Separated by a Common Language

Do not take cold and flu medications while operating this blog entry.

One of the "surprise hits" of the UK music charts around last Christmas was a folky song by Nizlopi. It's from the point of view of a five-year-old who feels safe and co{s/z}y while skipping school in order to ride around with his dad on a piece of heavy machinery. This was called the The JCB Song. My first thought about this song was "Well, that's not going to chart in America--no one would know what a JCB is." My second thought was "I'm feeling slightly queasy." My third thought was "Where can I find a sharp object to jam into my ears?" (Yes, it's a terribly sweet song. The charitable interpretation of my distaste for it is that I'm just too sweet to require more sweetness. I'm sure you can think of uncharitable interpretations on your own. Better Half has just suggested a few, but he can get his own blog if he wants to report them.)

Non-Britons must be listening to the JCB song, though, as there are people on the Internet asking what a JCB is. The (British) answers are often in the spirit of "it's a digger, duh! where have you been?" (So much for the stereotype of Britons as polite and proper.) JCB is a company name that's used generically to refer to any kind of big, yellow construction vehicle, typically the kind of bulldozer/backhoe thing pictured here. Incidentally, OED and BH say that backhoe is AmE, but that's what the British JCB company calls them.

Another piece of heavy machinery with a non-travel(l)ing name is the kanga hammer (heard recently at a lovely dinner party--thanks, Gill!). This is again based on a tradename (though I can't find a company website--are they still going?) and seems to be most used in Australian English, but it's unclear to me from the evidence on the web whether this is a specific type of (small) jackhammer, or something different from a jackhammer (as hinted at by the contrast with jackhammer in the second quotation):

A construction engineer offered me the use of his Kanga hammer, a small jack hammer, and after ten minutes of vibrating the rust the bolt loosened. -- Travel Through Cambodia on a Harley-Davidson by Peter Forwood

My hands are familiar with the steely hexagon of a crowbar, the distinction between the long handled and short handled shovel, the two blades of the pickaxe etcetera. I recall the jackhammer and kanga-hammer, the ramset nailgun, the wheelbarrow of treacherously sloppy cement and the narrow scaffolding along which it had to be manouvred. --'On poets being paid for their work' by Geoff Page and Alan Gould in Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature

[Update: Eimear in the comments has noted that I'm not finding many Kanga hammers on the web because they're Kango hammers--aha! Here's a picture--they are a sort of power-hammer, not as big/bulky as a jackhammer.]

Finally, an AmE tradename-cum-generic-heavy-machinery-name is the Mack truck, heard often in the phrases hit by a Mack truck and run over by a Mack truck:

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left. --Jean Kerr

If you wake up feeling as though you've just been run over by a Mack truck – what doctors refer to as unrefreshing sleep – it is reasonable for your physician to assume that you have a sleep disorder. --Fibromyalgia Network

(Click here for pictures of Mack trucks.) OED has Mack as 'Chiefly N. Amer. (Orig. U.S.)', so it may be somewhat familiar in BrE. Other AmE names for Mack-type vehicles of various types are: 18-wheeler (marked in OED as 'orig. N. Amer.'), semi (also AusE) and tractor-trailer. The usual BrE term is articulated lorry.

Off topic, but someone would be sure to mention it, are the BrE meanings of semi. Usually semi refers to a (BrE) semi-detached house or (AmE) duplex. In Scottish English it can also refer to the second year at certain universities, including St Andrews (similar to AmE sophomore).

The time-telling construction exemplified by quarter of four was among the first Americanisms to be beaten out of me (metaphorically, of course) ex patria. People challenged me to explain why I'd said of when I'd meant 'before', and since I couldn't explain it, I gave up saying it. This is the most opaque of the differing time expressions in AmE and BrE, but there are others. In the table below, the ones that are in bold are particular to one dialect. If they're not in bold, they're used in the other dialect too:

time	AmE	BrE
10:15	quarter after 10	quarter past 10
9:45	quarter of 10	quarter to 10
10.30	ten-thirty	half-ten

In either dialect, one could say half past 10, but Americans generally call it ten-thirty. The BrE half-ten is informal, but common in speech. What's very confusing, if you're someone who is learning both BrE and Swedish at the same time (ok, so maybe it won't bother you), is that in Swedish halv-tio ('half-ten') means 'half an hour until ten', i.e. 9:30.

Some Americans say quarter till ten, which Michael Swan on the BBC Worldservice reports is due to old Scottish English. Hence its effect in the US is strongest in Appalachia.

The other main time-telling difference between the UK and the US is the relative prevalence of the 24-hour clock. In the US, 24-hour time-telling is associated with the military, and with spoken expressions like 'oh-four-hundred hours' or 'twenty-three hundred hours'. Since everyone else only counts up to 12 in telling time, we have to append a.m. and p.m. on everything.

Until recently, Britain did the same, but increasingly the British are following the Continent in using the twenty-four hour clock in writing, for example on invitations, bus and train timetables (AmE=schedules) and digital clocks. In speech, twenty-four-hour time-telling is still a bit artificial. Say you were asked when the next train is. You look at the timetable/schedule, and it says: 18:42, 19:00. It'd be fairly natural to say that the next train is at eighteen-forty-two (or six-forty-two), but for the one after, one would be more likely to say seven o'clock than nineteen hundred. Saying *nineteen o'clock is definitely out.

(Better Half chips in that in the a.m. meaning 'in the morning' is very American.)

Dates, of course, are written differently on either side of the North Atlantic, with North Americans (most strongly US Americans) putting the month before the day and the rest of the world putting the day before the month. I used to be confident that international communication via computer would force a regulari{s/z}ation of date formats, but this doesn't seem to be happening. I assume that underlying mail programs there is a universal way of dating mail, but in the interface it is translated into the format that is local to the recipient. So, emails from my computer have shown up on others' computers in the following formats:

Skickat: den 11 augusti 2006 07:26 [Sweden]
Date: Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:29 pm [Sweden via a US e-mail program]
Sent: 26 July 2006 14:35 [UK]
Sent: Mon 24/07/2006 17:51 [UK]
Sent: Mon 4/24/2006 8:59 AM [US]

There go my hopes for world peace through shared date formatting.

It has been interesting, however, to witness the evolution of the name of that horrible day in September 2001. It didn't take the US media long to settle on Nine-Eleven (usually written 9/11) as the way to refer to that day and its events. In Britain, it was referred to as September 11th for some time after this, but nine-eleven is creeping in. Better Half points out that some Brits have started to refer to the day of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot as five-eleven. This stands for the 5th of November, not the eleventh of May, of course, so it's both an homage to and a corruption of the 9/11 formula. Two such-named plays about the plot were produced for its 400th anniversary last year: 5/11 and Five Eleven.

Myself, I avoid saying 9-11, and become a bit sad when I hear it with a British accent. Perhaps because I was not living in America during and since the events, the term didn't grab hold of me, and I can't help but perceive it as jingoistic and, well, disrespectful. I found the following bit of blogging (from By Neddie Jingo) on this phrasing:

I guess I'm bothered by the idea that "Nine-Eleven" has become a shorthand for a bottomless reservoir of symbolism and automatic, reflexive emotional associations, a thing that's so fraught with meaning that "the terrorists were responsible for 9-11" is used as a justification for the most idiotically disastrous war my country has ever embarked on. It's become, in short, a brand name, a thing used to sell the Iraq War to the people paying for it, and I (and, I imagine, a lot of you) would like to see it subverted.

And that's where you, my international friends, can make a difference.

My suggestion: Insist on calling it "Eleven-Nine," just as your own national conventions dictate. Boy, that'd confound a lot of people who desperately need some confounding. Imagine -- just by gently insisting on the rightness of your own nomenclatural convention, you remove at one blow "Nine-Eleven's" mystical associations. You'd also strike a major blow against the notion of American Exceptionalism, of linguistic hegemony, of cultural imperialism. Strike a blow for Relativism.

I think the notion of 9/11 as a brand name is what strikes me here, and explains to me a little while I've felt so uncomfortable with the term.

Let's hope no other dates need names like this.