Separated by a Common Language

I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...

Mike C from Shropshire asks:

Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. …  Any thoughts?

Pleading and plea-ing

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is fairly particular to much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:

• He pled guilty   = real but prescriptively frowned-upon 
• She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
• He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
• ?? She pled for their forgiveness.  = unnatural-sounding much less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon

As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:

Because of this,  I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.

The British history of pled

Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!

The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:

pled guilty in Hansard

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)

The American history of pled

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants.  But.

In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).

On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.

At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on. 

Pled guilty in speech

I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.) 

The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:

• pled guilty:  356 
• pleaded guilty: 295 

I can look at these in films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA.  Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:

 

	UK	USA
pleaded guilty	.02	.02
pled guilty	—	.07

While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.

Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?

It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.

At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile. Here's more from the up-to-yesterday News on the Web corpus, where pleaded guilty outnumbers pled guilty nearly 40-fold. 

How many of those are Scottish? Well, quite a few, but it would be a lot of work to sort out both 'is this in a Scottish news site' and 'if it's not on a Scottish news site, is it talking about something or quoting someone Scottish?'.  But I did take a sample of 100 and did a quick (more BrE) reckoning of what was what:

• 53 were from Scotland
• 30 were from either English local news or UK national news 
• 10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
• 1 Northern Irish
• 1 Wales
• 5 ?

I'd take the 30 English/UK national with a grain/pinch of salt because I didn't check whether they were about Scottish legal cases. 

Is pled going up in the UK part of the news corpus: yes, but so is pleaded guilty—so it looks like there are just more legal cases in the news 

pled guilty in NOW-GB

pleaded guilty in NOW-GB

Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland.  (There was only one BBC hit in my NOW sample of 100.)

I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 (Scotland) and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 (Scotland) that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled). 

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A great thing about being Facebook friends with linguists is that I get to benefit from their daily observations of English. Here's a recent observation from John Wells:

Something I've just heard on the telly about someone who nearly drowned: "If the fisherman hadn't've spotted him, he might not have survived."

I keep hearing this grammatical construction in BrE, with extra "have" ('ve) as compared with the standard "...hadn't spotted...".

But I have never come across any comment on, or discussion of, this usage.

In the comments, some people claim it's much used in the US, but it soon becomes clear that there's some confusion with a different construction than Wells was talking about. So, let's look at it. 

I'm using the News on the Web corpus (because my usual go-to GloWbE corpus isn't co(-)operating in giving me the contractions). There I searched for "had n't have VERB" and got it with a range of verbs:

So, it's looking pretty British, but in Caroline McAfee's 'Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland', she says "as in American English". (Bold = my emphasis, so it's clear which [more BrE] bits of the example we're talking about.)

In Scottish speech, as in American English, there is a sequence had – (ENCLITIC NEGATIVE PARTICLE) – have PAST PARTICIPLE. The identity of the second have, which appears as a weak or enclitic form, is problematic (as witness the writers who spell it of):

 

‘Ah wouldnae of came if Ah had of knew,’ he insisted (Helen W. Pryde, the First Book of the McFlannels, 1947: 24)

Adams (1948) suggested that it was a survival of English dialectal y- before past participles, reinterpreted as have via the latter’s weak form a. The occurrence of the form in Scotland and the USA is compatible with diffusion from Ulster. Fodor and Smith (1978) offer a purely synchronic analysis, seeing the first have as a modal and the second as the auxiliary of the perfect.

A shorter (maybe), quicker and earlier post this month, since I am going to be travel(l)ing without much internet access in September and am (orig. AmE) freaking out* about how much work I have to do before the autumn/fall semester begins. 

In a recent Language Log post, Victor Mair points out a difference in how American and British teens might react to this shirt:

Americans would tend to say I wouldn't be caught dead in it but BrE speakers would more likely say I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

To me, these bring up different images, since caught is a more dynamic verb than seen. Those who are caught are generally trying not to be caught. I wore the t-shirt, but I wanted to avoid being seen in it. But those who are seen can't help being seen. If you say 'I wouldn't be seen dead in it', it sounds to me like you fear someone putting the t-shirt on you after you've died. But maybe that difference in imagery is just me. Most people aren't so literalist about their idioms.

Anyhow...what's the history of these phrases? The OED has American caught dead from 1870 and American seen dead in 1887, then a Scottish-authored found dead in 1923, followed by British seen deads in the 1930s. So it's likely it started in the US, but then got translated a bit in UK.

from the OED

As well as caught unaware, there's the more frequent caught unawares (which might not have been tagged as an adjective in the corpus, leading to its absence from the chart above). Another AmE caught expression is caught short: 

from the OED

So, generally, caught is used with adjectives to describe being in a situation you're not prepared for. With a noun, we also have caught by surprise (more than 2x more US hits in GloWbE). 

But not all caught + adjective phrases with connotations of unreadiness are more American. Caught red-handed has more UK hits in the GloWbE corpus (less than 2x more), and that makes sense since red-handed is from Scotland in the early 1800s. (The red is the blood of the person you've just murdered.) That's a more literal caught, though—being caught by the police (or someone).

*I've only really just appreciated that anything that looks bold when I'm in the blogger editor doesn't look bold when the post is published—at least not on my browser. So, I'm going to start putting bold things in another colo(u)r just to underscore the difference. If anyone wants to give me a tip on how to retroactively change the font across the blog to make the bolds stand out more, please let me know via gmail (lynneguist). 

On my way home from work, I pass the windowless side of an end-of-terrace house, on which this sign is posted:

Such signs are a common sight in England, and not immediately transparent to AmE speakers, who are more accustomed to 'No dumping' signs:

from SmartSign.com

(There's more we could say about these signs, but we haven't got space for that right now. For more on NO TRESPASSING, see this old post on AmE POSTED signs.) 

The Brighton sign is an official local-government sign, while anyone can buy those US examples. The equivalent anyone-can-buy it signs in the UK might have both the terms tipping and dumping:

from morelock.co.uk

Tipping (first cited UK early 1800s), like dumping, relates to tipping, and thereby releasing, the contents of a truck or cart into an area for waste, hence BrE tip for what AmE would call dump: a (probably official) place where the waste from a particular area can be left (for processing, piling up, burial, etc.). The verb dump ('to fall with sudden force') goes back to Middle English, but it's only in the late 1700s, in the US, that it starts to be used transitively to refer particularly to getting rid of waste.  (See this old post for more on AmE dumpster. See the comments of this old post for discussion of dump truck.) 

Tipping or dumping could be legal, but fly-tipping is specifically 'illegal dumping'. Why fly? It's not to do with the insects that inevitably follow illegal dumping. It's the fly in the expression on the fly: that is, in motion or 'on the wing'. Dumping/tipping that is "on the fly" is without prior arrangement and probably surreptitious. You're taking a load of waste away from where it's not needed, and you just leave it someplace that is conveniently unobserved. The term fly-tipping is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s, and the back-formed verb fly-tip only comes up in the 1980s.

On the fly developed different uses in BrE and AmE in the mid-1800s. In BrE it could be a slang term for begging (or committing crimes) while moving about/around town. (See Green's Dictionary of Slang.) With that extension, fly-tipping makes some sense as a term for an illegal activity. In AmE, on the fly became a description of a baseball that's been hit, but has not yet touched the ground—so you want to catch the other team's ball on the fly. (The term fly ball comes some decades later, as a result.) 

fly-posting 

If you know that fly-tipping is illegally dumping waste "on the fly", then it's easier to see what BrE fly-posting means: putting up posters on the move—all over town.  (Often, but not necessarily, illegally.) If you don't make the on the fly connection, you might think it's about posting (orig. AmE) flyers (late 1800s). But since flyer also comes from that same 'quickly, while moving' sense of fly, you're not far off.

From a Brighton & Hove News article "Council brings in new rules to tackle flyposting and stickering"

An earlier term for this is bill-sticking (late 1700s, esp. in 1800s), which one occasionally still sees in the UK, especially the agentive noun bill-sticker. We rarely call flyers or posters bills or handbills these days, but that's what they were from the late 1700s and into the 20th century.

While it's possible to find uses of fly-posting in the US, it's a much rarer term there. Instead of signs saying No Flyposting you might see a stencil(l)ed Post No Bills. 

(From Alex Westerman's essay about POST NO BILLS in New York City.)

from Pittsburgh Orbit

(This calls to mind my earlier post on POSTED signs in the US, also linked-to above. And my post re bills versus notes. Neither of these is terribly related to the issues in this post, but, hey, someone might be wondering.)

Another bill/Bill joke, seen in UK and Australia, responds to No Bill Posters signs.

from Bill Posters Soundcloud

While you don't tend to see POST NO BILLS in the UK now, it does seem to have been used in the UK in the early 20th century. I've found a couple of these signs (now sold) on auction sites:

From GWRA auctions

An AmE informal term for (often illegal) postering is wheatpasting, after the paste used to fasten the posters so that they cannot be easily removed.

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context:

Over on Bluesky last month, I was pulled into a conversation that went something like this:

• Someone tweets a screenshot of a comment with the phrase Do you baulk at the film reviews...?
• Someone American asks "how long have y'all been adding a u to balk?"
• And then, predictably, some respondents say it's always been there, Noah Webster took it out.

The Oxford English Dictionary has it as balk. Since it comes from Old English, it only got a 'u' after French had influenced (I am tempted to say 'infected') the spelling system. The 'u' came into the word in the 1600s and 1700s, and today the spelling is very mixed in BrE.  British National Corpus has 21 baulked/13 balked, more recent Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 71 baulked/93 balked in BrE.  Cambridge, Chambers & Collins Dictionary all list balk first as does the Guardian Style Guide.

Most u/non-u variations in BrE and AmE involve an o—as in words like colo(u)r and mo(u)ld. The variation can probably be blamed on Samuel Johnson as much as Noah Webster. In the 18th-century, not all British dictionaries put a u in words like colo(u)r, but Johnson did, and his dictionary became far more famous than the others, so the u form eventually became standard in BrE. I write about the ou/o spellings at this old post (and much more and much better in in The Prodigal Tongue). But even Johnson spelled balk without the u.

My attention to the -o(u)- words in the book meant I overlooked balk/baulk—but I used the word balked in chapter 7:

...please seemed inappropriate in the small request situation, and so Americans balked at it.

The British copyeditor did not bat an eyelash—or a blue pencil—at it.

Given the dictionaries' agreement, we can say that balk is the "standard" spelling of the verb in BrE. Given the corpus numbers, we can say that it is the "normal" spelling. Given the word's history, we can say it is the "original" spelling.

But those corpus numbers aren't so distinct, and given the conversation on Bluesky, it seems that some BrE writers really want to spell it with a u (and to believe that that is the "standard/normal/original" way to spell it). This may well be another instance of British spelling changing in recent decades in order to fight against perceptions but not realities of a British/American spelling difference.*

Confusion about its spelling is understandable, though, since there is a noun that is more usually spelled/spelt baulk. It's part of a billiard-type game table, and the term is used in several terms in several such games.

Illustration from International 8 Ball Referee

I searched for several of these terms as either balk or baulk in Corpus of Global Web-Based English and got only the u spelling—with none of them in AmE:

(Britannica.com has it as balk. They're owned by the same company as Merriam-Webster. Is the ghost of Noah W. removing U's in the encyclop[a]edia?)

So, in general, if it's a [billiards] noun, it's baulk and if it's a verb it's balk. They both come from the same Old English word, with a Germanic ancestor.

The one other -aulk word in current English is caulk (used much more in AmE than BrE, which tends to say seal/sealant instead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquer in the 1500s.

The post-Norman urge to stick a U in balk also affected talk and stalk in the 1600s, but not, apparently walk. For me, the mystery is: why has the urge to stick a U in persisted for baulk and not the others?

----

*I say 'another' instance of spelling change due to perceptions of 'Americanism' because I discuss the main instance of that phenomenon in detail in The Prodigal Tongue:

Harry Enfield, Loadsamoney

I belong to a fantastic international writing group. There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included "tons of something" (I can't actually remember what the noun was). A New Zealander in the group commented, "I suppose we'd say heaps of." 

Indeed.  Here are some imprecise, informal ways of expressing 'large quantities of' in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The darker the blue, the more characteristic that phrase is to that country: 

Or, here's a better, but not as pretty way to report these results, as number of occurrences per million words. This makes the numbers comparable across countries (since the individual country corpora are not all the same size). Here are those figures for the three main expressions, with the numbers rounded.