Separated by a Common Language

Now, if you worked at a college/university in the US, I am quite sure that you would hear alum much more than you'd hear singular alumni. I had a quick look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which showed twice as many an alum of as an alumni of (though the numbers were small--21 in total).

So, a few points of unseemly defensiveness after all this:

• Americans are able to and do use the Latin gendered suffixes. I mention this because there seems to be some belief that the British know Latin better than Americans do.  One of the interviewees in Jones's book on English expats in the US says she felt "she got to win a lot of arguments" because Americans assume “I [have] this great level of culture [and speak] and read fluent Latin” though of course she didn't. Similarly, I've had it said to me that Americans make barbarous "false" Latin words because we aren't close enough to the language. An British commentator on early American accents wrote that "Americans do not, however, speak or pronounce English according to our standard; [...] probably from a want of any intimate knowledge of Greek or Latin." I can't see much evidence for thinking the contemporary British folk have some access to Latin that contemporary Americans don't. Latin comes and goes in both American and British schools. Yes, the fancy public (i.e. private) schools of Britain do tend to offer Latin, but so did my run-of-the-mill American high school. Very few schools anywhere require it (or even offer it) any more--though apparently it's popular with American home-schoolers.
• If you see Latin plurals masquerading as singulars, it's not a case of "American political correctness" coming over and "ruining" the language. The British are very capable of being sensitive to gender discrimination and changing the language themselves.  

The other thing to notice is that Americans use these words more. In fact, Americans have a great head start on using them. This is not necessarily a bragging point. The reason Americans needed these words earlier is that American universities have long depended on their graduates' generosity.

That was not an issue for British universities, which until recently were funded mainly through government grants. While I've lived in the UK, I've seen tuition fees go from 0 to over £9000 per year. And it was only once the government stopped directly funding university teaching that universities needed to step up relations with their graduates in the hope of getting donations and bequests. That's when my university got an Alumni Relations Office, something any American university would have had decades earlier.

Americans, I would say, have a keener sense of alumnihood. They have stickers identifying their alma mater in the back windows of their cars. The phrase alma mater is about four times more common in AmE than BrE (in GloWBE). They go to homecoming. They follow their institution's sports teams for the rest of their lives. (The need to keep alumni involved is a big reason for American universities having so much sporty activity.) They might even know their college's/university's song. That's in general, of course. I can't say I do any of those things. But I know many more Americans than Britons who do. 

The spelling foetus has no etymological basis but is recorded from the 16th century and until recently was the standard British spelling in both technical and non-technical use. In technical usage fetus is now the standard spelling throughout the English-speaking world, but foetus is still found in British English outside technical contexts. 

At the foetus entry, it just says: "Variant spelling of fetus (chiefly in British non-technical use)."

How true is this, that it's the accepted technical spelling in the UK? In The Lancet and the BMJ, it's doctors writing for other doctors. What about the rest of the medical professions? What about when medical types communicate with patients?

My first stop was the NHS Choices website, where the readers are would-be patients. A search for foetus brings up 27 hits, but fetus has 7. But, going the other way, foetal has 66 hits and fetal 82. What's going on?

I contacted the website to ask if they had a policy on this and they were extremely helpful (as the NHS always has been for me ♥♥♥). They put me in contact with their Head of Editorial Production, who sent me both a link to their style guide (which has fetus as an Americanism to be avoided) and his own document entitled 'Fetality', which he wrote when the Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme (so spelled) asked if the rest of the website could switch to fetal/fetus. In his paper he gives several arguments for retaining foetus/foetal, even on pages where it will conflict with the FASP program(me)'s spelling, but I think this first one is key:

NHS Choices is a ‘British English’ service and, as stated in its Editorial Style Guide, is bound to:

·       Write plain English

·       Avoid medical jargon and technical terms as far as possible

On the basis of those two points, if it is accepted that foetus is the general spelling and fetus the technical-medical, NHS Choices should use foetus.
(Bolton, Barry. 2014. Fetality. Internal document, NHS. Received with thanks from the author.)

Looking again at the o-less hits on the NHS Choices site, many of them seem to be in comments from site users—so the house style doesn't apply. Are they misspelling it, or do they know the 'technical' spelling? Why so many more fetals? Possibly because it's in the name of a lot of things, not just the FASP program(me), such as the 'Fetal Medicine Unit team at St George's Hospital', which is indeed how the hospital spells that unit's name.

It's an interesting mixture: the NHS website keeps the traditional British spelling in communication with patients in order to avoid technical language, but the hospitals and such seem quite happy to foist the technical spelling on patients in the names of units and program(me)s.

To investigate this a little further, I did a little survey in which I asked for UK medical personnel to tell me which spelling they would use in a work context: foetus or fetus, sulphur or sulfur and amoeba or ameba. F(o)etus was the only one that respondents disagreed about:

 
(The 'it depends' person gave that answer for every question and said they'd use the American spelling if they were writing to an American.)

I invited respondents to explain their preferences to me, but unfortunately only four did, and two of those used the space to tell me about words I hadn't asked about. The two relevant comments were:

I am an allied health professional who wouldn't use these words much in my work, but these were how I was taught to spell them at school. I've heard in the past that "foetus" is completely wrong, though I can't quite remember why and I write the word so infrequently that I wouldn't change my spelling of it anyway!

Homogenisation of the English language to accommodate American English is a pernicious assault on the richness and diversity of English usage. It shouldn't be tolerated!

Unfortunately, I didn't ask for demographic information beyond country of abode, so I can't see whether the people who prefer fetus are in professions in which they need the word more often than the ones who prefer foetus.

But my impression is that fetus/fetal seems to be something of a medical shibboleth in the UK now. Doctors use the e spelling and it sets them apart as 'in the know', and maybe they don't mind that the rest of the country goes about putting the o in it. All the better to tell who the truly educated are. I'd love to hear from people 'in the know' in the comments. Have I got that wrong?

And before I leave, a note about the other false etymological form that readers of The Lancet (well, at least one) have tried to change. Here's another letter to the editor:

SIR,-Spelling is a curious blend of phonetics, etymology, tradition, and nonsense ; we should take care not to let the last preponderate. Dr. Napier (Nov. 1) is to be congratulated on his attack on the absurd o which it is customary now to insert into fetus. I would like to raise support for a similar attack on the ph with which we generally mis-spell sulfur and the other words derived from it. Sulfur comes from a Latin word. Undeniably some Latin authors used the ph form, but there is good reason to think that this was a blunder, and most of the European languages that use the Latin root have not followed the erroneous spelling. The spelling sulfur was common in Britain from the 14th to 18th centuries, and this presumably explains its present day use in the U.S.A. It is in no sense an American innovation.  (Pirie, N.W. 15 Nov. 1952.The correct spelling of medical terms [Letter to the Editor]. The Lancet vol. 260, pp.987-8.)

The argument for sulfur seems not to have been heard—sulphur still rules Britannia absolutely.


Footnote
*It's a digraph, not a diphthong, but what do doctors know?

Robert W. M. Greaves wrote to me (in July 2010--my [seemingly orig. AmE] backlog is huge!):

I was somewhat surprised yesterday to be asked by an American woman (mid 70s from Montana) what more haste, less speed meant. She had never heard the expression before. I checked with another American friend (woman from Kentucky, in her late 50s) who also didn't really know what it meant but was aware of some younger people occasionally using it.

For me (and I would have thought most people in the UK) this is a piece of folk wisdom parents and grandparents use to admonish children. (In case you haven't come across it before either, the idea is that if you do something in too much of a hurry you'll be careless or make mistakes and have to go back and do it again, so it's actually faster to work more slowly and carefully and get it right first time.)

Have I just happened to hit the only two people in America who don't know the expression?

No, you've hit two members of the majority, Robert.  More haste, less speed (and less frequent variants, like less haste, more speed and more haste, worse speed) is mainly a BrE expression. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary marks it as UK, and it does not occur at all in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (but three times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus).  

Americans, on the other hand, say haste makes waste, which is not unknown in the UK, but it's not in the British National Corpus and only 9 times on the guardian.co.uk site (versus 140 for more haste, less speed).  Many people treat it as if Benjamin Franklin first said it, as it occurs in his Poor Richard's Almanack. But look look up haste in the OED and one finds this (my emphasis added):

 6. In proverbs and phrases: chiefly in sense 2.

a1525  (1500)    Sc. Troy Bk. (Douce) l. 1682 in C. Horstmann Barbour's Legendensammlung (1882) II. 275   Of fule haist cummis no speid.

1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiii,   Haste maketh waste.

1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiii^v,   The more haste the lesse spede.

That is, by 1546 both of these phrases were familiar enough to be recorded as English proverbs. The source of these is often attributed to a similar Latin phrase, Festina lente ('make haste slowly'). But if he wasn't the originator of Haste makes waste, Franklin was at least a great populi{z/s}er of the phrase.

Looking a bit more at the history,  the Corpus of Historical American English has two instances of more haste, less speed (in 1869 and 1920) and 11 of haste makes waste--seven of those before 1860. The early 19th-century boom for haste makes waste might have been a Franklin (orig. AmE in this sense) boom, but what's happening around 1860? Something, for sure:


That's a Google Ngram for more haste less speed and haste makes waste in English books generally.  This is American English:

And this is British English:

In each case, more haste, less speed increases in frequency around 1860--where the phrase was used in the name of a story (1856) and in other books.Why the fashion in the UK turned so dramatically in favo(u)r of the longer phrase, I do not know. Perhaps because it's closer to the Latin, perhaps because the rhyming version was perceived as Americanism, perhaps because someone really stylish and influential was using it. I don't know.

What is clear from all of this is that Americans invented neither phrase.  What is suggested from it is that the relative lack of more haste, less speed in AmE could be due to its lack of popularity in English when the AmE was getting going, since it seems to have been rather (orig. AmE) under-the-radar in the early 19th century.  The missing link here is what was happening in the pre-Richard's Almanack 18th century.

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I feel shame when I do a post that's mostly just listing "they say this, we say that". There are plenty of sites around that do that kind of straight word-for-word listing. But I get enough requests for vegetable names that I'm just going to try to get it over with right now. Where there are links, that's because I've already written about some of these at greater length elsewhere. I've also already written about veg/veggie and various herbs (and the pronunciation thereof). So please click on those links to discuss those issues in greater detail.

And now, the list (which has no particular order):

BrE	AmE
aubergine	eggplant
courgette	zucchini
rocket (sometimes roquette)	arugula
mange tout	snow peas/sugar peas
spring onion	green onion/scallion
swede	rutabaga
beetroot (treated as a mass noun)	beet (count noun)
sweetcorn	corn
chicory	Belgian endive
pepper (sweet pepper if it's not green; one occasionally hears the AusE capsicum)	(bell) pepper
chick-pea	chickpea/garbanzo bean
haricot bean	navy bean
broad bean	fava bean
runner bean	string bean
cos lettuce	romaine lettuce

In addition, some names for groups of vegetables are different. BrE pulses = AmE legumes (though, technically, legume is a broader category). In AmE I'd refer to cruciferous vegetables, meaning broccoli and cauliflower collectively, but in BrE I hear Brassica, the Latin name of the family (which includes cabbage and Brussels sprouts).

Squash are another matter. One easily finds acorn and butternut squash (and courgettes/zucchini) in both countries, but otherwise the varieties of squash tend to be different. Marrows will be known to fans of Wallace and Grommit, but the term is not much used in the US. It refers to "any of various kinds of squash or gourd which are chiefly the fruits of varieties of Cucurbita pepo, eaten as a vegetable; esp. one of the larger round or cylindrical kinds with green, white, or striped skins and greenish-white or (occas.) yellowish pulpy flesh" (OED June 2008 draft rev.), so courgettes/zucchinis are technically small marrows. In the UK I've never seen what we call summer squash* (aka yellow squash--is this a regional difference? Not sure) or spaghetti squash (which was something of a fad in the US in the 1970s, I think, but I haven't seen it lately). The OED lists pattypan (squash) as 'chiefly N. Amer.', but I've only seen it for sale in the UK and South Africa. Pumpkin is generally only used of the orange-rinded variety (for making jack o'lanterns) in AmE, but in BrE the term applies more generally to gourd-y squashes with orange flesh. (Jack-o-lantern pumpkins have become more available in the UK as Halloween celebrations have become more popular.)

The British talk about more kinds of shelled peas (garden peas, petits-pois [for younger, sweeter peas]) than Americans do. (Click on the link for the mushy variety.)

As can be seen in the examples presented here, BrE tends to be more influenced by French and AmE shows some Italian influence, which is not surprising since Britain has a lot of contact with France and its cuisine, and popular cuisine in the US has been greatly affected by Italian (and other) immigrants. Those who read Menu Italian may not recogni{s/z}e arugula for Italian rucola, but arugula was the dialectal version of the word that immigrated to America. (Just as rutabaga is not the general Swedish word for that kind of turnip, but a dialectal term for it. Click on the link above for more on that.)

I await the first comment that points out a completely obvious one that I've left off the list!

*Summer squash for me has two meanings. Either the general term that refers to any thin-skinned squash, or the specific one that refers to yellow squash that are picked at the same time as courgettes/zucchini.

A member of our Psychology Department wrote the other day to ask about distractor and distracter. In her experience, the former is AmE, but BrE can have either (as she found in the OED). But this isn't quite true. Look up distractor in the American Heritage Dictionary and you'll find "Variant of distracter". Both variants are available in both dialects, but is there more to it than that?

I was intrigued by this query because of other niggling (for me, at least) -er/-or distinctions. Here, I'm talking just about the use of these letter combinations as agentive suffixes--i.e. endings that turn verbs into nouns meaning 'someone who VERBS'. Of course, there are other -er and -or endings that differ in AmE and BrE (centre/center, color/colour), and those are what you find if you try to look up AmE versus BrE differences in spelling -er and -or words. But that's an unrelated issue that we'll just ignore for now.

So, both -er and -or are agentive suffixes. The -or suffix is only primarily found in words derived from Latin, whereas -er can be put on the end of just about any verb that involves an agent (a 'doer' of the 'action'). But Latin-derived words differ in how strongly they are associated with the -or suffix. Latin-derived verbs that end in -ate, for example, almost always take the -or suffix. So we have dictator, but not a variant *dictater, alternator but not *alternater.

Things are less clear-cut with other Latin-derived verbs. For example, in my job, I advise students and convene courses, and when I spell out those roles, I'm an advisor and a convenor, but when my UK university spells them, I'm often an adviser (which just looks wrong to me) and a convener. (Incidentally, Blogger's allegedly AmE spellchecker likes the -er forms.)

So, is this a dialectal difference, or just personal perceptions? (It's not a pronunciation difference, except in those cases in which one exaggerates the pronunciation in order to give a clue to the spelling.) I've searched for advisor and adviser on a range of university websites from the UK and the US, and here's what I found:

US Universities	adviser	advisor
U of Massachusetts (Amherst)	10%	90%
U of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)	27%	73%
Baylor University	31%	69%
UK Universities
U of Sussex	38%	62%
U of Manchester	36%	64%
U of Edinburgh	49%	51%

So, it's probably not my imagination that the -or form is stronger in the US than the UK, though there's considerable variation within each country. The fact that I started out at the university with the strongest preference for -or might account for my strong preference for it. There's also the question here of whether this distinction can be attributed to regional differences within the countries. We see the strongest -or preference in the US in a northeastern university. Did I get that strong preference because of my university experiences, or had it already been inculcated in me by growing up and learning to spell in the northeast? In the UK, we see the weakest -or preference in a Scottish university. Does that extend to other Scottish universities? I'm not going to spend my Saturday finding out! But you're welcome to!

Before we leave this topic, let's raise the question of whether these spelling differences are meaningful. There's a general principle at work in language (sometimes called the Principle of Contrast) that if there are two different forms, they must have some different significance. This is why it is difficult to find exact synonyms in a language--once you introduce a new word for something, people start to assume that it must give some different information from that given by the old word for that thing (otherwise, why bother to coin or borrow the new word?). The Principle of Contrast (and avoidance of synonymy) is so strong that it can be extended to spelling variations. So, for example, I was once party to an American discussion of grey versus gray (the latter being the more common AmE spelling, but the former being acceptable as well), with people discussing whether grey or gray was a darker colo(u)r. (The discussion began here; search the American Dialect Society archives for 'grey and gray' to get the whole string). Because there are different forms, and because people like to look for differences in meaning and maybe because they have been exposed to one form more in one type of context than another (e.g. grey in clothing catalog(ue)s, but gray in a box of crayons), people often believe that the words have different definitions. This discussion has happened (for about 100 years!) at the OED, too, where there's a note at the 1989 grey/gray entry that reads:

With regard to the question of usage, an inquiry by Dr. Murray in Nov. 1893 elicited a large number of replies, from which it appeared that in Great Britain the form grey is the more frequent in use, notwithstanding the authority of Johnson and later Eng. lexicographers, who have all given the preference to gray. In answer to questions as to their practice, the printers of The Times stated that they always used the form gray; Messrs. Spottiswoode and Messrs. Clowes always used grey; other eminent printing firms had no fixed rule. Many correspondents said that they used the two forms with a difference of meaning or application: the distinction most generally recognized being that grey denotes a more delicate or a lighter tint than gray. Others considered the difference to be that gray is a ‘warmer’ colour, or that it has a mixture of red or brown (cf. also the quot. under 1c below). In the twentieth century, grey has become the established spelling in the U.K., whilst gray is standard in the United States.

So, do advisor and adviser mean different things to you? Or does one just seem misspelt?

Still making my way through the backlog of queries I've received, and still in March. It must be said that while I'm trying to get through the backlog in chronological order, some luckier souls have their queries answered more immediately. It just depends on what else is going on at the time. Anyhoo (that's an AmE and extremely colloquial, allegedly humorous version of anyhow), the_sybil wrote back then to say:

Had you ever considered writing about the way in which the spelling of words with vowel groups originating from Latin dipthongs (oesophagus/esophagus, oestrogen/estrogen) have been simplified in AmE usage? Don't know whether there's anything of interest to say about them or not.

I got thinking about it because the other day I came across the spelling "Edipal" in an online text about psychology - and being a BrE speaker rather than an AmE speaker, I had to do some googling to be certain it was an error rather than an acceptable alternative spelling.

Let's start with some history. As Oedipal hints, most of these can be traced back to Greek, then to Latin, then to English. Greek oi became Latin œ (with a ligature between the letters) became, more commonly, oe in contemporary (post-typewriter) English. In Latin and English, oe and ae are pronounced as a single sound (which sound is another matter, and can vary from case to case), rather than as two vowel syllables or as diphthongs, i.e. a combined vowel sound. (Still, because they're written as two vowels, many people refer to them as diphthongs--but they should be calling them digraphs instead.) The simplification of ae and oe to e is present in Noah Webster's dictionaries (late 18th/early 19th c.), but I'm not sure whether the shift (like many others) originated with him or not, as it's not mentioned in any of his spelling reform documents that I've found.

It's tempting to believe the kind of advice given below from Ask Oxford's Better Writing guide (as well as other sources on BrE/AmE differences), that:

British English words that are spelled with the double vowels ae or oe (e.g. archaeology, manoeuvre) are just spelled with an e in American English (archeology, maneuver).

But as the_sybil has discovered, there are cases in which ae and oe are not reduced to e in AmE, including:

• many names and derivatives of them, whether from Greek/Latin or not (Disraeli, Michael, Caedmon, Aelfric, Caesar/Caesarean, Oedipus/Oedipal)
• a few ae words that are not from Greek/Latin (at least not directly) and in which ae is usually pronounced as a diphthong (maelstrom, maestro)
• some recent-ish borrowings from French and other languages with oe: oeuvre, hors d'oeuvres, trompe l'oeil
• the Latin feminine, plural suffix -ae, as in (predominantly AmE) alumnae, lacunae, ulnae, etc.
• words with aer(o)- as a prefix or root: aerial, aerosol, aerodrome (but, of course, aeroplane is almost always airplane in AmE).
• some Scottish English words, and words from Gaelic: Gaelic, nae, brae, etc.
• (Probably not worth mentioning, but words that end in oe like toe and shoe are never reduced to e in AmE, since the vowel sound here is /o/ or /u/or similar. And, of course, the oe that straddles a morpheme boundary in 3rd person verbs and plurals like goes and potatoes are not reduced to e.)

Edward M Carney in A survey of English spelling estimates that the BrE ae is e in AmE in 89% of words and 63% of names. (I was a bit puzzled that the name claim was so high, as I have a hard time thinking of names that are spelt differently in the two dialects. The only one I can come up with is Rachel, which I'd never seen spelt Rachael until I moved to the UK--but now I notice that an American cooking celebrity has that name.)

Still, there are some Greek/Latin ae/oe words that I learned to spell with the ae/oe back in America, and which are often spelt like that, regardless of the 'rule'. For example, aesthetics is taught in most American university philosophy departments, not esthetics. In fact, aesthetic gets 28.9 million Google hits, while esthetic gets only 3.5 million. (Compare a more reliable AmE/BrE distinction favor/favour in which the AmE form gets 243 million hits and the BrE form only 39.3 million.) Still, in lists of spelling differences, esthetic is frequently cited as the AmE equivalent of BrE aesthetic, with no further qualification. In spite of this AmE strongly prefers anesthetic over (BrE) anaesthetic.This can result in some difficulties in finding information in the Information Age. Last week, I tried to look up haemolysis in the index of the British-i{s/z}ed edition of an originally American book. It wasn't there, and I just couldn't believe it. Only later did I accidentally stumble upon it, and all of the other haemo- words, between HELLP and hepatitis. Once they changed the spelling from hemolysis, they forgot to re-alphabeti{s/z}e that bit of the index, apparently. (They did manage for foetal, though, which comes between fluid and folic acid.) Another problem occurs when I suggest that my students use encyclop(a)edias of linguistics as sources of background material and ideas for their research projects. They come back to me and say that our library is (BrE) crap and no such books are there. I point out that there are, if you remember to use both spellings of encyclop(a)edia as your key words in the electronic catalog(ue) search.

The divide between BrE and AmE spelling may be narrowing, according to some sources:

Even in British English there is a slow trend toward simplification: For example, the form encyclopedia is now much more common than encyclopaedia. (from English Toolbox)

foetus vs fetus: In American English, foetus is usually not used. In British English usage is divided. In academic literature, fetus is preferred. (Wikipedia Manual of Style)

The OED notes that (usually AmE) eon is preferred over (usually BrE) aeon in Geology. So, there seems to be a tendency toward regulari{s/z}ation in international academic fields.

Most AmE/BrE spelling differences reflect no particular differences in pronunciation, and most of the ae/oe cases are the same, but some have come to be pronounced differently. (O)estrogen is one such case. In AmE, the first syllable in estrogen rhymes with west. In BrE, the first syllable of oestrogen typically sounds like east. However, many BrE speakers pronounce (o)esophagus with a short vowel, like the Americans do. [This last claim edited since original post.] Another case is p(a)edophile. In BrE, the first syllable is usually pronounced like peed, and in AmE it more usually (though not exclusively) ped. But both dialects pronounce p(a)ediatrician with a 'peed', regardless of the different spelling.




P.S. Since writing this post, I've written a more in-depth one about the problematic f(o)etus.
 
Other business

• I don't know if cross-Atlantic spelling differences will come up, but I'm going up to London this week to appear on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. It seems they'll be doing a spelling challenge and want to be trained by some serious Scrabble players. Should be a (BrE colloq/jovial) larf.

When I lived in South Africa, I often claimed that the country's major industry was bureaucracy. As a foreigner, I had reason to feel this, since until I was granted permanent residence (not very permanent, it turned out), I had to stand for a few hours on a (BrE) queue/(AmE) line every three to six months in order to have my work permit renewed. There was one year in which I had three chest x-rays--first they lost one, and then they made me incorrect identity documents...twice. The first time, my ID book said I was born in South Africa, the second time it said I was born in Albania (see evidence right--first name covered with (BrE) toilet roll/(AmE) toilet paper in order to maintain a sense of mystery). It also said I was a South African citizen, which was never true. By the time all the corrections were processed, the second x-ray had 'expired', so I had to prove again that I was tuberculosis-free. So, if I ever come down with any cancers of the upper torso, we'll know which government to blame.

But it turns out that South Africans are mere amateurs at bureaucracy compared to Higher Education in England. My life is paperwork. Paperwork if I want to give students an extra week to write their essays. Evaluations to write up about my students' evaluations of my courses. Then evaluations of the external examiner's evaluations of my evaluation of my students. (Most American universities don't even have external examiners.) Evaluations of all the courses in the department, then evaluations of all of the degrees on which those courses are offered. My reading lists have to be written up in at least three different formats (one for the library, one for the bookshop, one for the students) before each course. And, just like in South Africa, there's always someone in some office to tell you that you've misinterpreted a question or you were supposed to fill out a CQ3 instead of a QC3, and therefore your proposal/evaluation/application won't be considered again until the next committee meeting.

But the most difficult part is that I have a big block against talking about this paperwork, because I just can't get my brain around the local terminology. My colleagues use the term pro forma for what I would call a form. This is a Latin prepositional phrase that means 'on account of form'. Using it as an adverb seems natural (It was done pro forma), as does using it as an adjective (a pro forma document). My colleagues use it as a noun, though, which I've never experienced outside the UK. The noun sense ('an official form for completion' [OED]) is not found in American dictionaries (well, at least not Merriam-Webster's or American Heritage), but is in Oxford's. It's spelt a variety of ways:

1945 Ann. Trop. Med. & Parasitol. XXXIX. 226 A senior member of the nursing staff..checked that the patient took the tablet and recorded each dose given and taken on a pro-forma. [OED]

1978 Jrnl. R. Soc. Med. LXXI. 413 Details of the illness were recorded on a proforma. [OED]

Use of a pro forma for head injuries in the accident and emergency department [Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, 1994]

The examples above make clear that use of this term is common in medical jargon, but I'm here to tell you that the term is alive and well in English Higher Education as well.

Now, form in this meaning is perfectly sayable in British English, so I'm not really sure what has motivated the use of pro forma as a noun. But we can note that form has another sense in BrE, relating to a division of students in a school, discussed back here.