Separated by a Common Language

Southern BrE speakers frequently comment upon AmE speakers' lack of the /j/ or 'y' sound in words like Tuesday and tune: BrE /tjun/ versus AmE /tun/ (= toon). The difference is found in many words with a coronal consonant followed by an /u/, including assume, new, duke, sue, due. The two dialects don't usually differ when it comes to the /ju/ sound in other phonetic contexts, as in use, huge and cute.

Since BrE is so /j/-ful, it often strikes me when the /j/ goes missing in some British pronunciations of American names. Twice this week, I heard the American director John Huston's name pronounced by BrE speakers without the /j/: /hustn/. Americans would pronounce his name as /hjustn/ (imagine the 'n' as a syllable--I'm too lazy to go after the phonetic symbols tonight)--and as far as I can find, that's how the Huston family now pronounces it too. (There was a slight discussion of this on the American Dialect Society list in 2003. The name was changed from Houghton by John Huston's father, Walter, but the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary reportedly says that Huston is pronounced with the /j/.) Similarly, BrE speakers often call Houston, Texas /hustn/, but the American pronunciation has a /j/. (We can't take the British too much to task for incorrectly pronouncing Houston Street in New York City, since most non-New-Yorker Americans pronounce it incorrectly too. The first syllable is pronounced like house.)

I encountered another missing /j/ in a production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in Johannesburg some years ago. There I sat, enraptured by an excellent production of an incredible play, believing that the actors had been imported from the US, as their accents were impeccable. But then the Mormon characters started referring to the state of Ootah. (The actors also seemed to be allergic to the the in the AmE phrase in the hospital.) It didn't diminish the strength of the play, but it left no doubt that the actors were not American.

This all could lead to the hypothesis that there are only so many /j/s available to a dialect, and if they use them all up in words like Tuesday, they'll not have them for use elsewhere. (Similar things have been claimed for dialects that don't pronounce the /r/ in dear but find an /r/ to put at the end of idea.) But I think the real story, once again, is that the pronunciation of names is particularly difficult to master.

Better Half is a bit obsessed with the Ashes, which, because it's taking place in Australia, involves listening to the radio at very unsocial hours. One of these days I will do a post on cricket metaphors in BrE (as I have started to do for baseball in AmE--though there is a lot more to do in that field, so to speak). I incidentally heard the following on the radio very early this morning by Geoffrey Boycott ("a horrible , nasty man," says BH, "but very entertaining"):

If you're going to be a hooker, you should be a controlled hooker, not a compulsive hooker...

I said, "there should probably be court-ordered therapy on the NHS for compulsive hookers." BH agreed.

No turkey for me. No cranberries. No Macy's parade. So, none of that to be thankful for then. I suppose that I can be thankful for the lack of (American) college football.

Other than that, the day has really been (BrE) pants, with one bit of silver lining (ooh, silver-lined pants! how posh!): The Home Office phoned to say that I should disregard the letter in which they denied me citizenship, as my documents have turned up. So, I'm thankful for that.

I've postponed my Thanksgiving until next week, when friends are available to help celebrate. We have a tradition (based on, but more involved, than my family tradition) of pausing before each course to go around the table and say one thing we're thankful for this year. That usually involves three courses/three thanks/umpteen people. If you would be so kind as to say what you're thankful for this year, then perhaps I will thankfully plagiari{s/z}e your thanks in my little thankful speeches.

The American Heritage Dictionary lists bollard as 'Chiefly British', and indeed this is a word that I hadn't encountered before I lived here, though I'd certainly encountered the things before.

A bollard (in its most frequent sense in BrE) is a post that is used to get in the way of traffic--for instance to keep cars from driving or parking on the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk (like the ones on the left) or to direct cars toward(s) the correct lane (see right). There's a scene I like in the film The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz that involves some paranoid bollards. But then again, I like every scene in that film. It's not a film that would be to everyone's taste (I saw it in a Paris cinema's season of 'British eccentrics'), but it's one of those films in which the city (London) is at least as much of a character as those that are played by actors.

Prior to my residence in Britain, I would have called bollards posts. Oh, what an impoverished vocabulary I had back then! But then one does come across more bollards in the UK than in the US. Sometimes they're there for no obvious reason. For example, on a two-way road near my house, there is a bollard that makes traffic going down hill give way (AmE yield) to traffic that's coming up the hill. Since the road is wide enough at this point to let the traffic go both ways, the bollard is just there to slow down the cars that are going down the hill. I can't see why they didn't choose another way to slow the traffic that wouldn't involve the creation of traffic (BrE & regional AmE) queues (general AmE lines). For instance, one could use a (BrE [originally] & regional AmE) sleeping policeman (other AmE speed bump; BrE & AmE speed hump; BrE road hump). Better Half has just called this bollardy arrangement a chicane, another word that only entered my (passive) lexicon after I moved here. The term comes from motor racing, where it usually refers to a little kink in the racetrack, but it's extended here to include the type of traffic slowing measure described above, and like the one (that's barely visible) in this picture from Lancashire.


Sometimes the word bollard is used (in BrE) to refer to the thing on the left, though such things are usually termed traffic cones in BrE and pylons in (at least my dialect of) AmE. Pylon, of course, can also refer to the electrical type of thing to the right--in either dialect. A strange piece of lexicographical trivia is that American Heritage doesn't record the 'traffic cone' sense of pylon, while the OED does (and marks it 'U.S.').

.........

In other news, I was away playing Scrabble again this weekend (hence the lack of blogging), and, as often happens in such situations, I was twice mistaken for Canadian. That brings the Canadian count to five instances in five months. (I also got one instance of "I usually don't like American accents but...".)

Perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't have a chance to blog, as I believe the blog is starting to work against me. I mocked mushy peas, and, lo and behold, five days later my application for UK citizenship was turned down. They say it's because some of my paperwork didn't arrive on time, but I think we can read between the peas...

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.

Wore my red shoes today, which always provides someone with an excuse to exclaim red shoes, no knickers! The word knickers is, of course, a dead giveaway that this is a BrE expression. The first 50 or so times I heard it, I assumed it was a comment on the raciness of the colo(u)r red and the type of woman who might call attention to herself (and her feet) by wearing red shoes, but the story is a bit less lady-of-the-evening than it seems at first.

The more common phrase--never applied to me because of my fondness for wool--is all fur coat and no knickers. Both phrases are used to refer to someone (or something) that is all flash and no substance. That is, one who's bothered with the decorations, but not with the basic necessities, like knickers (=AmE panties).

Of course, the moralistic edge of the phrase--encouraging us to have a good foundation (garment) before turning our attention to frills, is often these days overlooked, in favo(u)r of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Search (unfiltered) all fur coat and no knickers on Google Image to see what I mean, if you need to. But you don't really need to, do you?

Another faintly misogynistic (which is not to say entirely unuseful) phrase that the British have introduced me to is mutton dressed as lamb: used to refer to any woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a style that is deemed too young for a woman her age. Better Half also enjoys the phrase mutton dressed as mutton, which is to say a woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a way that is too appropriate to her age. (Thankfully, neither of these has yet been applied to me...to my face.)

The British do not have a monopoly on phrases that pass judg(e)ment on the sartorial choices of women. Muffin top, to refer to the roll of flesh that often appears at the top of some low-slung trousers/pants is an Americanism. This word has made its way into BrE, even though the types of muffins that the phrase alludes to are a fairly recent import to the UK.

[Here I must digress. The cake-like American-style muffin seems to have taken over the UK. This is the kind of muffin that a lot of my students think of first when asked to describe muffins--which they are often asked to do in my courses--rather than the type of flat, non-sweet thing that looks like what Americans call an English muffin, but which actually differs from those as well. According to United Biscuits, individually packaged muffins, such as those pictured at the right, are now 'the second largest sector in eat-now cakes' in the UK. But...there has been some semantic slippage in the transfer of this term (and baked good) to the UK: (a) The muffins that are sold in the UK as American-style muffins often lack 'muffin tops' --i.e. the mushroomy bit that has risen over the side of the muffin tin-- so I'm not sure whether the phrase muffin top is quite as evocative here when applied to love handles. I've yet to come across a home-baked muffin in the UK that wasn't made by me--though one can buy Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mix at Asda, I see. (Not that I want to admit to having been in an Asda--which is owned by Evilmart.) (b) Many of the so-called muffins I see in UK shops are, in AmE terms, cupcakes, as far as I'm concerned. One started to see (horrors!) chocolate chip muffins in the US when I was in my late teens, but to my mind, muffins have to have some whiff of healthfulness about them--bran or fruit, or at least cornmeal--and certainly no frosting. Something built around the theme of a chocolate bar, such as the Galaxy muffin above, is most definitely a cupcake. And before raising the issue of fairy cakes or otherwise taking this conversation any further on the baked goods tangent, please do have a look at the baked goods post from July.]

Back to American body-fascist misogyny! Or cultural observation...take your pick! The other AmE phrase that springs to mind (though admittedly not as widespread as the others discussed so far) is sausage casing girl, to refer to someone young and female who wears clothes in a size or two smaller than the sizing lords intended. I learned this phrase from an LA Times article this summer, and it did strike me as descriptive, though cruel. The article seems to no longer be accessible to the masses on-line, but you can read Grant Barrett's record of it here.

All of these expressions describe phenomena that exist in both countries, but the two cultures have had different priorties as to which type of woman gets judged on the basis of her behavio(u)r with reference to her appearance. As ever, we can wonder about what this says about the cultures--although one has to be careful about plucking a couple of phrases out of the culture and judging the culture on the basis of those. Nevertheless, in the spirit of sweeping generali{s/z}ation, we see in (some of) these phrases British women being mocked for not acting their age and American women being mocked for not acting their weight. And men on both sides of the Atlantic remaining relatively unscathed.

A correspondent on the American Dialect Society e-list expressed surprise at the following Briticism spoken by an American character in the American television show/programme Law & Order: Criminal Intent:

He liked to dress in women's clothes - panties, bra - the whole kit.

In BrE, kit is used both more frequently and in more ways than in AmE. Used alone, AmE kit is likely to refer to a set of parts that one can put together to make something--as in She built her car from a kit. It's also used in various combinations. For example, a shaving kit or Dopp kit is a travel bag for men's toiletries. (Dopp is a trade name, but Dopp kit has been generici{s/z}ed.) Kit is also heard in the AmE phrase the (whole) kit and caboodle--that is, the entire collection of things related to a certain task or context:

Dell's modular approach is an attractive proposition for those who wish to avoid lugging around the whole kit and caboodle every time they hit the road. --Newsfactor Network

For some etymological information on this phrase, see The Maven's Word of the Day.

In BrE, kit is used to refer to any collection of related things, particularly equipment or clothing. For instance, in the second (if I remember correctly) episode of the new BBC program(me) Torchwood, newcomer Gwen experiences a lot of whizzy gadgets in a vehicle and says (sarcastically) to her colleagues (again, if I'm remembering correctly), Got enough kit?

The Law & Order quotation above shows the clothing/equipment sense, which is most often used in relation to what one would carry/wear for a sport. Thus tennis kit (typically used without a or the) would consist of the clothes, the shoes and (often) the racket.

The 'clothing' sense of kit is often heard these days in get one's kit off, as in:

Sometimes in life it's nice when people are complimentary about you without trying to get your kit off. --Don Pablo Escobar on bangingtunes.com

Other ADS-list correspondents noted having heard BrE-like kits on another television show/programme and in the cycling world--so it seems to be infiltrating AmE.

I'll stop here because an IBook failing-battery horror caused me to lose (another version of) this entry once already. I need new kit!

Derrick e-mailed the other day with the following request.

My question to you, based on your interesting in both spelling variants and common citation of Wikipedia, is what your opinion is on the official Wikipedia policy on English spelling in articles, described here. [...]It's one of the oldest rules on Wikipedia, resolved in its infancy, and has stood the test of time, consistently resisting attempts to modify it. [...] I've seen proposals to consistently use one spelling method, to extend the software to allow the user to configure which spelling they prefer, and countless other suggestions, but all met a rapid demise. Is this a good rule, and why is it so popular? Thanks for your insight.

I was glad he drew this to my attention. I think it's a popular policy because it's a terribly sensible policy.

Basically, any standard English orthography (spelling system) can be used on Wikipedia, with the following provisos:

1. Articles should use the same dialect throughout.
2. If there is a strong tie to a specific region/dialect, use that dialect.
3. In choosing words or expressions (especially article titles) there may be value in selecting one that does not have multiple variant spellings if there are synonyms that are otherwise equally suitable and reasonable.
4. Follow the dialect of the first contributor.

I've heard British people argue that BrE spelling should be used in international contexts because the UK is the 'homeland' of English. I've heard Americans argue that AmE spelling should be used because Americans outnumber the British. I've heard learners of English from other countries argue in favo(u)r of AmE spelling because American cultural exports are more widely found than British. Whichever decision one makes about how international English should be spelt/spelled, some sector is going to be offended or disappointed. So, let's not favo(u)r either. Let's let the forces of culture decide.

Rule 2 in the list above is exemplified on another Wikipedia page:

Sean Connery
Fact profile: A Scottish-born actor, but has spent much time in America. He now lives in the Bahamas. However, he has retained his British citizenship and still sees himself as Scottish.
Conclusion: Use standard Scottish English for the article on Sean Connery.
Harold Larwood
Fact profile: English-born cricketer, who is notable for his performances for England in the 1932/3 Bodyline series. After retirement he emigrated to Australia, took Australian citizenship and saw himself as Australian.
Conclusion: As his notability relates to the period in which he lived in Britain, use standard British English for the article on Harold Larwood.
Said Musa
Fact profile: Said Musa is the Prime Minister of Belize. He was born in Belize when it was known as "British Honduras" and was under British rule. He also studied law at Manchester University in England, but returned to Belize the following year. He became a politician in independent Belize and has lived there ever since. Belize usually considers itself a Caribbean nation, rather than a Central American nation.
Conclusion: Use standard Caribbean English for the article on Said Musa.
Fiat Regata
Fact profile: The Fiat Regata is an Italian motor car. It is produced in Italy, where there is no national variety of English, by an Italian company. It is sold in many markets, across which many varieties of English are in use.
Conclusion: The country of Italy is within the political and geographical entity of Europe. The government of the European Union has several official languages including British English. This is currently the version employed in the article.

All of these conclusions are debatable (or moot?), of course, but we've got a lovely set of rules as the pivot on which our debate reels. How pleasantly legalistic! (And no, I don't think that's an oxymoron.)

Many ideas for posts, but no time, so here's a placeholder until I have cleared out my inbox:

Paul pointed me to a discussion on a bridge discussion list (that's bridge the game, not the architectural kind, or the dental kind, or the musical kind...) that starts with a puzzle, directed to members of the American Contract Bridge League:

In the phrase "skillful signaling" can you move one letter
and retain correct, preferred English spelling?

I hope that readers of this blog will be able to solve the puzzle. (Find your hint here.)

The American responders find some clever ways to answer this question while missing its point--which just goes to show how separated the common language is.

Previously on SbaCL: I started a discussion of expressions that include names of animals that are special because both the expressions and the animals mentioned in them are local to either BrE or AmE. The discussion started with the AmE raccoon eyes and (slightly cheating) BrE pissed as a newt. While I was having a hard time coming up with more related to British (and not American) animals, Swedish Teacher's Beau yesterday suggested flat as a hedgehog, which works. The thing to understand here is that hedgehogs are very often roadkill (orig. & chiefly AmE). There are only a few examples of this expression on the net and a couple more of flat as a steam-roll(er)ed hedgehog:

The sign said WATCH OUT THIS HOUSE COULD FALL DOWN AND KNOCK YOU FLAT AS A STEAMROLLED HEDGEHOG. --Story by a (BrE) pupil/(AmE) student at Abernethy Primary School
I have to make the point that the McFly version is as flat as a hedgehog on the M1! --'Michael' on Ramair 1350am Forum

But still, I can think of more relating to American animals, possibly because there are more American-and-not-British animals to name.

The groundhog, aka woodchuck, has a day named after it, Groundhog Day, which will be a familiar phrase from the 1993 Bill Murray/Andie McDowell film/movie. The other week, I had to disabuse a friend of the notion that the observation of Groundhog Day and the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil were not products of a screenwriter's imagination, but real cultural treasures of the United States. The superstition is that on the second of February, groundhogs awake from their hibernation and pop their heads out of their burrows. If the groundhog sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter (so he pops back into the burrow), otherwise, spring will come early. The OED records another groundhog expression: a groundhog case--'a desperate or urgent affair'. Thisis mostly a regional term, chiefly used in the southern Midlands and South, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English. Here's a current use of the term:

Groundhog Case A term used by CS professors to describe a student hopelessly below the passing grade mark that absolutely needs to complete the course for a variety of reasons (graduation, marriage, work, MOM, etc...) --Software Engineering Terms glossary, West Virginia University Insititute of Technology

As for woodchucks, there's the tongue-twister How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

On to the skunks! There's the verb to skunk, meaning either 'to defeat, to prevent from scoring' as in (1) or 'to cheat (by not paying)'. These are listed in the OED as originally and chiefly American.

I've played games where I 'skunk' the opponent, winning without any meaningful response, and it's ego-building, but not nearly as fun. --emlprime on Digg

But there's another verb sense of skunk that the dictionaries don't record: 'to be sprayed by a skunk'. If one Googles "got skunked", one finds lots of examples of that sense:

Our dog recently got skunked for the 2nd time in 5 months. --from Berkeley Parents Network advice forum

Another skunk-derived expression is the adjective skunky, meaning 'to smell/taste bad, in a skunk-like way'. This is not completely foreign to BrE (OED doesn't mark it as AmE), but it's not quite as, um, pungent here as one can't be expected here to know what a skunk smells like--but there are few mainland Americans who've escaped this unpleasant bit of education.

To play possum is listed in the OED as 'orig. U.S.', but again, it's one I've had to explain when I've used the phrase in the UK. It means 'to play dead; to feign injury/illness; to pretend to be asleep'. This follows from the fact that (o)possums are thought to play dead in order to trick their predators--in fact, what they do is pass out, but it has the same effect.

Goodness knows, there are probably other local fauna expressions I'm missing. I've speciali{s/z}ed here on a certain size of animal, it seems. Feel free to add other examples in the comments.

When I come home after a long day's hay-feverish work, I often give my eyes a good rub and suffer the mascara-smeared consequences. [Incidentally, the second syllable in mascara sounds like care in (most northern, at least) AmE and like AmE car in (most south-eastern, at least) BrE.] When Better Half sees me after my eye-rubbing catharsis, he'll say something like "Hello, panda eyes." But in my AmE dialect, what I have are raccoon eyes. Think of a black-eye-masked animal in the US, and one naturally thinks of a raccoon. Think of one in the UK, and the panda more readily comes to mind. [Raccoon eyes is also the informal, and descriptive, name of a medical condition--bilateral periorbital ecchymosis.]

This got me thinking on the theme of animal expressions that don't work in other dialects because the animal isn't native to other dialect's area. I'm finding it easier to think of AmE expressions that don't translate into BrE. For instance, while the hedgehog is a native species in Britain, there don't seem to be any hedgehog-based clichés. So, I'm going to cheat a little and offer pissed/drunk/tight as a newt, meaning 'extremely intoxicated'. There are newts in America, but (a) they are different genera than the newts in Britain and (b) salamander is, in my experience, the more common way of referring to them in AmE. (But this may differ in parts of the US with different kinds of newts.) According to Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack, the newts in pissed as a newt weren't originally animals, but young men who were hired to watch gentlemen's horses while they were out on the town. The gentlemen would return from their libations to find that the "newts" had tippled too. However, there's no record of this sense of newt in the OED and Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English says the phrase probably comes from Army officers' slang. Is Albert Jack a quack? (For some clues as to the answer to this question, see Arnold Zwicky's post at Language Log.)

Martin Willett, in the glossary of his Debate Unlimited website, notes that as a newt doesn't need a word meaning 'drunk' in order to convey drunkenness:

Pissed as a newt and pissed as a fart; expressions of extreme drunkeness. The ending “as a newt” can be added to other expressions to express the concept of drunkness e.g. “Did you see Caroline Aherne receive her award last night, she looked, er, relaxed... as a newt.”

On the internet, one also finds cute as a newt (a few times). Since this is on the Urban Dictionary and MySpace, we might suppose it's a recently coined phrase. It doesn't mean 'drunkenly cute', but something more akin to AmE cute as a bug.

Both these BrE phrases can be compared to drunk as a skunk, which involves a North American animal, but nevertheless is said in Britain as well. Like cute as a newt, we can presume that it's caught on in large part because it rhymes--not because of any lack of sobreity in skunks or because of the inherent attractiveness of newts.

This one phrase has taken rather longer than expected, so I'll leave the rest of the American animals for tomorrow (or thereabouts). Stay tuned...

As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television (or, in pleasant but intense weekend bursts, Scrabble tournaments). For a while, I was hearing a fair amount of Scottish-accented speech on The Thick of It, a political satire in which the government's spin doctor is played by (*sigh*) Peter Capaldi (whom I still have a crush on due to Local Hero—undaunted by the many more/less savo(u)ry characters he's played since then). In/on the program(me), the Scots seem to run the government really, and it's generally felt that this was made to reflect real life. Sometimes I think it reflects my real life too, as I work at a university in southern England that has a Scottish Vice Chancellor and a history of Scottish people running various administrative departments.

Linguistically speaking, this means that sometimes the unfamiliar terms that come up in the university's administration-speak are Scottish imports. I'm not sure if we're the only university south of the border in which the year's exam diet is spoken of, but my colleagues who have come from other parts of England to work here find this term as foreign as I do. In Scottish law, a diet is a court session—and in academia it is the series of exams and examination boards (a feat of mind-wrenching bureaucracy necessitated by the classification of degrees) that happens at the end of the academic year—i.e. the examination 'season'.

I was reminded of this today when I was filling out a form concerning a new course. It said:

List all the programmes which will include this course. This should include ALL programmes within and outwith your school.

This was not the first time I'd encountered outwith where I would say outside or possibly (but only if I wanted to sound highfalutin in AmE) without. But this time, I was moved to investigate it, and (whaddya know?) it's marked in my dictionaries as Scottish. (My concise dictionaries say Sc(ottish), while the OED says Now chiefly Sc.) A little further investigation on the (AusE>BrE) uni website reveals that the author of the document is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.

I wondered whether I should start to develop a paranoid theory about the Scottish conspiracy to run my life and drown me in paperwork (for all of my paranoia is deliberate), but then I thought about the fact that all the Scottish people I know are super-nice and very efficient. Contrary to popular stereotypes, they always seem willing to buy a round of drinks. (So what if my sample size is limited to less than a dozen Scots? They're buying!) If these people do have plans to run my life, well, maybe I should let them. Perhaps it'll turn out that all the drink-buying was a ruse, but it's a lot better than the other paranoid fantasies I have to choose from.

I am misunderstood when I say can't--almost as often as I'm misunderstood when I do my modern dance interpretation of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Many BrE speakers have difficulty hearing the difference between most AmE pronunciations of can and can't.

In both dialects, it's not really the 't' that helps us tell the difference between the positive and negative words--that sound is mostly swallowed at the end of the word. It's the vowel that makes the difference. In standard BrE, the vowel quality is the clincher. Can rhymes with pan but can't is pronounced like the AmE pronunciation of Kant (see the comments for more discussion). In other words, the vowel in can't is considerably further back in the mouth than the vowel in can. (One feels the need to mention the old chestnut: Kubla Khan, but Immanuel Kant--but note that Khan and can are pronounced differently.)

In AmE, the vowel quality is very similar between the two forms, but the length of the vowel in can't is shorter. (By a 'shorter' vowel, I literally mean 'shorter'--i.e. not pronounced for as long.) I explained that fact to my students yesterday, and once they knew that they got much better in the "which one am I saying?" test.

Pronouncing can't the other way is a favo(u)rite way for British singers to make themselves sound more American, and for American singers to make themselves sound more British. (I suppose either identiy has some cachet, depending on what kind of sound you're going for.) I've got to run to London to celebrate some fellow Librans (yeah for us!), so will leave it as your homework assignment to identify one example of each!

Nancy e-mailed to ask about AmE cater to versus BrE cater for. This is where the book that I got for my birthday comes in handy. In it, John Algeo writes:

In CIC [the Cambridge International Corpus], cater for is more than 100 times as frequent in British texts as in American; cater to is 3 times as frequent in American texts as in British. In the sense "provide food (at a party)" British prefers cater for or possibly cater at; American also uses the verb transitively: cater a party.

What can I add to that? Just that catering is used more broadly in BrE than in AmE. For instance, a Scrabble comrade describes herself as working in catering. In AmE, I'd expect that to mean that she is an events caterer--someone who shows up to feed people at parties and conferences. In BrE, it means that she works in the food branch of the hospitality industry. In her case, catering is the department of the university that's responsible for the cafés/tea bars/restaurants on site.

Since Algeo so neatly took care of that case of verb complementation, I should move on to another challenge: a complementation difference that Algeo missed. John (coming to us through the Association of British Scrabble Players) writes to say:

One phrase not yet covered (as far as I can tell) is

beat up on = to attack physically or verbally (Websters 11th Collegiate). This strikes me (oops no pun intended) as exclusively North American, the equivalent British phrase being "beat up"

Where does the "on" come from? It appears to be a relatively recent addition. The 1937 version of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition Unabridged lists only "beat up" - (sense b) Slang to thrash (a person) esp. soundly.

John, come and be one of my students--I love the ones who do a bit of research before coming in with a question. Ten (BrE) marks/(AmE) points for laying the groundwork! Let's start by comparing beat and beat up:

(1) Batman beat the Joker

(2) Batman beat up the Joker.

(1) is ambiguous. It either means that Batman struck the Joker or that Batman won against the Joker. (2) indicates that Batman physically beat the Joker until some conclusion was reached--i.e. the Joker soundly thrashed. This involves the completive particle up, which we've seen before. The OED notes that beat up is originally AmE, and the first example of it (in an O. Henry story) is from 1907. Next year we can celebrate its hundredth birthday in print, then.

Then there's beat on:

(3) Batman beat on the Joker

(4) Batman beat on the door.

(3) sounds odd in many dialects, but (4), with an inanimate object, sounds better. If we use beat on with an animate object as in (3), it can sound like the object is not so animate--perhaps the Joker is unconscious or otherwise being very passive about being beaten. (Note that the participial form is beaten in standard BrE and AmE, but can be beat in informal and non-standard contexts, as in the AmE phrase It can't be beat = 'it's the best'.) On also seems to give a more repetitive connotation--it's the same spot on the door/the Joker that is being struck repeatedly. Batman beat the door/Joker sounds a bit more like the door/Joker is being struck all over.

So, now we come to the one that John wondered about:

(5) Batman beat up on the Joker (AmE)

Here we get both some completiveness from up and some impugned inanimacy from on. (Or at least, this is my reading of the situation.) Here, Batman pretty soundly (AmE dialectal) whupped the Joker, but the Joker didn't offer much resistance. As John's dictionary quotation indicates, this is often used figuratively. So, if you don't agree with what I've said here, you can beat up on my ideas in the comments section. I'll be passive about it in the sense that I probably won't be on-line to defend myself when you comment. But if you say something cleverer than what I've said here, I'll only thank you for the beating. After all, blogging is a form of intellectual masochism.

Suzannah e-mailed to ask about the rituals involved when two people say the same thing at the same time. In the US, the schoolyard tradition is to say jinx! (For a discussion of the etymology of the word see World Wide Words.) In general, a jinx is a kind of curse. After simultaneous speech, one tries to be the first to say jinx (or to jinx them, for it can be a verb too), after which the "jinxee" is "cursed" by not being allowed to speak. Wikipedia elaborates the rules as:

"Jinx" is also a term used when two people say the same thing at the same time and the person who says jinx first makes the other person not speak until somebody says his or her name. The only prevention for this state is to yell the word "buttercup" after the jinx. This can be countered by "Jinx no buttercups".

This shows up a limitation of Wikipedia--the rules here are undoubtedly the rules that the author has experienced, but there are plenty of other rules too, since regional variation is rife in children's games and playground activities. (So go now and add your own rules to Wikipedia!) In Suzannah's experience:

When I was in school, if two people said the same thing at the same time you hurried to say "jinx" first - whoever lost wasn't supposed to talk until someone said their name. A bystander could also say it, and both of the people involved would be caught. I learned from a friend who grew up in another area that "pinch poke you owe me a coke" was the answer to this situation, or sometimes just "jinx you owe me a coke". I saw in an old movie (and another friend said she'd seen it in person) where the two people stopped for a second in their conversation and linked pinkies when this happened, then kept going.

(I think we played with something like Suzannah's rule--but usually we just got bored with our friend not being able to talk so we'd unjinx them.) Over at The Law of the Playground there are some more versions. OED doesn't have this sense of jinx but does note that the word is 'orig. U.S.'.

Better Half says that he knows jinx from his days on a South London playground, where they said jinx and fainites. (Though BH remembered the word as "fainlights", making it difficult to look up. Some kind folks at the American Dialect Society set us straight on the spelling.) Fainites (and variations on it--OED lists fains, fains I, fainit...) gives the sayer immunity from jinxing or touching.

Off the playground in BrE, one is more likely to hear snap, which is, as the OED puts it, 'an exclamation used when two similar objects turn up or two similar events take place'. This doesn't have the cursing connotations of jinx and is used off the playground as well. For example, when playing Scrabble, if I announce my score and my opponent has the same score, she might say Snap! or if you reach for something at the same time as someone else, one of you could say it.

This use of snap comes from a card game of the same name, which is similar to the game I played as a child called slapjack--but there are many variations of this game (and other names for it) that are of varying similarity to snap. (Here are two--including one in which one actually slaps jacks.) Essentially, one splits a deck of cards between two people; both lay a card face up on the table and continue doing this, piling the cards on one another, until two cards match (e.g. two jacks). The first one to slap the pile and say (BrE) Snap!/(AmE-dialectal) Slapjack! gets to keep the pile (or in some versions not keep it--depending on whether the aim is to have all the cards or none of them). For young children, one can buy snap cards with pictures.

In my house, slapjack always ended in tears and accusations, and sometimes with being sent to one's room. The name snap sounds much more civili{s/z}ed. But is the game?

I want to write about one thing, and can do so while writing about something someone's asked me to write about, but:

I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
....

OK, here we go. Kate e-mailed to request some coverage of pants, trousers and slacks. In BrE, pants refers to underpants, which sometimes leads to sub-hilarity when an American says something like I look good in pants. Pants is a generic term—those for women can also be called knickers or panties. Pants has another life as a term of derogatory evaluation. Better Half has obliged us with an example:

Superman Returns was completely pants—and he even wears them on the outside.

(For those interested in Greek terms for odd turns of phrase, that's a zeugma, though some would prefer you to call it a syllepsis.)

The BrE word for the bottom half of a suit is trousers—indeed British women wear trouser suits, while their American counterparts wear pantsuits. Trousers is understood, but not much used, in AmE. I'd certainly never apply the word to womenswear in AmE, but do so easily in my approximation of BrE. In AmE, trousers is an old-fashioned, kind of funny word.

What about slacks? BH and I were just saying the other day that we thought we'd only use slacks as an AmE word for certain types of women's trousers. The very same evening, we were watching an episode from the first (BrE) series/(AmE) season of the very clever BBC comedy The Smoking Room, in which a male character's trousers are referred to as slacks. So it looks like BH and I don't know nuffin. (On the positive side, I can start to cite watching comedy DVDs as an important research activity.) Nevertheless, we both think of slacks as a word that's more at home in our mothers' or grandmothers' vocabularies.

But all of this talk just gets me further from what I wanted to talk about. I mean, we're entering the glorious season of Lynneukah (the festival of Lynne), so I should get the space for my big rant here: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH WOMEN'S TROUSERS/PANTS? I've worn skirts through several years of the low-waisted fashion, because no one makes a woman-shaped trouser anymore. They make trouser legs with something to hold them together. Even the ones that call themselves natural waist (I'm talking to YOU, Boden!) reach nowhere near that narrower part of me between my hips and my ribs. So this year (after some rumblings in this direction last year), the fashion mags proclaimed that high-waisted trousers are back! In fact, they seem to believe they are ubiquitous:

And for anyone tired of the smock, and the baby doll, and the high-waist trouser, and sick to death of wearing nothing but grey, or black, or shell (fashion speak for off-white), then I am afraid that next summer you will be disappointed. —The Daily Mail, 18 September 2006

Where on earth are all these high-waisted trousers? This summer I've returned five so-called items to mail order houses, and found just one pair in the High Street (AmE = 'on Main Street', but since there are no (AmE) stores/BrE shops on Main Street, USA anymore, the translation doesn't really work). Which brings me to the heart of my rant. I found another pair of trousers-that-fit-women-with-hips-and-waist in the US in March and both of these pairs of trousers/pants are made of (it makes my skin crawl even typing this) p-o-l-y-e-s-t-e-r. Reader, I am so desperate that I bought them. And by the second wearing, each of them was covered with (here comes the big BrE/AmE distinction that I wanted to get to!) (AmE) PILLS/(BrE) BOBBLES.

BH tells me that I need to get a Remington Fuzz-Away. But then again he is also the man who just said "If I had a band I'd call it Victor Kiam's Love Child."