So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think:
'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered, and those don't even include the ever-growing list in my head of things that fit
my original intention of discussing the "words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis" (plus the pragmatic conventions, social constraints and value systems that affect communication and get me into even more trouble). I'd hoped that I'd blog at least three times a week during my
(AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday, but instead I have blogged
just twice (ok, now thrice)
and received six emails with good requests for new topics
plus a number of others in the comments sections of current and old posts
plus the 'have you blogged that yet?' conversational asides from Better Half and others at a rate of about three per day. I'm fairly confident that I could blog daily on this topic until retirement age and still have ideas for new posts. But, of course, I'll have to wait until I'm retired to blog at my desired pace. In the meantime, I'll just have to take my vitamins (while trying not to think too hard about how that's pronounced) in the hope that I'll have a long enough retirement to even start to do these dialects justice. If you're interested in reading the faster-paced version of the blog, please remember to eat your five a day, walk your 10,000 steps and use your SPF 50—you've got another 20-some years to wait before it even starts.
And after that bit of solipsistic (
ish) reflection, a post that concerns me-me-me! Ok, so it starts with a much more famous writer, but that's just an excuse to get to
me. One of the aforementioned six emails was from
Marc, who wrote:
I'm listening to Just a Minute on Radio 4, and the subject is "Scott Fitzgerald". It seems to me that Americans always say "F. Scott Fitzgerald". I actually think the Just a Minute usage makes more sense, since his full name is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. If he chose to call himself "Scott", the alternatives in my mind would be his four-name full name, or Scott Fitzgerald.
Well, his family called him 'Scott' and I'm sure that's how he introduced himself in social situations, but when he published he called himself F. Scott Fitzgerald, as on the cover of the first edition of
The Great Gatsby (via
Wikipedia):
Fitzgerald was named after his famous relative,
Francis Scott Key, but the family called him
Scott—I don't know why, possibly to differentiate him from some other Francis or because they didn't like the possible nicknames for
Francis or because they just liked
Scott. But when Americans (like me! like me!) go by their second names (like I do! like I do!), they (I) tend to acknowledge that they (I) have a first name by including the first initial in formal, written contexts.
My story is a little different than Fitzgerald's—when my parents named me, it was with the intention that I would be known by both of my names. When I got to
high school, the computeri{s/z}ed attendance (esp. AmE)
rosters had room only for first name and middle initial—so my teachers tended to call me by my first name. I didn't like that, so I rebelled (kind of) and reinvented myself (more so) by adopting my middle name as my 'main name' when I started attending
college/university courses. But the outcome is the same as Fitzgerald's:
when I publish, I do so with my first initial, full middle name, and full surname.
(Sorry, I can't find an image of this in which my name is clear—nor is there a good picture of
the next one. That linked picture is a pre-publication mock-up...
my lovely co-author's name will also be on it when it's published.)
I must pause for the inevitable question "What does the M stand for?" When I lived in the northeastern US, I had a ready-made non-answer that worked: "It starts with an M and I have an Irish surname. You can figure it out." But when I moved to foreign lands (first South Africa, then TEXAS), I found that the people couldn't figure it out, since they had considerably less exposure to certain Catholic-Irish-American naming practices. (NB: my non-answer doesn't work in Ireland either.) But you're intelligent, worldly people. You can figure it out. Or if not, you can read
this. Note that the double-naming Irish-American thing in the north is perceived (at least by folks like me) as being a different tradition than the (largely non-Catholic) double-naming tradition in the South, for which a broader range of possible name combinations is available (as well as the tradition of using a family surname as the second name). See
here for some examples.
When I moved to the UK, I started having trouble with my first initial and name. I had come to think of
M. Lynne Murphy as my 'brand', but you can see that my employer has decided not to include my initial in
my web profile. Furthermore, plenty of people seem to have a hard time referring to my work using my first initial. So, I'm referred to as
Lynne M. Murphy and
L.M. Murphy (even by people who I work very closely with—Scandinavians seem to be the most frequent reversers). Google Scholar even thinks I'm L.M. Murphy
for this publication (even though it links to something that gets my name right). I thus work toward(s)
the next research-based funding exercise for higher education in England with fear and loathing, since I have particular reason to fear that citations of my work will not be counted accurately.
When I first moved to my job at Sussex, I had an American colleague, the great
Larry Trask, who was born Robert Lawrence Trask. This led some English university folk to ask me "why do all you Americans use your middle names?" Of course, two linguists do not amount to "all Americans", and looking at famous linguists and philosophers who use their middle names, I'm not at all convinced that Americans use middle names more than the British do. After all, two of the people I cite the most, HP Grice and DA Cruse were born in the UK and were/are called by their middle names. But they mostly publish(ed) with both initials, rather than initial-plus-name. Checking Wikipedia, the Cambridge University Press catalog(ue) and my own friends/citations, all of the first-initial users are American:
G Tucker Childs
W Tecumseh Fitch
D Robert Ladd (working in Scotland)
M Lynne Murphy (working in England)
T Daniel Seely
A Ronald Walton
(but here's another one, with an interesting story, who doesn't quite fit in this list)
The most famous living linguist also goes by his middle name, but Avram Noam Chomsky just skips to his middle name with no fanfare. I have no way of checking how many other middle-name users completely omit the first name when publishing. (Know of any others?)
If you're not all that interested in linguists' names (poor you), here is a
first-initial-plus-middle-name hall of fame, which cheats a little by including some people who didn't really use the first initial (like
Neville Chamberlain).
The AmE tendency to use first initials is tied, no doubt, to the AmE tendency to use middle initials in the names of people who go by their first names.
Wikipedia notes that "The practice of abbreviating middle names to initials is rare in the United Kingdom", although certainly some UK authors use their middle initials when publishing—especially if they have common first and last names. Americans are so in love with these initials that we had a president who had an initial and no name to go with it: Harry S Truman. (And I'll repeat a link here
because it's the same kind of story.)
But Americans like to spell out the name that they're called by, and so do not tend to reduce their names to just initials + surname, as the British often do in formal/bureaucratic situations. For instance, it's more frequent on forms in the UK to be asked for surname and initials than in the US, where one typically is asked for first name and middle initial (much to the chagrin of those of us who want to be mysterious about our first names). UK credit/debit cards and (BrE)
cheque-books (=AmE
checkbooks) typically have only initials+surname, though the bank will certainly have your full name on record. American ones more typically have a name and an initial. And this is reflected in signatures, too. Better Half's signature includes neither of his given names—just initials, and it's my impression that this is much more common in the UK than in the US.
But while the English often use just initials in 'formal' (i.e. printed) settings, I've also heard them complain about the American trend for calling people by their initials. (I once belonged to a group of about a dozen Americans that happened to have two people called 'D.J.'—this had nothing to do with turntables. One was male, one female.) I must say, it's not my taste either, but then again there are lots of names that aren't to my taste.
And then there's the question of who uses both first and middle names—e.g. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I direct you to
Language Log for that discussion. But in that discussion there is a comment that the first initial + middle name thing is common in Scotland. I'll quote it in its entirety:
"Americans frequently switch (a)round his initial and forename"! Oh, don't get me started (again)! (Except to note that
forename is much more common in BrE than in AmE.)
Posts
David Eddyshaw said,
J. Ewan McPherson
An author relative of mine whose name follows this pattern finds that Americans frequently switch round his initial and forename to conform to their preferred Homer J Rodeheaver pattern. I actually have an American edition of one of his works with this error on the front page.