badminton

Tim showed up in my inbox recently to ask:
As a Briton in the US I am frequently flabbergasted to discover the deep linguistic differences between us.

The most recent case of this arose with the pronunciation of the word "badminton." In the UK, we say the word as it is spelled. However, to my surprise my seemingly uncontroversial pronunciation elicited scoffs and giggles from my American friends. They apparently pronounce the word "bad-mitten," leaving the poor old N out entirely... Have you noticed this?
Indeed. Americans often ignore or minimi{s/z}e the first n in the spelling. There does seem to be some variation within the US, though. Most sources I've found list both the n-ful and the n-less pronunciations for AmE. (Except for the OED, which seems to think that we favo(u)r the [n] and leave out the [t]. I've never heard that pronunciation.)

I grew up without the [n], but now say it. However, when I use the [n] I don't really enunciate the /t/--so it's more like badmin?n--where the ? is a pause in sound-flow. (I'd say it's a glottal stop, but it seems to me that I'm creating the stop at the soft palate--closing off the sound at the entrance to the nasal passage. Is there a name for this, phoneticians?) I'd not be at all surprised to learn that Americans misspell this word (e.g. as badmitten) far more often than the British do, but it's hard to search for misspellings on the web, as one gets a lot of hits for a band named Bad Mitten (an allusion to the AmE pronunciation of the game name, no doubt) and many sites about badminton seem to have included badmitten in their code in order to funnel bad spellers their way. That itself is evidence that people are aware of misspellings of the word, but not enough to say that it's mostly Americans misspelling it.

You can get upset on behalf of the first /n/, if you like, but you might also want to spare thoughts for the sounds from spelling that go missing in BrE too, like the /o/ in some BrE pronunciations of inventory, the /r/ in the Received Pronunciation form of farm or half the letters in Cholmondeley.

Why do many Americans not pronounce the /n/? I have no idea. Sometimes letters that are spelled but not pronounced in words are re-introduced because increased literacy has left us expecting to pronounce them. (See this Wikipedia bit on spelling pronunciation, if you like.) But this doesn't seem to be the case for badminton, which was named after a castle stately home in England and has always had the 'n' in the place name too.

An old discussion on the Linguist List notes that badminton is among a small number of English words that are exceptions to the generali{s/z}ation that 'closed penults in English attract stress'. Translation: that second-to-last syllables that end in a consonant are stressed. That generali{s/z}ation would predict that BADminton would be pronounced badMINton instead. Could it be that AmE has reacted to badminton's exceptionality by dropping the sound that closes the penultimate syllable, i.e. the first /n/? Once that happens (if my reasoning is correct) badminton acts more like a typical English word in its stress pattern. I'm sure my phonologist friends/readers will tell us if I'm completely (orig. AmE) off the wall on that one.
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milk( )shakes

Like many in the UK these days, we do our weekly shop(ping: AmE) on-line and have our groceries delivered to us by a nice person in a van (that would be called a truck in the US) that's named after a fruit or vegetable.* It started out really well. The first order we got had a free, big Galaxy bar (which in the US would be a Dove bar) as a tie-in promotion for the Sex in the City (usual BrE) film/(usual AmE) movie. Score!

Our grocery supplier gives us a free copy of the Times with every delivery, so I suppose I shouldn't complain about the quality of other freebies since the Galaxy incident, but this week we got this stuff (photo swiped from Wikipedia):


On the back, it promises "the healthier milkshake that's packed full of flavour". But this is milkshake (or milk shake as most dictionaries would have it) in the BrE sense to mean what most AmE speakers would simply call chocolate milk. I'll give you here the OED definition of milk shake:
milk shake n. orig. U.S. a cold drink made of milk, a sweet flavouring, and typically ice cream, mixed together as by shaking or whisking until smooth and frothy.
Typically ice cream? No, definitely ice cream!** And not the piddly amount of ice cream that the shake shops in Brighton use. A LOT OF ICE CREAM. And some malt powder (or syrup), please! (Gourmet Burger Kitchen does ok, but lime is a rather odd flavo(u)r for a shake from an American perspective. But they're from New Zealand. Who knows what they do there?)

Some Americans will be quick to point out that they happily use milk shake to refer to milk mixed with some sweet flavo(u)ring and no ice cream. But they're from in/near Boston, where they use the term frappe (rhymes with cap) for proper (ice-creamful) milk shakes. So, they have an excuse. But the British have no such excuse for advertising milk shakes on café menus and then stirring a bit of Nesquik*** into a glass of (BrE) semi-skimmed and charging a (orig. AmE in this sense) premium for it.

I'm just grumpy, of course, because I'm on a diet and instead of having mostly-ice-cream malted milkshakes, I'm having water--with a slice of orange in it when I'm really treating myself. The upside, though, is that I did taste the low-fat Yazoo drink that I was sent, and I don't feel that I'm missing much. In fact, I'm glad to have an excuse to pour it down the drain, even though the perpetual student in me thinks: "FREE CALORIES MUST BE CONSUMED."

* I can't believe this hasn't caught on more in the US. No, not naming vehicles after produce--having your groceries delivered. It's wonderful. I suppose that in the land of cars, it's not as much of a service.

** Note that certain fast food establishments sell shakes. Not milk shakes, because they can't legally advertise them as containing milk. Those may not have ice cream in them, but they at least try to mimic a milk shake with ice cream.

*** Apparently, it's now called Nesquik in the US as well as the UK, but when I was a kid in the US, it was called Nestlé Quik.

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goatee (beard)

My brothers and I have discussed making a 'Mom bingo' game, in which you get to mark a square in your bingo card if it matches something that our mother regularly says or does--mostly says. Things like to each his own, said the old woman as she kissed the cow and we're off on an adventure! and paint the barn white if you want it to look bigger (the reason you will never, ever see me in white [BrE] trousers/[AmE] pants). Another that I would add to the bingo card is never trust a man with a goatee. Which, of course, is why I married one.

I am reminded of this because a dip down to the bottom of my virtual mailbag brings this query from Joan:
As a US-ian, I've always heard it used as "goatee" pronounced (sorry for the non-technical notation) [go-TEE]. My department manager is a UK-ian, and he uses the phrase "goatee beard" rather than just the word "goatee," and pronounces the first word [GOAT-ee] as if it were spelled "goatey" or "goatie." Is this a real US/UK difference?
The answer to Joan's question, like most of my answers to most readers' questions, is "Yes, but..." In this case, yes, the difference is dialectal, but while a goatee beard-sayer will be British (if the choice is only between British and Americans) not every British English speaker will say goatee beard. The one I live with says goatee without the beard. I suspect it's a generational thing.

Goatee is originally an AmE word, and in AmE to say goatee beard would sound pleonastic, and it would grate, like saying robin bird or bungalow house. Which is not to say we're pleonasm-free. After all, we say crossword puzzle and tuna fish. It's just to say that goatee beard sounds weird and redundant to Americans because it's not what Americans say--we just say goatee. I did a quick comparison of a couple of newspapers just to check. The Boston Globe website has four examples of goatee beard, all of which come from UK sources. The (London) Times Online on the other hand, has 99 goatee beards and more than twice as many just plain goatees. So, goatee beard is not necessarily the norm in the UK, but it's definitely of this place.

(I liked this quotation in the OED from Isabella L. Bird's The Englishwoman in America:

1856 I. L. BIRD Englishw. Amer. 366 They [Americans] also indulge in eccentricities of appearance in the shape of beards and imperials, not to speak of the ‘goatee’.)
As for the pronunciation, I have only heard initial stress on GOAtee when I've heard it before beard (though I am not sure that everyone who says goatee beard stresses it in that way). The OED does not record the GOAtee pronunciation, just the goaTEE one. I can think of two (and a half) reasons why the stress might've moved in this case: (1) the British like to move the stress to the front of words, which is where most native disyllabic English nouns would be stressed (recall our discussion of beret, ballet, etc.) and (1.5) maybe this need is particularly felt when the word is compounded, since we expect the first element in a noun compound to be more heavily stressed, or (2) perhaps he is thinking of goatee as an adjective meaning 'goaty'--after all, it's a beard that's like a goat's. I'm leaning toward(s) (1). But as I have prove{n/d} time and time again, I'm no phonologist--so I hope that someone with a better insight will be inspired to write an elucidating comment.
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cupboards and closets

I've got a few posts brewing in my head that require me to (a) take my camera out with me and (b) remember to take pictures of the relevant things when I get to them. So far, I've only managed (a), which, it must be admitted, is pretty pointless without (b). But there's a lot of pointless activity in my life at the moment, like an afternoon investigating new textbooks after being told that mine couldn't be ordered--only to discover that the bookshop already had the books in stock, they just looked them up the wrong way. And waiting for the phone and internet to be re-connected after my neighbo(u)r told the people working on our house that the wires at the front of the building were extraneous and should be removed. And investigating and correcting the recent mistaken change to my tax code which left me paying three times as much as I owed this month. It's the camera one that really irks me though, since it's the only one I must blame myself for.

So with those plans thwarted, I have clicked onto a random post in my 'to be posted about' mailbox and found JHM, writing:
I've been on an Agatha Christie binge of late, and have subsequently been up to my eyeballs in potential questions on BrE. Seeing as these stories were written between the 30s and the 70s, however, it becomes complicated from your vantage, because even trying to compare fifty-year-old AmE usage to modern AmE would present problems.

Even so, one usage that seems fairly consistent over time, and that tends to confuse me, is the BrE use of "cupboard." I see that you've covered this to some degree, but I still have a few questions. [...] My word for the small, doored-off areas either hanging from the ceiling or under a [ed: AmE] countertop is cupboard (which I pronounce /cubbard/, making it a further annoyance when I see the word spelt, as the two seem not to match at all, and besides which, my "cups" usually hang from hooks below the cupboard, and are one of the few items not to be found inside one). So, first minor question is whether BrE by and large has the same pronunciation.

Now, it seems to me that BrE never seems to use closet, but prefers cupboard for just about anything that has a door. In my case, a cupboard is never something in which a corpse (at least one still in one piece) could be either found or put, but this seems commonplace in my stories. What are the bounds of the BrE cupboard, when does closet become more likely, and is all of this an artifact (ed: BrE artefact) of obsolete usage?
First, let me recommend that people who haven't read it click on the link to get to the post on (BrE) Welsh dresser, since it answers some questions. It's one of those sad posts from the beginning of the blog that would have received many more comments had I had readers at the time. Please feel free to comment on it there--it's never too late to comment on this blog's posts and it's one of those posts that gets a lot of hits via search engines, so your comment may help someone nice. Or possibly someone nasty. But if you help someone nasty, you're still being nice. Unless you're aiding and abetting in something nasty, that is. And I don't think anyone could hold you accountable and take away your niceness badge if your comment happens to lead to the Great Welsh Dresser Robbery of 2011 or the exploits of the Countertop Ripper in 2015.

I expect JHM that your rendition/rendering of the pronunciation is a bit misleading in terms of the second vowel. Since the stress is on the first syllable, most people would pronounce it with schwa-type sound. So, it sounds more like the word bird than bard. Like you, the British do not say 'cup-board', so the word is pronounced similarly in AmE and BrE--except for the way in which you'd expect it to differ: in what is done with an /r/ after a vowel.

On the meaning, one of the reasons why one doesn't hear closet much in BrE is because there just aren't many of them. Our current (three-bedroom) home has none. Our last (two-bedroom home) had none. My first (one-bedroom) home here had none. Instead, people generally keep their clothes in free-standing wardrobes, which move from house to house with them. (I have met/needed this beast only once in my dozen or so past American abodes.) Most Americans will be familiar with the furniture sense of the word just from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe--but I'm not sure that all reading the book would recogni{s/z}e that the wardrobe isn't a closet. Closets are becoming more popular in the UK in new-build/remodel(l)ed homes.

But that aside, BrE has held on to other meanings of closet to a greater degree/longer than AmE has. The original meaning was 'a private room' and this has been extended in various ways to refer to small rooms in general or small rooms of particular types. The OED tells me that this meaning is (or was when that entry was written) common in the North of England, Scotland and Ireland, where bed-closet means 'a small bedroom'. That meaning seems to have gone by the wayside in AmE, probably because there are so many storage-closets there. So, the small rooms in American homes are for storage, the word for small rooms closet is applied to them, there are no smaller rooms in the homes, so it's odd to refer to bigger rooms as closets too, and eventually people no longer reali{s/z}e that they could be using the word for other types of rooms. At least, that looks like a likely progression of events.

This has some knock-on effects idiom-wise. A skeleton in the closet (which goes back at least to the 19th century in BrE) transmogrifies into a skeleton in the cupboard in modern BrE, while it stays in the closet in AmE. On the other hand, (orig. AmE) come out of/be in the closet (as gay, etc.) has been imported directly into BrE. One can find a few instances of come out of the cupboard or come out of the wardrobe (as gay) on UK websites but they're few and far between. It's possible, though, that the imagery for the two is not quite the same in AmE and BrE minds. Do Americans imagine the closet-dweller as hunched among hangers and clothes and shoes and British people imagine them as just being in a small, private room? I imagine that the range of imaginings on an individual level vary a lot no matter where one lives.

Some types of closets in AmE are cupboards in BrE (or vice versa), such as a broom closet/cupboard. But this discussion reminds me that RMWG (another of my frequent, initial[l]ed correspondents) wrote a long time ago:
My American colleague is having problems with the concept of airing cupboards. I have done my best to explain, but as an American who presumably now has experience of them, perhaps you could do better.
Airing cupboards are called the same thing in the US, there are just far fewer of them. I got to know them in old houses in New England. More Americans would have a (non-airing) linen closet, which in BrE would be a linen cupboard.

On our recent trip to the US, Better Half didn't know what I meant when I said that I wanted to give a donation to the local food closet, which is run by a friend of our family. Food closet is essentially the same as (orig. AmE) food bank, the term that has come to be used in the UK (and is still used in the US too). I read with some surprise the Swindon Food Bank's claim that food banks are a 'ground-breaking concept'--since they've been around for decades in the US. But the first one in the UK was founded only in 1999.

Of course, closet is also found in the BrE term water closet, but please go back here to discuss that.

Back to JHM, he followed up his first email with:
[...] my reading has introduced me to the boxroom which, aside from their being convenient places to try to hide potentially incriminating evidence, seem to answer to an American's description of a closet. Is boxroom still in use? is it readily recognizable, if not commonplace?
I've never come across box(-)room in the wild, and the OED defines it only as 'a room for storing boxes, trunks, etc.'. It looks like it has developed in meaning a little bit, judging from this exchange on Gumtree:
> Hi, I'm currently looking for a place to live in London, and I'm simply wondering what a "box room" is?
>>
very small room often with no window.
>>>
or it can simply mean a very small single room, where you can just [s]queeze a bed & small desk or bedside table in - I'd ask about the window for each property - as I've never looked at a box room that didn't have a window personally, but I can see how in Cities that could apply! - I expect people try to rent out broom/laundry cupboards as commutor [sic] "bedpods"
>>>>
studio flat for £180 per week in zone 1 or 2 Laughing [link added for clarification--ed.]
In sum, I'd have to say that it's not a closet in the AmE sense and is not used all that much for storage rooms these days. Better Half adds that he gets the connotation of 'no windows' with box room, and that the adjective boxy is applied to rooms to mean that there's no room to swing a cat. (Not that good-conscienced, vegetarian BH has ever tried the cat-swinging bit.) To my AmE ears, a boxy room would just be one that has only 90-degree angles and probably walls of a uniform size.

Since we were corresponding at Thanksgiving time last year, JHM added:
As a seasonal bonus question, I wonder if you could discuss the use of the word larder in BrE [...]. I recognize the word, but don't have any idea how I might use it. There is the pantry, a small closet for dry goods, and the aforementioned cupboard, and the refrigerator (which seems to me what is referred to by larder in my stories. My grandfather would have used an ice box before refrigerators, but larder brings to my mind images of a cave, or walk-in refrigerator (perhaps since it sounds a bit like lair, I couldn't say). Does modern BrE have larders? What are they?
As the name hints at, larders were originally for storing bacon or other meats in the pre-refrigeration days. It is still used by extension for a large cupboard where food is stored. So, some old homes may have larders, which should be cooler than the rest of the house. (E.g. they may be on a side of the house that gets no sun or may have stone or porcelain parts to help keep the temperature down.) There's some information on BrE dialectal terms for larder in this Wikipedia entry. These days, one hears it in contexts like raid the larder, used like raid the refrigerator to mean something like 'get snacks'.

AmE ice box (or icebox) is still sometimes heard, having shifted its meaning from a literal 'box with ice' to 'refrigerator'. It's what my grandparents usually called the fridge. In some AmE dialects ice chest is used--though for many people that would refer to an insulated (orig. AmE) cooler (BrE: cold/cool box and these days one often gets cool bags--which reminds me, I need to get one. How about this one?). I can't imagine that there are many people under 60 years old using these terms for refrigerators--but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. One does still see/hear it in the names of certain sweet recipes.

As a cultural aside, Americans might wonder how the British live without built-in storage space. (UK houses also rarely have basements and residents may not have much--or any--access to an attic.) The answer is simple: they generally keep less stuff. I'm always reminded of this when I visit the US and see the seasonal stuff that a lot of people decorate their homes with. During our August visit, the shops there were already full of Hallowe'en (BrE) tat like this and plenty of people in my hometown decorate their porches with an ever-changing display of seasonal flags or banners like these. Some have special sets of china or linens for Christmas as well as decorations for every room and the great outdoors. One just doesn't see all this much in the UK. Where would you put it when it's out of season? Rather than sticking something that has outlived its usefulness or stylishness into a cupboard, closet or attic, a lot of UK residents would drop it by the nearest (or dearest-to-them) (BrE) charity shop/(AmE) thrift store. People often brought in single items or small bags of things to the shop where I used to work and we keep a constant 'Oxfam bag' going in the house--whereas I think Americans usually do their charity-giving after bigger clear-outs--often just before moving (house) or after dying (in which case they get out of doing most of the packing themselves). I must admit that some gifts I've received from some Americans (who do not appreciate that I have nowhere to put that cute/funny/weird thing that made them think of me--our place is smaller than a single floor of their three-stor(e)y+basement+garage houses) have gone straight to the charity shop. But not yours, of course. I cherish that. It is just so really, really extra cute and weird.
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filet, fillet and the pronunciation of other French borrowings

Looking through my long list of topic requests, I've found a duplicate--so that surely deserves to be treated first. Mrs Redboots recently emailed to say:
I was watching an on-line video, yesterday, of a chef preparing fish, and instead of saying he was filleting it (with a hard "t") as I should have done, he said he was "filay-ing" it, as though it were a French word. And later on, I saw it written as "filet", where I would have used "fillet". Which is the original - for me "filet" is the French term, and I hadn't realised it was also used in America.
And Laura, a New Yorker in Cambridge, wrote 10 months ago (sorry, Laura) with:
My British husband and I find endless entertainment emailing your blog entries to each other. What a great resource. I have searched past entries and cannot find anything pertaining to our longest running argument - on the pronunciation of "fillet." He says "filliT," and I would say "fillay" (like ballet, right?), although I refrain from doing so here for fear that butchers won't understand me. I thought British English would be the version more influenced by French...then again, I pronounce the er in foyer whereas he would say "foyay." What is going on with the influence of French in American and British English?
I'll have to preface this by saying that I can't possibly discuss all such differences in the pronunciation of words from French here--there are lots of them. And let's not get into the pronunciation of words from other languages just yet (I have posts-in-process on some of them). To start with Mrs R's question about which is original, well, in a sense, the question doesn't really work, since the word was borrowed at a time before spelling was standardi{s/z}ed in English. And it may not have been standardi{s/z}ed in French, either (do we have an expert out there?). Modern French spelling is based (according to what the internets tell me) on medi(a)eval pronunciation, which would mean that at the time it was first borrowed into English, the 't' would have been pronounced in the original French word.

Looking at the OED, we can see the word in English back to 1327--though that is in the sense of 'a ribbon used as a headband' . The first quotation for the 'cut of meat' meaning in English comes from around 1420, in the plural filetes (remember, though, that the word would have been borrowed earlier than this and used in speech and in writing that hasn't survived the centuries). The 1327 quote uses filet, but in all of its senses, the spellings vary for the first few centuries. In the 'cut of meat' uses, we also see Fylettes (c 1430), Phillets (1658), Filets (1725). From the 1741 quotation, fillets rules until the first American quotation in 1858 (filets). So, judging from the dates, it could be that it was imported to the Americas at a time when its spelling had not yet settled down and the influence of French settlers headed it toward(s) the more modern French spelling and pronunciation. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, in Maine people working in the fisheries say fillit on the job (their citation is from 1975, so may not be true now), though in lay use, it's filet, as in the rest of the US. For the McDonald's Filet-o-Fish, there is some question about how it should be pronounced in the UK, but the official McDonald's answer is '“Filet-o-Fish” can be pronounced any way you wish. Most people say “Filay”.'

Similarly, Americans tend to pronounce valet as 'valay', while it is more common to pronounce the 't' in BrE. As I've mentioned before gillet/gilet show a similar spelling difference--but that difference isn't strictly on national lines--I see both gillet and gilet in England and rarely either in the US. It's usually pronounced in the French way, but then it was imported from French more recently--in the 19th century.

Across both dialects, it's a general rule that the longer the word has been in English, the more likely it is to be pronounced as it is spelled/spelt. So, claret (a wine name rarely heard in the US, where it would tend to be called Bordeaux), which has been in English since at least the middle ages, is pronounced with the 't', but Cabernet, which came to us in the 19th century, isn't. But still, there are a lot of differences. Let's divide them into types: consonant differences, vowel differences and stress differences--though where there are stress differences there are often also C and V differences. From here I'm going to do less history and more listing.

Among the consonant differences we have the already-discussed herb ('h' versus no 'h'). Then there's the French 'ch'. Chassis usually has a hard 'ch' in AmE, but usually a soft one ('sh') in BrE. (Both usually don't pronounce the final 's'.) According to the OED, preferences for the pronunciation of niche are reversed in BrE and AmE, with rhymes-with-itch dominating in AmE and rhymes-with-leash dominating in BrE. Myself, I've always pronounced it to rhyme with leash wherever I've been--but the pronunciation was only 'Frenchified' in English during the 20th century. So, nitch-sayers can consider themselves to be a certain kind of authentic, and niche-sayers can consider themselves to be another kind of authentic. And then there's schedule, which begins with a 'sh' in BrE, and a 'sk' in AmE--though one does hear the AmE pronunciation in BrE now (and BrE speakers often say timetable where AmE speakers would say schedule).

On the vowels, I've been mocked in England for my AmE pronunciation of France (rhymes with ants but without the 't'). Yes, the standard, southern BrE pronunciation is more like the French pronunciation, but it's also part of a more general pattern of AmE having the [ae] sound (as in cat) and standard, southern BrE having a long [a:] in these places--cf. dance, lance, chance and answer. And the southern BrE pronunciation of these things in these ways is due to a modern change in pronunciation (see this discussion of the TRAP-BATH split). So, I'm not convinced that BrE speakers say Frahnce (or Fraunce, if you prefer) because they are being authentic in a French way--they are being true to the rules of their own dialect.

A more irregular difference is in clique, which is 'cleek' in BrE, but often 'click' in AmE. See the Eggcorn database for some discussion of the consequences.

And leisure is more French-ish in BrE, where it rhymes with pleasure, than in AmE where the first syllable is usually pronounced 'lee'.

The 'a' in apricot is like that in cap in [my dialect of] AmE and in cape in BrE. I'm sure there are people in each dialect who would argue that theirs is closer to the French, but the fact that both dialects pronounce the final 't' (and that neither uses a 'b' rather than a 'p') tells us that it's given up any preten{c/s}e of being French.

As you can see, this list is pretty random and I'm sure there are others that could be added. Here's one that has both consonant and vowel differences: vase. The BrE pronunciation is more like the French with an 'ah' and a 'z', whereas the usual AmE pronunciation rhymes with place.

On to stress... Note that most of the following involve vowel changes as well, since unstressed vowels are reduced (which often includes making them more centrali{s/z}ed in the mouth).

AmE tends to keep the French stress pattern make recent loan words sound more 'foreign' by resisting the native urge to stress earlier in the word, whereas stress in BrE tends to gravitate to the front of the word. This means that ballet is BALay in BrE and balAY in AmE. The same pattern can be found in a number of two-syllable French borrowings.
ballet
baton

beret
bourgeois

café

debris

frontier
(in this case, neither dialect preserves the French three-syllable pronunciation)
garage (with changes in the vowels and final consonant too, as mentioned here)
pastel
For three-syllable words, BrE often stresses the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable where AmE stresses the final one, with a secondary stress on the first syllable. Thus one stress pattern can seem as if it's turned inside-out if you're used to the other one. The sore-thumbiest one for me is Piaget:
escargot
fiancé(e)
Piaget
(the Swiss psychologist): BrE pee-AH-Ê’ay vs. AmE PEE-uh-Ê’AY
This is not to say that AmE always resists the urge to move the stress leftward or that BrE never does. Observe police, which has the accent on the last syllable in both standard dialects--though there is a non-standard (and sometimes jokingly used) first-syllable-stressing pronunciation in some dialects of AmE: PO-leese. Courgette in BrE retains the final stress.

And then there are the other examples that go the opposite way, with AmE having the stress more front-ward than BrE. This is typically for words that have been in the language longer and seem 'less French' to us than things like beret and escargot:

address (noun)
magazine
m(o)ustache(s)
And then there is Renaissance, for which I quote from the American Heritage Book of English Usage:
This 19th-century borrowing from French, which literally means “rebirth,” is usually stressed on the first and third syllables in American English. In British English the word is usually stressed on the second syllable, which is pronounced with a long a sound [...]. The American English pronunciation is an approximation to the French pronunciation, while the British English pronunciation reflects the typical English (Germanic) tendency to put the main stress on the root part of a word.
So, I'm sure you'll come up with many more examples and counter-examples, but that's a smattering, at least. Special thanks to Better Half, for letting me (AmE) sleep in/(BrE) have a lie-in a few times during the past couple of weeks, so that I could work/blog into the wee hours. Having written all this, I find I've not/I haven't commented on Laura's mention of foyer, but since I don't want to abuse BH's kindness by sleeping the whole of tomorrow away, I'll just refer you to this nice little discussion on 'The Growlery'. I've concentrated on pronunciation here, rather than French-versus-English spelling, which we'll go into another time. If you can't wait, see here and here and here for some discussions where French and spelling intersect.
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initials and names

So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think: 'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered, and those don't even include the ever-growing list in my head of things that fit my original intention of discussing the "words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis" (plus the pragmatic conventions, social constraints and value systems that affect communication and get me into even more trouble). I'd hoped that I'd blog at least three times a week during my (AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday, but instead I have blogged just twice (ok, now thrice) and received six emails with good requests for new topics plus a number of others in the comments sections of current and old posts plus the 'have you blogged that yet?' conversational asides from Better Half and others at a rate of about three per day. I'm fairly confident that I could blog daily on this topic until retirement age and still have ideas for new posts. But, of course, I'll have to wait until I'm retired to blog at my desired pace. In the meantime, I'll just have to take my vitamins (while trying not to think too hard about how that's pronounced) in the hope that I'll have a long enough retirement to even start to do these dialects justice. If you're interested in reading the faster-paced version of the blog, please remember to eat your five a day, walk your 10,000 steps and use your SPF 50—you've got another 20-some years to wait before it even starts.

And after that bit of solipsistic (ish) reflection, a post that concerns me-me-me! Ok, so it starts with a much more famous writer, but that's just an excuse to get to me. One of the aforementioned six emails was from Marc, who wrote:
I'm listening to Just a Minute on Radio 4, and the subject is "Scott Fitzgerald". It seems to me that Americans always say "F. Scott Fitzgerald". I actually think the Just a Minute usage makes more sense, since his full name is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. If he chose to call himself "Scott", the alternatives in my mind would be his four-name full name, or Scott Fitzgerald.
Well, his family called him 'Scott' and I'm sure that's how he introduced himself in social situations, but when he published he called himself F. Scott Fitzgerald, as on the cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby (via Wikipedia):


Fitzgerald was named after his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, but the family called him Scott—I don't know why, possibly to differentiate him from some other Francis or because they didn't like the possible nicknames for Francis or because they just liked Scott. But when Americans (like me! like me!) go by their second names (like I do! like I do!), they (I) tend to acknowledge that they (I) have a first name by including the first initial in formal, written contexts.

My story is a little different than Fitzgerald's—when my parents named me, it was with the intention that I would be known by both of my names. When I got to high school, the computeri{s/z}ed attendance (esp. AmE) rosters had room only for first name and middle initial—so my teachers tended to call me by my first name. I didn't like that, so I rebelled (kind of) and reinvented myself (more so) by adopting my middle name as my 'main name' when I started attending college/university courses. But the outcome is the same as Fitzgerald's: when I publish, I do so with my first initial, full middle name, and full surname.



(Sorry, I can't find an image of this in which my name is clear—nor is there a good picture of the next one. That linked picture is a pre-publication mock-up...my lovely co-author's name will also be on it when it's published.)

I must pause for the inevitable question "What does the M stand for?" When I lived in the northeastern US, I had a ready-made non-answer that worked: "It starts with an M and I have an Irish surname. You can figure it out." But when I moved to foreign lands (first South Africa, then TEXAS), I found that the people couldn't figure it out, since they had considerably less exposure to certain Catholic-Irish-American naming practices. (NB: my non-answer doesn't work in Ireland either.) But you're intelligent, worldly people. You can figure it out. Or if not, you can read this. Note that the double-naming Irish-American thing in the north is perceived (at least by folks like me) as being a different tradition than the (largely non-Catholic) double-naming tradition in the South, for which a broader range of possible name combinations is available (as well as the tradition of using a family surname as the second name). See here for some examples.

When I moved to the UK, I started having trouble with my first initial and name. I had come to think of M. Lynne Murphy as my 'brand', but you can see that my employer has decided not to include my initial in my web profile. Furthermore, plenty of people seem to have a hard time referring to my work using my first initial. So, I'm referred to as Lynne M. Murphy and L.M. Murphy (even by people who I work very closely with—Scandinavians seem to be the most frequent reversers). Google Scholar even thinks I'm L.M. Murphy for this publication (even though it links to something that gets my name right). I thus work toward(s) the next research-based funding exercise for higher education in England with fear and loathing, since I have particular reason to fear that citations of my work will not be counted accurately.

When I first moved to my job at Sussex, I had an American colleague, the great Larry Trask, who was born Robert Lawrence Trask. This led some English university folk to ask me "why do all you Americans use your middle names?" Of course, two linguists do not amount to "all Americans", and looking at famous linguists and philosophers who use their middle names, I'm not at all convinced that Americans use middle names more than the British do. After all, two of the people I cite the most, HP Grice and DA Cruse were born in the UK and were/are called by their middle names. But they mostly publish(ed) with both initials, rather than initial-plus-name. Checking Wikipedia, the Cambridge University Press catalog(ue) and my own friends/citations, all of the first-initial users are American:
G Tucker Childs
W Tecumseh Fitch
D Robert Ladd (working in Scotland)
M Lynne Murphy (working in England)
T Daniel Seely
A Ronald Walton
(but here's another one, with an interesting story, who doesn't quite fit in this list)

The most famous living linguist also goes by his middle name, but Avram Noam Chomsky just skips to his middle name with no fanfare. I have no way of checking how many other middle-name users completely omit the first name when publishing. (Know of any others?)

If you're not all that interested in linguists' names (poor you), here is a first-initial-plus-middle-name hall of fame, which cheats a little by including some people who didn't really use the first initial (like Neville Chamberlain).

The AmE tendency to use first initials is tied, no doubt, to the AmE tendency to use middle initials in the names of people who go by their first names. Wikipedia notes that "The practice of abbreviating middle names to initials is rare in the United Kingdom", although certainly some UK authors use their middle initials when publishing—especially if they have common first and last names. Americans are so in love with these initials that we had a president who had an initial and no name to go with it: Harry S Truman. (And I'll repeat a link here because it's the same kind of story.)

But Americans like to spell out the name that they're called by, and so do not tend to reduce their names to just initials + surname, as the British often do in formal/bureaucratic situations. For instance, it's more frequent on forms in the UK to be asked for surname and initials than in the US, where one typically is asked for first name and middle initial (much to the chagrin of those of us who want to be mysterious about our first names). UK credit/debit cards and (BrE) cheque-books (=AmE checkbooks) typically have only initials+surname, though the bank will certainly have your full name on record. American ones more typically have a name and an initial. And this is reflected in signatures, too. Better Half's signature includes neither of his given names—just initials, and it's my impression that this is much more common in the UK than in the US.

But while the English often use just initials in 'formal' (i.e. printed) settings, I've also heard them complain about the American trend for calling people by their initials. (I once belonged to a group of about a dozen Americans that happened to have two people called 'D.J.'—this had nothing to do with turntables. One was male, one female.) I must say, it's not my taste either, but then again there are lots of names that aren't to my taste.

And then there's the question of who uses both first and middle names—e.g. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I direct you to Language Log for that discussion. But in that discussion there is a comment that the first initial + middle name thing is common in Scotland. I'll quote it in its entirety:

  1. David Eddyshaw said,

    July 2, 2009 @ 11:57 am
    Scots eldest sons frequently have the same first names as their fathers, but actually use their middle names instead, and will abbreviate themselves as e.g.
    J. Ewan McPherson
    An author relative of mine whose name follows this pattern finds that Americans frequently switch round his initial and forename to conform to their preferred Homer J Rodeheaver pattern. I actually have an American edition of one of his works with this error on the front page.
"Americans frequently switch (a)round his initial and forename"! Oh, don't get me started (again)! (Except to note that forename is much more common in BrE than in AmE.)
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seaside diversions

While it's still seasonal, I should mention a couple of differences that have come up in Grover's first summer of proper playing on the beach.

First there are these things:
[photo and instructions for building it from about.com]

In my AmE dialect, this is called a pinwheel, but in BrE it's called a windmill (because it looks like a 'real' windmill). It may also be called a windmill by Americans as well. Pinwheel in AmE is also extended to other things that resemble including the pinwheel quilt pattern and pinwheel cookies (which resemble the motion more than the thing).

And then there are these things:

[from Open Clip Art Library]

In BrE, this is a bucket and spade. Now, whenever my in-laws discuss these, they put them in that order (bucket and spade), and so I was going to say that this phrase is an irreversible binomial (something we've discussed before) but via Google, I actually find more spade and buckets [see the first comment for vindication of my intuition/experience]. The AmE equivalent (in my dialect, at least) is shovel and pail, which I would put in that order, but for which there are many times more examples of the other order, pail and shovel, online. So, don't listen to me about word orders--apparently I don't know.
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musical notes

Sorry I've been quiet--was trying to finish a book before coming on holiday. So, 'hello' from the US, where Grover is getting reacquainted with her cousins and I only have a little editing to do in order to finish the book. (I think my honeymoon was the only non-working holiday I've had in years...)

In the interest of not distracting myself too much from that editing, I'm going to pull together some info that readers have sent me about musical terminology in the two countries. Since my years of childhood music lessons did not result in any usable skills, I've never applied myself to the making of music in the UK, and so my exposure to the terminology has been slight. But reader darcherd kindly sent me a list that he's encountered in his reading, which I reproduce here. The first item of each pair is BrE and the second AmE.

  • Breve - A note of two bars' length (a count of 8) in 4/4 time (no AmE equivalent of which I'm aware)
  • Conservatoire - Conservatory
  • Crotchet - Quarter note
  • Minim - Half note
  • Quaver - Eighth note
  • Semiquaver - Sixteenth note
  • Demisemiquaver - Thirty-second note
  • Hemidemisemiquaver - Sixty-fourth note
  • Semibreve - Whole note
  • Semitone - Half step
I'm assuming that darcherd is correct about all these. (Use the comments if you'd like to correct or expand on any of this, please.) I haven't checked all the notes terminology, but I did look up conservatoire, about which the OED says:
A public establishment (in France, Germany or Italy) for special instruction in music and declamation. (The French form of the word is commonly used in England in speaking not only of the Conservatoire of Paris, but also, with less propriety, of the Conservatorium of Leipzig, and the Conservatorios of Italy, and is even sometimes assumed as the name of musical schools in England. In the U.S. the anglicized form conservatory is used.)
Conservatory tends to be used in BrE in a deviation from this sense (also from the OED):
A greenhouse for tender flowers or plants; now, usually, an ornamental house into which plants in bloom are brought from the hot-house or green-house.

The deviation is that the conservatories people tend to speak of are glass-enclosed extensions on their homes, which allegedly raise the value of the property, but always seem to be too hot to sit in, thus requiring very elaborate systems of window blinds. (See photo, from here.)


But back to music...David Young wrote some time ago to point out this bit from the March 2009 issue of Classical Guitar magazine:
Without being too rigorous about it, Classical Guitar has generally preferred the word 'rendering' to the word 'rendition' to describe a performance of music, considering it to be American usage only. However, I discovered the word 'rendition' in an English review published in 1906. So it's been around for at least 103 years, though it lost some respectability recently, when it came to mean removing suspected terrorists to a remote country where they could be tortured without too much danger of the details being picked up by the international media.

But 'rendering' can bring to mind a coat of plaster, and is only fractionally better.[Colin Cooper, Editorial Consultant]
The dangling participle there is driving me a little (AmE) crazy/(BrE) mad, but massive quotation is the way to go if one wants to blog quickly!

One last musical note, which came up in a conversation with friends recently, is that pop music has a much broader application in BrE than in AmE. In my American high school and (AmE) college/(BrE) university, it was deeply uncool to like 'pop' music, one had to like (orig. AmE) rock or (orig. AmE) R&B or, later, (orig. AmE) indie music. (Or jazz or classical, but not pop!) But many of the British acts that we thought were cool would have been defined (or would have defined themselves) as pop in Britain. A key difference may be the fact that the British charts don't categori{s/z}e music in such strict ways. Whereas the American Billboard magazine publishes a load of genre charts each week (giving rise to the AmE phrase crossover artist for someone who charts* in more than one genre), the UK Singles Chart is not genre-specific and did not start having genre-specific versions until the 1990s.

Googling the phrase "I'm just a pop star", we find it attributed to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Björk--but in my American days I would not have described either of them in that way (especially not Pink Floyd). I would have limited its use to Britney Spears and 'N Sync or whatever the (orig. AmE) tweenies were listening to at the time. I had thought that the uncoolness of pop was what made Pop Idol into American Idol when it moved across the Atlantic--but Wikipedia tells me it was legal restrictions instead. Younger Americans can tell us if pop has redeemed itself in recent years (comments, please!).

*This verb sense of chart hasn't made it into the OED yet, so I'm not sure where it originated.
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self-catering

It's been a while since I've had a simple 'they call it this/we call it that' post. Some of you can think of this as a reward for sitting through all the grammar and html tables. It's an old request, but a seasonal one. Mrs Redboots wrote months ago to ask:
From http://www.ruthdoanmacdougall.com/more/doan-sisters.html

"She had once stayed in a rented cottage in Surrey, and she remembered the odd term the British use for this arrangement: self-catering."

Is it odd? And what do Americans say?
It is odd, Mrs R. And although just sentences ago I promised a 'they call it this/we call it that' post, I can't hono(u)r my own promise, because Americans don't call it anything.

Why? Because Americans don't expect their holiday/vacation abodes (and their prices) to include any meals. The British notion of 'bed and breakfast' is regarded as a quaint one that was only imported in earnest (as tourist accommodation) to America a couple of decades ago (or so). In fact, I recently had a conversation with an Englishwoman who had come over to the US for our second wedding reception and was still talking (two years later) about how incredibly wonderful the B&B in my hometown was. While that B&B is especially nice (elaborate, different breakfasts every morning, warm cookies every evening, all antique furniture, scented bath potions, and so forth), I think it especially impressed my English friend because B&B accommodation in the UK can be somewhat dire (it can also be very, very nice). In fact, B&Bs often serve the roles in the UK that (AmE) motels do in the US (except that there are far fewer films involving murders in B&Bs than in motels!). For evidence, see this article that recalls a B&B's role in housing homeless families.

I'm finding that increasingly one can get a room in a hotel without breakfast in the UK (for a lower price), just as in the US provision of included-in-the-price breakfast (or at least doughnuts and coffee) has increased.

But back to self-catering. This is generally used by BrE speakers to refer to (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation accommodation such as cottages, cabins, and (BrE) flats/(AmE) apartments,where there is no restaurant or service staff to provide meals, but cooking facilities are available. In the US, we'd just say we were renting a cottage somewhere, and that would be that--no need to mention the eating arrangements. One often hears BrE speakers saying things like "We want to go self-catering this year", to mean that they want a reduced-cost, back-to-basics holiday/vacation.

One often sees (BrE) package holidays advertised as 'self-catering' (as opposed to 'bed and breakfast' or 'all inclusive'). Here's another contrast: Americans rarely take package holidays unless (a) they've got a deal to go to Disneyworld, or (b) they're in their 'golden years'. This is probably because (a) Americans are wary of anything that might 'tie them down' too much, (b) [and therefore] they often just get in the car and drive, and (c) they get almost no holiday/vacation time (usually two weeks' paid vacation for Americans versus the six weeks or so that Europeans usually get)--and therefore often use what they've got to do things that need to be done, like visiting family or undertaking big projects, rather than going on treks to new and different places.

We've discussed a couple of other differences in tourist accommodation in past posts--so click back if you'd like to read/discuss (BrE) flannels/(AmE) washcloths in hotel bathrooms or (BrE) en-suite accommodation.
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on accident

Looking through my backlog of requests, I found this one from Neal Whitman, the Literal-Minded Linguist:
I've recently gotten a a few interesting comments on a post from a year ago [well, more than that by now--ed.]. In one of the comments to this post, I quote an ADS-list exchange between you and Ron Butters regarding a semantic distinction between 'on accident' and 'by accident'. What's interesting about the more recent comments, from two Australians and one UK resident, is that 'on accident' seems to be particular to US English. Do you hear 'on accident' from people where you live?

I've chosen this one to reply to because I can answer it in a word: 'no'. I'd call on accident a non-standard Americanism, and I refer you to Neal's discussion and the comments on it for much further rumination on the expression.

But really, I blog tonight in order to accidentally on purpose have the opportunity to thank the readers of this blog for your votes for the Lexiophiles Top Language Blogs 2009--and for all your support over the past few years. I'm absolutely (BrE) gobsmacked to find this blog at the number one spot in the 'Language professionals' category and 14th overall. Wow. I'm hono(u)red to be on the same list as the other nominees. Click on the links to see the full lists.


This blog would be nothin'/nuffink without its loyal readership--whom I've come to think of as a kind of extended family. The kind that are likely to tell you when you look fatter than the last time they saw you and that they liked your old haircut better and to say that they are planning to disown you for the way you voted in the last election (they won't), but who will also take an interest in what you're up to, help out when they can and stand up for you when you need an ally. I'm a couple of posts away from number 300, and was planning on saying something like that when I hit that milestone--but why wait? Thanks for sticking around, reading, commenting and sending me your ideas, observations and anecdotes.

Now, good night!
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the States

I've had a couple of queries lately about the States as a nickname for the United States of America--with some implication that Americans in Britain learn to say this from the British. One query was (indirectly, through their [BrE] tutor/[AmE] professor) from an American student who has come over on a summer exchange program(me). The other was from Laura, who wrote:
I worked in London for a few months last year and was surprised to hear everyone referring to the U.S. as 'the States' or 'America', both names I rarely (if ever) use. Normally I just say 'the U.S.' or even the full(er) name of 'the United States'. I did a sort of poll on this in a Livejournal community I am a part of, here at Brits-Americans. On the whole, people agreed with me that Americans do not call our country 'the States' (a few more call it 'America' though) and if they do, it is generally only after visiting/living in Britain (or a country outside the U.S., even Canada).
Laura has noticed that this isn't just a British thing, but the student, probably with less travel(l)ing experience, considered it to be BrE--and we can investigate that idea. Others seem to think it's an exchange student thing. I found this claim in a review (warning: .pdf) of Stuff White People Like:
Incidentally, every American exchange student is required by the Geneva Convention to use the term, “The States,” preferably whilst rolling his or her eyes. I did it so effectively that I developed minor eyestrain.)
The obvious reason why Americans only start calling the country America or the States when they're abroad is that an American just doesn't have as much reason to call it anything when in the US--for instance, when someone asks an American where they're from when they're in the US, they'll answer Kansas or Cincinnati, not the US of A or any such thing.

But is it used more in the UK than elsewhere? It's a bit hard to tell, but let's start by looking at where on the web some names for the US are used. Apologies for my primitive skills with html tables, but what I've done is to search for America, the States, the US, the USA, and the United States on the web in two sentential contexts in and out of the UK. First, I searched "are you from x" with the proviso that it should not include any sites that had the phrase "Where are you from"--because otherwise you're flooded with examples like Where are you from? The US. This was important because my aim here was to find uses of these names for the US that were more likely to be written by non-Americans. For the Americans, I searched for "I'm from X". The table shows the total number for the "are you from" searches, followed by the results from just the UK, followed by the proportion of world uses of a term that come from the UK, followed by UK-based writers' preference for the term--and then it repeats that for the "I'm from" searches. So, we can see here that presumed non-Americans in the UK tend to call the country (in web-based writing, at least) the US or the USA. If it were a Briticism, we'd expect UK uses in the Are you from context to be a fairly big proportion of the world uses--but that doesn't seem to be the case. The confounding factor would be if it were British, but the British considered it degrading, in which case they might use it in other contexts, but not the Are you from one.


Are you from [x]   UK  UK/World       UK%       I'm from [x]UK     UK/World   UK %
America1270181%13%32,2009223% 14%
the States313124%9%23,20013306%20%
the US709598%44%63,50028905%43%
the USA17,500402%30%30,0006872%10%
the United States127064%4%23,2008424%13%

Before looking at the American side of the table, let's consider whether it is degrading. Ben Zimmer has kindly pointed out to me this claim by 'Areff' on alt.usage.english:
[in response to someone's usage of the States] First off, you get Oy!ed for using that expression 'the States'. This is a deprecated usage outside of military and diplomatic contexts. Odd thing is, the British think Americans commonly use 'the States' (they don't), and the Americans think the British commonly use 'the States' (they do, but only because they mistakenly think that's what Americans commonly do).
A lot of people on that discussion board took issue with this claim. I've certainly never found 'the States' to be deprecating (which is all I can imagine he meant by 'deprecated'), and would think that non-diplomatic contexts would be less sensitive to such connotations in any case. But at any rate, our evidence here is that Americans in the UK use the term at a much higher rate than the British do--since it's only the 4th most common on the British side of the table, but the second most common way for Americans to refer to their home country. So I have a hard time buying that Americans in the UK are learning it from the British.

Now on to the American side of the table, we see that on UK websites Americans use 'the States' one-fifth of the time when asked where they're from, but this accounts only for 6% of the world total of people saying they're 'from the States'. But that 6% is bigger than the percentages for any of the other expressions, so perhaps it is a bit more likely in the UK.

For interest, I also checked some other anglophonic countries' sites. The numbers were very small in some cases, but I'll present here the rankings of the terms in Australian, Canadian and South African sites. The figure on the left is the ranking of the 'Are you from' result and the figure on the right is the 'I'm from' version.
Australia
you/I
Canada
you/I
South Africa
you/I
UK
you/I
America=1/31/12/13/3
the States=4/54/2=4/54/2
the US3/43/33/21/1
the USA=1/12/41/32/5
the United States=4/25/5=4/45/4


If Americans do say the States more often in the UK than elsewhere, one of my hypotheses is that it has something to do with language. When I lived in South Africa, I was conscious of referring to the US as America when I was speaking to someone whose native language was not English. One knows that America can be understood by speakers of most languages, but you need more of a grip on English to understand that the States is used as a proper noun. So, it's easier to use it with the (native) BrE speakers than with people who are speaking English as a second language. I also liked saying the States because the US comes out as 'theeyuwess', which sounds pretty mushy coming out of my mouth, and so I found myself having to repeat myself when I said it in South Africa. (The USA just sounds too [AmE] yee-haw jingoistic somehow.)

But why not in Australia? An English friend has wondered whether in the UK the States has an echo of the Colonies. Maaaayybeeeee. I'm preferring a more pragmatic solution. Larry Horn has a principle I like called 'Familiarity breeds CNTNT'--that is, familiarity breeds reduced content; the more familiar something is, the more economical you can be in referring to it. Maybe the States is more common in Canada and the UK because people there have more interaction with Americans and America than Australians and South Africans have.

But in conclusion, from this not-very-scientific investigation, it looks like the people who are most likely to say the States are Americans talking to Canadians or the British. Do we learn it from the British? Do we learn it from each other? Is it an echo of the Colonies? Hard to tell...
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midterm

Just a (orig. AmE) quickie from my lunch break:

Yesterday, during another lunch break (maybe I have lunch too often), I met a student who's at Sussex for the annual International Summer School--which as far as I can tell has just American students, but I may be wrong about that. At any rate, there are a lot of Californian science students wandering around at the moment. She's working with my friend Maverick, who introduced me as "Lynne, whose blog I was telling you about". At the end of the conversation, the student--let's call her Santa Barbara, after her home university--told me she'd be (orig. AmE) checking out the blog soon. So in order to welcome her, I'm going to point out the little communication hiccup I observed in her interactions with BrE speakers yesterday. If you're reading, Santa Barbara, say 'hello'!

SB is doing a psychology study under Maverick's supervision, but she was having trouble recruiting other students from the summer school to take part. Looking for possible explanations, she said to Maverick--"Well, it's midterm." It looked to me like Maverick was not getting the relevance of this, but happily SB carried on to say "A lot of the students are Physics students, and they have a big exam today." I watched the same thing happen again when the Blinder joined our conversation and SB had to bring her (apparently orig. AmE) up-to-speed on what had been discussed so far. She may have said in at least one case "it's midterms". Again, I could see the Blinder not really getting it, until SB continued on about the physics exam.

When SB said midterm she meant an exam or examination period. The reason for this not transferring well to BrE is that midterm examinations are not very common in higher education in the UK. At our university, if we have tests during the term, they're called coursework tests (I'm not marking that as general BrE, since I can't speak for other universities). It's only very recent that students in UK higher education have testing during the academic term. When I started at Sussex nearly 10 years ago, students had their exams at the end of the academic year for all courses--even autumn term courses that had ended 5 or 6 months before. This was frequent examination as compared to the experience of my older UK-educated colleagues, who, 30 years ago or more, had to wait until the end of their three-year degree program(me) to be tested on everything they had been taught.

I expect that when the Blinder and Maverick heard midterm, they thought (BrE) half term--which is a holiday/vacation period in the middle of a term (though Maverick would know that these students didn't get a break--it's only a six-week program(me)). They can tell us in the comments if I'm wrong about that. I've discussed half term before, so please click on the link to see more discussion and discuss more.

Because US students have midterm exams to contrast them with, end-of-term exams tend to be referred to as final exams or finals, whereas UK students (at least at my [BrE informal] uni) tend just to talk about exams.

Here's another exam-related post, in case you're interested.

And so, to conclude my lunch hour: the fruit salad was rather disappointing. Back to the coalface--which is LynneguistE for 'library'.
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Abbr.

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