Showing posts with label project ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label project ideas. Show all posts

Descriptions in Twitter profiles


When Twitter tells me I have new followers, I can see their name and self-description before I can see their location (if they've given any). So I play a little game of 'guess which country they're from' before I click through to see it.  I seem to be good at picking out the Americans (or at least North Americans--the Canada/US distinction is hard to make here--sorry Canadians), based on the style of the name and self-description. To be fair, I'm probably guided by the photos too. (Pick out the Americans at the airport is another fun and not-too-difficult game. There, you can see the red maple leaf patches on all the Canadians' bags, which save them from the lumping-together.) But I'm a linguist, so I like to think it's the language I'm sensitive to.

(A postscript on 27 Oct 2014: In the comments, Dorothy Bishop reminds me of a post she did three years ago that was in the back of my head when I started this, but I failed to find it in my preliminary search. I didn't want to take the chance of you missing that if you don't read the comments. So, if you like this post, you'll love this one.)

Because I probably should have been doing something else, I decided to try to test 'what marks an American (versus British) Twitter profile'. Here's my method:
  • I worked backwards from recent followers using the 'Who Unfollowed Me' (Pro) list of followers whom I don't follow back. I used this because it does the opposite of Twitter: it shows me the location, and I have to click through for the description.
  • For each follower who (a) was a person, not a company, and (b) unambiguously listed their location as being in the US or UK, I recorded:
    • country: I only included people whose locations were unambiguous, so no London-Islamabad-Hong Kong multiple locations and no indications of internationality in the descriptor, such as An American in London
    • gender: by name/photo/description (female, male, unknown/other)
    • Twitter handle: does it reflect their name? Three possible values:
      • Yes/name: the handle is some version of their name or their name + numbers, e.g.  @lynne_murphy, @LynneM34, @Lynney, etc.
      • Mixed: part name/part descriptor, e.g. @LynneLinguist, @LynneEdits, @LordLynne, @CrankyLynne
      • Not name: e.g. @poltroonish, @LinguistYay, @subjunctiverobot
    • Number of self-descriptors: this is the tricky one. Basically, I counted nouns or verbs that constituted separate descriptions of the person, so:
      • Writer, teacher, blogger, linguist, parent, feminist, Scrabble player:  counts as 7.
      • Loves cooking, dreaming, whittling, singing: counts as 4.
      • Teacher of ESL, EFL and Intercultural Communication counts as 1--the main identity is 'teacher'.
      • Dreams are sometimes songs: counts as 0, since if it's label(l)ing the person, it's very indirect. 
      • An empty description also counts as 0, but I had a separate sub-category in which I distinguished the content-ful and content-less zero scores.
    •  Caveats: I also kept track of who said things like "RTs are not endorsements" or "All views are my own", but there were some in each nationality and not enough of these to warrant further analysis.
  • I did this for two notebook pages for each nationality, which totals 64 from each country. More would have been better, but I can only justify a certain amount of procrastination per day.

A big caveat here is that I'm only sampling my own followers, which is to say it's probably people with an interest in language or US/UK issues, possibly a bit older and educated than average.  So this might not be generali{s/z}able to US/UK Twitter users generally. The other caveat, of course, is that I'm equating location with culture. For all I know, half of the people who listed their location as 'London' are exchange students who aren't mentioning that they're from Iceland. But I'm working with what I've got, and we can only hope that the rate of 'false positives' in one country's data is matched in the other country's data.

All examples in this post are made up, mimicking profiles I read. I don't want people to feel like I'm giving any individuals a hard time. Or to [orig. AmE] out them to their friends and family as someone who follows me.  If it so happens that I've made up a handle or a profile that actually exists, that's accidental.

So this is what I found:

Gender
Overall the sample had more women than men, which is to be expected because 62% of Twitter users are female (according to one study).  (For this sample it's 56% female. The table below has raw numbers.) The gender breakdown was similar across nationalities, so whatever we see here is more likely to be a national effect rather than a gender effect.


gender
      F     M    O

US     37     26     1
UK     34     25     5
Total        71     51     6


Handle = name?
I was interested in the name versus pseudonym issue because, as we've seen before, Americans introduce themselves by name earlier in conversation than Brits do. So, I wondered, are the British more careful about giving out names on Twitter? The caveat for this result is that I have no way of knowing whether the handles people use are their real names. If someone's name was presented as 'Gemma Thornton-Baker' and her handle is @gemmatbkr, then the fact that the handle matched the name meant that I counted this as a name, rather than a pseudonym.  If their name was presented as 'Hunky Cloud' or their handle was @rottenweather, then I took it for granted that their name wasn't really Rotten Weather.

But after all this preamble, I'm not even going to bother to put together an HTML table of results because the numbers were exactly the same for US and UK.  So, hypothesis that Brits would be less apt to use their name as a handle was not supported.

Self-descriptions
On to the meat of what I wanted to look at. Remember, I'm not testing word-count of the self-descriptions, but the number of separate descriptions given--a single description may be one or ten words long. So, this isn't about how much one says, but how many different things one says. My hypothesis was that Americans list more different things, divulging more about themselves.

The result favo(u)red the hypothesis, in that Americans listed, on average, 3.58 descriptors and the British 2.78.  The range was exactly the same: 0 to 14 descriptors. The US median was 3 and the UK median was 2.

But although the numbers were in the right direction for the hypothesis, they are only significant at p=.100, which means, basically, that there's a 10% likelihood that the difference is down to chance. We'd probably have a better answer if I'd looked at more than 64 people per country. Which is why I'm going to point this out to our students who are currently looking for research projects to do...
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prototypical soup

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

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

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

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

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

The point is the soup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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write (to) someone

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

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

Comment is from an England-born Australian.

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

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

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

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

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic. That was about at the time, but this one is about at this time. It started:

Reader (though he might not be a reader anymore, since it's taken me so long to get to his request) Jon wrote to ask:
I wondered if you could explain why Americans use the phrase "at this time", where a Brit would say "now", or nothing at all.

I recently returned from the US. While on a Washington State Ferry I heard over the tannoy, "Vehicle owners should return to their vehicles at this time."

It seems strange to me, but working for a US company with Americans in the
office, I hear it a lot.
I have to say, Jon, that it's not something I think of as particularly American. (But tannoy, that's British--originally a trade name. AmE would be loudspeaker or more formally public address system--which would work very formally in BrE too.)

That's as far as the draft got. I've just checked some UK and US newspaper sites and found that the Guardian (UK) website had 277,000 instances of at this time, mostly repeats of "Sorry, commenting is not available at this time. Please try again later." That seems like exactly the type of 'empty' at this time Jon was asking about. The Boston Globe (US) and the Times (UK) both had around 5000 hits for the phrase, the Chicago Tribune 12,000. Now, searching these, there's no way to know (a) how many of the examples are the use of the phrase that Jon was talking about, (b) how many are quoted American speech.

So, let's try government sites--and let's limit it to orders of the form "please * at this time" (* being the wildcard in a Google search). The.gov.uk sites immediately examples where a now (or nothing) would have sufficed:
There is currently a suspect bag in Park Place W1. Cordons are at Arlington st and Park Place please avoid at this time

Thank you for your patience and please accept our apologies at this time.

Can you please send us at this time the form of wording your officers are considering so that we can review it at an early stage

So I would be much obliged if you could please freeze the application at this time till I gather required specifications to help you assess the planning
Now, of course, one could say 'Look at all that creeping Americanism in British English'. Or you could say 'Look at all that officialese where they try to use more words to sound more formal'. Or you could say that at this time sounds less 'at this very second' than now does, and therefore sounds less bossy than now.

At any rate, I'd need more evidence of a comparative and historical nature in order to conclude that the origin of this is American--since, as we've seen many times before, just because something strikes you as new and annoying doesn't mean it's not native to your country's dialect. So, I'm putting this in the 'project ideas' file--if one of our students would like to research this using corpus data next year, they're welcome to a neat little project.

In other news...the voting is now on at the Lexiophiles site for the top 100 language blogs. Last year I made it to a respectable number 40, but this year they've added categories and a voting process--the outcome will be 50% based on readers' votes. So, if you'd like to support SbaCL this year, please click on the button!

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'can I get' redux

The comments on this are now closed, since the student's project is long over. If you'd like to comment on the topic, please see the link to a fuller blog post at the end of this post.

 

This is for an MA student at our university. Here's her plea:

For my dissertation, I'm looking at the recent increase of young Brits using 'can I get' for requests, rather than 'can I have..', which old-school speakers like me use. I'm assuming that the 'can I get..' form is American, but I'm not sure if Americans see the two forms as having any difference in meaning. To me, and older British speakers, 'can I get a glass of water?' means 'do you mind if I help myself to...' if I'm in someone's house. It therefore seems odd to use it in a cafe or a pub, unless you plan to go behind the counter and help yourself. A quick look at an American corpus seems to suggest that American usage of 'can I have...' is used more for questioning if you are allowed something. Is this really the case? I'd be really interested to hear what Americans with an interest in linguistics have to say! Thanks very much.
So, please help her by discussing in the comments. Here's my posting on 'Can I get a latte grande?' from some time ago.
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compliments, nice and lovely

My first out-of-North-America experience was when I moved to South Africa at the age of 27, in order to take up a post at a large, English-medium university there. I'd been teaching for three years at my (AmE) graduate school by that time, and my teaching in South Africa was going fairly well, but a vague anxiety plagued me (as well as the not-so-vague anxieties that went with living in the city that had the highest murder, rape and [orig. AmE] carjacking rates in the world at that time). Although I was teaching my heart out, I had the feeling that my students weren't too impressed by me or my teaching. But after the term, when I read their teaching evaluation forms, I found that they rated me very highly. It was then that I worked out what had made me anxious: I missed receiving nearly constant compliments from my students.

Now, when I was teaching in the US, I was barely aware of the fact that I was being complimented. It would have been things like a student saying that he liked the course more than he thought he would, or another noticing that I'd had a haircut and saying something positive about it, or another expressing an enthusiastic appreciation of my kindness in lending her a book. In South Africa, my (mostly white, English-background--this was right after the downfall of apartheid) students were, for the most part, polite and committed to their course, but they showed little interest in me as a person. Of course, that wasn't a problem. The problem was that as an American, I was used to near-constant positive reinforcement from students, colleagues, friends, strangers...just about everyone. Once I reali{s/z}ed that the problem wasn't my teaching or my relationship with my students, but my expectations about them, that particular anxiety abated.

That aspect of living in South Africa was good general training for being an American abroad, as if you're outside the US, you'll probably have to get used to a less compliment-driven culture--and to outsiders' estimations of American compliment behavio(u)r.

One frequently comes across the notion that Americans are insincere--after all, they couldn't possibly be that enthusiastic about everything, could they? But the problem with such reasoning is that it comes from a different starting place than the behavio(u)r it judges. OK, sure, the waiter who is depending on you for a tip may be insincere in his compliments, but the friend-of-a-friend you've just been introduced to or the business contact you're meeting probably isn't. It is in Americans' nature to subconsciously look for points of connection with anyone they meet because mainstream American culture is solidarity-based (see Brown & Levinson 1987). This is to say that communication is based on the goal of creating a sense of equality and belonging. This, in turn, is due--paradoxically--to the facts that American culture rests on a belief in the primacy of the individual (rather than the group) and that it is achievement-oriented, rather than ascription-oriented--i.e. it's about what one does rather than what one is (we saw this recently in the discussion of social class). The individualism means that we can't just rely on the knowledge that we belong, we have to be reassured of it fairly regularly. In the words of Stewart and Bennett (1991: 139):
By defining people according to achievement, Americans can fragment their own personalities or those of other people. They do not have to accept others in their totality [...]; they may disapprove of the politics, hobbies, or personal life of associates and yet still work with them effectively. It is this trait of seeing others as fragmented, combined with the desire to achieve, that provides Americans with the motivation to cooperate.
In other words, I don't have to approve of you in order to compliment you, I just have to find a fragment of you that I can approve of in order to develop a relationship of some sort with you. One can see why this might be taken as insincerity in some quarters, but if I tell you I like your shoes and that you play the tuba well, it's almost certainly the case that I really do like your shoes and think you're tuba-tastic. So, it's a sincere attempt on my part to cement our relationship with shared values--at least as far as shoes and brass instruments are concerned.

If compliments are positive things that bring people together, why isn't everyone in the world complimenting so much? One reason is that they might not need to. If your social position is more stable, if you don't start new relationships all that often, then you might be able to take for granted the good things and commonalities in your relationships. Another reason could be that compliments are more costly in the interactional economy of other cultures. For example, in some cultures (I can never remember which ones!), if you compliment someone on their hat, they will insist that you have it. In that kind of culture, you'd not be appreciated for complimenting people on their things willy-nilly, and so compliments are more scarce. Similarly, in a culture in which praising oneself is taboo, compliments will be given more carefully, since to accept a compliment is to praise yourself. When I told my friend the Blinder that I was going to write about compliments, she said "you must write about the English inability to accept compliments". I'll let Kate Fox (2004: 408) start us off:
The English are no more naturally self-effacing than other nations, but [...] we have strict rules about the appearance of modesty, including prohibitions on boasting and any form of self-importance, and rules actively prescribing self-deprecation and self-mockery. We place a high value on modesty, we aspire to modesty.
If someone compliments you and you accept it by saying thank you, you are implicitly agreeing with the compliment and therefore breaking the 'modesty rule'. Thus, if you compliment an English person on how well she did something, she's likely to claim that anyone could have done it or to point out the bits she could have done better. As Fox notes, the self-deprecation is often ironic and humorous. Still, the fact that the modesty rule is stronger in the UK than in the US makes a compliment more 'costly'. The other reason that compliments aren't quite as free-flowing in the UK is that the culture here is traditionally deference-based (preserving hierarchies and differences between people--viz. the class system; maintaining a sense of personal privacy), although it has been shifting toward solidarity over the past century. Thus, members of the mainstream British culture are not so reliant on the approval of others as Americans are.

Now, the reason I started wanting to write about compliment behavio(u)r was because I had read the following in George Mikes' How to be an Alien (1946:31), the seminal book on being foreign in England:
If you live here long enough you will find out to your greatest amazement that the adjective nice is not the only adjective the language possesses, in spite of the fact that in the first three years you do not need to learn or use any other adjectives. You can say that the weather is nice, a restaurant is nice, Mr Soandso is nice, Mrs Soandso's clothes are nice, you had a nice time, and all this will be very nice.
Reading this, I was a little surprised, because I had got(ten) the impression, somewhere along the line, that nice was a crass American thing to say, so I got myself into the habit of saying the far more English-to-my-ears lovely wherever I would have said nice. I may have got(ten) this impression from people mocking Americans for saying Have a nice day (something that even Americans have been embarrassed to say since about 1980), or it may just be that I've heard general complaints about nice (without reference to America), as discussed by Ben Zimmer recently on his new blog--where you can see that nice already had a bad reputation well before Mikes wrote his book. At any rate, the frequency of nice noted by Mikes has also been noted in American compliments. Nessa Wolfson (1981) studied compliments in a number of cultures. In cultures where compliments are most 'costly', they tend to be rather indirect. For instance, Indonesians identified (the translation of) "You have bought a new sewing machine. How much did it cost?" as a compliment in their culture. But of America, where compliments are (BrE) cheap as chips, Wolfson notes, "The most striking feature of compliments in American English is their total lack of originality”:
22.9% of AmE compliments include nice
19.6% include good
85% of compliments fall into one of three patterns
53.6 % in the pattern: NOUN-PHRASE is/looks (really) ADJECTIVE
16.1% in the pattern: I (really) like/love NOUN-PHRASE
14.9% in the pattern: PRONOUN is (really) (a) ADJECTIVE NOUN-PHRASE
I haven't found an equivalent study of British compliments, but I don't imagine that they're much more creative, given Mikes' assessment of Englishpeople's adjectival vocabulary. (Hey, soon-to-be-final-year students--there's a possible dissertation topic!)

It must have been months ago that I first stated my intention to write about compliments, but I'd passed them up so far, favo(u)ring shorter posts. One of the things I would have liked to have done here is to go back through the comments on the blog in order to see whether I could tell which nationality was more apt to send "Hey, I love your blog"-type comments. The thought of going through thousands of comments, knowing I'd rarely be able to tell where the commenter was from, kept me from writing this for a while. So, I've not done it--and I don't recommend that you try! But feel free to pay a little more attention to your cross-cultural compliment experiences and report your observations in the comments.

Further reading/sources:
  • Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge University Press.
  • Fox, Kate. 2004. Watching the English. Hodder.
  • Mikes, George. 1946. How to be an Alien. Penguin.
  • Stewart, Edward C. and Milton J. Bennett. 1991. American Cultural Patterns (rev. edn.). Intercultural Press.
  • Wolfson, Nessa. 1981. Compliments in cross-cultural perspective. TESOL Quarterly 15:117-24.
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to hyphenate or not to hyphenate?

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th edn) recently made the news for deleting a lot of hyphens that had been in the previous edition. According to the AskOxford website:
Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000 hyphens from the text of the Shorter. So it's double bass, not double–bass, ice cream not ice–cream, makeover instead of make–over, and postmodern rather than post–modern. [Italics added because it was driving me crazy that Oxford hadn't marked the self-referential use of these words!]
Now, I neither have the two editions of the Shorter Oxford, nor would I have the time to look up all of the de-hyphenated words if I did have them, but it's long been my impression that British dictionaries (and possibly BrE speakers--we'll come back to this below) and American dictionaries (and speakers?) differ in their relationships with hyphens. When the Association of British Scrabble Players switched over to the international dictionary (including the former US and UK Scrabble dictionaries), one thing that struck a lot of players was how many more verbs could take the re- prefix. (As in relocate or reassemble. I'm afraid I don't still have my old dictionary to tell you which ones weren't allowed.) This was in part because of the BrE tendency to put hyphens between the prefix and the base verb, especially in cases in which not to do so would involve the same letter repeated twice at the end of the prefix and the beginning of the base word. So, BrE prefers re-elect, which is happy without a hyphen in AmE: reelect. The same thing happens with the prefix co-, especially before another o, so that BrE tends to prefer co-ordinate and co-operate, whereas AmE prefers coordinate and cooperate. So, I wondered, do the changes in the Shorter Oxford reflect more AmE-like use of hyphens? I found the following examples of de-hyphenated words in the Shorter Oxford 6 from news items and commentaries about the change: this BBC article, this New York Times article, World Wide Words and the aforelinked OUP press release. Then I compared them to the American Heritage Dictionary, which happens to be on my desk.

Shorter Oxford 5 (2002)Shorter Oxford 6 (2007)American Heritage 4 (2000)
fig-leaffig leaffig leaf
pot-bellypot bellypotbelly
pigeon-holepigeonholepigeonhole
leap-frogleapfrogleapfrog
double-bassdouble bassdouble bass
ice-creamice creamice cream
make-overmakeovermakeover
post-modernpostmodernpostmodern
hobby-horsehobby horsehobbyhorse
fire-drillfire drillfire drill
water-bedwater bedwaterbed
test-tubetest tubetest tube
bumble-beebumblebeebumblebee
cry-babycrybabycrybaby
low-lifelowlifelowlife
up-marketupmarketupmarket

The bold entries in the table show the three cases in which the change in SOED6 is a change in the opposite direction from the AHD4 entry. (And I have to take issue with the AHD's one-word status for hobby horse. Not how I would spell it. I'm less-than-sure about potbelly too.)

Does this mean that BrE is becoming more like AmE?
NOT NECESSARILY!
These changes probably have at least as much to do with the SOED looking more carefully at how these words appear in printed language as they do with any actual language change. After all, there have been only five years between the editions--that's an awful lot of hyphens to bite the dust in such a short time. The NYT article notes, "That ice cream and bumblebee ever had hyphens to begin with suggests an excess of fussiness on the part of older lexicographers" and BrE-speaker Michael Quinion at World-Wide Words says, "The new SOED lists many hyphenless words such as leapfrog, bumblebee, crybaby, pigeonhole, lowlife, and upmarket, which will be a relief to those of us who have been spelling them like that all along."

I do get the feeling, however, (and this is just a feeling) that BrE favo(u)rs keeping words more separate. We can describe a hierarchy of 'one-wordiness' or 'joined-up-ed-ness' of English compound nouns, like this:
fully integrated: lifeboat, prejudge
semi-integrated: sit-in, semi-integrated
not integrated: ice cream, throw up
Using this hierarchy, I'd suppose that BrE writing tends toward(s) non-integration--that is to say, keeping words separate, or at least hyphenated, whereas AmE is happier to have more fully integrated compounds. It's just a hypothesis, though, and you're welcome to test it. (Hey, final-year students! There's a project!) Part of the reason I've formed this hypothesis is the widespread habit in BrE writing of treating some prefixes as separate words. Here are some examples, in which in AmE I'd have to have at least a hyphen, if not a single word, but which one sees not infrequently as separate words in BrE:
over- as a verb prefix
On the other hand, children are very good at expressing what motivates them in a learning context but perhaps over egg the custard a little when it comes to saying that what they find boring. --Scaife & Rogers, 'Kids as Informants'

post- as a prefix meaning 'after'
Public Health Advice ? Post Flood
Before re-occupying your home
The flood water affecting your home or other property may have been contaminated with sewage and other contaminants... --Bridgnorth District Council

sub-
as a prefix meaning 'below'
Sub normal growth rate (usually a height velocity below the 25th centile usually. equates to less than 5 cm per year in a pre pubertal child). --from an NHS [Wales] diagnostic guide
And so forth. This is the kind of thing I find myself 'correcting' constantly in student work in the UK (never as much of a problem in the US), so much so that I started to wonder whether I was the one in the wrong in my new dialect-land (as has happened before). But no, my New Oxford Dictionary of English treats all of these as prefixes, requiring hyphens or full integration with the base word. Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edn) doesn't mention the writing of prefixes as separate words, and in its entry on hyphens recommends the use of hyphens with prefixes--as opposed to full integration--in the cases where the prefix joins to a proper name (anti-Darwin) or where the same letter is repeated (re-elect) or an ambiguity ensues (as in the pro-verb/proverb case that I mentioned a while ago).

But before you go any further in thinking about this, I give you the following cautionary quotation, cited on the American Dialect Society e-list recently:
If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.
--John Benbow, Manuscript and Proof, 1937

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Abbr.

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