

Bickerstaff was not the only academic type to ruminate on go missing this year--it was the subject of quite a bit of discussion on the American Dialect Society e-mail list. Another academic discussion was by Anya Luscombe of the Netherlands, who gave a paper on BBC Style at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference [warning: link is a pdf file]. Luscombe discusses four 'pet hates' of BBC writers, one of which is 'Americanisms' and another is go missing. While her work clearly isn't about the phrase in AmE, it's interesting to see how attitudes to it have changed in the BBC style guides. Luscombe quotes these editions:
Prior to 1992: no mention
1992: ‘“Gone missing” was originally Army slang. It now has wider use, and has become journalese.’
2000: ‘People do not “go missing”. They are missing or have been missing since.’
2003: ‘Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms. Disappear and vanish do not convince and they suggest dematerialisation, which is rare.’
And going further, a current BBC webpage says:
Missing
Perhaps it's to time to admit that further resistance against "go missing" is in vain. The problem comes when you are writing about the event in the past. " Mr Childers disappeared last Tuesday" is as improbable as "Mr Childers went missing" is ugly. ".....was last seen" is an acceptable alternative.
What I love about the importing of go missing into AmE is that American peevologists don't like it in spite of the fact that it is British! While Americans often suffer a verbal inferiority complex when they encounter a British English (standard or not), grumpy Americans are standing their ground on this one. Perhaps they don't realize that this phrase comes from the Mother Country?

Went missing was Grammar Girl's pet peeve of the year 2008. Another example comes from Peevologist-at-Large Robert Hartwell Fiske's Silence, language and society (reproduced by the eminently reasonable Mr Verb on his blog in June):
"Gone" or "went" missing is dreadfully popular today. Everyone from reporters on "CNN" to detectives (or their writers) on "Without a Trace" now prefer it.

People are so dull-witted and impressionable that, today, in this country, the popularity of "gone" or "went missing" has soared. Words like "disappeared," "vanished," "misplaced," "stolen," "lost," "deserted," "absconded" are seldom heard today because "went missing" has less meaning, or less exact meaning, than any of them, and people, especially the media, perhaps, are afraid of expressing meaning. What's more, "went missing" sounds willful or deliberate, and, indeed, sometimes that connotation is accurate, but the child who has been kidnapped is hardly agreeable to having been so.

Now, that kind of language grumpiness is just precious (and published regularly in Mr Fiske's publication, the Vocabula Review)--language is changing because people are afraid of meaning anything. My goodness, I do hope Mr Fiske is wearing his tin foil hat because the media are probably right now trying to suck meaning directly from his brain so that they can club baby seals with it.

Go missing is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

For more on this, I point you to another language commentator who picked up on this phrase this year, Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe (and not just because she quotes me!). It was her research on the phrase earlier in the year that put it in my mind as the frontrunner for the WotY crown, and it wears it well, I think.

Happy New Words!
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buying meat

Dec 7, 2009
My latest book deadline is now behind me, and while I desperately try to catch up on the work that's piled up while I've been editing-editing-editing, I've also finally found the opportunity to catch up a bit on entertaining, and so had friends over for lunch yesterday. I go back and forth about whether I "should" use American or British recipes when I cook. The American ones have familiar foods and familiar measurements (cups, ounces) but force me to make substitutions for the many basic ingredients that are just not basic here, whereas the British ones are new-to-me recipes that require (AmE) a kitchen scale/(BrE) kitchen scales (since the measurements are often weights) and figuring out whether the cake will be moist enough if I leave out the sultanas (AmE [near-equivalent] golden raisins). (For me, the hardest part of Christmas in the UK is not the lack of snow, but the presence of dried fruit in all the baked goods. I like dried fruit. I like baked fruit. But I do not like baked dried fruit, and I miss [AmE] Christmas cookies.)

Yesterday I compromised: British baking recipe (ginger cake with clementine (orig. AmE) frosting), American main course (chicken and dumplings). Since it's hard to get shortening (tip for American expats: Trex or white Flora are the closest things to Crisco--look for them next to the margarine) and lots of other baking-type products, it seemed like the British cake was the safer way to go. But the first ingredient on the chicken recipe brought home the fact that no recipe is safe from trans-Atlantic opacity. It called for a fryer. This is AmE for 'a chicken suitable for frying' (OED), but what it really means is a 'a small chicken'. Larger are broilers and larger still are roasters. Now, I don't know off-hand how big any of these chickens are supposed to be, as in the US, I'd just go to the supermarket and buy the one label(l)ed 'fryer'. So, I have to add a bit to the recipe:
  • Preheat wireless modem to 24 Mbps.
  • Google 'fryer chicken lbs'
  • Translate pounds to kilograms
  • Log on to internet grocer
  • Order 1.5 kg chicken
But at least I was just buying a whole chicken. Butchered meats are a shopping minefield. Sam wrote recently to ask:
how do American names for different cuts of steak translate into English names?
"They don't always translate" is the answer to this question. It's not that the cuts of beef have different names in the two places, it's that they are different cuts of meat. Here's the picture of British beef cuts from Wikipedia:

And here's the American:


Then, once you get into particular cuts of steak, there is plenty of room for other differences. I've not found a good source on UK versus US on this, and it's my impression that AmE just has a lot more words for steak types. Here's a helpful guide from someone on answers.com (with the misspellings corrected and all AmE terms in bold):
... rib steak which has bone in or rib eye which is boneless, same cut of meat different name because of bone removed. very good with lots of marble. porterhouse from the hind half with bone in and tenderloin on other side of bone, take bone out and it's a new york strip, t-bone [orig. AmE, now used in BrE too--ed.] same but smaller tenderloin. tenderloin itself lies right under the back bone as is the most tender steak on the cow, because there is no movement of any part of it, therefore it lies there doing nothing, all 3 are very good. sirloin comes from the hip and is the most unpredictable piece of meat, sometimes very tender other times not,it is right above the rump section.
We've discussed the pronunciation of fil(l)et here before, but another one to mention is that in BrE one sees fillet steak on menus, but in AmE one tends to see filet mignon as a rough equivalent.

Meanwhile, on the pig:


And the British ones:


I've already discussed bacon briefly elsewhere. The other main pork difference that I can think of is gammon, a word I'd never heard in English until moving to the UK. According to someone else at answers.com (again, spelling is corrected):

[Ham and gammon] are both pork but ham is usually a leg of pork that has been aged, cured, smoked or cooked. Usually in the UK, its wet cured in a brine (salt) solution, then it's cooked. Gammon is the hind leg cut from a side of bacon, so it's cured (again in brine) but it's not cooked before you get it.
Basically, if you're served a roasted ham in the UK, they call it gammon, as far as I can tell. (I've also discovered that you can bake a ham in AmE but not BrE.)

And that's what I can tell you about meat. My education in such things has been curtailed by Better Half's vegetarianism. I am ardently plotting my next opportunity to lure friends and acquaintances into our home on the pretext of entertaining them, but with the true motive of cooking meat for myself.
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Words of the Year 2009

Nov 24, 2009
I'm celebrating (for two-and-a-half minutes) a major milestone in the preparation of the book manuscript (FINAL VERSION--eek!) that is due by the 30th (double EEK!) by logging on briefly for a little cut-and-paste posting. (Spot the differences between this and last year's version!)

Word of the Year season has begun. 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
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2009, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. (I'll admit I have something in mind for category 2--but I can be persuaded.) I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness (WotYness?) 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. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week after Christmas.
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Sesame Street

Nov 14, 2009
While Grover takes/has her nap, a little reflection on her bi-dialectal language acquisition. She's six weeks short of being two, and (orig. AmE) talking up a storm. I'd wondered whether she'd get any Americanisms from me, but (a) I tend to use BrE words when in the UK and (b) I'm just her mother. It's not me she's going to get Americanisms from. It's Elmo.

So, she says (BrE) nappy and cot and loo and peebo (that one is the creche's influence, I think). I've had a little influence on her (and her father) with (AmE) washcloth and bathtub (as opposed to BrE bath). But I took it upon myself to sing the ABC song with (BrE) zed, which led me to entertain myself by making up new endings for the sake of rhyme:
...double-you, ex, why and zed
Now I know my ABCs...

...and it's time to go to bed
...next time you can sing instead
...and a zombie is undead
...you're a Grover born and bred
...can you get that in your head?
In fact, when rocking her to sleep I'd entertain myself by changing the last line each time. But all my zed training was all for (BrE) nought/(AmE) nothing, since this came into our lives:



Now the ABC song bring cries of "Elmo, Elmo!" and Grover sings it beautifully and Americanly. (Her rendition/rendering of it is the ringtone on my (BrE) mobile/(AmE) cellphone.) I was also being very good about saying (BrE) ladybird, not wanting her to be the odd one out for saying ladybug, but then we started singing this song, and the more transparent compound won:



Which is to say that Sesame Street is running our lives. And you know what? I don't really mind all that much. It's much better than Barbie or the Teletubbies or Thomas the Tank Engine, in my book. First, it has a great aesthetic--largely due to the Muppets. Second, it has a great sense of humo(u)r that speaks to child and parent on different levels. I mean, have you seen their Mad Men parody? Or the reggae joy that is Do de Rubber Duck? (And I'm always secretly thrilled/shocked when Hoots the Owl says near-taboo things like "Don't be a stubborn cluck".) Third, the songs are good enough to listen to even when your child is napping, and you just can't say that about the Wiggles. A lot of that is, again, the humo(u)r. I also think that the fact that the (BrE) programme/(AmE) show is made in the mother-city of the musical comedy helps. I also like that it is grounded in a kind of reality (where one has to brush one's teeth and learn to share)--it's not about a dream space like In the Night Garden (which is the drug of choice for toddlers in the UK at the moment, and which I just (BrE) can't get on with aesthetically or interest-wise). And Sesame Street is made by a production company that is all about children. Any profits it makes go toward(s) projects for children around the world.

What makes me reflect on all this is the fact that Sesame Street is celebrating its 40th anniversary (which means that I was 4 when it first started--part of their original demographic), and the BBC website published a piece called "Why did Britain fall out of love with Sesame Street?", which was interesting reading. Grover gets her Street fix in a number of ways. She was introduced to it by an animatronic Elmo doll, a gift from her American Papa. Then we got a CD of Sesame Street songs and now we have probably about five 20-minute sessions with SesameStreet.org each week. (Grover: "Puter. Elmo. Turn it on. Apple puter."*) The shop in our library (yes, our library has a shop, like a museum) sells Elmo and Ernie dolls, but the library holds no Sesame Street books or DVDs, strangely.

One British television executive is quoted in the BBC piece as "The style of the programme is a tad out-dated - there are very few puppet shows around now. Perhaps LazyTown, but that's a very different tempo". Um/Erm, who cares? Does my toddler really need something with a faster tempo? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage a longer attention span in children? And what's wrong with puppets? Children go to bed at night with cuddly toys, not two-dimensional animations.

Unlike in the rest of the UK, Sesame is enjoying a renaissance in Northern Ireland, where a franchise version, Sesame Tree, is produced locally, with funding from several peace and reconciliation organi{s/z}ations.

I do wonder a bit if different preferences for children's literature and television in the two countries reflect different ideas about childhood. The things that I know and love from childhood are (orig. AmE) wacky. The characters are brash and outgoing. Americans in the 1950s had Howdy Doody, but the British had the Flower Pot Men on Watch with Mother. The British program(me)s seem to have a lot more narration than American ones, which seem to have more direct interaction between characters and children. From the Flower Pot Men to Clangers to the Teletubbies, there are many British children's television characters who don't speak in discernible language, whereas American children's television is extremely focused on verbal humo(u)r (click on any of the Sesame Street or Howdy Doody links above). Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to these generali{s/z}ations, but they stand out when I reflect on the children's television that adults talk about.

I was prompted to think about this even more after I posted a status update to Facebook yesterday, in which I proclaimed (too hastily) that there should be a law that all children's picture books should rhyme. I take that back, but I will say that any children's book with text is not a very good one if there isn't some joy to be found in the use of language. An American friend in Japan responded that:
A British friend of mine in Japan HATES Dr. Seuss, and says his kids didn't like it either. Sounds like a blog topic to me....
So here we are. First thing to note about Dr. Seuss is that the British tend to pronounce it as Doctor [sju:s] or sometimes even Doctor [zju:s] (we've looked at the reason behind that before), whereas for Americans, it's Doctor [su:s]. But after that point has been made, there are certainly lots of people in the UK who like Dr Seuss, but, like my friend in Japan, I've heard British people say he's overrated (and have never heard an American fault the stories--though not everyone loves his drawing style). And I do wonder whether that is because Americans are looking for brash humo(u)r and language play in their children's stories, while the British are looking for calm and comfort.

I expect that this is the type of topic that's going to touch nostalgic nerves, so fire away! I'm in the (AmE) home stretch before a big deadline, so please excuse me if I go a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks. I hope I've given you plenty to talk among(st) yourselves about.


*An aside: It's a little scary how many brand logos Grover already knows before the age of two. We're not (BrE) label-Mabels, and she doesn't watch commercial television, but having flown on Delta four months ago, she still points at triangle-chevron-type things and says "Airplane!" We were in a cafe the other week and she was pointing out the window saying what sounded to me like "Books, books!" Then I reali{s/z}ed it wasn't books but Boots--she knows the logo and the name of the (BrE) chemist's/(AmE) drug store chain where we buy her nappies/diapers. Today she went to the door with glee, exclaiming "Ocado man!" (Indeed, it was.) And pointed at their logo with interest, saying "Ball". Of course, she's learn{ed/t} the Sesame Street brand too, not to mention Maisy, Charlie and Lola, and Miffy, which are brands of a type too. The most embarrassing thing is when she sees the Coca-Cola logo and says "Mummy". I really thought I'd hidden that dirty habit.
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well done the

Nov 6, 2009
Often these days my blogging consists of answering queries from readers wondering about this or that thing they've heard or read. I'm going to turn that on its head and ask you about something. It's this little type of exclamation:
In each Festival match of 30 overs we scored over 115 runs and on average only lost 4 wickets an innings – well done the batters.* [Derbyshire Cricket Board]

Well done the players, we knew you had it in you and well done Juande Ramos, you sorted the tactics just right to get the best from our lads [comment on SkySports]

Well done the runners [comment on a JustGiving page]

This for us was an excellent result, playing in a section above a our current one and finishing in the top half of the results, nothing wrong with that, well done the band. Well done the other bands yesterday, it was by all accounts a great contest [Amington Band]

* I also found one example of Well done the batsmen. I know cricket purists will be annoyed by the batter in that example--but BH tends to associate the expression with batter rather than batsmen, so that's what I looked up first.
So...this well done the thing. I can't say it. Better Half says he hears it often in cricket commentary, but that it's rather new. I can't find anything discussing it in the usual places I'd look.

It looks like a congratulatory utterance directed at the named group, but if you're congratulating someone, you'd usually do so by addressing them. In the second example we see an example of that: well done Juande Ramos. But if you're addressing a group by common noun rather than by a proper name, you wouldn't normally in English use a definite determiner (the). So, Well done, runners would be fine in any form of English.

The other thing that it could be is a sort of indirect congratulation, where you're not addressing the congratulatee (congratulee? congratuland?) directly, but expressing your congratulatory sentiments about them to someone else. In this case, common core English would usually use a to: Well done to the runners! Or 'Well done!' to the runners.

Most of the cases of this that I've found involve no mid-phrase punctuation. With a comma after done, I'd think it a straightforward case of direct congratulations, and so would note the weird use of the whoevers as a term of address. Without the comma, it's less clear--though note that the comma is not always used when address terms are used--and may be less often used (or used less often) in less-comma-ful British English. One doesn't see things like the runners being used as a term of address elsewhere in the language. Race officials don't welcome racers with *Hello, the runners. So, it's less than clear that the runners is being used as a term of address.

But I can see no motivation for dropping the to in the indirect form either. I can't imagine similar droppings of to in other indirect greetings. Hello to the children, yes. Hello the children, no. So, I'm sticking with my initial assumption that we're supposed to understand the runners as a term of address in Well done the runners. But then again, there is the BrE Up the runners, which is also missing a preposition (with) from my AmE perspective. BH's perception is that that use of up is (his words) (BrE) "toffee-nosed Oxbridge talk" and well done the is in a different class--but others may have different perceptions of the two constructions. I'd love to hear about them.

Because BH knew this from cricket, I had a snoop around other countries--I found only one case on an .au site (searching for batters, batsmen, bowlers, players and runners), none on .ie, .pk, .nz or .za, and the only one I found in a few pages of sorting through Indian sites was by a New Zealander. So, it's looking pretty British to me--though whether it's coming from a particular dialect is not at all clear, since I've found it all over the country.

So, who's got [orig. AmE] the scoop on the origins of this construction? And is there anyone out there whose brain isn't a bit jangled by it?
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this/these premises

Oct 31, 2009
I was in London yesterday, and blew some money on a black cab, since a cancel(l)ed train had made me late. While paused at a stop light, I read a notice outside a (BrE) railway station/(orig. AmE) train station that said something like "This premises closed for necessary maintenance", which left me wondering: whoever says this premises instead of these premises? When one encounters unfamiliar forms or usages in a dialect other than one's own, one naturally suspects that one overuses the impersonal pronoun that the form is native to the other dialect and not one's own. My methodology for discovering whether this is true: search for the phrase on the web, then search for the phrase only on UK sites on the web. If one of the forms has a UK proportion that is out of line with the alternative form, then assume that form is BrE. So, for instance:
59% of the global instances of (BrE) climbing frame are from UK sites
whereas only about 1 in 27 global instances of jungle gym are UKish

1 in 40 instances of mashed potatoes are from UK sites
but 1 in 3 instances of mashed potato are from UK sites

So...is it a British thing to ignore the plural marking on premises?
23% of the world's this premises are on UK sites
24% of the world's these premises are on UK sites
This premises accounts for about 11% of the total this/these premises in the UK.
It looks like the British use the singular version to some extent, but probably were not the originators of it, or else we'd probably see them having a greater proportion of the world hits.

I also compared .ac.uk sites versus .edu sites as a way of comparing UK and US that avoids the trap of the international .com.
About 3% of this/these premises on .ac.uk sites were this premises.
About 1.5% of this/these premises on .edu sites were this premises.
So, it does not seem to be a feature of 'educated' language, but it's more common in BrE academic circles than AmE ones.

So whose form is it? My money was on Australian English, which gives us this window dressing:


(click photo for source)

Comparing world hits to .au hits gives us:
1 in 19 these premises is Australian
1 in 4 this premises is Australian
Australians write this premises 37% of the time.
And, consistent with these findings, Australians are fairly happy to write the premises is (40%) rather than the premises are.

(Feel free to repeat the exercise with New Zealand and South Africa to see if it is general antipodean English--I'm coming down with a severe case of Googler's neck.)

But then I was re-reading Arnold Zwicky's post from last month about this premises (looking at why it is that something with an apparent plural suffix would be treated as a singular), I noticed mollymooly's comment (hello!): 'Irish law treats “premises” as singular, e.g. “any premises or any part of a premises” in S.60(2)b of the Insurance Act'. And, whoa, look at this:
Irish English uses the premises is and this premises nearly twice as often as the premises are and these premises.
16% (1 in 6) of the this premises on the web are Irish.
1 in 75 of the these premises on the web are Irish.
Which is to say that you only had to read all that about Australian English because I wrote it before reading M's comment. And, to be honest, I'm fairly surprised to find it so close to England, but so far as well. Did the Australians get it from the Irish, or is it arising separately there? Are the proportions in Scotland different from those in England? Those are questions I'm not prepared to answer.

(God knows, someone new to the blog is going to want to mention math(s) in the comments. Don't do that. Click here instead.)

Oh, and by the way, BOO!

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write (to) someone

Oct 26, 2009
Frequent contributor Marc wrote to say that he:
received this comment about a draft letter I prepared:

"Can you please put in I AM WRITING TO YOU NOT I AM WRITING YOU..this is amercian and bad english."

Comment is from an England-born Australian.

I am willing to admit that this may be American English (and the letter is on behalf of an organization that is supposed to use "international" (i.e., British) English. But it's certainly not "bad English", is it? (And I do find it easier accepting criticism on my English that is spelled and capitalized properly... but that's another issue.)

If there is a difference between UK and US English on this, does it apply to other verbs, such as "send"?
Well, as long as people are being judg(e)mental about others' language here, I'll say that it's Rude English (RdE) to claim that someone else's dialect is 'bad English'. Let's see what Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) has to say about write:
The transitive AmE use = 'to communicate with (a person) in writing' is shown in the following examples from short stories in the New Yorker. I had written my mother about all this (1987); Liza, my dear, I have never written you yet to thank you for going out to our house (1993). This construction was formerly standard in BrE ('frequent from c 1790' says the OED), but it is now in restricted use unless accompanied by a second (direct) object, as in I shall write you a letter as soon as I land in Borneo. In old-fashioned commercial correspondence the types We wrote you yesterday; Please write us at your convenience were often used, but nowadays to would normally be inserted before you and us.
Meanwhile, John Algeo's British or American English? says:
Ditransitive [i.e. with two objects--Lynneguist] use of write (I wrote them a letter) is common-core English. But some ditransitive verbs can also be used with either object alone: I told them a story. I told a story. I told them. In American English, write belongs to that category: I wrote a letter. I wrote them. In British English, however, if write has a single object, it is normally the ditransitive direct object, and when the ditransitive indirect object occurs instead, it is the object of a preposition: I wrote to them. Also in British, if the direct object function is filled by direct or indirect discourse, the same prohibition against the ditransitive indirect object exists: I wrote to them, "I'll come on Sunday," not ?I wrote them, "I'll come on Sunday." I wrote to them that I would come on Sunday, not ?I wrote them that I would come on Sunday.
So, to sum up:
  • I'm writing you a letter is standard AmE and standard BrE.
  • I'm writing you to ask a question is fine in AmE and used to be fine in BrE.
As for other verbs, Marc mentions send, but we can't use that with just the recipient of the sending in either dialect: *I sent you. (* means 'ungrammatical')
send: I sent a package to him. I sent him a package. I sent a package. *I sent him.
So, send is in the wrong class of verbs for comparison. Write in AmE is more like tell and the following verbs, in that it can both take two objects without any prepositions and it can have just the recipient of the communication as a single object (which may or may not occur with other non-object kinds of things, as indicated in the parentheses/brackets below).
tell: I told Di a secret. I told Di (about the fire).
ask: I asked Di a question. I asked Di (about the fire).
teach: I taught the students an equation. I taught the students (about fire safety).
All of those ditransitive and transitive versions are fine in BrE--so it is only write, as far as I know, that creates a problem. Having a look in Beth Levin's wonderful* English verb classes and their alternations (1993), I'm a little disappointed to find that she's not treated this class of verbs ('Verbs of transfer of a message') fully--but she does admit to this. Since the class also includes things like preach and quote and those don't fall into the same patterns as ask and teach and tell, there's yet some work to be done here.**

So, this is all to say that there are some patterns to be found in verbs of this type, but that not every verb follows them, so it's not surprising that this is an area where dialectal differences might crop up. But don't blame the Americans. We're not the ones who (orig. AmE) ditched a perfectly good transitive verb!

* No, I'm not being sarcastic. Linguists adoooore books like this.
** Hey, final-year students--why not you?!
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à la carte

Oct 18, 2009
In my last, menu-related post, I cheated and let someone else do all the work. As my penance, I'll do the work on this menu-related one. Moe wrote (a half a year ago) to ask:
I'm from the US and my boyfriend is from Liverpool. Last night at a restaurant (US) he ordered a sandwich a la carte. I asked him if he wasn't hungry enough to get the fries\chips that came with the sandwich. This launched into the discussion of him stating, rightly so, that a la carte means "according to the menu". By his definition, this means just ordering from the menu directly instead of special ordering.

From my understanding and from what I've asked other Americans, a la carte means in resturant terms "by itself". Meaning if you order a steak a la carte, you would not be receiving mashed potatoes or other items along with it.

Is his understanding correct in Britain and if so, what would they ask for in a restaurant if they wanted an item "by itself"?
This is as much a difference in our expectations of how restaurants work as a difference in language, I'd say.

À la carte comes from French, bien sûr, and is used in opposition to table d'hôte--more commonly called (these days) prix fixe. In the prix-fixe situation, the restaurant offers a meal of several courses with few or no choices as to what you get in which course. You get what the chef has decided to put together. In the US, I think I've only ever seen this in the most expensive restaurant I've ever been to, though I suppose it's the same thing as a meal deal at a fast food restaurant. (But I've yet to come across a burger (BrE) pedlar/(AmE) peddler who asks you if you want your Big Mac à la carte. I believe the appropriate idiom is the sandwich or the meal?) In the UK, prix fixe is a more familiar concept--both because more British people will have experience of eating in France, where prix fixe menus are common, and because they're not entirely uncommon in the UK. That is to say, I've had prix fixe in the UK at restaurants where the (AmE) check/(BrE) bill was more in line with the cost of a ticket to the theat{er/re}, rather than the cost of a ticket to Hawaii.

Ordering à la carte, then, is ordering from the (individual courses) menu rather than ordering (AmE) the whole shebang/(BrE) the full monty. So, Moe's boyfriend saw himself as ordering a sandwich as it comes according to the menu (which may be with chips/fries or what have you).

But while we don't in the US think of ourselves as having prix fixe menus, it is the case that restaurants often distinguish between 'dinners' (sometimes called entrees in this case) and simpler courses. For example, a menu might be divided into 'pasta', 'sandwiches', 'pizza' and 'dinners'. Where I come from, a popular dinner is prime rib.1 If you order prime rib, they might ask you if you want the dinner or to have it à la carte. If you have the dinner, then it will come with salad (or sometimes the option of soup) and one or two side dishes. This always flummoxes Better Half when we go to a certain restaurant in my hometown. He orders his portobello mushroom thingamajig and is then somehow offended when asked what kind of dressing he wants on his salad.2 (Even worse, they expect him to eat his salad before his dinner! The injustice of it all!) My mother, on the other hand, is regularly shocked and dismayed when she orders a main course in England and gets only what it says on the menu--a piece of meat. And you should have heard her when she ordered veal parmesan in Ireland and wasn't served a side of spaghetti with it.3 If the menu says 'rib-eye steak' or 'veal parmesan', then you're probably going to have to look at the side-dishes menu if you want any vegetables. The exception to this, of course, is if it's a roast dinner at Sunday lunch. If it's Sunday lunch, you will be served so many vegetables that you could conceivably fulfil(l) your five-a-day requirements until Wednesday.

So, it looks like Americans have sort of reinvented the prix-fixe menu as 'dinner', but don't really think of it as a menu--just as the main course. When they want a simpler and less expensive meal, they order à la carte, which almost means 'off the menu' in this case. The equivalent in the UK would just be to say 'I'd like my steak without the potatoes, please', and I'd be very surprised if that made it any cheaper for you.

And just in case all this reminds you of (AmE) à la mode, let the link take you there.

1 I've never seen prime rib in the UK, though the term itself is not an Americanism. Instead of having rib roasts and prime rib, one tends to see thinner-cut rib-eye steaks on UK menus. Someday, when I have a lot of energy, I will have to do a post on different cuts of meat in the two countries. In the meantime, please consult the maps of cows on Wikipedia.

2 I've never been asked what kind of dressing I want on my salad in the UK. You get what you get, and it usually tastes of mustard. My commenting on this will probably send some people to the comments section to exclaim that American salad dressings (particularly French and Russian) have disingenuous names--since the comments section serves as a magnet for salad dressing-related complaints.

3 I've started to think of BH and my mother as two sides of a coin, which raises the question of what/whom he's the better half of. Maybe it means it's a good thing I'm turning into my mother. Now I'm just confusing myself.
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Abbr.

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