Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts

painting as decorating

We're four months into a major renovation project and the walls (at least) are finished, so we're getting our brains around painting them. So far, one wall is painted so that the radiator can be (more BrE) fitted (in AmE, I'd say installed) this week. I've marked the same space as 'same wall' on the 'before' picture, so you can see the difference, though it's a Ship-of-Theseus question whether it's the same wall...

after before

Because major renovations are not something I've done in any other country, I'm often not sure if the vocabulary I'm learning is (a) trade jargon that lay people don't generally know, (b) words I'd know if I were just a little bit handier, or (c) British words for things that Americans have different (or no) words for. Painting is something I have previous experience of, though, so I'm pretty sure I can make a whole week's worth of Twitter Differences of the Day (#DotD) out of them (#PaintWeek). So, I'm pre-loading the differences on this blog, but I reserve the right to add more painting differences to this post as the week goes on! 

Decorating

When UK friends see the progress pictures I post on Facebook, many say "It's just the decorating now!" By (BrE) decorating they mean the painting, wallpapering and decorative tiling. They've been saying that for over a month even though we don't have (AmE) countertops/(BrE) worktops, a (BrE) hob/(AmE) range top, bathroom plumbing, or a (finished) kitchen floor and soon we'll be moving everything from the living room into the kitchen, so that another floor can be replaced. Other than the one wall painted so that the radiator can be plumbed in, decorating is mostly (AmE) a ways off yet. But my main point is: my American friends don't say "it's just the decorating now!" and I can't think of an exact AmE equivalent for BrE decorating in this sense.

Similarly, the person you hire to paint interior walls (or to wallpaper them) is a (BrE) decorator. In AmE, you'd call them a painter if they're painting. In AmE decorator is not the name of a manual-labo(u)r job, but a creative one—close to being an interior designer, but more focused on choosing lampshades and pictures for the walls than on . This art/design college site describes the difference between interior design and AmE interior decorating as:

Interior design is the art and science of understanding people’s behavior to create functional spaces within a building, while interior decorating is the furnishing or adorning of a space with decorative elements to achieve a certain aesthetic. In short, interior designers may decorate, but decorators do not design.

(In other words, interior designers are not very good at explaining what interior designers are, but they get paid a lot more than interior decorators.)

Paints and their finishes

The paint term you're most likely to find confusing if you move countries is the name for normal wall paint. In BrE it's emulsion and in AmE latex (paint) or just wall paint.

In terms of finishes (there's a chart below), the dullest one is matt in BrE but spelled matte in AmE, in a rare case of AmE spelling being longer than BrE. AmE also uses flat for this finish. Dulux (UK brand) has flat matt as a 'more velvety' kind of matt.

More popular than matt(e) in the US is eggshell, which is promoted as 'more washable'. You get this in the UK, but people seem to talk about it much less and buy matt paint more. 

Both BrE & AmE have paints with satin finishes, though they may be more popular in UK—or there's the possibility that a meaning difference causes the different numbers in the two places, e.g. if UK satin has less sheen than a US satin or something like that. Then again, some of the number differences in the corpus table below may stem from people writing about such things more in the UK than the US. I remember when Peter Gabriel's song D.I.Y. came out in 1978 and Americans had to be told what the initialism meant. DIY is a national obsession in the UK. 

A finish name I've seen in the UK and not the US is silk, "Dr Dulux" tells me that the term silk is used for woodwork paint, whereas satin is for (plaster) wall paint.

In AmE, I'd talk about paint finishes on wood in terms of gloss, a term well-used in BrE too. But it seems gloss finishes tend to be talked about in more hyphenated ways in AmE: semi-gloss, high-gloss.

(Note that the BrE 'matte finish' examples in the table are mostly about makeup, not wall paint.)


Plaster & paint

Last week we had a classic misunderstanding when Spouse kept saying he'd do the mist coat on a newly plastered wall and I didn't know not to hear that as "missed coat". ("If the plasterers missed a coat," I was thinking, "why aren't we asking them to fix that?") It turns out a mist coat is a coat of diluted paint that's used to prime a newly plastered wall. While I have found mist coat in a US paint company's glossary, it offers sealer coat as an alternative, and that term might be more common in the US (see chart), but it's not clear from the data that the examples have to do with sealing plastered walls, rather than sealing something else that's going to be painted further.

(To see more data on these, click here for a Google Books ngram, which shows mist coat looking not-terribly-different across the countries.)

In both countries, this could be called a primer or priming coat too.

In talking about mist coats with Americans, another reason for our unfamiliarity with the term came up: Americans rarely deal with fresh plaster walls these days, mostly using (AmE) drywall (aka AmE sheet( )rock, wall( )board & BrE plasterboard). I've mentioned some of these terms in another post, and remain very bitter about drywall, because at my first UK Scrabble tournament I played DRYWALLS as a nine-timer (i.e. on two triple-word scores) for 171 points and it was disallowed because it was not in the UK Scrabble dictionary at the time. (Today it would be good for tournament play. Waaaah!!!)

At any rate, watching the plasterers' progress has been really impressive. They are GOOD at their jobs. So smoooooooth.

Colo(u)rs 

It's interesting that in our globali{s/z}ed world that paint brands are rather nation-specific (US Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams; UK Dulux, Albany...). Perhaps that's because the materials you're painting and conditions under which you're painting can differ from place to place, and therefore the best formulations for one place aren't the best for another. Maybe they're all coming from the same factories somewhere, but they're branded locally because that's where the colo(u)rs are mixed. I could do some research on that, but I've already spent too much of my Sunday on this post. Whatever the reason, the names of the paint colo(u)rs are going to differ.  I've noted in another post that fudge-colo(u)red paint in one country is a strikingly different colo(u)r from in the other.
 
How you choose a colo(u)r is named differently. In AmE I'd call the things you get from the paint store swatches or paint/color chips. Valdspar Paints from Minnesota has come to the UK and advertises colour chips, but in the main UK paint companies offer colour cards or sample cards.

If everything from our dining room weren't packed up in boxes right now, I'd show you a print  we were given as a wedding present, in which a map of Britain is shaped from paint samples with names based on UK place names, like Dorset Cream and I-don't-remember-what-else.

Dorset Cream, as it happens, is from a paint company that has gone global, trading on its Britishness and therefore sent up in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

 

A verb or two

And I've just noticed this relevant old Difference of the Day:


...as paint 

Finally (if I don't add more), paint similes seem to be much more common in BrE than AmE. I've run across smart as paint before, and Michael Quinion has written about that and other positive comparisons to paint. With smart as paint, it helps to keep in mind the more BrE sense of smart, i.e. stylish and fresh. (I do recommend Quinion's post.) 

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solder (and a bit about calm)

I've had requests from Andy J and (long ago) Doug Sundseth to cover this one. Here's an excerpt from Andy's recent email on the topic:

I watch a lot of Youtube videos which feature people who self-describe as makers (part DIYers and part semi-professional craftsmen and women). I have noticed that also without exception those based in the USA and Canada pronounce the word solder as sodder, whereas we BrE speakers would invariably sound the L in both the noun and the verb solder.
The North American variation seems at odds with the similar phonic construction in soldier or for example folder which, to my ear based on film and TV utterances, seem to be pronounced in a largely similar way to BrE, ie the L is sounded.

Before I go into the history of the word, I want to do a little bit of "here's how a linguist thinks".  Andy's got(ten) us started along the right lines here, in that (a) he talks about variation, rather than deviation, and (b) he looks for broader patterns. It's important to look for the broader patterns because we know that:
  • Where spelling clashes with pronunciation (that is, where spelling is not phonetic), the spelling often gives clues for finding an earlier pronunciation.
  • Linguistic sound changes are very often regular. That is to say, they apply across all words that would be susceptible to that change. 
(A bit on how linguists write: putting a letter between / / means I'm using the International Phonetic Alphabet —or a simplified version of it in this case— and talking about sounds. Where I'm talking about spelling, I'm using italics.)

We can illustrate those two points with the /r/ after vowels. In my inland northern American accent, I would pronounce the -er in solder with an /r/. In my spouse's London accent, he would pronounce it as an unstressed vowel /É™/ —no /r/.  That difference carries on to every word that ends in -er (and every other r that follows a vowel, actually). If we look at that spelling and those pronunciations, we are well justified in thinking that earlier English pronounced the /r/ there, and the English of southern England later stopped pronouncing it. Otherwise, why would all those r's be there in the spelling? And indeed, that's the case.

Pic from (AmE) Jewelry Making Daily
But in this case, as Andy notes, there is no evidence of a regular sound change. Most Americans don't pronounce an /l/ in solder, but if there had been a sound change that got rid of /l/ after a vowel or before a /d/, then Americans should pronounce folder as "fodder" and soldier as "sodyer", and Americans just don't do that.

In the absence of evidence for a regular sound change, we have two possibilities:
  1. the /l/ is not an original part of the pronunciation, but people started pronouncing an /l/ because they saw it there in the spelling. This happens often enough that we have a name for this kind of sound change: spelling pronunciation.
  2. the /l/ is an original part of the pronunciation, but for some idiosyncratic reason, someone started pronouncing it without the /l/ and that caught on. That can happen too.
So our question is: which of those is it?  (And does it have to be just one of those?) Here's where we have to look at the evidence from the past.

The OED gives the following historical spellings of the word (the numbers indicate the centuries in which you see those spellings):
α. ME soudur, ME soudure, soudour, sowdur, sowdowre; ME soudre, ME–15 souder, ME–16 (18 dialect) sowder (ME sowdere, 15 soweder); 18 dialect sowther. β. ME sawdur, sawdyr, 15 sawyer; ME sawd(e)re, 15 sawder (16 sawter), 15–16 saudre, 16 sauder. γ. 15–17 soder (16 soader, sodar), 16– sodder; 15 sother, 16 soather. δ. ME souldour, 15–16 soulder (15 sowl-). ε. 16 soldure, 16– solder
I've highlighted the five paths that the spelling seems to follow (indicated by the Greek letters). Why five paths? Because language is a moveable, social thing. The word shows up in English in the period when English was getting a lot of vocabulary from France (after the Norman Invasion and all that). But words don't have to just show up once. And once they do show up, they don't stay the same.And when they change, they can change in different ways in different places.

The Old French word that solder comes from is represented in the OED etymology as:
< Old French soud-, saud-, soldure (compare Italian saldatura ), < souder , etc.,
Three of the paths are  L-less (and these are the paths for which the OED has more examples—so the L-less spellings were more widespread. That's because it came into English without an /l/ sound because it mostly didn't have one in French. The Italian comparison word that has an L tells us that there's a fair chance that the French came from a Latin word with an /l/, which the French subsequently lost. And that's indeed what we find: the Latin etymon is solidare 'to make solid'. Both French and Italian dropped the Latin word's second syllable, but French did it by losing a consonant and Italian by losing a vowel.

So what about the two L-ful paths? There are (again) two possibilities (plus the possibility that it is both of these to different degrees/in different places):
  1. Maybe some of the people who brought the word to England did pronounce an /l/ in it, and so the spelling reflected that. Note the soldure spelling that existed in Old French.
  2. Maybe some scribes started inserting an L because they knew the word came from Latin and they wanted to hono(u)r its Latin roots. 
If the answer is (1), then it is possible that the minority pronunciation was what came to be standard in the spelling, and eventually that pronunciation became standard across England.  Maybe the word travel(l)ed to the US between those two standardi{s/z}ation events.

But (2) is more likely, judging from the clear history of sentimentality for Latin affecting English spelling. Here's an article by Arika Okrent on weirdly spelt words, and indeed she includes solder in the same category as debt and receipt, as victims of re-Latini{s/z}ing in the 15th and 16th centuries. The L got added into the spelling, and then later, people started pronouncing it as a spelling pronunciation.

We've seen a similar story for herb: the spelling got Latini{s/z}ed, and the English (eventually) went for a spelling pronunciation, but Americans carried on with the old pronunciation.

When did the spelling-pronunciation shift happen? After America had had its English from England (mostly).  The OED notes that Smart's 1840 pronouncing dictionary (from England) included only the /l/-less pronunciation, but it looks like this was very much a 'live' problem in the 18th and 19th centuries (when Englsih had been burbling along in America for over 100 years). The 1824 edition of Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary said this:


Click to embiggen
If you can't read that: the key point is that Johnson's dictionary of 1755 preferred spelling it without the L, but the L spelling was already well established. It acknowledges differences in opinion about the pronunciation among orthoepists [pronunciation prescribers] and that the L-less pronunciation was used by workmen, but "workmen ought to take their pronunciation from scholars and not scholars from workmen".  (Ah, social class in England...)

Solder does seem to be exactly the kind of thing whose spelling would revert to older form in AmE, so it's a little surpising we don't spell it sodder.  Noah Webster did try to change it. At solder in his 1828 dictionary there is a cross-reference to soder, which reads:


click to embiggen

It's no wonder soder didn't catch on, since it looks like it should have the same first syllable as soda. If only Webster had doubled the d.

While I've been known (to myself) to misspell it as sodder, that spelling hasn't had much traction in AmE, and neither has Webster's, as can be seen in numbers from the Corpus of Historical American English. (The Soders in the 2000s here are all someone's name.)


Interestingly, for those who find such things interesting, the addition of L to an L-less French borrowing is also why we have an L in salmon (French saumon, Latin salmo(n)), but there's been no big movements toward(s) pronouncing that L in English. This just goes to show that spelling pronunciation changes are not regular changes.

And I expect someone will have calm on their mind now. That one's pronounced with no /l/ in England but some Americans do have an /l/ in it. The vowels differ in these cases, but then most of our vowels differ, don't they? I believe my own calm varies from pronunciation to pronunciation (and probably did so even before I moved to the UK). Calm differs from solder in that it came into English from French with its L. However, it looks like not everyone was pronouncing it, since there are some caume/cawme spellings in the 1500s and 1600s.

This seems to be a case of the /l/ being lost because it's in a phonetically complicated place—between two other sonorous elements. An /l/ after a vowel/at the end of a syllable is pronounced differently than one at the front, and that back-of-the-syllable "dark /l/" often does strange things, especially in combination with other consonants. You can see (or hear) in Irish and Scottish English the evidence that /l/+consonant combinations often feel a bit unnatural. Those Englishes often sort out /l/+consonant by inserting a vowel between the consonants, which "un-darkens" the /l/.  Filmfi-lum, Colm Co-lum (you can hear that at 1:50 in this Derry Girls clip, and any excuse to watch Derry Girls should not be snubbed). English English (and French before it, it seems) has sorted this out by just not pronouncing the /l/. Whether some Americans have added it back in as a spelling pronunciation, or whether the /l/ came over as the original pronunciation and stayed, I'm not sure.

I've been careful to say "England" and not "BrE" in this post, since we're talking about pronunciations and they can vary more than spellings.  I've only gone with the pronunciations in the OED, so your mileage may vary. It would be interesting in particular to hear about Scottish and Irish pronunciations in the comments, since they do interesting things with /l/+consonant combinations. But also please let me know if you know of variations within England or elsewhere.

P.S.  Yes, the vowels are different too. Vowels change very easily, so that wasn't as interesting to me here. A consonant change is more of a mystery! BrE solder rhymes with folder and AmE rhymes with fodder. YouGlish is a great resource for hearing words pronounced. You can set it for AmE or BrE, and then use the 'forward' button to skip to the next pronunciation.
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dull and blunt

This item ran as a Twitter Difference of the Day back in September, and I've been meaning since then to explore it a bit more. My thanks to Colin Fine, who pointed out a Canadian tale of 'the customer isn't always right' story, in which the writer consistently used dull where (British) Colin would have used blunt. Since gradable adjectives are my favo(u)rite kind of word ever, I've been thinking about it on and off since.

'The most important tool' by Simeon Berg,
shared under a Creative Commons licen{s/c}e
I hadn't noticed that British folk talk about blunt knives and not dull knives because Americans can talk about blunt knives too. Hearing blunt knife hadn't bothered me (and I hadn't noticed the lack of dull knives), because I hadn't (BrE) twigged that it means something different in the UK than it means to my American mind. It's one of those differences that can easily hide.

In AmE, blunt is generally used to refer to things that aren't pointy (though they might have been). So, if I poke you with a stick, you would be better off if it were a blunt stick, rather than a sharp, pointy one. Using that meaning, an AmE blunt knife would be one without a sharp tip.

That 'not-pointy-sharp' meaning works in BrE too. In BrE, I could poke you with the sharp end of a pencil or its blunt end. (Stay away from me. I'm clearly in a poking mood.)

But BrE also allows for blunt to be the opposite of sharp when referring to an edge, not just an end. So, blunt knife in that case means that the knife is not good for cutting (whether it's good for poking people with is another matter).

AmE uses dull for the edge, and thus has lexicali{s/z}ed (i.e. put into words) the contrast between the 'edge' and 'end' ways that something can be not-sharp. The chart below shows the nouns that are statistically 'more American' (left, green) and 'more British' (right, green) in the GloWBE corpus. (These are not the nouns that are used most with dull, but the ones that are not used in the other country much. See the 'ratio' column for the strength of the noun's 'Americanness' or 'Britishness' in this context.)  (Dull Tool is scoring so high because 12 of the 18 hits are the title of a Fiona Apple song, which goes 'you're more likely to get hurt by a dull tool than a sharp one'.) The 'more BrE' uses of dull have to do with its 'boring' or 'not bright' senses, which exist in AmE too, but perhaps aren't used as much.



In both Englishes, sharp is the opposite of both dull and blunt in their literal 'cutting' senses. So if we talk about a sharp knife in either English (or a blunt knife in BrE), then it's ambiguous as to whether we're talking about the edge or the tip, but context often lets us know. If you're talking about cutting vegetables, the edge is more relevant; if you're talking about poking people, you're probably describing the tip. Where the context is not enough, you'll have to use more words to make it clear—e.g. The tip of that knife is really sharp. AmE doesn't have that ambiguity in the 'not-sharp' end of its vocabulary: the choice of dull or blunt disambiguates it.



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tape measure / measuring tape

Emma, an English friend now living in Canada, asked me:
Have you ever looked at measuring tape/tape measure for UK/US? A Canadian friend said she uses the first for the bendy fabric kind and the second for the more rigid, retractable builders' kind.
And I said 'That's how I do it too. What do you do?'  Since this was on Facebook, I now know that I know four Englishpeople who say tape measure for both. Everyone who's commented so far follows the English/North American division that Emma and her Canadian friend observed.

In other words, I learned to call this a measuring tape:

Photo by Ben Watkins: https://www.flickr.com/photos/falcifer/

and this a tape measure:

Photo by redjar: https://www.flickr.com/photos/redjar/with/136165399/

...and my BrE-speaking friends call them both tape measure.


What's interesting is that neither the North American semantic distinction nor the North America/UK difference is recorded in most dictionaries. They (both UK and US ones) tend to say measuring tape is another word for tape measure (Merriam-Webster [learner's dictionary], Oxford). Collins has measuring tape as an alternative for tape measure in its British English listings, but doesn't include it at all in American English. The American Heritage Dictionary doesn't have measuring tape at all. (The OED's first record for measuring tape is in 1805. Tape measure is 1873.)

Now, before you say 'maybe the distinction is a regional Americanism', note that Emma's friend is from western Canada, I'm from New York state and another Californian friend has reported that he makes the same distinction. There doesn't seem to be anything else similar among us either--male and female, people who sew and people who don't. Searching on Amazon.com, the distinction is not solid, but it's a tendency--one sees more of the metal things if searching 'tape measure' and more of the cloth things when searching 'measuring tape'. (The corpora just tell us that both terms are used in both countries.)

What the dictionaries do tend to tell us is that tape line is an American alternative for tape measure--but this is a term that's completely new to me. There is only one US example in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, and in that one the author felt the need to clarify that they meant 'some kind of measuring tape of some sort'. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, only one of the eight examples of tape line (as part of surveyors' tools) might be relevant--most are about making a line of tape (e.g. on a floor). And in the Corpus of Historical American English, the most recent relevant example is from the 1930s. The original citation in the OED is from Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1847), and it seems to have just been repeated in dictionaries ever since. So this looks much less current than the measuring tape/tape measure distinction. Attention lexicographers!
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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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stemware and other wares

My now-retired colleague Max has time to read novels. He not only has time to read them, he has time to note the Americanisms in them and send them to me. I have more than 20 years until retirement. Do you think it's too early to start counting the days?

Here's one of the passages he sent me from Anne Tyler's Back when we were grownups:
Alice Farmer washed stemware so silently and morosely that she might have been hung over, except that she didn't drink.
Max correctly surmised that AmE stemware means 'glasses with stems', and avers that BrE has no term for this collection of things. One would probably say wine glasses in most cases, but, of course, not all wine glasses have stems and not every stemmed glass is a wine glass--some are champagne flutes or brandy (AmE) snifters/(BrE) balloons. (You can debate whether these are 'wine glasses', but in my world, they don't count.)

This word had fallen onto my own 'to be blogged about' list back in July 2007, when Better Half and I did the legal deed and got an embarrassment of stemware. We'd actually asked for gifts to charity, but plenty of folks felt they couldn't not give us stuff, so we received five sets of wine and/or champagne glasses. We'd just got two boxes of champagne flutes for Christmas and a set of stemless red wine glasses as an engagement present. If only there were enough room in our (BrE) flat/(AmE) apartment to have a large enough party to use them all. Or, if only we had a working fireplace, so that we could make dramatic toasts and throw our glasses at the fire. But I'm getting away from my point, which was this: a friend was taking down the gifts and givers for our thank-you note list, and I'd call out "stemware from [insert your name here, if you gave it to us]" and half the room said "Whaaa?" (Incidentally, one set had no card with it. So, if you gave us wine glasses and never got a thank you, then I thank you now! We will use them all eventually, I'm sure, as we do tend to break them even without dramatic toasts.)

Stemware is but one of many -ware terms that Americans are fond of using. Another is silverware, which in AmE can apply to any of what BrE would call cutlery. In my AmE experience, the more common use of cutlery (not that it's a common word) is to refer to cutting instruments--e.g. knives and scissors (what was traditionally made by a cutler). (Both the 'cutting instruments' and 'knives, forks and spoons' meanings are included in American Heritage; strangely, the latter sense has not yet made it into the OED.) The bleaching of the meaning of silverware is evident from the fact that the phrase "plastic silverware" gets more than 39,000 Google hits. If one wants to talk about the silver silverware, you can leave off the -ware. Or, do as my mother does and say "(AmE) set the table with the real silver". Of course, the people selling you the stainless steel stuff would get into trouble if they called it silverware, so another term for this stuff in AmE is flatware.

Hardware, the pre-computer meaning (i.e. metal things), is a useful word in both BrE and AmE, but hardware store is originally AmE. The traditional BrE equivalent would be ironmonger('s shop), though these days one might also hear hardware shop. (Google tells me that hardwareshop is "Australia's premier online hardware and home improvement store".)

Some other -ware words that I thought might be AmE are not AmE according to the OED. But then the OED doesn't mark stemware as AmE, and I've yet to meet a BrE speaker who uses the term. So, whether or not words like tableware and stoneware and so forth are AmE, I get the feeling that AmE speakers are a bit happier using the -ware suffix than BrE speakers are. In fact, when I asked BH which -ware words he thought were particularly American, he said, "All of them." The one other 'originally AmE' one that I've found in the OED is barware. Are there more?
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bowls

I'm embarrassed by how much television I've been watching lately. On further reflection, perhaps that's not true--maybe I'm just embarrassed by how much television I've found myself admitting to watching. But it does raise lots of bloggable issues, so here I go again with the admitting.

Better Half came home tonight to find me watching The Big Bang Theory with a sleeping baby on my lap. (My excuse: I was stuck--I couldn't very well disturb the baby, who hates to nap and so must be tricked into doing it on my lap. So, nothing to do but power up the remote control.) In this episode, the boys are preparing for the "Physics Bowl". When they started practi{c/s}ing for the Bowl with physics quiz questions, BH said, "Oh, that's what they're doing! I couldn't figure out why physicists would get so excited about bowling!"

The AmE bowl in Physics Bowl is the same as the more general College Bowl--a contest between (usually) students in which they answer (usually) academic questions. The UK equivalent to the College Bowl is University Challenge, a television program(me) in which students from different universities (or colleges within the Oxbridge/London universities) compete on television. (Perhaps some Americans will have seen this in the book/film Starter for Ten--if it was released over there...) University Challenge was based on the College Bowl, but it has overtaken its ancestor in terms of popularity. The College Bowl was televised in the US from the 1950s until 1970, but University Challenge is a television institution that's still very popular today. My own bowl experience was to be in the History Bowl when I was in the 8th grade. In that case, it was a county-wide competition for which I had to learn much more than I ever wanted to know about the Erie Canal. (I stayed home on the day of the final, insisting that I was [AmE-preferred] sick/[BrE-preferred] ill, but I think my mother was right in insisting that it was just butterflies. Oh, the regret.)

I'm fairly certain that the name of these kinds of contests (which hasn't made it into the OED or American Heritage) is derived from the use of bowl to refer to certain post-season football (=BrE American football) games, such as the Rose Bowl, which are played between (AmE) college (= BrE university) teams. (Plus the Super Bowl, which is played between professional teams.) They are so-called because of the bowl shape of the stadiums (or stadia, if you prefer--the spellchecker doesn't) in which they were first played.

The kind of bowl(ing) that Better Half was imagining is generally called bowling in AmE, but ten-pin bowling in BrE. (In AmE bowling can also refer to variants like candlepin bowling. You can look these things up if you'd like to know the difference! The social class implications of bowling in America are noted in the comments of a recent post.) This distinguishes it from the game more traditionally played in England, (lawn) bowls, which is closely related to the continental games boules/pétanque and bocce (which is the more familiar game in America, thanks to Italian immigrants). Another kind of bowling found in the UK (more than the US), particularly in the Southwest, is skittles, the game from which modern indoor bowling is derived. This provides me with an excuse to post one of my photos of the Children's Parade in the Brighton Festival. This year the theme was favo(u)rite games, and one school chose skittles. (It's not the best photo I took, but I've suddenly had qualms about posting a photo of other people's children.) In the US, I imagine most people would associate skittles with a (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweet.

(...which compels an anecdote. I was at a party in Waco, Texas once and met a man who told me he was in Research and Development at M&M/Mars, one of the bigger employers in town. I asked what he'd developed. His wife proudly put her arm in his and beamed, "He invented Skittles!" As you can see, one meets Very Important People in Waco. And I should join Anecdoters Anonymous.)

The verb to bowl is used to describe what one does with the projectile in all of these games, but is also used to describe how the ball is delivered (or not) to the bat in cricket--and hence the person who does that delivering is the bowler. The closest thing in popular American sports is the pitcher, who pitches a baseball.

Going further afield, another bowl that differs is found in the (AmE) bathroom/(BrE informal) loo. While AmE speakers clean the toilet bowl, BrE speakers stick their brushes into the toilet's pan. I'm not absolutely sure that BrE speakers don't also use bowl in this sense (do you?), but it jars whenever I hear people speak about the toilet pan, as it makes me imagine something very shallow.

Those are the bowl differences I've noticed myself, although the OED also gives a special Scottish English sense: a marble. Their only example is from 1826, so you Scots will have to tell us whether it's current!
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heavy machinery

Do not take cold and flu medications while operating this blog entry.

One of the "surprise hits" of the UK music charts around last Christmas was a folky song by Nizlopi. It's from the point of view of a five-year-old who feels safe and co{s/z}y while skipping school in order to ride around with his dad on a piece of heavy machinery. This was called the The JCB Song. My first thought about this song was "Well, that's not going to chart in America--no one would know what a JCB is." My second thought was "I'm feeling slightly queasy." My third thought was "Where can I find a sharp object to jam into my ears?" (Yes, it's a terribly sweet song. The charitable interpretation of my distaste for it is that I'm just too sweet to require more sweetness. I'm sure you can think of uncharitable interpretations on your own. Better Half has just suggested a few, but he can get his own blog if he wants to report them.)

Non-Britons must be listening to the JCB song, though, as there are people on the Internet asking what a JCB is. The (British) answers are often in the spirit of "it's a digger, duh! where have you been?" (So much for the stereotype of Britons as polite and proper.) JCB is a company name that's used generically to refer to any kind of big, yellow construction vehicle, typically the kind of bulldozer/backhoe thing pictured here. Incidentally, OED and BH say that backhoe is AmE, but that's what the British JCB company calls them.

Another piece of heavy machinery with a non-travel(l)ing name is the kanga hammer (heard recently at a lovely dinner party--thanks, Gill!). This is again based on a tradename (though I can't find a company website--are they still going?) and seems to be most used in Australian English, but it's unclear to me from the evidence on the web whether this is a specific type of (small) jackhammer, or something different from a jackhammer (as hinted at by the contrast with jackhammer in the second quotation):
A construction engineer offered me the use of his Kanga hammer, a small jack hammer, and after ten minutes of vibrating the rust the bolt loosened. -- Travel Through Cambodia on a Harley-Davidson by Peter Forwood

My hands are familiar with the steely hexagon of a crowbar, the distinction between the long handled and short handled shovel, the two blades of the pickaxe etcetera. I recall the jackhammer and kanga-hammer, the ramset nailgun, the wheelbarrow of treacherously sloppy cement and the narrow scaffolding along which it had to be manouvred. --'On poets being paid for their work' by Geoff Page and Alan Gould in Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature

[Update: Eimear in the comments has noted that I'm not finding many Kanga hammers on the web because they're Kango hammers--aha! Here's a picture--they are a sort of power-hammer, not as big/bulky as a jackhammer.]

Finally, an AmE tradename-cum-generic-heavy-machinery-name is the Mack truck, heard often in the phrases hit by a Mack truck and run over by a Mack truck:
Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left. --Jean Kerr

If you wake up feeling as though you've just been run over by a Mack truck – what doctors refer to as unrefreshing sleep – it is reasonable for your physician to assume that you have a sleep disorder.
--Fibromyalgia Network
(Click here for pictures of Mack trucks.) OED has Mack as 'Chiefly N. Amer. (Orig. U.S.)', so it may be somewhat familiar in BrE. Other AmE names for Mack-type vehicles of various types are: 18-wheeler (marked in OED as 'orig. N. Amer.'), semi (also AusE) and tractor-trailer. The usual BrE term is articulated lorry.

Off topic, but someone would be sure to mention it, are the BrE meanings of semi. Usually semi refers to a (BrE) semi-detached house or (AmE) duplex. In Scottish English it can also refer to the second year at certain universities, including St Andrews (similar to AmE sophomore).
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plumbing the depths for words

I was at a party again today. It must be the party season, as I've got another to go to tomorrow. Thank goodness. If it weren't for parties, I'd just be sitting alone at my computer most of the time, not having interesting interactions with British English.

First thing to note about the party was that once again someone I'd just met assumed I was Canadian. I'm going to start keeping track of these. That'll be number 1.

Second thing to note is an interesting Cocktail Party Effect I experience. The Cocktail Party Effect is our ability to tune into one conversation and ignore others in a noisy environment, but while still apparently paying enough attention to the surrounding noise to switch our attention when someone in another conversation says our name. I've noticed that I switch attention when others say American or the States, etc. I can't help but (BrE) earwig (=eavesdrop).

Today I found myself listening to the end of a conversation between Better Half's Sister and Distant Relation. DR is an Englishman with a vacation home in South Carolina (first time I've come across that combination!). He's trying to supervise some plumbing work from a distance, and was saying that "everything there has a different name." I didn't catch all of the examples, but did get (BrE) tap versus AmE faucet and BrE bath vs AmE tub. I can add the following. Some of these you would hear in either country, but different words are preferred in the two countries.

AmEBrE
sink trapU-bend
sinkbasin
caulksealant
(toilet) tankcistern
hot-water heatergeyser (for certain types)


All of this ignores discussion of what to call a toilet or the room in which a toilet stands. I'm saving that for another time. [Now available here.] Meanwhile, can anyone add to the plumbing list? I know there are more differences out there...
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The book!

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Abbr.

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