Separated by a Common Language

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 [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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic.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

Reader (though he might not be a reader anymore, since it's taken me so long to get to his request) Jon wrote to ask:

I wondered if you could explain why Americans use the phrase "at this time", where a Brit would say "now", or nothing at all.

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

It seems strange to me, but working for a US company with Americans in the
office, I hear it a lot.

I have to say, Jon, that it's not something I think of as particularly American. (But tannoy, that's British--originally a trade name. AmE would be loudspeaker or more formally public address system--which would work very formally in BrE too.)

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

So, let's try government sites--and let's limit it to orders of the form "please * at this time" (* being the wildcard in a Google search). The.gov.uk sites immediately examples where a now (or nothing) would have sufficed:

There is currently a suspect bag in Park Place W1. Cordons are at Arlington st and Park Place please avoid at this time

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

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

So I would be much obliged if you could please freeze the application at this time till I gather required specifications to help you assess the planning

Now, of course, one could say 'Look at all that creeping Americanism in British English'. Or you could say 'Look at all that officialese where they try to use more words to sound more formal'. Or you could say that at this time sounds less 'at this very second' than now does, and therefore sounds less bossy than now.

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

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