Separated by a Common Language

I've been teaching in England for 11 years now, and I've come to the point where I cannot tell whether the weird things that (some of) my students write are generational (after all, I've never taught their generational equivalents in the US) or dialectal.  For the past couple of years my pet peeve has been with regards to and in regards to -- I rarely read a student essay, dissertation, or thesis without at least one of these scratching my eyeballs more than once. Aside from the use of three words where one (e.g. concerning) would do, there's that plural regards, which sounds to me like a confusion (or, if you like technical terms, a phrasal blending) of with/in regard to and as regards.*

In fact, I got so frustrated about it in my last batch of marking that I wrote this note on Facebook:

'Regard' has three uses in common idioms.

In 'with/in regard to', it means 'attention' or 'sight'. You would not pluralize those words in this context, so don't pluralize 'regard'.

In 'as regards'. 'regard' is a verb that means 'concerns'. You'd have the 's' on either verb here as they're agreeing with an unspoken 3rd person subject.

In 'give my regards to', 'regards' means 'greetings', and like 'greetings' in this context, it's used in the plural.

Glad I got that out of my system.

(Now, I must say here that language--particularly English--is not necessarily logical. The above explanations were intended as aids for learning and remembering which versions take the plural, and are not expected to be taken as historical facts, as I didn't research those at the time.)

I spent a long time thinking that the plural regards in this context is just the product of young people not reading as much edited text as previous generations of university students. But when I complained about it to someone or other, they did the one thing that can move me to immediate dialectal research. They claimed it was the effect of American television.

Reali{z/s}ing that I could imagine with regards to much better in an English accent than an American one, I started looking around. But the more I looked, the more confusing it got. It's a mystery wrapped in a shibboleth.

At first, I could not find much British usage commentary on it. But it definitely seems to be something that annoys Americans.  For instance, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (cited here) says:

In and with regard to, regarding, and as regards are all Standard, synonymous prepositions, slightly longer and more varied than but meaning much the same as about and concerning: I spoke to him regarding [as regards, in regard to, with regard to] his future. With regards to is Nonstandard and frequently functions as a shibboleth, although it can be Standard and idiomatic in complimentary closes to letters: With [my] regards to your family…. In regards to, however, is both Substandard and Vulgar, although it appears unfortunately often in the spoken language of some people who otherwise use Standard. It never appears in Edited English.

On the other hand, neither The Economist Style Guide (UK) nor Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford UP) have anything to say about. The Guardian Style Guide (which is more relaxed about linguistic change than some of its competitors--see this debate) says:

        regard

with regard to not with regards to (but of course you give your regards to Broadway)

And the OED says that in regards to is 'regional and non-standard' but does not mention with regards to.  So...coverage of these items is patchy, which either means that it's a newish innovation or that it's not annoying everyone else as much as it annoys me. 

On to the British and American numbers. I used Mark Davies' corpus.byu.edu website, as I often do, in order to access the British National Corpus (compiled in the early 1990s) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990s-present). Using these corpora and searching with regard(s) to and in regard(s) to I found the plural 'regards' outnumbering singular in BrE, but not in AmE.

	BrE	AmE
with regard to:with regards to	3:7	8:1
in regard to:in regards to	1:2	4:1

But it turns out that this data is weird. I have no idea why the plurals are coming out so high in the BNC, but other British data don't give the same result. A possible explanation can be dismissed: maybe the 'with regards to' examples were in the appropriately plural greetings sense, as in 'I send these flowers with (my) regards to you and your mother'. But I checked, and all of the examples have the 'concerning' rather than 'greeting' sense.

John Algeo's book British or American English? reports that in the Cambridge International Corpus, the singular regard is favo(u)red 19.4:1, versus the smaller 4.3:1 ratio in AmE. So, the plural looked like it was BrE in my search, but looks AmE in Algeo's.

So, I tried another old Separated by a Common LanguageTM trick, and searched websites of American and British higher education establishments by searching the phrases on Google specifying .edu or .ac.uk sites only. Here, the picture is somewhere in between the CIC and BNC/COCA stories; both Americans and British prefer the singular, but the British are more likely than Americans to use with regards to rather than with regard to. But at the same time, the British more strongly (than the Americans) prefer the singular for the in phrase:

	BrE	AmE
with regard to:with regards to	10:1	17:1
in regard to:in regards to	4:1	2:1

The other thing to note here is that the in phrase is not as common in BrE as in AmE. According to Algeo (and the CIC), of the four combinations of in, with, singular and plural, with regard to accounts for 82% of the data in BrE, but only 68% in AmE. My .edu/.ac.uk numbers come out almost exactly the same.

The only explanation for the BNC aberration that I can think of is that most of the examples of these regard(s) to phrases in the BNC are from spoken data.  I can't know how many of the CIC instances were spoken--about 17% of the corpus overall was spoken--but much of that is the BNC spoken material.

My last search was on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), also from Mark Davies' site. This allows one to see results by decade, from the 1810s to the 2000s. I have no equivalent for BrE. But I think I have the answer to my original question: the plurals explode in the 2000s.  This jibes with my subjective experience. Thus, I'm concluding it's more a generational thing than a dialectal one.

All this, and I haven't really given you an AmE/BrE difference: both prefer the singular, and the plural seems to be picking up speed. But that's kind of the point. My initial urge was to point fingers at the British, and the British person I talked to wanted to blame it on the Americans. But it's happening everywhere, and you only really know that if you look in the right places.



* Yes, the professional linguists' line is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. But I'm not just a linguist. I am a university instructor, and one cannot be one of those [at least not on the Arts side of campus] without being a writing instructor some of the time.  I want my students to come out of our degree program(me) writing as if they are well-read, well-spoken and reasonable.  And so, I try.

So, last weekend the hospital released me to continue my treatment as an outpatient, then two days later on my first outpatient visit , they re(-)admitted me. Now I'm released again, but have been told to bring a packed bag to my outpatient visits...so you can expect my posts to continue to be erratic for a while. The good news is that I don't actually feel poorly, so I can blog when I have access to the Internet. The bad news is that I have plenty of time and desire for blogging when in (the) hospital, but no access to the blog. Catch-22.

So, the combination of dealing with a lot of different doctors and watching daytime reruns of ER left me thinking about the differences in doctors' titles/roles in American and British hospitals. I must admit that, despite having watched a lot of medical dramas and having read a lot of medical thrillers and memoirs in my youth (the better to feed my hypochondria), I've never been clear on what exactly an (AmE) attending physician is/does or how a (BrE) senior house officer relates to a (BrE) registrar. So, with a lot of help from Wikipedia, I've been trying to teach myself the ins and outs of these titles.

Let's start before we get to the hospital ward. In the UK, your regular doctor, the one you see in their (AmE) office/(BrE) surgery, is your GP or general practitioner. In AmE, the insurance-driven name for such people is primary care physician, but most people would just call that doctor my doctor or their family doctor (who works in or operates a family practice--a term that is found in both countries, but in my experience is more common in the US). The term general practice is also known in the US, but one doesn't hear people talking about their GPs.

When your GP/primary care physician decides that you require more speciali{s/z}ed attention, they refer you to a specialist--but in BrE they're likely to say that they're referring you to a (specialist) consultant. The experience of such referral can be somewhat different in the two countries. Let's say your usual doctor wants you to see a gastroenterologist. In the US, they say "I'm going to refer you to Dr. Guts." Then you get an appointment with Dr. Guts and meet Dr. Guts at that appointment. In the UK, you are referred to Mr Entrails' clinic (more on the 'Mr' shortly). Maybe you will see Mr Entrails--you're likely to on the first visit, at least--but you might see someone else in his clinic team, or firm (the term that Wikipedia reports--not one I've come across in the patient's seat). The consultant Mr Entrails has overall responsibility for your care, but a variety of more junior doctors might see you. Mr Entrails' clinic will most likely be located on hospital grounds, whereas American Dr. Guts will probably see you in an office complex--often one built specifically for medical offices.

In a hospital context, there are different titles (and responsibilities) for specialist doctors at different levels of training. In the UK, there's apparently been a move to 'moderni{s/z}e' medical career paths in the National Health Service, though I've seen little evidence of the changes reported on this NHS site. It says that a new title, Specialty Registrar [StR], replaces Senior House Officer [SHO] and Specialist Registrar from August 2007. But I was being seen by SHOs and Specialist Registrars at our hospital. So, I don't know if the new title applies only to people who have started since August 2007 or whether it's been abandoned, since when one hits the link for further info on the NHS site, one gets a 'page not found' message. For a comparison of new and old titles, see the table on this Wikipedia page. I'm going to stick with the old titles, since they're the ones I've experienced. [NB: Yes, it's specialty, not (BrE) speciality. This is one of many examples of BrE medical jargon being closer to AmE than to non-jargon BrE.]

So, in the UK, you're a medical student, then once you qualify as a doctor, you go on to be a house officer (Pre-Registration House Officer in the old system, Foundation House Officer in the new). After this, the doctor has a choice of going the GP route (which involves more training, but not all the titles I'm about to reel off) or undergoing specialist training for a minimum of two years as a Senior House Officer, followed by 4-6 years of further training and increased responsibility as a Specialist Registrar. One takes exams to go from one level to the next, with the highest level being Consultant. The amount of time one needs to train for these various positions varies by the specialty, culminating in the Certificate of Completion of Training after exams from the specialist college (e.g. the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists). All of this is overseen by the General Medical Council, which determines the standards for entry onto the specialist registers that allow one to work in hospitals as a consultant.

In the US, you're a medical student, then for your first year in the hospital you are an intern, which may or may not be considered the first year of your residency, during which you are a resident (physician). This can also be called house officer, as in the UK. After residency, one may or may not get a fellowship for sub-specialty training, before going on to be an attending (physician) [or staff physician] the equivalent of a (BrE) consultant.

[Update, 16 Sept 2024: British junior doctors have now been re-named residents. See here for context.]


In the UK, medical training begins at the undergraduate level--which is to say, people can be 'medical students' from their first year (BrE) at university. In the US, medical school is for (AmE) graduate/(BrE) post-graduate students, and the undergraduate students do pre-med degrees, which cover a lot of science, but also, like other US undergraduate degrees, a liberal arts curriculum. (Law training differs in a similar way in the two countries.)

At least, that's how I understand all this. Anyone with better knowledge is welcome (as ever) to correct me in the comments.

Now, a few words on what you call these people. In the US, medical doctors, no matter their specialty or status, are usually called Dr. [Surname]. In the UK, there's a kind of reverse snobbery, in that GPs and more junior specialists are called Dr [Surname], whereas surgeons and other consultants go back to being Mr or Mrs or Miss--though I've only met men in the consultant role so far, so I can't vouch for the actual use of Mrs and Miss. (Note that BrE tends not to put a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period at the end of title abbreviations like Dr, Mr or Mrs, while AmE almost always does.) Here, I'll rely on Wikipedia again:

In the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other areas whose culture was recently linked to the United Kingdom, the title Doctor generally applies to both academic and clinical environment. "Registered medical practitioners" usually do not have a doctorate; rather, they have the degree of Bachelor of Medicine (usually conjoint with Surgery). Cultural conventions exist, clinicians who are Members or Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons are an exception. As an homage to their predecessors, the barber surgeons, they prefer to be addressed as Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss, even if they do hold a doctorate. This is first because they have normally achieved another degree - that of Master of Surgery (MCh from the Latin magister chirurgiae) from a university. When a medically-qualified person passes the notoriously difficult examinations which enable them to become a member of one or more of the Royal Surgical Colleges and become "MRCS", it is customary for them to drop the "doctor" prefix and take up "mister". This rule applies to any doctor of any grade who has passed the appropriate exams, and is not the exclusive province of consultant-level surgeons. In recent times, other surgically-orientated specialists, such as gynaecologists, have also adopted the "mister" prefix. A surgeon who is also a professor is usually known as "Professor", and similarly a surgeon who has been ennobled, knighted, created a baronet, or appointed a dame uses the corresonding title (Lord, Sir, Dame). Physicians, on the other hand, when they pass their "MRCP" examinations, which enable them to become members of the Royal College of Physicians, do not drop the "Doctor" prefix and remain doctor, even when they are consultants. In the United Kingdom the status and rank of consultant surgeons with the MRCS, titled "mister", and consultant physicians with the MRCP, titled "doctor", is identical. Surgeons in the USA and elsewhere may have the title "doctor".

So, there we go. Probably a topic that interests me much more than you, but what are blogs for, if not self-indulgence?

Oh, and by the way, one of the registrars has added to the Canadian count. So, that's 12. The nurses just asked where I was from. Score one for the nurses!

Better Half got back (on) Tuesday after eight days in New York. He had a great time promoting his work at an English teachers' conference and enjoyed working with his US distributors, except for one thing that niggled. He'd be chatting with the American folk, cracking jokes as he is apt to do, and someone would exclaim (no doubt indicating him with a nod or a pointing gesture) to the others in the group, "I love this guy!" or "Don't you just love this guy?" or some variation on this. (He should be used to this by now—some of my family members are guilty of the same behavio(u)r.)

Now, BH, it must be said, usually enjoys the attention that he gets for being English when in America. In fact, his main complaint about the country on one of our visits last year was that due to the favo(u)rable exchange rate, New York was crawling with Brits, and he was no longer special. So, one might think that he'd love people exclaiming their love for him, but he found it rather off-putting—and so would I. No doubt, the people who say it would think that they're being complimentary. So, what's behind this phrase/behavio(u)r (which I can't say I've ever experienced in the UK)?

Why some people would find it off-putting, or even rude, to be the topic of such an exclamation is easily explained. There you are, getting along with people, feeling like you're making headway in being accepted as part of the gang. Then you say something funny, and instead of laughter, compliments, or inclusive back-slapping, someone starts talking about you in the third person. You stop being you or Lester (or whatever your name is) and start being this guy. It's distancing. It makes you feel like a performing seal and not a person taking part in the conversation. And what do you say after someone says I love this guy? You haven't been addressed, so it has essentially ended your turn at talking. You're put in an awkward position.

So, why it makes people uncomfortable—easily explained. Why do people say it? It seems to say "Look at me! I'm sophisticated and/or clever enough to appreciate this person's humo(u)r!" In other words, it seems a rather self-cent(e)red thing to say. So, part of me is tempted to say that one hears expressions like this more in the US than the UK because the US is a more individualistic society, with more emphasis on the 'me' in conversation. And I'm sure that's part of it. Another part, I think, is the relative insularity of mainstream American life—if you don't interact with a lot of people from other cultures (as equals) on a regular basis, perhaps you don't know what to do when they make a slightly off-colo(u)r comment. (BH does have a tendency to like to shock middle Americans with his Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.) Folded into this is some Americans' insecurity around British folk, whom they consider particularly funny, well-spoken (recall AVIC) and therefore possibly more intelligent than themselves. So, perhaps in such a situation, it's more natural for people to express their appreciation in a distanced way (this guy!) rather than a personal way (you're hilarious!) or a joining-in way (carrying on the joke).

Those are my working hypotheses, at least. (Or since it's a bit of this, a bit of that, maybe it's only one complicated hypothesis.) I'm not sure how much they're worth (it's been a long and tiring week—not a good time for self-critique!), but at least I can offer the public service of pointing out to I-love-this-guy-sayers that there are more effective ways of making people feel loved.

BTW, one more notch in the Canadian count bedpost this weekend—courtesy of a very nice (well, not nice enough to let me beat him) Scrabble player from the Wirral. The Canadian count has slowed down of late (we're just up to 11 now)—maybe I'm not meeting enough new people, or maybe I'm volunteering information about my childhood home too early in conversations, or maybe I'm being accepted as British now that I'm a citizen (HA HA HA—tell us another one, Lynne!).

How am I avoiding marking/grading? Let me count the ways... Every time I finish a dissertation (which in AmE would be called a thesis, since it's an undergraduate piece; thesis and dissertation are used in reverse ways in BrE and AmE), I reward myself by going on-line. I probably read more on-line in my breaks than I read on paper in the work times (which means that the work times then extend through the night in order to stay on schedule). It's just so much more pleasant to read things that don't involve me having to make a formal judg(e)ment about them, which I'll later have to defend to someone else (second examiner, external examiner) and which I'll later have to live with--and live with the knowledge that someone else has to live with it. Don't get me wrong, I'm reading some really good work, but still I find the process emotionally draining.

But I've taken so many reading breaks that I've pretty much read the Internet now. Well, everything in my bookmarks, at least. So on this little dissertation break, I'll write instead of reading. Some time ago, I ripped the following bit from the Guardian, intending to write about it later. (Welcome to Later.) It's from a piece in the Work section on April Fool's pranks for the office:

Fill a desk with peanuts
According to the interweb, Americans love filling other people's desk drawers with peanuts. Handy for a snack--but read the small print. These are packing peanuts (whatever they are), and therefore not edible. Ridiculous! I'll be going straight for the dry-roasted KPs [a UK brand of peanut--L]. Open those drawers wide. [Vicky Frost, 'Pick a prank for the delayed April Fool', The Guardian, 31 Mar 2007]

Now, usually I will defend the Grauniad, but here I cannot. Vicky Frost, what kind of reporter are you if you have to write "whatever they are" in an article? (OK, an article that is meant to be taken as humorous, but an article nonetheless.) Research, darling, research! (This is starting to feel like marking/grading. Uh-oh.)

I was reminded to find and write about this item (in my staggering tower of things to write about) when BH and I walked by a packing supply shop/store the other day. Its sign advertised that it sells loosefill. Now, this is trade jargon (used in the US too), not BrE particularly, but it gave me cause to ask BH "Is that what you'd call packing peanuts?" and he guessed that it would be the name for them, though not a word that he'd necessarily use. He'd probably just call them annoying polystyrene (=AmE styrofoam) bits, or some such thing. (The photo of a particularly miscellaneous collection of packing peanuts comes from this blog.)

Packing peanuts are so-called in AmE because of their typical shape, like a whole peanut (i.e. with its shell on). Perhaps this name is not so transparent in BrE because the word peanut is generally restricted to the shelled nuts (technically not nuts, but legumes; but since this isn't a botany blog, we'll just call them nuts). The shell-on version are sold as monkey nuts. (Stop that tittering!) Packing monkey nuts just doesn't have the same ring. (Photo 'borrowed' from this blog.)

Incidentally, I haven't run into cornstarch "peanuts" in the UK, though they are a wonderful invention, as they melt in water, making them completely biodegradable. Of course, it's the corn (BrE maize) growers of America, trying to find more things for us to do with corn/maize, that are behind this--so not terribly surprising that you don't find them here. (Just as you're more likely to find cars running on ethanol in the US.) Still, I really like them, as they're relatively guilt-free packaging.

P.S. I had a Canadian count double-whammy yesterday (at a Scrabble tournament--these happen often in Scrabble contexts). A player (whom I've known for a few years now) expressed surprise when I mentioned going to the US to see my family. She said "Oh, you're not Canadian?" And then added "I told A [another player from her town] that you were American, but he was so insistent that you were Canadian..." So, those are numbers 8 and 9 on the Canadian count.

I know I promised another posting on determiners, but here are just a couple of items that I want to slip in between posts:

1. Benjamin Zimmer points out the linguistic issues that are allegedly related to the Prince William-Kate Middleton break-up over on Language Log today. The post and the links from that post touch on many topics that we've already discussed here. Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe has blogged on this too--linking to my humble blog here. Thanks, Jan!


2. Another notch on the Canadian Count belt. A vendor at the Portobello Market asked me if I was Canadian. Her response to my Americanness was "Your accent is very soft." I've had that one before too...

Had another "Is that a Canadian accent I'm detecting?" moment today, bringing the Canadian count to six. This one, upon hearing that I was American, said "I thought so. I always guess Canadian first. That way, I don't offend anyone."

I told you that people are afraid of Canadians!

The American Heritage Dictionary lists bollard as 'Chiefly British', and indeed this is a word that I hadn't encountered before I lived here, though I'd certainly encountered the things before.

A bollard (in its most frequent sense in BrE) is a post that is used to get in the way of traffic--for instance to keep cars from driving or parking on the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk (like the ones on the left) or to direct cars toward(s) the correct lane (see right). There's a scene I like in the film The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz that involves some paranoid bollards. But then again, I like every scene in that film. It's not a film that would be to everyone's taste (I saw it in a Paris cinema's season of 'British eccentrics'), but it's one of those films in which the city (London) is at least as much of a character as those that are played by actors.

Prior to my residence in Britain, I would have called bollards posts. Oh, what an impoverished vocabulary I had back then! But then one does come across more bollards in the UK than in the US. Sometimes they're there for no obvious reason. For example, on a two-way road near my house, there is a bollard that makes traffic going down hill give way (AmE yield) to traffic that's coming up the hill. Since the road is wide enough at this point to let the traffic go both ways, the bollard is just there to slow down the cars that are going down the hill. I can't see why they didn't choose another way to slow the traffic that wouldn't involve the creation of traffic (BrE & regional AmE) queues (general AmE lines). For instance, one could use a (BrE [originally] & regional AmE) sleeping policeman (other AmE speed bump; BrE & AmE speed hump; BrE road hump). Better Half has just called this bollardy arrangement a chicane, another word that only entered my (passive) lexicon after I moved here. The term comes from motor racing, where it usually refers to a little kink in the racetrack, but it's extended here to include the type of traffic slowing measure described above, and like the one (that's barely visible) in this picture from Lancashire.


Sometimes the word bollard is used (in BrE) to refer to the thing on the left, though such things are usually termed traffic cones in BrE and pylons in (at least my dialect of) AmE. Pylon, of course, can also refer to the electrical type of thing to the right--in either dialect. A strange piece of lexicographical trivia is that American Heritage doesn't record the 'traffic cone' sense of pylon, while the OED does (and marks it 'U.S.').

.........

In other news, I was away playing Scrabble again this weekend (hence the lack of blogging), and, as often happens in such situations, I was twice mistaken for Canadian. That brings the Canadian count to five instances in five months. (I also got one instance of "I usually don't like American accents but...".)

Perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't have a chance to blog, as I believe the blog is starting to work against me. I mocked mushy peas, and, lo and behold, five days later my application for UK citizenship was turned down. They say it's because some of my paperwork didn't arrive on time, but I think we can read between the peas...

Kate, a Canadian attached to a South African, wonders about handbags, having noticed that Britishoid Englishes use that term where North Americans would say purse. What's more confusing is that the word purse is used in BrE, but for a different kind of object than in AmE.

The thing to the right (from phulbari.com) is called a handbag in BrE, and a purse in AmE. One can say handbag in AmE, but it sounds rather old-fashioned. In keeping with that feeling, I'd tend to reserve the term for vintage items (when speaking in American environs). Handbag can be used to refer to most handled women's accessories for carrying around life's essentials—money, lipstick (lippy: BrE informal, orig. AusE), (BrE) mobile/ (AmE) cell phone, Syndol--which itself is a major reason to emigrate to Britain. Longer-handled ones might also be called shoulder bags (as they could be in AmE as well). But in everyday BrE life they all tend to be called just bags--as in I have some Syndol in my bag--want some?

Purse in BrE is a (typically women's) leather/cloth/etc. thing that money goes directly into--like the ones at the left, from Arnold & Arnold. Thus female BrE speakers usually have purses inside their bags. AmE retains this sense of purse in change purse. For North Americans, the things on the left are wallets. If it's in a man's pocket, it's wallet in both dialects--but my dad (like others in his AmE-speaking generation) calls his a billfold.

BrE has a few handbag idioms worth noting. Handbags at dawn (also a great name for a band) or handbags at ten paces is a way of referring to a usually loud, public fight--originally among footballers. This is sometimes shortened to handbags. The OED's earliest citation for this is 1987, but they're looking for earlier ones. To handbag is an established verb in BrE, meaning 'to assault with a handbag', and can also be used figuratively, meaning 'to verbally assault or criticise', as in:

Not since Mrs Thatcher handbagged her cabinet into attending a seminar on climate change at Number 10 had so many senior Tories been seen doing something green in one place. -- The Telegraph

Kate's Canadianness has reminded me that I haven't reported an instance of being assumed Canadian. It happened last weekend at the Scrabble tournament, though to be fair it was after I was explaining the differences between Canadian, American and British spelling. Who but a Canadian would know such things? I would, apparently.

(Links to commercial sites here are just (a) to acknowledge the sources of photos and (b) prevent people asking me "where did you get that bag/purse?" Now you know already. This is not an endorsement of these companies/products, but they are rather pretty, aren't they?)

I was at a party again today. It must be the party season, as I've got another to go to tomorrow. Thank goodness. If it weren't for parties, I'd just be sitting alone at my computer most of the time, not having interesting interactions with British English.

First thing to note about the party was that once again someone I'd just met assumed I was Canadian. I'm going to start keeping track of these. That'll be number 1.

Second thing to note is an interesting Cocktail Party Effect I experience. The Cocktail Party Effect is our ability to tune into one conversation and ignore others in a noisy environment, but while still apparently paying enough attention to the surrounding noise to switch our attention when someone in another conversation says our name. I've noticed that I switch attention when others say American or the States, etc. I can't help but (BrE) earwig (=eavesdrop).

Today I found myself listening to the end of a conversation between Better Half's Sister and Distant Relation. DR is an Englishman with a vacation home in South Carolina (first time I've come across that combination!). He's trying to supervise some plumbing work from a distance, and was saying that "everything there has a different name." I didn't catch all of the examples, but did get (BrE) tap versus AmE faucet and BrE bath vs AmE tub. I can add the following. Some of these you would hear in either country, but different words are preferred in the two countries.

AmE	BrE
sink trap	U-bend
sink	basin
caulk	sealant
(toilet) tank	cistern
hot-water heater	geyser (for certain types)

All of this ignores discussion of what to call a toilet or the room in which a toilet stands. I'm saving that for another time. [Now available here.] Meanwhile, can anyone add to the plumbing list? I know there are more differences out there...

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):

America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.

This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:

There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?

By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:

From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.

Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

• I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.


• Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.


• I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)

*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.