Separated by a Common Language

I’ve written about off of on this blog before, in reaction to British complaints about it as a horrid Americanism. In my day job, I’m writing about it again from different angles, so I was thrilled to see that some researchers in Helsinki and Stockholm have undertaken much more wide-ranging and in-depth research about it than has ever been attempted: 

 

 

Their paper, as the title hints at, is very much about getting around the problems of studying the history of and variation within the English language, given the impoverished nature of the data we have. There’s lots of English out there, but it’s not always easy to get a balanced view of it. For example, it’s not enough to know where a work was published, you need to know where its author was from. For another example, if all the evidence you have from Sussex is from farmers and all that you have from Yorkshire is from school teachers, then your regionality conclusions are going to be tarnished by other contrasts. Sometimes data sets give this info. More often you either have to go hunting for it and/or the information doesn't exist.

Vartiainen and Höglund have come to their conclusions by triangulating evidence from a number of corpora, each with their own limitations, but together rather convincing. At one chronological end, they’re using the Early English Books Online (EEBO, 1470s–1690s) corpus and, at the other end, a corpus that is updated daily in the present, News on the Web (from which they only use regional UK news sources). They’ve also included a range of sources for American English.  

Off of only really takes off in the 17^th century. (I won’t go into why that’s so interesting because I have to save things for my book!) In the 19^th century, prescriptivists start saying how horrible it is. British prescriptivists have been more damning of it (“vulgarly superfluous”, “a Cockneyism and incorrect”), but American style guides advise against it too (“much inferior to off without the preposition”). The authors suggest that prescriptive attitudes have colo(u)red linguistic description of the term, and there’s pretty clear evidence of this, I’d say, in a lot of the British writing about it, where off of is presented as something from America. Huddleston and Pullum’s (generally excellent) Cambridge Grammar of the English Language claims off of is only used in AmE. Vartiainen and Höglund show that this just isn’t true, and moreover it never was.  

Off of originates in England and has consistently been used there. What’s striking is how regional it’s stayed. Here are their maps of where it was most used before 1700 and in the 21^st century. It is very much a southern thing.

 

 

This gives a big clue about the presence of off of in AmE: 

They go on to cite examples of off of in the Salem Witchcraft Trials: 

Since then, off of use declined in the US until the 1970s, when it started to go up—possibly as a result of a general tendency toward(s) colloquiali{s/z}ation in written English. It remains mostly a spoken form but has been on the increase in edited text like magazines and newspapers (though not in academic texts). 

While it’s certainly possible that the off of surge in AmE could affect current BrE, the evidence from the British data is that it has always been used there. If AmE is having an effect, perhaps it’s just providing a kind of linguistic mirror that makes the form feel less non-standard to those who are already hearing and/or using it in their regional Englishes. The authors conclude that: 

There remain problems in making direct comparisons of English from different times and places. For example, the AmE corpora include no casual conversation, but the BrE data do. The authors therefore have to be cautious in comparing rates of usage in the two countries, There is some indication that off of is far more widespread in AmE than in other Englishes. In the GloWBE corpus of web-based English (written, but often not as formal as published English), AmE has 26.2 off of per million words versus 21.5 in Canadian English and 8.7 in British. (That data set has not seen the same care as their main data sets, though. It may contain false hits,  probably contains duplications and can’t give a regional picture.) 

 

The paper includes research on the variants offen and offa. I won’t cover them here, but just mention them to say: oh it’s all so complex and transatlantic. 

 

In all, a fascinating read for someone who’s always thinking about function words and transatlantic linguistic comparisons. (That’s me!) I thank the authors for it and American Speech for publishing it. 

 

The comedian Olaf Falafel has made a Government COVID Slogan Generator (play the video and click on it to stop it on a new slogan):

I made you a Government COVID Slogan generator pic.twitter.com/qfCDRrLfzu

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) May 10, 2020

 

As many have pointed out, it's unclear what we're supposed to stay alert for when we can't see the virus or tell who's carrying it. The UK government seems to love to direct its public with three-part  slogans, as we've seen before with "See it, say it, sorted". One reason that the "stay home" message was heeded was its appeal to protect the National Health Service—and the NHS's absence from the new slogan comes at the same time as many are worrying about backdoor machinations to sell off the NHS to private companies. There is the possibility, though that the "stay home, protect the NHS" message needed to be replaced because it had backfired and endangered people by making them reluctant to use NHS services for non-COVID-related problems.

Much more heartening than government messages is the outpouring of NHS-love in the front windows of the UK, where many are putting up pro-NHS messages and messages for other (BrE) key/(AmE) essential workers, with rainbows to cheer us all up. Here's a Google Image search result for "rainbow windows". On the windows, the more common slogan is stay safe.

 

Here's how we did our front window. No slogans, just rainbow:
Stay safe.

 (And if you want to read me railing against the phrase stay safe in American discourse, click here.)

Thomas West recently asked:

AmE/BrE difference of the day: "on the up and up" means "above board, not underhanded" in AmE but appears to mean "rising, on the rise, moving upward" in BrE. Is that right? @lynneguist

— Thomas West (@IntermarkLS) April 16, 2020

I hadn't really noticed this before, but it looks like it's probably a case of an American phrase coming
to Britain and being re-interpreted (which happens now and again—I talk about a few other cases in The Prodigal Tongue and elsewhere on this blog).

The expression originated in AmE in or before the 1860s. It is often hyphenated: on the up-and-up. The OED entry for it starts:

a. Honest(ly), straightforward(ly), ‘on the level’. Originally and chiefly U.S.

1863   Humboldt Reg. (Unionville, Nevada) 4 July 2/1   Now that would be business, on the dead up-and-up.

But then it continues with a second definition that it does not mark as U.S.:

 b. Steadily rising, improving, or increasing; prospering, successful.

1930   Sun (Baltimore) 18 Aug. 6/1   From now on, we are led to believe, law and order will be on the up and up, as the current phrase is.

1937   G. Heyer They found him Dead xiii. 265   He certainly wasn't on the up-and-up when I knew him. He was picking up a living doing odd jobs for any firm that would use him.

1959   Encounter Oct. 25/2   Private travel is on the up and up.

Just the first example in sense b is from an American source—but I really can't tell why they think that either of the first two examples has sense b and not sense a. I would have thought that the first one is saying that the police are going to be less corrupt or disorgani{s/z}ed, and, in the second, I would think that they were saying that he was taking money under the table. But you can see how the two senses can overlap and therefore sense a could morph into sense b, which it definitely has done by the 1959 example.

Sense b comes 50 or 60 years after the first sense, during a time when the UK is getting a lot more exposure to AmE, so it does seem reasonable to think that the phrase came from the US and changed in the UK. The data from Google Books also seem to support this hypothesis:


The b sense is definitely the primary sense in BrE. The (UK-based) Collins COBUILD Idiom Dictionary marks sense a as American but not sense b, and the BBC World Service's Learning English pages give only the 'successful' meaning in their list of up idioms:

To be on the up and up: to be getting increasingly successful.
Example:
His life has been on the up and up since he published his first book. Now, he's making a film in Hollywood.

One of the sources on freedictionary.com explicitly marks the b sense as British:

But all that said, a few commenters on Thomas's original post seem to be Americans saying that they use the 'successful' sense. (I suspect they are younger Americans.) As we've seen above, it's not always clear which one people mean. Looking at a sample in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, though, the sense a meaning predominates:

Click picture to enlarge

Some of the BrE speakers responding to Thomas said that they assumed that on the up and up is an extension of a phrase on the up, meaning 'rising, being successful'. The OED doesn't record that, but there are plenty of examples in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I searched for them followed by a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period, so that I could be sure there wasn't another and up after the first up.)


The examples in this data are often along the lines of "the numbers of X are on the up", so they are clearly about rising numbers and (by extension, often) success.

Now, there is no expression on the down to mean 'decreasing' and the OED hadn't yet noticed the on the up expression, so I have to wonder whether the phrase on the up and up came from the US, got reinterpred in BrE, and then got shortened to on the up (rather than the latter being expanded from the former).  It's harder to get information for on the up in a place like Google Books, because one can't do the punctuation trick and rule out all the examples like on the up grade or on the up line. I had a quick look at the Hansard corpus, the record of UK Parliamentary speech, as that gives a more reasonable amount of data to comb through. None of the examples of on the up before the first appearance of on the up and up (1946) are on the up to mean 'improving'—they are all on the up [noun], using up as a modifier for the noun. The 1946 Hansard example of up and up is used to mean 'growing, successful' (the b sense), as are the subsequent examples (33 of them). The first example of on the up in that meaning is in 1978. So, that is making it look like the phrase was cut rather than expanded in BrE.

Thanks to Thomas for pointing this one out!

And thanks to Jan Freeman and Ben Yagoda for noticing it earlier. I'd forgotten about Ben's post here.

These kinds of experiences have led me to suspect that instead of American spelling taking over, we have another case like -ize/-ise (which, if you want to read some interesting facts about those, I have a book to sell you). That is, because one of the spellings (and not the other) is known by British people to be unacceptable in American English, that spelling is now perceived as"the British spelling" and then applied willy-nilly. In the case of practice/practise, this means that errors are introduced into the British spelling, while Americans (BrE) tootle along with one spelling. 

So, to test what's happening, I looked, as I like to do, for objective evidence—not filtered through my (or anyone else's) biased attention for one type of error or the other in everyday life. To do that, I looked up practice and practise in the British portion of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE), asked it to give me a random sample of 200 passages with each spelling, and then read each and identified any spelling errors (using the British rules). That is, I looked for nouns in the practise data and verbs in the practice data.

The result:

Of 200 British cases of the spelling practise, 65 were misspelled nouns.
Of 200 British cases of the spelling practice, 23 were misspelled verbs.

At the bottom of this post, I'll stick in screenshots of the data so you can see some examples.

Now, I am not convinced that people were ever good at keeping these spellings straight. Some people were, sure, but homonyms have given people trouble since people started standardi{s/z}ing spelling. We'd need some more historical data to see if this is the pattern of error has always been this way. But at least now, at least in this web-based data, there's less evidence of Americani{s/z}ation of British spelling and more evidence of counter-Americani{s/z}ation—people using the spelling they perceive as not-American, even though it's not the right spelling for standard British English.

Before I go: Some people say to me "I didn't know you were in my town! I would have come to see you talk if I'd known!" I keep my talk schedule posted here. If you're in Brighton or London (UK) in the next few weeks or the DC/Maryland area in August, have/take a look at the schedule and see if you can join us! 

Some noun practises on UK websites (click to enlarge)

Some verb practices on UK websites (click to enlarge)

from the Guardian

Today the Guardian reported on a new study by Bruno Gonçalves, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José J. Ramasco, and David Sánchez (you can get the pdf here) entitled The End of Empire: the Americanization of English. There are interesting things to find in this study, but I'm taken back to a panel that Sandra Jansen, Mario Saraceni and I presented on 'problems in predicting the linguistic future' last week in Newcastle. The focus of our talks was how the media present change in the English language and how linguists  sometimes contribute to skewed presentations of past, present and future—taking part in the very linguistic ideologies that academic linguists should be regarding with a critical eye. 


It's perfectly clear that many originally-American words and spelling standards have spread elsewhere. It would be surprising if they hadn't, since the US has a large population that mostly (and mostly only) speaks English, as well as a very big and very international economy. For me, the problem comes

• (a) when "Americanization" becomes the whole story (because life and language are more complex than that),
• (b) when the story depends upon informational/logical fallacies, and
• (c) when that story is pitched as a story of winners and losers (because language doesn't have to be a competition, and because that winner-loser narrative is often heavily dependent on the simplifications of (a)).

Though I've label(l)ed those points as a/b/c, part of the task I have in writing up the paper is that it's hard to pick apart and label those points—they're very interrelated and also they hide a lot of detail. Here was my first draft—a slide from my talk last week. It's called "panic tools" because I am considering how Americani{s/z}ation* news stories might sit within "moral panic" about language change in Britain—a panic that Deborah Cameron wrote about in her 1995 book Verbal Hygiene.

Slide from Is the future American? (Murphy 2017)

Anyhow, I was heartened to see that the Guardian article is by a data scientist, Mona Chalabi, and therefore it did something that popular news articles rarely do when talking about linguistic research—it sounded a note of caution concerning the data sources for the research: Google books data and Twitter.

Both are problematic resources in terms of making sure the data is what you think it is (here's one of many Language Log posts about Google Books metadata). This is not a criticism of the paper—we linguists use what we can to find out about language. But then we give caveats about the data, as we should.

But that note of caution is about where they've looked. There's also what you look for. Neither the Guardian article nor the paper give many caveats about that. The Google Books data was used to see what's happening in the US and UK over time, and the Twitter data to see what English is like across the world, and they searched for a specific list of "American" and "British" spellings and vocabulary.

To give just some examples that deserved more caution (from the paper's appendix of the British and American vocabulary that the authors searched for).

• AmE bell pepper is matched to "BrE" capsicum. But the usual term in British (as in AmE, really) is just pepper or a colo(u)r+pepper (green pepper, etc.) or sweet pepper. Capsicum is primarily Australian English.

Capsicum the GloWBE corpus

• AmE drug store and drug stores are matched to BrE chemist's. Why just the singular possessive? Why no plural? Looking at the same data set as they used (Google Books), it's clear that it's more common to get things from the chemist than from the chemist's. And often (maybe even usually) in contexts in which Americans would say drug store rather than pharmacist—e.g. The boy from the chemist is here to see you. But then, that leads us to another problem: does chemist's really match with drug store, when it also means pharmacist's and pharmacy?

Click here to be taken to the interactive version

And then there are the problems of polysemy (many-meaninged-ness) and variation, for example (but there are many examples):

• The polysemy problem: in comparing BrE draughts and AmE checkers, are we sure that they're all about games? Some of the draughts will be AmE drafts (for beers or breezes). Some of the checkers could be checking things. If the frequency of use of any of these meanings changes across time, then that can interfere with answering the question of what people call the game. Elastic band is given as the BrE for AmE rubber band, but in my AmE, elastic band can be a name for the covered kind you make ponytails with (and then in the US there are also regional terms for both the stationery kind and the hair kind).
• The variation problem: BrE plasterboard is given as equivalent of AmE wallboard, which I can't say I've ever used. It's drywall or Sheetrock to me in AmE. BrE spring onions is compared with AmE green onions (which, since that's the title of a song, might provide a fair amount of data "noise"), but AmE scallions is not included. BrE mobile phones is searched for, but not mobiles—but it looks to me (using GloWBE corpus) that about 1/3 of mentions of such phones have the shorter term. In the US, calling the phone by the shortened name cell looks to be less common than the equivalent shortened British form. So if you compare mobile phones to (AmE) cell phones, you might be missing a lot of BrE. (Then there's the problem of the not-uncommon spelling cellphones, which they didn't search for either.)
• The vocabulary–spelling problem: AmE license plate v BrE number plate. If BrE or another English borrows license plate, they may very well adapt the spelling to their standard, so why not look for licence plate? What does it mean if that's found? Is it an Americanism or not?

All of this is to say: comparing such things is hard to do well.

(If the authors read this and want to correct me on any points in the comments, please do. I may have misread something in my haste.) 

I'd also like to sound a note of discomfort and caution regarding talking about AmE and BrE  "around the world". This involves a leap of thinking that bothers me: that AmE and BrE are used outside the US and UK. To be fair, the authors mostly talk about BrE or AmE forms being used. But for us to claim national ownership of those forms is to take a particular nationalist-political stand on English, I think.

It's a common way to talk about English. People in, say, India or Korea might say "I/we speak British English" or "I/we speak American English". But what people generally mean is "I/we use the British (or American) spelling conventions."

If you're learning English as a foreign language (e.g. in Korea), you may well use learning materials that are from the US or the UK. (Your teacher may well be from somewhere else.) You may aim for a particular kind of accent (though a number of studies show that learners are often not very good at telling the difference between the accent they're aiming for and others). What you speak will be English, but it won't particularly be "American English" or "British English".  You may aim for a certain pronunciation convention, you may get certain vocabulary. But your English has not developed in Britain or America. It's developing right now where you are. It's absolutely related to British and American English. But it is neither of those. (Glenn Hadikin's your linguist if you want to know about Korean English.)

In a place with longstanding English usage, like India, the language has been going in its own direction for some time. The fashions for UK or US spellings may change, and the language will take in new English words from the US and other places, but it also makes up its own, has its grammatical idiosyncrasies, etc. If you look at whether people in India use off-licence or liquor store (as this study did), then you're missing the fact that the Indian English liquor shop is more common than either the American or the British term. (And, interestingly, it looks like a mash-up between American liquor store and the British use of shop for retail places.) I don't know what the alcohol-selling laws in India are, but if they're not like Britain's then the British term off-licence would make no particular sense in India. Instead, Indian English has a nice descriptive phrase that works for India. But what a study like this will find is that there are a few more uses of liquor store in their Indian data than off-licence —who knows, maybe because they're talking to Americans on Twitter or because they're talking about American films in which people rob liquor stores. (Spare thought: are there UK films where people rob off-licences?) The study then completely misses the point that, for this particular word meaning, Indian English is Indianized, not Americanized.

The most interesting thing about the study (for me), but not one that gets a mention, is what happens to their data in the Internet age. After 1990, we see the gap narrowing. This does not come as a surprise to me—this is also the point at which Britain falls out of love with the -ize spelling and starts preferring the -ise one (having allowed them co-mingle for centuries). In the internet age, we also are seeing grammatical changes that set British and American on different paths (you're just going to have to wait some months for my book for those details).

From Gonçalves et al. 2017

This graph is based on Google Books data from the US and UK (or at least, that's what Google Books thinks). The yellow line is BrE vocabulary and the black line is BrE spelling (of the particular vocabulary and spellings they were looking for—which include no words with -ise/-ize). Those lines are fairly steady--though you can see that the two world wars did no favo(u)rs to British book publishing. You can also see dips in the American lines after WWII. The authors attribute this to European migration to the US after World War II.  I'd also wonder about American contact with Britain during the war.

But after 1990, those British lines are going up—the spelling one quite sharply. In the paper I gave last week, I talked about (what I've decided to call) contra-Americanization—British English changing or losing old forms because they look like they might be American. There seems to be a backlash to (perceived and real) Americanization.

I've  congratulated the Guardian author on the note of caution. I don't want to congratulate the headline writer, though. Nor the researchers' title for their paper.

The paper's title, setting the end of Empire against Americanization, implicitly feeds into that "it's a two-way competition" story.

The Guardian headline 'Do you want fries with that? Data shows Americanization of English is rising' includes an Americanism that wasn't part of the study. The implication that Americanization means de-Briticization (which falls out from the competition story) doesn't work for fries. British English now has fries, but it has very Britishly made it mean something different from what it means in America, since in Britain it contrasts with (rather than replaces) chips. But the bigger problem in the headline is that "is rising". Given what we've seen in the post-1990 graph line, is that true?

These kinds of things also raise the question: what is meant by Americanization? Apparently it means non-Americans having the words fries and cookies in their vocabulary. But if those words don't mean the same thing to them that they mean to Americans, what does Americanization mean here?

The moral of this story: talking about "the Americanization" of English makes a lot of assumptions—including that "Americanization" and "English" are each one thing. They ain't.


*I'm too tired to keep up the marking of the s/z contrast here, so I'm going with the z because it's Oxford spelling, good in Britain and America. Don't let any contra-Americanizer tell you otherwise!

Those who follow the blog may remember that in February I was on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth, where fellow guest Matthew Engel and I debated the effect of American English on British English. Engel had written many newspaper columns on the topic, but at that point his book, That’s the way it crumbles: the American conquest of English, was yet to appear. What struck me in that radio conversation was how little Engel appeared to have to say about a topic he’d just written a book about. While he had some examples, he mostly seemed to repeat his claim that American English is "taking over" British English while offering little more than the experience-based perceptions of an Englishman in his seventh decade. He does have much more to say in the book, but he hasn't changed my mind about the topic. (You're not surprised, right?) I'm writing this on my way back from giving a conference paper on the research gaps and logical problems in British arguments that "American English is taking over". While I didn't discuss Engel's book there (my focus was on work by linguists—and media representation of that work), I wouldn't have had to change my argument if I had discussed it.

It's easy to suspect that the conquest in the book's subtitle was the work of his publisher's marketing
department, since Engel states in the preface "Let’s get two things straight right now: this crisis is not the Americans' fault; and this book is not anti-American." (Some of his best friends are American…) Instead, the "crisis", as Engel has it, is mostly the fault of the British, and their "current self-imposed verbal enslavement" (p. 3). Chapter by chapter, the book takes a chronological tour of Britain's alleged "long journey towards subservience" (p. 109). I've written about this slavery trope in an earlier blog post. It seems a peculiarly post-imperialist way of understanding global relationships—if you are no longer the master, you must be the slave.

If Engel is not anti-American (and we do have to ask: is he the best judge of that?), we can still conclude he’s somewhat anti-linguist. A few linguists are cited in the book (mostly for popular-audience works), listed in the references list under the 19^th-century-feeling heading "Philology, etc.". In recalling the path to the book (more on this below), he complains that his work

reached the ears of the online lexicographical community, some of whom have not quite learned the niceties of civil disagreement and disputed my right to offer an opinion at all. One American said it was none of my business because I was not a 'qualified lexicographer'.

This is one quotation whose source Engel doesn't cite, and which I’ve been unable to find in the "online lexicographical community". (I don't know what they'd think a "qualified lexicographer" is. Lexicographers generally have experience rather than qualifications—see the last book I reviewed.)
As for whether linguists and Americans (or, indeed, American linguists) have been civil in their conversations, well, if you start with fighting words, you get fighting conversations. For Engel, there is a contest between American and British words, and it is "no longer a fair one" (p. 66). Americanisms aren’t just words, they're culprits, invaders, garbage. And if you say that about my words, it feels like you're saying it about me.

The lexicographers were loud not just because of Engel’s opinions, but because the "facts" in his newspaper columns often misjudged what was actually British or American English. He has learn{ed/t} his lesson on that point and so starts the book with a "note on the text" in which he admits that there will be "honest errors" of categori{s/z}ation and that he's willing to receive "politely worded suggestions for amendments" (p. viii). Since I suspect that Engel and I do not share a common view of what "polite wording" is (maybe I'm the "online lexicographical community" to which he refers), I won't burden him with my (few) (orig. AmE) nitpicks about word origin in the book.

The issue for debate here is not whether Engel is entitled to an opinion; rather it's whether people are entitled to go unchallenged when they express opinions that show only partial understanding of the issues at hand. Engel has the opinion that Britons should fight against American English. But this opinion is based on various claims or assumptions 

• about what English is in the US and UK. For example, though he's not southern in origin, the English he talks about is very much the south-eastern standard—take, for instance, the claim that pants meaning 'trousers' is American and trousers is British—a common oversimplification, but an oversimplification all the same. 
• about the nature of the "Britishness" that he wants to protect.
• about how language changes, and how it is or is not changing in the UK and US. For example, what's the role of regional identity or social class [in bold because it's heavy] in how English changes in Britain?
• about the relationship between language and culture. 

This last point is important. Engel's real enemy is not American words, but changes to British culture. Thatcherism, Blairism, loss of interest in the countryside, all are blamed on "Americani{s/z}ation". The extent of that can be debated, but Engel wants to situate the problem in words. The words came over, and they brought ideas with them, and as if in some Whorfian horror story, the ideas have eaten British brains. One problem with blaming the words is that in several chapters Engel has to stop after discussing word-culprits and admit "None of these can actually be counted as Americanisms" (p. 110)--they are relatively fresh Britishisms. But they feel American in tone or meaning to Engel, so they go on the slag heap.

Engel’s book provides lots of interesting cultural history, rich with entertaining facts, quotations and stories of the famous and not-so-famous. It’s also very well written, with a sly sense of humo[u]r. But the claim for “loss of the British language” (p. 235) feels, at best, like a case of selective attention leading to a grumpy nostalgia for olden times (or vice versa). At worst, it comes off as disingenuous. Engel  knows very well (as evidenced in the book) that British English has always been undergoing change and that exciting linguistic things are happening in Britain that have nothing to do with America. (He has a bit on Multicultural London English, which is not very American at all.) But he's got himself into an argumentative corner where he has to rely on hyperbole. "It would be totally impossible to write a coherent book in English without words imported from the United States" (p. 11). (Writers! The gauntlet has been thrown!) It also has irony. "I’m not prescriptive", he writes on page 13.

In the end, Engel proposes that Brits try to stop Americanisms with pressure groups, for instance emailing and Twitter-shaming the BBC whenever they hear life vest instead of life jacket. The thing that worries me is that when I analy{s/z}ed a list of complaints to the BBC about Americanisms, only half of them were Americanisms. But if you're going to base your linguistic crusades on nationalism, maybe you don't care about facts. Engel also proposes that "Ridicule can work wonders" (p. 238). Ah, so that's how "civil disagreement" works.

 Please reserve the comments section for topics related to this post. 


Lately, I've been super-aware of people saying that British English "slavishly" copies American English. Like this:

 the UK slavishly adopts Americanisms !! (from an email to me this week)

“To be snooty about Americans, while slavishly admiring them; this is another crucial characteristic of being British.”  (From the Economist, but quoted this week in Toni Hargis's reflection on the recent Word of Mouth on English)

It's an interesting choice of words, and I was reminded of it this morning when I read the television critic Mark Lawson writing about BBC4 (my emphasis added):

The original 2002 mission statement also included “international cinema”, and this was expanded to include foreign television, which could be regarded as BBC4’s most lasting legacy. Its screening of Mad Men was formative in changing the UK’s attitude to US drama from dismissiveness to submissiveness.

Why slavishly? Why submissive? Lawson was probably pleased with his rhyme, but why not dismissiveness to enjoyment or appreciation? In this case, it's not even that it's a torrent of US drama that the viewer cannot avoid, as BBC4 doesn't broadcast very much American drama. The paragraph goes on:

Its imported Swedish and Danish hits – including The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen – established that subtitled stories could find a British audience, encouraging other channels to shop from Scandinavian suppliers, and also to adopt the slower rhythms of Scandi-drama in homegrown series such as Broadchurch and The Missing.

What, the homegrown series didn't submit to the Scandinavian rhythms, but adopted them? Don't you mean they slavishly copied them? 

Now, of course, slavish isn't the same thing as enslaved. The relevant OED sense is defined  as

Available here

But it's an interesting word and image. The adjective slavish is used to similar degrees in AmE and BrE.  Most often it's followed by the noun devotion in both countries, but in the UK it's about as likely to be followed by adherence while in the US, the next most frequent noun is fear. Slavish fear involves a very different interpretation of slavish than slavish devotion does. It calls more directly on literal slavery, with the existence of a fear-inspiring master.

The adverb slavishly is found nearly twice as much in BrE (in the GloWBE and NOW corpora). Google Books corpus shows that the two countries used to use it at similar rates, but it's been falling off in the US since the 1960s. Perhaps Americans find it a bit more distasteful since the civil rights movement. (Maybe that accounts for my reaction to it.)

For me, the weird thing about the use of slavishly in the 'copying American English' context is that you can't have a slave without a master. And being a master has to be intentional. But American English isn't trying to have a slave.

Yes, Americans want to export stuff. But they don't care a lot about exporting American English--at least, not as much as the British establishment cares about exporting (and enforcing?) British English. (The reasons for this American lack of interest are complex, but contributing factors are that the British are already doing the work and the feelings that any English is good enough and that British might even be superior.)  Exporting the language is a bigger industry in the UK-- most of the dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language come from the UK (in fact, that's the only kind of dictionary that some UK publishers work on). The government funds the British Council (which also makes a lot of its own money through the IELTS language test). The US has been much later to that parade--and half(-)hearted about joining it.

The language continues to be Britain's empire--and imperialism seems to be the frame through which many Britons frame relationships with "bigger players", like the US and the European Union. Once the British were the imperialists, and now other relationships of interaction and dependency are framed as if they are the coloni{s/z}ed. There is often a disconnect between the complaint that American English is "taking over" and fact that it all started when Britain took over. Not to mention that Britain has benefited hugely from American English's role in keeping their language relevant to the rest of the world.

I compare this to thinking about British English and French. About how in the 19th century the British added the -me on programme in imitation of the French spelling.* How the British couldn't sell zucchini (the particular hybrid was originally Italian), but ate up courgettes. How they're partial to French-inspired spellings like colour and centre. British English is often deferential to French--after all, for a long time the aristocracy spoke French. But although French speakers were, at points in English history, literally the overlords (and then they had two centuries' worth of wars with them) I don't hear complaints that English has slavishly copied French. (Well, I do hear them from myself sometimes. Those [heavily tongue-in-cheek] complaints were recorded for a podcast that'll be released in July.)

All of this is related to the themes from two posts ago. These things are at the forefront of my mind as I write the conclusion for my book, so I'm testing out ideas here. But the slavishly/submissiveness wordings also resounded particularly this week after Ben Carson's comments about "involuntary immigrants" and also reading about another "unpopular invader" from America, the gr{a/e}y squirrel. Not comparing these things, you understand, just hyper-aware of how 'migration' and 'slave'-related words are being used these days.

So, are the British brainwashed by American English into slavish submission? Have you other thoughts on these metaphors and their use?


* The earlier spelling program has come back from the US and is now used in Britain as computing jargon. The Americanness of computer jargon spelling (program, dialog box, disk) is taken by some as an unwelcome American incursion. But in my experience British computer types use these spellings as (more AmE?) shibboleths. Those who know not to use the general-purpose British spellings for the computer-related meanings are accepted as reasonably knowledgeable. Those who don't might be in for some instruction on the topic.

Today I got to hear myself on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth talking with host Michael Rosen and anti-Americanism-ist Matthew Engel.

This is just a picture. Click HERE for the program(me)!

Biggest regret: that I completely blanked on the fact that sidewalk is originally a British word. Had to go home and read about it in my own book manuscript. I also regret that they cut a bit I said about British music artists singing in their own accents. (So please read this instead. I think the producer/editor might have thought that the reference to grime music would be too much for the Radio 4 [orig. AmE] listenership.)

But listening now to Engel repeatedly saying that American English influence on British is constantly increasing, I wish I'd pointed out this:

The 20th Century is often called "The American Century". The 21st Century is looking a lot less American. To be sure, it's not looking like the British century either. That came the century before.

American culture (and words) could easily spread in the 20th century because it was hard to produce and distribute recorded entertainment, but the US had the capacity and the economy and the marketing savvy to do so [And I mustn't forget the Marshall Plan, which my colleague just mentioned to me.] America was inventing and manufacturing all sorts of things and putting names on them and selling them everywhere. Two world wars and the cold war had Americans stationed all over the world using their slang in the presence of young recruits from other countries. The 21st century is looking rather different.

The 20th century brought us talking pictures and television. Radio, the most affordable form of broadcast, remained a more local proposition--though the recorded music could be imported. (Though the word radio, well that's an Americanism.) The 21st century is the time of the internet and of personali{s/z}ed entertainment. The popular songs are less universally popular, because people have more access to more different kinds of music on download. Instead of two or three or four choices on television, there are hundreds. And if you don't like what you're seeing you can go on YouTube or SoundCloud (or other things I'm too old and [orig. AmE] uncool to know about) and find all sorts of people doing all sorts of things. People go on the internet and meet each other and talk to each other, meaning that there's more opportunity than ever for there to be exchange of words between people, rather than just reception of words from the media. The slangs that young people use are sometimes local to their school or area and sometimes particular to an international online gaming community or music fandom. The notion of community, for many people, has internationali{s/z}ed. Language is moving in different ways now than it ever had the chance to move in the 20th century.

In the meantime, all indications are that the US is becoming politically more isolationist and more of an international pariah. Are its words going to flow so freely abroad? Will there be a taste for them?

The American century has happened. I don't know whose century this will be (please, please not Putin's), if indeed it will be any nation's century. (Better a nation's century than a virus's century, though.) American words will continue to spread to other parts of the world, but I can't see the evidence of Engel's strong claim that the imbalance between US and UK word-travel is increasing faster than ever.

At the start of the 21st century, British words seem to be entering America in greater numbers than they were a few decades ago. Much of this has to do with journalism and how international that's become. The online versions of the Daily Mail and the Guardian are extremely popular in the US. There are more US fans of Doctor Who now than in its Tom Baker days. Harry Potter is the single most important thing that's happened to children's publishing in the English-speaking world in my lifetime, and though the editions sold in the US are translated into American to some extent, it's actually only a small extent. Americans are reading and hearing more British English than they have in a long time.

The scale(s) is/are still tipped in American vocabulary's favo(u)r. But as far as I can see, there's not a lot of reason to believe that the degree of the imbalance is rapidly increasing. Yes, the number of American words in British English constantly increases, but there's more westward traffic now, more UK coining of managementspeak, and new local youth cultures making their own words in Britain. The tide hasn't turned, but there is (mixed metaphor alert) (orig. AmE) pushback.

And if English continues to be popular as a global lingua franca (due to its momentum, rather than the foreign and cultural policies of the UK and US), then more words may be coming from other places altogether.

It seems to happen once a week that I'm talking or listening to someone and some interesting new combination of morphemes (meaningful word-parts) is uttered. The conversation will go something like this:

A:  Ooh, this cake has real taste-itude. 
B: Ha! Taste-itude, is that even a word?
Lynne: It is now.

People are saying it, people are understanding it. It's made out of morphemes and it's not a phrase. It's a word. It might not be a word that's going anywhere, but it's a word. And I'd go so far as to say it's an English word, since it's made of English word-parts according to English rules, pronounced with English sounds, and understood by English speakers.

Recently someone on Twitter took me to task for giving BrE versus AmE uses of tortilla as my Difference of the Day, protesting that tortilla isn't even an English word; that the difference is between European and Mexican Spanish, not British and American English. My response was: yes, the word(s) came from those Spanishes, but you can find tortilla in English dictionaries and how English speakers use tortilla can differ from how Spanish speakers use it. So, is tortilla an English word? It is now.

This isn't to say that any non-English word in an English sentence automatically becomes English. If I wrote "My favo(u)rite Swedish institution is fika, the social coffee break", a lexicographer would look at it and say: we don't need to put fika in our English dictionary because (a) it's been marked as foreign (with italics), (b) the writer felt the need to define it, indicating that it's unfamiliar in English, and (c) it describes something in another non-English-speaking culture. When the glorious time comes that English-speaking cultures embrace fika, we'll say things like "I'm just going to fika with Jo. Care to join us?" and the lexicographers will put it in English dictionaries.

• the expression has become less specific to America, and therefore British people say it as well as American people because it is now 'general English'.
• the expression used to be American, but now British people say it and Americans don't. Thus, it is not 'general English', but 'British English'. 

This kind of thing has come up on the blog before when British media have distributed complaints about "Americanisms" coming to Britain, and people like me point out "Many of your so-called 'Americanisms' came from Britain, but the British forgot about them". (A nice example of that is now-AmE expiration versus more-recent-BrE expiry.)

This week, we can analy{s/z}e whether the same happens when Americans talk about Britishisms. (Of course, what's different is that Americans are likely say "That's so cute! I'm going to start saying that!" rather than "Those people are ruining our language with these silly expressions!")
Here's a list of "British expressions" that has been going (a)round the web:



Like many things on the interwebs, there's no source-citing here. Judging from the 'we say' at zed, it's by an American who knows a bit about Britain. Some of the translations are fairly poor and some of it is fairly dated (chap illustrates both these charges).

What struck me about the list was that I was pretty sure that some of these were American English (originally, if not currently). And at least one I knew to be an Australianism. So, since I have finished my external-examining (it's a British academic thing, and it's a lot of work), I am celebrating by looking into all the items on the list. I won't bother to say "yes, that's originally British" about the majority that are. (Some of them have been discussed already on this blog; you can use the search box on the right to look for them.) But let's think about the ones that aren't.


(the) bee's knees This is 1920s American slang, and as far as I can tell it has never been more popular in the UK than the US. Yes, some British people say it, but Americans are saying it more. And whoever is saying it, they're probably elderly or affecting a vintage style.

know your onions Another old US phrase (the first two OED citations - 1908 and 1922 - are American; first British one comes in 1958). It is definitely used more in the UK now than in the US. World Wide Words has a nice post on it.

wicked to mean 'good, cool' is something that may have been re-invented in the UK (negative words have a way of being made positive in slangs), but it was certainly something I said in the 1980s in the US, earlier than it was being used in UK. OED lists it as 'orig. U.S.' and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald for its first recorded use:

1920   F. S. Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise i. iii. 119   ‘Tell 'em to play “Admiration”!’ shouted Sloane... ‘Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf.’

(a) tad To quote the OED: "colloq. (orig. and chiefly N. Amer.)." The 'chiefly' there is out-of-date; it's well used in BrE now (new ways of achieving understatement are always helpful in BrE). But it's never gone out of use in AmE, so its presence on the list is a puzzle.

(a) shambles To mean 'a scene of disorder or devastation', the OED says 'orig. U.S.' And yet it is in the list twice. (It is used more in the UK, but it's not unused in the US.)

skive Now, I've written about this word before (great word--didn't know it before coming to the UK), but in doing so I failed to mention that it started out in America, seemingly derived from French esquiver. Again, from the OED:

 1. intr. U.S. College slang. At the University of Notre Dame: to leave the college campus without permission. Also in extended use with reference to other disciplinary matters. Freq. with away, out, etc. Cf. skiver n.³ 1. Now disused.

 2. trans. orig. U.S. College slang. To avoid (work or a duty) by leaving or being absent; (now) esp. to play truant from (school). Now chiefly Brit. colloq.

uni Here's the Australianism. BrE speakers above a certain age will tell you it came into Britain through the soap opera Neighbours in the 1980s. BrE speakers of university age now probably have no idea it came from Australia. It is used a lot in the UK.


So, about 12% of the lists are expressions used by the British, but not invented by the British. So, they're British expressions in the sense that British people say them.

Some are not invented by the British and not exclusively said by the British. Seems a bit odd to call those ones British expressions.

These not-so-British expressions on the list probably indicate that the writer fell into an old trap: if you don't know an expression and then you hear someone with a different accent say it, it's easy to conclude that the expression is a regionalism that is particular to people with that accent. I fall into the trap too, like when I assumed station stop was a Britishism because I had only heard it in Britain (but then, I take trains more in Britain).  It's our duty as people who care about language to try to resist those easy conclusions, because we have to admit that our individual experience of vocabulary is an imperfect, biased, and ahistorical view of the language.

The other problem with the phrase British expressions (and one that plagues this blog) is what's "British enough" to be British. For something to be called a British expression is it enough that it is used in Britain? Is a Yorkshireism or a bit of slang from Multicultural London English a British expression? Or, for an expression to be British does it have to be used across the whole country (or at least the whole island)?

So, what do you think: should we call the originally-not-British items on this list British expressions? The next time a British person says Can I get a latte? and someone else says "That's not British!" should we say "It is now!"



Postscript: I just can't resist mentioning what I've learn{ed/t} about a British-British item on the list:

arse-over-tit is British through and through, but it was originally arse-over-tip. Its current form lends support to my belief that British English will find any excuse to say tit as often as possible.