Different
pronunciations and new-to-you vocabulary can be charming. "I just love your accent!" people say, or "I love how the English/Americans say [insert word here--but not
wanker, please]." Dialect wannabes pick up on these things and incorporate them into the linguistic identity that they try to project. But different meanings are another matter--they sneak up on you. Different meanings can get you into trouble.
Tiger Woods discovered
this when he called himself a
spaz on live UK radio/television after playing badly at the Masters last April. (See
Language Log's discussion from back then.) To an American ear, that's a word for a (AmE)
klutz. To a British ear, it's one of the
most taboo insults, on a par with
retard as one of the worst playground taunts. The difference is that BrE speakers see the connection between
spaz and a specific disability, cerebral palsy. When I first moved here and donated to the charity
SCOPE, its literature still said 'formerly
the Spastic Society'. The name was changed in 1994, and you can read about it
here. Until that point, I had never heard
spastic as a synonym for 'having cerebral palsy' or 'person with cerebral palsy'--which is not to say that they were never used in the US in that way, but that it wasn't a use of the word that people of my generation were likely to come across. I had heard it as a description of some of the symptoms of CP (e.g.
spastic muscles), so when I saw the title
The Spastic Society, I could guess what the society was about. Still, it immediately struck me as a fairly crude and insensitive description of a disability, even though I still wasn't associating
spaz with the disability. But like Tiger Woods, I heard horrified, sharp intakes of breath when I first unwittingly used it in the UK to describe my own behavio(u)r.
As
Liz Ditz points out,
learning disabled is another disability-related term that could cause transatlantic offen{c/s}e. It's a term that I used often as a (AmE) professor* at an American university, since it's the term that's used to collectively refer to things like dyslexia, dyspraxia, and attentional deficits. In other words, it's used for people with normal IQs who have specific problems with some aspect of learning. But in the UK,
learning disability is equivalent to what is now in the US called
developmental disability--and what has been called
mental retardation (though this is found by many--especially in the UK--to be offensive now). Dyslexia and other normal-IQ conditions come under the umbrella of
specific learning difficulty. The thing that keeps me confused about not calling dyslexia a
learning disability is that it's covered by the UK
Disability Discrimination Act. So, it's a disability that's not a
disability. When trying to speak about such things at teaching-related meetings, I remember not to say
learning disability, but can rarely remember
difficulty, so I usually end up saying useless things like
we need to keep in mind the students with learning....issues. (Doesn't every student have a learning issue?)
Another big term in British schooling is
special educational needs, or
SEN, which is the blanket term for any learning or behavio(u)ral problem that requires special consideration at school, and is used in contexts like
SEN classrooms. One also hears/sees
special needs education. I asked one of my bestest friends, the
Ginger Nut about this. GN has been studying for a teaching certificate in the US while (working full-time and) raising a child who has an autistic spectrum disorder--so she's much more in touch with the terminology in American schools than I am. She confirms that
SEN isn't the term of choice in AmE, but that "We might say,
Special needs, and the official phrase that I think is comparable is
Special education and related services - that's the phrasing in IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)." Incidentally, I was recently told by a UK teacher that one has to avoid referring to anything as
special in the classroom these days because of the association with learning/developmental disabilities. It may be the same in the US, where I first (about 12 years ago) heard the taunt
You're so special, you should be in special education (or,
the Special Olympics).
To see fuller lists of terminology (and perhaps do your own comparison), you can find a glossary of BrE terminology at
the Department for Education and of AmE terminology at the
UCLA/Wallis Foundation website. A term from the latter that GN had mentioned was
emotional disturbance (
ED), whereas the BrE equivalent seems to be
EBD:
emotional and behavioural difficulties. We tend not to get these terms at the university level, and instead talk about such problems (including depression and schizophrenia) as
mental health problems or
mental illness.
*Yes, there are professors at BrE institutions too, but most British universities the term only applies to the equivalent of AmE
full professor, and I wasn't one of those. Hence, the '(AmE)' marking. Someday I'll do an entry on
that.
(And I now have.)
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