spastic, learning disability

Different pronunciations and new-to-you vocabulary can be charming. "I just love your accent!" people say, or "I love how the English/Americans say [insert word here--but not wanker, please]." Dialect wannabes pick up on these things and incorporate them into the linguistic identity that they try to project. But different meanings are another matter--they sneak up on you. Different meanings can get you into trouble.

Tiger Woods discovered this when he called himself a spaz on live UK radio/television after playing badly at the Masters last April. (See Language Log's discussion from back then.) To an American ear, that's a word for a (AmE) klutz. To a British ear, it's one of the most taboo insults, on a par with retard as one of the worst playground taunts. The difference is that BrE speakers see the connection between spaz and a specific disability, cerebral palsy. When I first moved here and donated to the charity SCOPE, its literature still said 'formerly the Spastic Society'. The name was changed in 1994, and you can read about it here. Until that point, I had never heard spastic as a synonym for 'having cerebral palsy' or 'person with cerebral palsy'--which is not to say that they were never used in the US in that way, but that it wasn't a use of the word that people of my generation were likely to come across. I had heard it as a description of some of the symptoms of CP (e.g. spastic muscles), so when I saw the title The Spastic Society, I could guess what the society was about. Still, it immediately struck me as a fairly crude and insensitive description of a disability, even though I still wasn't associating spaz with the disability. But like Tiger Woods, I heard horrified, sharp intakes of breath when I first unwittingly used it in the UK to describe my own behavio(u)r.

As Liz Ditz points out, learning disabled is another disability-related term that could cause transatlantic offen{c/s}e. It's a term that I used often as a (AmE) professor* at an American university, since it's the term that's used to collectively refer to things like dyslexia, dyspraxia, and attentional deficits. In other words, it's used for people with normal IQs who have specific problems with some aspect of learning. But in the UK, learning disability is equivalent to what is now in the US called developmental disability--and what has been called mental retardation (though this is found by many--especially in the UK--to be offensive now). Dyslexia and other normal-IQ conditions come under the umbrella of specific learning difficulty. The thing that keeps me confused about not calling dyslexia a learning disability is that it's covered by the UK Disability Discrimination Act. So, it's a disability that's not a disability. When trying to speak about such things at teaching-related meetings, I remember not to say learning disability, but can rarely remember difficulty, so I usually end up saying useless things like we need to keep in mind the students with learning....issues. (Doesn't every student have a learning issue?)

Another big term in British schooling is special educational needs, or SEN, which is the blanket term for any learning or behavio(u)ral problem that requires special consideration at school, and is used in contexts like SEN classrooms. One also hears/sees special needs education. I asked one of my bestest friends, the Ginger Nut about this. GN has been studying for a teaching certificate in the US while (working full-time and) raising a child who has an autistic spectrum disorder--so she's much more in touch with the terminology in American schools than I am. She confirms that SEN isn't the term of choice in AmE, but that "We might say, Special needs, and the official phrase that I think is comparable is Special education and related services - that's the phrasing in IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)." Incidentally, I was recently told by a UK teacher that one has to avoid referring to anything as special in the classroom these days because of the association with learning/developmental disabilities. It may be the same in the US, where I first (about 12 years ago) heard the taunt You're so special, you should be in special education (or, the Special Olympics).

To see fuller lists of terminology (and perhaps do your own comparison), you can find a glossary of BrE terminology at the Department for Education and of AmE terminology at the UCLA/Wallis Foundation website. A term from the latter that GN had mentioned was emotional disturbance (ED), whereas the BrE equivalent seems to be EBD: emotional and behavioural difficulties. We tend not to get these terms at the university level, and instead talk about such problems (including depression and schizophrenia) as mental health problems or mental illness.


*Yes, there are professors at BrE institutions too, but most British universities the term only applies to the equivalent of AmE full professor, and I wasn't one of those. Hence, the '(AmE)' marking. Someday I'll do an entry on that(And I now have.)
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shameful self-promotion

It's just too embarrassing to ask, so I'll just put this here:


What you do with that is your business.

It's been a problematic week (Britishoid understatement), so haven't had a chance to post, but did see an old (17 April 1996) Steve Bell If... cartoon in the Guardian that made me think of (AmE) you-all. I can't reproduce it here (can't find it on the web, and fear that people who break copyright rules might not get blog awards), but the dialogue goes like this:
Her Majesty the Queen out on a walk with her corgi "Geraint" [emphasis as in original]

HM: Tell me Geraint Do you think I'm middle clawss? I pay
tex
, I live in inner London, I wear sensible claythes. My children aren't very bright and my husband's unemployed!

G: You'll always be my little bit of rruff maaajesty!

Some quick notes on the sounds here, courtesy of Upton and Widdowson's Atlas of English Dialects:
  • The pronunciation of a before [s], [f] or [θ] as 'aw' is a distinctly Southern pronunciation. This was due to a couple of fashionable sound changes in the South. In the 17th century, people here started lengthening this vowel, and in the 18th it moved further back in the mouth (hence the 'aw' quality). This later became part of 'Received Pronunciation' (RP).
  • Pronouncing tax as tex: This is an exaggeration of the conservative form of Received Pronunciation, which U&W describe as 'a with a flavour of e'. They note that 'to many Northerners southern [ae] sounds like [ɛ], and it is not hard to see how this pronunciation at times slips over in to the full [ɛ] to which it is so close.'
  • U&W don't cover claythes (i.e. variant pronunciations of o in the middles of words), and the RP pronunciation of this sound is typically [əʊ], which gives it a bit of a Frenchish sound. I've found a few uses of claythes on the web. One is from a man in Teesside wondering about a woman in a play (Does she get her claythes off?). But other evidence is in favo(u)r of this being a northern thing as well, as there are historical spellings of clothes with a or ai in the OED, such as clathes and clais, which are marked as Northern and Scottish, respectively. (Well, she does spend a lot of time at Balmoral...). Any other thoughts on why the Queen is depicted as saying claythes?
cheating postscript: I was sitting in the theat{re/er} tonight, watching a show, and suddenly reali{s/z}ed that I forgot to end this post in the manner I'd intended--which was to point out the study that's shown how the Queen's English has become decidedly more "middle clawss" over the years. So now I have.
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me (n)either / nor (do) I

Robert wrote last week to say:
Watching a film called The Holiday yesterday evening, I was astonished to hear Jude Law, playing a British character, say, "Me, either" in reply to something Cameron Diaz had said. To my [...] Southern British ears that sounds very American. I would say "Neither/nor do I" or rather less likely "Me, neither." Any thoughts?
My first thought is: the screenwriter is American, right? Right--although the title of the film, shows some Anglophilia. You'd have thought that Jude Law would have pointed the unnaturalness (for an Englishman) of the phrase to the director/screenwriter, but perhaps he's lost his sense of dialect.

Yes, me either is American, and there are plenty of pedants who will tell you it's wrong. Pedant's Parsnips (you can tell this is a British site--most Americans couldn't pick a parsnip out of a (AmE) line-up/(BrE) identification parade) says that me either is:
A doubly illiterate response to sentiments such as "I don't like this" where presumably it is short for "me don't like this either." Use Nor I. Or, if you prefer verbosity, Neither do I.
Americans are less vociferous on the topic, but there are plenty out there who will claim that it "should" be me neither or, preferably, neither do I or nor I.

Myself, I can't be too bothered about any of this. We can see two patterns here of agreement responses to positive and negative sentences. There's the "me-something" pattern and the "something do I" pattern.

The "me-something" pattern goes like this:
I like parsnips.
Me too.
I don't like Brussels sprouts. (AmE: often brussels sprouts)
Me neither.
BrE allows me too, as evidenced both by the title of a CBeebies television (BrE) programme/(AmE) show and by Better Half's predictable response when I say I want ice cream. But BrE doesn't like me (n)either. (AmE) Go figure.

The "something-do-I" pattern goes like this:
I like parsnips.
So do I.
I don't like {B/b}russels sprouts.
Neither do I. / Nor (do) I.

The "something-do I" pattern sounds more formal to my AmE ears, but "formal" isn't always "better".

As for pronunciation, me (n)either is pronounced with an 'ee' (IPA: /i/) sound at the start of the (n)either. Even if one uses the diphthong that sounds like eye (IPA: /aj/) at the beginning of (n)either in other phrasal contexts, in this phrase it must have the 'ee' (/i/). Both /i/ and /aj/ pronunciations of either/neither are acceptable in both AmE and BrE, although individual tastes may vary. (Myself, I say both/either. I've tried to discern a pattern in myself, but haven't come up with anything beyond the me (n)either regularity.) For more on the history of the pronunciation, see this 1999 post on Maven's Word of the Day.
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hairy subjects, part 2: hair accessories

Today's post was going to be a serious examination of sensitive subjects that affect many lives. But the Blogger ate my homework. So let's talk about hair some more! (So what if this means just giving a straight catalog(ue) of lexical differences (ho-hum)? It's what the blogger gods want, apparently.)

As we saw recently, some names for hairstyles (and parts thereof) differ in BrE and AmE. And things that one might put in or on one's hair differ as well.

First on our list is the thing to the left. The AmE word for it is barrette, whereas in BrE it is typically called a hair-slide. This particular one is from a wood-working studio in Canada, if you're interested.

Littler hair-holders made out of a folded piece of wire are called bobby pins in AmE--apparently because they were first used in 'bobbed' hairdos, and kirby-grips in BrE--based on the tradename Kirbigrip.

In AmE, the item worn by Alice at the right is typically called a head band. But in BrE, it's an Alice band, after Alice's headgear in John Tenniel's illustrations of Through the Looking Glass. Now, of course, head band could refer to a lot of other kinds of things as well, such as the type of thing a hippie or a martial-artist might wear across the forehead. The BrE term is much more specific, which is probably why one can find it from time to time in AmE as well.


A BrE hair band, on the other hand, is an elastic band (possibly decorated) for making a ponytail or pigtails/bunches. This little item (like rubber bands more generally) is a dialectal jamboree (orig. and predominantly AmE) in the US. I call this an elastic (and consider hair band to be another word for head band/Alice band). Elastic as a word for pony-tail holders is symboli{s/z}ed by the red bits on the map below from linguist Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey:

The purple in this map is the less-than-helpful term hair thing, leading me to wonder if the 'purple people' have short hair or particularly limited vocabularies. (Is hair thing really a lexicali{s/z}ed term with this specific a meaning? Americans, what do you think?) The royal blue is rubber band, and the gold is hair tie. See here for all the details and more maps.

A scrunchie, however, is a scrunchie--and an abomination--in any dialect.
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form and pro forma

When I lived in South Africa, I often claimed that the country's major industry was bureaucracy. As a foreigner, I had reason to feel this, since until I was granted permanent residence (not very permanent, it turned out), I had to stand for a few hours on a (BrE) queue/(AmE) line every three to six months in order to have my work permit renewed. There was one year in which I had three chest x-rays--first they lost one, and then they made me incorrect identity documents...twice. The first time, my ID book said I was born in South Africa, the second time it said I was born in Albania (see evidence right--first name covered with (BrE) toilet roll/(AmE) toilet paper in order to maintain a sense of mystery). It also said I was a South African citizen, which was never true. By the time all the corrections were processed, the second x-ray had 'expired', so I had to prove again that I was tuberculosis-free. So, if I ever come down with any cancers of the upper torso, we'll know which government to blame.

But it turns out that South Africans are mere amateurs at bureaucracy compared to Higher Education in England. My life is paperwork. Paperwork if I want to give students an extra week to write their essays. Evaluations to write up about my students' evaluations of my courses. Then evaluations of the external examiner's evaluations of my evaluation of my students. (Most American universities don't even have external examiners.) Evaluations of all the courses in the department, then evaluations of all of the degrees on which those courses are offered. My reading lists have to be written up in at least three different formats (one for the library, one for the bookshop, one for the students) before each course. And, just like in South Africa, there's always someone in some office to tell you that you've misinterpreted a question or you were supposed to fill out a CQ3 instead of a QC3, and therefore your proposal/evaluation/application won't be considered again until the next committee meeting.

But the most difficult part is that I have a big block against talking about this paperwork, because I just can't get my brain around the local terminology. My colleagues use the term pro forma for what I would call a form. This is a Latin prepositional phrase that means 'on account of form'. Using it as an adverb seems natural (It was done pro forma), as does using it as an adjective (a pro forma document). My colleagues use it as a noun, though, which I've never experienced outside the UK. The noun sense ('an official form for completion' [OED]) is not found in American dictionaries (well, at least not Merriam-Webster's or American Heritage), but is in Oxford's. It's spelt a variety of ways:

1945 Ann. Trop. Med. & Parasitol. XXXIX. 226 A senior member of the nursing staff..checked that the patient took the tablet and recorded each dose given and taken on a pro-forma. [OED]

1978 Jrnl. R. Soc. Med. LXXI. 413 Details of the illness were recorded on a proforma. [OED]

Use of a pro forma for head injuries in the accident and emergency department [Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, 1994]
The examples above make clear that use of this term is common in medical jargon, but I'm here to tell you that the term is alive and well in English Higher Education as well.

Now, form in this meaning is perfectly sayable in British English, so I'm not really sure what has motivated the use of pro forma as a noun. But we can note that form has another sense in BrE, relating to a division of students in a school, discussed back here.
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hairy subjects, part 1: hairdos

Michelle, inspired by recent posts by Neil Gaiman (and here), wrote to ask about (AmE) bangs and (BrE) fringe, the words for hair cut shorter on the forehead. While they mostly mean the same thing, they don't seem to absolutely match. Bangs sit on your forehead, but some fringes don't--as I've heard fringe used to refer to bits of hair that are shorter than the rest but still too long to sit on the forehead, so they flip off to the side. I, myself, would not call such things bangs. I once slipped at my old South African hairdresser's (the one where they gave the most incredible head massages. Sometimes I can't believe I moved away from that), and asked for my bangs to be trimmed, which the hairdresser thought was hilarious. After that, she always asked "should I trim your bangers?" (which could mean, among other things, 'should I trim your sausages?' Maybe that's why I moved away). According to the Online Etymological Dictionary: "Bangs of hair first recorded 1878, Amer.Eng., though 1870 of horses (bang-tail), perhaps from notion of abruptness (cf. bang off "immediately, without delay")." Someone on Gaiman's site felt it was unseemly that the word bangs thus seemed to implicitly compare her face to a horse's bottom.

Michelle's query leads us on to other words for hair(-)styles. I'll save the matter of hair accessories for another post.

If hair is divided into three locks then woven together to make a 'rope', the result is called a plait in BrE and a braid in AmE--though both words are known in both countries. BrE plait is pronounced to rhyme with flat, whereas in AmE most speakers pronounce it like plate.

If the hair is tied into a bunch with an elastic band (I'll save discussion of that term for later, but if you can't wait to see how complicated it is, check out this map), then it could be in a pigtail or a ponytail, but in BrE you might also say that someone had her hair in bunches, particularly if there are two such bunches on either side of the head. (Clicking here should take you to the images available via Google.)

I'm shying away from putting pictures here, since the ones I find on the web are generally photos of real people who haven't given their permission for me to plaster their heads on my blog. So, if you want to see a lot of photos of our next haircut, go here, to a site without the same ethical qualms, it seems. (Be sure to page down--the first photo doesn't count.) And what is our next haircut, you ask? It's that emblem of British 1970s (and still!) rebellion the (BrE) Mohican, otherwise known as the (AmE) Mohawk. Why two names? It's all rather confusing actually, as Mohican is a term of questionable lineage and accuracy and the Mohawks are a completely different people; the translation blog Transubstantiation discussed this a bit in August. If you want to be really esoteric (or some would say 'p.c.'--but you know I hate that term--and others would say 'annoying'), you could call the haircut a Kanyin'kehaka, which is apparently what Mohawk people call themselves. Mohawk hairstyles were only worn by Mohawk men going to war. Or people hanging around doorways in Tottenham Court Road. As this story from the travel pages of a Hawaiian newspaper states (with subdued amazement), "Punks with spiked hair can still be seen around [London] town."

Once a rebel, always a tourist attraction?
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never mind

I must admit, my feelings are a tiny bit hurt. The Guardian Guide's Internet page has published a list of recommended language blogs. It includes some of my favo(u)rites--Language Log and the blog of an American in Sweden--but, well, Americans in England weren't on their wanted list, apparently. Or at least I wasn't. The properly British thing to say in response to that is:

Never mind.

(As pop culture informs us, this is spelt with a space in BrE--as in the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, but sometimes without one in AmE, as in Nirvana's Nevermind. [PS: see comments for further discussion of this point!])

Ideally, I should say never mind with a sing-song quality. It's not that it's an exclusively British saying, it's just that it's used a lot more here--wherever I would say:

Oh well.

...which I say altogether too much.

I had a hard time getting used to this kind of 'Well what can you do? We might as well change the topic of conversation' never mind . Early in my days here I was telling an Englishman about something that I found upsetting (involving a close family member and emergency surgery), and his response was NEver MIND. Now this may have been a defen{c/s}e mechanism against a foreigner who was breaking British privacy mores, but I still found it a very glib response (how could I not mind?!). But a few years later, I reali{s/z}e it's more a statement of resignation (stiff upper lip and all that) than of lack of sympathy.

I had a similar bristly kind of reaction to the use of It's a pleasure as a response to Thank you--a response that is far more common in BrE (and South African E) than in AmE. After shame-facedly asking to borrow money until payday from my boss in South Africa, he handed over some number of rand and said It's a pleasure at which point I (AmE) wigged out and exclaimed It is NOT a pleasure! It's an inconvenience to you! Ah, I know how to show gratitude, don't I? That's probably why I'm not allowed to have nice things like a mention in the Guardian. It's karma.
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the names of the games, part 2: games children play

It was probably Better Half's and my visit to the Strong National Museum of Play that inspired me to think and write about board games a couple posts ago. Then I promised a follow-up on children's games, but come to think of it, a lot of the games I've blogged about so far are games I played as a child (Parcheesi/Ludo, Clue/Cluedo, checkers/draughts, slapjack/snap). So, while not repeating those, here are some more.

It's not surprising that a lot of playground games (like a lot of nursery rhymes--there's fodder for another post) are different (in name and rules) in the two countries, since they also vary a lot from playground to playground within a country. Those kinds of games are passed on by oral tradition, and traditions get muddled and/or developed from time to time, so that we're left with games with just vague family resemblances. One of these was raised by the mysterious Dearieme on the previous games post: (BrE) British bulldog(s). When I looked up the game on some website, I didn't recogni{s/z}e the rules as those of (AmE) Red Rover, but according to the Canadian Dialect Topography site (skip down to item 73), the two terms are used synonymously in Canada. The games are no doubt related, but the description of British Bulldog on Wikipedia sounds little like the game that we called Red Rover on my old playground. There, there was no breaking through a chain of people or getting tagged, as described on various website descriptions of Red Rover. No, it was a game of social exclusion at my school (that and kickball were the only kinds of games we played)--the person who was 'it' would say "Red Rover, Red Rover let X come over" where X would be a colo(u)r (of clothing) or another physical/clothing attribute (e.g. "let t-shirts come over"). The 'it' would do this until some poor soul they didn't like was the only person left on the other side and they then knew where they stood on the social hierarchy. But apparently that's not how the game was meant to be played. Better Half says "That's not a game. That's bullying with a rhyme!" Perhaps it's explained to him some of my less appealing adult behavio(u)rs. ("Explained, but not forgiven," crowed BH.)

Kickball, while we're at it, does not mean (BrE) football/(AmE) soccer, as it can (BrE can do) in BrE, where, according to the OED, it's spelt kick-ball and started out as a Scotticism. In the US, kickball is much the same as baseball, except that an inflated ball (about the size of a soccer/foot-ball) is rolled on the ground and kicked instead of a smaller ball being thrown and hit with a bat. It was a staple in my (AmE) gym class (=PE [physical education]) and on our playground. (Since I went to a poor (AmE) Catholic school/(BrE) convent (school), our playground was a church parking lot. So none of this new-fangled climbing equipment and such that kids get these days. And I had to walk there, waist deep in snow. Past man-eating earthworms. Yeah, you kids don't know how good you've got it. I tell you, in my day...)

Let's get back to board games, though, as that's where I meant to be. The most shocking discovery at the Strong Museum was that Better Half had never seen, played nor even heard of Candy Land, a game that only three-year-olds could love. It's one of those games where one has to advance around the board to a final goal. To make it easy for tiny tots, the spaces on the board are different colo(u)rs, and on each turn one takes a card with a block or two of a colo(u)r or a picture of a landmark on the board (like the (AmE) Candy Cane Forest). That way, the child can tell where they need to get to without having to count their way there. Parents and (orig. AmE) babysitters/child-care workers (BrE child-minders) soon learn to stack the deck so that the child will pick the Lollypop Woods card early and the game will soon be finished. I pretended that I felt sorry for BH that he'd missed out on this game, but really I was seething with jealousy.

The advancing-up-the-board game that one does find in Britain is Snakes and Ladders (picture left from here), which was marketed in the US as Chutes and Ladders by Milton Bradley (picture right from here)--the same evil geniuses who brought us Candy Land. As the names suggest, in the more traditional British version the board has ladders that one can advance up and snakes that one must slide down, to a less advantageous position. But who in real life goes down snakes? The literal-minded Americans changed them to chutes, and the boards there reflect this.

Another game for playing with very young children is the memory game (AmE)Concentration/(BrE) Memory, which proves that the Americans don't have the patent on literal-mindedness. That's the one where you have a set of cards in which each card has a matching mate. A player turns one over and then gets one chance to turn over the mate. If the two cards match, the player keeps them and has another go. If they don't match, the cards are turned back over and the next player has a try.

One of the toys at the museum that BH was able to wax nostalgic about was the Erector Set--except, of course, that he knows it by the name Meccano. (I've just discovered there's a Meccano web ring. There's a web ring for everything these days.) But as a child in England in the 70s he didn't have Slinky or Mr Potato Head or Silly Putty. And he certainly didn't have Lincoln Logs. Disraeli Log just doesn't have the same ring.

Postscript! I forgot to discuss a children's amusement that I'd promised to M.A. Peel. (Apologies, Mrs Peel.) Remember dot-to-dot puzzles? In AmE, one must connect the dots, while in BrE one joins the dots--and thus the puzzles are sometimes called connect-the-dots or join-the-dots, depending on where you are. The verb difference carries over into metaphorical use of the phrases--i.e. 'to find the connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information' (or something like that).
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scatological adjectives

If you don't like "naughty" words, please skip this post.

American visitors to the UK enjoy taking in the culture while they're here, and on Ben Zimmer's (of Language Log) most recent trip, he took in the controversies of this year's Celebrity Big Brother. For those of you who are in another country (for you can't avoid the news of it here), a woman who is a celebrity only for having lost a previous Big Brother got into trouble on CBB for alleged racist bullying of another celebrity. (I say 'alleged' because I haven't seen it myself, so shouldn't have an opinion on the matter.) She's quoted in the papers as having said I feel shit.

What she's done here is to use shit as an adjective. (Unless, of course, she was intending to say that she habitually handles f(a)eces. I really don't think she meant that.) Shit (or shite) and crap are found in the various places one finds adjectives in English--as in:
  1. I feel shit.
  2. ....remember how shit you feel now for future refernece [sic] and make sure you don't do it again! (University of the West of England student forum)
  3. I am having a shit day. (mildlydiverting.blogspot.com)

Now, this is not unheard of in AmE (as noted by Arnold Zwicky on the American Dialect Society list some time ago), but more typical AmE is to use shitty (or crappy) when one needs an adjective--or to use different grammatical constructions (as in 4b) in order to work around the nouniness of shit:
4. a. I feel shitty. b. I feel like shit.
5. remember how shitty you feel now
6. I'm having a shitty day
Which is not to say that people don't say shitty in BrE too. The OED records the attributive (adjectival) use of shit first in Hunter Davies' 1968 book The Beatles. Shitty is first recorded in a 1924 letter by Ernest Hemingway.

This is ignoring, of course, the use of shit as a term of appreciation (as in it's the shit or shit dope and all that). That's always shit, not shitty, but it's also not what I'm talking about.

On shit versus BrE shite (rhymes with bite), the OED says that "The form shite now chiefly occurs as an occasional jocular or quasi-euphemistic variant." But most southern English people will tell you that shite is a northern and Scottish variant. I don't know what the Northerners and Scots say about it.
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black (briefly)

I haven't got a lot of time tonight to talk about this, but I'm very interested in discussions I've seen regarding Barack Obama's racial identity--particularly because the meanings of social category names is a major (though at the moment suspended) research interest of mine. On the Obama issue see, for example, this article and this one, both from salon.com. The first one claims that Obama is not really black in American terms, since he is not decended from American slaves.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Black History Month (in October, as opposed to February in the US), at least in my English town, is focused on "the history of Asian, African and African Caribbean peoples." Plainly, the use of black varies, at least around the edges, in the two countries. As in AmE, the primary BrE sense of black is 'person of sub-Saharan ancestry',* but AmE's main second sense tends to be restrictive (i.e. 'descendants of American slaves'), while BrE allows more inclusive interpretations.

But that's all I can afford (time-wise) to say at the moment, so I'll leave it at that and will promise more on black after one of my students finishes the research for his BA dissertation (AmE thesis) on the meaning of black in the UK today.


*And no, I'm not counting among 'persons of sub-Saharan ancestry' the Afrikaners or other people whose ancestors (somewhere between Lucy and grandma) are European. And yes, I am aware that most 'black' people in America have some European ancestry (the one-drop rule, and all that). As I said, I need to be brief!
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the names of the games, part 1: board games

Better Half has found himself surrounded by out-laws (not quite in-laws) who like to get together and play games. My out-laws (BH's family) think this is hilarious, because of BH's reputation as a games-hater, which stems from several throwing-over-the-board-in-disgust incidents from when he was a child. When I met him, he was willing to play Connect Four with his godchildren, but only because he could still obliterate them. I count it as great progress that he now actually volunteers to play Yahtzee and Cribbage and will tolerate a few more games. (God, I've been good for him.) But games still remain a source of transatlantic miscommunication in the family since they, as we've seen already, frequently have different names in different places. The ones I'll cover in this series don't require a lot of discussion, hence my putting them all together like this.

Most of you will know that (BrE) draughts is (AmE) checkers. Or checkers is draughts -- I can't figure out whether I think the earlier term should go first or last in that equation, I can see the connotations going either way. You may also know that Americans spell draught as draft, reflecting the fact that the 'gh' is pronounced 'f', but while I have seen the board game sold as Checkers/Draughts in the US, I've never seen the BrE name of the game translated into AmE spelling. (I'm not going to get into the pronunciation of the vowel...suffice it to say that it too is different in different places.) Where do these names come from? It's a tricky question, since the OED, amazingly enough, includes neither draughts nor checkers. (No, what's amazing enough is my poor dictionary search skills in this instance--see the comments.) The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that draughts is related to dragon and goes back to about 1400. Checkers, alluding to the appearance of the board, arose in America in the 18th century. That "OED" (shall I call it OnEtyD?) also notes that "British prefers [the spelling] chequer, but the U.S. form is more authentic." Another case (cf. -ise) of British spelling being influenced by French. So, (AmE) Chinese checkers is known (though not very widely, it seems) in BrE as Chinese chequers. (Chinese draughts seems much less common, and seems mostly to be used by non-native speakers).

BrE Ludo (left, from Wikipedia), from the Latin for 'I play', is the game that Americans call Parcheesi (right, from Robby Findler's software construction course), though as you can see their boards are slightly different. It derives from an Indian game, and the AmE name is based on the Hindi name--which has been spelled in many ways in English, with pachisi sometimes regarded as 'most authenthic'. Parcheesi is the most familiar spelling in the US, as that's how the game was marketed by Selchow & Righter, 'the house that Parcheesi built'.


Once you know about Ludo, it makes more sense that the game that is called Clue in AmE is called Cluedo in BrE. Cluedo came first, as it was invented, A.E. Pratt of Birmingham, in the 1940s (though he had originally called it Murder). Since the pun wouldn't be appreciated in the US, it was marketed there as Clue. The game is the same, except for the names of some of the characters, weapons and rooms. There are a few linguistic differences in the game:

  • Miss Scarlett (UK) v Miss Scarlet (US)
  • Rev Green (UK) v Mr. Green (US)
  • Mrs(.) White has recently been replaced in US by Dr. Orchid
  • According to Wikipedia, the dagger is called the knife in some US editions (it was dagger in mine growing up, so I don't know...)
  • The lead pipe was originally called lead piping in BrE
As far as I know, the names of all the rooms are the same, but it's worth noting that conservatory is often pronounced differently in the two. You can hear the difference here. Boards even within countries seem to vary in whether they consider the conservatory to be a glass-enclosed room full of plants or a music room. The original board just had blank areas label(l)ed by room names, but more recent ones illustrate them. I've seen this one on both Clue and Cluedo boards:



The Hollywood film based on the game, incidentally, was called Clue internationally and used the American character names.

I've got other board games to cover under part 2—children's games. There may be a part 3 on card games, if I can find more to mention. Email me if you have any suggestions.

[This post was updated 23 March 2020 with the details of US/UK Clue(do) differences, replacing a no-longer-working link on the topic.]
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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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double

David, another American who does language research in the UK, has blogged about something I've been meaning to blog about. I'm trying not to hold it against him, because he seems like a nice (AmE) guy/(BrE) bloke, and you should read his entry. The issue is how people read out or recite strings of numbers, such as phone numbers or credit card numbers. Take the number 8853, for example. Americans typically say that as eight-eight-five-three, whereas a BrE speaker would be much more likely to say double eight-five-three.

David's entry talks about the cognitive dissonance that he experiences when he is writing down a number and has to translate from double 8 to two eights. I completely identify with that feeling--it feels like the information is coming backwards. They say two, you write 2, but when they say double you have to wait to hear what you need to write and then write it twice. And when someone spells a word and they say double-u, you're expected to write W, not UU.

All the same, it is an aspect of BrE (and other Es) that I've embraced (my phone extension at work is two sets of double numbers), but one that's also led me astray. When I lived in South Africa, I had a credit card number with three zeros in it. Reading it out to people, I'd say seven-nine-triple zero (or whatever it was), which usually led to some consternation. People were used to hearing double zero, but triple zero didn't sit right, and they'd ask me to repeat the number. I think I made single attempt at quadruple four for another number, but that didn't go over well at all.

So, I've stuck with the doubles but given up on the triples and quadruples. (Nowadays, I say double four, double four when faced with 4444.) Better Half claims that he'd definitely use triple and might even use quadruple--but that he is extra careful in reading out numbers on the telephone and says "four [pause] four [pause] four (that's three fours)". But now he's added "I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask about these things." So, what do you do?
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slingshot and catapult

It's time to start catching up on the trickle of queries that seems to have created a flood in my inbox. James in western Massachusetts writes:
My source is some eighty years out of date, but I've been reading a British author who used "catapult" for what (today) an American would call a "slingshot." Is this still the case, and does this make the machines of war seem more puny, or the child's toy more fearsome?
Catapult continues to be used in BrE for things like this toy to the right, which is advertised for sale on the English Heritage website. It's also used, as in AmE, for big machines used to shoot boulders over castle walls. Slingshot, originally AmE (goes back to 1849, at least), doesn't refer to the machines of war, just the toy thing and extended senses relating to motion. These days, slingshot is understood and used in the UK as well as catapult, but is often reserved in BrE for the kind of weapon that is otherwise called a sling.  The OED quotes an occurrence in The Economist in 1966, so it seems to be fairly recent British usage.

I also found a spoof "Edwardian" on-line magazine called The Slingshot [no longer available]--does the editor reali{s/z}e that even his title is an anachronism? In-joke or sloppiness? One can only guess.
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antsy

Today on a Catalan open-source dictionary discussion list, one of my immediate colleagues asked whether a particular word was American, and someone else on the list recommended my blog to him (which he then forwarded to me, knowingly). Does that mean I'm two degrees of separation from myself?

The word in question was antsy (not to be confused with Ansty, a village in Sussex whose (shared) sign on the A23 I consistently misread as Antsy Cowfold, thus self-inducing the giggles). I only discovered that antsy was American when the Association of British Scrabble Players moved to a combined British-American dictionary (soon to be replaced by another one). Antsy is an important word to Scrabblers because of its comparative form: antsier. Competitive Scrabble players tend to study "stems", typically 6-letter combinations that have a high probability of making a 7-letter word when combined with one more letter, and thus using all of the tiles on one's rack. Doing so results in a 50-point bonus score, and thus is called a bonus word in BrE and a bingo in AmE Scrabble circles. Antsier is a case of RETAIN+S, and RETAIN is one of the first stems a Scrabble geek learns. (I say geek [orig. AmE] in the proudest possible way.)

But what does antsy/antsier mean? To a Scrabble fiend it should not matter, but I'll tell you anyway. The first meaning is 'fidgety, restless', that is, acting like one has ants in one's pants (orig. AmE), and it's often assumed to have derived from that idiom, although there is some evidence to the contrary. Thus, the goal in my lectures is to keep the students from getting antsy. If I see them starting to shift around in their chairs, I tell them something outrageously untrue to keep them interested. Oh wait, sorry, that's what I do when I can sense your attention starting to wander away from this blog. Maybe I should have done it back in the Scrabble paragraph.

By extension, antsy can also mean 'nervous, apprehensive'. So, I might start getting antsy before my first lecture of term. Or maybe my students will. I was very relieved when, about two years ago, I finally stopped having teaching anxiety dreams before every single term. I should probably (AmE) knock on/(BrE) touch wood now that I've said that. Maybe they stopped because parts of the dreams started coming true--such as students take phone calls during class.

By the way: HBBH! (LynneE for: Happy Birthday, Better Half! A few minutes belatedly!)
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could (not) care less, adverbs

A flock of relatives came from Indiana for Dad's birthday party and were underwhelmed by the hotel services in Hometown. At various times, at least three relatives told the sad story of the check-in and said that the staff "could care less if they got any business." This set off the prescriptivist alarm bells in my head, and it took great acts of willpower to not play teacher and correct them with "could NOT care less." Just hours later, regular reader/contributor David in Dublin sent me a link to John Cleese's podcasts, and in particular podcast 18, in which he lectures Americans about the correct form of this phrase. It's an entertaining little rant.

Let's keep this straight: there are BrE speakers who erroneously say could care less as well. But AmE speakers do it a LOT more often.

Besides could care less, the use of adjective forms in adverbial slots is, from time to time, brought to me (by BrE speakers) as a certain sign of AmE inferiority and of the degradation of BrE through the influence of AmE. Here are some examples, in case you don't know your adverb from your elbow:
He did it realADJ well. VERSUS He did it reallyADV well.

He did it real
ADJ goodADJ. VERSUS He did it reallyADV wellADV.

She did that so cuteADJ. VERSUS She did that so cutelyADV.

When BrE speakers chide me about "ignorant" aspects of AmE, I have a ready arsenal of BrE illogicalities, "errors" and losses to throw back at them--some of which have been or will be discussed here. And the adjective-as-adverb issue is easier to dismiss as "not our fault", since using adjectives as adverbs is an established feature of several BrE dialects. Furthermore, both adjective-as-adverb and could care less are considered to be "non-standard" in AmE--we do have some standards, I say. But on the way home from an American Christmas party, I remarked to Better Half "I don't think I've ever gone for so long without hearing an adverb," to which non-linguist BH replied, "I wouldn't have been able to say it that way, but I know what you mean!" (The last adverbless example above is an actual example from the evening.) One does hear adjective-as-adverb in BrE--and not just in noticeably dialectal speech. But it's certainly not heard in BrE at the rate one hears it in AmE speech these days.

Tomorrow we're back to Blighty, so this ends my (BrE) holiday-/(AmE) vacation-time blog-o-rama. Next week we'll be back to term-time posting frequency.
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Words of the Year 2006

Ta-da! Here are the results of the first annual SbaCL Words of the Year Awards, celebrating the words that demonstrated a lessening of the separation of our common language in 2006. I thank readers of this blog for their nominations. My selections from among those nominations have been based upon the timeliness of the nomination (in other words, if the word enjoyed a particular surge in popularity this year) and the success of the word in the relevant dialect--i.e., whether people are actually using the word.

The first category is Most Useful Import from American English to British English. This is a difficult category because of the regularity with which words travel from AmE to BrE these days. Nominations included Size 00, through when used to describe an inclusive range (e.g. the numbers 1 through 5), and cookie. Only the first of these meets the timeliness criterion, but I think it must be disqualified on two counts. First, its lack of nativi{s/z}ation in BrE is evident from the fact that no one seems to be able to agree how to pronounce it. Second, it remains a name for an American thing. American size 00 is equivalent to British size 2. The term size 00 was in the news a lot, but it is regularly noted as an American phenomenon.

So, the winner of best AmE import to BrE is...


muffin topthe roll of fat that bulges over the waistband of (BrE) trousers/(AmE) pants that are too tight and too low
Muffin top is found almost as often in the UK news as size 00 this year, but when it is used, it's usually to refer to British muffin tops--thus clearly filling a gap in the BrE lexicon. Here we must take issue with Hadley Freeman at the Guardian who incorrectly (a) confuses a muffin top with a double hip (a phenomenon that is not dependent on tight jeans) and (b) claims that muffin top is a British coining. As I've pointed out here before, the term depends on an understanding of American muffins that few BrE speakers have--since it's rare to see an "American-style muffin" in the UK that has an actual muffin top, as illustrated at the right here. And it's been popular in AmE slang for several years now, while it's still used somewhat tentatively in BrE. The majority of my 19-year-old students did not know the term at the start of the Autumn (AmE prefers Fall) term this year, but few Americans who have recently survived high school would have missed the term.

On to our next category: Most Useful Import from British English to American English. Here there is a clear winner, with no other nominations meeting the timeliness criterion. And the WotY goes to:

wanker (and its derivatives)
a detestable person, a loser, a self-aggrandi{s/z}ing person
The meaning of wanker is difficult to make precise, but it derives from the BrE verb to wank, i.e. to masturbate. Wanker has been sneaking into American popular culture under the radar for some years (e.g. Peggy Bundy's maiden name on television's Married with Children [1987] was Wanker, which was certainly meant as a joke that could make it past the censors' noses--though it would have more trouble doing so on British television). But it came into its own in AmE this year, especially, it seems, in political blogging, where many variants on the term are found, including: wankiest (in American Prospect), wankerism (quoted on Firedoglake), wank-fest (in a letter to Salon.com), wankery (on Brendan Calling from the Underground). Though some of these don't include the -er suffix, I'm treating this as backformation from wanker rather than derivation from wank because of my hunch that wanker was the vanguard word in the move from BrE to AmE. In other words, the British had the word wank and made wanker out of it, wanker travel(l)ed to America, then lost its -er. Notice that all of the above words are derogatory, but there is at least one positive member of the wank(er) family: wankalicious. According to the Urban Dictionary (never the most reliable source), this describes something "so good it compares with masturbation". My understanding of the term, however, is that it's something so good that it inspires masturbation. This one definitely derives from wank without involving wanker.

Finally, our last category of the evening, Best Word Coined by a Reader of this Blog. And the WotY goes to:
Googleschaden
"the way in which pundits' past pontifications can now come back to haunt them"

Regular reader/commenter Paul Danon created the word, after Andrew Sullivan created the definition (and an ill-fitting word) on his blog, which was forwarded to this blog by M.A.Peel during the nomination stage. Sullivan then noted Paul's word on his blog, leading more than 9500 of his readers to this blog (and the entry in which Paul coined the term) in two days. While I'm sure many of you have created new words this year, and we even witnessed monetary exchange for a new word on this blog, Googleschaden was definitely the one that got the most attention this year. Tip for next year's WotY contest: make sure your word has a good PR machine behind it.

Thanks again to everyone who's played a role in making the first SbaCL WotY happen!
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roast

As mentioned previously, my dad has an important birthday today, for which we had a big party on the 30th. We needed a theme for this party that would suit my dad and that his friends and family would enjoy, so I suggested that we roast him. Better Half protested that he couldn't possibly take part, due to his vegetarianism, which is how I reali{s/z}ed that the roast tradition is an American thing. Since I'm beginning this entry on the morning after the night before, I'll let Wikipedia do the explanation for me:
A roast, in North American English, is an event in which an individual is subject to publicly bearing insults, praise, outlandish true and untrue stories, and heartwarming tributes. It is seen as a great honor to be roasted, as the individual is surrounded by friends, fans, and well-wishers, who can receive some of the same treatment as well during the course of the evening. The party and presentation itself are both referred to as a roast. The host of the event is called the roastmaster. [...] In short, it is both the opposite and the same as a "toast".
The Friars Club, a (AmE) fraternal organization for comedians, is known for its roasts, but people of my generation are likely to know about them because of Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts on television in the 1970s. Because I remembered my dad enjoying those when I was a child, a roast for Dad seemed like a great idea--and it was. I must say, my family and their friends are some pretty hilarious folk. But the break-out star roaster was our own Better Half, who discovered that my dad shares his birthday with great Americans Paul Revere and Betsy Ross. So BH riffed (orig. AmE) on the theme of "what if it had been our birthday boy who had been called on to warn that the British were coming or to sew the first American flag?" It was abso-effing-lutely riotous.

The roastee sits on the stage while he is being roasted, and we had a huge throne for Dad to sit in (right). At the end of the roasting, there is some toasting of the roastee, after which the roastee has the opportunity for a rebuttal--which is done with the same type of humo(u)r as the roasting. You might be able to see in the photo that dad has paper and pen at the ready to make notes of jokes he'll want to make at the roasters' expense.

Also in this picture you get a view of BH's shoulder. I've got too much of a headache for any serious cropping action today.

So, Happy New Year to you, and

Happy 70th Birthday, Dad!
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a slosh

I was thrilled last week to be contacted by Jan Freeman, who writes a weekly language column, The Word, for the Boston Globe. One of her readers had written in to ask how much port might be in a 'cheddar with a slosh of port', as advertised on an English website. We had a nice correspondence on the matter and I and this blog get a mention in the 24 December column in which she answers that reader query (see here, but you might have to register your details with the Globe first). One or two Globe readers have made their way here through that column, so (BrE) cheers (thanks) to Jan for bringing you here.

While slosh can be found in AmE recipes, it's found more often in BrE ones. (In some of the American recipes, it looks suspiciously like the recipes may have been "translated" from a BrE source.) American dictionaries don't cover the liquid measure noun sense of slosh. Within BrE, it's hard to pin down exactly how much a slosh is. OED only says it is "A quantity of some liquid." After a recipe on epicurious.com that calls for 2 tablespoons of whisk(e)y, a Scottish cook writes in to say that the recipe is better with "a good slosh of whisky much more than stated." So, a slosh in this context is a good deal more than 2 Tbsp. Another recipe site calls for one to soak more than a kilo of dried fruit in "a generous slosh of rum or brandy." With that much fruit, that slosh is likely to be cups of liquid. (Side note: British recipes generally don't use cup measures, but instead use grams, lit{re/er}s and portions thereof. An American cup = about 240 ml.)

In general, it seems that a slosh is a "generous" amount, and what one considers to be a generous amount will vary from recipe to recipe, liquid to liquid and person to person. While it is used for measuring (AmE-preferred) liquor/(BrE-preferred) spirits in recipes (and to my mind sounds best that way), it's also used for milk, juice and water. But compare: 36 google hits for recipe + "slosh of milk", 21 for recipe + "slosh of water", and 38 for recipe + "slosh of brandy". More recipes use milk or water than brandy, one should think, but brandy is more likely to come in sloshes. I think this is because slosh likes to go with liquor, rather than that you're more likely to use a small quantity of brandy in a recipe than a small quantity of water. That's just a (non-native) hunch, based on the fact that there's often a reason to use a sloshy quantity of water in cooking. But when it comes to spirits in one's baking, there's a need for imprecision, which slosh helps with--one person's "generous amount" is another person's homeopathy and yet another person's poison. While one can find translations of other "casual" measurements like dash, splash, pinch and smidgen into more precise measures, I've yet to find a precise equivalent of slosh.

On slosh versus splash: Both are onomatopoetic, but note that the 'o' sound seems to indicate a larger amount than the 'a' in splash. This is a well-discussed element of sound symbolism. Here's a (rather technical) quote on this from a paper (NB: link is to a .pdf file) by John Ohala:
Based on data of this sort, it has been claimed that the following sound types are predominant in the expression of "small": high front vowels like [i I y e] [...], and "large": low back vowels like [ɒ ʌ ɔ o] [...]. There is support for this pattern from experimental (Sapir 1929; Fischer-Jørgensen 1968) and statistical studies (Chastaing 1958, Thorndike 1945, Ultan 1978). The phonetic generalization that can be made is that the expression of size utilizes speech sounds whose characteristic acoustic frequencies vary inversely with size of the thing designated.
The /ae/ in splash being a more fronted, higher frequency vowel, it "sounds smaller" than the back, lower frequency /ɒ/ in slosh. Notice also that when you say slosh your mouth has a bigger "hollow" in which the liquid could slosh around in. The mouth seems less open (from an ingestion point-of-view) in splash.
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Abbr.

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