Theresa and other sibilant names

The appointment of a new Prime Minister in the UK has led to both national and international crises in pronunciation. How do you say Theresa?

The national crisis, within the UK, is the problem of whether the second syllable is pronounced 'ree' or 'ray' ('ree' it turns out, for this particular Theresa) and whether the first syllable is truncated (no), as this passage from a Buzzfeed article (helpfully jpegged by author @jamesrbuk) explains:


Language Log looked at that vowel yesterday.

The international crisis is: what's going on with that 's'?  In American English, the 's' means /s/, but note that the Buzzfeed article didn't even mention the possibility of (mis)pronouncing it with an /s/. In British English, it's a /z/.

Theresa is not alone. There are other s-ful names that British English routinely pronounces with /z/, and American English usually pronounces with /s/. These include:

  • Denise
  • Leslie / Lesley (which British folk will tell you is the feminine spelling--Americans don't follow that distinction) and the truncated form Les
  • Wesley
  • Lisa sometimes (hear here - this is the only UK voice I've found on name-pronouncing sites)
  • Joseph sometimes (compare here)
  • Louisa? (I only recently learned that other people say LouWEEza, whereas I always said lewISSa. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I'm an American weirdo. Here's some discussion. About Louisa, not about whether I'm a weirdo. That matter has been settled.  Louise has a /z/ in both countries.)
For comparison, here are a British and an American actor saying Wesley. The American /s/ is very pronounced, the British consonant less so:




But—and this is a big BUT—these are names, so anything can happen. Names are subject to fashions and to individual whimsy. In particular, I suspect that the /s/ in the 'sl' names varies in America. In fact, I know it does in Wesley. The name (for the same character) is pronounced on Big Bang Theory with a definite /z/. Since the /s/ pronunciation is used by the character's own mother, this just seems disrespectful. ;)




In on-line conversations, I've seen Americans calling the /z/ version of 'Theresa' "posh". (They were American, so maybe posh isn't the word they used, but it was the meaning.) That may be because of the association with British accents or the Frenchness of the /z/ (as in Thérèse).


I can't say that I ever noticed any /z/ pronunciations of Theresa while growing up in America. Mother Theresa had an /s/ and so did the Theresa I went to school with. She used to ask if she could carry my lunch box for me to show that we were friends. When we'd get to the corner where we should part ways, I'd ask for my lunchbox back and she would laugh and cross the street that I wasn't allowed to cross and run away with my lunchbox. Yes, the use of habitual verb forms there indicates that it happened more than once. She always promised that it wouldn't happen again if I just trusted her...

 Alicia and Marcia are another couple of names that often throw me when I hear them in the UK. Whereas the Alicia I grew up with was "aLEEsha", in the UK it's "aLISSeeya". There is bound to be variation in the US on these, especially since in Spanish Marcia would have a "seeya" pronunciation.

There are, of course, many other names that are pronounced differently in the two countries. On the theme of national leaders' names, I have another post on Barack Obama. You might find discussion of some of the others by clicking on the names tag.  Important to note here that the /z/ in these names is not particularly related to the /z/ that's used in a lot of British nicknames. While Theresa may become Tezza, the z in that case is coming (believe it or not) from the /r/, just as it does for Jeremy —> Jezza. I've another post on that phenomenon.


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leafy

David Cameron and his house in 'leafy' Holland Park
Daily Express




Brits sometimes tell me that the problem with American politics is that the system of checks and balances, with the separate executive and legislative branches, means that changes are hard to make. My experience of politics in the UK since 2010 leaves me feeling that changes are too easy to make. Have an election and the next thing you know, things that have been built up over years can be thrown away. Get a new cabinet and within the year school curricula may change, departments of the civil service are closed, public properties are sold off. Because it's so much easier to destroy than to build, the recent Conservative (and coalition) governments (approx. AmE administrations) have wreaked change that undoes generations' worth of work and that will affect many generations beyond the current decade. But perhaps the most surprising thing for Americans watching the news is how quickly David Cameron had to move out of 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence. On the 8th of July, there were two candidates to replace Cameron, and the winner of their contest would be decided on the 9th of September.  Three days later, one of the candidates dropped out, and so the remaining candidate was (almost) automatically appointed head of the ruling party, and therefore the next prime minister. She could have been made prime minister that day, but the queen was out of town, and you can't become prime minister without the monarch's ceremonial say-so*.  So two days later, on Wednesday, Theresa May was made Prime Minister, which meant she got to move into 10 Downing Street right away. None of this two months' warning that residents of the White House have.

But that's all just preamble for this tweet from Tony Thorne:

Sounded right to me, but I had a quick look.

My first question was: Which things are described as leafy in AmE and BrE? This result from GloWBE shows us just nouns after leafy for which there are sufficient numbers for some statistical analysis.

 My second question was, if Americans don't say leafy suburb, what do they say?



The software isn't searching for meanings, it's just searching for any adjectives right before suburb. As it happens it's given us some near-synonyms, for leafy in BrE is code for 'affluent'. Tony clarifies:



It works as code better in the UK than in the US for geographical reasons. The UK has far fewer trees than the US, and the way cities are built means that there are few trees within them. In the US, the poor neighbo(u)rhoods in a medium-sized city may well have trees (of course denser cities have fewer).  I live in a nice part of town in Brighton and our street/road has almost no trees. And of course, no lawns. And little in the way of (BrE) front gardens/(AmE) front yards. (It would have had a few more trees in the past, but Brighton lost many to the Great Storm of 1987 and to Dutch Elm disease.)

The numbers for leafy suburb in the US are not zero, as Julie Lawson notes:

I noted in reply that the Washington Post is a hotbed of Britishisms. (It's been coming up a lot as I do the research for my book.) None of the six in the GloWBE corpus are from the Post but at least three are from DC-area writers/sources, so it may be fairly local to the area.

The semantics of suburb are not quite the same in the US and UK. (But I'm going to have to leave that for another day.)  I've just shown suburb in the table above because if you search for suburb* with a wild-card at the end, you get suburban and suburbanite and it all gets a bit messy. But if we look at the plural alone, we're informed a bit more about American society...





*Interesting side note: say-so has been around since the 1600s, but OED says "In 19th cent., chiefly U.S. and Eng. regional (midl.)." It now seems to be general English again. 

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infections and itises

So last time, I wrote about disease versus infection following the phrase sexually transmitted, and I started thinking (again) about how we talk about medical things--technical or non-technical? In the book I'm writing (for you!), I've touched on it a little with respect to bodily functions:

Sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, I’m amused and a bit astonished to find posters about what to do if there is blood in your pee or poo.* The equivalent American public-service advertisements say urine and stool. In the medical context, America avoids being crude by sounding more scientific, and Britain uses baby-talk.
* Make an appointment with your doctor immediately!
The discussion hits on things like BrE waterworks ('urinary tract') and back passage ('rectum') and  classes given to foreign nurses in the NHS on British slang--aka British euphemism. (It's a bit of the book that looks at the stereotype of Americans as euphemists, so yes, there's a lot of attention in the other direction.)

The "Americans use overly technical terminology" aka "Americans like jargon" stereotype that I contribute to in the quote above is one worth taking apart as well. I've been encouraged in that stereotype when I hear friends talk about their chest infections where I tend to have bronchitis. But then they're also talking about having cystitis (my poor, unhealthy friends), which I hadn't heard of before moving here. An infected cyst? Ew... No, it's a bladder infection. In AmE I'd call it a UTI (urinary tract infection). (The NHS website tells us that cystitis is a common type of UTI, so the terms are slightly different--but that's the case with bronchitis and chest infection too.)

So far, we're tied: Itises: BrE 1, AmE 1. Infections: BrE 1, AmE 1.

So I thought I'd have a look at which things Americans and Brits call infections and which they use Medical Greek -itis names for.

 The tables below are the statistically "most American" (left) and "Most British" (right) nouns that come before infection in the GloWBE corpus. (If you click on the table, it should get bigger.)
"Most American" and "Most British" words preceding infection
What you can notice there (if you can read the small print) is that the "more British" preceding nouns include things that can get infected (wounds, chests, throats), whereas the "more American" ones tend to be the microbes that do the infecting. In AmE, I think I'd say someone has an infected wound rather than that they have a wound infection. And one kind of wound infection you can have is a staph infection (in the US list), which is a very familiar term from my AmE childhood (we were constantly being told that gym mats were very dangerous). I don't know that I've ever heard staph infection in the UK.

In the BrE column you can also see urine infection, another BrE way of saying urinary tract infection. This one names neither the pathogen nor the organ, and always strikes me as a bit odd. Urine might have germs in it, but can urine itself be infected?

BrE has more throat infections because Americans are more likely to say they have strep throat. In my experience, scarlet fever is heard more in BrE these days (which is not to say you never hear it in AmE). When my child was diagnosed with it (in the UK), I really felt like I'd been taken back to Victorian times. She wasn't all that sick. But when I looked it up and found that it's the strep germ, I thought: maybe you hear scarlet fever more often in UK because AmE has strep infection.

Some of the numbers up there, though, are art{e/i}ifacts of the corpus. AmE has 56 instances of HSV infection but all of them come from a single website (virologyj.com), so we shouldn't take too much from that. American, like British, English would typically call that herpes. HBV infection is found on a greater range of sites, but they are mostly medical journals and such. Laypeople would generally say Hepatitis B.

But that does seem to sum up the difference between the AmE table and the BrE table: a lot of the AmE infection cases are use of medical jargon in a medical context--staph infection was the only one I knew as a layperson. Whereas in BrE the body-part+infection cases are terms that non-medical people would use when talking about their maladies.

If we look at the infections that American and British English have in common, we can see  that Americans do talk about infections too, sometimes with body parts, even.


But what about -itises? Is it mostly Americans using the fancy words? No, but there again maybe some effects here of one source being over-sampled in the corpus. Here I'm showing what came up as 'most American' (left) and 'most British' (right), with a bit of the 'neither one nor the other' showing in white. This is going to be very hard to read on a phone (sorry!), but I'll write up the highlights below.


I've given a comment in red if (a) the things are not diseases, but just coincidentally spelled with -itis, or (b) if it's a spelling issue. Though oesophagitis shows up in the British list, it's not because Americans don't use an -itis name for the problem, but because we spell it esophagitis. (Click here for my old post on oe/e spellings.) The British list is lengthened by a misspelling of arthritis and having two spellings for tonsil(l)itis.

After discounting those, the British list is still a lot longer than the American one, but I'm very much suspecting some bad corpus effects here. Tonsillitis, colitis, dermatitis, gastroenteritis, appendicitis, pancreatitis--I or members of my family have had all of these and that's just what they were called in the US. The numbers for these diseases are greater than expected in the British part of the corpus--but they're hardly absent in the American part. For example, note that there are 756 AmE occurrences of meningitis--which is here counting as "rather British", while only 16 AmE hits for phlebitis make it "very American". Some of these cases are going to seem "more British" or "more American" to the software just because the corpus happened to hit on some websites that talked about these things a lot. But I think what we can say from this exercise is that we have no particular evidence for British English avoiding -itis words, despite its greater use of body-part+infection.

Still there are a few itises worth mentioning for BrE/AmE interest. One is labyrinthitis, which I had an unfortunate encounter with this spring. When I described my symptoms (the room going upside-down and inside-out every time I turned my head left), lots of British friends said "Oh, that's labyrinthitis. I've had it. It's horrible!" But it was not a word that my American friends seemed to have at their fingertips--to them it was an inner-ear infection. (Why do Brits seem to get it more often, though?)


Conjunctivitis shows up on the British list, though it is a word that Americans use too. But Americans have another informal term for the problem: pink-eye. That will push the US conjunctivitis numbers down. (There are a few UK hits for pink-eye--with or without the hyphen, but a lot of US hits.)

In the white part of the table--where the numbers are similar for AmE and BrE -- are the two itises that are earlier in this post: cystitis, which I've experienced as more British, and bronchitis, which I've experienced as more American. Because the corpus is imperfect, I'm not going to totally discount my experience on these. But it would be interesting to hear if others (particularly transatlantic others who can compare) think I'm off my rocker...

I was surprised to see only one made-up disease in the list: boomeritis on the AmE side. (It was the name of a book--click on the word to learn more.) I would have bet that (AmE) senioritis would appear. (As it happens, there were only two US examples of it in the corpus--most are Canadian.) To quote Wikipedia:

Senioritis is a colloquial term mainly used in the United States and Canada to describe the decreased motivation toward studies displayed by students who are nearing the end of their high school, college, and graduate school careers.
For a minute there, I was worried that I expected senioritis to be there because I am OLD and UNCOOL. But I'm happy to report that in both the Corpus of Historical American English and in Google Books, the rate of senioritis use has only gone up in the decades since I was a high-school/college senior. Not happy for the teachers who have to teach these seniors, but happy that my vocabulary is not a complete dinosaur--yet.

If you're interested in other disease names, do have a look at the medicine/disease tag--thanks to (a) having a small child and (b) being a complete hypochondriac, quite a few have come up over the years--but there are still many more to cover in future.

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STD, STI

Is a Manchester sexual health clinic
trying to tell me something?
I just feel that I should say this up front: there is nothing autobiographical about this post. There. Got that out of the way. The topic only came up because I was in a conversation that involved an allusion to leaflets in doctors' (AmE) offices/(BrE) surgeries

Those leaflets are sometimes about (AmE, old-fashioned) social diseases. In either country it's possible to find references to  Sexually Transmitted Diseases or STDs or  Sexually Transmitted Infections or STIs. Is there a difference? Not really. To quote one (US) site on the matter:
STI stands for sexually transmitted infection, and many people, mostly the medical community, have begun transitioning from “STD” to “STI” in an effort to clarify that not all sexually transmitted infections turn into a disease. For instance, the vast majority of women who contract HPV (human papilloma virus) will not develop the resulting disease cervical cancer. In fact, most cases of infection will clear up within two years. Additionally, people who use this term believe that it also eliminates some of the shame that’s been associated with the acronym “STD.”
The UK seems to be far ahead of the US in adopting the "new" term.

The GloWBE corpus has about 5 times as many STD(s) in AmE as STI(s), but about 1.2 times as many STIs in BrE as STDs. The numbers for the non-abbreviated forms were not as strongly separated by country, but there were still more sexually transmitted diseases in the US and infections in the UK.

GloWBE is useful because relatively current and country-coded, but  it's counting up phrases from the web and there's no guarantee of the Britishness of someone writing a comment on a British news site (etc.). I wanted to check further because the UK numbers weren't as stark as I had expected. The friend in the aforementioned conversation has a nurse for his partner, a (UK) nurse, and his experience/impression was that in the medical profession it is almost always STI in the UK. That's been my impression too.

So, I searched for the terms on the National Health Service (UK) website and found about 4 times as many sexually transmitted infection(s) as sexually transmitted diseases but similar numbers of STI and STD. This seemed to be because almost whenever the NHS site uses the abbreviation, they use both abbreviations, as in "Sexual health testing for people with symptoms or who have had sex with someone who has a confirmed STI/STD" on a list of clinic services. In some cases, when I clicked through on a hit for STD there was no visible STD on the page, just STI. Which is why, boys and girls, it is generally better to use a corpus rather than Google for getting word-frequency counts. Some SEO magic seems to be going on on there.

On the National Institutes of Health (US) website there are twice as many sexually transmitted diseases as sexually transmitted infections.

Was STI coined in the UK? Not necessarily, but it's hard to tell. Only sexually transmitted disease (first citation, 1962) is in the OED. Searching Google Books, I find instances of sexually transmitted infection going back at least as far, but there's no clear separation between US (red) and UK(blue) books at the start of the term's history.



Why has STI caught on more in the UK? Some possibilities:
  • A more enlightened approach to sexual health? 
  • Better management of terminology due to the dominance of the National Health Service in delivering patient information and treatment?
  • It fits better with other names for illnesses in the dialect?
In terms of the last point, a first thing to wonder is whether STD is more popular in the US because Americans are more used to calling such things diseases, as in venereal disease. The answer seems to be "no". Venereal disease is and was just as well used in BrE, as far as I can tell.

What about the word infection, is that more common in BrE more generally? The answer is complicated, so I've decided to make that a separate post. It's half-written, so it might even be the next one!

And I leave you with what may be my favo(u)rite disease joke, from Cyanide and Happiness:

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the fourth of July

When I (or a guest blogger) have talked about dates here, it's mostly been about how dates are written. (One exception was about how we say the year.) One thing we've not really talked about is how we read dates out loud.

I've been struck by the mismatch a couple of times when British people have tried to "go American" and put the day after the month. In one case, it was The Telegraph on complained-about Americanisms on the BBC. One of these was July 5. And I thought: but Americans hardly ever say July 5. We write it, but in the context of a sentence we'd pronounce that date as July 5th. Not It's on July 5, but It's on July 5th.

The same happens in BrE. People write 5 July, but they pronounce the 5 as the ordinal version: fifth. People don't go about saying "My birthday is five July". So, I've never understood: when people complained about July 5 on the radio, had they heard someone say July five, or is that their way of writing that someone said July fifth?

It happened again today, when @BoswellAffleck forwarded to me a tweet in which someone else wished Americans a "Happy July 4". Maybe the tweeter was saying that to himself as July 4th, but if I were to write it, I think I'd write "Happy July 4th", since it's in an expression that's addressed to some particular people; not a fact of when something happened, but the name of a day. July 4 might be what I write at the top of a letter, but if I put it in a phrase like that, I think I'd have to write the th in order for it to look like it sounds.
Trumbull's The Declaration of Independence (1819)

It's OK to wish someone a Happy July 4th (especially if you're trying to save characters on Twitter), but it's still not super-idiomatic American English. The holiday that falls on that day has two official names: Independence Day and the Fourth of July. In wishing people a happy one, it's clearer to use the name of the holiday.

British folk sometimes ask me about the Fourth of July. If Americans write the date as July 4 (and 7/4 when expressing the month as a number), why is the fourth in front of the month in this case?

They probably ask about that one in particular because they don't hear all the other times Americans say the date that way. But we do have and use the option to say other dates that way too.  My Englandiversary is on the 6th of January or January 6th. I could say either, but the 6th of January sounds more formal to me. The formality might just be due to the length of it--and maybe particularly that definite the. The is something of a marker of more formal English.

At this point, a table might be a good idea.


today's date AmE BrE
07/04/2016 yes --
July 4th yes sometimes
July the 4th legal contexts yes
04/07/2016 -- yes
4th July -- yes [but more written]
the 4th July -- yes [but more written]
the 4th of July yes yes


I used the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus to check on these (though I used *th instead of a particular number and June instead of July, because the holiday's name would skew the results)--and that's how I found the "legalness" of [month] the [ordinal] in AmE: all of the examples seemed to be from courtrooms or reporting on legal matters, as in "the evidence will prove that Kato last saw the defendant on the night of June the 12th at 9:35 at the latest".

In general, the table shows that each national dialect wants to do something "extra" if it puts the date on the "other" side of the month from that which it occurs in writing the date numerically. If the date is put after the month in BrE, it needs a the. If it's put before the month in AmE, it needs a the and an of. These extra words are marking these expressions as 'not the default way to express the date' in those countries.

In British English, dates like the 4th June are written much more than they're said. More often the pronounced version has the of in it. Not only does the of help to avoid the ambiguity between 'the fourth day in June' and 'the fourth June in a series', it gives the date a nicer melody: spoken English doesn't like to have two stressed syllables in a row. The of breaks up the stressfest.

How did we end up putting the day on opposite sides of the month? It's one of those where American has the older form. It says July 4, 1776 at the top of the Declaration of Independence because that's how people wrote dates back then. Putting the date before the month came to Britain in the late 19th century, influenced by other European countries. (I'm going to assume "especially France", because British English loves nothing more than a bit of Frenchifying.) 

And why is the holiday the Fourth of July rather than July Fourth? I suspect it has to do with that sense of formality that the longer form conveys and the the.  It's not just some date, it's the date.
(I now have The Twelfth of Never stuck in my head.)

For more on why Americans tend to call the holiday by the date, rather than Independence Day, see this article on Slate.


And I can't leave this post without noting Nigel Farage (UK Independence Party) urging
"let June the 23rd go down in history as our independence day". 

First: note that date after the month. Does June the 23rd sound more formal or ceremonial than the 23rd of June in a BrE context? Would love to hear British thoughts on the relative formality of the ways of saying dates.

Second: Whenever I heard the Leave [the European Union] campaigners claiming that date as "Independence Day", I thought: Is that what all this is about? Are these guys just jealous that they don't have a holiday with a [orig. AmE] kick-ass name like the US has?  I'm asking a bit as a joke, but a part of me thinks that it's not far off the mark.

(The timing of the new Independence Day film, opening in the UK on the day after the EU referendum, meant that lots of people were using the film's poster instead of images of actual people fighting for actual independence in the actual world. It is all rather surreal.)

And third, this table. I haven't been able to find who first put it together and posted it  (if you know, let me know and I'll add a credit)--I've seen it on many friends' Facebook pages.

(The table is from Wikipedia, but I'm not sure who added the question and circulated it.)

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Trying to sound cool & British: bollocks!

We've seen other cases before of Americans trying to use "cool" British words--especially slightly "colo(u)rful" words, and getting it wrong ([more used in BrE] viz. wanker, snog). Here's a lovely example from the New York Daily News (which I saw via Oliver Burkeman):



There's a pile-up of Britishisms here: arse (=AmE ass), Mummy (=AmE Mommy), footy (=AmE soccer--or whatever informal equivalent of soccer there is. Socky?). But the sore thumb sticking out here is bollocks (click link to see its Word of the Year discussion). Yes, bollocks sometimes--sometimes--is an equivalent to AmE bullshit in the sense of 'nonsense, (BrE) rubbish'  But calling bullshit on (something/someone) is an American idiom, and you just can't stick new words (especially new words with not-quite-the-same-feel) into idioms. Kicking the pail is not the same as kicking the bucket; a bird in the hand is not worth two in the shrub, etc.

Who knows, maybe call bollocks on will catch on among the readers of the Daily News, and then we'll have yet another case where borrowing a word from one dialect to another brings a reduction in meaning and a change in usage with it. But I'm betting that British readers are hoping otherwise...


P.S. my arse! or my ass! also qualifies as an idiom, but the two dialects share it, albeit with different forms of the word. (See the link at arse above for more of the arse–ass story.)

P.P.S. Yes, there are a few examples of it on the internets. In those cases, taking the US idiom and replacing 'bullshit' with 'bollocks'. But the facts that (a) Urban Dictionary hasn't noticed it, and (b) two Brits on Twitter pointed it out to me as a bad translation underscore that it's a weird usage. 
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hokey-cokey, hokey-pokey

Thursday's British referendum on EU membership (let's not talk about the result) has given American readers cause to wonder about the hokey-cokey (thanks for pointing this out, Emma). Americans know the song-dance as the hokey-pokey. On referendum day, it was a hashtag on Twitter, with gems like these:





 (Click here for a barbershop referendum hokey-cokey.)


Various sources tell origin stories for the song/dance. It may be based on an old British or Irish children's song/game, but it definitely became popular (as hokey-cokey) in British music hall entertainment in the 1940s. The Hokey Pokey Dance was copyrighted in the US in the 1940s, and recorded in the 1950s as the Hokey Pokey.  And of course there were legal battles.  I'll refer you to Fraser's Phrases on BBC America's Anglophenia for more of the story.

Sometimes it's also known as The Hokey-Tokey. Maybe particularly in New Zealand where Hokey-Pokey is a flavo(u)r of ice cream.

The tune is the same, but the lyrics (and therefore actions) may differ a bit.  I can only tell you about where I grew up in the US and where my child is growing up in the UK, and there might be local variations.

Here's a Hokey Pokey:




And here's a Hokey Cokey:

The differences in these are in line with my experience, that the "knees bent, arms stretched, rah-rah-rah" part is not used in the Hokey-Pokey, but is generally found in the Hokey-Cokey.

Any other good #hokeycokey tweets or jokes to share? Or school dance horror stories? I need some cheering up...
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surgeries, constituencies, MPs

American readers/tweeters have been getting in touch to wonder about the use of surgery in reports like this from the BBC and other UK sources.
Jo Cox 1974–2016
From the Labour party website

Mrs Cox, 41, is the first sitting MP to be killed since 1990, when Ian Gow was the last in
a string of politicians to die at the hands of Northern Irish terror groups.
The man taken into custody was arrested in Market Street, not far from Birstall Library where Mrs Cox was holding a constituency surgery.

I touched on surgery back in the post about physician's titles, but I didn't cover all its uses.  Oxford Dictionaries Online gives the relevant British senses. (This is sense 2, after the general-English 'invasive medical procedure' sense.)

2. British A place where a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner treats or advises patients.
2.1 [in singular] A period of time during which patients may visit a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner for treatment or advice: Doctor Bailey had finished his evening surgery
2.2  An occasion on which an MP, lawyer, or other professional person gives advice.
So, you can go to a doctor's surgery (AmE office) during her surgery (= consultation hours). Elected representatives also hold surgeries at which constituents can come to discuss whatever's bothering them. These can be held at their office, but are often at some more public or accessible place, like a library. In my parliamentary constituency (approx. AmE congressional district) the MP has held a surgery on a bus as it goes about its normal route.

By extension, surgery is used for many kinds of meetings where someone offers expertise to someone else. Schools and universities have writing surgeries, there are knitting surgeries and bicycle surgeries, events where you can drop in and have a problem diagnosed and get help in fixing it.

In US news, I've seen surgery translated into meeting. In the back of my mind, I have a recollection that there are similar things to MP's surgeries sometimes in the US, but I can't for the life of me think of (or find) the terminology. Can anyone help?

I've translated constituency above to district, but let's be clear that AmE does have the word constituency, it's just more likely to refer to the people than the place, in my experience. In the GloWBE corpus, there are nearly four times more British uses of the word constituency than American ones.

I tweeted this on Thursday: 


And, of course, the response was requests for translation of MP, which is more familiarly Military Police in AmE. (I think I --and maybe others of my generation-- just know that because of M*A*S*H.) It stands for Member of Parliament, which is kind of like AmE congressperson, or member of Congress. I should say: it's not straightforward to translate parliamentary terminology into American terminology. This one isn't too bad, but when Americans call the Prime Minister the President it's a bit of a sin. The PM is the head of government. The President is the head of state. (So some countries have both.) In the UK, the reigning monarch is the head of state, but the powers of the monarchy are severely restricted--so, as I say, it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to translate the terminology. The president isn't like the queen, but neither is the office the same as the office of Prime Minister. So, simple translations don't get you very far if you want to understand the context of news stories. 

I only first heard of Jo Cox this week, but, wow, she was something special. I can't say anything more about the subject without dissolving into a state of abject despair.
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the c-word and gendering mansplaining

In 2011, Douglas Bigham asked me if I'd write a piece about "the c-word" for the Popular Linguistics website, which he was trying to get started at the time. He observed:
It *seems* to me that "c---" is less gendered in the UK, but can only be directed at a woman in the US.
(He didn't censor the word, but I have. I'd say it in a linguistics lecture, but putting it on a page is a bit too in-your-face for a blog that wants to be used in schools. I think I've screwed my chances with the nanny software already, though. Of course, I'm talking about the word that's an anagram of the name of a certain Danish king.)

The article never happened (I'm sorry!) and the site closed (I hope unrelatedly, but I will admit my contribution by non-contribution, if necessary). But today I am moved to write a bit about the word because of this (slightly censored for this blog) message I got on Facebook this morning:




I will come back to why I got this message and why I've hidden his full name. Let's just deal with the BrE/AmE difference first.

This message looks like it's from the USA (and his Facebook profile agrees), because he called a woman a 'dumb c-'. Looking at the GloWBE corpus, there are two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine. This is not to say that it can't refer to either sex in either country, but there are definite different tendencies, and they give the word a different feel in the two places. The shift from feminine to masculine in BrE is (of course) part of a more general tendency to use words for women (or our parts) as the ultimate way to put down a man. Which just sums up the status of womanhood in our culture rather neatly.

(The data for stupid c--- are a bit more mixed, but still tending toward(s) AmE=female, BrE=male. And, as we've seen before, the nationality of GloWBE data is probably 15-20% corrupted by the internationality of web data.)

In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like. The statistical analysis in the GloWBE corpus marks it as a particularly British word, with 1634 British uses to 467 American ones. The statistically "most British and not American" words to come before it are that, fat, black, some and the. (The American data shows up no 'strongly American' collocates.) That shows us that it's often used referentially in BrE--i.e. to talk about people rather than to address them directly, as in "Some c- of an economics analyst on BBC News 24 just tried to equate...".

The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans. And it does offend. For me in my American state-of-mind, only certain racial insults are viler than this word. It was a very long time before I could say it out loud at all (I don't think I ever even heard it till [AmE] college/[BrE] university), and I am not usually one who is shy about words.

But the intent with which words are uttered is what really matters and this reminded me of something else that happened recently:
This was in the UK, and what the man yelled (really aggressively at a woman in an open-windowed car) was "YOU STUPID COW". While cow isn't a taboo word, it can be used very aggressively (and also often playfully) to refer to women in BrE. (Worth noting here that everyday life in the UK provides ample evidence against the American stereotype that the English, as a people, are polite.)

I wouldn't claim that  cow got started as a substitute for the coarser anatomical word (women have been insulted by all sorts of animal names for centuries), but I think that in cases like this road-rage incident there's a link. The former c- word for women is now used for men, but cow provides a similar articulatory gesture.

I've seen lots of cases of women reclaiming the c-word as an anatomical term, but less so reclaiming it as a word for people, rather than people-parts. (Compare the word for a female dog, which has been reclaimed often as a word for women showing strength of character in the face of sexism.)

a bit on the mansplaining...

I'd like to say a bit about what led to this point. It started when the Linguistic Society of America shared a link on its Facebook page:

 

That's a bad piece of  (AmE) subhead /(BrE) standfirst writing. What it means is that studies are equivocal about whether bilingualism helps cognitive development. What it says is that there might not be any advantage to bilingualism. Linguists know well about these debates, and so I posted an ironic comment on the article:
"not show any real benefits"? Like speaking two languages isn't a real benefit?
I later added a smiley face. But without the smiley face  Mr Jason, above, felt the need to explain to me that there are studies that have said that there are cognitive benefits of bilingualism and other studies that have said there are not. (He deleted his explanation before I received his personal message.) I went back-and-forth in my mind a bit about how to respond to it, and I went with this comment-reply:
Sorry, is this what they call 'mansplaining'? It was a critique of the phrasing. I do know this. I do teach it!
And in the morning, I got the private message you see above. Before reporting him to Facebook and blocking him, I did get a look at his public profile. According to that, he had studied English Applied Linguistics at a Wisconsin university less than 10 years ago. I am not including his full name here, because, honestly, it's not worth whatever further abuse he might be willing to give. I have once before received a very similar Facebook message from another  young man (that one in Ohio) after I beat him repeatedly on an online game and he accused me of cheating. (I no longer play on-line games against people I don't know.) I know a male Scrabble champion who gets such cheating-accusation abuse all the time. All they needed to do was google his name to know how silly their accusations would sound. But that seems to be expecting too much of some people. So here are some helpful rules if you want to insult people on the internet.
Rule #1 for insulting people on the internet: find out who you're insulting first.
Rule #2 for insulting people on the internet: don't insult people on the internet.
(I bother with rule #1 because you might learn something interesting. )

Now, you might say here that I did not follow rule #2. I would disagree that I literally insulted, though I will admit that it seems to have had the same effect. I used the word mansplaining in order to call out a behavio(u)r. I did not call the person anything. Maybe that one needed a smiley-face too.

I had weighed whether to call it mansplaining (and even when I did, I did so indirectly), but in the end I went with it (and even got a 'like' and a supportive message about it). I've posted this Jason's message on my Facebook page and have been discussing it with my friends this morning. One (male) friend, whil{e/st} being sympathetic to my situation and angry on my behalf, said
this is why I'm not a fan of the word 'mansplaining'. Let's not taint the name of a whole gender because of these morons.
And I've got mixed feelings about that. I replied (in part):
I have had my joke explained to me three times and it has been by a man each time. Any genitals-free behavio(u)r can be done by anyone, sure, and I have used 'mansplain' at least once of a woman, but that doesn't mean it's not gendered behavio(u)r. Just like I argued two weeks ago(?) that I felt it important to call out creepy behavio(u)r as 'creepy' I think this needs to be called out for what it is. [...C]alling it out with the 'man' is to acknowledge male privilege, and I think men (and whites and straights) need it pointed out once in a while that they are coming from a position where they've assumed some things based on that privilege. I 40% agree with you, but I 60% agree with me.
The creepy thing relates to another debate with my Facebook friends. When an inappropriate appreciation of my photo was posted in the '10th blogiversary' post, I went back and forth a bit about whether to just delete the comment or to thank him for the other part of the comment, followed by "but let's keep it non-creepy, please".

In that case I got a mix of advice in both directions. I put up the "thank you for your kind comments on the blog, but please let's keep it non-creepy" comment and deleted it almost immediately (I don't know whether the post will have gone out to people who were following the thread by email) and then deleted his comment (because I do have a comments policy and I just didn't want to spend my time debating it with strangers). I found it interesting that several female friends suggested paraphrases of the comment (mostly without the warm thanks part) that changed creepy to inappropriate or that asked for "no personal comments, please" or that I not post a photo of myself. I reacted to those suggestions [in part] with:
I don't mind personal comments. I don't like creepy comments. If I'm going to [comment on] it, I'm going to say 'creepy'. [...]  'Inappropriate' doesn't tell him what was inappropriate about it. Creepy does. Some guys don't reali{s/z}e what creepy is [...]

I post pictures to be more human. Having a face isn't an invitation for somewhat sexual comments about it. I do have a comments policy where I say that I reserve the right to delete things that aren't in the spirit of helpful conversation. But I'm not interested in banning comments about appearance. If someone says "You look just like one of my cousins!" or "I think your hairstyle has got more British while you've lived there" (I don't think it has!), that can be a bit of fun.
So, as I said above, I 60% think that when unfortunate behavio(u)r is gendered, it's important to point out the genderedness of it. That way, you hope that the person who's creeped you out, or exasperated you, or insulted you might go ahead and think about their sociali{s/z}ation to act in this way and to maybe pause to think a bit more about the things they've been led to believe about the world.  Maybe before "helping"  someone who's said something that they think "needs help", they might pause to wonder whether there's another possible interpretation of what she's said (it could have been a joke) or whether she might know more about the topic than you do.

The act of explaining things to people who don't need an explanation can be done by any gender of person to any other gender of person, sure. And it is usually done with no malice. But there's a reason it's been called 'mansplaining' and it is exhausting. Women get their jokes misunderstood or explained to them because there is a cultural assumption that women aren't funny. Many men (in many cultures) are put in positions from childhood where they are listened to, treated as authority, expected not to keep quiet and play along. And so on and so forth.

The main reason not to call out genderedness of gendered behavio(u)r (the other 40%--but it's important to note that my 60/40 split sometimes reverses) is that it makes people defensive when they're treated as a phenomenon and not an individual. And so they might not learn. But if the genderedness isn't pointed out, then they might not consider everything there is to learn there. I tweeted my ironic comment (my joke, if you will) as well:


At the time I'm writing this, 30 people have retweeted it, and 80 have 'liked' it, so I think many are getting the joke. But another three men have tweeted back to 'explain' the line about 'no real benefit of bilingualism' to me. Another follower called one of them out for mansplaining, and the explainer protested that he hadn't mansplained--he just hadn't read the article. So to him, explaining an article you haven't read to a person who has read it (and made a joke about it) isn't mansplaining. To me it is a perfect example. But it may well be the naming of it as a gendered behaviour that (apparently) kept him from thinking more deeply about the matter. This is why sometimes my 60/40 thinking flips to 40/60. I could try to deal with the situation by saying "let's all be good humans and treat each other with respect", and that's what I want in the end. But I think it's hard to think about what "being a good human" means without being able to reflect on sexist privileges, beliefs, and behavio(u)rs. If you've grown up male (and comfortably masculine) in a culture where masculine power and the masculine point-of-view is the default, then your perspective on what it means to be treated badly in that culture starts from a position with a limited view.

Of course, the other reason not to point out sexism is that there are a lot of scary men out there. They send threatening messages. They call the other scary trolls' attention to you. And in Jason's land they're allowed to own guns. America has become a violent opera about the dangers of damaged masculinity. It's a complete Catch-22. Don't call out sexist behavio(u)r, and sexist behavio(u)r is allowed to thrive. Point out sexist behavio(u)r and you might have to live with more (and worse) of it.

(I'm sticking to sexism here, but I think the argument and the dangers are fairly transferable to other kinds of discriminatory structures and behavio(u)rs and the privilege they create. But that might not be for me to say!)

In case you are ever accused of mansplaining or any other kind of unhelpful 'splaining, here are some responses that you might consider:
"Whoops! Sorry about that!"
"It hadn't occurred to me that I was doing that, but thanks for pointing it out."
"Fair enough. Never mind!"
"Hm. That's given me something to think about, thanks."
If you use the last one, please note that you can do the thinking without involving the person who felt mansplained-to. Don't expect them to give you a sticker for working it out. Don't expect that they want an argument about why what you did wasn't really mansplaining. Just take it as someone else's observation on your behavio(u)r. (You don't even have to reply at all on social media.) And then, if you want to be helpful, try to see it from their side.

on  irony

And, yes, it's dangerous to try to achieve irony on the internet. Next time, I'll try to remember the smiley face. British people often comment on Americans' alleged inability to interpret ironic statements (here are two old posts about that: one two and a BBC piece on the matter). There are definite regional differences in this, however, and that may have been a factor here.  I'm a northeasterner. (It may also be relevant that I'm an academic.)  I do irony, and I enjoy it when others enjoy it too.

p.s. avoiding mansplaining

I forgot to add my easy mansplaining-prevention tips for any gender:
  1. If you feel the urge to explain something (especially to a stranger, especially on social media), pause to ask yourself: was I asked a question? 
  2. If you were asked a question, consider: might this be a rhetorical question?
  3. If you weren't asked a non-rhetorical question, there is no need for you to explain.
Regarding the second item: it's not a bad idea to avoid rhetorical questions in writing.
Regarding the third item: this doesn't mean you can't have a conversation about the topic. But rather than trying to explain, you could ask a question and find out more about the other person's relationship to the topic. You could say why you too think the topic is interesting. There are many things you could do that don't involve making yourself seem like a mansplainer...

p.p.s. I've reali{s/z}ed that you can't search for this post on the blog because I've been coy. So: cunt.
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Book week: You could look it up

And so we come to the end of Book Week. There may well be other books that I'd been sent at some point or another, and if I find them, I may stick in a book post here or there. But I'm ending with a book that I cannot wait to read, but that I have to wait to read because of other work-related reading commitments. So, the main thing I'm going to do here is call attention to it and talk about why I want to read it, because it's probably more useful to the author and publisher if you know about it now rather than knowing about it later...

Free book 9: You could look it up by Jack Lynch

The subtitle of the book (or maybe its tagline) is The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. A history of reference books--swoon!

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When I went to the States in April to do research for my 'Dictionary Cultures' project, I had just received this book, and though I was excited to read it, I had just started Rosemary Ostler's Founding Grammars (which I'd actually paid for). It was much less bulky than Lynch's book, so I stuck with Ostler (a good read if you're interested in the role of grammar books in American history), and left Lynch behind. Then I kept meeting people who said things like "Have you read Lynch's book yet?" and "You know Jack Lynch, right?", and I had to say "regretfully, no" to both. (Though I certainly knew of him. He's also written The Lexicographer's Dilemma. He's a clear and entertaining writer.)  The praise the book was getting from lexicographers I was meeting only made me more eager to read it. 

I'd gone to the US in April because that was the most convenient time for me to go family-wise, but it was not the most convenient time to go project-wise. So when I got back, I had to put dictionaries aside for a while (they're in chapter 9 of the book I'm working on, I haven't got past chapter 5 yet). And so Lynch's book is sitting there, waiting for me to get past the catch-up reading lists I have for intervening chapters.

I have allowed myself the prologue and the table of contents. Look at the chapter listing --it has half-chapters! I am charmed!



The structure is to look at 50 great reference works. Lynch admits this is a love letter, and possibly a eulogy, as printed reference books fall by the wayside. (Just yesterday I was admitting to not using mine.) The tone, at least as far as the prologue goes, is warm and personal. Now I want to read it now even more. 

So, have any of you read it?
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Book week: Collins dictionary & Punctuation

I missed a couple of my promised 'post a day for Book Week' posts because I was running a fantabulous event (if I do say so myself) called Doing Public Linguistics. The event was about linguists doing things like I do here with the blog—engaging non-academics in the work we do as academic linguists. One of the best bits of the day was when Geoff Pullum (speaking about his involvement in Language Log) gave us their motto for how to deal with media stories about language: "We can fact-check your ass". It's what I do, but I'm glad now to have a motto to go along with the doing.

Now back to books!

Free book 7: Collins English Dictionary, 12th edition

The beautiful cover
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One of my hobbies: looking up words that start with nid-
I'm grateful to the Collins people for sending me a copy of the latest edition of their beautiful dictionary. Collins is one of the dictionaries I regularly use for checking BrE facts. It's also now the basis for the  Official Scrabble Words used in the UK and most of the rest of the world, so I know its two- and three-letter words intimately.  (Scrabble is owned by a different company in North America, so it's been hard to standardi{s/z}e our ways of playing.)

It claims to be the most inclusive single-volume dictionary of English (any English? I'm not sure). One of the marketing points for this edition is that it includes more words without making the dictionary bigger. Looking at the pages, you see why. It is crammed with print. It's also, as they go, a fairly encyclop(a)edic dictionary—including a lot of proper names of places and people. (Don't try playing them in Scrabble.)

I think the binding is beautiful, but the truth of the matter is that despite their gift, I still mostly use the online version. Since I'm mostly on the computer when I need to use a dictionary, it just makes sense. I also haven't found that this paper dictionary is particularly easy to find one's letter-place in.

I will be using the print edition when I get a bit further into the research I'm doing on American and British Dictionary Cultures, and I look forward to doing so!

Free book 8: Punctuation..?

User Design sent me this book after asking if I might like to review their new book. I said 'okay', received the book. Three weeks later, they emailed me to see how the review was coming along—and that was part of what inspired me to do Book Week and try to salve my conscience about all these free books. But instead of reviewing theirs immediately, I wrote back with a question: why was I told this was a new book, when it was published in 2012 (as an improved second edition)? A week later, I still don't have an answer to that one. The other mystery is why the title of this book has been punctuated with a combination of marks that's not found in the book itself.

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The book introduces each of the punctuation marks with little cartoons that illustrate  examples of the marks' "correct" use. And when I say 'each of the punctuation marks', I mean above and beyond the usual expectation. They've got guillemets (the «  » you might see surrounding quotations in French texts), the interpunct · and the pilcrow ¶. Still, they don't have my fave, the swung dash:

I'm not 100% sure who the book is for. It claims to be age-non-specific, and suggests it be given as a gift. I suspect it would be best given to designers, as they need to know a bit about punctuation, including things like interpuncts and pilcrows, but they don't need to know a lot. A telling quotation is:
"An almost identical character to the forward slash is the fraction or division slash (/) but with more of an angle, it is used to make fractions" (p. 20)
Who but a typesetter would need to know the difference between a forward slash and a division slash? Where do I find a division slash on my keyboard? And, most importantly, why are these two sentences separated by a comma, rather than a full stop or a semi-colon?

It's definitely a pretty little book, but from this blog's point-of-view, it commits a major sin: it claims to give "the correct uses" of these marks, but never acknowledges that these are only the correct uses in certain places and in certain styles. You could say that the hints are very strong that this is about British punctuation, since it talks about full stops (not periods) and exclamation marks (not exclamation points). But I'd say that's not enough. Readers may be able to identify that the American names aren't there, but they won't (unless they're well versed in these things) necessarily know that what's been claimed as "correct" is only correct so far as some stylesheets in Britain are concerned. (General ignorance that there is a transatlantic difference was what allowed Eats, Shoots and Leaves to be a US best-seller.) Without qualification, the book tells us that you don't put a full stop after Mr or Dr or within an acronym like USA. The one place I noticed such a much-needed qualification was in the discussion of quotation marks, where there is an "In the UK," qualification. That's something, at least, but we're not told what happens elsewhere. (You might say: "that's ok because it's a book for British people". But then I'd ask: then why did we need to know the difference between French and German practice in the guillemet section?) At the back of the book, we are told that initial reference for the text content was the Oxford English Mini Dictionary, 5th edition. Oddly, the book neither uses nor mentions the Oxford comma.

So, if you know a British designer who needs a handy reference for the difference between en-dashes and em-dashes, this might be a cute little gift. But for people who need more practical information beyond what you learned in primary school (e.g. which lists of prenominal adjectives get commas and which don't? how many spaces after a full stop? should you ever capitali{s/z}e the first word after a colon?) and global outlook (e.g. how do Americans use quotation marks?), you probably need to look for something else.
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Book week: One language, two grammars?

Book Week continues...

Free book 6: One language, two grammars? differences between British and American English

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A lot of the interesting work about British and American English these days is not coming from Britain or America, but from the home countries of other Germanic languages. This collection, edited by Günter Rohdenburg and Julia Schlüter is a case in point; German, Swiss, and Swedish universities are better represented in the table of contents than the US or UK. The 19 chapters cover a range of topics--many of which I've not got(ten) (a)round to posting about here, with a few exceptions (like this one). 

I won't try to go through all of the chapters here--you can read the table of contents at the publisher's (Cambridge University Press) site. The book tests the sociolinguistic aphorism that "accent divides, syntax unites" by taking a much closer look at the patterns of language use and grammatical change in these two major varieties of English and questioning whether there are more differences than first meet the eye. In summing up the findings, the editors note that generalizations about grammatical differences "remain confined to system-internal, intrinsic tendencies" (p. 5). The four generalizations they make are:
  • AmE has "greater tolerance and inclination" (p. 5) toward(s) the structures of colloquial speech, with California setting trends, while the east coast is more conservative. BrE is comparatively more formal (in writing--most of the work here is on written corpora. That they find these differences in writing is interesting because in general there's a pull toward similarity in writing, difference in spoken forms). 
  • AmE exhibits a pull towards(s) regularization of patterns in both morphology (e.g. how past tenses or plurals are made) but also in syntax--for example, using more comparatives (which can be applied to any adjective) where -er ones might be possible (in Britta Mondorf's chapter).
  • AmE tends more toward(s) explicitness. While the same things are grammatical in both varieties, AmE users often choose forms that put a lighter cognitive load on the hearer/reader or they add clarifying information, where BrE users tend to leave more implicit. (I have to say, I found the evidence for this a bit too mixed to be totally convinced by, but I often feel it true when reading British writing--things like leaving off that in relative clauses and lower use of commas seem to make the reading harder going, requiring more sentence restarts. But I can't know whether that's just me. A colleague and I once discussed doing an eye-tracking study on this, but then our eye-tracking contact moved away. Anyone want to eye-track with us?)
  • AmE "shows a more marked tendency to dispense with function words that are semantically redundant and grammatically omissible". This is kind of funny considering how many complaints I listen to about Americans having of in things like off of the sofa or how big of a catastrophe, not to mention the greater British tendency to leave off that in relative clauses (e.g. The sofa (that) I sat on). But the evidence here comes from lesser use of reflexive pronouns (e.g. acclimate/acclimati{s/z}e (oneself) to) and not using prepositions after certain verbs (e.g. protest), both of which are discussed in chapters by Rohdenburg.  
Another general theme of the book is discerning the evidence for colonial lag, the idea that language changes slower and older forms remain preserved in colonial-type offshoots of a language. There's not much evidence for that lag here--but it's also not the case that AmE is always the innovator.

This is a book for academics, really. If you're an editor wanting more insight on which prepositions to put with which verbs, you want Algeo's book in the same series.

This is another book that I've had for an embarrassingly long time (published 2009) before reviewing it. The main reason for this lag: my god, this book is heavy. They sent me the hardcover, and it is shockingly heavy for 461 pages. I tend to do book-review reading on plane or train journeys, and when there's a heavy book to do, I often photocopy a chapter at a time to take on the journeys, so I don't break my back. I couldn't stand to do that for this book because it saves its bibliography for the very end, rather than at each separately-authored chapter, and I hate reading chapters without bibliographies. The other little complaint that I have to Cambridge University Press (publisher of many fine books!) is the re-starting of section numbering in each chapter. Yes, this is really (BrE) anorak-ish/(orig. AmE) nerdy and minor, but if a book has lots of section 5s when I'm looking for section 5 of chapter 12, it would be so much easier if it were marked as section 12.5.

But never mind the physical flaws, it's a really interesting book!


---

A post-script: I've just discovered that I've double-reviewed one of this week's books! Re-inventing my own wheels. No wonder my to-do list doesn't get any shorter...
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Abbr.

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