Separated by a Common Language

In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing. 

red sauce

Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:

(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin; (b) adj. (attributive) U.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.

Wikipedia tells us:

Red sauce may refer to:

That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinara on Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.

An Australian ketchup

brown sauce

The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.

Wikipedia's photo at brown sauce

In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:

In The Prodigal Tongue I wrote quite a bit about how differences in prototype structures for word meanings can lead to miscommunication between BrE and AmE speakers, and I've written about such differences here on the blog with reference to soup and bacon sandwiches. This past week I was faced with an example I'd never considered before: fudge. 

I'm sure I've never considered it because I have no interest in eating the stuff. I don't even really like walking by the fudge shops in Brighton with their sickly smells pouring out onto the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk. But then Welsh-linguist-in-the-US Gareth Roberts ran this Twitter poll and I thought "Oh, yeah. That's true, isn't it?"

First thing to note: fudge in its food sense is an Americanism, and it seems to have been mostly chocolate at the start. The OED's first citation for it comes from a Michigan periodical in 1896 and reads "Fudges, a kind of chocolate bonbons." Wikipedia notes that a recipe for "Vassar chocolates" (made at the college/university in the 1890s) was actually vanilla fudge—which seems to say that fudge could be considered to be the poor student's chocolate, no matter the flavo(u)r.

At least some of the North American 'no' votes were Canadians laying a claim for maple fudge, but other Canadians agreed with most Americans that in North America fudge can be assumed to be chocolate unless otherwise specified, while BrE respondents mostly said it was vanilla unless otherwise specified. As a result, chocolate fudge turns up more in BrE than in AmE:

I should note that 20 of the 41 UK hits for chocolate fudge are followed by cake and a few more are followed by other nouns like frosting or biscuits. There's only 1 chocolate fudge cake in the AmE data, but if you look for fudge cake there, you get double fudge cake, which (I'm willing to bet) any American would interpret as an extra chocolatey cake. (The BrE data include no double fudge cakes but one double fudge chocolate cake, underscoring that you need to mention chocolate because fudge doesn't mean chocolate in BrE.)

Now, we've seen something like this, but a bit different, before: BrE use of chocolate brownies. In the case of fudge, Americans (like UKers) have many, many flavo(u)rs of fudge these days. But because the prototypical (and original) American fudge is chocolate-flavo(u)red, Americans tend to only specify a flavo(u)r where it's contrary to that prototype. 

For BrE speakers, chocolate is contrary to the prototype, and so needs specification. Looking for fudge recipes on BBC Good Food, the 'classic fudge recipe' (pictured right) and plain ol' fudge are flavo(u)red with vanilla only.

the actual jar, 2014

AmE also has hot fudge, which is a thick chocolate sauce that needs to be heated to make it pourable. One of my best blogger moments was when a US reader came to see me talk in Reading (England) while she was on her holiday/vacation. Knowing she would see me and knowing that I went to college/university in western Massachusetts she brought me a jar of hot fudge from Herrell's, a Northampton, MA ice cream shop that happened (she didn't know this) to be in the same building as where I held my first full-time job. I think I heated up one bit of it for an ice cream (orig. AmE) sundae. The rest I ate spoon by spoon straight out of the fridge over the next few months. Hot fudge is not literally heated fudge, but instead fudge here "Designat[es] sweet foods having the rich flavour and dense consistency associated with (esp. chocolate) fudge". The OED marks that definition as "Originally and chiefly U.S."

Back in the UK, Cadbury Fudge is bar of chocolate-coated fudge in the BrE sense. They typically come in a small size and are the kind of thing that children with not-too-much pocket money might get after school.

This led me to wonder if fudge is used differently as a colo(u)r name in the two places and sure enough, this is what happens when you search for "fudge paint color" in the USA:

So, if you're travel(l)ing to another country and need to describe yourself to the person who'll be picking you up from the airport, I'd advise against saying you'll be the person in the fudge-colo(u)red jacket.

A few more fudge facts:

• The meaning 'to do in "a clumsy, makeshift, or dishonest manner"' (OED) is over 200 years older than the food meaning. That came from an earlier word fadge, and it's thought that the vowel alteration was symbolic: people fudged the pronunciation to indicate they were talking about something fudged.
  
  Fudge the food might well get its name from the fact that it was a way to make candy/sweets at home, "fudging" the usual processes for making fancy chocolates and the like.
  
  
• The exclamation Oh fudge! similarly predates the candy/sweet. I'm sure many people these days think of it as a minced way of saying another word that starts with fu, but the first interjection use of fudge in the OED in the 1700s predates their first use of that other word as an interjection (and the one in Green's Dictionary of Slang) by nearly 200 years. The original use of fudge as an interjection meant something more like "Nonsense!"
  
  
• The usual BrE mnemonic for the high notes of the treble clef is Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. In AmE I learned Every Good Boy Does Fine, but a more recent AmE version is Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Click here for an n-gram chart, showing the rise of fudge.
  
  

Thank you to everyone who nominated words for this year's SbaCL Words of the Year.  I needed them more than ever this year, as I had few ideas or preferences of my own on this matter.  But thanks to my kind readers, we have some winners.


Let's start with the more competitive AmE-to-BrE category.  Here we've had some nice suggestions, and the hono(u)r nearly went to primary in the sense of 'preliminary election'. Reader-in-Ireland mollymooly had suggested this at the end of 2009, noting that the Conservative party had an open primary to choose a candidate for the House of Commons seat for Totnes. Perhaps it should have beaten staycation last year--but it came to my attention a little too late.  But it was ousted as frontrunner in the last day of nominations, when SP nominated a gerund that has both been discussed in the news this year and made its way into UK news.  And that gerund, The 2010 American-to-British Word of the Year is:

Like, for instance, his [Cameron's] current 'shellacking' (love that word) over a supposed lack of vision and confidence in the recent Guildhall speech. [Skol303 comment on Nick Robinson's blog]

Vince Cable being torn a new one by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight...she got him so rattled he developed a Herbert Lom-like twitch (left eye) halfway though the shellacking by Wark (I kid you not). [samandmai comment on digital spy]

So thank you, SP, for a fantastic nomination!

And on to the BrE-to-AmE winner.  This is always a tougher category--in part, because I live in the UK, but mostly because of the lesser impact that UK news and popular culture makes in the US. The winner is not a particularly 2010 word--instead, it's one that's been making steady progress in AmE over the past decade.  But in hono(u)r of the near-culmination of the Harry Potter film adaptations, the British-to-American Word of the Year is:



...in particular, the adjectival use to describe hair colo(u)r and, to some extent, the noun use to mean 'a red-haired person'. Twice this year I've heard from US parents (including Mark Allen) who have said that their children use ginger in this more British way because of the influence of the Harry Potter stories, which features the red-headed Weasley family, including Harry's sidekick Ron. (Here's my old post on the topic.)  The much-discussed new Google n-gram tool shows 'ginger hair' steadily increasing in American English books since 1995, though Harry Potter was not released in the States till September 1998.  In British English books, however, there's an increase in the Harry Potter days (after some years of decline), but what looks to be a decrease as we come toward(s) the present. It's hard to say if that's meaningful--and unfortunately I don't have access to any British corpus that takes us up to date.  In the more reliable Corpus of Historical American English, there are 8 uses between 1940 and 1979, none in the 1980s, five in the 1990s and 8 in the 2000s, which seems to show the Harry Potter effect.  It's harder for me to find incursions of the noun ginger in the meaning 'red-head' in AmE, since one must search for word strings, not meanings.  All I can think to do is to note that the Urban Dictionary entry for the noun ginger include some contributions that spell color without a u.  Further evidence is welcome in the comments.


Also welcome in the comments are your thoughts on whether I've done an effective or abominable job in choosing this year's Words of the Year.  But if you don't like them and didn't nominate any, I reserve the right to roll my eyes at you.  Through the computer.  Ouch.

Looking for something easy to blog about, I was reading through old email requests from back in the days when I was in (the) hospital, waiting for Grover to be born.  Grover's going to be three in December, so there's a little insight into just how untidy that email inbox is and how many unblogged-about topics might be lurking there.

At any rate, then-reader (are you still out there?) Catnap in the US wrote to me about some British recipes she'd been reading, including one for brownies.  She correctly surmised that brownies are not the institution in the UK that they are in the US--but they've become much better known/loved in the decade that I've lived here.  (I've never known a British non-professional-baker person to actually make brownies.  One tends to get 'gourmet' brownies here--and they can be incredible.  Like the raspberry ones made by Prosperity Brownies. Ooh, I'm getting palpitations just thinking about them.)  It's all part of this craze for importing and "fancifying" American baked goods. 

At any rate, the BrE word that Catnap noted in the recipe was squidgey, which the OED and I spell squidgy.  The older sense of this word in OED, from the 19th century, is 'Short and plump; podgy' And here we pause to note that BrE prefers podgy, but AmE uses pudgy almost exclusively.

The second sense of squidgy is the brownie sense:

Moist and pliant; squashy, soggy. Esp. of food.

The definition doesn't sound very appeti{s/z}ing, but squidgy can definitely be a positive trait in a brownie. 

This sense of squidgy is only noted since the 1970s, but squdgy, a word that looks like a typo, has been around and meaning 'soft and moist or yielding' starting with Kipling:

1892 KIPLING Barrack-Room Ballads 51 Elephints apilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek.  1919 W. DEEPING Second Youth xvii. 145 He made haste to shake Joseph Bluett's squdgy hand and escape. 1959 M. STEEN Woman in Back Seat I. v. 97 ‘Don't you like babies?’ Lavinia shook her head... ‘They're so squdgy, and they haven't got any shape!’

Looking for other -dgy adjectives that might differ, I find splodgy. OED defines it as 'Full of splodges; showing coarse splotches of colour.'  In AmE, this would be splotchy (and 'full of splotches').  The OED doesn't mark splotchy as 'chiefly American', but there are no instances in the British National Corpus, as opposed to three instances of splodgy. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, it's 78 instances of splotchy and zero splodgy.

The only other differing -dgy adjective I can think of is dodgy, which the OED has as:  

Brit. colloq. Of poor quality, unreliable; questionable, dubious.

One hears it in contexts like I have a dodgy knee or He's selling some dodgy goods on the internet.

The Lesson of the Post is thus: BrE likes adjectives ending in -dgy more than AmE does!

Today's query comes from Kirsten in Australia:

Would you be able to explore/explain the expressions brown-bagging or brown-bag lunch?

I first heard it used by an American colleague visiting our Melbourne office. Searching references on the net I gather it is used to refer to a home-made lunch in a school or business situation (as opposed to buying from fast food or cafeteria). I have some questions about the term:

• Could you please confirm the correct meaning/usage in the US?
• Is the term used/understood in the UK?
• Is it typical for Americans literally to carry home-made lunch in brown bags?

Kirsten has the AmE meaning generally right (more on this below), and it is AmE (or more generally North American English) and not BrE. On her last question, it's probably less common in these days of hyperconsumerism to use brown paper bags (I'm sure people are using Tupperware [often used generically in AmE] and designer insulated bags and such), but it's certainly traditional to use paper bags. Originally, this was a way of re-using small shopping bags, but by the time I was a child, one could buy packages of lunch-sized brown paper bags. (I always wanted my mother to buy them and give me a fresh paper bag each day, but my mother was generally more sensible than that.) When I was a child, up until about age 9-10, you wanted to have a lunch box--a new one each year, usually with a cartoon or toy character or pop star or something on it. For me it was (click on the links for added fun!):

• First grade: White and yellow flowers on a olive-green background (this one was vinyl, and purchased before I knew what was 'cool' on the playground; can't find a photo on the web--must not be 'collectible' enough)
• Second grade: Miss America
• Third grade: The Partridge Family

You can tell how important these things were, given that I remember them 35 years later. But just as important was the shift to brown paper bags in the fourth grade. By that time, I recogni{s/z}ed that lunch boxes were 'little kid' stuff, and I needed to have brown paper bags in order to look more grown up, like I didn't have an investment in Barbies or ElectraWoman and DynaGirl (boy, do I wish now that I had that lunchbox. I'll just have to console myself with listening to the theme tune over and over).

Kerstin says that the term brown bag is not used in Australia, but hearing it conjures up something less savo(u)ry than homemade lunch:

To my Australian ears (and those of my Australian colleagues) "Brown-bagging" sounds a very unsavoury term - We don't use the specific phrase for any particular meaning, but it conjures up images of responsible dog owners cleaning up after their pets. Or less revoltingly, but still not particularly pleasantly, an allusion to discrete packaging used to disguise porn, alcoholic beverages, or bribes.

The use of brown bag (noun) or brown-bag (verb) in AmE can also refer to drinking alcohol from a bottle that's wrapped in a paper bag, a way around the general proscription on street drinking in the US (now making its way to the UK).

When I asked Better Half if he was familiar with the term, he said that it would be avoided in England because "brown is a problem"--that is, its association with egestion. But innocent American that I am, I knew the term brown-nose ('chiefly' AmE, according to the OED: a sycophant) for years before I reali{s/z}ed that it had anything to do with bottoms, so I'd never think such a thing of the humble brown paper bag. (Though filling paper bags with [more frequent in BrE] poo/[more frequent in AmE] poop and setting them alight on someone's front step is a classic Halloween prank--though it's never happened on my watch.)

The verb brown-bag is primarily used with a rather empty object, it, as in this newspaper headline Save a buck [AmE slang: 'dollar'], brown-bag it or in the common phrase "I'll be brown-bagging it". The 'it' in the first example does not refer to the buck. It could arguably refer to the lunch, but I think it's the kind of near-meaningless it that one finds in expressions like to wing it. The it there could refer to something, but when we put that something in place of the it, the meaning seems to lose something. I'll be brown-bagging my lunch sounds like it refers to the wrapping of a brown bag around the food for a lunch. But I'll be brown-bagging it sounds like it refers to coming to a lunch event with a meal in a brown bag.

And then there's the venerable academic (etc.) institution, the brown-bag lunch (as in I'm going to a brown-bag lunch, rather than in I brought a brown-bag lunch). This is an uncatered event that occurs over the lunch hour (12-1 in the US), usually a somewhat informal talk by an expert on a subject. In the case of this series of such lunches at the University of Pittsburgh, they are also referred to as Brown Bags.

While I see lots of 'lunchtime concerts' advertised in the UK, it seems rarer (than in the US) to have 'lunchtime talks'. Here, the lunch hour is more jealously guarded to keep work out. (For instance, in the US, I was used to the staff in university offices staggering their lunch hours so that the office would stay open all day. In the UK, the university--except for the catering facilities--basically shuts down between 1 and 2, although we've recently started teaching in the lunch hour--a change brought on by lack of classroom space, more than willingness to give up lunch. Unfortunately for working/studying parents, the university crèche still closes from 1 to 1:55.) But where they do occur, they're more likely to be called lunchtime talks, with instructions as to whether bringing a lunch is necessary/acceptable, rather than fitting all that information into the neat little title Brown Bag. I think there must be a connection here between the rarity of organi{s/z}ed bring-your-own-lunch events and the relative (to the US) infrequency of (AmE) potlucks (or potluck suppers , or [AmE dialectal] covered-dish suppers). I had to've gone to at least one of these a month when I was in graduate school (what with the departmental potlucks, the potlucks organi{s/z}ed by political groups I belonged to, and just friendly potlucks). Have I been to a single one in the UK, even under another title? Just picnics--and then they can be quite comedic. For Grover's half-birthday picnic we asked people to bring a dish to share and noted that I'd be bringing the cakes. Better Half kept suggesting other dishes we could bring--salads, side dishes, main courses, but I kept saying "No, we're bringing the cake". He'd say "what if everyone else brings cake?" And I'd say "they know we're bringing the cake, so they'll bring (chiefly BrE) savo(u)ry stuff." "You over-estimate their attention to the invitation," he warned. Not only did EVERYONE bring cake (or biscuits or cookies or muffins), they all brought at least three different things, not just 'a dish'--and in several cases this was three different kinds of sweet baked good, rather than anything lunch-like. I think I made two mistakes here:

1. misplaced faith in the apparently transparent (but really culturally loaded) 'bring a dish to share' potluck notion (though I didn't use the usual AmE turn of phrase bring a dish to pass--i.e. 'pass around')
2. making the invitation for 2:00, rather than within the national lunch hour of 1-2--so that people were less sure about whether we would be eating lunch together or not.
3. not listening to BH, who is always right, or so he tells me. (You'll notice that I only thought I made two mistakes--you understand that this third is dictation, right?)