Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts

pavement, sidewalk, and the stuff thereof

Jul 18, 2008
I'm essentially an idealistic and optimistic person, if one can judge by thoughts that go through my head like "Sure, I can work on the blog tonight and still meet all my other deadlines." But I have a very healthy morbid streak (as the hypochondriac child of a funeral home should have), as evidenced by the following train of thought, which stopped at several stations in my head this afternoon while I was pushing Grover in her (BrE) pushchair/(AmE) stroller across the (BrE) car park/(AmE) parking lot at the (AmE) train station/(BrE) railway station:
"Oh look, that car is (AmE) backing up (= BrE-preferred reversing).
"Maybe I ought to get on the (BrE) pavement. That way, if they hit me, it'll be the driver's fault and I'll have a moral victory.
"Hm, if you said to an American 'the pedestrian was on the pavement when she was killed', they'd probably think it was the pedestrian's fault.
"That'll disappoint my parents when the police come to tell them about my tragic demise. (Of course, Grover, being on wheels, will be pushed to safety. )"
Now, one point of interest (at least to me) is the fact that I seem to be thinking in a mix of dialects. That's probably not as clear in reality as it is when I type out the thought process. When I saw the car's movement, I probably thought "!!!" rather than "Oh look, that car is backing up." But the word pavement definitely made it through my head, since otherwise the subsequent thoughts wouldn't have come hot on its asphalt heels. But that's not the reason I've stopped to blog about it.

People frequently note that AmE sidewalk = BrE pavement, but it's rarer to see the AmE use of pavement explained in those ubiquitous lists of simple AmE/BrE lexical differences. In BrE, if you're on the pavement, then you're not on the road, but for Americans, this can be confusing because the road is paved, and therefore pavement. The OED gives the following:
2. a. The paved or metalled part of a road or other public thoroughfare; the roadway. Now chiefly N. Amer. and Engin.The main sense in N. America.
But the more common sense in BrE is:
b. A paved footpath alongside a street, road, etc., usually slightly raised above the level of the road surface. See also foot-pavement n.
I've seen one person on the web claiming that we use pavement in this way in the US--i.e. to distinguish the pedestrian path from the road. That's not my experience at all--so it may be that that it's regional--the writer doesn't indicate where she's from.

Incidentally, sidewalk (originally side walk or side-walk) is one of those things that was originally British English, but which faltered here while gaining favo(u)r in America. So, next time you see/hear a British person showing distaste for the word, you can ask them to thank their ancestors for it. Let's start with these charming folk:
Sir David Attenborough would never say 'sidewalk', he speaks English (properly). [poster PEB at the ITV football (=AmE soccer) forum]

 i find myself using more and more American English, in an effort for smoother understanding, as i come into contact with so few Brits here. i say ’apartment’ and ’soccer’ and ’line’ instead of ’queue’ - which is all pretty bad - i commit to never say ’sidewalk’, though - and hope that if i ever did, even in jest, anyone who thought of themselves as a friend would have the common decency to punch me in the face. square in the face. repeatedly. [a gareth egg's myspace page; I don't consider him a friend, but I would consider punching him square in the face. Maybe not repeatedly, as that would ruin my pacifist cred.]

But all that wasn't the reason I've stopped to blog about my morbid thought train either. No, the reason I'm blogging about it is that I have a modicum of guilt about the fact that I've used so few of the good ideas sent to me by readers these days, and thinking of pavement made me think of an e-mail sent to me by my emeritus colleague Max (since he uses his own name when he comments here, I won't do my usual pseudonymi{s/z}ing). He's just read Jane Smiley's Ten days in the hills (which I won't be reading because I've given her two chances and she's driven me [BrE] mad/[AmE] crazy each time), and he sent me a list of Americanisms that were new to him. Among them was
He went down the front steps and walked toward the aviary across Mike's pavers, set in an elaborate pattern of interlocking arches.
which, as he correctly worked out, is equivalent to BrE paving stones, though I had to look it up to know that, as it's not a word I'd ever use. In fact, it's not in many dictionaries--answers.com has to go to the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction for it, so it might just be trade jargon. That's not the only place in Smiley's novel where Max found a term that I had to go to a specialist glossary for (true-divided-light windows, anyone?), which gives a little hint as to why I find her writing too gristly to chew.

Of course, these days, paving is done with just about anything that can be used to harden an area of ground. Where I grew up, we called the black stuff that's used on roads tar or blacktop (one could also, more dialect-neutrally, call it asphalt) but in BrE, it is more likely to be called tarmacadam--a word I'd never heard in America--or its abbreviation tarmac. In AmE, tarmac (originally Tarmac, a trade name) is reserved for the surfaces that (AmE) airplanes/(BrE) aeroplanes drive on at airports--as in "I once had to sit on the tarmac for five hours at JFK." (Not that my bottom came into contact with the tarmac, but that my bottom made contact with a plane that made unmoving contact with the tarmac.) In the OED definition above, we see metalled (AmE would prefer metaled), which refers to road metal, a term that I've never come across before, but refers to "broken stone used in making roads", as is found in these tarmacky, asphalty things. If you'd like to know the technical differences between tarmac and asphalt, I recommend that you look them up because although I've just read all about it, I just can't build up the enthusiasm to tell you about it.

I can't leave this subject without mentioning crazy-paving, which I have only heard in BrE contexts--the first of which (in my American circumstance) was in Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' song Rattlesnakes:
her heart, heart's like crazy paving
upside down and back to front
she says ooh, it's so hard to love
when love was your great disappointment*
Getting to hear that live was the first and only reason we've had to find someone to (orig. AmE) babysit in the evening so far. Did not disappoint--in fact, Mr Cole appointed very well. But getting back to language and away from the little (orig. AmE) crushes of mine that Better Half bears so well, crazy paving is the use of paving stones in a 'crazed' non-pattern. Although, as far as I know, the term crazy paving is mostly used in the UK, it is based (according to the OED) on the originally AmE collocation crazy quilt, for a patchwork quilt with irregularly shaped/placed patches.

* These are the published lyrics, but I've always heard this as 'love was sure a great disappointment'. Click on the link above to watch the video and tell me I'm not wrong!
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the floor

Nov 3, 2007
Since Better Half and I both lived with each other's dialects for some time before meeting each other, there aren't too many times when our linguistic differences get us into trouble. But one thing that hasn't stopped confusing me is when he calls the ground outside the floor. For instance, we might be walking along the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk and he'll say "Mind the poo on the floor there" or "Look at all the chewing gum on the floor!" (He's just come up with those two examples himself, reminding me of my mother's recurrent surprise at the 'uncleanliness' of England. Of course, my mother lives in a small town in a rural area in the US, so her comparisons to cities in England aren't really fair.)

Anyhow, BH's exclamations about things on the floor almost always knock me for a loop, because to me the floor is something inside a building. Of course, in AmE I can also talk about the forest floor, but I think of that as being a very speciali{s/z}ed usage; it doesn't just mean the ground in the forest, it means all the ferns and mosses and things that one finds on the ground in a forest. Similarly for the ocean floor--to me, it's about an ecosystem, not just a surface.

I've asked various BrE-speaking friends whether they use floor to mean ground, and their replies have been mixed. (But it also should be said that I usually don't think that asking people whether they say X is a very productive or accurate way of finding out if they say X. What we do when speaking is a largely subconscious process, and when we reflect on that process, all sorts of things, not least ideas about how we 'should' speak, get in the way.) Looking in the OED, I find that it lists the sense 'the ground' as obsolete, except in dialects.

Now, as a Saaff Lundun boy descended of a long line of South Londoners, I kind of doubt that BH is hanging on to some old ways that the OED compilers thought of as 'dialectal'. So, my hypothesis is that this usage has been re-introduced to the general language through cricket. (This would contribute to explaining why BH uses it more than most of my girlfriends.) As the OED notes, floor is the ground of a cricket ground--that is to say, the dirt/grass part of the cricket field (too many senses of ground in that last clause). So, the OED also lists to put a catch on the floor as a colloquial way to say 'to fail to hold a catch' in cricket.

I was reminded of the whole floor issue while watching the quiz celebrating Channel 4's 25th anniversary last night. (For certain reasons, I'm watching way too much television lately.) They showed a clip of a program(me) in which Derren Brown gets 'normal' people to hold up an armo(u)red bank car. And in that, in the out-of-doors, the robber demands that the bank guy get 'down on the floor' (i.e. on the street/road). You can see a clip from that (BrE) programme/(AmE) show here on YouTube, but to hear people saying floor, skip to about 7:24. Here, of course, there's the possibility that the speakers have been affected by seeing lots of dramati{s/z}ed robberies that take place inside banks, and so the thing that one says in that condition is Get down on the floor. But it still sounds really unnatural to me--I can't help but think that I'd say Get down on the ground. Next time I rob an armo(u)red vehicle, I'll have to have someone tape me.

So--can you refer to the surface of a road as the floor?
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yard sales, car boot sales and other sales

Aug 22, 2007
Getting back to Kelley of Delaware's queries (which I started answering here):
Every weekend this time of year there are dozens of yard/garage sales in my town. Do such things exist in the rest of the English-speaking world, and, if so, what are they called?
I can't speak for the rest of the English-speaking world, but similar things do exist (to some degree) in England, though not by the names yard sale or garage sale. These things are allegedly named after the locations in which they occur, however the ones I've passed by this week (in NY state) that have been advertised as 'yard sales' or 'garage sales' were mostly actually in (chiefly AmE) driveways (BrE drives) next to (AmE) yards or garages. AmE has other terms for such kinds of sales, including tag sale (popular in New England). Many of these terms can be seen at the Dialect Survey map here.

(Side note: The pronunciation of garage was a point of discussion at dinner tonight. Better Half's mum said it in her normal way, so that it rhymed with HAIR ridge carriage, and my mom expressed her admiration of BHM's unfamiliar pronunciation. BHM countered that the AmE (and sometimes preferred BrE) pronunciation gər-RAZH was nicer. Garage is one of the few words (maybe the only word?) that BrE speakers have complimented my (AmE) pronunciation of. This is another case in which the AmE pronunciation is closer to the original [French] pronunciation than the BrE--which only matters if you're one of those people who think 'older' means 'better'.)

Of course, part of the reason that people don't have yard sales in Britain is that they would not call the un-built-upon fronts of their properties yards. That would instead be the front garden (at least, if it's planted). (This was a point of contention between an American and an English friend this summer. The American kept calling the Englishwoman's garden a yard, and the Englishwoman kept letting the American know that she felt insulted by this description.) Nevertheless, there is nothing called a front garden sale either. I've not seen many sales of household merchandise on/in residential properties in the UK, but those that I have seen have been advertised as moving sales. Obviously, that term only applies to certain situations, when people are trying to get rid of things that they don't want to cart to their new abode. There may be a term for non-moving household sales that I've not come across. (Answers in the comments, please!) But these kinds of things are pretty rare--at least in my neck of the English woods.

What the UK does have (and the US generally doesn't) are car boot sales. These take place in public spaces, usually a (BrE) car park/(AmE) parking lot [or a field--see comments]. People put the things that they want to sell into their car's (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk, then set up a little stall of their wares (often using a folding table, etc.) by their car in the car park/parking lot (typically paying a fee to the organi{s/z}er/landowner). These happen all year round--there is one that happens every week, for example, at Brighton station. Big ones like that often have professional sellers, who may be selling new or used goods (so they resemble flea markets). Others, like the one at a school near our house, are more geared toward(s) the occasional seller.

Both countries have other types of sales in which people donate their used goods for a one-off sale (and possibly social event) to benefit a charity--for example a church. In the greater part of the US, these are called rummage sales, although they may have other regional names. In the UK, they are jumble sales. White elephant sale is a term that I heard as a child in the US (and it was already old-fashioned at that time), but that I've seen more often in the UK.

When I asked Better Half if he knew of any BrE equivalent of yard sale, he drew a blank and noted that such things are a rarity in Britain. One reason for this is that most British homeowners wouldn't have the space for such things. Front gardens/yards tend to be very small, drive(way)s are quite short, and garages are a luxury in town cent{er/re}s. Another reason is that most British homeowners just don't have the space to store as much unwanted junk for as long as American homeowners can--and thus they can't store up a sale's worth of merchandise. BH's mum, for example, has a good-sized three-bedroom house. But as is typical of a post-war London home, she has no basement, no attic to speak of, no garage, and no walk-in closets. In that situation, one doesn't wait long to get rid of clothes that don't fit, gifts that didn't hit the mark, and decorations that have been replaced. People have various ways to get rid of unwanted stuff (and, it must be said, they tend to buy less junk in the first place), with charity shops (AmE: thrift stores) playing a major part in the second-hand economy.
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up the albion!

May 20, 2007
From the "Up the Albion" Facebook page
The comments on the last post mostly cent{er/re} around uses of up as a verb...which led me to recall one of my first encounters with a BrE sense up. (This one a preposition.)

It was on the back of a bus, and it said: UP THE ALBION!

Now, the Albion is Brighton and Hove Albion, also known as the Seagulls, the local (BrE) football club / (AmE) soccer team, so I was puzzled as to why the local bus company would want to say something rude about the local team. You see, in AmE I would have to say up with the Albion (reminding me of a slogan from my childhood, Up with People). Without the with, I could only presume that I should interpret it as I interpret Up yours, which is a rude thing to say wherever you are.

Better Half says that Up the Albion! is a kind of cheer that one used to hear on the terraces, but these days one is more likely to hear You are going home in a fucking ambulance! (he sang that, but I can't figure out how to give you a sense of the rhythm) or some of the chants available on this website. (I'm sending you to the Albion page, but there are lots more on that site for other clubs too. For an intro to football chants, see also this BBC site.) Terraces in this sense means steps or tiers where people stand to watch the (BrE) match/(AmE) game. They're kind of like (AmE) bleachers, except that they're for standing, rather than sitting. Terraces are becoming a thing of the past (whereas increasingly abusive football chants are not), because of safety concerns, following a number of horrible incidents in the 1980s (including and especially the Hillsborough disaster). New stadiums have seating throughout.

Of course, there are other ways in which up is used differently in AmE and BrE, but they'll have to wait until I haven't got so much marking/grading to do.
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bungalows and ranch-style houses

Apr 28, 2007
Better Half just read yesterday's post and noted that I didn't mention a type of house I've been meaning to mention for a while: the bungalow.

The term has come up a lot since my friend Recyclist bought a house that she calls a bungalow, but that doesn't (chiefly AmE) jibe with BH's notion of what a bungalow is. The word comes from India, where it refers to a one-stor(e)y house with a thick thatched roof. This has been extended outside India to refer to single-stor(e)y houses. But in my part of the US (and I do believe this varies in different parts of the US), it's used more specifically to refer to a house like this one (and like Recyclist's), which has a front porch with pillars and a partial 'attic' top floor. These were popularly built in the 1920s and 1930s, I understand. According to this internet discussion (which led me to this photo), this would be called a dormer bungalow in BrE--but having never seen one here, I haven't had any occasion to hear such a term used. What BH would call a bungalow--i.e. a one-stor(e)y house--I (when in America) would call a ranch(-style) house--not to be confused with the culinary horror ranch(-style) dressing. Buttermilk-based foods are generally not to be found in England, which is sometimes sad. Buttermilk pancakes, for instance, are particularly nice. But not having to face ranch dressing is one of those things that makes living in England a pleasure.
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semi-detached, duplex and other houses

Apr 27, 2007
In the comments to the last post, I promised a posting on housing types...so here we go!

In his book The English: Portrait of a People, Jeremy Paxman quotes from (an English translation of) Hermann Muthesius' Das englische Haus (1904-1905):
There is nothing as unique in English architecture as the development of the house . . . no nation is more committed to its development, because no nation has identified itself more with the house.
Paxman (and he is not alone in this) attributes English interest in house and home to the English sense of privacy:
Because the English dream is privacy without loneliness, everyone wants a house. Given a choice between their own back garden and life in a communal living project where they might share the benefits of a common swimming pool or playground, most will choose their own plot of ground. In France, Germany and Italy, about half the new homes being built in the 1990s were apartments. In England, the best estimate was about 15 per cent. It reflects a belief that at the end of the day, instead of sitting on the street chatting, the English would rather go home and slam the door.
The English passion for houses, and insistence on owning rather than renting them, is often remarked upon by European observers, but there's something of a family resemblance between English and American attitudes about optimal housing situations. A major difference between them, however, is that the US has a lot more space in which to fulfil(l) the dream of every nuclear family having their own house with their own siz(e)able (BrE) garden/(AmE) yard. England has one of the highest population densities in Europe, with 383 people per square kilomet{re/er}. For London, the figure is 4,700 per km2. (For more figures see this.) Compare this to the US average of 31.7 per km2. My home state of New York averages about 195 per km2. This includes New York City, which has an average density of 10,316/km2. That just goes to show how sparsely populated my part of the state is.

So, every time my mother comes to England and sees views like this (from my university's website), she cannot help but wonder aloud at the fact that people can live this way--with no lawn separating them from the neighbo(u)rs. This type of housing is called terraced housing or a terrace (and thus terrace is a frequent element in UK street names. In pre-Better Half days, I lived on/in Denmark Terrace). In AmE, these are townhouses or row houses--but they're not nearly as common in the US as in the UK. The ones here may be single-family dwellings or they may be divided into (AmE) apartments/(BrE) flats. Better Half and I got lucky in buying our current flat/apartment, as it's end-of-terrace, meaning that we have windows on three sides, not just the front and back.

The next step into privacy is the semi-detached house, known in AmE as a duplex--that is, a building that is divided into two houses, so that each shares a wall with the other. In fact, it was only in adulthood that I learned the term duplex--we referred to the duplexes in my neighbo(u)rhood as apartment houses when I was a child.

Going one further (privacy-wise) than semi-detached, are detached houses, which are what Americans would simply call houses. To get a detached house in an English town, one must have a pile of money--especially down here in the South East:
The average property price in Brighton in 2006 was £187,309 with detached houses selling for just over £350,000. The average property in Brighton now costs £213,566 (up to £248,000 according to Halifax figures) with detached properties selling for over £400,000. The national average stands between £177,000 and £228,000. (from Edison Ford; for rough US dollar conversions, double all the numbers).
One can see here why assumptions about class are made on the basis of what type of house one lives in--although it would be extremely déclassé to go around mentioning that you live in a detached house. My first experience of these words was back in the US, watching Are You Being Served? (an old British sitcom that is--to the bemusement of many British people who lived through it--incredibly popular with PBS viewers. John Inman, RIP). Miss Brahms, the junior ladies' department assistant, frequently defends her claims to middle-classhood by proclaiming in her working class accent that she grew up in a detached house, but Mr Lucas seems to have knowledge that it was really semi-detached.

Postscript (4 May): Dean over at Brighton Daily Photo has provided us with a great view of the housing density in Brighton.

Speaking of déclassé, Ben Zimmer points out that the New York Times has caught up with the rest of the world and has published an article about Kate Middleton's mother's alleged class-signifying no-nos--including and especially using the word toilet. All the news that's fit to already have been printed.
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signs you wouldn't see in America

Mar 28, 2007
Hej från Sverige!

That is to say, Hello from Sweden!

English in Sweden is interesting because (besides being impeccable) it more often sounds American than British (at least in terms of vocabulary). My former Swedish tutor attributed this to the fact that Swedes get a lot of their English from television, and most of that English is American. In fact, flipping channels on my hotel room television (which gets Swedish, Danish and German channels), my choices now include a Will Smith vehicle, Lost and MTV's Jackass, subtitled in Swedish (or Danish, depending on the channel--I'm on that end of Sweden).

While Swedish English is usually very natural, I was initially puzzled by the following instruction, embossed in the control panel of the elevator/(BrE) lift in my hotel:

INSERT ROOM KEY TO DRIVE CAR

In AmE, the 'box' part that you enter in an elevator/lift is called a car, and according to the British information on lift/elevator safety equipment that I can find on the net, they're called cars in BrE too. However, when I tried to use car as an example of polysemy (multiplicity of meaning) in a semantics class in the UK, my students told me they'd never call a part of a lift a car, so perhaps it's not a well-known term in BrE. Anyhow, while/whilst it's correct to call that thing a car in (at least American) English, it is not idiomatic AmE to drive the car of an elevator. I think that such an instruction in AmE would read "Insert room key to operate elevator" (or, more probably, "To operate elevator, insert room key").

But talking about this Swedish sign is just a weak introduction for talking about "Signs You Wouldn't See in America". Of course, there are many signs in the UK that one wouldn't see in America. The speed limit signs look different, the (AmE) YIELD signs say (BrE) GIVE WAY and, of course, there are no signs in America for Ansty Cowfold. But I know people like reading about taboo words (if the number of comments on the toilet post are any indication!), so here are a few more for you.

This picture, advertising an event on my (BrE) uni's campus, would of course not be seen in America, where people would have made sure to abbreviate association as Assn or Assoc. (Go back here for discussion of ass/arse.)

Another one, which I haven't managed to capture in pixels (One used to say on film... What does one say now?), is at the local Bon Marché (BrE) shop/(AmE) store. This company, which sells inexpensive, larger-sized women's clothing (and which, as far as I know, is unrelated to similarly-named companies in the US), has recently taken to re-branding itself as BM, and offering the BM Collection. (Americans, stop your giggling right now!) As my brother Bill will tell you, you don't want to be a BM. When he has to initial things, he uses his 'proper' initials WM, because of the tee-hee-hee factor of BM. BM, you see, stands for bowel movement. In other words, it's a way to avoid saying shit.
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toilet

Mar 24, 2007
Howard wrote recently to ask:
What about the word Toilet? From correspondence and discussions with American friends, I am given to understand that this is very much a no-no word in AmE.
In AmE, toilet is used to refer to the porcelain receptacle for human waste, but not usually to the room in which it's situated. It can refer to either in BrE. So, toilet is a perfectly usable word in AmE when one wants to refer to the fixture, as in I stood on the toilet in order to change the lightbulb. But one wouldn't usually hear it in AmE in contexts in which is refers to the room, as in They were smoking in the girls' toilet(s). For someone who associates that word only with the porcelain object, it seems a bit too personal to say Where's the toilet?, since there's no doubt that bodily functions will be involved if you're asking for that porcelain object. On the other hand, asking for the room in which the toilet sits seems less personal, since there are lots of reasons to go to that room (e.g. to brush your teeth, get some toilet paper for blowing your nose, adjust your toupee...). So, one asks for the room, and no one is forced to contemplate bodily functions.

In AmE, bathroom has been used to euphemi{s/z}e 'toilet' for so long that go to the bathroom means 'evacuate one's bladder/bowels'. So, an unfortunate person might say to the doctor I have pain when I go to the bathroom. They don't mean that they knock their head on the door frame. Because bathroom = bodily functions, that word has become tainted as taboo, and thus other euphemisms like restroom and powder room have been invented for the room.

BrE has different reasons for having many names for the room with a toilet. One is that bathroom only indicates a room with a (BrE) bath/(AmE) bathtub, whereas in AmE it refers to a room with a toilet (and usually a sink, and possibly a bath(tub) or shower). I heard the following exchange a couple of years ago in the National Gallery (London) between a couple of American tourists and a cruel (and probably bored) security guard:
Tourist: Could you tell us where the restroom is?
Guard: Do you need a rest?
Tourist: Oh no--I mean the bathroom.
Guard: Why? Do you want to have a bath (=AmE take a bath)?
Tourists: *gasping for another word*
Guard: I can direct you to the ladies' toilets.
Since bathroom refers only to rooms with baths, toilet or loo is used for a room with a toilet/sink, and sometimes shower room is used for a room with a toilet, sink and shower. (To my AmE ears, that sounds like a room with just showers--such as one finds in a gym.) I remember as a child learning that the British say water closet or W.C., but it's not a very popular phrase today, at least not in the circles in which I travel. I've seen W.C. on public facilities far more often in France than in England. A term I wasn't prepared for but do hear a lot is en suite (bath/toilet) which refers to a room with a toilet (etc.) that is adjacent and private to a bedroom. This comes from French (bien sûr). En suite accommodation is a hotel (or bed-and-breakfast) room that has its own toilet/bathing facilities.

While/Whilst toilet is less taboo in BrE than in AmE, some people avoid it because it is déclassé* (or non-U, in BrE terms). The U (i.e. upper class) terms are lavatory (or lav for short) or loo. At school in the US, I was taught to ask to visit the lavatory. I can still recall my classmates' and my confusion as to why the bathroom was called the laboratory. I can also recall Sister Helen's exasperation with our insistence on saying labatory or labratory (the usual AmE pronunciation of laboratory).

When I first moved to South Africa, and was faced with not being understood when using AmE euphemisms for the room with the toilet in it, it caused me considerable discomfort to ask Where are the toilets? Loo came to the rescue, since it was clear to me that that referred to the room. But by the time I left SA, I'd got(ten) used to saying toilet when I needed one. You should've seen the looks on faces when I asked for the toilet on my first day at my new job in Texas. It was at a reception for faculty wives and female faculty. Yes, this university was so conservative that it was considered improper for faculty husbands and faculty wives to have luncheons on their own, so they avoided the problem by inviting the female faculty instead of their husbands. So there I was in a reception full of big-haired, proper Texan ladies (one of whom actually said to me 'It must be so good to be back in civili{s/z}ation'!) and I asked for the toilet. It was priceless.

*Déclassé can be used in AmE to mean 'reduced in social standing' (i.e. formerly higher status) or 'of low social status' (i.e. not originally at a higher status). The OED has only the former meaning, so I am unsure at the moment whether my use of déclassé here is AmE, or if the OED is just a bit out-of-date on that one. Better Half is away, so you'll have to be my guide.
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malls

Sep 1, 2006
The first time someone in England suggested we meet at the mall, I thought they were joking around, since they pronounced it to rhyme with pal. I heard this pronunciation on and off again, but when I was invited to meet someone at the [mæl] tonight, I decided this issue needed more investigation.

My dining companions were mixed in whether they'd call it a [mæl] (rhyming with pal) or a [mɔl] (rhyming with tall), but they agreed that they only use the American-like pronunciation [mɔl] when referring to shopping malls--and especially in the phrase shopping mall. They also agreed that calling such things malls feels like a recent borrowing from AmE--that they feel the "real" name for such things is shopping centre. In fact, people usually refer to enclosed shopping areas by their proper names, such as the Putney Exchange or Churchill Square. Better Half and I don't know of any enclosed shopping cent{re/er}s in the UK named X Mall (but I'm sure one of you will point one out if there is one).

This is not to say that the word mall is a recent import to BrE--far from it. But in its native environment here these days it most usually rhymes with pal. For instance The Mall (a tree-bordered walk in St James's Park, London) is usually pronounced as [mæl]. Pall-mall, historically a game, but now (in the form Pall Mall) a street in London, is similarly pronounced with two [æ] sounds in modern BrE. In fact, mall originally meant an alley in which pall-mall is played.

In my childhood in the US, Pall Mall cigarettes were pronounced [pɔlmɔl], but I was taught that the place in England was [pɛlmɛl], rhyming with bell. Apparently, I was being taught out-of-date British English. While today it's pronounced with [æ], the 1904 New English Dictionary records it as [ɛ]. Of course, when you're young, you think your teachers are ancient, but I don't think they were really that ancient. This just goes to show that dictionaries, like any other reference book, go out of date.

And all of this is related to pell-mell (the similar form of which is thought to have affected the pronunciation of pall-mall). This has the bell vowel, but, according to the OED, BrE and AmE stress it differently, with Americans stressing the two syllables equally and Britons putting slightly more stress on the mell. For what it's worth, three English people pronounced this in conversation tonight, and I didn't notice any stronger stress on mell. But I'm not a phonetician, I just play one on the Internet.*

The fact that the shopping kind of mall and the outside kind of mall are often pronounced differently in BrE seems to suggest that people don't see the two types of things as very related. In AmE, both are pronounced the same (the mall being the local shopping cent{er/re} and The Mall being the green area around which the Smithsonian Institute is arranged)--but that doesn't mean that people necessarily see them as related. After all, people don't necessarily see the bird duck and the action duck as being related--although they historically are.

*Joke assistance for the young and/or non-American: In the US, it's illegal for licensed medical doctors to promote products in advertising. In the early 1980s, a (AmE) cough syrup/(BrE) cough medicine was therefore advertised by a soap-opera actor who said "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" and then going on to plug the product. It was such a ridiculous premis{e/s} for an ad(vert) that "I'm not a X, but I play one on Y" became a popular joke. In fact, googling "but I play one on TV" results in over 87,000 hits. As a phrase, it's been discussed at the Language Log. (The link is to the third instal(l)ment of that discussion, but you can link to the earlier ones from there.)
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plumbing the depths for words

Jul 8, 2006
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.

AmEBrE
sink trapU-bend
sinkbasin
caulksealant
(toilet) tankcistern
hot-water heatergeyser (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...
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dens and forts

Jun 27, 2006
When my brothers and I were small we made lots of forts, usually with the (US-preferred) couch/(UK-preferred) sofa cushions. In the winter, we made snowforts in the snowbanks in the backyard (AmE; BrE = back garden). Our cushion-forts were especially important to me during the annual televising of The Wizard of Oz. I always watched with my head peeping out of the fort so that I could duck back in quickly whenever the flying monkeys came on screen.

Meanwhile on this fair island the children were making dens. These days, child development experts are afraid that dens/forts may be going the way of tiddlywinks now that children's time is taken up with organi{s/z}ed or electronic activities. The Guardian's Family section has recently run a few articles about den-making, including some how-to tips. Bring back the den/fort!

A related BrE term is Wendy house, which Americans would usually call a playhouse. A Wendy house (after Wendy in Peter Pan) is typically not made by the child but made or bought by the parent, and is usually situated in the garden/yard.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)