Separated by a Common Language

So the other day, when I decided to avoid difficult questions and not decide between my top two US-to-UK words of the year, I laid the groundwork for general indecisiveness. So, I might as well not be decisive about the UK-to-US words either. It works out well (I re(-)assure myself) because in the end I will have a Noun of the Year and an Adjective of the Year in both directions. (Orig AmE) Tough luck, verbs.

And the UK-to-US Adjective of the Year is:

dodgy

When asked which British words I now can't live without, I usually mention dodgy. What did I say before? It's got such a feeling to it, and has to be translated by different words for different contexts in AmE. Take, for example, these British collocates (i.e. words that go next to it) for dodgy:

 dodgy knee, dodgy memory, dodgy ticker:  unreliable because falling apart

dodgy internet connection, dodgy CGI: unreliable, not very good--probably because it's done on the cheap

dodgy statistics,  dodgy accounting, dodgy refereeing: questionable; unreliable and possibly dishonest

dodgy business practices, dodgy characters, dodgy suburb: disreputable and probably dangerous/criminal

dodgy photos: either poorly taken or picturing dodgy activities

...and so on.

So, my question is: Is dodgy  used in the same way in AmE as in BrE?  One way to check on this is to look in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE). GloWBE collects about 387 million words from each of these dialects, and the basic numbers show that the word is still definitely BrE and only marginally AmE: 491 AmE examples to 3970 BrE ones.

You can ask GloWBE which collocates of dodgy are most typical of AmE and BrE--that is, not just which ones occur most in each, but which ones are statistically over- or under-represented in each. This bit of statistics is a bit dodgy, since the number of AmE dodgys is so small. But let's do it anyhow. We get a table like this, with AmE on the left:


The darker green indicates collocates that are very particular to that dialect. So, in the right column, we can see that BrE has lots and lots of nouns that go with dodgy a lot that are not much found in AmE. In the left column, we see that dodgy energy, dodgy theology, and dodgy scientists are found more in AmE than in BrE. However, that looks fairly suspicious, and sure enough the AmE dodgy energy examples are just repetitions of the same text (a problem for internet corpora is that a lot of internet content is mirrored or quoted on different sites), the AmE dodgy theologies are really two rather than three different examples, etc. The pink/red ones are over-represented in British compared to American.

The white ones are comparable in the two dialects--and bloke is a funny one here. Not only is it a BrE word, it's a BrE word (like bloody) that Americans probably overuse when 'doing' British English. I'd say this tells us that dodgy is generally perceived as British in AmE. And it's the number one collocate for dodgy in AmE. (The numbers here are slightly different from the above since I searched for nouns within one word above and within two words below.)


There are a lot of businessy collocates throughout the AmE list. There are in the BrE list too--after all, we're getting a lot of news stories here and there's been a lot of dodginess in that realm in the past few years. But there aren't many body parts on the American list. At number 58 on the list there are two instances of dodgy stomach, whereas on the BrE list, numbers 11 and 12 are knee and knees. The vaguely-criminal/dishonest meaning of dodgy seems to be coming through stronger in AmE than the 'unreliable/poorly constructed' sense.

This may be underscored by a US example from a novel by a Texan author (found via the Corpus of Contemporary American English), which wouldn't mean in BrE what it seems to be meaning here:

They'd need dodgy breaking-and-entering skills to get the journal (having somehow first discovered its existence), an impressive knack for wordplay, and access to Mission Impossiblestyle office products to obliterate all superfluous words into mind-blowing nonexistence.

What seems to be intended by the author is '(slightly?) criminal breaking-and-entering skills'. But say dodgy breaking-and-entering skills in BrE and it sounds like it means 'not-very-good breaking-and-entering skills'. BrE just wouldn't use dodgy to mean 'criminal' before something that is actually criminal.

And so it goes when words are imported. You can call them 'misunderstood' or you can call them 'subject to semantic change'.

Next up in the Words of the Year...nouns!

Thanks to all who have nominated US-to-UK and UK-to-US words for the annual Words of the Year (AmE) fest. The decisions were difficult, and so I am going to cheat and have two US-to-UK words. I can do that, because I'm the (orig. AmE) boss. And the first one is:

awesome

And in a coincidence that you probably won't believe (it's true!) my BrE-speaking child has just looked up from her (arguably orig. AmE) video game to say "That was awesome. I cooked an egg!"

Of course, awesome is not a new word in any English. It's been used to mean either 'full of awe' or 'inspiring awe' for centuries. But its use as enthusiastic praise of any little (or big) thing is originally American; the earliest [alleged] example of it in the OED is from 1961 in the now-defunct women's magazine McCall's:

He looked up to see Mrs. Kirby, awesome in a black-and-yellow polka-dotted slicker, bearing down on him.

This use of awesome really came into its own (in the US) in the 1980s. As Robert Lane Greene reminisces:

...change was happening to “awesome”. It was defined in 1980 in the “Official Preppy Handbook”, a bestselling semi-satirical look at well-heeled American youth: “Awesome: terrific, great.” It had a bit of California surfer-dude and Valley Girl, too. By 1982, the Guardian was mocking the West Coast with “It’s so awesome, I mean, fer shurr, toadly, toe-dully!”

Soon the word needed no definition. “Awesome” became the default descriptor for anything good. In 1982, I was seven and I swallowed it whole. It stayed with me for decades. In 2005, I remember meeting a girl when I had just seen “Batman Begins”, the moody psychological picture that reinvigorated a tired franchise. “It’s awesome,” I told her. “Awesome. Just awesome.” She wondered, she later said, what kind of journalist had just one adjective in his vocabulary. Somehow, she married me all the same.

“Awesome” has been with my generation in America so long that it now has a whiff of retro.

And it's been in BrE for a while now too. My colleague Justyna Robinson studies the sociolinguistics of word-meaning variation and change, and awesome is one she's followed in British English. This means that she gets to write things with titles like "Awesome insights into semantic variation". (I am jealous.) In that 2011 book chapter, she reports on a study in which she asked Yorkshire residents of different ages and backgrounds to name something awesome and to tell her why it was awesome. Older respondents said things like "The Grand Canyon. Because it takes your breath away." The under-30s said things like "a salad, because it was really good".

Robinson (2011; see Awesome title link above)

But it's not just teenagers using it. Robert Lane Greene reports that "The Guardian, the paper that mocked “awesome” in 1982, had used it in 6,457 articles by July 2011, with one or two being added each day"(see link above).

So, why make it Co-Word of the Year for 2014? One reason is that it was all over the news when the first findings of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 came out. Here's a selection in which this particular word made the headline.

In the Guardian:
There are several (press-release-inspired?) with this title (this one from phys.org):

And more:
And more:


The Daily Mail headline alludes to the other reason this is a Word of 2014. The Lego Movie and its theme song 'Everything is Awesome'.



Before 2014, I heard British teenagers saying awesome. I heard my English child saying it only when she had just been visiting her American cousins. But now, it's the (AmE) go-to positive evaluation word for the under-10s too. This is part of the landscape of their language now--not an Americanism that they've ironically decided to adopt, but just how they talk. The makers of The Lego Movie were surely cognizant of the word's "retro" feeling when choosing it for their theme, making a bit of an in-joke for the US parents who used it (and Lego(s)) when they were young. But the irony is lost on young British children. It's just a (orig. AmE in this sense) cool word for them.

Its WOTY status was sealed for me when I overhead this conversation between mother and pre-school son about how he should be playing with his baby sister:

Mother: Reuben, Isabella is much smaller than you. When you play with her, you have to be extra....
[Reuben ignores her]
Mother: When you play with her you have to be extra.....
[Reuben ignores her some more]
Mother: You have to be extra...
Reuben: Awesome!


The other US-to-UK and the UK-to-US WotYs will be revealed in the next few days.

• I'm only talking about the relationship between British and American English here (as is my theme). These expressions may well have equivalents in other languages or dialects.  
• By Untranslatable I mean that there is no lexicali{z/s}ed equivalent in the other dialect. And by lexicali{z/s}ed I mean that the expression is a word or an idiom--something that language users learn through hearing others say it, rather than something that has been made up anew.
  One can translate things by making up new sentences or phrases that describe the same thing, sure. But it's special when a language has lexicali{z/s}ed an  expression for something--it tells us something about the culture that invented and uses that expression.
• Many of these have started to be borrowed between the dialects--and that's natural. If it's a useful expression and the other dialect doesn't have it, it's a prime candidate for international migration.
• If you have not heard of the word before (even though I've said it comes from your country), this is not cause for complaint. It is cause for celebration that you have this opportunity to enrich your vocabulary! 

• They can't repeat items from the previous Untranslatables Months.
• It should be the expression that's missing from the other country, rather than the thing. So, for instance Page 3 Girl was suggested, but there is no American newspaper that puts topless young women on page three every day (thank goodness). There's no word for it in the US only because there's nothing for it to refer to in the US, so it doesn't belong in this particular list.
• I try to alternate American and British expressions (but that doesn't always work out).

• BrE snug: a small, comfy room in a pub. Occasionally  extended to other comfy personal (orig. ScotE) hidey-holes. Here's a Wikipedia description. [I learned this during the year while reading an article that I now can't find. I had to look the word up, and then spent the rest of the year waiting for untranslatables month to come round again.]
• AmE to jaywalk: to cross the street/road against the light or where there's no crossing. Thanks to @SimonKoppel for the suggestion. As I noted in a later tweet, this word is known by many in the UK, but generally only used to refer to people doing it in the US. Some British twitterers objected that this couldn't count because the thing doesn't exist in the UK. They were under the impression that one cannot jaywalk in the UK because it's not illegal to cross in the middle of the (orig. AmE) block here.  But notice that there's nothing about legality in the definition I've given. I grew up in a place where (I was told, I've never actually checked) jaywalking wasn't illegal. But we still called it jaywalking. (Remember: laws--including many traffic laws--vary by state in the US.)
• BrE Billy No-Mates: a friendless person. Here's a history of the phrase. (Can't find who suggested it, but thanks!) Several people sent variations on this like Johnny No-mates, Norma No-Mates and Norman No-Mates, but Billy seems to be the original (and the one I hear most--the others may be a bit more spread around the anglophone world).
• AmE backwash: saliva/mouth contents that go back into a bottle that's been swigged from. (Urban Dictionary's take on it.) Several Brits told me they knew this from childhood, but it's still not (in my experience) widespread in the UK. Of course, the word-form is used in both dialects for other kinds of washing-back in rivers and plumbing.
• BrE garden(ing) leave: Explained in this old post.  Thanks again to @SimonKoppel.
• BrE to plump for: to choose suddenly after much dithering. Thanks for the suggestion to @rwmg.
• AmE will call: [of tickets] to be collected at the box office. Wikipedia says COBO ('care of box office') is the BrE equivalent, but it's not in general use. In a US theat{er/re} you might have to go to the will-call desk/counter/box office to get the tickets. COBO isn't used like that. Yet another one suggested by @SimonKoppel. I might have to put him in charge of Untranslatables month next October.
• BrE to decant: to transfer people temporarily to another location. See sense 1.1 in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Thanks to Diane Benjamin for this suggestion.
• AmE to stop on a dime: to come to a halt quickly and neatly in exactly the right spot. Many complained that this has a BrE equivalent in stop on a sixpence. Fair enough. Though I will note that turn on a sixpence seems to be more common than stop on...
• BrE three-line whip: Party instruction to Members of Parliament that they must vote with the party on some matter. (Here's more explanation from a Stack Exchange.) There is a question here whether it should count: is there an equivalent three-level structure of whips in the US? Well, there could be, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Thanks to @JanetNorCal for the suggestion.
• AmE loaded for bear: well prepared (and probably eager) for a forthcoming confrontation. Thanks to @sethadelman for the suggestion.
• BrE gazunder: [for a buyer] to reduce an agreed-upon price for a house/property just prior to signing contract.  Here's Word Spy on it.  
• BrE gazump. To obtain a property by offering more for it than an already-accepted offer. Here's Oxford Dictionaries Online on it.
• AmE layaway (= AusE lay-by). Instal(l)ment purchasing, where the item's not received until it's paid off. There was some discussion about whether this should count because it's unclear that the equivalent exists in the UK. British hire-purchase is the equivalent of AmE rent-to-own or rental-purchase, in which case you take the thing home and make payments on it. I allowed it because I think one could argue that certain Christmas schemes in the UK (like this one) are kind of like layaway. Thanks to @smylers2 for the suggestion.
• BrE U and non-U: (Non)-upper class, with particular reference to words that "should" or "shouldn't" be used. Here's the Wikipedia article on it. And here are places where the distinction has been mentioned on this blog.
• AmE charley horse. A cramp in the leg. Here is Merriam-Webster's definition. Thanks to @meringutan for the suggestion. There were some suggestions for British-dialectal equivalents of this. Hard to tell if they're really equivalent. You can discuss amongst yourselves in the comments.
• BrE WAGs: wives and/or girlfriends of (BrE) footballers as a type of celebrity. Discussed on this blog here. Thanks to @meringutan.
• AmE snow day: a day when schools and businesses are closed due to snow. (Longman definition). Sometimes heard in UK now, but no local lexical equivalent. Thanks for the suggestion, @laurelspeth.
• BrE chav. This is a word for a stereotyped type of person. Here's Wikipedia's take on it. Suggested by @kearsycormier (thanks!). This one I was most uneasy about including, because I think it is the case of it being more the referent (in this case people rather than things) rather than the word that the US lacks. It's all about the UK social class system, which operates in different ways, with different emblems, than the US class system.  Many years ago I wrote about an attempt to import chav to the US. It hasn't worked.
• AmE family-style: adjective or adverb describing the serving of food at restaurant in dishes that are to be passed (a)round and taken from, like at home. (Oxford's definition)
• BrE scrumping: stealing apples from an orchard. Thanks to @beardynoise for the suggestion.
• AmE palimony: (humorous) alimony-style payments made after the break-up of a non-marital relationship. 
• BrE dodgy: with its many shades of meaning, it's hard to think of an exact equivalent: Here's Oxford Dictionaries Online on it. Once one learns this word, it soon becomes a necessary part of one's vocabulary, so it's not surprising that there are US sightings of it. Thanks to  @tonythorne007 for the suggestion.

Thought I'd dip into the 'to-be-blogged' e-mailbox and click randomly for the next topic, and wouldn't you know it: the thing I clicked on, a five-month-old note from Jan Freeman, is about off-piste, which I used in the last post, leading to some off-piste (and off-piste) discussion in the comments there.

So, here I am discussing it again, but that's (orig. AmE) okay because I like things to have their own posts and because it leads me to a few other off- expressions.

Off-piste has both literal and figurative uses in BrE. A piste (pronounced 'peest') was originally the path beaten by a horse or mule, but was extended to the area of play in fencing and to prepared/designated ski paths. Piste has other uses in French, but English has taken those particular meanings.

The English-French hybrid off-piste usually refers to skiing*; skiing off-piste means leaving the designated path. [Though the UK isn't a great skiing destination, that doesn't keep Brits from skiing--remember: they get a lot more holiday/vacation time than Americans, many go on package holidays where they (AmE) rent/(BrE) hire the equipment, and the Alps are just over there...] I won't say that American skiers never say (off-)piste, but the ones I know don't. They talk of ski runs, not pistes. I assume that the skiing terminology differences between the US and UK stem from the fact that the British rarely ski in their own country and so the terms they use are sometimes borrowed from other European languages. Meanwhile, Americans tend to ski in the US and have come up with their own English words for things. So Americans wear ski bibs (or overalls), while UK skiers have salopettes, from French. Americans do cross-country skiing, but my English in-laws call it langlauf (from German) and others in the UK (more officially) call it Nordic skiing (but also cross-country skiing).

The figurative meaning of off-piste is very British and seems to be relatively recent (the OED doesn't cover the figurative meanings). So, figuratively, off-piste is any deviation from what is expected. Some examples from the interwebs, courtesy of GloBWE:

• I'm a fan of wine from off-piste regions. 

• tell them exactly what you want, while still remaining open to any slightly off-piste suggestions 

• Goldie's debut looked to slick jazz-funk and soul for off-piste inspiration

As you can see here, off-piste works well as an adjective, but it's also used adverbially:

• To the rescue Domaine Guenault Touraine Sauvignon 2011 (7.99), from the Bougrier's own property -- the conversation was much better, though one of our number went off piste and really rated the Muscadet with it, especially the cockles. 

So in this case one drinker didn't follow the path set by others and had a different wine. (That's an informal BrE use of rated -- to mean 'rated highly'.  I really thought I'd covered that before, but it seems not.)

Similar to off-piste, but not as useful as an adjective, is the phrase off the beaten [noun].  The choice of noun in that phrase differs by continent. The US and Canada prefer off the beaten path at a rate of about 3:1, while the UK and Ireland prefer off the beaten track by about 5:1 (again using GloWBE).

In all these figurative expressions, going off the path gives the connotation of trail-blazing excitement (reminding me of the AmE use of maverick) or, at least, interesting idiosyncrasy.  This is in contrast to another sport(s)-related figurative off- adverbial: (orig.) AmE off base. This comes from baseball, where a player (on the batting team) is safe while on a base. If you're not on a base, a member of the fielding team can put you out by tagging you with the ball (or by some other means). So, in the figurative sense, something that is off base is not where it should be; it's misguided and wrong and may put you in a position where you (or your idea) can be disregarded, as in (still from GloBWE):

• Dawkins was way off base. He is so busy being the leader of the New Atheism that he has no idea what is going on behind him. 

• your predictive powers and knowledge of the economy have thus far proven to be so far off base that it's a whole new game in another stadium

The phrase is known in BrE, but much less used, and certainly not with the extension of the baseball metaphor as in the last example.

In the American corpus data, many uses of off base try to pre(-)empt judg(e)ment, as in:

• feel free to correct me if I'm off base...

• I may be off base here but...

One can use off-base as an adjective, as in off-base assertions, but it's far more often used as the adverbial phrase. The hyphenated adjective is more common in its literal use for 'off (of) a military base' (e.g. an off-base apartment).


And with that, I'm off...



*It seems only fitting that in a post about off-piste, I should go off piste. And so I will, to share a harrowing tale of third-grade injustice. We were playing a game in class where two teams had to challenge each other to think of and spell words with double letters.  I challenged my opposite to come up with a word with double-i.  The teacher said I couldn't do that unless I could think of a word that had double-i. So I whispered "skiing" in her ear and she said I couldn't use that because it was not an English word. (She was a Norwegian immigrant and claiming it for her language. Never mind the -ing.) When it was my turn again, I challenged my opponent to find a double-u word. Again, the teacher challenged me. Again I had a word in mind (vacuum). But this time she wouldn't let me use it on account of me being a (orig. AmE in this sense) show-off. Look where that's got(ten) me. Forty years of bitterness.

I had to take/make a decision on how to hyphenate the title of this post--it could have been

anti-clockwise and counter-clockwise
anticlockwise and counter-clockwise
            or
anticlockwise and counterclockwise

but I went with (BrE) anti-clockwise and (AmE) counterclockwise because, as we've seen before, Americans are a bit more apt to close up prefixed words when given the chance to. 

@jaynefox requested this one as a Twitter 'Difference of the Day', but since it's been a month since my last post (shock! horror! marking/grading!), I'm easing myself back into blogging with something that can't get too out-of-hand, I hope.

So why do we have different words for going in a circle as if going backward(s) on a clock?  The earliest instance of clockwise in the OED is from 1888 (and it's clock-wise, adding all sorts of hyphenation possibilities). This tells us that its opposite is a good bet for transatlantic differences: the British colonists could not have taken it to America, so each nation was free to come up with its own version. It's not so clear that their origins really were in different countries, though.

The OED's first instance of counter-clockwise is in the same quote as the clock-wise one, from the Times (of London).  Their first for anti-clockwise is from 1898. But should we trust the OED on this one? Probably not. These entries have not been updated in a long, long time and the OED's use of American sources was pretty limited in the early years.


Merriam-Webster has a first attestation date of 1879 for anticlockwise, but doesn't give the source. Its counter-clockwise date is also 1888.

So, I've turned to Google Books. Do you know what? Google Books is a pain. Search for counterclockwise in 19th century books, and you'll find that a lot of books that Google Books thinks were published in the 19th century weren't.  So, searching 12 pages into the results, I've found a few cases of counter(-)clock(-)wise antedating:

• 1882 in Uniplanar Kinematics of Solids and Fluids by George Minchin, an Irish-born scientist in London. 
• 1882 in The Civil Engineer's Reference-book by Pennsylvanian John Trautwine
• 1883 in Pamphlets on Biology (can't tell where it's published)

I could not find anything before 1880 for anti-clockwise (there's a nautical almanac that Google's dated as 1858, but that particular almanac didn't start publication till 1877, according to Wikipedia...and there are other such mis-datings).  

So, anti-clockwise is looking mostly British, but counterclockwise seems to have been used in England as early as it was being used in the US.  No obvious first coinage here, so we can't tell a tale of different national origins. All we can say is that anti-clockwise never caught on in the US, and counterclockwise quickly fell out of favo(u)r in the UK.

Oh, I suppose I can't leave without saying something about pronunciation.  In BrE the second syllable of anti-clockwise is pronounced like tea. Americans often (but not always) pronounce anti- with a second syllable like tie, which can help in distinguishing it from ante-. Some discussion of the variation in AmE pronunciation of anti- can be found here. For me, it's partly on a word-by-word basis: 'tea' in anticlimax, but 'tie' in anti-Communist.  I think if I form a new word with it (say, if I'm anti-pigeon), I'd pretty regularly use 'tie'. But that's what I think. And we're all pretty bad rememberers of what we do say and we're often bad judges of what we would say.  So, unless someone records me unawares saying antipigeon, we may never know...

It's Tuesday night! I'm supposed to be blogging! It's already 10! What will be quick to write about?!

Let's go with the item in a recent email exchange with the famous (if you read the comments section here) David Crosbie. But before I do that: thanks to David and to all the other commenters here who add so much to this blog. I'm (orig. AmE) taking a back seat on comment-replying these days, and I'm really grateful to all of you who fill in so much great information from so many different perspectives here.

So, anyway, we were having a conversation about certain comments on the site and I said "I think it's just (AmE) garden-variety spam", which he pointed out would be common or garden spam in BrE, which the OED lists as "a jocular substitute for 'common' or 'ordinary'". The same description works for garden-variety. They're descriptions that would be used for a variety of plant or animal that is the 'ordinary' kind that you would find in your garden, extended to a more general use. Both have had this kind of figurative use since about the beginning of the 20th century.

David also reminded me of an arguably more coarse (but more frequent) BrE synonym, bog-standard. That's come up in passing here because it's always used in my house when Better Half offers people tea: 'Do you want Earl Grey or bog-standard?' (The usual reply: 'bog-standard'.)  Keeping with my aim to blog quickly tonight, I'm going to let the OED tell you about the etymology:

Origin uncertain; perhaps an alteration of box-standard adj. (although this is first attested later), after bog n.⁴

Differing theories of the origin of bog-standard have been proposed, but none proven. An immediate association with bog n.¹ seems unlikely on semantic grounds. The most commonly held view is that the transition from box to bog resulted from a mishearing or misunderstanding of box-standard n.

Others have suggested a derivation < bog-wheel, former Cambridge slang for a bicycle, though ultimately also related to bog n.⁴: see P. Beale Conc. Dict. Slang (1989) 47/2, 48/1.

The  bog n.⁴ they're referring to is the BrE slang use of the term for a latrine (which I somehow failed to mention in the toilet post). Bog n.¹ is the 'swamp' [orig. AmE] meaning.

I can't think of a similarly slangy AmE equivalent, but what AmE does have is regular to mean 'ordinary'.  The OED (again) lists it as:

6 a. Having the usual, typical, or expected attributes, qualities, parts, etc.; normal, ordinary, standard. Now chiefly U.S.

That meaning has given rise to other AmE meanings:

 d. Chiefly N. Amer. Of food and drink: having the usual or typical constituents, as distinguished from some other defined category of the same foodstuff; unmodified; not distinguished by any peculiarity of quality, preparation, presentation, etc.

 e. orig. U.S. Normal, average, or standard with reference to a predetermined scale or system of categorization; belonging to the category or class considered to be standard.

 The last of these has come into BrE with McDonald's and Starbucks, and one sees it often in non-US-owned coffee shops now. And it's one of those things that some BrE speakers like to complain to me about. In fact, an American David who works at Sussex with me emailed me a few months ago about his run-in with a 'regular' correcter:

[H]ave you ever covered "regular" which, in AmE, can mean something like the bog standard or ordinary, but, in BrE seems to never have that meaning?  I asked for "regular flavour" crisps at the Bridge Cafe, some years ago, and a perky, apparently British woman informed me that "regular" is a frequency. She was probably one of your linguistics colleagues.  :-)

So, I managed a blog post in less than an hour by quoting liberally from dictionaries and emails. Score!


Before I go, some dates and places where I'll be speaking about linguistic stuff for general audiences:

• Sermon: Love your language as yourself.
• 4 May,  Sunday Assembly Brighton, Brighton Fringe event in the Spiegeltent. Free, but requires booking (there is a fee to book online if you're not a member of the Fringe)

•  How America Saved the English Language
• 15 May: Reading Skeptics in the Pub (I assume a small donation will be requested)

•  'The most acceptable hypocrisy'?  Polite words in the UK and US. 
• 19 June: The Bedford Culture Club (which is not in Bedford, but in Horsham) (£10)

And if you're interested in what goes on in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex (woo hoo!!), check out our new events blog. (You can also follow us on Twitter @SussexLinguist.)

• I'm only talking about the relationship between British and American English here (as is my theme). These expressions may well have equivalents in other languages or dialects.  
• By Untranslatable I mean that there is no lexicali{z/s}ed equivalent in the other dialect. And by lexicali{z/s}ed I mean that the expression is a word or an idiom--something that language users learn through hearing others say it, rather than something that one makes up anew. One can translate things by making up new sentences or phrases that describe the same thing, sure. But it's special when a language has lexicali{z/s}ed an  expression for something--it tells us something about the culture that invented and uses that expression.
• Many of these have started to be borrowed between the dialects--and that's natural. If it's a useful expression and the other dialect doesn't have it, it's a prime candidate for international migration.

In some cases, I've discussed the expressions before on this blog, so I provide links to those posts. I also include here the links I provided with the tweets and I try to give credit to those who suggested them as untranslatables.

• AmE buyer's remorse: 'regret felt after a purchase'. [Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary definition]. Suggested by @flipdrivel

Two matters for this belated blog post:  Words of the Year nominations and the Untranslatables Month summary.

WotY Nominations
Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:

1. Best AmE-to-BrE import
2. Best BrE-to-AmE import

The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2012, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.


Untranslatables II
Last year, as a birthday treat to myself, I declared October to be Untranslatables Month, which meant that I tweeted an expression that was unique to one dialect or another, in that its meaning was not captured by an expression in the other dialect. This year, I did it again, but made the job easier on myself by deciding not to tweet on weekends. Here's a summary of the 'untranslatables' I tweeted. In some cases, you can follow links to places where I (or someone) have discussed them in more detail.

• BrE lie-in (noun). The act of staying in bed later in the morning than usual. Sleeping not required, but lazing is. Example: 'The family was away, so I had a lie-in on Saturday as an early birthday treat.'  (AmE & BrE both have sleeping in for when one sleeps late.)

• AmE cater-corner, kitty-corner, catty-corner (regional variations), adj & adv, meaning 'diagonally opposite to'. Example: 'I live kitty-corner to the bordello'.

•  BrE builder's tea. Very strong (hot, of course), basic (i.e. not a special cultivar/flavo[u]r) tea with milk and lots of sugar. The 'lots of sugar' part is in most definitions for it, but some of my correspondents don't consider 'sweet' to be a necessary feature.

• AmE Nielsen rating. The television rating system that determines advertising rates, used figuratively as a measure of popularity. Example: 'When you give babies a choice of what to listen to, a kind of baby Nielsen rating, they choose to listen to mothers talking to infants' (from The Scientist in the Crib).

• BrE It's not cricket. 'It shouldn't happen because it's not fair/proper'. Occasionally heard in AmE too.

• AmE poster child. Figuratively, an emblematic case of something, esp. a cause. Originally a child on posters promoting a charity. This one has come into BrE--as untranslatables often do (because they're useful). In the US, it's especially associated w/the (US) Muscular Dystrophy Association, which is also responsible for the US's longest-running charity telethon. It's interesting how different diseases are 'big' in terms of fundraising in different countries...

Goodbye Untranslatables month!

It's our last full day in the US after a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation of nearly a month.  I'd thought I'd catch up on blogging during this downtime, but I started to enjoy actually being on holiday/vacation. Imagine that!

As we rushed to get everything done before leaving my parents' house and my hometown, I asked Better Half to run across the street/road to the (AmE) drug store/(BrE) chemist's to buy a (AmE & BrE) greeting/(BrE) greetings card for my soon-to-be nine-year-old niece. He came back with a very (orig. AmE in this sense*) cute card that was arguably marketed at a younger age group, explaining (with alarm in his voice) that he couldn't bear to buy a (orig. AmE) tweenie-appropriate (not his words) card addressed to 'a spunky girl'.

An hour or so later, we searched with desperation for a place to have lunch with my parents. We'd checked in at the airport, but there is now nowhere in ROC to have anything but a cookie or a pretzel outside (of) the security zone, and our usual diner across the road had closed down. (We found later that JFK is no better--couldn't find a 'proper' restaurant in which to eat after collecting our luggage/before going to our foodless hotel. I blame Homeland Security. And, America, why don't you put sensible things in your airports after security? Like a drug store/chemist's where one could buy baby food and sunscreen in order to get around the 3-oz./100 ml rule? UK airports [orig. AmE i.t.s] rule, oh yeah!)  We ended up at a local (orig. AmE i.t.s) chain restaurant about which the less said, the better. But it thrilled by being in the same (orig./chiefly AmE i.t.s) plaza (i.e. set of retail businesses sharing a [AmE] parking lot/[BrE] car park) as this gym:





And this had BH clamo(u)ring** for a blog post on spunk. 

Spunk came up, so to speak, in my last post, because the American Heritage Dictionary gave it as a synonym for gumption. And there I had the footnote:

* I've no doubt that some readers will find this definition humorous, as spunk is BrE slang for 'semen'. But the primary meaning in AmE (also found in BrE, and originating from a Scots/northern England dialect for 'spark') is 'Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' (OED).

In the comments, a couple of US readers claimed familiarity with the 'semen' sense of spunk, but its use in US business names indicates that it is the 'spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' sense that is called to mind first in AmE. (My research has, however, led me to an adult entertainment business in Australia called "Spice and Spunk Strippers". You're welcome.) In BrE, the 'seminal fluid' meaning has been around since at least 1890, and the other meanings (of which there are many) have been around longer, but many of the other meanings (e.g. 'a spark', 'a match', 'a lively person') seem to be more rooted in northern dialects and may not have had much currency down south when the 'semen' meaning took off. Two meanings that aren't marked as dialectal in the OED are 'tinder' and 'One or other of various fungi or fungoid growths on trees, esp. those of the species Polyporus, freq. used in the preparation of tinder'--and perhaps it is that sense from which the 'semen' sense comes (here's a photo of the fungus, you can judge).

Spunky meaning 'Full of spunk or spirit; courageous, mettlesome, spirited' is not marked as dialectal in the OED, but some of the earliest citations seem to be Scottish. (Well the first one, Burns, definitely is, and the second one has the word lassie in it. For some reason the links to the OED sources aren't working for me.) There is no 'semen-y' meaning in the OED, but it certainly exists. The OED does include a 'US & dial' meaning 'Angry, irritable, irascible', but that's not a sense that I hear used, and the citations are all from the 19th century.

At any rate, the semen sense seems to have taken over British minds--or at least the minds of the under-50s, as far as I can tell. I'd be interested to hear whether people in other parts of the UK have the same impression of the spunk(y) situation. Americans, meanwhile, mostly use the word in with positive connotations--and with a definite feminine bias. Here are the top nouns that follow spunky in the Corpus of Contemporary American English:




So, this is yet another example of Americans innocently using words that sound "dirty" in BrE. And before you comment, please note that there is a £5 tax on this blog for typing fanny pack.***



Oh--and before I go:
If you've ever wondered what a Lynneguist sounds like (after 12 years of anglification), wonder no more! Patrick Cox's latest World in Words podcast is an interview with me about all sorts of things, like how my immigrant vowels have shifted, criticism-softening devices in BrE, and language and social class. He promises a part 2 after his holiday. I had a lovely time (that's me all Britified) speaking with him, as we have converse experiences--he's an Englishman living in the US. I hope it might be of interest to some of you too...




*There are several 'in this sense' originally-AmE items here, so henceforth I abbreviate 'in this sense' as 'i.t.s'.
** Quote: "You could blog about that."
*** Payable to: http://www.msf.org/