topping oneself, topping and tailing

A short post, but this headline (courtesy of this tweeter) is worth reproducing:



The headline is about an American basketball player, Jeremy Lin, who is all the rage these days. The problem is that the headline would be rather upsetting reading for a BrE-speaking Lin fan.  In BrE to top oneself is a colloquial way of saying 'to kill oneself'.  But it was the AmE meaning 'to surpass oneself/one's previous achievements' that was clearly intended by the New York Times

It's not necessarily the case that the "AmE" meaning is entirely AmE here--the 'surpass' meaning of top is general English. But with the reflexive pronoun, it's not the first meaning to come to mind in BrE. The 'suicide' meaning comes from a more general use of top meaning 'to kill'--which originally referred to killing by hanging, but which is used more generally now for execution/killing in BrE, but not AmE.

And while I'm talking about topping... The OED mentions to top and tail [a baby], which I only learned as a new mother in the UK. Not having been a new mother in the US, I can't swear this is BrE only, but corpus and internet evidence seems to suggest so.  If you know top and tail meaning to cut the ends off (of) vegetables (e.g. green beans) (which seems to be used a bit in AmE, but not as much as in BrE), then the image of topping and tailing one's infant child is a horrid thought. But what it means is to wash only the head and bottom of the child, as newborn skin doesn't need or appreciate lots of unnecessary washing.

And for another verbal use of top in BrE, see this old post on top up.

------------------------------
Oh, and P.S.
I'm sorry not to have been blogging much lately, in spite of my grand intentions at the start of the year. But here's a bit of what I've done instead:

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graft

JL in New York wrote recently with this observation:
Last week's Economist included an article ("Executive Pay: Money for Nothing?", in the Britain section) that begins:

Hard work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons believe the link between graft and gain has broken down.

The word that struck me was "graft" -- in my AmE usage, it can only mean "corruption", not "hard work".  (Other than horticulturally.)

The link between graft (AmE) and gain has, sadly, not broken down, of course.


My first thought was that certainly AmE has the 'hard work' sense of graft, since the phrase hard graft is known there. But is it the case that AmE and BrE are divided by graft

The corruption sense of graft is listed in the OED as 'colloq. (orig. U.S.)'. Their first published citation for it is from an 1865 New York-based police gazette. West's Encyclopedia of American Law defines it as:
A colloquial term referring to the unlawful acquisition of public money through questionable and improper transactions with public officials.
Graft is the personal gain or advantage earned by an individual at the expense of others as a result of the exploitation of the singular status of, or an influential relationship with, another who has a position of public trust or confidence. The advantage or gain is accrued without any exchange of legitimate compensatory services.
Behavior that leads to graft includes Bribery and dishonest dealings in the performance of public or official acts. Graft usually implies the existence of theft, corruption, Fraud, and the lack of integrity that is expected in any transaction involving a public official.
This sense of graft may or may not come from the 'work' sense of graft; the OED lists them separately and doesn't have an etymology it trusts for the 'work' sense either. The 'work' sense is also listed as 'slang' and the first citation is in the phrase hard graft in 1853. An 1890 Glossary of Words of County Glouster lists it as meaning 'work', so perhaps it has dialectal origins there. Neither of these senses of the word, then, seems to be terribly old, but because they're colloquial and dialectal, they'll have unwritten histories going back further.

So, how well-known are the senses in AmE and BrE? A quick look at our (chiefly AmE) go-to corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus (via Mark Davies' interface) can give some indication.  First I looked at how much of the use of the noun graft in either corpus consisted of the phrase hard graft. For AmE it was only 6 of 640 (less than 1%), for BrE 28/145 (19%).

Taking a sample of 100 sentences containing a noun graft from each corpus, the use of particular senses breaks down as:




SenseBNC (BrE)COCA (AmE)
work332
corruption1429
tissue4262
spade/shovel70
proper name06
??43

So, the first thing to notice is that the 'work' meaning is indeed much more common in BrE. Both cases in the AmE sample were hard graft. Most of the 'work' uses in BrE were also modified by an adjective, but in addition to hard, there was honest, sheer, real, tireless etc. 

Second thing to notice: the 'corruption' sense is hardly unknown in BrE--but about half as frequent as in AmE. In both corpora, tissue grafts (on trees, skin, veins, bones, etc.) are the most common kind of graft.

Third, the 'spade/shovel' sense is particular to BrE. The OED defines it as 'a narrow crescent-shaped spade used by drainers', and its only citation is from a 1893 Worcestershire dialect glossary. One of the corpus examples mentioned it as a Norfolk term--these are not particularly close to each other, but who knows what was really happening dialectally 100 years ago or what changed in the 100 years till the BNC. (I mention shovel because of the American tendency to use the term instead of spade, discussed back here.)

And then there are more people or at least more famous people named Graft in the US than the UK (probably the former, it's a German name).

The ?? cases were those that I couldn't really tell the meaning of in the little bit of text I was given (e.g. in the BNC: His father quarrelled with the Colonels over some detail of graft). I didn't go to the effort of looking at the larger contexts, which might have helped. But what this 3-4% of ambiguous cases tells us is that even though graft has lots of meanings, they don't cause too much difficulty in understanding the language. The people who originally heard/read those seven ambiguous cases in full context probably had no problem with it at all.

So, my initial reaction 'Americans know about 'work' graft' might only (or particularly) be true of Americans like me who hang around a lot of British people and are able to separate the word from the phrase hard graft. And it just goes to show, you shouldn't trust your memories of words and meanings you've "always" known, as those kinds of memories just aren't very good. Can anyone tell me: is there a name for that kind of false memory/familiarity? It's the opposite of the Recency Illusion, but I've not found a particular name for the 'I've always said it that way' illusion.

Wait, wait! A little message to Arnold Zwicky, and I have the answer: the Antiquity Illusion. I feel like there should be a corollary of it for the effect when one moves from dialect to dialect--i.e. the 'it is old, but not old for you' illusion. The 'native-speaker illusion', perhaps.
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just about

Continuing on the backlog of emailed requests, Ron Shields writes (well, wrote--in August) with:
I have noticed football commentators in Britain using the phrase just about when a player is successful as in "He just about made that pass". In AmE just about would mean "close but no cigar".
Indeed, for the 'did make it, but only by a small margin' meaning, AmE could just use just: He just made it into the goal. But we might even avoid that, since that could also mean 'a moment ago'. This ambiguity is probably more of a problem in AmE than in BrE because of the differences in past-tense marking. I'd probably say only just in this context, but I'm fairly contaminated by BrE at this point. The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms gives only the meaning 'very recently' for only just. The two instances of only just made it in the Corpus of Contemporary American  English (COCA) are 'very recently' and the eight in the much smaller British National Corpus all mean 'barely'. I think this has firmly diagnosed my BrE contamination. I'll have to tell my American family to wear protection around me.

I must admit, I'm held back a bit* in my discussion here by a couple of things. First, finding examples of particular meanings of just about is not exactly easy. If you search for the two words in a corpus or on the web, you will find huge numbers of examples, most of them irrelevant--it's just about how common the words are (see what I did there?). So I've had to look for bigger stretches of text, like just about made it, in order to limit the results to useful ones. That means that anything interesting that I didn't think of, I didn't find. Second, we were supposed to (AmE/BrE) move/(BrE) move house this week. We discovered Monday that we were not moving (house) this week, or indeed next week, or indeed this  month. So all my books are packed (not the greatest of the current  inconveniences!), and therefore I can't consult a couple of things that might have been helpful. I will blog about English (BrE) estate agents/(AmE) real estate agents and the horrors (and vocabulary!) of  buying/selling property in England after this nightmare is over.

At any rate, the translation problem in just about isn't just about just.  Let's think about about. The (UK) Collins English Dictionary gives us this sense-definition, which is not to be found in the American Heritage Dictionary or Merriam-Webster:

about
7. used in informal phrases to indicate understatement I've had just about enough of your insults it's about time you stopped

Aha, the famous British understatement. Rather than saying I've had enough, you put an about in to soften the blow. And then a just to soften it more.

But one would say I've had just about enough of your insults in AmE too.  In fact, in COCA, there are 35 instances of about had it, including 16 just about had it. There might be a difference in perception here. To my AmE ear, I've just about had it is not an understatement. It means, if things don't change right away, I will have had it, and it's thus used as a warning. Whether BrE ears perceive that particular example as understatement is something that the mouths (or the typing fingers) that  share a brain with those ears will have to tell us. At any rate, the UK dictionary did feel the need to mention it as an understatement-marker and the US ones did not, and I think there's something to that.

Ron's example is a much clearer case of understatement. The claim is that the pass was made, but it is stated as if the pass was not quite made in order to communicate that it almost wasn't made.

To give a few more examples, found by Google-searching "just about made  it" (plus 'British' and 'American', because I originally searched with the  hope that I'd find some dialect commentary):

We just about made it through Christmas. (Temple Audio, Ltd)

Well, I just about made it to hunt out some British talent for you all  this week. I've tried to include more variety this time... (Road Runner Records)

I think you just about made it to the studio in time for your show!  (commenter on Simon Mayo's BBC Radio 2 blog)
There are also examples of the (orig. AmE) 'close but no cigar' type on this search and (of course) some that are ambiguous. But the above examples all come from the first page of results, clearly describe events that did happen (rather than ones that almost happened), and are all related (at least) to the UK. (The second is located in the US, but is a music scout who seems particularly Europe-focused, so one can only guess about his nationality or his linguistic contamination level.)

 And on that note, I'm about finished.


 * My ubiquitous bits are further evidence of my contamination. And yes, that is a double entendre. But don't think about it too much, please.
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haste makes waste / more haste, less speed

Robert W. M. Greaves wrote to me (in July 2010--my [seemingly orig. AmE] backlog is huge!):
I was somewhat surprised yesterday to be asked by an American woman (mid 70s from Montana) what more haste, less speed meant. She had never heard the expression before. I checked with another American friend (woman from Kentucky, in her late 50s) who also didn't really know what it meant but was aware of some younger people occasionally using it.

For me (and I would have thought most people in the UK) this is a piece of folk wisdom parents and grandparents use to admonish children. (In case you haven't come across it before either, the idea is that if you do something in too much of a hurry you'll be careless or make mistakes and have to go back and do it again, so it's actually faster to work more slowly and carefully and get it right first time.)

Have I just happened to hit the only two people in America who don't know the expression?
No, you've hit two members of the majority, Robert.  More haste, less speed (and less frequent variants, like less haste, more speed and more haste, worse speed) is mainly a BrE expression. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary marks it as UK, and it does not occur at all in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (but three times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus).  

Americans, on the other hand, say haste makes waste, which is not unknown in the UK, but it's not in the British National Corpus and only 9 times on the guardian.co.uk site (versus 140 for more haste, less speed).  Many people treat it as if Benjamin Franklin first said it, as it occurs in his Poor Richard's Almanack. But look look up haste in the OED and one finds this (my emphasis added):

 6. In proverbs and phrases: chiefly in sense 2.

a1525  (1500)    Sc. Troy Bk. (Douce) l. 1682 in C. Horstmann Barbour's Legendensammlung (1882) II. 275   Of fule haist cummis no speid.
1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiii,   Haste maketh waste.
1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiiiv,   The more haste the lesse spede.
That is, by 1546 both of these phrases were familiar enough to be recorded as English proverbs. The source of these is often attributed to a similar Latin phrase, Festina lente ('make haste slowly'). But if he wasn't the originator of Haste makes waste, Franklin was at least a great populi{z/s}er of the phrase.

Looking a bit more at the history,  the Corpus of Historical American English has two instances of more haste, less speed (in 1869 and 1920) and 11 of haste makes waste--seven of those before 1860. The early 19th-century boom for haste makes waste might have been a Franklin (orig. AmE in this sense) boom, but what's happening around 1860? Something, for sure:


That's a Google Ngram for more haste less speed and haste makes waste in English books generally.  This is American English:

And this is British English:

In each case, more haste, less speed increases in frequency around 1860--where the phrase was used in the name of a story (1856) and in other books.Why the fashion in the UK turned so dramatically in favo(u)r of the longer phrase, I do not know. Perhaps because it's closer to the Latin, perhaps because the rhyming version was perceived as Americanism, perhaps because someone really stylish and influential was using it. I don't know.

What is clear from all of this is that Americans invented neither phrase.  What is suggested from it is that the relative lack of more haste, less speed in AmE could be due to its lack of popularity in English when the AmE was getting going, since it seems to have been rather (orig. AmE) under-the-radar in the early 19th century.  The missing link here is what was happening in the pre-Richard's Almanack 18th century.


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zee and zed

Now that the Term from Hell has finished, I'd like to get back to blogging on an at-least-weekly basis.  Toward(s) this end, I've stuck my cursor into the e-mailbox that holds the 'potential bloggables'. Since it's nearly midnight as I start this, I consider myself very lucky to have blindly picked one that I've mostly done before. [Editor's note: but since it was interrupted by a conversation about applying for primary school places for my daughter and some laundry, I'm still getting to bed after 2. Typical me, typical me, typical me.] Since I feel like it should have had its own post, I shall give it one.

So: BrE  zed versus AmE zee, for the last letter of the English alphabet.

The last time I talked about these was in my grumpy (but reasonably well-informed) reply to BBC News Magazine's (merrily uninformed) grumpfest "Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples". Here's their Number 46, followed by my reply:

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as "zee". Not happy about it! Ross, London
Fair enough, but why has zed come to us from zeta, but beta hasn't turned up in English as bed? (Because it's come from French and they did it that way. But still!) I have two zee-related suspicions: (1) Some BrE speakers prefer zee in the alphabet song because it rhymes better (tee-U-vee/double-u-eks-why-and-zee/now I know my ABCs/next time won't you play with me). (2) Fear of 'zee' is a major reason that Sesame Street is no longer broadcast in most of the UK. Both of those issues (not problems!) are discussed in this old post.
...which gives you a link to the time before that that I talked about it. And before that, I mentioned it in my zebra post. But there's more still to say about zee and zed.

Zed goes way back in English--the OED's first citations of it are from the 15th century. The OED's first example of zee, on the other hand, is from a 1677 spelling book published in England by Thomas Lye, a non-conformist minister.  Lye was born in Somerset and educated at Oxford, and was preaching and teaching school in London at the time of publication. Bill Cassell at his Canadian Word of the Day site mentions its competitors:
The letter has actually had eight or more names during its long sojourn at the bottom of the English alphabet: zad, zard, zed, zee, ezed, ezod, izod, izzard, uzzard. One of those names is zee, a dialect form last heard in England during the late seventeenth century. That name was brought to America by British immigrants, perhaps not on the Mayflower but very early indeed in American history.
Another English dialect form is izzard, from mid-eighteenth-century English, perhaps from French et zède meaning and z, or else from s hard. Or, as I believe but cannot prove, izzard is simply as an r-infix form of izod that arose in an English dialect where speakers liked to insert r-sounds into r-less word endings. In Scotland the letter’s name has been at various times in history ezod and izod. Even uzzard shows up as a legitimate name of the letter.
(I think we should be a little careful here. We don't have any citations of zee written in Britain since Lye's spelling book--but this does not mean it was last heard then. The names of letters are not often written out, and dialectal names of letters even less so, so goodness knows how long it might have [chiefly BrE] pottered on.)

So, zee is not originally AmE, but it came to be decisively AmE, with Noah Webster (whom we might call the architect of American spelling), specifying in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language "Z.‥ It is pronounced zee". 

Decisively American, but not always unanimously American, it seems, as the OED also gives this quotation:
1882    E. A. Freeman in Longman's Mag. I. 94   The name‥given to the last letter of the alphabet‥in New England is always zee; in the South it is zed.

So, dialectal variation for names of this letter has been found on both sides of the Atlantic. Many things conspire against the survival of such dialectal variations--for example compulsory education, formal education of teachers, the rise of the text(-)book (more likely to have the hyphen in BrE, no space/hyphen in AmE), and the spread of the "Alphabet Song" (first copyrighted in Boston, Massachusetts in 1835). I'd be interested to hear whether any of you (in the US or UK) still use dialectal versions that are out-of-step with your nation's standard.

One place where zed is used in the US is on (orig. AmE) ham radio--which is what got me started on this post in the first place. American Bill 'K1NS' wrote to me in September with this:
Amateur radio operators (hams) around the world have
been saying ZED instead of ZEE for as long as I have
been a ham, which is 54 years now. For example, my
old call sign used to be KAY 6 ZED AITCH ARR.

It is odd, but over my lifetime it has become a habit, and
I automatically say ZED when with hams, but never in
other circumstances.

But I must say that the newer generation of hams say
ZED less often. They are more likely to say ZED if
they are "DXers," that is hams who regularly make
international, long distance contacts as opposed to
local hams who mostly "ragchew" with their local
ham buddies.
So, some free ham-radio lingo with your alphabet info.  I cannot attest to the dialect-specificity of that!

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2011 US-to-UK Word of the Year: FTW

Many thanks to the intrepid readers who have nominated words and phrases for SbaCL Words of the Year this year. Yesterday, kettling was announced as the BrE-to-AmE WotY. Tonight's post does the other (AmE-to-BrE) half of the job.  Unusually, both Words of the Year come from readers' nominations. Am I getting less bossy and opinionated and more generous in my old age? We can only hope so.

And so the AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year is (you're going to hate this):

FTW

Yes, you are going to hate it. And you will hate it for one or more of the following reactions:
  1. "WTF does it mean?"
  2. "That's internet-speak, which is border-crossing by nature. Why should we think of this as inherently AmE?"
  3. "That's not a word! It's an alphabetism [or initialism]! At best, it's a phrase!"
  4. "My nomination was so much better."

Let's take these objections one by one: 

First, get your mind out of the gutter. The F stands for for.  As in For The Win. If I read it aloud, I read it as that phrase, not as the letters. (I'd be interested to hear if anyone does just pronounce the letters for this meaning.)  It's usually used as a post-nominal (after a noun) modifier in order to indicate enthusiastic approval of something--especially something that has 'come through' and 'won' for you.  Here are some recent tweets that have used it (and while I typed the last sentence, 59 more twitterers used it):

@HarrysSmile 
god, love sophia grace and rosie, essex girls ftw!

@tweet_han
Big bang theory FTW!

@sunny_hundal
What I need is a 'Labour Insider' (unhappy SpAd will do) who has same axe to grind & can repeat himself every week. Journalism job FTW!

@LouiseMensch 
This made me laugh. tithenai.tumblr.com/post/321518623… Catholics FTW
[Editor's note: it made me laugh too. Go ahead, (BrE) have/(AmE) take a look!)

The first two of these seem to be by young people watching television. The third writes for The Guardian. The last is a Member of Parliament. So, you might not know FTW...but a lot of people do.

Now, its Americanness:  Once upon a time there was a television (AmE) game show/(BrE) quiz show called Hollywood Squares. In it, nine entertainers sit in a giant (AmE) tic-tac-toe/(BrE) noughts-and-crosses array, and two contestants try to get Xs and Os into the boxes. During X's turn, for example, Contestant X chooses which square to attempt. The host, Peter Marshall (who hosted it 1966–1981) then asks the (orig./chiefly AmE) celeb a question, and the celeb says funny things and eventually gives an answer. The contestant then has to decide whether to accept the answer or not. If contestant X makes the right choice, then "X takes the square", as Marshall would say.  When a contestant chose the square that could give them their three Xs or Os in a row, Marshall the contestant would name the celebrity and say "[insert name of celebrity] for the win!"  The game was later adapted for UK television as Celebrity Squares, but without that catchphrase.

The catchphrase then, as catchphrases do, made its way into non-televised discourse. And in the age of the 140-character limit, it's been initiali{s/z}ed. The full version exists too, even in BrE. A young tweeter in Sussex, whom I won't link to because he's both underage and apparently doing something illegal, has just tweeted "VIDEO PIRACY FOR THE WIN". 

I see that the (AmE) show/(BrE) programme was back on the air with Tom Bergeron as host 1998-2004, and while I've watched a couple of wins on YouTube now, I've not heard anyone utter the phrase.  If the more recent incarnation hasn't breathed new life into the phrase, then would expect that most young Americans have no idea where FTW comes from. (And even if he did say it and it's being repeated on the Game Show Channel, I'd still not be surprised if young Americans have no idea where it came from.) But knowing the origin of an expression is no prerequisite for using it, so young people, British people, and, according to my Twitter research, an awful lot of German people are using it. I'd expect most Americans of my generation (let's just leave it as 'old enough', ok?) to remember it (maybe not immediately. We're old, you know.  I mean, 'old enough'.).

On the "that's not a word" argument. Well, that's been going on very loudly about Oxford Dictionaries' WotY, (BrE) squeezed middle. (Here's a peek at the pro and the con.)    If we're considering FTW as an alphabetism, then I point you to just about any introduction to linguistics or morphology text that lists word-formation processes of English. If it's attempting any kind of completeness, it will list 'alphabetism' or 'initialism' as a word-formation process. (Here are some examples.) And if it's a word-formation process, then, well, you know...it must form words.

If you think it's not a word because it's a phrase, I've already ignored you by having a phrase as AmE-to-BrE WotY in 2009 (go missing). For the win (like go missing) is word-like in that it is a bit of language that is learn{ed/t} as a whole, with meaning and usage constraints that go beyond the sum of its parts. That makes it [in my professional usage of the term, at least] a lexeme--something that you'll store in your mental lexicon--the dictionary in your head.* And I'm a lexicologist. We [the three or so people in the world who call themselves lexicologists] mostly deal with words, but, you know, we usually don't see a very important distinction between words and other types of lexemes when thinking about things like lexical borrowing between dialects. 
* (Or we could think of it as a lexicali{s/z}ed construction--and I like to think of things that way. But let's not try to squeeze too much of a linguistics degree into this post. It's already way past anybody's bedtime.)

It all comes down to your definition of word. We can fight about it, but I'll just phone in my part of the fight because 'word' is not a terribly useful linguistic concept.  Most people think of words as bits of writing with spaces on either side, but that doesn't work.  Less masochistic readers might want to skip this bit, but here's is part of the entry on 'Words' that I wrote for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences:
In English orthography, word is easily defined as a unit of language that is written contiguously, with a space on each end. The notion of orthographic word is, however, circular since spaces were introduced into the written code in order to mark the boundaries between words. A more satisfying definition would help explain why such boundaries are perceived in the flow of language. Orthography is also an unreliable indicator of wordhood. Some languages do not have a written form, some orthographies
(e.g., Chinese, Lao) do not mark word boundaries, and any orthographical system is subject to fossilization and arbitrary fashions. For example, on most linguistic criteria, the compound noun ice cream is a single word, in spite of the space within it.
There is no clear linguistic definition of word, however. The most theoretically useful definitions are based on grammatical or phonological criteria [...], but their usefulness is limited by the fact that a) grammatical word and phonological word do not delimit the same set of expressions and that b) no grammatical or phonological criteria for wordhood are applicable to all types of words in all languages.

So: is it a word? Isn't it a word? It's a bit of language whose meaning is more than the sum of its parts and whose form-meaning association has to be learn{ed/t} by, and stored in the memory of, competent speakers of the language. That's good enough for me.

If you object to this word because you didn't nominate it, then you only have Ian Preston to blame for getting there first, arguing his case and attracting support.  (BrE Teacherese) Must try harder.

[added: 22 December lunchtime] But why is this the word of 2011?  In part it's because 2011 seemed to be the year of win.  We had BrE speakers complaining about AmE use of winningest (here, among other places), Charlie Sheen all over the news with Winning! (which has not caught on as much over here--nor has Two and a Half Men), lots of use of win as a mass noun.  For evidence of that, I just searched for of win use by tweeters within 50 miles of London and got a lot of results, including:
Actually - this whole site is full of win:
Samantha Halford

My graze box for tomorrow is made of win. And sadly I'll have to nom the whole thing due to the hols. What a shame :D 
[Ed: This one might need some translation. Nom was last year's runner-up for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year. Hols is BrE informal for 'holidays'. If you want to know what a graze box is...]
But among these, it was FTW that was nominated, and since it has a long history in AmE and a shorter one in BrE, it seemed a clearer instance of dialectal borrowing than the others. Why this year? Because this year is when I noticed my students using it. In fact, it was because of  Erin McKean (amazing to discover you know people with their own Wikipedia entries) and one of my English former students using it on social media on the same day that I looked it up--reali{z/s}ing that the F was probably not as bad as it sounded...


WotY signing off for another year!


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2011 UK-to-US Word of the Year: kettling

This year, I'm spreading the SbaCL Words-of Year announcement into two posts -- partly to make up for hardly blogging at all this autumn and partly so that I can go to bed tonight.  So, starting with the BrE-to-AmE import of the year, I give you: 

kettling

I'm thinking of it here mostly as a gerund (a verb made into a noun by adding -ing), but, of course, the verb itself has been imported too: to kettle - '(for police) to herd protesters/demonstrators into a restricted, exitless area in order to restrain them'.  Now, this is fairly new to BrE too, and Michael Quinion wrote about it last December. He traces its use in English to happenings around the London G20 summit in 2009 and notes that it seems to be a calque (loan-translation) from German. When students were protesting and then kettled in London at the end of 2010, a number of American readers of internet newspapers contacted me to ask what it meant.  A year later, American newspapers use the word to describe the treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters.  This Gawker piece uses the similar-though-not-police-related AmE word corral in its headline, then explains the police procedure as kettling in the article.

Kettling makes an ideal SbaCL WotY for two reasons:
  1. It's a word of this year.  Other nominees like gobsmacked  have been slowly making their way into AmE for a number of years. Kettling is very 2011. 
  2. America didn't really need it (we had corral), but took it anyway.  This is the usual complaint about AmE imports to BrE: "Why use this horrible foreign word when we have perfectly good words from OUR side of the ocean that we should have PRIDE in?!  We're being Americanised!! Or, worse, AMERICANIZED!!"  This just goes to show that AmE can both dish it out and take it.

So, congratulations kettling and many thanks to Nancy Friedman for nominating it and other commenters and tweeters for supporting it.

Before turning to the AmE-to-BrE winner tomorrow, let me just mention an AmE-to-BrE also-ran that relates to kettling: occupy.  It was nominated by Roger Owen Green and supported by others, but I don't think it qualifies.  The meaning of occupy in Occupy Wall Street and later Occupy London Stock Exchange (etc.) is a meaning that was already common to the two dialects. What has been imported is not a new word, or a new meaning of a word, but a new slogan or a new template for a proper name. Definitely influential, but not what I'd consider a suitable WotY.

So, come back tomorrow for the AmE-to-BrE winner!



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Word of the Year 2011: Nominations, please!

(A lightly edited version of last year's announcement for this year. There is one more week of the Term from Hell, after which there is the Marking from Hell, but I do hope to get back to regular blogging soon.)

Word of the Year season has begun (though I must say, I do not approve of announcing WotYs in November. Oxford Dictionaries is so cruel to December). This means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY escapades.

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 2011, 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.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. 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 before Christmas.

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Untranslatables month: the summary

Still buried deep beneath teaching. For your amusement, here are the 'untranslatables of the day' posted on Twitter last month, as promised in my last post. Where there's only a link, it's an expression that I've already written about in some detail. Please click through to see (or take part in) further discussion of those expressions.
  1. BrE punter

  2. AmE pork : "Government funds, appointments, or benefits dispensed or legislated by politicians to gain favor with their constituents" (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edn)
  3. BrE kettling :  Police practice of surrounding protesters and holding them in a restricted area. Starting to be borrowed into AmE.
  4. AmE trailer trash : Because the social significance of trailers in US is very different from that of static caravans in UK.  (Mentioned in this old post.)
  5. AmE snit : American Heritage 4 says: "state of agitation or irritation', but that's way too imprecise. It's a tiny fit of temper.  (Discussed a bit back here.)
  6. BrE secondment : temporary transfer to work in another part of a company/organi{z/s}ation, e.g. for a special project.  Pronounced with the stress on the second syllable.
  7.  BrE to skive off, skiving.
  8. AmE to jones, jonesing : To suffer withdrawal symptoms and crave. Originally used in relation to heroin. Increasingly heard in BrE. The verb 'to Jones' is from AmE drug slang noun Jones, a drug habit. Then later, a craving: I have a Jones for Reese's peanut butter cups. > I'm jonesing for some Reese's peanut butter cups.
  9. BrE git : Collins English Dictionary says "contemptible person, often a fool". Closest equivalent probably bastard. Git is originally related to bastardy: it comes from beget.
  10. AmE rain check : A promise for something postponed (the check = BrE cheque). For example, I'll have to take a rain check on lunch = 'Although you invited me to lunch, I can't make it today, but I'll take you up on your offer at another time'. Rain check was claimed by Matthew Engel to 'abound' in BrE in his complaints about Americanisms, but it's also the case that it's widely misunderstood in the UK.
  11. BrE jobsworth : "a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner" (Wikipedia)
  12. AmE potluck : a shared meal (bring a dish to pass), but culturally a different kind of ritual in US and UK.  I discussed it back here.
  13. BrE Oi! : Kind of like hey, you! but with a sense that the addressee is doing something that impinges upon you.  Not to be confused w/ Yiddish oy (vey), heard in AmE.
  14. BrE naff : Means approximately 'uncool' but with particular overtones of 'dorky', 'cheesy' and probably others. Contrary to widespread folk etymology, there's no evidence that naff comes from Not Available For F--ing. Origin is unknown.
  15. AmE nickel-and-dimed : 'Put under strain by lots of little expenses'.  E.g. I thought the house was a bargain, but all the little repairs are nickel-and-diming me to death.
  16. BrE  jammy.
  17. AmE hazing : OED has "A species of brutal horseplay practised on freshmen at some American Colleges".
  18. BrE to come over all queer : to suddenly feel "off"--physically or emotionally. Queer meaning 'feeling odd' (ill or upset) is much more common in BrE than in AmE.  Also: come over all funny, come over all peculiar.
  19. AmE to nix (something) : Generally, to do something decisively negative to something. Specifically: cancel/refute/forbid/refuse/deny (OED).  It's not unheard of in UK, but it's a borrowed AmEism. This is true of many of the AmE 'untranslatables'. They fill a gap.
  20. BrE oo er missus : Humorously marks (maybe unintended) sexual innuendo. See here for some history.
  21. AmE (from) soup to nuts : absolutely inclusive; from absolute start to absolute end or including every related thing.
  22. BrE taking the piss / taking the mickey : Explained at Wikipedia.
  23. AmE inside baseball : requiring rarefied insider knowledge. William Safire discussed it here.
  24. BrE moreish 
  25. BrE ropey or ropy : Of a thing, inferior, unreliable. Of a person, feeling vaguely unwell.
  26. AmE mugwump : Covered recently on World Wide Words.
  27. BrE lurgi or lurgy
  28. AmE 101 (one-oh-one) : the basics of subject. E.g. saying 'please' is Etiquette 101. From the traditional US university course numbering system. The Virtual Linguist wrote about this one.
  29. BrE faff.  See Oxford Dictionaries on this one.
  30. AmE squeaker : Competition or election won by tiny margin.
  31. BrE gutted.

Goodbye Untranslatables month!
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Intralexy

Some readers may be fed up with me for not blogging enough and seeming to spend all my time on Twitter. Those readers will probably not like this post, as it's about what I'm doing on Twitter. But perhaps it might get you interested in joining the party there?

On Twitter, I do a 'Difference of the Day' each day highlighting a small way in which British and American English differ. But since (a) October features Lynneukah, the joyous festival of Lynne, and (b) I'm not going to be able to work in long-form (blogging) much during my Term from Hell, I'm doing something different this month. Each day I will feature an 'untranslatable'--that is, a word or phrase in AmE or BrE that has no true-complete-easy equivalent in the other dialect. The title of this post, intralexy, is my little word for it. Words (that's the -lexy) that exist within (that's the intra-) a particular one of my focal dialects. (These may be very translatable in another dialect or another language...but covering that is not part of my SbaCL shtick. Feel free to point out other equivalents, if you see them.)

Now, I'm sure that people will suggest lots of translations for the things that I present as 'untranslatable'.  So be it.  The expressions I present as 'untranslatable' will be those for which I feel that there is a nuance that cannot be captured by any near-equivalents. That might qualify most of the differences between the dialects. But, again I say: so be it. It's a bit of fun, and if it provides entertainment for people who want to challenge the notion of 'untranslatability', so be it. 

(Hey, you know 'so be it' isn't a bad motto for a Term from Hell. You may hear more of it!)

The first one is going to be BrE punter, which can be translated in lots of ways (click on the link for discussion). Sometimes it means 'bettor', sometimes 'john', sometimes 'person who tries something'. Because all those meanings are joined together in a word that was originally to do with gambling, the other senses carry connotations that aren't found in the AmE version.  In fact, it's one of the words that puzzled me most in my early years in the UK.

So, if you're on Twitter or following my Twitter feed through another means...I hope you enjoy this little diversion! And feel free to suggest more 'intralexis' in the comments!
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The book!

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Abbr.

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