Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts

mobility

Smylers got in touch recently with this observation:

I found myself being surprised by the word “mobility”, and was wondering if there's a BrE/AmE difference? Enterprise Rent-a-Car emailed to say they're introducing a new brand: Enterprise Mobility




That made me think of vehicles adapted for wheelchair users, or those who otherwise have limited personal mobility. But apparently it's the overall brand for various transport services; “mobility” is being used to mean “travelling in a vehicle”, rather than “travelling on foot”.

There's no reason why the unqualified word should have one or the other meaning. But to my British brain, “mobility” makes me think of “mobility scooters” or “mobility aids” — such as those provided by Mobility People, whom you linked to in 2008:


It's an interesting one. 

The word mobility seems a bit more common in BrE in the the News on the Web corpus: you find about 11 mobility per million words in the US, versus about 13 per million in the UK. Those British uses tend to relate to a couple of domains: physical (dis)ability and social class.

It's not that Americans don't use mobility in that way. You can definitely find phrases like mobility scooter (as can be seen at this US electric wheelchair retailer) in AmE. (Though when I asked my brother what those things are called, he didn't use the word mobility, just scooter.) Nevertheless, this (dis)ability-related use of mobility used a lot more in BrE:



The (dis)ability-related uses of mobility really take off in this corpus after 2021. For instance, mobility issues (which could refer to different kinds of mobility, but mostly doesn't) had only 0.30 per million (across countries) in 2019, but 0.85 per million in 2022. 

Both AmE and BrE use mobility for metaphorical movement, as in social mobility. 



Why so much more talk of social mobility in the UK? Because the Tory government had appointed a "Social Mobility Tsar" during the period that this corpus was collected. (The hits for tsar in BrE are similarly out-of-whack.) 

If instead of asking the corpus for particular phrases like these and instead ask it to tell us which combinations with mobility are statistically "most American" and "most British", the results are interesting. On the left are the "most American" ones*—the greener, the more not-British they are.  And vice versa on the right. 
*This doesn't mean that these are the most common phrases with mobility in either country. And it doesn't mean that the other country doesn't use these phrases. It means that one country uses them surprisingly more than the other.

mobility + noun

Noun + mobility



Adjective + mobility

The thing to notice here is how much longer the green lists are on the American side of the second two charts, where mobility is modified by another word. AmE writers seem to have more kinds of mobility than BrE writers do. Where you see something like this, it's reasonable to suspect that more phrases = more meanings, or at least more domains in which the word is used.  

Sure enough, the BrE side is almost entirely characterized by phrases used in talking about physical (dis)ability and social mobility. (Green Mobility there refers to an electric car [BrE] hire /[AmE] rental company in continental Europe.) But the AmE side has other themes coming through: family mobility is about the Massachusetts Work and Family Mobility Act, which is about what kind of paperwork you need to get a (AmE) driver's/(BrE) driving licen{c/s}e. Electrophoretic mobility refers to a chemistry thing that I'm not going to try to understand. Mobility wing mostly refers to sections (Air Mobility Wings) of the US Air Force Reserve. And so forth.

Some of the uses, for example, commercial mobility, refer to means of transport(ation), and that's the use that Enterprise is picking up on in their branding. So there we go! It does look like branding that would work better in the US than the UK. Thanks, Smylers!

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leave

I have left my leave. In the spring of 2020 I was on university-funded leave. Then I took unpaid leave to go be an NEH Public Scholar for six months. Now I'm returning to my university job six weeks early so that someone else can go on sick leave. (Then I'll go back on unpaid leave in April and finish off the NEH grant.) That leaves me thinking about leave, and how Americans sometimes ask me to explain some BrE uses of it. 

Leave, a noun meaning 'time off from work/service' is general English, but it's used for more kinds of time off in BrE than in AmE. The leave in all of these expressions is not "I'm leaving! Bye-bye!", but that you have been given leave (permission) to go. And so...

Leave of absence is used in both places, but more in North America—and I am guessing that's because using leave on its own is less clear to those who use it less:

To be on leave is general English. The OED says that Americans can also be on a leave, but the corpus data I can find shows that as being more common in Canada than in the US. (On a leave of absence is much more common than on a leave on its own.)

In employment   

Several modifications of ___ leave seem to be used in both countries:

  • paid/unpaid leave
  • sick/medical leave
  • maternity/parental/paternity leave

...though you find all the parental leave expressions above, plus adoption leave much more in the UK because there's just much more of it to be had over here. Maternity leave also pops up as mat leave (and in Canada too) because familiarity breeds abbreviation.

Some BrE kinds of leave that aren't expressed that way in AmE are:

  • annual leave: one's annual (BrE) holiday / (AmE) vacation allowance. It's not uncommon in the UK to get out-of-office email messages that say "I'm on annual leave until [date] and will not be checking my email during this time".  
  • compassionate leave [thanks for reminding me, Biochemist]: time off to deal with some personal crisis, often a bereavement (bereavement leave also shows up in the corpus) or a family illness.
  • research leave: what those in US universities call sabbatical. (Sometimes in the UK, one runs across sabbatical leave.)
  • study leave: time off to do some training or education. I don't know of a US equivalent for this. Is there one?
  • garden(ing) leave: a euphemistic way of talking about some kind of paid suspension of work, often to keep someone out of trouble before they exit a job. This has come up before in this old post and was also an item in one of my Untranslatable Octobers.

Some or many of them might come from the military (see below) via the civil service. 

Some of kinds of leave in the UK might be threatened by post-Brexit degradation of working conditions. (Maternity leave looks ok for the time being, but holiday/vacation pay is a worry. See here.)  

The only ___ leave I can find that is used more in AmE than in BrE is administrative leave. In the news, it's what you see happening to police who shoot people while the shooting is being investigated.  American police do a whole lot more shooting people than (the mostly un-firearmed) British police. It's also used for other kinds of "we can't fire you yet" or "we don't want to fire you, but we need to look like we're doing something". In one British article (about doping in competitive cycling), administrative leave is followed by "sometimes called garden leave". While garden leave might hint at an impropriety, the hint is not as strong as it is for administrative leave. (E.g. some examples of garden leave seem to be about preventing employees from having access to company secrets before they move to another company.)

 In military service

Shore leave is general (military) English. I'd presume most of the military leaves are common to both. Furlough (my 2020 US>UK Word of the Year) is another military term for leave, with more meanings in AmE than BrE.

The military term absent without leave goes back to the 17th century, but the OED also marks it as "U.S. Military" in two senses: the offen{c/s}e of being absent without permission, and a person who is absent without permission. The acronym AWOL is originally AmE in all its senses.

 In immigration

As well as getting permission to go, you can get permission to stay. A BrE phrase every UK immigrant knows well is leave to remain. That is, permission to stay in the country. BrE indefinite leave to remain is equivalent to the AmE green card or general English permanent residence. Leave to remain can also be  temporary or limited (which are not the same thing), and discretionary, which is used in extraordinary circumstances (as for asylum seekers).

Not that kind of leave

And as long as I'm talking about noun uses of leave, take leave of (someone) is general (maybe a bit old-fashioned?) English, but take leave of one's senses ('stop thinking normally') seems rather BrE:


 

What have I forgotten? Let us know in the comments:

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British words (most) Americans don't know

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended to know and American ones didn't:

All of the terms will be discussed below, but not necessarily in the order given in the table. Instead, I'll group similar cases together. The unknown items from AmE were overrun with food words—that's less true here, though there are some.

Stationery items

The first two items are generici{s/z}ed brand names for office supplies. Tippex is correction fluid, known in AmE by brand names Wite-Out and Liquid Paper. Tippex is used as both noun (for the fluid) and as a verb for the action of covering things over—literally with correction fluid or figuratively. Here are a few examples from the GloWBE corpus that show some range:

  • Her contact details had been TippExed over a number of times. 
  • make-up, hair extensions, fake tan and tippexed teeth
  • But one series of game Tippexed over the old rules   

Biro is an old trade name for a ball-point pen, based on the name of the inventor László Bíró. The first syllable is pronounced like "buy" (not "bee").

Amusements

Pic from here
A tombola is a kind of raffle, where numbers are pulled out of a revolving drum-type container, and also a name for that container. The game is often found at school fairs, (BrE) village fetes, etc. The OED tells us tombola comes to English "partly from French, partly from Italian", which might mean the French got the game from Italy. The Italian game seems more like bingo. While bingo is called bingo in BrE, you might use a tombola (the drum-thing) for playing it, so it's not surprising that tombola was adopted as the name of a UK-based online bingo company.

Dodgems (or dodg'ems) are (orig. AmE) bumper cars. The BrE has the look of a brand name turned to a generic, though it's unclear to me if that name was ever trademarked. The cars were first called dodgems by their inventors, the Stoeher brothers of Massachusetts. This isn't the first time we've seen an American product name become the generic name for the product type in BrE—but I'll let you sort through the trade names posts for others.

Abseil might not quite belong in the amusement category, as it seems more like hard work, but let's put it here. It's a verb from German for a means of descending a mountain (etc.) using a rope affixed on a higher point. Americans use the French word for the same thing: rappel. The idea comes from the Alps, where both German and French are to be found, so it looks like Americans and Brits might go to different areas of the mountain range. (This is a counterexample to my usual claim that the English will take any opportunity to use a French word.)

Food

Chipolata is a kind of small sausage. They've been mentioned already at the pigs in blankets post. The name comes from French, which got it from the Italian name for an onion dish.

Plaice is a kind of flatfish that's common at British fish-and-chip shops. The OED says "European flatfish of shallow seas, Pleuronectes platessa (family Pleuronectidae)", but some other fish (esp. outside the UK) are sometimes called plaice. The name came from French long ago. It shows up in *many* punny shop names. 

Korma is a type of very mild curry typically made with a yog(h)urt-based sauce. BrE speakers generally have large vocabularies of the types of curry that are popular at UK Indian take-aways and restaurants, which often have menus with headings based on the curry type, like this at the right. It (orig. BrE) flummoxed me at first when English friends invited me over for a take-away and I was expected to already know this vocabulary and be able tell them what I'd like without reading the fine-print descriptions of the curry ingredients. The OED tells us korma comes from an Urdu word for 'cooked meat', which itself derives from a Turkish word.

Escalope takes us back to French, and the French influence on UK menus. OED defines it as "Thin slices of boneless meat (occasionally of fish), prepared in various ways; esp. a special cut of veal taken from the leg." It's found in menu phrases like veal escalope or an escalope of chicken.
P.S. Thanks to Cathy in the comments we have an AmE equivalent for this, the Italian scallopini. Another case (like courgette/zucchini) of a French-derived food word in BrE and an Italian one in AmE. (The Prodigal Tongue covers this a bit more.)

 

Slang

Yob is an example of back slang. It's the word boy backwards, and it's used particularly for young men/boys who engage in anti-social behavio(u)r. Hooligans, etc.

Naff is a word that's hard to translate exactly, which is why it has been one of my 'untranslatables' in the past. It's an adjective that refers to a certain kind of 'uncool', or as Jonathon Green defines it: "in poor taste, unappealing, unfashionable, bad" and more recently it's also meant "second-rate, workaday".  I've seen Americans get this word very wrong, so best not to attempt it until you've been in the UK for a some time. Some Brits will tell you it stands for 'not available for f***ing', but, as with almost all such acronymic slang tales, that is almost certainly false. Green's Dictionary of Slang gives this for etymology:

[? north. dial. naffhead, naffin, naffy, a simpleton; a blockhead; an idiot or niffy-naffy, inconsequential, stupid or Scot. nyaff, a term of contempt for any unpleasant or objectionable person; however note Polari etymologist WS Wilcox in a letter 25/11/99: ‘I have long believed that naff may well derive from Romany naflo, a form of nasvalo – no good, broken, useless. Since several other Parlary words derive from Romany this is not impossible’; in this context note also 16C Ital. gnaffa, a despicable person]

Brolly isn't in the same slang league as the previous examples. It's a kind of (orig. AmE) cutesie way of referring to an umbrella. As I discuss in some detail in The Prodigal Tongue, this is what BrE speakers say instead of (AmE) bumbershoot, an Americanism that Americans often erroneously believe to be British. That bit of my book is excerpted at Humanities magazine. Have a read and if you like it, maybe buy or borrow the book? (Please?)

Bolshy is an adjective derived from bolshevik, and as such it originally meant 'left-wing, Communist', but these days it's more often used to mean 'uncooperative, obstructive, subversive' (thanks again Mr Green) or 'Left-wing; uncooperative, recalcitrant' (OED). Don't get bolshy in the comments, OK? 

The rest

The other items on the list are just too miscellaneous to fit together under meaningful subheadings.

Gazump (and its sister gazunder) have been treated in an Untranslatables post already, so you can read about it there. It's about underhanded (BrE) property/(AmE) real-estate -buying behavio(u)r.

Kerbside is just (AmE) curbside in BrE spelling. Here's the old post about curb/kerb

Judder is an onomatopoetic verb. Like shudder, but used more often of mechanical things, like engines that aren't working well. Here's an example from the GloWBE corpus: "the bus juddered over potholes".  The OED's first citations of it are in the 1930s, so it came into English long after AmE & BrE separated.

Chiropody is used as AmE (and more and more BrE) would use podiatry, though some specialists try to force a difference in meaning between the two (see this, for example). You'll find other sites telling you there is no difference, and that, for the most part is true. The word podiatry was coined in the US and there covered the same things that chiropody covered in the UK. Chiropody comes from the Greek for 'hands' and 'feet', and you can see the similarity with chiropractor, who uses their hands to treat people. What's a bit funny about chiropody/chiropodist is that the pronunciation is all over the place. Some use the /k/ sound for the ch, following the Greek etymology. That's how dictionaries tend to show it. Others use a 'sh' sound as if it comes from French. You can hear both on YouGlish.

Quango stands for 'quasi-autonomous non-governmental organi{s/z}ation'. I remember learning about non-governmental organi{s/z}ations, or NGOs, when I lived in South Africa in the 90s. Apparently NGO has taken off as a term in the US in the meantime (see comments), but not quango. A quango is an NGO that gets public funds to do something that the government wants and maybe has government participants. Google says the word quango is 'derogatory', but I think that depends a bit on your political persuasion. Here's a BBC fact sheet on quangos.

A pelmet is a decorative window-covering that doesn't cover a window—it covers the top of the window and maybe the curtain rail. It can be a little curtain or a kind of box or board. Here's a selection of those that come up on a Google Image search:


The curtainy type of pelmet would be called a valance in AmE—which we've seen before because it has a bed-related use in BrE. I honestly do not know what the boxy things would be called in AmE. I've never had one in an AmE house, and my efforts to find them on US websites have not (orig. AmE) panned out. If you have the answer, say so in the comments and I'll update this bit.

P.S. Thank you commenters! Grapeson offers cornice as an AmE possibility. Usually (and in BrE too) this is a thing at the joint of the wall and the ceiling (often decorative). But Wikipedia has a little section on 'Cornice as window treatment' that confirms this usage. Then Diane Benjamin offers box valance as an AmE alternative. The Shade Store says this:

The primary difference between a curtain valance and a cornice is that valances are made out of drapery or fabric, while cornices are typically made out of wood.

Thanks to the commenters for helping out!


Finally, chaffinch is a bird species (which didn't come up in the recent bird posts). The Wikipedia map to the right makes it easy to see why Americans didn't recogni{s/z}e the word (the green areas are where chaffinches typically live). Wikipedia does say "It occasionally strays to eastern North America, although some sightings may be escapees."



So, that's that! Words that most British folk know and most Americans don't. If only I'd had Brysbaert et al.'s list when I was trying to make very difficult AmE/BrE quizzes.


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surgeries, constituencies, MPs

American readers/tweeters have been getting in touch to wonder about the use of surgery in reports like this from the BBC and other UK sources.
Jo Cox 1974–2016
From the Labour party website

Mrs Cox, 41, is the first sitting MP to be killed since 1990, when Ian Gow was the last in
a string of politicians to die at the hands of Northern Irish terror groups.
The man taken into custody was arrested in Market Street, not far from Birstall Library where Mrs Cox was holding a constituency surgery.

I touched on surgery back in the post about physician's titles, but I didn't cover all its uses.  Oxford Dictionaries Online gives the relevant British senses. (This is sense 2, after the general-English 'invasive medical procedure' sense.)

2. British A place where a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner treats or advises patients.
2.1 [in singular] A period of time during which patients may visit a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner for treatment or advice: Doctor Bailey had finished his evening surgery
2.2  An occasion on which an MP, lawyer, or other professional person gives advice.
So, you can go to a doctor's surgery (AmE office) during her surgery (= consultation hours). Elected representatives also hold surgeries at which constituents can come to discuss whatever's bothering them. These can be held at their office, but are often at some more public or accessible place, like a library. In my parliamentary constituency (approx. AmE congressional district) the MP has held a surgery on a bus as it goes about its normal route.

By extension, surgery is used for many kinds of meetings where someone offers expertise to someone else. Schools and universities have writing surgeries, there are knitting surgeries and bicycle surgeries, events where you can drop in and have a problem diagnosed and get help in fixing it.

In US news, I've seen surgery translated into meeting. In the back of my mind, I have a recollection that there are similar things to MP's surgeries sometimes in the US, but I can't for the life of me think of (or find) the terminology. Can anyone help?

I've translated constituency above to district, but let's be clear that AmE does have the word constituency, it's just more likely to refer to the people than the place, in my experience. In the GloWBE corpus, there are nearly four times more British uses of the word constituency than American ones.

I tweeted this on Thursday: 


And, of course, the response was requests for translation of MP, which is more familiarly Military Police in AmE. (I think I --and maybe others of my generation-- just know that because of M*A*S*H.) It stands for Member of Parliament, which is kind of like AmE congressperson, or member of Congress. I should say: it's not straightforward to translate parliamentary terminology into American terminology. This one isn't too bad, but when Americans call the Prime Minister the President it's a bit of a sin. The PM is the head of government. The President is the head of state. (So some countries have both.) In the UK, the reigning monarch is the head of state, but the powers of the monarchy are severely restricted--so, as I say, it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to translate the terminology. The president isn't like the queen, but neither is the office the same as the office of Prime Minister. So, simple translations don't get you very far if you want to understand the context of news stories. 

I only first heard of Jo Cox this week, but, wow, she was something special. I can't say anything more about the subject without dissolving into a state of abject despair.
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deductible and excess

Feeling a bit guilty that I haven't blogged in more than a week, but then I'm also feeling guilty that I haven't finished all the things that I need to finish.  So, here's a quick one, largely in other people's words, starting with an email from an American colleague in another department at Sussex.  The difference is in insurance terminology.  Let's say you were (BrE/AmE) burgled/(AmE) burglarized and the insurance company agreed to cover your losses.  Of course, they never cover the full amount that you claim for; there will be, say $100 or £50 (or some such number) that is not paid, as per the insurance contract.  In BrE that's the excess, whereas in AmE it's the deductible.  My colleague writes:
It kind of comes down to how you think about it. In American English, you start with the total, e.g., £200. Then, you deduct the deductible (e.g., £50). So, you are left with the amount you can claim (£150). In contrast, in British English, you start with nothing* then, there is the excess (£50) and anything in excess of that amount you can claim (£150) towards the total (£200).
Her footnoted comment is that the differences in perspective are not terribly surprising, given the stereotype of Americans as positive-thinking and the British as, well, not.  I'd explain excess slightly differently: you start with a claim for £200. The insurance company gives you £150, so your claim exceeds (is in excess of) the settlement by £50.  I'm not sure that this is any less 'positive' in its perspective than deductible is.

On another insurance note, in BrE, you're more likely to see some insurance products or companies with assurance in their names, rather than insurance.  One particularly sees it in the context life assurance (vs AmE life insurance)--but this is rarer and rarer.  On the  differentiation of assurance and insurance, the OED says:
Assurance is the earlier term, used alike of marine and life insurance before the end of 16th c. Its general application is retained in the titles and policies of some long-established companies (e.g. the London Assurance Corporation). Insurance (in 17th c. also ENSURANCE) occurs first in reference to fire (1635 in INSURE v. 4), but soon became coextensive with assurance, the two terms being synonymous in Magens 1755 (see ASSURANCE 5). Assurance would probably have dropped out of use (as it has almost done in U.S), but that Babbage in 1826 (see quot.) proposed to restrict insurance to risks to property, and assurance to life insurance. This has been followed so far that assurance is now rarely used of marine, fire, or accident insurance, and is retained in Great Britain in the nomenclature and use of the majority of life insurance companies. But in general popular use, insurance is the prevalent term. Mr. T. B. Sprague, followed by others, considers assurance, assure, assurer, etc., the proper words for the action of the company or persons undertaking the risk, insurance, insure, insurer, etc., for that of the person paying the premium. This would be in some respects a useful distinction, if it could be carried out; but it would leave the members of mutual societies at once assurers and insurers.
That, happily, is about the extent of my experience with insurance-related terminology. If you know of any more, feel free to relate your examples in the comments.
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watershed and prime time

This post is inspired by the following quotation from darling, two-year-old daughter Grover:
"Bastard.  (BrE) Mummy said it!"
 Before she (orig. AmE) outs me as a (orig. AmE) potty mouth at her (AmE) daycare/(BrE) crèche (or nursery), I'll have to take the matter into hand and save my sparkling wit (in response to Better Half's all-too-accurate parodies of me) for (BrE) after the watershed.

Because it's late at night (or early in the morning), I'll let Wikipedians do the work for me:

United Kingdom

According to Ofcom, the watershed on standard television in the UK starts at 9:00 p.m., and finishes at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. Programmes that are 15+ are shown during this period. However, some 12+ shows can be shown before 9:00 p.m., such as The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and Doctor Who. On premium film or pay-per-view services requiring a subscription, the watershed starts at 8:00 p.m. However, 12, 15 and 18 rated films can be shown on PIN protected channels (such as Sky Movies) at any time of the day. Viewers are required to enter their PIN to view. There should be a gentle transition to adult material, and 18-rated material is not allowed to be shown before 9:00 p.m.
See also for the UK: The Ofcom Broadcasting Code - Section 1

United States

The term "watershed" is not used in this context in the United States. In the US, the "safe harbor" for "indecent" programming begins at 10:00 p.m. and ends at 6:00 a.m. the next morning (all time zones). However, content that is considered "obscene" (including explicit human sexual intercourse) is never allowed by the FCC rules for broadcast stations. Those content rules only apply to channels broadcast terrestrially and not those only available on cable. Consequently, restricted-access networks (like the premium channels HBO and Showtime and adult channels Playboy TV and Spice) have taken advantage of considerably more leeway in their programming.
The term is an extension of other uses of watershed:  'the ridge or crest line dividing two drainage areas; water parting; divide' (which some dictionaries list as 'Chiefly BrE') and later ' an important point of division or transition between two phases, conditions, etc.' (Late addition, June 2017: Michael M has pointed out that World Wide Words has a good account of the AmE/BrE difference in the watery kind of watershed.)

If I needed an equivalent for after the watershed in AmE, I think I'd say not in prime time, which isn't exactly the same thing.  The watershed is a dividing line between the times when stricter and looser 'decency' codes have to be followed, whereas prime time is the part of the evening in which television networks expect to have the most viewers and therefore where they put their choicest programming (8:00 to 11:00 or 7:00 to 10:00, depending on the time zone).  It's also when they charge the most for advertising time.  In BrE, this is more commonly known as peak time, though since the major broadcaster (the BBC) is (orig. and principally AmE) commercial/(BrE)advert-free, it's less directly about advertising revenue.  While prime time is not the only time when children might be watching, not in prime time is often used to mean 'not appropriate for a general audience'.  This gives a double meaning to the name of Saturday Night Live's original troupe, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

On American (chiefly AmE) network television (i.e. distributing programs to local affiliates; not cable/satellite), the rules are fairly restrictive at all times, so I was surprised when I first moved to the UK and saw things like Something for the Weekend (which was really horrid) or The Sex Inspectors (experts watch couples getting it on and give them pointers on improving!  The website describes it as post watershed), right there on free TV at a time when the equivalent US stations are showing the nighttime news.  (Did the US ever import this format?)  The reason why most of the good American television comes from HBO and Showtime is that those, as pay channels, do not have the same content restrictions as their free broadcast counterparts (and they've decided to use that power for good rather than evil).

At any rate, either Better Half will have to wait until the watershed from now on before he points out my pedantries and hypocrisies, or I'll have to rein in my tongue-in-cheek responses. Or else Grover will be teaching the entire pre-nursery room some choice AmE phrases.    I think I know which one is most likely.
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sick and ill

I'm pleased to welcome my former student, Solo, for her second guestblogging service here on SbaCL.  Take it away, Solo:


The Oxford Dictionary of English informs me that sick is an adjective meaning “affected by physical or mental illness,” suggesting that illness is the dominant term. Furthermore, to my BrE mind, the generic term when one is suffering from any form of malady is ill, which covers generally feeling unwell right through to serious, long-term affliction.  (The definition of ill incidentally is “suffering from an illness...”.)

I would have said the exception was poorly for the under-fives, but previous comments on this blog suggest most Britons consider poorly an old-fashioned or locali{s/z}ed Yorkshire expression to mean ‘very seriously ill in hospital’. In my personal (Southern) experience however, it’s just a word said to small children with stomach bugs.

The obvious transatlantic synonym is, of course, sick, which receives reasonable employment on this side of the pond too.  I’d argue that ill  is favo(u)red over here, however, it would seem that sick has broader meaning for AmE speakers than for BrE.

Case in point: I recently asked an American (and long-term UK resident) colleague how she was. She did seem a little under the weather. She replied “I’ve been sick.” My response to this was {sympathetic face/noise} “Oh, what was wrong?” To demonstrate the thought process here, I heard sick in an AmE accent and automatically translated to ill. If a fellow Brit had told me they’d been ill, that would probably mean they’d  had some specific, diagnosable malady.  I therefore anticipated greater explication at this stage in the conversation, e.g. “I’ve had a cold/flu/a stomach bug/malaria.” However, she simply reiterated “I’ve been sick.” As though this were explanation in itself. In my idiolect a reiteration like that would be followed with a slightly patroni{s/z}ing "haven’t I?" It therefore transpires that sick was not merely an umbrella term covering all manner of sickness, but also had some specific connotation for the AmE speaker; perhaps something akin to run down? If we say we are run down it means not feeling one’s best due to maybe working too hard, not getting enough sleep/exercise or eating badly, but without having an actual illness.

Sick in the ‘unwell’ sense does of course enjoy widespread popular use in BrE, but, I’d argue, with nowhere near the prevalence with which it is used in AmE. Exceptions would be compound phrases such as off sick (AmE equivalent: taking a sick day) and the related sick pay. Then there are sickness benefits, paid to those unable to work for health reasons. *Illness benefits would grate on British ears. So these are exceptions in which sick is used in BrE, but with very specific applications. Then there’s the very British sickie, which is the act off taking a day off (from) work claiming ill-health when actually either hungover or simply not in the mood for a day’s work. AmE phrases like sick day have become codified in the lexicon of the workplace, so on an application form one would have to state how many sick days one had taken in the last two years, but I wouldn’t use the phrase independently, I’d just say I’d had the day off, or I was off sick.  [Lynneguist’s note: I've been asked how much BrE medical leave I've taken.  Disturbingly for an American, it's legal here for a prospective employer to demand medical info.  I recently read that that may change soon...] The prevalence of AmE expressions in work practice seems to be growing exponentially, but that’s a topic for another post.

Etymologically, my highly academic sources lead me to believe that somewhere around the turn of the last century ill was the common parlance amongst the common people and should they wish to better themselves and their manner of speaking they were encouraged to employ the term sick, as was the preference of the more socially advantaged.  I’m fairly confident this is no longer a class shibboleth, in the fashion of sofa/settee, but I have noticed the BrE use of sick in this context is far more prevalent amongst more senior generations, especially the better to do thereof.

To me, the most obvious meaning is the verb phrase form to be sick (AmE equivalent presumably to get sick). Context aside, this would typically be my first interpretation of the word. I always thought this meaning was very closely linked to the mass noun use of sick, a direct synonym of ‘vomit’. Oxford however tells me the mass noun use is an informal and specifically British application, which appeared sixth in their pecking order of definitions. So do AmE speakers find this use odd or improbable?


For an example the last time I was at Thorpe Park (the UK’s secondary theme park), we were made to wait at the front of the Colossus (BrE) queue/(AmE) line, where we heard the following announcement:
Thorpe Park apologi{s/z}e for the temporary delay. This ride is closed for essential cleaning. There is sick on one of the seats and we have to clean it, or it will be on you. We would like to remind passengers to keep all food and drink inside themselves at all times whilst on the ride.
For this reason I have a lot of trouble hearing/using I’ve been sick to mean I’ve had an illness. I would always process it to mean the action in the recent past and then from context would have to work out what the speaker actually meant. Is this too broad a generali{s/z}ation, BrE speakers?

After those interpretations there is also the implication of depravity, propagated particularly by the gutter press (Ban this sick filth!), which seems to carry equal weight on both sides of the water, and lastly, though by no means leastly, in the sociolect of the kids it is also an expression of approval originating in London, which has graduated to Brighton. For example, That is sick, bruv.  Or Those alloys are well sick, and such words to that effect. I have reason to believe this employment of the word has enjoyed perennial popularity amongst the AmE adolescent populace too, but the ‘unwell’ usage carries far more weight in the US than it does here and the colloquial use is therefore far less likely to affect its salience to such an extent, though whether older or more Northern BrE speakers would find that the current slang use of sick affects their processing is not something I can judge. So with that, I’ll throw open the floor…

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initials and names

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:

  1. David Eddyshaw said,

    July 2, 2009 @ 11:57 am
    Scots eldest sons frequently have the same first names as their fathers, but actually use their middle names instead, and will abbreviate themselves as e.g.
    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.
"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.)
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redundant

David C wrote this week to ask:

I know the English use 'redundant' where we USns would say 'laid off' but the question came up whether they would use 'redundant' where we would say 'obsolete' in reference to, say, a 5-year old computer.

Let's back up a bit and discuss what David's taken for granted. In AmE a company can lay off its employees but in BrE a company (or a university!) makes its employees redundant. What's a little confusing is that you can be laid off in the UK too, but it means something different. According to this site (among others) a lay-off is expected to be temporary, as opposed to a redundancy in which you really, really lose your job. But this is not the understanding in AmE, where being laid off is the equivalent of BrE redundancy.

In answer to David's question, objects can also be made redundant in BrE--if they've been made worthless, particularly because they've been superseded by something else. Both Better Half and I feel like this is not quite the same thing as obsolete, but we're a bit hard-pressed to explain exactly why. Do others have this intuition?
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collegiality

A British colleague and I were drowning our professional sorrows in a bit of bourbon whisk(e)y at a campus pub yesterday, when an American from another department stopped by our table to discuss the bad news that's affected us. Professor American expressed his dismay at our news and how it had been delivered to us and the campus--that he felt a lack of collegiality in the way that we were treated.

As soon as he went back to his table, my British colleague said "I love that word collegiality. It's really an American thing, isn't it?"

Well, maybe.

If it's not a word that you use much, then Wikipedia is helpful in this case:

Colleagues are those explicitly united in a common purpose and respecting each other's abilities to work toward that purpose. A colleague is an associate in a profession or in a civil or ecclesiastical office.

Thus, the word collegiality can connote respect for another's commitment to the common purpose and ability to work toward it.
Wikipedia also notes that in sociological terms, collegiality is the opposite of bureaucracy.

The word comes from French, and certainly can be found in BrE texts. But in academic life, it certainly is true that it's a word one hears much more on the left side of the pond.
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institutional verbs

One thing that I like about British English is the range of verbs and phrasal verbs for various interactions with public welfare institutions. I don't know why I have such fondness for them--maybe it's just my fondness for the public welfare institutions. When asked by British folk what I like about living in England, my first two answers are: the National Health Service and the trains. They usually express shock or derision, but then I point out how much healthcare costs (and how unevenly it is distributed) in the US and the fact that in my last American place of residence (a city of about 125,000) the Amtrak passenger train came only TWICE A WEEK and even then you had to drive to a couple of towns away to catch it. After those explanations, my appreciation for what might not be the greatest health and transport services in the world seems a lot clearer. As a (smugly) non-car-owning person with chronic illness, I have very few complaints about the services, and tend to find that the loudest complaints come from healthy folk who drive everywhere. But maybe I should save my prejudices about healthy people for another forum. Some of my best friends are healthy. Well, one of them, at least.

(In case you're wondering what my third favo(u)rite thing about living in England/Britain is, it's: everyone seems to have a hobby or passion [besides sitting in front of the tv/(BrE) telly every night]. What fun! If only everyone in my family had a hobby--it would make Christmas shopping so much easier.)

But enough asides (or since they came first, should I call them atops?). Here are some of the BrE institutional verbs I love:
  • to sign on also known as to go on (BrE) the dole: to register to receive social benefits (AmE: welfare or unemployment insurance). I was going to link you to the episode of Spaced in which Daisy tries to sign on, but no one's uploaded that one to YouTube yet. Just when you start to think that you can depend on the Internet, it goes and disappoints you in a fundamental way.

    One can use sign off to mean 'go off benefits (because one has become employed)', but I'm more accustomed to hearing it used to mean:
  • to sign off: (for a medical doctor) to give a medical certificate (to someone), allowing them medical leave from work. This is usually done by one's (BrE) GP -- general practitioner (AmE: primary care physician [though that's (AmE) HMO-speak] or family doctor). This is often used in the passive--e.g. I've been signed off for the next five weeks. When it's used in the active form, the direct object comes between the verb and the particle: The doctor signed John off, not *The doctor signed off John.
Of course, no welfare system is without its cheats, and BrE supplies some interesting verbs for turning them in:
  • to shop (someone): to turn someone in for some misdeed. This isn't only used for fraud against the government, but it's certainly used for that a lot. The OED has it going back for centuries, but says it's now "only slang or dial". For example:
    Council [AmE: municipal government] launches 'shop your neighbour' dustbin [AmE: trash can] hotline (Daily Mail, 12 Oct 2006)
While it is slang-ish, newspapers and even the government use shop quite easily--although often in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas in order to signal its 'slanginess'.
  • to grass (up) (someone): again, to inform the police/authorities about someone's misdoings. More likely than shop (in my experience) to be used for non-fraud kinds of crimes. There are also the nouns grass and supergrass, meaning a person who grasses. And once one learns that, the name of the band [warning: link makes noise] makes more sense. AmE alternatives that I can think of for this meaning, such as rat, are also found in BrE.
According to someone in this BBC article (which uses both grass and shop):
Most smokers are law-abiding citizens, and I can't believe people will want to shop smokers. It is not the British way.
That it is perceived as 'not the British way' might go a little way to explaining why (in my experience) British universities tend not to have Hono(u)r Codes, in the American sense. At many US universities, one must sign a document promising not to cheat and to report any cheating one knows about. At my UK university, students have to sign statements that they haven't cheated (when they take an exam or submit and assignment), but (as I found when someone grassed on a fellow student) there is no process in place to allow for the investigation of an accusation of cheating that comes from a student, rather than a faculty member.
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AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)