Separated by a Common Language

in (one's) stride, at (a) pace

Nov 11, 2024

This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table, ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema/(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the wherewithal to support it, click!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelwithaclause/rebel-with-a-clause

Now back to our (somewhat) regularly scheduled grammar-gazing.

to take (something) in (one's) stride

Ellen asked on social media whether people say take it in stride or take it in one's stride:

When I see a split like that, I think dialects.

The version with a possessive pronoun, to take in one's stride, is the more British (and non-North American) version:

And the shorter version, to take in stride, is the North American:

The phrase is a metaphor from horse racing. As the OED defines it:

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

It seems to come from the UK in the early-mid 1800s, and then takes off in its possessiveless form in 1930s US. (The possessive-ful lines are low in the following graph because I had to choose just one possessive form to search—I chose his for the illustration because it's the most frequent in this phrase in Google Books.)

It's not clear to me whether AmE speakers back then were familiar with the racing expression. If not, then the expression might not have been recogni{s/z}ed as metaphorical, and therefore might be more likely to change.

But then again, I'm not sure the possessive is absolutely needed—you wouldn't take something in someone else's stride. So maybe Americans dropped the possessive in both literal and metaphorical usage. A horsey person might have to tell us.

at (a) pace

At pace (meaning 'moving fast') is a similar expression—a prepositional phrase involving a noun that alludes to walking—and it has no possessive or other word introducing it. But that doesn't help us explain the American loss of the possessive in in stride, since at pace is a more British and much more recent expression.

An older version has the indefinite determiner: at a pace. That's found in similar numbers in AmE and BrE. And then there's the very old (Middle English) expression apace, which means much the same thing and sounds much like at pace. It's possible that at pace is an eggcorn for apace, or that it's at a pace without the a, or maybe it's a bit of both—i.e. different people have come to the same form from different angles.

why?

So we have two phrases that originally had a determiner* (a possessive pronoun or an article) between a preposition and a noun for a stepping action, and in just one place (but not the same place) the expression has been getting shorter. Why? Well, the basic answer is: language changes and it doesn't ask anyone's permission. If it changes in one place it doesn't need to change in the other. And for set phrases like this, change is likely to be piecemeal. Just because one phrase loses its determiner, doesn't mean all such phrases will.

Since these expressions have got(ten) more and more figurative over the ages (referring to properties like ease and speed, rather than literal steps or paths), the determiners have had less and less work to do. Since they are unstressed syllables, they're easy to swallow up. So, if they go, we might not miss them, and if they stay they probably won't bother us. C'est la parole.

*You'll see above that OED calls these things possessive adjectives. I don't. They act more like determiners (e.g., a(n), the and this) than like adjectives like good or corporate.

Labels: determiners , idioms , metaphor , prepositions | 9 comments

one-off and one-of-a-kind

Oct 20, 2024

Congratulations to Ben Yagoda on his new book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English! If you like this blog, you are going to like that book. I was both gobsmacked and chuffed to see that I was among the dedicatees of the book (and in wonderful company). It even has an appendix of my UK-to-US Words of the Year! (And on that note—feel free to start nominating 2024's Transatlantic Words of the Year.)

Ben has been observing the transit of British English words, pronunciations and grammar for 13 years now at his blog Not One-Off Britishisms. So, to celebrate his book, let's look at one-off, the Britishism in his blog title. One-off can be used as a noun or an adjective to refer to something happens once and won't happen again.

Ben's blog evaluates previously British-only expressions that seem to be catching on in American English, and one-off was one he first covered in 2011. In the book, he gives more historical context for both the British and American usage. Google Books charts (nicely redrawn by Eric Hansen in the book) provide a handy view of the trajectory of British words in American publications over time.

In the case of one-off, the first known occurrence of it is in 1930s Britain. It seems to take off in Britain in the 1960s, then shows up in the US in the 1990s, picking up speed as it goes along. Here's the the relevant bit of the book:

Graph showing one-off usage in US lagging behind that in UK.

He also categori{s/z}es each expression as to how entrenched it has become in AmE. In the case of one-off, it's "taking hold."

While Yagoda keeps track of the migration of Britishisms, my (self-appointed) job on this blog is to give American English translations. One-of-a-kind seems a good candidate But is one-of-a-kind American English or General English? And is one-off displacing it at all?

My first stop is the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, whose data comes from 2012:

Now, we don't always hyphenate one of a kind (it depends on how it's being used in a sentence), but this chart at least gives a sense that one-of-a-kind is used proportionally less in BrE, since it has one-off to use instead. In the same corpus, unhyphenated one of a kind is still "more North American," but more gently so: 490 US hits to 320 GB ones.

All of the Oxford English Dictionary quotations for one-of-a-kind are North American too—the first one from 1954 by American art critic Arthur C. Danto. (The first unhyphenated one is from 1977.) The OED does not, however, mark it as an American expression.

Now, one-off and one-of-a-kind aren't exactly the same thing. One-off has a more temporal connotation: it's happened once (and won't again). That said, you could say, for example, that a person is a one-off or one of a kind meaning that they're a unique kind of person.

So is the existence of one-off hurting one-of-a-kind? It happens to be easier to look at the unhyphenated version in Google Ngrams and the hyphenated one in the Corpus of Historical American English, so let's look at both.

First, we can see that one of a kind has been increasing fairly steadily in both AmE and BrE, but it's definitely more American. One-off's appearance on the American scene has not caused one of a kind to become less frequent.

And here's the hyphenated one-of-a-kind in comparison with one-off in American English since the 1940s. American use of one-off has taken off in the 21st century. One-of-a-kind is still used more, but the gap is closing:

How are both of these expressions doing so well? Well, it seems to be because everything in the world has got(ten) more unique. Here's the Google Ngram for unique, going up-up-up in English generally since World War II.

And just for the pedants, here's the chart for more unique:

(I wonder what proportion of the hits for more unique are just people complaining or warning against more unique.)

Anyhow, congratulations to Ben Yagoda on the success of his blog and the publication of his book!
And so many thanks for this kind dedication:

Labels: adjectives , books , Britishization | 9 comments

crochet, boondoggle, scoubidou

Sep 15, 2024

Before the school year started, the 16-year-old and I (BrE) had a day out at a "Learn to Crochet" course. Here's my first. slightly (BrE) wonky (orig AmE) granny square (which, according to this site were once called American crochet in Europe):

a dark pink granny square on a wooden background

The instructor started by warning to always ascertain the provenance of a crochet pattern before embarking on it because the US and UK terminology differ in potentially disastrous ways. In the take-home materials, we were given two charts. One spells out the differences in names of stitches. What's called single crochet in AmE is double crochet in BrE—with (orig. BrE) knock-on effects for other stitches. So, AmE double is BrE treble, AmE half-double is BrE half-treble, and AmE triple treble is BrE double treble.

Crochet abbreviations conversion table: see paragraph above for the relevant difference

Now the obvious question is: how can you get to double without having single first? The answer (according to KnitPro) is that the BrE is describing the number of loops on one's hook during the stitch, and the AmE is describing the number of "yarnovers when pulling up your first loop". Yarn over (the site uses it as one word and two) is another difference according to that site: in BrE it's called yarn over hook. Yarnover is essentially how many actions you're doing to complete the stitch. That KnitPro page has more description.

Let's just pause here and note that crochet is pronounced differently in the two countries because of the general rule that for two-syllable French borrowings, BrE stresses the first syllable and AmE the second one. And then there's what happens when AI gets its hand on the pronunciation:

Lynneguist on bluesky: The main thing I've learned from watching crochet reels is that the automatic voiceover pronounces 'crocheter' as 'crotch-eater'. If you close your eyes and listen to the narration, it takes on a rather different tone.

But back to the charts the instructor gave us. Just as there are differences in measurements for cooking, the measurements for crochet hooks are different in US and UK because of the "Americans haven't gone metric" problem. The US uses letter or number sizes, whereas the rest of the world uses more transparent millimeter measures. So, US size B = US size 1 = 2.25mm. From the chart below, it looks like no one knows what size N or P are.

This alt text is copied from the Craft Yarn Council site and may be a bit different from the picture of the chart from my crochet class: 2.25 mm B-1 2.75 mm C-2 3.125 mm D 3.25 mm D-3 3.50 mm E-4 3.75 mm F-5 4 mm G-6 4.25 mm G 4.50 mm 7 5 mm H-8 5.25 mm I 5.50 mm I-9 5.75 mm J 6 mm J-10 6.50 mm K-10 ½ 8 mm L-11 9 mm M/N-13 10 mm N/P-15 11.50 mm P-16 15 mm P/Q

While knitting stitches generally have the same names in US and UK, knitters have the same problem for knitting needle sizes. You can find more info about these sizes and other conversion problems at the Craft Yarn Council website. (In my experience, new crochet hooks are likely to have both kinds of size printed on them, and online retailers will indicate both. But if you're using older hooks, you will probably need a chart like this.)

Now, this class wasn't really my first crocheting—I'd done straight lines and zigzag crocheting as a child. Also big in my Girl-Scouting (UK Girl-Guiding) childhood was (AmE) boondoggle. Nowadays, this is an American word that can mean 'a wasteful or useless product or activity', often in reference to (more AmE) government/(more BrE) public spending. Originally, it meant 'a trivial thing', from which came to be used for a kind of twisted leather object that Boy Scouts used for fixing their kerchiefs (click link for picture). It then extended to the weaving of flat plastic cords that was a popular craft back when I was a kid.

Screenshot of a google result for a Reddit page titled "You guys remember Boondoggle?! Anyone know any other cool stitches?" with three pictures of maybe 6-inch lengths of boondoggle/scoubidou in different colors

And I thought of that this week when the Google Doodle in the UK was in hono(u)r of this craft (which has apparently had a revival), except it had the BrE name for it, borrowed from French: scoubidou.

The Google Doodle was about "Celebrating Scoubidous". On first reading, scoubidous looked like an adjective to me (SCOUb'dous, that which is scoubi?). Part of the reason I read it wrong the first time (even though I knew the word scoubidou) is that I wasn't expecting it to be plurali{s/z}ed. I use boondoggle as a mass noun, so for me the things in the photos are pieces of boondoggle (or something like that), rather than as boondoggles. I'm not sure if that's just me, and there's too much 'government spending' noise in the data for me to quickly check it. (Happy to hear from other former Girl Scouts on the matter.)

Is scoubidou related to Scooby Doo? Not directly, I think. There was a song Scoubidou in the 1950s, and I suspect that the craft and the cartoon dog were separately named after it. But the dog's name was for some time spelled/spelt Scoubidou in France.

Labels: count/mass , fashion/clothing , French , hobbies , measurement | 23 comments

analogous

Aug 26, 2024

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.

screenshot from examplesof.net

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuəs/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

Analog(ue) = /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/ [dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [ɔ] or [ɑ] & BrE [ɒ])

Analogy = /əˈn*lədʒi/ + -ous = analogious > /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

Analogu(e) + /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + ous = analoguous > /əˈnaləɡjuəs/ [non-dictionary]

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kənˈteɪdʒəs/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdʒəs/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdʒəs/ and AmE /prɛˈstidʒəs/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdʒous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.

(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.
[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.

The moral of the story: soft-g analogous is a bit weird—which is to say, a bit interesting.

If you liked this post, you might like:

-og and -ogue

-ousness

conflab

Labels: adjectives , morphology , pronunciation | 30 comments

graduation

Aug 5, 2024

I'm in the US at the moment, where two of my nephews have recently finished (mostly now AmE in this sense) high school. That is to say, they (AmE) graduated from high school. Though their graduation ceremonies were in June, they are still in the midst of graduation party season—and we arrived in time to attend one of those parties. Invitations are extended to extended family, family friends, the graduate's classmates/friends and their nuclear families. And all family units who attend will bring a gift for the graduate. Back when I graduated, these were mostly presents you could unwrap. Dictionaries were common graduation gifts, and I recall getting a cookbook (orig. more AmE, vs BrE cookery book) and things for my (AmE) dorm room. I also got two handmade dolls, meant to represent me as a graduate—and since I'm at my childhood home, you get to see them. They're looking pretty good at 41 years old.

These days, graduation presents mostly come in envelopes. My first stop on this US trip was at the bank, to get some crisp (AmE) bills/(BrE) banknotes to slip into cards for the two nephews as well my niece, who has a freshly minted BSc in Economics. (If you've read The Prodigal Tongue, you've met her before. She was the niece who had things to say about British bacon.)

High school graduation parties are generally not held in England—partly because there one does not graduate from high school. Graduation is only for those who get a degree from a university. But even when people graduate with a degree, family parties like this are not common. Generally, Americans do a lot more of this kind of party-throwing and gift-giving to mark life transitions (and help out a bit). See the earlier post about showers.

Meanwhile, my 16-year-old (aka Grover) has recently finished secondary school in England. (Her secondary school, as it happens and unusually for England, has high school in its name.) Before school finished, she took 27 exams over 6 weeks in 9 subjects—this is what's known as the GCSEs (General Certificate[s] of Secondary Education). (NB: Many of the educational issues that come up here have been described in previous blog posts—rather than clicking on each link here, you might want to save your efforts for the 'related posts' links below.) Grover won't know her results in those exams till late August, when she'll be able to enrol(l) in the sixth-form college that's accepted her. (Though she's accepted to the college, she won't know until she has her exam results whether she's met the prerequisites for the A-level subjects she's chosen.)

Her status has been difficult to explain to her American family. Sixth-form college is not what Americans think of as college, which would be called university in BrE. In England, sixth-form (and many other diverse things!) counts as further education—after secondary school, but not degree-level study. In an effort to translate her status, she's started telling Americans that she's graduated. Her reasoning for this is that (a) they had a little ceremony in an assembly on their last day of school, (b) she's going to something called college, and (c) she's had a prom (an imitation of the American tradition for these younger students). But since she doesn't even know whether she's passed her exams,* it can't really be counted as "graduating", can it? I have suggested to her that she may be misrepresenting her situation. She doesn't mind. It might yet pay off...

What she is, in Britain, is a school leaver. Instead of getting a mortar board and gown, she got a (orig. BrE) hoodie. (Pic here from an Etsy shop. Grover's hoodie is back in Brighton.)

*Oh, I'm sure she's passed. Whether she's got the prerequisite grades is another matter, so it's all a bit stressful.

PS: While on this holiday, I have missed the University of Sussex graduation. I usually go, but since Grover's school ended early this year, we took advantage of being able to travel before the prices go insane during the (BrE) school holidays. (As Paul in the comments section notes, GCSE students just stop going to school after their last exam—it's very anticlimatic, but it got G out of school about a month earlier than usual. We hung around for the prom in early July.)

So, I want to say: Congratulations to our BA English Language and Linguistics and BA English Language and Literature graduates of 2024! Here's the outfit you didn't get to see me wear.

Related posts:

Types of schools and school years
(the one that's linked-to a LOT above!)

2021 UK-to-US Word of the Year: university

Academic titles and address

And lots of others with the Education label

Labels: education , rituals | 13 comments

conf(l)ab

Jul 15, 2024

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:

The character Shiv Roy on Succession with captioned speech: "Uh, what's the conflab? Boomers versus zoomers?"

I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.

Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old. (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:

The OED marks conflab as 'chiefly U.S.', with its first citation being from Kansas in 1873:

Green marks it as American as well. His 1843 example is from a book published in Philadelphia. BUT before the 1873 Kansas citation, he has who British ones:

So is conflab an Americanism? Well, whatever its origin, it is more British now.

In the News on the Web Corpus, confab occurs 91 times in the BrE subcorpus (0.03 pmw) Conflab occurs 43 times (0.02 per million words)—so 1 out of 3 British conf(l)abs is conflab.

Confab is a much more common word in AmE than in BrE in the NOW corpus, occurring 1,494 times (0.20 pmw). Apparently, it's a popular word among American journalists. Conflab only occurs 4 times (0.00 pmw).

The Corpus of Global Web-Based English shows a similar situation, with confab far outnumbering conflab in AmE, but the L-ful form accounting for over 40% of BrE's conf(l)abs.

What's happened here?

Hypothesis 1: Conflab has always been more British than American.
Hypothesis 2: Conflab started in the US, and subsequently withered there, but not before it had been taken up in the UK.

Hypothesis 1 is semi-supported by Green's early examples, but not much else. The only historical BrE corpus I have quick access to is Hansard, the parliamentary record. That's not going to have a lot of informal language in it. For what it's worth, here's what it has for conf(l)ab(s): a total of 18 without L and 3 with L. The L-less ones get going in the 1900s and the L-ful ones are all after 1950. But I don't think we can make a lot of conclusions based on this particular data.

The Corpus of Historical American English has only one (1850s) example of conflab (and none of conflabs), but over 150 confab(s):

In other words, no matter where it started, conflab never really found its footing in AmE.

We've seen other cases before where something that started in the US was forgotten in AmE but retained in BrE. Of course, saying that, I now can't remember which ones we've said that for, except that it was true of quick-fire (link is to a Twitter/X post). If you remember others, remind me in the comments and I'll start a category tag for these!

PS: Jonathon Green, he of the dictionary (aka Mister Slang), sent me this reply via BlueSky. A big thank-you to him!

Labels: clipping , OrigAmENowBrE , pronunciation , spelling | 15 comments

stodgy and claggy

Jun 20, 2024

I have been asked many times if I've written about stodgy, and I always think I have, because I wrote a post about other BrE -odgy adjectives. I have no idea why stodgy didn't make it into that post, but I'm here to rectify the stodgelessness of this blog.

I remember (early in my time in England) asking an English friend what she meant when she said she looked forward to a bit of stodge. She meant 'a carbohydrate-heavy meal'. It was new to me, and this chart from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) lets you know why: most Americans don't talk about stodge:

stodge in the GloWbE corpus

But stodgy is a different matter:

stodgy in the GloWbE corpus

So how could I not figure out from context what stodge meant, if stodgy be a relatively common word in AmE?

Because Americans typically don't use stodgy to mean 'carb-heavy'. We mostly use it to refer to someone or something that is so conventional or inactive as to be dull. You can see this in the typical nouns following stodgy in the News on the Web corpus. Here are the top 3:

	BrE	AmE
1	stodgy food	stodgy industry
2	stodgy performance	stodgy incumbents
3	stodgy comfort food	stodgy reputation

Stodgy performance (in sport[s]) in the BrE column shows that it can also mean 'dull' in the UK. It's a negative thing when it comes to things other than food, and it can be negative regarding food too. You might feel unpleasantly heavy after eating stodgy food. But stodgy food can also be nice, as I know all too well.

Claggy reminds me a bit of stodgy, and it came up recently when I baked some banana bread for a gathering then overheard a participant describe it as claggy. This again, is a BrEism, which might have become somewhat familiar in the US due to the popularity of the Great British Bake Off (aka the Great British Baking Show: see this old post about that). It means 'having a tendency to clot'—so when it is used in reference to baked goods, it means something like 'so moist or undercooked as to feel gummy or clumpy'.

My thought on having my moist banana bread called claggy: Those who come empty-handed shouldn't throw baking insults, [IrE/AmE] bucko!

I reali{s/z}e I haven't given any AmE equivalents. That's because I felt like these words filled a gap in my vocabulary when I learned them. But if any Americans out there have some good words for these things, do let us know in the comments!

P.S. See the comments re the original 'muddy' sense of claggy. It's also made an appearance in the NYT Spelling Bee: an archive of disallowed BrE words post.

P.P.S. I dealt with this a bit more in my newsletter, including a less-used synonym of claggy, clatty. Related, there is also clarty ('smeared/covered with sticky mud'), which didn't make it into the newsletter, but is discussed in the comments below.

Labels: adjectives , food/cooking | 24 comments

Bedfordshire, the hay, and the sack

Apr 21, 2024

Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to bed, where they've come from and who uses them now.

to Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire, a county north of London, has been a humorous synonym for bed since the 17th century.

Here's what the OED has (in an entry last edited in 1887):

Humorously put for bed.

1665

Each one departs to Bedford-shire And pillows all securely snort on.

C. Cotton, Scarronnides 19

1738
Faith, I'm for Bedfordshire.
J. Swift, Complete Collection of Genteel Conversation 214

This seems not to have made any inroads to AmE. Here are go to Bedfordshire and off to Bedfordshire in Google Books. Of course some of them might literally be about going to the county where Luton Airport is, but it's pretty likely that most are the idiom.

Hit the hay

From Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (via Bad Robot)

Liberman says "the phrase seems to be an Americanism". The OED defines hit the hay and roll in the hay but its earliest citation for hay in this sense is crawl into the Hay (1903); the first hit the hay they have is from 1912 (though, of course, it probably existed in speech much earlier). They also have leaving the hay (P. G.Wodehouse, 1931—English, but a great user of Americanisms) and being great in the hay (Norman Mailer, 1959). This all gives the sense that the hay might have been a more agile synonym for bed than it is today, when most of us are not so used to thinking of hay as mattress material.

Though still more used in AmE, hit the hay is no longer foreign to BrE.

Hit the sack

Sack was a synonym for bed much earlier than hay (1829 first citation). The OED says of sack:

(a) A hammock; a bunk; (b) a bed; frequently as the sack; to hit the sack: see hit v. II.11c. slang (chiefly U.S.; originally Navy).

Hitting the sack doesn't show up in citations till 1943, though, so it was probably influenced the use of hit in other expressions like hitting the hay. Its US/UK usage pattern looks much like hit the hay's:

And others?

I was interested to learn that turn in is from the 17th century and, it seems, originally nautical slang. It comes from a time when sailors slept in hammocks rather than bunks—not sure if that's related. Going that far back, it's common to both Englishes. (Go to) beddy-bye(s) is also found in both Englishes in similar numbers. The first OED citation is from Australia in 1901.

Labels: idioms | 26 comments

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