Separated by a Common Language

Growing up, we always had a ceramic nativity scene (made by my Aunt Connie) on our mantel at Christmastime, and we always called it the nativity or the nativity scene. As I got older, I discovered that most other families called these things their (AmE) crèches. Until I moved away from the US (or started reading the word in non-US sources, I can't remember), that was the only English meaning of crèche that I knew. I was reminded of this limitation of AmE crèche this summer, when my mother was in town and confused by a sign for a local (BrE) crèche, which is to say a (AmE) day care center for babies. We find the 'nativity scene' meaning of crèche in the OED, but with no BrE examples after 1963. That doesn't mean such examples don't exist, of course, (you can see some at this UK Catholic gift retailer), but crèche certainly isn't the most common BrE name for such things. In fact, if one looks up 'Christmas crèche' on UK Internet sites, most hits are about (orig. AmE) babysitting/(BrE) child-minding services--or in this case, a man-minding service.

Instead, the more common BrE name for such scenes is the Christmas crib, with (BrE) crib referring specifically to a manger, as detailed by the OED:

1. A barred receptacle for fodder used in cowsheds and fold-yards; also in fields, for beasts lying out during the winter; a CRATCH. (In nearly all early quots. applied to the manger in which the infant Christ was laid; cf. CRATCH n.)

According to the OED, the extension of crib to nativity scenes was originally from the Roman Catholic church, and it may be the case that such scenes are more common in the UK in Catholic homes. In the US, they're nearly universal elements of Christmas decoration, but I don't recall seeing any in homes in the UK (yet), although there is a piece in Saturday's Guardian about the knit(ted) nativity scene (the author's term--not crib, creche, etc.--so that one seems to be dialect-neutral) that the author bought at Oxfam.

Now, of course, crib in AmE is the usual word for a baby's bed with barred sides, which in BrE would be called a cot, which in AmE means a (BrE) camp bed. But what I find funny about all this are the lyrics to the Christmas carol 'Away in a Manger':

Away in a manger,
No crib for His bed
The little Lord Jesus
Laid down His sweet head

According to cyberhymnal, the author of the first two verses is unknown, but it was originally published in a Lutheran book in Philadelphia, so we can probably assume American authorship or at least assume that Americans were responsible for the first English translation of the lyrics (if they were originally German, as the Telegraph claims). We probably should assume American authorship, since if you're a BrE speaker, the lyric seems to mean 'Away in a manger, no manger for a bed'. Nevertheless the British site carols.org.uk claims that this is "always the first carol that children are taught." (I'd like to see the research to back that up.) The only reference to 'no cot for a bed' that I've found on the web is a South African on alt.usage.english complaining "It's those damned Americans. They've even hijacked the Christmas carols". I don't see how we could have hijacked something that didn't exist before one of us made it up, but perhaps someone in South Africa should be considered a better authority on hijacking. (Oooh, Lynne's getting catty.)

Carols--particularly the ones one hears in church--vary a lot in the US and UK. The tune for 'Away in a Manger' differs in the two countries. Click here for the American tune, and here for the British one. I went to a local carol concert a couple of years ago, and found that I couldn't sing along to many of the songs, either because I'd never heard them before, or because the tunes were completely different from the ones I knew.

So...Merry (BrE informal) Chrimbo! Don't forget to nominate your favo(u)rite dialect-crossing words for the SbaCL Word of the Year!

Cathy wrote the other day to ask:

I've been watching "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard" on Masterpiece Theatre in the US. [...] I noticed an interesting phrase Mrs. Pritchard used, "Chinese whispers." I thought at first she meant what Americans mean when we say children are playing telephone or whisper down the lane. Then I thought, in the context it was used in, that it wouldn't be appropriate to suggest the person was playing a child's game. Mrs. Pritchard's right hand man (I can't remember his title) has passed on a bit of gossip that was passed on through several people. Any thoughts?

Coincidentally, the night before, Better Half and I had been watching the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David (surprise, surprise) makes a faux pas in playing telephone at a party, and BH asked, 'That's Chinese whispers, right?' Chinese whispers and the telephone game are indeed names for the same game in BrE and AmE, respectively. (And this came up once before in the comments for a previous post.)

What has thrown Cathy off is the fact that Chinese whispers is much more likely to be used in an extended or metaphorical way than this sense of telephone is. This is probably not too surprising, since telephone has other senses that would make the metaphor less clear. The OED lists Russian scandal as having the same two senses as Chinese whispers (though I've only ever heard the latter):

(a) a game in which a whispered message, after being passed from player to player, is contrasted in its original and final versions; (b) gossip inaccurately transmitted

People disagree about whether Chinese whispers should be avoided due to racist connotations. It makes me a little uncomfy, but then I don't find myself needing to say it very often, so I don't worry about it too much. It also reminds me of an AmE term (at least I've not found a BrE speaker who knows it yet---but I haven't asked that many) for another silly pastime with an ethnically (BrE) dodgy name: the Chinese fire drill. Wikipedia describes it as:

A Chinese fire drill is a prank, or perhaps an expression of high spirits, that was popular in the United States during the 1960s. It is performed when a car is stopped at a red traffic light, at which point all of the car's occupants get out, run around the car, and return to their own (or go to other) seats. Chinese fire drills are sometimes executed when one needs to get something from the trunk of a car. Occasionally, if one of the participants is late to get inside the car, the others might drive off without him/her. People have reported this phenomenon as early as the 1940s, so it is possible that the phrase was current at the time, but simply was not written down that early.

The term is also used as a figure of speech to mean any large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise.

When I was a child (a bit later than the dates in the Wikipedia article), the driver never got involved--because the driver was Mom or Dad. But we'd try our luck and yell "Chinese fire drill!" and judge how much trouble we were going to get into for trying to do it before opening the car doors. It always sounded like a marvelous idea to my young mind, but I don't know that we ever executed a true Chinese fire drill.

So far, Bonfire Night has only come up in the comments on another post on this blog. But thinking about it (for it is tonight) has me thinking about all sorts of differences in my experience of autumn (or, more often in AmE, fall) in the US and UK. Forgive me, but this post will be lighter on linguistic gore than most, and heavier on nostalgia and maybe even a touch of homesickness (not something I think of myself as suffering from!).

Autumn/fall was always my favo(u)rite season in the US, but in the UK, I tend to face it with a certain "Oh god, it's going to get dark early" kind of dread. It doesn't help that the UK goes off British Summer Time a week earlier than the US goes off Daylight Savings Time, but the greater problem is that this time of year there is less light up here at +50° latitude than there was at +43°, where I grew up, or +31° or -26°, the last two places I lived. By the time we get to mid-December, when it's invariably overcast in Brighton, it seems to me like the day never gets all the way to proper daytime light levels. Today there are 37 fewer minutes of light in Brighton than in my hometown, and by winter solstice, that difference will be more than an hour--or two hours if I compare it to my last abode.

But it's not just the dark that does me in, it's the relative lack of distractions from the dark. American autumns/falls, especially in the northeast where I'm from, are chock-full of them. Of course, there are the back-to-school rituals (found in the UK too), and Lynneukah, the joyous festival of Lynne (at the start of October--it's not too early to start planning for next year). But after those, we get into the serious autumn rituals.

Watching the changing colo(u)rs of leaves is a big one--so much so that in New England there's a word for tourists/leisurely drivers who arrive in hordes to look at the trees: leaf-peepers. Here's a nice photo of what they go looking for. Where I come from, foliage observation is tied up with other rituals, like going to apple orchards for fresh cider (which in AmE is a rusty-colo(u)red, pressed apple juice, not a fermented drink), hayrides (AmE: 'a pleasure ride in a hay-wagon', OED), bonfires--and, my favo(u)rite, apple cider doughnuts. Bonfires and hayrides are often part of other autumn/fall rituals, such as Homecoming (for which, see Janna's comment describing Homecoming in the previous post on proms).

Then there's Halloween, which has roots going back to Scotland and Ireland (particularly the Scottish tradition of guising), but whose modern form is a recent import from the US to the UK--and a poorly understood import, I'd say. Boy, do people complain about it here. There's a common perception of trick-or-treating as "as a nuisance or even a menacing form of begging" (Wikipedia). After reading this anti-Halloween diatribe on the BBC website, I was relieved to read one British expat in Canada's take on it in the comments:

I moved to Canada from Britain in the mid 90s, and at first, treated trick-or-treating with a healthy suspicion. However, I soon realized, that in my neck of the woods at least, Halloween is more about fun than menace; it's about the treat rather than the trick. In our neighbourhood, it's mainly young kids who come trick-or-treating with their parents. We also get a few older teens who come by, almost self-deprecatingly, and we always compliment them on their costumes, or berate them gently for their lack of effort, but fill their bags nonetheless. No menaces, no threats. I was back in England last Hallowe'en and was surprised to see and hear the healthy antagonism there was against trick or treaters. Friends and family all had signs in their windows, weren't planning to answer the door, couldn't understand why my seven year-old wanted to dress up and go out after dark with a bag looking for treats. I think in England, what has happened is that the message has been lost in translation, and over the years the idea of treat has [been?] supplanted [by?] that of trick. Maybe you should all come over here and go trick-or-treating with my little ones tonight - then you'd have a better understanding of how it *should* work!
Anne, Vancouver, Canada

In other words, in North America, Halloween tends to be a child-cent(e)red event that brings people in a neighbo(u)rhood together in celebration of their children. A couple of differences I've noticed in trick-or-treating here (besides the fact that there's just a lot less of it) are (a) a lot of people give coins instead of (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweets, and (b) adults seem more 'purist' about costumes. I've heard a couple of people complain that a child was dressed as a fairy or a superhero, implying that that is not a Halloween costume. But by the time that the traditions were being (re)imported from the US, few people in the US saw anything wrong with dressing as whatever you liked. Thinking back on my Halloween costumes, I'd been a fortuneteller, a magnet, and a bride--never anything particularly scary. So, (a) contributes to people seeing the holiday as extortionate and (b) contributes to a more sinister (it's all about evil!) view of it than is typically held in the US.

After Halloween, American attention turns to Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November). While there is the position that this holiday is politically/racially insensitive (since it celebrates the saving of European immigrants' asses/arses by Native Americans, many of whom were subsequently subject to genocide), it has a lot going for it too. Bill Bryson writes about it as 'The Best American Holiday' in I'm a Stranger Here Myself:

Thanksgiving is wonderful for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, it has the commendable effect of staving off Christmas. Whereas in in Britain the Christmas shopping season seems nowadays to kick off around about the August bank holiday, Christmas mania doesn't traditionally begin in America until the last weekend in November.

Indeed, the Christmas decorations have been up (not lit, but still...) in Brighton for several weeks now. There have been Christmas cards, Christmas decorations, and most weirdly Christmas food in the shops since September. You get a little of that in the US, but the onslaught is staved off by the retailers' need to keep part of their shelf space free for Halloween and Thanksgiving (BrE) tat (=junk). The reputed busiest shopping day of the American year (at least in terms of traffic, if not sales) is the day after Thanksgiving, known in the retailing world as Black Friday. Thanksgiving gives us a clear sense of when the (commercial) Christmas season begins--at a time that isn't too far away from when Advent begins.

Bryson continues:

Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialization. It involves no greeting cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. I love the fact that at Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball and then go and watch a game of football on TV. This is my kind of holiday.

But perhaps the nicest, certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you a formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can't believe that it hasn't been picked up by more countries.

(Though we should note that many churches have a Thanksgiving Sunday--but that's not typically an occasion when families travel to be together and do all of the other things that go along with American Thanksgiving.)

So those, plus a few things here and there like Veteran's Day (= UK Remembrance Day), the World Series in baseball and the (American) football season (and its many accout{er/re}ments, like tailgating) are some of the rituals that mark autumn/fall in (particularly north-eastern) America and distract us from the fact that the sun is going bye-bye and it's getting cold. We can still think of the weather as being crisp while we're enjoying ourselves with apple cider doughnuts and jumping in piles of leaves.

What do we have in the UK? One childhood autumn tradition is the playing of conkers. This is a game involving horse chestnuts on strings, where you try to knock each other's chestnuts, or conkers. (For a better explanation, click on the link.) More boys seem to play this than girls, and it can involve a lot of forethought, with dedicated players searching long and hard for the best conkers and then making them harder by, for instance soaking them in vinegar and baking them. This tradition may be dying out, with rumo(u)rs of schools banning the game for health and safety reasons. (I had to make that bold, since Health and Safety is such a BrE phrase/obsession. I suppose the AmE equivalent would be liability.)

Besides the half-hearted observance of Halloween, the main autumn ritual in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. (Remember, remember the fifth of November.) This marks the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of Catholics to blow up Parliament in 1605. Depending on where/who you are in the UK, this may be a bigger or smaller event. In nearby Lewes, it's huge--due to Lewes' history as a site of Protestant martyrdom. Here's a photo of a Lewes Bonfire Night from chrisgray.net--one that is bound to be a bit disturbing to Americans, since it looks like a Ku Klux Klan rally. In fact, Bonfire Night is not known for its political, religious or racial sensitivity. I have practi{c/s}ing Catholic friends who have been offended that I've gone and enjoyed the Lewes festivities since they involve the burning of effigies (Guy Fawkes, traditionally, but they'll burn anyone in Lewes) and throwing bangers (little fireworks) at someone dressed as the/a Pope--albeit nowadays a pope in fireproof clothing and safety goggles. (It's never clear to me whether it's supposed to be the current Pope or the one from 1605.) It also involves a parade that I've described before as something like "Mardi Gras with fire". Lewes has a number of bonfire societies, which can be likened to the krewes of New Orleans Mardi Gras, and each parades around town in themed costumes (not that the themes have to have anything to do with the Gunpowder Plot--some perennial favo(u)rites are stereotyped Native American dress, African 'tribespeople' and smugglers). After parading around town a few times, they lead crowds to their bonfire site, where there is a huge bonfire and the burning of their effigy. The effigy is usually filled with fireworks, and the fireworks shows that follow are always incredible. (So are the crowds.)

Of course, not everywhere is near Lewes or other big Bonfire Night towns, and so most people will celebrate Bonfire night on a smaller scale (if at all), either by going to municipal fireworks or by buying/lighting one's own in the back (BrE) garden/(AmE) yard. (Our window wells were full of spent fireworks Saturday night. Coming from a place where mere citizens are not allowed to have fireworks, I never cease to be surprised by how willing people are to light them close to buildings/people. My friend the Postman's bonfire party this year ended with broken windows and a trip to the hospital.) While I love the fireworks, to me Bonfire Night is a night out to look at fire more than a holiday, since it doesn't involve the kind of planning and preparation (at least not by me) that Halloween (costume-wise) and Thanksgiving (food/hosting-wise) do. But I'm sure for some people, like the Lewes Bonfire Societies, it feels like much more.

So--what British autumn rituals am I missing here? Help me out--I've got a lot of darkness to get through!

(December 2010 updates in red)

Once upon a time, Grant Barrett forwarded to me the following item from issue 343 (29 March 2007) of Popbitch:

Confessions of an 80s pop fan
ishouldhaveknownbetter writes:
"I met Simon Le Bon at a house party. Everyone was playing it really cool so when he came to say goodbye I just exchanged air kisses, but then as he turned away for some reason I blurted out, 'Simon, I just want you to know that when I was younger I had a whole wall covered in posters of you at jaunty angles'. He went quiet. So I continued, 'And once I had a dream that you and Roger Taylor came to call for me on horses and then we all went out and played on the climbing frames.'
He left the party immediately."

Grant thought a girl [*ahem*] of my generation would appreciate the Duran Duran reference (I never actually bought any of their albums, but did bother to have an opinion on which was the [orig. AmE] dreamiest). He also pointed out the non-Americanness of climbing frame, which he ably figured out is equivalent to (orig. AmE) monkey bars and/or (orig. AmE) jungle gym. Monkey bars is used in the UK now too, and in both dialects it can refer specifically to a contraption like the one below, from US company ChildLife, with a ladder-like structure several feet above the ground.


But in both dialects monkey bars is also used more loosely sometimes to refer to any kind of structure built for children to climb on--i.e. a climbing frame/jungle gym.

Most of the other amusements on a playground have the same names in both dialects, although swing set, to refer to the apparatus involving swings and the frame that they're suspended from, seems to be more popular AmE. Better Half says he'd just call the whole apparatus swings [although the OED does not mark swing set as AmE--see comments]. See-saws are see-saws, but teeter-totter is a dialectal AmE word for the same thing. (I grew up with both terms.)

And those round things that one kid pushes (a)round and (a)round while the kids on it get sick--well, as a child in New York State we called these things merry-go-rounds or roundabouts, but the American Heritage tells me that roundabout in this meaning is 'chiefly' BrE. As a child, I preferred roundabout, because I liked to reserve merry-go-round for the kind of powered thing with horses, also known as a carousel. (Let's ignore the traffic-related meaning of roundabout. That deserves its own post.) Oxford dictionaries like to claim that carousel is spelt carrousel in AmE ('frequently' in OED2, but simply presented as the AmE spelling in my [admittedly out-of-date] Concise). I don't recall seeing it spelt that way anywhere but in an Oxford Dictionary--and, now that I've looked, in the American Heritage, which lists it as an alternative spelling, but not the predominant spelling. The OED also says that attributive use (i.e. placed in front of another noun, to modify it) of carousel, as in carousel music, is chiefly AmE. Nevertheless, their most recent (2007) addition to the carousel entry in the OED On-line is BrE carousel fraud (a kind of scam to reclaim [BrE] VAT/[AmE] sales tax)--indicating that BrE speakers use it attributively too.

Going through my mental playground inventory, the only other dialectal difference that I can think of is AmE sandbox versus BrE sand-pit. But I suppose that this is as good a place as any to mention BrE bouncy castle versus (in my day) AmE moonwalk (or today) bounce house, even though they're generally not found on playgrounds everyday. The naming difference reflects the different ways in which these things are decorated and marketed. The bouncy castle is a big inflated thing that is usually shaped like a castle. Moonwalks tend to have space themes. I've found inflatable castle as an AmE term for the castle shaped ones as well. Apparently, there's some controversy about whether these things were invented first in the UK or the US.

Other business:

• This is it! I've finally got to the end of the answerable queries from March! Now I'm only five months behind!
• As for tomorrow's appearance on Ant & Dec, it might be a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of affair. We spent at least an hour together taping yesterday (charming young men!), but I have no idea what they'll edit it down to. But here's the evidence that we have breathed the same air:

Ant, Lynne, fellow Scrabbler Kat, and Dec (thanks to Stewart for the photo!)

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those of you (particularly the American yous) who like signage discussions will probably enjoy it.

But there was a comment in the post that got me a bit down. Orac shows a photo of a sign for a "Baby Nappy Changer Unit" in a public toilet/restroom (which funnily uses the more Canadian washroom in the sign--it's at the Tower of London, so perhaps they're going for the most transparent term, given the tourists). About this sign, Orac says:

It sounds so much more civilized that [sic] "diaper."

And my question is why? Nappy, the modern BrE equivalent to (AmE) diaper, is a baby-talk version of napkin--though no one these days calls the things that you put on babies napkins.* So, nappy, etymologically speaking, is on a par with other baby-talk words like doggy, horsie, and choo-choo. The OED's (draft 2003 definition) first citation for it in print comes from 1927, and it's hardly complimentary of the word:

1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 7 Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).

Diaper, on the other hand comes from a Latin, later French, with a root meaning 'white'. The first citation for it is from the 14th century, where it refers to a type of cloth, and it has its place in Shakespeare (probably not referring to a baby's napkin in that case, but to a napkin or towel). So, why does a babyfied word sound more 'civilized' to an educated AmE speaker than a good, old latinate word? Methinks that this is a symptom of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

AVIC strikes Americans from all walks of life. It's why my mother thinks that it's "pretty" when an Englishperson rhymes garage with carriage. It's why Americans think people with English accents are more intelligent than they are. It's why I get e-mails from Americans who despair of their fellow citizens' diction and thank me for championing the 'correct ways'. (I e-mail back and explain that I'm doing no such thing and that their reasoning on the matter is flawed. I wonder why they never send a reply...) Of course, there's a similar syndrome affecting some BrE speakers: British Verbal Superiority Complex; however, I've not found this to be quite as evenly distributed through the population as AVIC is in the US.

Now, there are times to think that some (uses of) language is(/are) better than others. One thing that Orac and commentators on his blog praise is the directness and honesty of certain signs. I don't always agree with their examples, but directness and honesty are admirable qualities in signs. (One that is pictured on the blog, but that I've never understood, is the BrE convention of putting polite notice at the top of a sign that orders people around. What's wrong with please?) Other things that make some (uses of) language arguably better than others are consistency within the system (e.g. in spelling) and avoidance of ambiguity. But these are issues about the use of the language, and both BrE and AmE can be (and often are) used in clear, consistent, direct, honest ways.

So, back to my old mantras:

• 'Different' doesn't mean 'better' or 'worse'.
• 'British' doesn't necessarily mean 'older' or 'original'.
• 'Older' doesn't mean 'better' either!
• Let's enjoy each other's dialects AND our own!

(One can be obnoxiously preachy in either dialect too.)

Happy Labor Day to the Americans out there. (I won't re-spell it Labour, since it's a name.) And I will admit my prejudice that American Monday-holidays generally have better names!


* I can't resist a few side-notes on nappy and napkin.

• AmE uses sanitary napkin for a feminine hygiene product, while BrE uses sanitary towel.
• Then there's the AmE meaning of nappy, which derives from the more general sense of 'having a nap'--as fabric can (BrE: can have). In AmE this also refers to the type of tightly curled hair that is (pheno)typical of people of sub-Saharan African ancestry--particularly when said hair is not very well cared for. This was the meaning in play when (orig. AmE) shock-jock Don Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". When the news story was reported in the UK, there was some confusion (see, for example the comments here), with some people thinking that Imus was claiming that the women wore diapers or napkins on their heads (à la Aunt Jemima).
• Then there's the old napkin versus serviette drama in BrE and related Es. In some (e.g. South African and some BrE speakers), the former is reserved for cloth table napkins, and the latter for paper. Elsewhere, serviette just marks you out as being 'non-U'--i.e. not upper class. Serviette is virtually unknown in AmE.

Postscript (8th September): Found a lovely example of AVIC (and its cure, in this case) in last week's Saturday Guardian Review section, in an article by AM Homes about American writer Grace Paley:

Grace often retold the story of how, at 19, desperate to be a poet, she took a course taught by WH Auden. When she used the word "trousers" in a poem, Auden asked why she was writing in British English - why didn't she just say "pants"? Paley explained that she thought that was just what writers did, and then never did it again.

Better Half has found himself surrounded by out-laws (not quite in-laws) who like to get together and play games. My out-laws (BH's family) think this is hilarious, because of BH's reputation as a games-hater, which stems from several throwing-over-the-board-in-disgust incidents from when he was a child. When I met him, he was willing to play Connect Four with his godchildren, but only because he could still obliterate them. I count it as great progress that he now actually volunteers to play Yahtzee and Cribbage and will tolerate a few more games. (God, I've been good for him.) But games still remain a source of transatlantic miscommunication in the family since they, as we've seen already, frequently have different names in different places. The ones I'll cover in this series don't require a lot of discussion, hence my putting them all together like this.

Most of you will know that (BrE) draughts is (AmE) checkers. Or checkers is draughts -- I can't figure out whether I think the earlier term should go first or last in that equation, I can see the connotations going either way. You may also know that Americans spell draught as draft, reflecting the fact that the 'gh' is pronounced 'f', but while I have seen the board game sold as Checkers/Draughts in the US, I've never seen the BrE name of the game translated into AmE spelling. (I'm not going to get into the pronunciation of the vowel...suffice it to say that it too is different in different places.) Where do these names come from? It's a tricky question, since the OED, amazingly enough, includes neither draughts nor checkers. (No, what's amazing enough is my poor dictionary search skills in this instance--see the comments.) The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that draughts is related to dragon and goes back to about 1400. Checkers, alluding to the appearance of the board, arose in America in the 18th century. That "OED" (shall I call it OnEtyD?) also notes that "British prefers [the spelling] chequer, but the U.S. form is more authentic." Another case (cf. -ise) of British spelling being influenced by French. So, (AmE) Chinese checkers is known (though not very widely, it seems) in BrE as Chinese chequers. (Chinese draughts seems much less common, and seems mostly to be used by non-native speakers).

BrE Ludo (left, from Wikipedia), from the Latin for 'I play', is the game that Americans call Parcheesi (right, from Robby Findler's software construction course), though as you can see their boards are slightly different. It derives from an Indian game, and the AmE name is based on the Hindi name--which has been spelled in many ways in English, with pachisi sometimes regarded as 'most authenthic'. Parcheesi is the most familiar spelling in the US, as that's how the game was marketed by Selchow & Righter, 'the house that Parcheesi built'.


Once you know about Ludo, it makes more sense that the game that is called Clue in AmE is called Cluedo in BrE. Cluedo came first, as it was invented, A.E. Pratt of Birmingham, in the 1940s (though he had originally called it Murder). Since the pun wouldn't be appreciated in the US, it was marketed there as Clue. The game is the same, except for the names of some of the characters, weapons and rooms. There are a few linguistic differences in the game:

• Miss Scarlett (UK) v Miss Scarlet (US)
• Rev Green (UK) v Mr. Green (US)
• Mrs(.) White has recently been replaced in US by Dr. Orchid
• According to Wikipedia, the dagger is called the knife in some US editions (it was dagger in mine growing up, so I don't know...)
• The lead pipe was originally called lead piping in BrE

As far as I know, the names of all the rooms are the same, but it's worth noting that conservatory is often pronounced differently in the two. You can hear the difference here. Boards even within countries seem to vary in whether they consider the conservatory to be a glass-enclosed room full of plants or a music room. The original board just had blank areas label(l)ed by room names, but more recent ones illustrate them. I've seen this one on both Clue and Cluedo boards:


The Hollywood film based on the game, incidentally, was called Clue internationally and used the American character names.

I've got other board games to cover under part 2—children's games. There may be a part 3 on card games, if I can find more to mention. Email me if you have any suggestions.

[This post was updated 23 March 2020 with the details of US/UK Clue(do) differences, replacing a no-longer-working link on the topic.]

It's time to start catching up on the trickle of queries that seems to have created a flood in my inbox. James in western Massachusetts writes:

My source is some eighty years out of date, but I've been reading a British author who used "catapult" for what (today) an American would call a "slingshot." Is this still the case, and does this make the machines of war seem more puny, or the child's toy more fearsome?

Catapult continues to be used in BrE for things like this toy to the right, which is advertised for sale on the English Heritage website. It's also used, as in AmE, for big machines used to shoot boulders over castle walls. Slingshot, originally AmE (goes back to 1849, at least), doesn't refer to the machines of war, just the toy thing and extended senses relating to motion. These days, slingshot is understood and used in the UK as well as catapult, but is often reserved in BrE for the kind of weapon that is otherwise called a sling.  The OED quotes an occurrence in The Economist in 1966, so it seems to be fairly recent British usage.

I also found a spoof "Edwardian" on-line magazine called The Slingshot [no longer available]--does the editor reali{s/z}e that even his title is an anachronism? In-joke or sloppiness? One can only guess.

Some nouns that AmE treats as count nouns are mass nouns in BrE. One school of thinking on noun countability is that whether or not a noun is countable is somewhat arbitrary. The other school holds that such differences reveal underlying cultural differences. (See Anna Wierzbicka (1986) "Oats and Wheat" in The Semantics of Grammar.) So, can we find cultural differences between the US and Britain to account for these examples? Well, we can have fun trying.

Let's start with food.

I ate some...

AmE	BrE
mashed potatoes	mashed potato
scrambled eggs	scrambled egg

These kinds of prepared food are substances more than individuable things. You can't see the boundaries of the individual eggs or potatoes once they are scrambled or mashed. The BrE forms reflect this--they're singular just as other 'substance' food names like porridge (= US oatmeal, Scots English porage) and dip are. The AmE forms, however, reflect the state of the food before mashing/scrambling. Does this mean that Americans think more about the origins of their food? I can't think of much other evidence for that.

It's also not a perfect pattern. I've never heard anyone in Britain order refried bean with their Mexican food. But then again, (BrE) tins/(AmE) cans of refried beans tend to be imported from the US, with the AmE name for them on the label. But one also buys tins/cans of chopped tomatoes, not chopped tomato, which seems to indicate that scrambled egg and mashed potato aren't really part of a deep pattern. (There are 8 hits for "tin of chopped tomato" on UK Google, but over 500 for "tin of chopped tomatoes".)

BrE is also less likely to plurali{z/s}e sport and tax than AmE is.

Here we explain the main points that you may need to consider first if you cannot pay your tax. (TaxAid website (UK)).

You may qualify for an Offer in Compromise if you are unable to pay your taxes in full (Internal Revenue Service (US) FAQ sheet)

In April of every year, Americans do their taxes --even if they only pay Federal Income Tax. Nevertheless, it may be conceptuali{s/z}ed as plural because many people have to pay income tax at both the state and federal level. Still, one pays only one tax on one's property in most areas, but people still speak of their property taxes in the US.

If you pay your property taxes by eCheck, for your security you will be asked to enter a receipt number as your PIN. (Iowa State County Treasurers Assoc.)

Of course, in both countries, tax is money, and money is a mass noun, like BrE tax. But finding logic in any of this strikes me as futile. (You're welcome to contradict me!) In the UK, one pays council tax (predictably singular), but before that one paid rates--uncharacteristically plural. And in New York, we pay sales tax, but not sales taxes, even though the sales tax is composed of two taxes: the state sales tax and the county or city sales tax. (UK equivalent is VAT, for value-added tax. Because it's the same in every part of the country, it is usually presented as part of the retail price of any item in a shop. For more expensive items, like computers, the VAT is often listed separately. People have asked me why it can't be so straightforward in the US--and the answer is that the tax in the next town may be different from the tax in this one.)

For sport:

Girls are you interested in sport? (item on 'Making the News' website for schools)

versus AmE:

Get a girl interested in sports, the experts say, and chances are you’ll get a girl who exudes confidence, is physically healthy and is a success story waiting to happen. (Trinity College (DC))

The BrE singular uses of sport seem to treat the various types of sport as belonging to a more coherent category than AmE plural uses do. I note (from my internet wanderings) that Canadians seem to use sport in a more British way.

One more that I forgot until I found this blog entry on the topic: Americans play with Legos and step on a Lego, while the British play with Lego and step on a piece of Lego or a Lego brick.

Shall we say that this is all just a matter of habit, or can you see some reasons why the two cultures would conceptuali{s/z}e these concepts differently? Are Americans just plural-happy?