Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts

Untranslatables VI: the summary

As previously announced, this was the sixth October during which I tweeted an 'British–American untranslatable' (that is, item lexicalized in one national dialect and not the other) on each weekday. If you'd like to complain that any of these does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context.

This year's was a bit British-heavy, though in looking back on previous years, I noticed that some had more American ones, so perhaps it all works out in the end. 

BrE rough sleeper  'homeless person who's sleeps outside, as opposed to in a shelter or other temporary accommodation'.  Suggested by John Kelly (@mashedradish)

BrE gongoozler originally, 'an idler who watches canal activities', now more broadly, 'a person who stares for long periods'.  Suggested by Andy M. (on Facebook)
source

AmE to t-bone '(for a motor vehicle) to crash into another vehicle perpedicularly'.  Suggested by Rhonda (on blog). (This one has started to have currency in UK—but the steak cut that it's named after is not traditional in UK butchery.)

BrE busman’s holiday 'leisure time spent doing something very much like what you do at work'. There are some variants used (a little) in the US, but the ultimate source is this phrase. See World Wide Words. Suggested by

AmE to kick the tires 'to determine the worth or "health" of something by testing it'. Suggested by @SimonKoppel. This has spread beyond the US, with some people (Australians, in my correspondence) interpreting it specifically as something done by people with no intention to buy. I liked the OED entry that says it's orig. U.S. Not with that spelling, it's not!


BrE (to give someone a) backie (also backy)  '(to give someone a) ride on the BrE parcel shelf of a bicycle'. Suggested by @formosaphile. Responses to this tweet brought up a lot of variants: Australian dink, dinky, New Zealand dub, and a number from the UK, which Moose Allain has put together into a slide show. But none from the US, as far as I've heard.

AmE third base (etc.) as measures of sexual accomplishment. Covered previously here.  Suggested by @Mburked

BrE love rat tabloid term for a male adulterer. Here's Collins Dictionary on it. (Sorry, someone suggested this, but I failed to note who!)

AmE candy striper a usually female, usually teen-aged hospital volunteer. Suggested by @CityMelzer A bit more on the term from Wikipedia.

BrE to blot one's copybook  'to do damage to one's own good reputation'. Here's the discussion of it at World Wide Words.

BrE Johnny Foreigner '[pejorative] personification of non-Britishness', often used satirically. Here's the Collins entry for it.

AmE big box store 'box-shaped single-company retail building at the edge of town'. Possible BrE translations discussed at Wikipedia.  Ta

BrE for in, for example, 7:00 for 7:30, which means 'come after 7, but by 7:30, when things will get started'. Or, as Andrew Caines defined it: "You'll be rude if you arrive up to and including 7:00, or any time after 7.29". 

AmE condo(minium) 'building consisting of residential units that are individually owned' or 'an individually-owned unit within such a building'. In AmE condo generally contrasts with apartment (building)—the former is rented, the latter owned. In UK, they're called (blocks of) flats regardless of owned/rented status. In some parts of the US, there are also co-ops. The difference between condos and coops is explained here. I'd tried to conceptualise this in terms of the difference between flat ownership with a leasehold versus a share of the freehold in England, but that's not right (see comments). Suggested by @RebelePublisher 

BrE I’ll be mother 'I'll serve the tea [or other food/drink that needs serving-out]'  Suggested by Rhonda on the blog.

BrE graunch used as a verb or noun onomatopoetically for a grinding/crunching sound, as when gears in a car grind. (OED lists this as [UK] dialectal & New Zealand.) Suggested by April23rd on blog.

AmE (esp. Californian) lookie-loo (and spelling variants) 'nosy person who goes to (AmE) real-estate open houses with no intention of buying'. It's also used (esp. in other parts of the country) as a synonym for (orig. AmE) rubber-necker. Suggested by Michèle, seconded by @cynderness.

BrE paddle 'go into water (especially the sea) without swimming, particularly walking in up to the knees or so'. In AmE, I'd just say wade, which isn't specifically about getting your feet wet for fun. Suggested by @simonkoppel.

AmE Monday morning quarterback 'person who criticizes others using hindsight the others couldn't have had'

BrE ready reckoner 'quick-reference table that gives solutions to simple calculations'. AmE has things like cheat sheet, quick reference, but those could be, say, lists of definitions, rather than a table of calculations.

BrE glamour model euphemistic expression for 'woman who poses topless' (particularly for certain UK newspapers and BrE "lads' magazines").

Will I find enough for a seventh year in 2017? I've already started the list, so maybe.  Feel free to keep suggesting them! Thanks to everyone who's helped this time.
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2013 US-to-UK Word of the Year: Black Friday

Long-time readers will know that every year I pick (with some helpful suggestions from readers) words of the year with a twist: they must be American words that made a splash in the UK, or British ones that found fame or infamy in the US. Or something like that. As I did last year, so here is the first one!

The 2013 US-to-UK Word of the Year is:

Black Friday

While we're at it, we might as well declare this the most annoying import in the seven years of this endeavo(u)r. But let's not blame America or Americans in general. Let's look at this WotY in a bit more detail. Then let's blame capitalism.

First, a definition: Black Friday is the Friday after American Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November), which is the popularly acknowledged start of the American Christmas-shopping season. Many people in the US have the day off work (or school) and retailers put on big sales, so the (AmE) malls/(BrE) shopping centres are heaving with people and unseemly behavio(u)r.


Why is this the US-to-UK Word of the Year? Because it was all over the UK media in the week of (and the week after) American Thanksgiving. (Three readers contacted me to nominate it--the only nomination I had this year.)  Here, for instance, are stories from The Telegraph, BBC News, The Mirror... (I would go on, but I'm sure you can google "Black Friday UK" yourself.) As well as 70% discounts, there was bad behavio(u)r (which you can find easily enough by googling "Black Friday UK bad behaviour"). 
Now, I know that some people will be wanting to complain "but it's not a word, it's a phrase". I've answered that objection before, since previous WotYs have also had spaces in them. To recap: there are many ways to define word, and perhaps the least interesting way, as far as linguists are concerned, is whether their written version has  a space in it. Grammatically, Black Friday acts like a word and it's the kind of thing that could be a headword in a dictionary--because its meaning is not directly derivable from its parts. So, it is word enough for me.
It is an annoying import because there is no logic to the importance of this day in the UK; it is a regular work/school day and the Christmas shopping season is already well underway in the UK by that time. For instance, the Christmas lights were ceremoniously turned on in Birmingham city centre (AmE downtown) on 9 November, on 14 November in Brighton and London's Oxford Street, and on 21 November in Guildford. (I could go on, but you can google "Christmas light switch-on UK" too.) 

What has brought "Black Friday" to the UK are US-owned retailers, notably Amazon and Walmart-owned Asda (site of much bad behavio[u]r--click the link for a story about that). These retailers are partial to some bad behavio[u]r themselves, such as union-busting (quelled at Asda, I should say), tax-evasion, and (particularly at Amazon) poor working conditions. So, American phrase, but please don't blame the average American. If you don't like it, then I recommend doing all your Christmas shopping for the following year in the very British Boxing Day sales and avoiding this whole sordid Black Friday business.
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-og and -ogue

Rachel Ward aka @FwdTranslations just asked me via Twitter:

Trying to check usage of epilog(ue) and prolog(ue) in US spelling. Seen suggestion that "ue" forms still more widely used. True?
 And I felt the need to blog this immediately, since this is something that niggles me about British understanding of US spelling sometimes. I am often being told that Americans don't write catalogue, they write catalog. The same for dialogue/dialog. But, the thing is, I've always (or at least since I was a grown-up) used the -ue in all of them. Because the shorter forms are only American, from the British perspective, the shorter forms are "the American spelling". But from the American perspective, most wouldn't consider the longer forms to be "the British spelling" in the same way that we'd consider colour or centre as British spellings. They're just alternative spellings, listed in American dictionaries without any dialect marking. Noah Webster is generally credited/blamed for these kinds of 'shortenings' in AmE, but he used dialogue in at least the earliest edition of his Blue-Backed Speller. The move for this change seems to have come later, in the period when Melvil(le) Dewey (he of the Dewey Decimal System) was a leading spelling-reform advocate. In an article in Verbatim on The American Spelling Reform Movement, Richard Whelan writes:

During the 1890s, a few state legislatures passed bills calling for simplified spelling to be taught in public schools, and the prestigious American dictionaries began to acknowledge the call for reform, first by listing simplifications in appendices, and eventually transferring some to the main entries as acceptable alternatives.

The turning point came in February 1897, when the National Education Association (NEA) resolved that all of its official correspondence and publications would thenceforth use simplified spellings for twelve words: catalog, decalog, demagog, pedagog, prolog, program, tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, and thruout. This move brought the issue of spelling reform to wide public attention and forced even many conservatives to take seriously what they had previously dismissed as the folly of cranks

But note that the ue-less forms have pre-American precedent. For instance, the OED notes that from Middle English to the 16th century dialogue was mostly dialoge (as it was in the French of the time), and sometimes dialog. The spelling dialogue is really only seen after this, following a spelling change in French.

So, for fun, here's how some of these spellings fare in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Noah Webster's namesake, the Merriam-Webster (online) Dictionary. The middle two columns give the raw numbers of how many of each spelling is found for the singular noun form of each of these words. The last column says which spelling is given first by Merriam-Webster.


-ogue-og M-W
catalog(ue)25594955           catalog
dialog(ue)12657               702*dialogue
epilog(ue)4908epilogue
monolog(ue)         1098 7 monologue
pedagog(ue)560** pedagogue
prolog(ue)890 3 prologue
analog(ue)1554306analogue***

So THE ONLY ONE that is more frequently used in the shorter form in AmE is catalog(ue), and even then, the longer form is well represented. In other words, the most commercial term is the most likely to use the shorter form. [And, afterthought: also the one that is closest to Dewey's heart, as a library term.] Despite the National Education Association's example, this spelling reform has not been wholly successful.

Some footnotes to the table:

*The case of dialogue is interesting because of dialog box, which is spelled/spelt without the -ue in computer jargon in both countries. This is like the case of program, which is longer (programme) in most senses in BrE, but which uses the shorter (AmE) form for the computer sense. (And color in html and so forth. One could say that America runs computing jargon, or one could say that programmers prefer shorter and consistent forms. Or one could say it's a bit of both.)  Anyhow, 375 (53%) of the 702 cases of dialog here are in the phrase dialog box and its variants (dialog boxes, dialog box-in). (There are also 18 cases of dialogue box[es].) So, this means that outside this two-word compound, dialogue outnumbers dialog in AmE by 38:1.

** There was one case of pedagogs in COCA.  There were 0 cases of demagog or demagogs. So, while M-W lists these as variants, they don't seem to have made deep inroads into the written language.

*** I meant to do analog(ue) too, and was reminded of it when commenters started asking for it, so here it is, several hours later.  This one is noteworthy because M-W says for the adjective that analogue is a 'chiefly British variant' of analog, rather than just listing it as an alternative spelling, but for the noun sense it has analogue as the preferred spelling for the noun--which is in contrast with the numbers from COCA [thanks to @empty in the comments for pointing out my error]. Like catalog and dialog box, its "technological" senses are more common. So we have a general pattern here of literary words keeping the -ue and more techie stuff dropping it.


My to-do list says that I'm (BrE) marking/(AmE) grading this morning. Please don't tell my to-do list that I was here.
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take-outs and take-aways

I've settled into Twitter by attempting a "Difference of the Day" each day, as well as passing on other (BrE) titbits/(AmE) tidbits of possible dialectal and cross-cultural interest.  There's only so much you can do in 140 characters, so most of the "differences" are over-simplified, as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends are happy to point out.  Yesterday's tweet inspired a fair amount of fine-tuning by readers.  It went:
In hono(u)r of Friday night, the Difference of the Day is AmE take-out (noun) and to-go (adj/adv) vs. BrE take-away.
Let's start with the BrE one.  Take-away is extremely flexible, both grammatically and semantically.  It can be:
A noun for the food that's been taken away:  We had a Chinese take-away.
A noun for a place that only sells prepared food to eat off-site: We went to the Chinese take-away.
An adjective for such food or place: a take-away pizza
A phrasal verb: Is that to eat here (or eat in) or take away?
On the last point: it's not really a full-fledged verb. You never hear anyone say We took out or We took out a pizza (or even worse, We took out a Chinese).  It's used mainly in the infinitive and mainly in the process of making or receiving a food order.  After the fact, you'd say We got a take-away, or some such thing.

A couple of readers pointed out that in Scottish English it would be carry-out (with the same grammatical range) rather than take-away.  I'll still call take-away BrE rather than just English English since (a) it's certainly spread that far, even if it's not the native term; there are businesses that call themselves take-aways in Edinburgh and Glasgow (though probably more that call themselves carry-outs, it's true) and (b) 'non-Scottish' doesn't necessarily mean 'English'--there are other parts of the UK tooOn point (a), there are over a million hits for each of take-away+Edinburgh and carry-out+Edinburgh, and the Glaswegian equivalents--in fact, one of the first hits is www.glasgowtakeaways.co.uk.

Damien Hall wrote to say:

I haven't checked this, but I think I've heard that this is a demonstration of a classic dialectological phenomenon, two varieties with an intermediate transition zone in between: so Southern English take-away, Scots carry-out, and I think some bits of Northern English say take-out.
Damien has remembered correctly.  I found this quotation in "The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations" by Frans Hinskens, Peter Auer, and Paul Kerswill (in their edited collection Dialect Change, Cambridge University Press, 2005):
Whenever dialect mixing leads to the stabilisation of the variants that are typical of the respective ‘pure’ lects along with additional ‘compromise’ variants, one usually speaks of fudging (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 110–118; Britain 2002, 2004). [...] a similar, more recent, example from British English, discussed by Trudgill, concerns central and southern take away, the northern variant carry out, and the intermediate take out, which is used in the southern part of northern England.
Incidentally, if you're getting fish and (BrE) chips, you generally don't need to mention that it's take-away.  As we say in Linguistics, fish and chips are unmarked for taking-away--it's far less usual to have your fish and chips in a restaurant. A (BrE) fish-and-chip shop is perhaps the archetype of British take-away establishments, and they most often don't have seating for eating-in.

On to the American: take-out does not have quite the range that take-away does, since it shares the work with to-go (which we have discussed a little bit already)A friend pointed out that he'd say carry-out for pizza or Italian food.  And you know what?  So would I.   I'm not sure why this is--it doesn't seem to be particularly regional, since my friend is from California, living in Illinois, and I'm from New York state.

The noun take-out has a very New York City feel to me, but that's probably just because I grew up in a part of the state that didn't really have take-out establishments (fast food, yes; Chinese restaurants, no) in my long-ago (1970s/80s) youth.  The fast-food places would ask if you wanted your food for here or to go.  (Indeed, I had to ask that myself during my two stints of McDonald's purgatory-on-Earth.)  The pizza places ask if you want it for carry-out (or also pick-up) or delivery.   For me in my youth, getting a take-out was what people on television did--though getting carry-out pizza was a regular treat for us.

A completely non-linguistic aside: it can be funny to reali{s/z}e how atypical one's everyday foods can be.  For me, pizza is the food of childhood (perhaps it wasn't so in other parts of the US way back then--I'm not sure. The northeast has had plenty of Italian immigration.)   Better Half was introduced to pizza when he was about 13 at Pizzaland, where they served up a half a pizza with a (BrE) jacket potato/(AmE) baked potato and cole slaw.  I still get the giggles whenever he mentions it.  (His sister's mother-in-law made it into her 70s without ever having had pasta.  She was not impressed when Sister-in-Law introduced her to it.)  I also find it funny that some English people say to me that they couldn't eat pizza often.  I reply: but you have sandwiches every day--what's the difference? It's another way of having bread with cheese, meat or veg and condiments.  (It becomes clear in most cases that we're never going to see eye-to-eye on this.  But as a conciliatory point, I really like British pizza--which is more like what one gets in northern Italy. Thin, olive-oily crusts and top-rate toppings.)

On the other hand, a few English people have asked me how curry here compares to Indian food in the US, and I have to explain that I never had Indian food until I moved to South Africa in my mid-20s--and that I have never lived in an American town that had an Indian restaurant (though some of the towns have changed by now--though their Indian places are generally fairly fancy, not the kinds of places you'd get a take-away/take-out curry from).  I still haven't acquired the British native's facility with an Indian menu. I can tell you that I like dupiazas (or dopiazas), that chicken tikka masala is supposedly the national dish of the UK and that kurmas (or kormas) are for (orig. AmE) wimps.  Other than that, I have to read all the fine print on the menus.  Here's a cheat-sheet if, like me, you need one...
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top-ups and refills

Christmas is a time for dealing with family, and when you have a transAtlantic family, many dialectal conversations arise.  But this time, it wasn't my family.  Grover's little best friend is a little girl who lives in our (very AmE-sounding) neighbo(u)rhood/(more BrE-sounding) area with her American parents, and they came to our Christmas eve do with the mother's (French) mother and her Brooklynite beau.  Many Briticisms were commented upon during the course of the party, but the one that stuck with me was top-up,  to which I've become so inured that I wouldn't have immediately thought of it as a Briticism.

The context was mulled-wine serving--about which we must first have an aside.  You don't get it as much at Christmastime in the US--probably because we have our standard Christmas drink, egg nog, instead.  But when I moved to the Midwest, home of many Scandinavian-descended peoples, I did come to know it well.  And, whenever we served it (back in the days when I was living with a Scandinavian-descended person), we served it in hot drink vessels--coffee mugs or the like.  In restaurants, it might be in the kind of glass mug in which you'd be served a caffe latte.  But whenever it is served in the UK (in my now-extensive experience of southern English Christmas parties), it is served in wine glasses.  Is this a universal difference between the US and the UK, I wonder?

But back to our party: Better Half asked whether anyone would like a top-up (of mulled wine) and the Brooklynite commented (something like): "Now there's a linguistic difference.  We'd say refill."  

And I thought, "Oh yeah, we would, wouldn't we?"  Americans refill drinks, the British top them up.  In the UK, the common American experience of (orig. and chiefly AmE) bottomless coffee (i.e. free refills) is not common at all, but in the US, the (AmE, often jocular) waitron will flit from table to table, coffee pot in hand, asking "Can I get you a refill?" or "Can I warm that up for you"?  If this were to happen in the UK, it would be most natural to ask if the customer would like a top-up. 

But the other common use of top-up these days is what you do to a pay-as-you-go (BrE) mobile/(AmE) cell phone.  (The picture is a common site in the windows of (BrE) corner shops and (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations in the UK.) Which led me to wonder: what do Americans say for that?  Pay-as-you-go phones are much more common in the UK than in the US, but from what I can gather from the interwebs, refill is used in this context too.  Here's a 2004 news release about an American "prepay" phone service:
As always, Verizon Wireless prepay service allows customers to refill their minutes over the phone, at a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, online, as well as at RadioShack, Circuit City and other authorized agents.
You could also in the UK use top(-)up for a number of other things that are refreshed by the addition of more of something.  For instance, you could get a top-up loan (well, maybe not in the current economic climate), a top-up dose of an(a)esthetic and you can top up your tank with petrol/gas.  The phrasal verb top up is only cited from 1937 in the OED, and the noun top-up only from 1967, explaining why it's not as common in AmE.  American readers, what would you use in these contexts?
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buying meat

My latest book deadline is now behind me, and while I desperately try to catch up on the work that's piled up while I've been editing-editing-editing, I've also finally found the opportunity to catch up a bit on entertaining, and so had friends over for lunch yesterday. I go back and forth about whether I "should" use American or British recipes when I cook. The American ones have familiar foods and familiar measurements (cups, ounces) but force me to make substitutions for the many basic ingredients that are just not basic here, whereas the British ones are new-to-me recipes that require (AmE) a kitchen scale/(BrE) kitchen scales (since the measurements are often weights) and figuring out whether the cake will be moist enough if I leave out the sultanas (AmE [near-equivalent] golden raisins). (For me, the hardest part of Christmas in the UK is not the lack of snow, but the presence of dried fruit in all the baked goods. I like dried fruit. I like baked fruit. But I do not like baked dried fruit, and I miss [AmE] Christmas cookies.)

Yesterday I compromised: British baking recipe (ginger cake with clementine (orig. AmE) frosting), American main course (chicken and dumplings). Since it's hard to get shortening (tip for American expats: Trex or white Flora are the closest things to Crisco--look for them next to the margarine) and lots of other baking-type products, it seemed like the British cake was the safer way to go. But the first ingredient on the chicken recipe brought home the fact that no recipe is safe from trans-Atlantic opacity. It called for a fryer. This is AmE for 'a chicken suitable for frying' (OED), but what it really means is a 'a small chicken'. Larger are broilers and larger still are roasters. Now, I don't know off-hand how big any of these chickens are supposed to be, as in the US, I'd just go to the supermarket and buy the one label(l)ed 'fryer'. So, I have to add a bit to the recipe:
  • Preheat wireless modem to 24 Mbps.
  • Google 'fryer chicken lbs'
  • Translate pounds to kilograms
  • Log on to internet grocer
  • Order 1.5 kg chicken
But at least I was just buying a whole chicken. Butchered meats are a shopping minefield. Sam wrote recently to ask:
how do American names for different cuts of steak translate into English names?
"They don't always translate" is the answer to this question. It's not that the cuts of beef have different names in the two places, it's that they are different cuts of meat. Here's the picture of British beef cuts from Wikipedia:

And here's the American:


Then, once you get into particular cuts of steak, there is plenty of room for other differences. I've not found a good source on UK versus US on this, and it's my impression that AmE just has a lot more words for steak types. Here's a helpful guide from someone on answers.com (with the misspellings corrected and all AmE terms in bold):
... rib steak which has bone in or rib eye which is boneless, same cut of meat different name because of bone removed. very good with lots of marble. porterhouse from the hind half with bone in and tenderloin on other side of bone, take bone out and it's a new york strip, t-bone [orig. AmE, now used in BrE too--ed.] same but smaller tenderloin. tenderloin itself lies right under the back bone as is the most tender steak on the cow, because there is no movement of any part of it, therefore it lies there doing nothing, all 3 are very good. sirloin comes from the hip and is the most unpredictable piece of meat, sometimes very tender other times not,it is right above the rump section.
We've discussed the pronunciation of fil(l)et here before, but another one to mention is that in BrE one sees fillet steak on menus, but in AmE one tends to see filet mignon as a rough equivalent.

Meanwhile, on the pig:


And the British ones:


I've already discussed bacon briefly elsewhere. The other main pork difference that I can think of is gammon, a word I'd never heard in English until moving to the UK. According to someone else at answers.com (again, spelling is corrected):

[Ham and gammon] are both pork but ham is usually a leg of pork that has been aged, cured, smoked or cooked. Usually in the UK, its wet cured in a brine (salt) solution, then it's cooked. Gammon is the hind leg cut from a side of bacon, so it's cured (again in brine) but it's not cooked before you get it.
Basically, if you're served a roasted ham in the UK, they call it gammon, as far as I can tell. (I've also discovered that you can bake a ham in AmE but not BrE.)

And that's what I can tell you about meat. My education in such things has been curtailed by Better Half's vegetarianism. I am ardently plotting my next opportunity to lure friends and acquaintances into our home on the pretext of entertaining them, but with the true motive of cooking meat for myself.
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over-the-counter observations

As I write this (which is actually a few days before I post it--connection problems at home), I am enjoying two British (or at least not-American) things about which I often ask: How did I ever live without this? Crumpets and Syndol. I’ve written about crumpets before back here, and as usual I’m eating them in a very non-British way—this time, with peanut butter and (AmE) jelly/(BrE) jam. (My other favo(u)rite and very non-British ways are with butter and maple syrup or with melted Cheddar and lots of A1 Sauce. Eating those messy concoctions requires a knife and fork.) Syndol is heaven in an over-the-counter blister pack: (AmE) acetaminophen/(BrE) paracetamol with a muscle relaxant of some kind. [Late addition: I shouldn't believe everything my drug (orig. AmE) pusher tells me. It's not a muscle relaxant. See here and the comments.] It does the trick for tension headaches—and just about anything else you want to throw it at. (Since I can’t take ibuprofen, aspirin or opiates [maybe--see comments], this is a godsend.)

Thinking (rhapsodically) about Syndol has me thinking about expressions that are used in AmE that I didn’t really understand until I had met them the BrE context—because over the counter is one of them. We say this in AmE to mean ‘non-prescription medications’, but I never understood why we say it, because in my American experience only prescription medications come from the other side of the (AmE & BrE) pharmacist’s/(BrE) chemist’s counter. The non-prescription medications are just out there on the consumer-accessible shelves in the (AmE) drugstore/(BrE) chemist’s (shop)/(AmE & BrE) pharmacy. But in the UK, a real over-the-counter category exists for things like Syndol. Plain old paracetamol/acetominophen can be found out on the shelves in many shops—and can be found in other types of shops, like supermarkets, (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations and (BrE) corner shops. But for Syndol and real Sudafed (i.e. pseudoephedrine, my other drug of choice at the pollenous moment), you must go to a pharmacy and must ask for it from over the counter. Upon doing so, you will be faced with a number of questions from the pharmacist or their assistant, such as Are these for you?, Have you taken these before? and Are you taking any [insert name of drug that might interfere]? Give the wrong answer (like that you’ve been taking something for a while and your symptoms haven’t cleared up) and they won’t sell you the good stuff, but will tell you to do something sensible, like seeing your doctor.

I presume that all medications used to be truly over-the-counter in the US too—since shopping used to be more like that in general. I don’t know if it’s just because the UK (and most of Europe, as far as I can tell) maintains the over-the-counter category and the US doesn’t, but one can get much better drugs without a prescription here—including painkillers with codeine, which I also enjoyed until my last two doses of similar-but-prescription-requiring stuff landed me (sorry, British taxpayer) in (BrE) A&E (Accident and Emergency -also known as Casualty)/AmE the Emergency Room (or ER, or, as my friend who works in a hospital insists, the Emergency Department—though I don’t know anyone outside hospital employment who uses that phrase). I only took the recommended dose, I swear! I’d just developed some kind of allergy to opiates. (At the first A&E visit, the doctor insisted that it couldn’t have been the pills that put me in so much pain--hence the second visit, that time via ambulance. Many apologies, British taxpayer! And a tip: be very careful with the phrase cold and clammy if you phone NHS Direct. Unless you want an ambulance at your house.)

I said I was thinking of expressions (plural) that involved this kind of linguistic eureka moment, though to be honest, there’s only one other that I can think of: pratfall, which I mentioned back here.

So, expatriates of one brand or another, have you had similar experiences in which your own language made more sense only after hearing it in another dialect/context? And what are the American things that British expats have become dependent on, and vice versa?


In other business:
  • I'm planning to announce the winner to the Limerick Competition tomorrow (that is, if I manage to contact all my co-judges by then). So act quickly if you have an entry to submit!
  • Lexiophiles is running their Top 100 Language Blogs again, so nominate a blog you love!
  • I'm experimenting with Google's AdSense here, having kept this a strictly not-for-profit blog for the past three years. Let me know what you think.
I'll be back soon with a real post about an actual linguistic difference!
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crisps, chips and tortillas

My friend the Maverick received a news item about this bird through an evolutionary psychology e-mail forum:

The video, from the BBC, refers to the Doritos that the seagull eats as (BrE) crisps, but the source that Maverick read refers to them using the AmE term chips, which, of course, is the BrE word for AmE (french) fries.

However, the BrE crisps = AmE chips equation is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. This is demonstrated to us by the (UK) Daily Mail's story about the bird:
The rest of the flock flap around, begging for titbits (=AmE tidbits) and diving for scraps.
Not this fellow. He simply pops to the shops.
And his tastes, it seems, are rather particular. It has to be tortilla chips. [...]
He is now so popular that customers have started paying for his chips.
Crunchy fried potato slices are always (potato) crisps in BrE, but Doritos and other (AmE) tortilla chips are not so straightforward. When taken collectively with the other (BrE) packets/(AmE) bags at the front of the (BrE) corner shop/(orig. AmE) convenience store in the video, the Doritos are crisps, but when referring to Doritos and the like on their own, BrE speakers often use the American import tortilla chips. This is doubly foreign, since not only does chip mean something different than in AmE, but in BrE tortilla more often (in my experience) refers to the Spanish egg-and-potato dish than to the Mexican flatbread. (The 2007 draft entry in the OED also informs us that use of just tortilla to mean 'tortilla chip' is 'chiefly' BrE, and that the term Spanish tortilla is also used for the frittata-like dish--from the quotations, it looks like the Spanish prefix is mostly AmE.)

Better Half and I have a favo(u)rite Mexican restaurant in Brighton, and when we order chips and salsa there (which BrE BH pronounces with a first syllable like Sal and I in my AmE way pronounce with a first syllable more like Saul), we have, more than once, been asked to clarify whether we mean tortilla chips or (BrE) chips/(AmE) fries...in spite of the fact that their own menu reserves the term chips for the tortilla kind and uses fries for the thicker/softer potato kind. Tortilla chips is the more common term in BrE, with 31,500 UK Google hits--but with 14,500 hits, tortilla crisps has a respectable presence.

Cultural side note number 1: Americans are often surprised by the size of crisp/chip packets/bags in the UK. The largest bags in the UK are probably the size of the smallest bag that's not meant for individual consumption in the US, and often at parties in the UK, the host will have opened several individual-size bags (which can be bought in variety packs) into several small bowls. In the US, the biggest bags are comparable to a pillow in size and at parties the chips/crisps are presented in large, deep bowls. This does not--oh no, it does not--mean that the British are unenthusiastic consumers of wafer-thin fried potatoes. They consume, on average 7.2 kg per person per year, as opposed to 4 pounds (1.8 kg) per typical American. I presume that the limits on bag size in the UK have something to do with the limits on supermarket shelf space and home storage space. Because there are no (orig. BrE slang) ginormous bags of crisps/chips in the UK, there's also no need for the chip clip, which Americans use to keep their chips/crisps crunchy between pantry-raids.

CSN 2: British crisp/chip flavo(u)rs are more popular (in relation to plain, salted) and more imaginative than American flavo(u)rs--which, when I was growing up (i.e. before the dawn of 'gourmet' potato chips/crisps), were limited to salted, unsalted and barbecue. Cheese and onion is the nation's favo(u)rite (editorial note: [orig. AmE] ick) and salt-and-vinegar (which was available in New England in my youth, then spread to other parts of the US) must be close to the top. Flavo(u)rs that involve meat (steak and onion, chicken and thyme, prawn [AmE shrimp] cocktail) seem very popular too--a trend that has reached its peak, or perhaps its nadir, in the current offering of Cajun Squirrel flavo(u)r. (orig. AmE) 'Fess up: who among you has tasted them?

An unpleasant side effect of CSN 1 and CSN 2 is that when one's host pours the contents of more than one little crisp/chip packet/bag into a larger bowl, chances are that they'll have mixed together two flavo(u)rs, only one of which will be gag-inducing.

CSN 3: Pringles are served unironically at parties in the UK.

P.S. FuelMyBlog recently saw fit to interview me on my blogging habits. Click on if you see fit to care!
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closeout

I've used my tried-and-tested 'click randomly in the email inbox' method to choose today's topic. Australian Bec moved to the US temporarily (she may well have moved back in the time it's taken me to respond) and found:
I am seeing the word closeout in shops everywhere, online and 'real'. I understand from context that it means something like clearance, but can you tell me if it is an American term, or just a new word or if it is common everywhere and I have just missed seeing it before? It sounds really odd to me.
The OED informs us that Bec is not unobservant--it is an American term and it means clearance (i.e. the selling of a line of stock or a shop's contents until there is no stock left). The OED covers the verb form to close out or , but they note that it's also used as a noun (or an absol. in the OED's vocabulary):
b. To clear out (a stock of goods); to wind up (a business); to sell or finish off. Also absol. U.S.
The examples in the OED mostly have pronouns as the object of close out, and the pronoun goes between the verb (close) and the particle (out), as in close it out. If the object is a full noun phrase, my spider senses tell me that you could put it either before or after the out--but the longer the object noun phrase, the more likely it would be to go after the out. In my experience, though, the noun closeout is currently more common than the verb to close out. That is, I'd be more likely to say They're having a closeout on Acme widgets, rather than They're closing Acme widgets out.

On the noun front, one might say that it's a closeout or a closeout sale. Wikipedia tells me that in the US there are things called closeout stores, which are dedicated to selling off ends of product lines. I've never heard that term (perhaps it is industry jargon), but the same phenomenon exists in the UK--except instead of (US) TJ Maxx, the UK has TK Maxx.

And on that note, I can close out this entry. Or close this entry out.
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zwieback, rusks--and more on biscuits

We're back in the UK, dealing with a very jet-lagged baby. During our US visit, I had reason to think about another BrE/AmE difference in baby paraphernalia terminology, since Grover's got her first two teeth and is working on her next two: (AmE) zwieback (toast) and (BrE) (teething) rusk.

These refer to essentially the same thing (when it comes to the baby product), although rusk can also be used in BrE to refer to a kind of bready stuff that's added to sausages. Zwieback rhymes with 'lie back' or 'lie Bach' (if Bach has a hard /k/ sound at the end) in my dialect, but American Heritage lists a number of alternative pronunciations. It comes from the German for 'twice baked', as that's what they are: first baked as a loaf, then sliced and baked again. In other words, they're biscotti for babies. (In South Africa, rusks are used just like biscotti--eaten by all ages, dunked into coffee or tea.)

Strangely, we weren't able to buy any of this staple of babyhood in the US, although we searched for it in supermarkets and (AmE) drug stores (=BrE chemist's shop, more or less) in three counties. Sometimes we found the empty space on the shelf where they were supposed to be, sometimes not even that. I searched on the web for signs of a recall or shortage, but found no information, except that, like all finger foods apparently, Gerber zwiebacks now carry stern warnings that they should not be given to children who cannot yet crawl with their stomachs lifted off the ground. They've made them part of their 'Graduates for Toddlers' range, suggested for age 10+ months. But, of course, you need them when the baby is cutting her front teeth, long before toddlerdom. Meanwhile, I just ordered some rusks from my UK on-line grocery and found them label(l)ed 'suitable from 4 months'. (Granted, they do give a recipe for making a sort of porridgy thing from them, so that's probably what's suitable for a 4-month-old.) I have to assume that the warnings on baby foods are the product of the litigious culture...but the warnings are so uniform across the brands/products that I wonder whether they're legally required. (Do any of you know?)

Though we didn't find zwiebacks, we did find some non-zwieback teething biscuits (and ignored age and crawling requirements), which Grover loves (and handles very well, despite being completely uninterested in crawling, since crying for Mum/Mom and Dad to pick her up and carry her wherever she wants to go has worked so well for her thus far). This made me return to thinking about biscuits. As we've discussed before, BrE biscuit is and isn't equivalent to AmE cookie, but in discussions comparing those two words, we tend to only mention the AmE sense of biscuit that refers to a scone-like (in appearance, at least) thing. We should acknowledge areas of overlap with BrE biscuit. Americans do use biscuit in the names for some cookie-like things: teething biscuits and dog biscuits. In both cases, these kind of biscuits are hard--harder than normal (BrE) biscuits/(AmE) cookies. I wonder whether these AmE uses of biscuit remain closer to its etymological meaning 'twice cooked', since teething biscuits (at least) typically are twice-baked (perhaps dog biscuits used to be twice-baked, too?). But note that in both of these cases, biscuit in AmE is used as part of a compound. We don't use biscuit alone to refer to crunchy things like these.

Pressing deadlines mean that I have to reduce my posting even further, I'm afraid. I have told myself that I can only blog once a week now, though it pains me to type that. I promise to work on that backlog of requests from kind readers.
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can I help who's next?

This is just a little parable about making dialectal assumptions.

For some time, I've been bothered by a phrase I've been hearing a lot in shops and cafés in Brighton. It happens where there is one (BrE) queue/(AmE) line for several (BrE) tills/(AmE) cash registers (note that BrE and AmE have both of these terms, but use them slightly differently, as discussed a bit back here). The (BrE) shop assistant/(AmE) clerk, upon finding him/herself customerless, calls out: Can I help who's next?

Now, this just sounds weird to me, and I don't recall ever hearing it in my native land. I'd have to say Can I help whoever is next? or Can I help the next person? So, I brought this up at dinner the other night with Better Half, lazybrain and the Poet. All insisted that I shouldn't call this 'British English' because it's 'ungrammatical' and 'lazy'. But, of course, that doesn't make it not British. Certainly not Standard BrE, but there are at least some English people who are saying it.

So then I decided to have a look on the web for the phrase, and what is the first hit that Google gives me? Why, it's a British linguist (Geoff Pullum), then living in the US, who'd noticed its use in American establishments, and therefore discussed it at Language Log. So, some of you may be thinking "Ha! I knew that such ungrammaticality must be an American aberration imported into the youthspeak of Britain!" But by Pullum's account, this is not a new construction, but an old use of who that had been thought to be extinct for at least 150 years. So, what's going on here? Is it that:
  1. this use of who died out in most places but survived in little pockets of AmE and BrE and may be making a comeback?
  2. this use of who is a natural development in English grammar that has erupted on two continents at vaguely the same time after going out of fashion for a while?
  3. the phrase can I help who's next? is an idiom that was (re)invented in one country and found its way to the other?
In the UK, I'm mostly hearing it from younger people (say, in their teens/20s). That doesn't mean that the youth are Americani{s/z}ed...I can't imagine that that many Marks and Spencer assistants/clerks spend a lot of time in the US picking up phrases that seem to be used by a minority of AmE speakers (not necessarily in the touristy areas). And it's not the type of phrase one would expect to hear a lot on The O.C., or whatever's replaced it. But the fact that I'm associating it with youth makes me lean against hypothesis (1). I'm liking (2), but really have no empirical evidence for it. (After all, my impression that it's younger people saying it may just be due to the fact that there are more younger people than older people working in such service industry jobs in Brighton.)

See Pullum's Language Log post for the grammatical gore. (Won't be answering comments this weekend, so please amuse yourselves with the topic!)

Postscript (25 October): Ben Zimmer at Language Log has posted a great clip about whoever versus whomever from the US version of The Office. See comments here for more discussion...
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yard sales, car boot sales and other sales

Getting back to Kelley of Delaware's queries (which I started answering here):
Every weekend this time of year there are dozens of yard/garage sales in my town. Do such things exist in the rest of the English-speaking world, and, if so, what are they called?
I can't speak for the rest of the English-speaking world, but similar things do exist (to some degree) in England, though not by the names yard sale or garage sale. These things are allegedly named after the locations in which they occur, however the ones I've passed by this week (in NY state) that have been advertised as 'yard sales' or 'garage sales' were mostly actually in (chiefly AmE) driveways (BrE drives) next to (AmE) yards or garages. AmE has other terms for such kinds of sales, including tag sale (popular in New England). Many of these terms can be seen at the Dialect Survey map here.

(Side note: The pronunciation of garage was a point of discussion at dinner tonight. Better Half's mum said it in her normal way, so that it rhymed with HAIR ridge carriage, and my mom expressed her admiration of BHM's unfamiliar pronunciation. BHM countered that the AmE (and sometimes preferred BrE) pronunciation gər-RAZH was nicer. Garage is one of the few words (maybe the only word?) that BrE speakers have complimented my (AmE) pronunciation of. This is another case in which the AmE pronunciation is closer to the original [French] pronunciation than the BrE--which only matters if you're one of those people who think 'older' means 'better'.)

Of course, part of the reason that people don't have yard sales in Britain is that they would not call the un-built-upon fronts of their properties yards. That would instead be the front garden (at least, if it's planted). (This was a point of contention between an American and an English friend this summer. The American kept calling the Englishwoman's garden a yard, and the Englishwoman kept letting the American know that she felt insulted by this description.) Nevertheless, there is nothing called a front garden sale either. I've not seen many sales of household merchandise on/in residential properties in the UK, but those that I have seen have been advertised as moving sales. Obviously, that term only applies to certain situations, when people are trying to get rid of things that they don't want to cart to their new abode. There may be a term for non-moving household sales that I've not come across. (Answers in the comments, please!) But these kinds of things are pretty rare--at least in my neck of the English woods.

What the UK does have (and the US generally doesn't) are car boot sales. These take place in public spaces, usually a (BrE) car park/(AmE) parking lot [or a field--see comments]. People put the things that they want to sell into their car's (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk, then set up a little stall of their wares (often using a folding table, etc.) by their car in the car park/parking lot (typically paying a fee to the organi{s/z}er/landowner). These happen all year round--there is one that happens every week, for example, at Brighton station. Big ones like that often have professional sellers, who may be selling new or used goods (so they resemble flea markets). Others, like the one at a school near our house, are more geared toward(s) the occasional seller.

Both countries have other types of sales in which people donate their used goods for a one-off sale (and possibly social event) to benefit a charity--for example a church. In the greater part of the US, these are called rummage sales, although they may have other regional names. In the UK, they are jumble sales. White elephant sale is a term that I heard as a child in the US (and it was already old-fashioned at that time), but that I've seen more often in the UK.

When I asked Better Half if he knew of any BrE equivalent of yard sale, he drew a blank and noted that such things are a rarity in Britain. One reason for this is that most British homeowners wouldn't have the space for such things. Front gardens/yards tend to be very small, drive(way)s are quite short, and garages are a luxury in town cent{er/re}s. Another reason is that most British homeowners just don't have the space to store as much unwanted junk for as long as American homeowners can--and thus they can't store up a sale's worth of merchandise. BH's mum, for example, has a good-sized three-bedroom house. But as is typical of a post-war London home, she has no basement, no attic to speak of, no garage, and no walk-in closets. In that situation, one doesn't wait long to get rid of clothes that don't fit, gifts that didn't hit the mark, and decorations that have been replaced. People have various ways to get rid of unwanted stuff (and, it must be said, they tend to buy less junk in the first place), with charity shops (AmE: thrift stores) playing a major part in the second-hand economy.
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women's clothing

Was out shopping for shoes today, and after my shoe-hunger was sated, I had a quick look into a (BrE) shop/(AmE) store as part of my never-ending quest for high-waisted (BrE) trousers/(AmE) pants (or as I like to think of them, waist-waisted trousers). I tried on the ones with the longest (BrE) zip/(AmE) zipper, and was predictably disappointed. But looking at the tag made me reflect on an interesting difference in BrE/AmE fashion-marketing lingo.

I was in Next. (I thought about pretending here that I was shopping somewhere fancier, but it is the only the place in the UK where I've found a pair of trousers that (AmE) fit/(BrE) fitted in the past three years, so they deserve some credit.) On the tag of the ill-shaped trousers/pants was the line Next Woman. That is to say, the item was from their women's range.

Compare this to American brands, where Woman often means 'extra large'. For instance Amazon.com lists 'Woman Sizes' as (US) 14-24. (American 14 = UK 16/18.) The Women's department in an American department store, such as Macy's, will carry precisely those larger sizes. Of course, this is confusing, since there are plenty of women who don't wear these sizes. But it works in the US because there are two other types of departments for smaller women. The Misses department carries the even-numbered sizes 14 and down, and the Juniors department carries odd-numbered sizes (up to 13) that are cut for younger women--or teenagers (smaller bust and hips). The word Misses is seen less these days in the actual marketing of clothing than it was when I was young, but the term is still used to designate sizes. Some non-department store retailers, like J.Jill, make the Misses'/Women's distinction. (There are also Petites in both AmE and BrE, but this category has to do with height, rather than width. One can find Petite Misses and Petite Women's sizes.)

The less-confusing name for women's sizes is (orig. AmE) plus sizes, but one sees the effect of the 'women' designation sometimes in plus sizes, which can be designated as 14W-24W. As Wikipedia (today, at least) explains, the W indicates a difference in cut:
As more and more retailers are rushing to join the plus-size clothing market, the fastest growing sector of the apparel industry, confusion has entered for the consumer regarding sizing. Some lines offering traditional "Misses" sizing have extended their size ranges up to 18 or 20, overlapping the "plus" or "women's" size range. However there is a difference between a Misses size 14 and a Women's size 14W. Traditional plus or "women's" sizing is cut with a deeper arm hole, lower and larger bust-line, and larger waist compared to hip ratio than "Misses" sizes. This results in 14W being about one size larger than a Misses Size 14. This cut difference also means a better fit for differing body types. Those women with a traditional hour glass or pear body type will usually find a Misses size range fits better. Women who have a rounder, more apple shaped figure and carry their weight mainly in the bust and abdomen, will find the traditional plus-size clothing or Women's Sizes will fit their figures better.
Of course, the fact that the US has invented this vocabulary for large clothing might be taken to corroborate the picture of Americans as fat--and it's true that Americans on average are fatter than other nationalities. But it's worth pointing out that the UK is not far behind--if at all behind. According to WrongDiagnosis.com, the rate of obesity (as opposed to mere over-weight) is 14.6% in both countries. However, as this site points out, attitudes toward(s) obesity vary in the two countries.
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range and collection

Nancy Friedman wrote ages ago to say:
Now that UK and Commonwealth retailers are extending their reach into the US, I've been noticing a usage that's recognizable but still distinctly alien: "range" to indicate "collection" or "line"--as in "Our New Winter Range" from UK clothing catalog merchant Boden and, in an email from Australian retailer REMO, NEW Candela Range & LOTS More.

Over here, a "range" sits in the kitchen and turns out tasty stews.

I've written catalog copy for years, but would never consider using "range" in the way the Brits and Aussies do.
As Nancy notes, it's recogni{s/z}able for AmE speakers/advertisers, but it's not what they tend to use. In order to research this, I mentally strolled through the last US mall I was in, and then searched for the websites of the clothing retailers. So as not to take forever, I only looked at their front pages, or, if not much was going on there, I looked at their main "women's" page. None of the thirteen American retailers I searched used range on their websites. In fact, I found no equivalent word on seven of those websites. The Gap, The Limited, Ann Taylor, Lane Bryant, and J. Jill use collection, and J. Jill and Eddie Bauer use selection (e.g. our selection of shoes). [For the record, I'm way too lazy to provide links to all of those websites, but not too lazy to tell you how lazy I am.]

Meanwhile, on the UK High Street (or at least on my virtual High Street), there are collections (Jigsaw, Next, Marks & Spencer, Wallis), ranges (Boden, Laura Ashley, Next), and lines (Monsoon, Topshop, Miss Selfridge). Is there any difference between these things? Not that I can tell--but apparently Marks & Spencer recogni{s/z}es a difference between them because on their women's clothing site, they divide their wares into Our Collections, Our Ranges and Our Products. Their "collections" include Autograph and Per Una--lines of clothing that are sold under their own labels and that are meant to appeal to different demographics. But they also include maternity wear and collections that are defined by size (plus, petite). Under "our ranges", we find "career" and "denim". "Our products" are organi{s/z}ed by clothing item type (knitwear, jeans, etc.). Why does Per Una constitute a collection, while MagicwearTM is a range? I have no earthly idea. Any marketing mavens out there who can help?

[Thanks to all this research, I'm now fighting a serious case of jacket lust--after promising myself to stop spending. The US may be better for high-waisted trousers, but the UK has much cuter jackets.]

While on all these catalog(ue) sites, I noticed something that another reader pointed out to me (again, some time ago!): the use of apparel in AmE. Anthony B wrote to say that while apparel is in common use in AmE, in BrE it sounds "old-fashioned, borderline pretentious and rare". (AB sent a list of words like apparel that seem odder in BrE. We'll get to one at a time.) Whether apparel is in common use in AmE depends on how you define common. Retailers use it. You see it in catalog(ue)s (and now websites) and on informational signs in department stores and so forth, but if a friend ever asked if I wanted to go shopping for some apparel, I'd think she was being old-fashioned, pretentious and rare.

Finally, as Nancy notes, range (chiefly AmE) can mean a (AmE) stove/(BrE) cooker, though like apparel it's a word that I associate with marketing rather than everyday use. It makes me think of being eight years old and home from school with a fever, watching The Price is Right, where the prizes always seemed to include [must be said in the voice of Johnny Olson] an Amana range!!! And then there are other geographical AmE senses of range (as in Home on the Range), but that's just getting us too far from cute jackets.
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word sale

One of my more entrepreneurial students is trying to earn a little cash by (BrE, informal) flogging* a word on eBay. Here's a bit of her sales pitch:
The perfect gift for wordsmiths, linguists and bookworms this Christmas.
Buy your loved one their very OWN word! This auction is for something really special: a wonderful personalised gift for the pain who has everything.
I am a Linguistics student and writer, and I will exquisitely craft an original, 100% unique word for the winning bidder. They can show it proudly to their friends, knowing that this word is their very own and made specifically with them in mind. And if you desire, I can use it in writing and encourage others to do so. Eventually, it could even become a recognised word with your own name featuring in a dictionary definition!
The word will land on your doormat within 5 days of auction end, presented beautifully with a professional definition and an essay explaining how it was made, in full linguistic detail!
I'm very happy to report that she has used a fair bit of the terminology from our course (Approaches to Meaning) in her eBay (BrE) advert/(AmE) ad, and she's used it all correctly. Thus, I believe that I can and should endorse her wordsmithing business. (I hereby endorse it!) But as I try to stay out of business transactions with my students, I'll leave it to someone else to bid on her word. Starting bid is £9.95. Or you can skip the bidding and buy it outright for £100.

*As far as I can tell, the 'sell' sense of flog is BrE. (Note the BBC (BrE) programme/(AmE) show Flog It! ) AmE does have the related sense 'to promote relentlessly'.
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veg

American reader Jackie e-mailed to say that after some time living in London:
"I can't tell you happy I am to be back in [a] country in which veg is a verb."
Now, I trust that Jackie has some happy memories of London as well, but you can understand a girl's homesickness for a comfy verb like veg. Not that she necessarily had to miss it here. To veg or to veg out, while originally AmE (a clipping of vegetate), is used in BrE too, as the following Guardian headline indicates:
Saturday night's all right for vegging (8 Jan 2005)
But veg is more common in BrE as a noun, a clipping of vegetable(s). In AmE, it's more common to affectionately refer to vegetables as veggies. Here we have examples of clipping in both dialects (let the clipping wars re(-)commence!), but also another interesting case of count/mass distinctions in the two dialects. Americans eat mashed potatoes and veggies (both plural), while the British eat mashed potato and veg (both mass nouns). One is tempted to say that this is because of the traditional British tendency to cook vegetables into unrecogi{s/z}able sludge. But that might not be nice. Then again, does one need to be nice to people whose culinary contribution to the world is mushy peas (pictured, right)? [I might not be allowed to sleep in my own bed tonight after that one.]

Then again, it could be argued that it's in the plural in AmE because Americans are more gluttonous. But using mass nouns does not seem to have stemmed the 'obesity epidemic' in Britain.

In order to distract attention from the incendiary statements (particularly the food criticism) above, I should point out that veg shows its, ahem, face again in the expression meat and two veg. This has two meanings. One of these refers to a type of traditional diet. In the same way that Americans would call someone a meat-and-potatoes man, a (male) traditional eater in the UK is a meat-and-two-veg man. That phrase can, however, provide a double entendre, as it also slangily refers to a man's genitals. I'll let you work out the details of the metaphor in your own time.

Postscript: Two things I meant to mention here, but failed to (due to the heat of my debate with Better Half about the political/culinary (in)correctness of this entry). First, as Rebecca's pointed out in the comments in BrE veggie (also veggy) means 'vegetarian' and works both as a noun and an adjective. Second, British supermarkets typically have a section called Fruit and Vegetables or Fruit and Veg, but in the US, it's generally called the produce section. One is more likely to come across a greengrocer's shop in the UK than in the US. American Heritage lists this word as 'chiefly British'--I certainly knew it before moving here, but not because I ever needed to use the word. While one could call such a shop a greengrocery, people tend to say I stopped by the greengrocer's, much as people prefer the butcher('s) over the butchery.
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AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)