2016 US-to-UK Word of the Year: gerrymander

In a year like this year, it's no surprise that most of the Word-of-the-Year nominations related to politics, either directly or indirectly (like the 2016 UK-to-US WotY). Several of my correspondents have been noticing Americanisms in British political talk and Britishisms in American political talk. Partly, I put this down to the internationality of journalism. American reporters are in London, trying to make sense of British politics for American readers/listeners, and British reporters are in Washington doing the reverse. And there is cachet going both ways: using a bit of the other country's jargon makes you sound more cosmopolitan--at least that's why I think backbencher made it to the US last year.

This year, the US-to-UK Word of the Year was not just a stylish synonym of an existing BrE word, but a word with no native BrE equivalent. The word is (ta-da!):

gerrymander


To give a 19th century definition of the US-origin term (cited in the OED) a gerrymander is:
a method of arranging election districts so that the political party making the arrangement will be enabled to elect a greater number of representatives than they could on a fair system, and more than they should have in proportion to their numerical strength (National Encyclopedia, 1868)

The name is a blend (or 'portmanteau') of the name Gerry and salamander--as another OED quotation explains:

In 1812, while [Elbridge] Gerry was governor [of Massachusetts], the Democratic Legislature, in order to secure an increased representation of their party in the State Senate, districted the State in such a way that the shapes of the towns, forming such a district in Essex [County], brought out a territory of singular outline. This was indicated on a map which Russell, the editor of the Centinel, hung in his office. Stuart, the painter, observing it, added a head, wings, and claws, and exclaimed, ‘That will do for a salamander!’ ‘Gerrymander!’ said Russell, and the word became a proverb. (Henry Cabot Lodge, 1881)

Though gerrymander started as a noun, today the -ing form is often seen as a noun describing the process. In fact, the first instance of the verb in the OED is an -ing form used as a noun:
1812   Salem Gaz. 22 Dec. 2/4   So much..for War and Gerrymandering.

In the UK, the setting of constituency boundaries is done by a non-partisan commission, so it is supposed to be immune to gerrymandering. But the proposals for 2018 (submitted to the public for review this year) mean that the Labour party is expected to lose a number of seats and the Conservatives gain some. The word came to mind when I looked at the changes to the Brighton and Hove boundaries. It looked to me like it was designed to make it more difficult for Labour and the Green Party to keep their seats in the city. Hove (which goes back and forth between Labour and Conservative) had been  split up so that it swooped over into the part of Brighton that is a Green mainstay. (Just my gut reaction at the time, not trying to make any real claims about the Commission's intention.)

Labour MP Stephen Kinnock called the proposals "a bare-faced gerrymander", resulting in lots of responses also using the term:

The word gerrymander has popped up into British English with some regularity since the late 19th century--whenever boundaries are being re-set. The UK "gerrymanders" are considerably less amphibian-like than, say, the districts of North Carolina. It struck me this year that the word was easily used in headlines, newspaper articles, and blog posts with no explanation--it has become a word that British people are just expected to know.

Given its now-native-but-non-native status in BrE, the dictionary treatments of it are interesting (to me, at least). The OED online still marks it as "U.S.", but Oxford Dictionaries (the same publisher's more 'general dictionary' website) doesn't. Cambridge has gerrymander as a U.S. word only, but has gerrymandering in British. Macmillan has gerrymandering without marking it as U.S., but anti-etymologically has gerrymander as a word deriving from it. Then again, in BrE that might be what happened--the -ing form coming in from America and only later back-formed into gerrymander.


The Google Books ngram chart above gives data only from books, only to 2008. The News on the Web corpus (2010-yesterday) shows that the Google books chart is misleading in terms of how much people actually run into these words in each country:


The .049 per million in British news is steady across time in that corpus, and many if not most of the UK usages of the term are talking about US events. But since many this year are specifically talking about the Boundary Commission Review, with many news and opinion pieces boldly using the word, I'm comfortable making gerrymander the US-to-UK word of the year for 2016. I can't say "Welcome to the UK" to it, but I can say "Nice to see you in Britain".
Read more

2016 UK-to-US Word of the Year: gutted

The day after the US election, it became clear to me that the UK-to-US Word of the Year would have to be the adjective

gutted


The verb to gut is, of course, common to both varieties of English, but in this case I'm talking about an adjectival use of gutted to refer to a feeling of disappointment or sadness that makes one feel utterly emptied. Green's Dictionary of Slang indicates it's been around at least as far back as the 1970s, originally in prison slang.  I blogged about gutted as a Britishism in 2009. Then I shared a story of an American inappropriately understanding its use  in the literal sense 'having had the guts removed', so it hasn't been a common expression in AmE for very long. The events of 8 November certainly put it in American social media feeds. Here are a couple of examples:


Ben Yagoda also noticed it at Not One-Off Britshisms.

The 'devastated' meaning of gutted has been growing in AmE for the last couple of years. A Twitter search today gave me US examples referring to that devastating feeling when the local Chic-Fil-A closes before you (AmE) get off work, when you miss an Ultimate Fighting match, or when you have to give up vlogging. Ok, so some of those would definitely not leave me gutted, but to each their own.

The adjective seemed to come into its own in the US in response to election happenings, when people who had been cruising on optimism for months suddenly felt truly down and hopeless. The New York Times seemed to find it useful:



The etymologist John Kelly, an American in Ireland, noted: 


And I agree. It is visceral. Though it is used a lot in talking about inconsequential things like football (yes, flying my anti-spectator-sport(s) flag again), it's just the right word when events come along and take the wind out of you.

John also mentioned trying out super gutted, but that just doesn't sound right in BrE. Here are some intensifiers that go with gutted, though note that this corpus result includes all senses of gutted. (Hence the large number of American completely gutteds are talking about buildings and the like.) Note that very gutted is also not common.


From GloWBE

I cannot resist ending on this little tweet, depending on the ambiguity of gutted:


Welcome to AmE, gutted!

(Stay tuned for the US-to-UK WotY. I hope to post it on 21 December.)
Read more

try and, try to; GMEU app


Our university's website provides helpful information for students about research and writing. It says things like this:
Another big mistake is to try and write an essay at the last minute.
I look at that and itch to edit it, just like early in my time in England, when my department head sent round a draft document for our comments, and I "helpfully" changed all the try and's to try to's. Imposing your American prescriptions on a learned British linguist is probably not the best idea, and it's one of those little embarrassments that comes back to haunt me in the middle of the sleepless night. I had had no idea that try and is not the no-no in BrE that it is in edited AmE.

I'm reminded of this for two reasons:
  1. Marisa Brook and Sali Tagliamonte have a paper in the August issue of American Speech that looks at try and and try to in British and Canadian English (and I've just learned a lot about the history of these collocations from it)
  2. I've been using this new English usage app and testing it on matters of US/UK disagreement. (Review below.) 

The weirdness  

Try and is weird. I say that as fact, not judg(e)ment. You can't "want and write an essay" or "attempt and write an essay". The try and variation seems to be a holdover from an earlier meaning of try, which meant 'test' or 'examine', still heard in the idiom to try one's patience. Though the  'test' meaning dropped out, the and construction hung on and transferred to the 'attempt' meaning of 'try'.

Though some people insist that try and means something different from try to, those claims don't stand up to systematic investigation. A 1983 study of British novels by Ã…ge Lind (cited in Brook and Tagliamonte) could find no semantic difference, and a statistical study by Gries and Stefanowitsch concluded "where semantic differences have been proposed, they are very tenuous". The verbs be and do seem to resist try and and prefer try to.

There are some cases where try and doesn't mean the same thing as try to, where the second verb is a comment on the success (or lack of success) of the trying:
We try and fail to write our essays. ≠  We try to fail to write our essays.
But in most cases, they're equivalent:
Try and help the stranded dolphin.  = Try to help the stranded dolphin.
Try and make it up to them. = Try to make it up to them.

(If the rightmost example sounds odd, make sure you're pronouncing it naturally with the to reduced to 'tuh'. If the leftmost one just sounds bad to you, you may well be North American.)

Though there are other verbs that can be followed by and+verb, they don't act the same way as try and. For one thing, try and seems to stay in that 'base' form without suffixes. It's harder to find examples in the present or past tense (see tables below). 
? The student tries and writes an essay. 
? The student tried and wrote an essay.
  Compare the much more natural past tense of go and:
The student just went and wrote a whole essay.
So, try and is a bit on-its-own. Be sure to/be sure and is the only other thing that seems to have the same grammatical and semantic patterns.

The Britishness

Here's what Hommerberg and Tottie (2007) found for British Spoken and Written data and for American Spoken and Written.

In the forms that can't have suffixes (infinitive and imperative), BrE speakers say try and a lot more than try to. They write try and less, but in in the infinitive, it's still used about 1/3 of the time.

Brook and Tagliamonte found that BrE speakers under 45 use try and over try to at a rate of about 85%, regardless of education level. But for older Brits, there's a difference, with the more educated mostly using try to

AmE speakers sometimes say try and, but they say try to more. They hardly ever use try and (where it could be replaced by try to) in writing.
Brook and Tagliamonte find much the same difference for British English versus Canadian English.


The "non-standard"ness

Though the try and form goes back before American and British English split up, its greater use in Britain is the innovation here. The try and form only started to dominate in Britain in the late 19th century.

Brook and Tagliamonte note that it's "curious" that BrE prefers try and when it has "two ostensible disadvantages":
  1. it's less syntactically versatile, since it doesn't like suffixation,
  2. it's long been considered the "non-standard" form, repeatedly criticized in even British style guides. 

On the second point, Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage (1947) calls it "incorrect" and "an astonishingly frequent error". However, other British style guides are much more forgiving of it. While the third edition of Fowler's Modern Usage (1996) says that "Arguments continue to rage about the validity of try and", it notes that the original 1926 edition said that "try and is an idiom that should not be discountenanced" when it sounds natural. The Complete Plain Words (1986) lists it in a checklist of phrases to be used with care ("Try to is to be preferred in serious writing"), but it got no mention in  Ernest Gowers' original Plain Words (1948) or the recent revision of the work by Rebecca Gowers (2014). Oliver Kamm's rebelliously "non-pedantic" guide (2015) calls try and "Standard English".  Other British sources I've checked have nothing to say about it. Though it's only recently climbed the social ladder, British writers and "authorities" seem, on the whole, (BrE) not very fussed about it.

American guides do comment on try and. Ambrose Bierce (1909) called it "colloquial slovenliness of speech" and Jan Freeman (2009) calls it "one of the favorite topics of American peevologists". The dictionaries and stylebooks that are less excited about it at least pause to note that it is informal, colloquial, or a "casualism". The American Heritage Dictionary notes:
To be sure, the usage is associated with informal style and strikes an inappropriately conversational note in formal writing. In our 2005 survey, just 55 percent of the Usage Panel accepted the construction in the sentence Why don't you try and see if you can work the problem out for yourselves?
(I can't help but read that to be sure in an Irish accent, which means I've been around Englishpeople too long.)

One hypothesis is that try and came to be preferred in Britain due to horror aequi: the avoidance of repetition. So, instead of Try to get to know, you can drop a to and have Try and get to know. The colloquialism may have been more and more tolerated because the alternative was aesthetically unpleasing.

Try and is an example I'm discussing (in much less detail) in the book I'm writing because it seems to illustrate a tendency for British English to make judg(e)ments "by ear" where American English often likes to go "by the book". (Please feel free to debate this point or give me more examples in the comments!)

Garner's Modern English Usage

And so, on to the app.  The Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU) app is the full content of the 4th edition of the book of the same name, with some extra app-y features. I've tested it on an Apple iPod, but I think it's available for other platforms too. On iTunes, it lists at US$24.99.

Full disclosure: Bryan Garner gave me a free copy of this app in its testing stage.  I've met Garner in person once, when I'm quite sure he decided I was a hopeless liberal. (The thing about liberals, though, is you can't really be one without lots of hope.) He's a good one to follow on Twitter.

Sad disclosure: I received the offer of the free app not too long after I ordered a hard copy of the 4th edition, which (AmE) set me back £32.99, and, at 1055 pages, takes up a pretty big chunk of valuable by-the-desk bookshelf (AmE) real estate. I bought that book AFTER FORGETTING that just weeks before, hoping to avoid the real-estate incursion, I'd bought the e-book edition for a (orig. AmE) hefty $34.99. So, although I got the app for free, I expect to get my money's worth!!

So far, the app works beautifully, and is so much easier to search than a physical book. Mainly, I've used it for searching for items with AmE/BrE differences. I also used it to argue back to a Reviewer 2 who was trying to (not and!) (orig. AmE) micromanage aspects of my usage that don't seem to have any prescriptions against them (their absence in GMEU was welcome). (Reviewer 2 did like our research, so almost all is forgiven.)

GMEU didn't have everything I looked up (see the post on lewd), but that's probably because those things are not known usage issues. I had just wondered if they might be. But where I looked up things that differed in BrE and AmE, the differences were always clearly stated. Here is a screenshot of try and:


Garner's book is so big because it's got lots of  real examples and useful numbers, as you can see in this example. Nice features of the app, besides easy searchability, include the ability to save entries as 'favorites', tricky quizzes (which tell me I qualify as a "true snoot"), and all the front matter of the book: prefaces, linguistic glossary, pronunciation guide, and Garner's essays about the language.

The search feature gives only hits for essay topics and entry headwords. That is probably all anyone else needs. I'd like to be able to search, for instance, for all instances of British and BrE to find what he covers. But I guess that's what I can use my ebook for...

Over the course of his editions and his work more generally, Garner has included more and more about British English, but at its heart, GMEU is an American piece of work. Other Englishes don't really (BrE) get a look-in (fact, not criticism). I very much recommend the app for American writers, students, and editors, but also for British editors, who are often called upon to work on American writers' work or to make British work more transatlantically neutral.



Read more

the maddest in the room


Headlines were made when Wikileaks, in their recent targeting of Hillary Clinton, released a transcript of a private speech by Bill Clinton. British news outlets (orig AmE) zeroed in on a particular passage from the speech for their headlines:




It looks, especially if you speak BrE, like Clinton was making a claim about the sanity level of Jeremy Corbyn (current leader of the UK Labour Party). This is a bit of headline evil.

Three things conspire here to give Clinton's statement an 'insane' interpretation in the headlines and many of the articles:
  1. AmE uses mad to mean 'angry', but BrE doesn't so much. 
  2. The maddest is before the noun.
  3. Some of British newspapers seem to be withholding the American meaning from their readers.
 So let's take those in turn.

1. The difference in mad

Mad can mean 'insane' or 'angry' in AmE, but is not as often used to mean 'angry' in BrE.

It's one of those word-uses that America preserved and Britain threw away. Originally mad was used of animals to mean 'rabid'. By the middle ages, it was used of (non-rabid) people, describing behavio(u)rs like those of a rabid animal: aggression (as if one is angry) or loss of the senses and frenzied behavio(u)r (as if one is crazy). Both senses were brought to America, but by the turn of the 19th century, BrE had mostly stopped using the ‘angry’ sense of mad. It was still around, though, for instance in the King James Bible: “And being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities” (Acts 26:11).

Mad 'angry' was thus one of the first Americanisms that British folk started complaining about. If you think it means 'insane', then using it to mean 'angry' could seem a bit simple, like you couldn’t tell the difference between feeling angered and losing your senses altogether. 

Mad isn't "American for angry", though. Angry is how Americans say angry. The words are near-synonyms, but mad tends to be used in less formal settings. That it's not completely equivalent to angry can be seen in their different grammatical behavio(u)rs, which brings us to...

2. The position of maddest
An adjective can go before a noun (attributive use) or on the other side of a verb from the noun it modifies (predicative use), as in:
  • She's a happy baby.  (attributive)
  • The baby is happy.   (predicative)
Not all adjectives go in both places. We can say the baby is glad (about something), but it's weirder to say she's a glad baby. What you can see from the baby examples is that the predicative use makes happy a less intrinsic property of the baby. She's happy now, but she might not have been two minutes ago and might not be two seconds from now. She's a happy baby seems to say something more general about the baby: she has a good disposition.

Now let's try that with mad:
  • He's a mad person.   (attributive)
  • That person is mad.  (predicative)
In BrE, the 'insane' meaning comes to the fore in both cases, since the 'angry' sense isn't in very active use. In AmE, you're very likely to get the 'insane' meaning in the attributive, but the 'angry' sense in the predicative context. (The 'insane' meaning is also possible--but Americans tend to say crazy when they mean that kind of mad.) This goes along with the point I was making about happy in these positions: the more stable trait ('insane') is more likely to go before the noun than the more fleeting emotion ('angry').

In AmE, like BrE, we're used to a range of mad='insane' phrases with attributive mad: a mad man,  mad scientist, the Mad Hatter and so forth.  MAD Magazine has a "crazy" kind of humo(u)r, (AmE) mad libs is a game of crazy word combinations,  and (AmE) mad money is money that you're free to spend in a crazy way [well, it is now--see first comment for further back!].

Typically, it's easy to disambiguate mad because the 'angry' meaning is directed at something. You are mad at someone or about something. (If you're American and felt that That person is mad meant 'insane', it's because there was no "something" to be mad at in the context I gave you.) We could call it a "two-place adjective": it has a "subject" (the one who is mad) and (loosely speaking) an "object" (the thing that's causing the anger). The 'insane' meaning generally isn't directed--you're insane or you're not insane, but you're not insane at something. That's connected to the attributive/predicative difference as well: you can fit the 'about/at' information into the predicate position (I'm mad at the newspapers), but it's harder to do in the attributive position: The mad-at-the-newspapers linguist is writing this blog.

You can see a similar thing going on with other "two-place adjectives". He's a proud parent is interpreted as 'He is proud of his child(ren)' because parent sneaks in the information about the thing that's causing pride. But in He's a proud person, we get a different interpretation (either 'arrogant' or 'stoic'), because it doesn't tell us what he's proud of

3. Clinton didn't mean 'insane', but the headlines were meant to make you think he did
So, what's going on with Clinton's the maddest person in the room? It looks like it means 'craziest', but...in the full context of Clinton's speech, it clearly doesn't. Here's the relevant passage:
If you look all over the world – the British Labour Party disposed of its most [inaudible] leader, David Miliband, because they were mad at him for being part of Tony Blair’s government in the Iraq War.
And they moved to the left and put his brother in as leader because the British labour movement wanted it.
When David Cameron thumped him in the election, they reached the interesting conclusion that they lost because they hadn’t moved far left enough.
And so they went out and practically got a guy off the street to be the leader of the British Labour Party, who I saw in the press today said that he was really a British citizen and had real British [inaudible].
But what that is reflective of – the same thing happened in the Greek election – when people feel they’ve been shafted and they don’t expect anything to happen anyway, they just want the maddest person in the room to represent them.

Clinton has set up mad as being 'mad at the powers that be', and he's repeating it in maddest to signal that angry people are looking for an angry leader.

The Guardian and Huffington Post UK both used the clickbait phrase "maddest in the room" in their headlines, but at least had the decency to point out in their articles that mad can mean 'angry' in American English (and probably meant so here). The Telegraph and the Independent (which, I'm sorry to say, gets more and more clickbaity by the minute now that it's no longer a print newspaper) used the headline but did nothing to challenge the impression that Clinton had called Corbyn "the insanest".

Wikileaks has been aiming to sow a particular kind of (clearly partisan) chaos. With headlines like these, the newspapers are only helping them to do it rather than taking a responsible position.


And the guy off the street
While we're here... Clinton's guy off the street probably also sounds worse in BrE than in AmE. In AmE the man on the street is the averagely informed person. If you call the person on the street away from the street, they would be a 'man off the street'. That doesn't work quite the same in BrE, where that person is the man in the street. Here's Noam Chomsky using man off the street to mean 'averagely informed Russian':
I don’t know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
A couple of UK readers have suggested to me that they'd interpret guy off the street as meaning 'homeless man', which clearly (to this AmE reader) wasn't what Clinton intended. The news sites didn't help readers to interpret this one either.


And a few notes before I go
I'd been doing well at blogging on a weekly basis, but the US election results threw me off my routine--and not just because it's left me waking in the middle of the night questioning what kind of world I've brought a child into. I'd been asked by the BBC to go up to Media City to be on The Verb with Ian McMillan that week. The brief had been to talk about words of 2016--but not politics because everyone would be sick of politics after the election. I prepared some materials and was on my way up north the day after the election, when the producer called to say "given what's happened, we can't not talk about politics now". So, instead of writing a blog post, I ended up preparing twice for The Verb. If you're interested in hearing it, it's available for listening here for 17 more days.

John Kelly wrote a piece on Slate about how we were talking about the election in the days after it, and he quotes me reflecting on what it was like talking to people at the BBC about it that day.

I've been thinking about what to choose for my US>UK and UK>US Words of the Year. There's a definite frontrunner for UK>US, and there was a frontrunner for US>UK: till I discovered that dog-whistle (nominated by a couple of you) was first (as far as the OED knows) used in Canada, and then made it big in Australia before going to the US. Now, I've little doubt that the UK media/politicians picked it up from the US, so it might still qualify as US>UK WotY. But if you have better nominations, I'd love to hear them. The criteria are that it should be a word from the US that made it big in the UK this year. That usually means that it made a splash in the media somehow. It should be a long-standing word in the US, not one that was invented this year--so that it's really an Americanism that has shown up in the UK, rather that just "a new English word". Please feel free to post suggestions in the comments.
Read more

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

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