Dialect fail in books - your help?

Something I've been meaning to ask you: could you help me in finding material for a talk I'll be doing soon?

I'm giving a talk called Whose Language Is It Anyway? at the first Brighton Book Festival ("Bookstock") on 9 June (click the Whose... link for details). Since it's a book festival, I'd like talk about some books. So I'm looking for examples of dialogue, first-person narration or anything, really, in which the dialectal features of the character are not right.  Really what I want are examples of US authors getting UK dialects wrong or UK authors getting US dialects wrong...but things from other anglophone countries might be helpful too.

(What I don't need is film dialogue or film accents, thanks!)


So, has any bad dialect representation stuck in your head? It'd be really helpful if you could provide author and title info with the examples. And if you read anything relevant before the 9th (or after, even), I'd love to hear about it.

And, of course, there is the possibility that some examples may be intentional.  When a UK book is published in the US, for instance, some unfamiliar words might be changed for the US audience (as famously happened for Harry Potter--warning there are a lot of errors at the link. Part way through the list, they seem to have reversed 'US' and 'UK').  It must happen in the other in the other direction too--so if you'd like to point any of those out, I'd be grateful. (The one I can think of is that Melanie Gerth's children's book Ten Little Ladybugs is Ten Little Ladybirds in the UK--and from what I can tell on the internets, the book is originally American.  And that tells you all you need to know about why I need help finding books. I haven't had time to read a novel since maternity leave. I look forward to reading my next one in retirement.)

So, have you got/do you have any examples for me? I'd love your help... 
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do you have/have you/have you got

Dipping into the email bag, we have a months-old note from Andy:
I was wondering whether you've done anything on your language blog regarding the uses of the phrases "have you got", "do you have" and "have you". I get the impression that "do you have" is the preferred form in America, whilst "have you got" is more usual in Britain. "Have you" is maybe considered rather old-fashioned in the UK these days; I'm not sure about its status in the US however.
Andy, you are a talented observer of language. While we've covered a similar topic before (I haven't/I don't have/I haven't got--see the comments too), I'm particularly inspired to do this one today as I've just been reading a paper by Peter Trudgill that cites these constructions as providing evidence that BrE is being influenced by AmE--before concluding based on a broader range of evidence that "there is no conclusive evidence one way or the other for convergence/homogenisation or divergence/disintegration at the level of grammar."

To grammatically achieve a yes/no question in English, the question has to start with a verb. Not any verb, but an auxiliary verb (or 'helping verb'). (Verbs that aren't auxiliary verbs are called lexical verbs.) If you have an auxiliary-less sentence, then you usually have to add an auxiliary to fill that beginning-of-question slot. So, if you want to ask if someone wants a pineapple, you have to add the meaningless (in this case) auxiliary do just to fill out the question structure and make it grammatical: Do you want a pineapple? rather than Want you a pineapple? But have can be either a lexical verb (as in I have a pineapple) or an auxiliary verb (as in I have found a pineapple, where found is the lexical verb and have is there as an auxiliary to carry the tense). Verbs that don't need do-support for question formation and negation are sometimes called operators.

So, let's assume that one needs a pineapple (as I do now that I've thought of pineapples). So you stand on the street corner and ask passing strangers for a pineapple (as I'm about to do).

Starting with the shortest of the possibilities we have:
(1) Have you a pineapple?
Here we're using the stative meaning of have, 'to possess'. In the English of England*, only the stative meaning of lexical have can be an operator. (In Scotland and Ireland it may be possible, according to Trudgill, to use a more dynamic meaning of have as an operator, as in Had you pineapple for lunch?) Operator use of stative have is, according to John Algeo, "said to be somewhat old-fashioned British [...], but it is hardly imaginable in American" (p. 30). Americans know of it, of course, from the nursery song Baa, baa, black sheep (have you any wool?), but outside of storybook contexts, they wouldn't expect to run into it.

 BrE prefers our next candidate:

(2) Have you got a pineapple?

You can say this in AmE as well, but it's not the default way to ask for pineapple. Have got, of course, is sayable in non-questions as well. But considering that the British say it more than Americans, it's funny that Americans are more particular about what it means. As we've discussed before, AmE makes the distinction between have got for possession (I've got a pineapple) and requirements (I've got to go) and have gotten for acquisition (I've gotten a pineapple from the fridge). Many language pedants (or peevologists, as they have come to be known in the trade) on both sides of the Atlantic (but probably more US than UK) insist that have got should be avoided in the possession or requirement senses because have alone is more elegant. To them, I point out some of the quoted users of have got in the OED: William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, W.M.Thackeray, Lewis Carroll...

At any rate, because we can say You have got some pineapple, we can ask Have you got some pineapple? Have is an operator in all dialects in this context. What differs is whether you prefer to say it that way. We'll look at the numbers after considering the final, and most AmE, possibility:
(3) Do you have a pineapple?
So, in this case, have is treated as a non-operator lexical verb, and do must come in and fill the operator space. This is the way we usually form questions with lexical verbs in English, and it's the preferred way for AmE speakers to form questions about possession.

Now what surprised me in investigating this was how much AmE prefers (3) over (2) (especially since I've seen have got derided as an ugly Americanism by uninformed BrE speakers). Using Mark Davies' Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the BYU-British National Corpus (BNC), I searched for 'Do you have [determiner]' and 'Have you got [determiner]'. By putting [determiner] at the end, I got all cases of Do you have any, Do you have some, Do you have those, Do you have a, etc., but none of Do you have to [verb], Have you got to [verb], or Have you got [verbed]. The result:
AmE: Do you have = 3092, Have you got = 99.  So 31:1.
BrE:  Do you have = 245, Have you got = 450.  So 1:<2.
Now, whether the two corpora are really comparable is debatable, but it's worth noting that COCA is about 20% spoken language and BNC is just under 18% spoken--so it shouldn't be just a difference in spoken-versus-written proportions that is making the differences so stark.


So, the lessons of today are:
  • If you are on a UK street corner, say Have you got a pineapple?
  • If you are on a US street corner, say Do you have a pineapple?
  • If you say Have you a pineapple?, you risk assault for non-normative behavio(u)r.

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FOOTNOTE
*I really resist writing English English, as word reduplication (as in Was it a salad salad? or I bought a book but not a book book) implies 'the real thing' or 'a prototypical exemplar'. And before you say 'but it is the real thing', which English English are you talking about?  
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I'm not being funny, but...

Of course, I can't exactly remember the conversation that inspired this post. But as we were leaving a café, Better Half said  I'm not being funny, but Costa's coffee has really gone downhill.† And I thought: that's the British idiom I'm going to cover next, because there is just so much Britishness in it.

In fact, in a 2009 paper in Discourse & Society, Judith Baxter and Kieran Wallace describe a particular use of it as:
the typically British idiom ‘I’m not being funny’ [used] to downplay the effect of a sensitive or non-politically correct comment
The phrase I'm not being funny but occurs five times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and zero times in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (both at corpus.byu.edu). The material in the BNC is 20+ years old, and since the phrase seems to be on the rise, I would expect it to occur more often these days. In 2008, it made a BBC list of 20 most hated clichés. There, a 'Rosie Spectacle' comments that it's "usually followed by a highly irritating and officious remark." Let's see if that's true.

All the BNC examples come from the 17.8-million-word spoken part of the corpus:
  1. I 'm not being funny but she can't stick up for herself, that girl can't
  2. Giles won't tell me but he definitely knows the two people that've laid her. Oh aren't they lucky gits. And I think that I 'm not being funny but I think that Jim did one.
  3. I 'm not being funny but I think that's actually maybe quite important, 
  4. The contract sorry is very specific. I 'm not being funny but we're nitpicking now at the difference between [...] site instructions and V Os
  5. And I 'm not being funny but when Malcolm did it, we would do that [a physical recount] almost two or three days after the stock taking if there were odd counts
Is I'm not being funny but preceding "sensitive", "irritating" or "officious" comments in each case? Well, it depends on what you are sensitive about. In some of these cases, there is clearly the potential for causing offen{c/s}e--for instance, in (1) the person might be saying something critical about a friend. In others, it's not clear that anyone would disagree with the statement, as in BH's comment about coffee, or in (3), a context in which all the interlocutors seem to be agreeing that it's important to be sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired at some event. In my experience, the minimal requirement for an I'm not being funny but prologue is that the speaker is expressing an opinion. The optimal contexts for using it are those in which the statement (a) could be interpreted as a complaint or a criticism or (b) might not be shared by everyone. In the coffee example, it was hardly the type of thing that would have offended me, so I was amused that he'd bothered to preface it in this way. But he still said it, he says, "So you won't think I'm petty. Out of some insecurity." It expresses a strange kind of plea to be taken seriously along with what seems like an implicit apology for having had an opinion.

This relates to various things that Kate Fox discusses in Watching the English. There are the "modesty rules"--i.e. cultural rules that enforce the appearance (but not necessarily the reality) of modesty and the importance of not seeming earnest, but instead always being ready to keep things light with humo(u)r. So, you have an opinion, but the need to appear modest means that you have to avoid sounding self-important. The avoidance of earnestness means that people are always ready to assume that you're joking if you seem het up* about something. So, what do you do if you want to state an opinion? You try to disguise it as a small fact ("she can't stick up for herself"), preface it with I'm not being funny but to signal that something controversial is coming, then let the listener fill in a lot of the opinion (e.g. 'she is weak and probably deserves what she gets if she won't stick up for herself'), so that you don't have to earnestly or controversially say it. 

I should say, one doesn't absolutely need the but in the phrase, but it's very often there. And we can say I'm not being funny to sincerely mean just that--for instance, as a protest when someone starts laughing after you've told them something sad. That's not the pre-emptive use--the 'let me put this negative opinion here' use--that one hears so much in the UK. That said, I think that in AmE, at least, one would be more likely in those more literal cases to say I'm being serious rather than the negated I'm not being funny. 

Blogger is acting very strange these days...I hope you'll be able to post comments below!

Postscript, the next morning:
I blogged in a rush last night, which isn't the best thing for working on something pragmatic.  Let me just add--the funny in I'm not being funny but can indeed (as some people have written to say) be read as the 'queer, peculiar' sense of the word. But that meaning is not unrelated to the 'humorous' meaning. It's best translated, I think, as 'I'm not trying to be difficult, but...'. But I do believe that the choice of funny in this phrase plays on this ambiguity--it's saying both 'I'm not making a joke' and 'I'm not being eccentric'. (Glad to see some comments are getting through--I know some others haven't. What's up with Blogger, eh**?)

† I belatedly found where I'd written down what BH said, so I've replaced my earlier 'the coffee is really disgusting' with the much more British understatement 'has gone downhill'. 'Has become disgusting to me' is what he meant though. This means I've also changed some further references to his statement. And, for the record, I like Costa's coffee and BH has been complaining about everyone's coffee lately...
* orig. BrE dialectal & AmE, now more common in BrE
** The eh is prevalent in Canadian English but also in my not-so-far-from-Canada AmE dialect.
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bunting

I feel the need to mark the royal wedding (lower case, please! The Guardian Style Guide says so!) on this blog, because I think American readers will expect me to say something. But I have very little to say about it. Having married in the UK, I can tell you that there are not a lot of linguistic differences between weddings. There are some different traditions, but not many different ways of phrasing the similar traditions. I could blog about all the incorrect things that have been written about British English in the American popular press (I haven't seen a single piece--and I've seen dozens--that isn't riddled with silliness), but I'd like to be finished before the couple's silver anniversary. The main problem with the American press is that they've not been reading this blog. Of course.

So, here's a short-but-sweet difference, suggested by Not From Around Here:


In BrE, this is bunting. In AmE, I'd call it a string of pennants. This picture comes from a panicky article in the Telegraph:

Royal wedding party 'crisis' as bunting stocks run low


Now, I suspect that some AmE speakers will know this sense of bunting. The most recent edition of the American Heritage Dictionary includes it as 'Strips of cloth or material usually in the colors of the national flag, used especially as drapery or streamers for festive decoration.' But, judging from comments/questions I've heard in the cacophony of American voices commenting/asking about the wedding, I don't think it's widespread in AmE at this point. Compare the results for a search for bunting on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and you'll see what I mean.

Growing up in the US, I knew a decorative sense of bunting, but it was limited to this stuff (from Amazon.com):
So, in my AmE, pennants are pennants and bunting is bunting and that's that. But what of these things? (From a Facebook update by Planted Feet.)



In BrE, they're still bunting, but in AmE, they're probably not pennants, since they're not pointy. I don't think I've ever had the problem of naming these things in the US, because they're just not as common, but I'd probably call it a string of little flags or some such thing.

The original meaning of bunting refers to the type of material that flags are made from, and then, by extension, it refers to things that are made out of that material. But the understanding of it particularly as 'strings of (decorative) flags' is ubiquitous in the UK. This sense in particular is not recorded in the OED (2nd edn, 1989), but I think it'll need to be in the next one, as I think it's the sense that most BrE speakers know--regardless of whether they know the more general 'material' sense.

There are, of course, other (unrelated) meanings for bunting. It's a kind of bird, for example. And, apparently, there's a dialectal difference here. In English generally, it applies to birds from 'Emberizinæ, a sub-family of Fringillidæ', and the particular species are generally called by compound names like rice bunting and corn bunting. But in AmE it's also '[a]pplied by extension to any bird of the bunting subfamily, and to similar birds of other families' (OED).

An AmE sense is related to baseball. To bunt is 'to stop the ball with the bat, without swinging the bat'. For more on why you'd want to do that, see Wikipedia.  This comes from an older BrE-dialectal word meaning 'to strike' (OED notes it in Wiltshire and Sussex).

Then there are the baby senses.  OED has "A term of endearment: in ‘baby bunting’, the meaning (if there be any at all) may possibly be as in Jamieson's ‘buntin, short and thick, as a buntin brat, a plump child’". Now, I only know this from a nursery rhyme that I only know from my time in the UK. The AHD doesn't record this one, so I'm going to call it BrE.

But AmE has bunting as 'A snug-fitting, hooded sleeping bag of heavy material for infants.' Like this one by Gap (from a UK site, but I'm assuming the name was imported along with the item):

These days, most things that are called baby buntings on US sites are indistinguishable from snow suits (which is what they'd also be called in BrE), in that they have legs, rather than a 'bag' at the bottom. The simple reason for this is that now all babies have to be strapped into car seats and (AmE) strollers/(BrE) push-chairs, with one of those straps going between the legs.


AHD gives the etymology as 'Perhaps from Scots buntin, plump, short.' So, we've got two baby-related senses (neither of which I caught in the big baby-related post), both supposedly coming from the same source, but mostly not shared between AmE and at least mainstream English-English. Scottish readers--do you use any buntings in this sense?

Bringing this back to the wedding: hanging bunting is a prime way to show involvement in the big day. So, it hangs in shop windows and will be strung around wedding street parties. But I'm not in the best place to show you BuntingFest 2011, as I live in what may be the most apathetic-about-that-wedding part of the country.  While Not From Around Here estimates that one in three shops in her town are decorated for the wedding, in Brighton/Hove/Portslade yesterday (I got around), it looked more like one in ten. And even then, it was often very half-hearted (say, a free-with-purchase flag or poster from a tabloid newspaper). Most of the (BrE) charity shops/(AmE) thrift stores have wedding gowns in their windows, but people I know are buying the cheap ones and wearing them with zombie make-up to go on (BrE) pub crawls. I've heard of no earnest street parties in Brighton and my Twitter feed is full of locals resenting the cost to the taxpayer at a time when the government is drastically cutting funding to just about everything else. (Some people counter that the wedding generates millions in UK spending, but we must remember that this is at the expense of many times that much in lost productivity because of the extra holiday.) The one sincere party I know of happened at my daughter's preschool on Thursday, where girls were dressed as princesses or brides and boys as princes or grooms. And all I can say is: I'm so glad Thursday is Grover's day off. (It's not the monarchism per se that bothered me, but the encouraging girls to dress up as princesses and brides. I would like to encourage her to dress up as an astronaut or a dragon or anything that isn't giving her the message that looking pretty is all that girls are supposed to do.) Though I've had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen and her successors, I can't imagine that the television will be on anything but Zingzillas tomorrow. (And if you don't know what Zingzillas is, you can count your lucky stars that you don't have the theme song going through your head right now. Make it stop! Please!!!)

And that's me doing a short and simple, dash-it-off post. Oh wait, it's 3am. I'm never going to be any good at this, am I?
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telephony

I've had various requests to cover various telephone-related vocabulary. Most of it is simple enough that I can do that thing that I think of as not-really-writing-a-legitimate-blog-post--that is, writing a big list of equivalent words. Some aspects might prove harder, though. Take, for instance, this email from someone I know:
I had a proposal from a US Co. today. For a British English speaker it was virtually incomprehensible unless you knew (which I didn't [BrE] twig [='understand'] until I'd read it for the 6th time) that a 'deck' was a mobile phone and a 'carrier' was what we call a service provider. The most unintelligible phrases included the statement that 'Carrier WAP-deck retail space largely dictates sales' and a sentence about 'On-deck carrier competitions'.
In this case, I think we're looking at more than a BrE/AmE difference. Deck, as far as I can tell, is industry jargon for a phone as a platform for a game.  Searching the web for "receive calls on your deck" gets zero matches (versus 232K matches for "receive calls on your cell").  It's not impossible to find this on UK websites (e.g. this one). So, I'm not convinced that that deck belongs here.

But there are enough others that do belong here. So, here's the list. No, wait! Here's the preface to the list:
  •  Items in [square brackets] are found in both dialects, with no indication in the OED that it is original to the dialect whose column it's in. Nevertheless, its counterpart in the other column is specific to that dialect.
  • Items marked * are found in the other dialect now too, though they are not original to it. 
  • I haven't included really slangy expressions here--that would just get out of control. Maybe another day.
  • They're in no sensible order whatsoever.
  • If they have a link, I've already discussed them in more detail--click to see.
  • Some corrections have been made (in green) since comments started coming in. Please see comments for more discussion of those...

BrEAmE
mobile (phone)cell (phone), cellular phone
engagedbusy*
directory enquiries   directory assistance (aka information)

telephone directory  phone book*

service provider  carrier

answerphone /Ansaphone [answering machine]

dialling code   area code

bleeper  beeper (pager in both dialects too)

phone box, telephone call-box  (tele)phone booth

reverse-charge call   collect call*

dialling tone   dial tone

ex-directory   unlisted (of a person/telephone number)

freephone number (0800 number)   toll-free number (800 number)
hash keypound key
telesalestelephone soliciting (telemarketing in both too)
push-button phone*Touchtone phone*
3G WAP
0898 number900 number (premium in both)
1471 (pron. one-four-seven-one; identifies last caller)*69 (pron. star-sixty-nine; call-return)




The list credits: Thanks to the following people for suggesting some of the above differences: Mark Allen, Philip Nelkon, and Ofer at Tomedes). And to the OED and Better Half for confirming some. 

The other thing to mention here is the difference in verbs of telephoning, particularly BrE is to ring someone, to ring someone up or to give someone a ring. In AmE, one can use call in all of these cases. While call is not just AmE in this case, it is stereotypically American--so much so that I've taught myself to say phone, which is shared by both dialects and makes me feel less self-consciously American while not feeling like I'm in a Jeeves and Wooster novel. I don't know why saying ring makes me feel self-conscious when I've easily adapted to lots of other BrE words. Perhaps verbs are harder to make oneself at home in.

Why are there so many differences? That's relatively simple: the technology was introduced after these dialectal groups were well and truly separated--so, if a new word for something needs to be made up in one country, there's no reason why the other country should come up with the same word. In some cases, the technologies themselves took different paths. Similarly, (BrE) motorcars/(AmE) automobiles and road systems have hugely different vocabularies (click on the transportation tag for some--but I've yet to do the Big List of Car Parts).

A few other differences to mention:
(1) The sounds that phones make are different in different countries. When I first moved to South Africa, I mistakenly believed that everyone I tried to ring/call was on the phone, because the ring tone to me sounded more like the American busy/engaged signal than the 'ringing' sound. (I've also been tempted to think, in various countries, that the phone is broken--because the dial[ling] tone sounds 'angrier' than the American one.)
(2) The US and Canada share the country code '1' (hey, they started this whole telephone thing). Historically, one dial(l)ed the '1' to let the telephone exchange know that an area code was the next thing coming--and one still does have to prefix the number with '1' whenever one dials out of one's own area code. That evolved into a North American country code, when such things became relevant. In many other countries (including all of Europe that I've telephoned in and South Africa), when dial(l)ing a non-local number, the first thing you dial is '0'. But whereas the '1' is not represented as part of the area code in the US (it's separated from it by a dash), the '0' is represented as part of the dial(l)ing code in the UK. Here are examples of each, using government tax assistance numbers in each case, as they are presented on the agencies' web pages:
US: 1-800-829-1040
UK: 0845 300 3900
The tricky thing for USers to learn is that the 0 at the front of a UK-style number needs to go away when you dial from outside the country. So, if you wanted to phone the UK number from abroad, it would be:
+44 845 300 3900
And before the country code (44), one needs to dial the international access code, which has been 00 in every other country I've used a phone in, but is 011 in US (and Canada too?).  Another thing that surprises North Americans abroad is that in other countries, all the phone numbers don't have to have the same number of digits. For example, the London codes 0207 and 0208 are shorter than my city's code, 01273. And until a few years ago, they were even shorter (020).

Which is all to say that if you live in North America, you have a lot to learn about how telephones work when you go abroad. But if you live in the UK, you can travel a lot of places and still apply the same telephonic logic to the new country's phone numbers. Unless you're travel(l)ing to North America, of course.
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skiving, bunking, playing hooky

I have now lived in the UK (Brighton, England, precisely) for one quarter of my life. This came home to me today in a lexical way. You might want to shield your eyes now, people in the northeastern/midwestern/western US. We've been having days like this here (photos from my employer, Sussex University):





The temperatures have been around 70°F/21°C, which yesterday prompted three-year-old Grover to drag herself around in her shirtsleeves* protesting "I'm very VERY BOILING." This is how I know that my child is English. And that she watches too much Charlie and Lola.

Given the weather and that I have a lot of reading to do for work, I went to the picnic tables outside my building this afternoon. I had expected to find, as I had on Wednesday, some competition for seats in sunny spaces, as everyone would be wanting to work outside. But there was no one there. (I took photos. I have no photos. Why, oh why, great Internet, has my iPhone 3G not uploaded any photos during syncing for the past three weeks?)  My conclusion: everyone else had decided to leave work early on a sunny, non-term-time Friday.

But this is what I actually thought: Everyone but me seems to have skived off.

And then I thought: I have no idea how to say that in American English. 

I put the question to the Twittersphere and received a lot of responses (thank you, all of you!), but none of them were what I was looking for. Most seemed to be about what one does when one doesn't go to school:
 (AmE): play hooky, cut class, skip class
I wanted one that was specifically about slinking out of work early. (The responders may have assumed that I was talking about students, since (a) non-Sussexers mostly don't know that we're between terms at the moment and (b) many people assume that university [BrE] lecturers/[AmE in the sense that I mean it here!] professors don't do any work when we're not teaching. I would like to disabuse anyone and everyone of that notion, but it would involve a good solid hour of ranting and possibly minor physical violence and loss of property.) Here's the OED definition for skive:

intr. To evade a duty, to shirk; to avoid work by absenting oneself, to play truant. Also with off.

The term is originally from the military, so perhaps the best AmE equivalent is go AWOL (=absent without leave; marked in OED as 'orig. U.S.'), though that sounds a bit too permanent. The best suggestion that I had from the Twitterpersons was (AmE) ditch, which American Heritage also defines as being about school: ' To skip (class or school).' But, unlike the above suggestions, I can more easily use it about work (I ditched work to play Scrabble today) and to mean that I left early, rather than that I didn't show up at all. I think ditch allows this flexibility because it has other, related AmE senses concerning derailing (of trains) and ridding oneself of things or people (let's ditch Lynne and have some real fun)--which may at some level all run together as a big meaning-mass. One can transfer hooky from school to workplace too (e.g. I played hooky from work), but it, like skip, generally means not showing up at all.

***NEWSFLASH (orig. AmE)***
As I was previewing this post, about to hit *send*, two Twitterphiles suggested AmE blow off as in blow off work. That's pretty damned good. But it still isn't quite skive (see the bullet list below and compare). And I'm excited to have the excuse to mention another difference.  In AmE you can blow off a person by not showing up to an arranged meeting. In BrE you would blow [them] out. I've been told by UKers that blow off sounds obscene, but to my AmE ears blow out sounds violent--like a (AmE) tire/(BrE) tyre bursting. Now back to your regularly scheduled nonsense.
*****************************

BrE has its own expressions for not going to school, including bunk off, which happens to be the first thing I thought of when I was looking for a synonym for skive. Bunk off comes from bunk meaning 'to run off', and though it's associated particularly with school, there are over 75K Google hits for bunk off work[Added a few hours later:] A friend on Facebook has pointed out (AusE, but apparently known in BrE) wag, which the Online Slang Dictionary defines it as 'to not attend school or work, without permission'. 

The only other possible translation for skive that I can think of is the general English shirk. But it just doesn't have the same connotations. Shirking ones duties is morally wrong, but skiving can be (in the current slang, at least--possibly not in the military) just a bit mischievous. (Or it can be morally bad. But my indignation about skivers this afternoon was a mock indignation--something harder to carry off when calling people shirkers).

So, I come to the conclusion that skive is a wonderful BrE word that has no equivalent.
  • I love that it is intransitive (requires no noun after it).  While words like cut, ditch and skip make you mention the thing that you're ignoring, skive lets you really ignore it.
  • I love that it can be a noun, and one can have a good skive.
  • I love that you can do it by leaving work or being at work (see: The Art of Skiving)
  • I love that it is a grown-up activity, rather than a concept borrowed from childhood. 
And I wonder: Why doesn't AmE have a good equivalent? Perhaps it doesn't fit with the Work Hard, Play Hard motto Americans are so fond of. Kate Fox (in the ever-recommended Watching the English) suggests that the more apt slogan for England is 'Work moderately, play moderately'. Having a ready vocabulary for talking about not-working (another one: having a duvet day, which came up in the discussion back here) is consistent with various things about English† culture, discussed in Fox's book (quoted, selectively, from p. 178, with linguistic commentary added in brackets/parentheses):
  • We are serious about work, but not too serious.
  • [W]e also believe it is a bit of a [BrE] fag (general English translation: drag, bother) and a nuisance [...]
  • We indignantly disapprove of those who avoid work [...] but this reflects our strict, almost religious belief in 'fairness', rather than in the belief in the sanctity of work itself (such people are seen as 'getting away with' idleness, while the rest of us, who would equally like to be idle, have to work, which is just not fair).
  • We often maintain that we would rather not work, but our personal and social identity is in fact very much bound up with work. [...]
  • We also have vestigial traces of a 'culture of amateurism', involving an instinctive mistrust of 'professionalism' and businesslike efficiency [...]
The first (reflecting the general cultural values of moderation and avoidance of earnestness) and the last are probably where the US and English cultures differ most in terms of work values, and seem to coincide well with the apparent contradiction in treating avoidance-of-work as both wrong and (in small doses) completely understandable. Especially on gorgeous days like today.






* Is this AmE? It isn't in Collins or OED (that I can find). It is on Macmillan's website, but I generally find them to be more dialectally inclusive. It means: wearing a shirt but no jacket or (BrE) jumper/(AmE) sweater, etc.

† Here I can only talk about English, not general British--you'll have to enlighten me about whether Fox's observations on the English reach any further.
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on on

*ruffling around in the email bag*

And here's the start of a letter from American reader Emmet:
Was struck by this example from the Economist as something that could be highly ambiguous to AmE native speakers:

"Correction: we accidentally published an incorrect set of figures for the percentage change on one week ago. This was corrected on January 22nd 2010."
Another example is a headline from the Guardian:  "University applications up a fifth on last year"
Ah, on. As John Algeo writes, "This preposition is one that has many differences in use between British and American English". So, let's try to get through a few of those here. 

The on that Emmet's observed here is indeed a BrEism meaning 'in comparison to'. The OED definition goes like this:
Indicating comparison with a standard, originally a favourable one; (Finance) compared with, in relation to (a previous financial situation, figure, etc.), esp. in up or down on.
They trace the usage to the 18th century--though the more modern examples involving numbers don't show up till the late 19th century. In AmE in these cases, one would have to do something else, such as Five times one fifth more applications than last year or the percentage change since last week. You might be able to use from here too--but as far as I can tell (on the web--my corpus access isn't working tonight), that's still more common in BrE than AmE.

Emmet's message continued:
There's a second and maybe (?) related usage that I've seen in discussions of the standings/league tables of sport(s) teams, like "Humble Lions slipped two spots to 10th on 27 points", or "After defeating Everton, Manchester United are on 15 points."
This doesn't have the sense of comparison that the last one has, so I wouldn't call them related. In AmE, one could say with here--that is, the teams have that many points for the season.  These relate to another UK institution: league tables. In this case, the league tables are for a literal league--in (BrE) football/(AmE) soccer (where the term league table originated in the early 20th century).  Americans would call these rankings or standings. Nowadays, the British have league tables for lots of things--schools, universities, companies, pension funds...

Some temporal ons are often pointed out to me. AmE speakers can do something Wednesday or on Wednesday but BrE speakers need the on. When speaking of future weekdays, BrE speakers are much more likely to say a week on Wednesday where AmE speakers are much more likely to say a week from Wednesday. (And then there's Wednesday week--which I've already discussed, along with some of the other things in this paragraph.)

A lot of the other on differences are associated with particular other words--verbs or nouns that precede or follow on. I can't do those all here--they'll come up (BrE) as and when/(AmE) if and when.†  But looking through the OED's entry on on, I note a few other things:
  • In sport(s), on to express the relationship between opposing players (e.g. one-on-one) is described as 'chiefly N. Amer.'.
  • The use of on with closed means of transport (e.g. I went there on the train) is originally AmE, but generally accepted as common English now. (This followed the common English on horseback, on foot--it was only the 'closed means of transport' that ever differed.)
  • With [name] on drums/guitar/bass/etc. (no verb of 'playing', no the after the on) is another originally AmE usage that is now used by performers all over. 
  • [This one's amended since David Crosbie's comment:] Another American-invented sense (or pair of senses) is: 'Addicted to or under the influence of (a drug or drugs); regularly using or receiving (medication, treatment, etc.).' (OED) so... He's on drugs. She's on antibiotics.
  • And we talked about on the street versus in the street back here.

P.S.  I had thought that I'd be blogging a lot more now that we're on a five-week teaching break, but we're about to start the third week of it, and I've only managed two because the deadlines don't stop when the students leave. Alas. Must try harder!

But AmE is not as likely as BrE to use its phrase as a stand-alone. In AmE I'm much more comfortable saying if and when they are topical or something like that.
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Not One-Off Britishisms

I don't usually review other websites here, and I don't really want to start now. But I'd be interested to read what you think of Ben Yagoda's site Not One-Off Britishisms.

Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware and author of many things. I first became aware of his worries about BrEisms in AmE in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called "The Elements of Clunk." There he bemoaned "a whole new strain of bad student writing."* To quote from that:
Another manifestation [of clunky student writing] is a boom in Britishisms: not only the weirdly popular "amongst," but also "amidst," "whilst"—I actually have gotten that more than once in assignments—and "oftentimes." (In a parallel move, the stretched-out and unpleasant "off-ten" has become a vogue pronunciation among youth, as has "eye-ther.") In spelling, "grey" has taken over from the previously standard "gray." I haven't seen "labour" yet, but the day is young.
Not One-Off Britishisms is kind of a blog, but what it is really...well, I'll let Yagoda explain. From the sidebar at the site:
Over the last decade or so, an alarming number of traditionally British expressions have found their way into the American vocabulary. This page offers a growing list of Britishisms that have been widely adopted in the U.S.–that is, they are not “one-offs.”  Each entry offers a definition/American equivalent, followed by quotes representing the first and most recent American usages I’ve found.
Some entries include a link to a Google Ngram. This is a nifty tool that allows you to search for the frequency with which a word or phrase was used year to year. The link provided here compares the use of the Britishism and the traditional U.S. equivalent in the “American English” corpus between 1990 and 2008, with a “smoothing” level of 0. (Don’t ask.) In some cases–e.g., advert, bits–Ngram data is not applicable because the word or phrase can be used in two or more different ways.
For each entry, readers are ask to vote on their opinion of the Britishism in an American context. By “over the top,” I mean that the word or phrase (still) comes off as mannered or affected. In my humble opinion, the key factor in this is whether there’s an equally good American equivalent. [...]

Yagoda's project is a perfect (although not as loud) counterpoint to the oft-heard British complaint that Americanisms "permeate, pervade and pollute British English" (Hardeep Singh Kohli, Sunday Times, 7 Nov 08--and if you like that one, I can give you plenty more), and it gives me some comfort to know that not every American is a victim of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.


Now, the longer I live in the UK (it's been more than 11 years now), the more out-of-touch I am with what Americans (other than my nearest and dearest) are saying--but some of the BrEisms that Yagoda picks out as "widely adopted" strike me as not so. For one thing, some of them are things that Americans have sent me puzzled emails about. For another, the sources Yagoda cites are very often New Yorkers, if not The New Yorker, and most come from the NY-DC corridor. The Google Ngrams show general trends in publishing, but I would be willing to bet that a fair number of US-published books are written by New Yorkers, if not British expats. I'm having a hard time finding out how many of the 685,000 British expats in the US are in New York, but many commentators seem to agree with  A.A. Gill that "The British have colonized Manhattan". And an awful lot of them seem to be in publishing. So, it could be a trend in a certain milieu. But if you're watching FOX** instead of reading Vanity Fair, it might not affect you too much. I'm not saying that all the BrEisms are coming from UK expats; I have no trouble believing that Americans in their milieu are easily influenced by chic-sounding British words. And if that continues, those words may make their way into general American English. But my impression from non-NYCers is that these words are far from "widely adopted."

There's also much reason to be suspicious of the Ngram data. Looking at the first ten 2007-08 sources for chat show in the Ngram that Yagoda presents, one finds that four are about British television (I haven't bothered to look into their authors' backgrounds), two are from Cambridge University Press dictionaries (offering it as a synonym for AmE talk show), one is by an Oxford-educated professor in the US (possibly UK-born) , and two are by (orig. AmE in this sense) faculty at UK universities whose university webpages show no educational experience outside the UK. So that's 90% that seem to be appropriately British in the American English "corpus". The remaining one is by a Brooklyn-born journalist who lives in Washington, DC.

On the other hand, if you look at the relationship between chat show and talk show in British English using an Ngram, you'll see that AmE talk show has overtaken chat show in the UK (supposedly) in the same period. And looking at the data comparatively in the allegedly AmE books, chat show barely figures in comparison to talk show.

I also note that some of the things that Yagoda mentions in the Chronicle article have been in variation in AmE for a long time--for example, the pronunciation of either. And his description of often sounds like how I started pronouncing it as a child. Can we conclude that recent fashions from them are due to British influence? Are Americans even aware of these as being "more British"? (He goes in that article to try to tar the spelling advisor with the British brush--until he discovers that it's regarded as an AmEism. Click on the link for my discussion of it.)

So, in the end, I think it's the kind of site that would interest readers of this blog and so I point it out and hope you'll visit it (particularly if you're American). But I'd also like your feedback on whether you think that the "Britishisms" that Yagoda notices are indeed widespread in AmE.

As a final note--why Britishisms?  What's wrong with the good old word Briticism? I give you the Ngram for American English:



Britishism (red) has outnumbered Briticism (blue) only since 1990.  As long as we have a good old standard word for it, why use a new one?  (And no, it doesn't seem to be because of the British people in NY.)



* In hono(u)r of Yagoda, I'm using American punctuation, rather than my usual indecisive mishmash.
** Please, stop.
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prototypical soup

I've been unwell (which is a very BrE way to put it, see this old guest post) a lot this winter, which seems to be the price one pays for procreating. They say that minor illnesses are good for developing children's immune systems, so I try not to resent the germs that infect poor little Grover. But I supposedly have a developed immune system. Shouldn't I be immune to some of these preschool bugs?  At least our norovirus kept us away from the preschool this week, when Erythema infectiosum has been going around. Or, as the note to parents said, slapped-cheek disease. Never heard of it? Neither had I. A little research showed that the more common nickname for it in AmE is fifth disease. That didn't really help either.  All in all, it sounds like a fairly pathetic entry into the childhood illnesses roster. (The child illustrating the infection's Wikipedia page looks like he's having a pretty good time with it!)

Before the stomach bug, it was a bad cold that had downed Grover and me. Both since my last blog post. (Better Half stays curiously well. Maybe I don't have a British-enough immune system.) Pity us!

In fact, you should pity any expat or immigrant with a minor ailment (or [BrE] the dreaded lurgy), because the one thing you want when you're feeling (chiefly BrE) grotty is the comforts of childhood--which are thin on the ground when one is separated from one's childhood by miles, oceans and passport controls, not to mention the decades. When I'm ill, I want two things, which, in my home culture, are known to have magical-medicinal properties: cold, flat ginger ale and chicken soup.

The ginger ale can be achieved. Saint Better Half only had to go to three shops before finding some.  Here, it goes by the BrE name American ginger ale, which I find amusing because (a) where I come from, we think of it as Canadian, (b) I can see no other kind of ginger ale for sale, so why do they need the adjective? One can only guess that it's to distinguish it from ginger beer, a much spicier drink, which is far more common in the UK than ginger ale (which in the UK is thought of as a mixer and not a drink in its own right). I can feel a tangent coming on. Whoops, here we go... Ginger ale consumption in the US is fairly region-specific. I come from the kind of place (the northeast) where it's a drink that you can buy cold in a single-serving bottle from a (orig. AmE) convenience store/(BrE) corner shop, but this isn't true throughout the US. And if there is a down-home 'American' ginger ale, then it's not the stuff that's used as a mixer. The Canadian mixer type is 'pale, dry' ginger ale (like this Schweppes or Canada Dry). But there is also 'golden' ginger ale, which is darker, heavier and gingerier (more like a traditional ginger beer). This is rarer in the US and even more regional. You'll know if you're in one of the regions for it if the names Vernor's or Blenheim mean anything to you (or a few others...see Wikipedia).  At any rate, it's the dry stuff that one wants if one's had a (more BrE than AmE) tummy bug. Because ginger is good for nausea, you know. It should have lots of ice, so that it gets watery and flat and rehydrates you without causing any more gastrointestinal upset.  But I live in England with a man for whom ice trays are one of those mysterious plastic things that come with a fridge yet have no clear connection to it, so I water mine down with water straight from the (BrE) tap/(AmE) faucet. Hey, I'm not well. I'm desperate.

Hm, over 600 words and I haven't even started to get to the point of this post. A record? Probably not.

The point is the soup.

See, we Americans know that chicken soup is the cure for the common cold. And, when you're recovering from a stomach virus, a nice chicken soup is a good second foray (after toast) back into the land of the digesting.  But, of course, you can't make it yourself. You're sick, after all. Stay in bed. And who wants to cook a whole chicken when no one feels much like eating? This is what the (orig. AmE) can-opener was invented for.  

It is perfectly possible to find 'chicken soup' in the UK. The problem is finding the kind that is good for a cold. Send your English (and vegetarian) husband out in the rain to buy a (AmE) can/(BrE) tin, and he will come home with five kinds of wrong before you send him out again whispering cock-a-leekie to himself.  The tins/cans of wrong will include various cream-based, coconut-based, curry-based concoctions--not what an ailing American soul needs.

The problem, I have come to understand, is prototypes.

So here comes the linguistics. Soup in either British or American English will include puréed and strained things like tomato soup, things with lots of cream in them, broths like the cock-a-leekie to the right, with pieces of meat and vegetable. All these things come within the boundaries of the category 'soup' in English. But categories have more than boundaries (and those boundaries are often 'fuzzy'. Yes, that's the technical term). Categories, as represented in our minds, also have peaks...or cent{er/re}s...or cent{er/re}s that are peaks. Pick a metaphor that works for you.  That cent(e)ry peak or peaky cent{er/re} is known as the prototype of the category, and a particular thing (like cock-a-leekie) is deemed to be part of a category (like SOUP) if it is close enough to/has enough in common with the prototype.  To quote a fine reference book on the matter:

According to one view, a prototype is a cluster of properties that represent what members of the category are like on average (e.g. for the category BIRD, the prototype would consist of properties such as ‘lays eggs’, ‘has a beak’, ‘has wings’, ‘has feathers’, ‘can fly’, ‘chirps’, ‘builds nests’ etc.).  Category members may share these properties to varying degrees—hence the properties are not necessary and sufficient as in the classical model, but instead family resemblances.  In the alternative approach, the mental representation of a concept takes the form of a specific, ideal category member (or members), which acts as the prototype (e.g. for BIRD, the prototype might be a representation of a specific robin or sparrow).
In other words, when deciding whether or not something belongs to the BIRD category, one measures its birdiness against some (possibly very abstract) notion of an ideal bird.  Now, it's reasonable to believe that there might be some room for dialectal variation in what the prototype of a particular category is. But we have to be careful here--it's not just a matter of what is more frequent locally that determines what the prototype is.  Chickens and ducks might be the most common birds down on the farm, yet the farmer will not treat them as if they are the prototype against which 'birdiness' should be judged--that hono(u)r stays with the birds that (BrE) tick/(AmE) check more of the 'bird' boxes like 'can fly' and 'chirps'.

As far as I know, not much work has been done on regional variation in prototypes. The only example I can think of is a small study by Willett Kempton (reported in John Taylor's Linguistic Categorization) on Texan versus British concepts of BOOT, showing that even though both groups considered the same range of things to be boots, there was variation in their ideas of what constituted a central member of the BOOT category, with the Texan prototype extending further above the ankle than the British one.

Though I've not done the psychological tests that would tell us for sure, I'm pretty sure that the American SOUP prototype is along the lines of this:
a warm broth with pieces of meat, vegetables, and/or starchy things (e.g. noodles, barley, rice, matzo balls) in it
And the English one is more along the lines of this:
a warm, savo(u)ry food made from vegetables and possibly meat that have been well-cooked and liquidi{s/z}ed
 These are not the definitions of soup, but the core exemplars of what belongs to the SOUP category, from which the 'soupiness' of other foods is measured. So, each culture has soups that don't conform to these ideals, but they nevertheless have enough in common with them (e.g. being liquid, considered food rather than drink, containing vegetables) to also be called soup.  The differences in the prototypes might have some effects on the boundaries of the category. So, for instance, since the English prototype has more emphasis on liquidi{s/z}ation, you'd expect the extension of the word soup to tolerate less in the way of (orig. AmE) chunky pieces than the AmE use of the word, which is stemming from a prototype that likes pieces and therefore will tolerate bigger ones (see point 3 below).

My experiential evidence for the differences in prototype are as follows:
  1. American dictionaries (American Heritage, Merriam-Webster) explicitly mention the likelihood of solid pieces of food in soup, while British ones (Collins, Oxford) don't.
  2. The soup of the day in English restaurants is very often a puree. In US restaurants, that's much more rare--the people want stuff in their soup.
  3. Some of the things I have made and called 'soup' have been met with a puzzled "that's more of a stew, isn't it?" from the Englishpeople I've served it to.
  4. Some of the most common soups in England are generally smooth: leek and potato, tomato (often 'tomato and basil', which to me is like eating pasta sauce with a spoon), carrot and coriander. Whereas American soups are often full of solid things: chicken noodle, beef and barley, vegetable (which brings us to...)
  5. Order 'vegetable soup' in England and it will almost certainly be smooth. Order it in the US and it will almost certainly be a broth with diced vegetables. 
But this could be more rigorously tested, so I mention here that dialectal differences in prototypes might be an interesting area for a student dissertation project to cover.  (Are any of our second years reading this?)

Two more things to cover before I go. (I must be feeling better...I haven't collapsed in a heap yet.)

First, notice that I've been saying 'English' rather than 'British' when talking about the prototype differences. The two most famous Scottish soups, cock-a-leekie and Scotch broth, are broths with (more BrE) bits in them, so the prototype might be different up there.

Which brings us to broth. It's a word found in both AmE and BrE, but in AmE it basically means BrE (but also AmE) stock--that is, a liquid made by cooking things in water, then straining the things out. In BrE, it can be used to mean a stock with stuff in it (hence Scotch broth).  So, when I've expressed my longing for a more American-style soup to an Englishperson, I've been told "oh, you mean a broth". But AmE also has bouillon, which is again broth, but I'd call it bouillon if I were drinking it out of a mug (as I used to have to do in the days when I had to go on clear liquid diets a lot. I'm not the healthiest character), especially if I'd made it with a (AmE) bouillon cube (or powder), which in BrE would be a stock cube (or, more colloquially, an Oxo cube--the dominant brand).

I'm going to stop there and go to bed, trying not to think about how much easier my life would be if I could write this many words in grant proposals in an evening.  That way lies insomnia.

P.S. [Jan 2024]  Here's another American take on stock v broth, which doesn't work so well in BrE. From All Recipes: Soups and Stews magazine.

Magazine sidebar defines stock as always cooked with bones but not necessarily with meat. Broth is defined as any liquid that has meat and or vegetables cooked in it which may or may not contain bones. The final result is much thinner liquid in stock and doesn’t gel when chilled . ALT Jan 6, 2024 at 12:54 PM 5 likes  0  Victoria Redfern @victoriaredfern.bsky.social · 15m I'm not an expert cook, but I'm pretty sure you're right.  There's beef stock and chicken stock but also veg stock.  Broth to me is a type of actual soup.  0   Lynne Murphy @lynneguist.bsky.social · 8m I was being a bit disingenuous with the “I suspect”. I’ve written a lot on the topic of soup. One of my great passions!  0   Rebecca Brite @rebeccab.bsky.social · 6m Per Oxford, stock = liquid made by cooking bones, meat, fish, or vegetables slowly in water, used as a base for soup, gravy, or sauce; broth = liquid made by cooking bones, meat, or fish slowly in water, or soup consisting of meat or vegetables cooked in stock and sometimes thickened with cereals  0   Rebecca Brite @rebeccab.bsky.social · 3m In other words, stock can be veg based and broth isn't? Like you, I'm an expat American, but not being a soup fan had never considered this question. In French it's all bouillon.  0   Lynne Murphy @lynneguist.bsky.social · 13s Partly, but see here for more: separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/02/prot...  0   Home Search Feeds Notifications Lists Moderation Profile Settings Search Following Discover Popular With Friends More feeds Feedback  ·  Privacy  ·  Terms  ·  Help   Magazine sidebar defines stock as always cooked with bones but not necessarily with meat. Broth is defined as any liquid that has meat and or vegetables cooked in it which may or may not contain bones. The final result is much thinner liquid in stock and doesn’t gel when chilled .


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in the middle of our street/block

When I don't know what I want to blog about, I stick a virtual pin into the email inbox and choose the first do-able request/suggestion that I find. This is supposed to be a fair method, though perhaps not as fair as 'first come, first served'. Truth be told, many of the oldest ones in the inbox are in the 'may not be doable' or 'may not be a real difference' category, so I have come to avoid them a bit. At any rate, my 'fair' method might not seem fair this time, since the suggestion I've clicked on is from the same requester as the last blog post.

So, thank you Ben Zimmer for putting another interesting and pop-culture-related suggestion in my inbox. Ben noted the use of in the middle of our street in the Madness song 'Our House', and asked: "Have you talked about this one? I don't think it's possible in AmE for a house to be in the middle of a street."

Yes, that's an interesting one.  But so is the rest of the song.  It's Saturday night--let's do the whole thing!




I should start by noting that this is the only Madness song that made it to the Top 20 singles chart in the US, whereas in the UK they were HUGE, having 20 singles in the Top 20 in the 1980s (more if you count re-issues). So, for British people of my generation, mention Madness and they're as likely (if not more likely) to wax nostalgic about 'Baggy Trousers' or 'House of Fun' as about 'Our House'. Still 'Our House' has had  a lot of attention in the UK. It won the 'Best Song'  in the Ivor Novello Awards, became part of the advertising campaign for Birdseye frozen foods (video) with frontman Suggs, and was the title of a Madness-based West End musical. Unlike some other pop/rock-band-based musicals, like Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You, the Madness musical did not transfer to Broadway or tour the US.

I loved 'Our House' as an American teenager, particularly for its wordplay, but I have to wonder how much I missed in my pre-UK days.  So, for the benefit of my teenage self, here's a stanza-by-stanza playback:

Father wears his Sunday best
Mother's tired she needs a rest
The kids are playing up downstairs
Sister's sighing in her sleep
Brother's got a date to keep
He can't hang around
In my day job, antonyms are my special(i)ty, so I am particularly fond of the juxtapositon of up/down here. However, I don't think that in my youth I understood that this wasn't just a little lyrical nonsense.  To play up is informal BrE for behaving irritatingly or erratically. One's lumbago can play up, the computer might play up, and certainly one's children can play up.  (Late addition: BZ has pointed out the AmE equivalent: act up.)
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our ...
The chorus, and the point of BZ's original query. To my young American ears, this sounded intentionally funny.  The house is in the middle of the street! Like where the manholes should be! No, no, no.  This is the BrE equivalent of in AmE in the middle of our block. This is a originally AmE use of block to mean 'the length of a street between cross-streets' or 'one side of a square of land with buildings, bounded by four streets'. This sense is not often found in BrE, though most BrE speakers I know are aware of it. Still, they find it odd when Americans apply it to British places since (a) there are rarely regular blocks in British towns ([BrE] Have/(AmE) take a look at this map of Camden Town, London [home of Madness], for instance) and (b) block has a more prominent residence-related BrE sense: 'a building separated into units', e.g. an office block or a block of flats. This sense of block is not marked as dialectal in the American Heritage Dictionary, but do Americans actually say it much? In AmE, I'd always say office building or apartment building.  (For another difference in UK/US use of street, see back here.)

But even if it weren't in the middle of the street, 'our house' would still be in our street, because in BrE addresses can be in the street or road. John Algeo, in British or American English?, writes:
For specifying the position of something relative to a street, British generally uses in and American on. When the street in question is noted as a shopping location, British uses on or in.
Algeo's corpus has equal numbers of in/on the High Street (i.e. the main shopping stree—akin to AmE Main Street, at least, before the Walmartification of American towns). A Google search of British books shows a clear preference for in in this case, however.  (Click here to see the ngram view.)
Our house it has a crowd
There's always something happening
And it's usually quite loud
Our mum she's so house-proud
Nothing ever slows her down
And a mess is not allowed
House-proud is the piece of BrE I remember learning through this song. The meaning is fairly transparent. To be house-proud is to take particular pride in the upkeep and decoration of one's house.  The expression reminds me of Kate Fox's discussion of the English relationship to their homes in her book Watching the English. A related newspaper piece by Fox can be found here—but I really recommend the book. Again.  (Click on the link for mum—I've discussed it on an earlier occasion.)
Father gets up late for work
Mother has to iron his shirt
Then she sends the kids to school
Sees them off with a small kiss
She's the one they're going to miss
In lots of ways

This verse has no glaringly specific BrEisms, but does allow us to note British male predilection for comedic cross-dressing, evident in the video above.

The last unrepeated verse has nothing particularly non-AmE about it either, but I include it here for completeness, and because I like how I can hear the words being delivered as I read them.
I remember way back then when everything was true and when
We would have such a very good time such a fine time
Such a happy time
And I remember how we'd play simply waste the day away
Then we'd say nothing would come between us two dreamers

The song ends with the chorussy bit repeated, with variations, including this one: 
Our house, was our castle and our keep
Our house, in the middle of our street
We can't say that castle and keep is non-AmE; if we needed to talk about castles and keeps, those are the words we'd use. But since we don't have medi(a)eval castles, many Americans might not know this sense of keep. Call me a philistine (you probably won't be the first), but I  didn't know it (despite hearing it in the song repeatedly) or other castle-part terms until I moved to England and started visiting castles. Here's a guide to castle parts for those who want to know.

And in case I haven't already thoroughly shown my age, I'll say this: I was so lucky to be a (orig. AmE) teenager and (AmE) college/(BrE) university student in the 1980s.* At least when I'm going senile and just want to sing songs from my prime, I'll be ok. Oh wait, I just had a Lionel Richie flashback. I'm doomed.



*Whether it was cool to like Madness in the 1980s is another matter, especially for my English generation-mates, such as Better Half. At the time, he tells me, one couldn't like both the ska-inspired London music that included Madness (though Madness were definitely ska-lite) and the New Romantics. But age works wonders on taste, and now we find ourselves nostalgic for music that we were too cool for then. But I am still embarrassed to have done so much dancing to Lionel Richie.
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Abbr.

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