Separated by a Common Language

Grover and I went out for a lovely lunch with our friend Maverick the other day, and now I find that her pseudonym creates a linkage problem. Do I link to her blog (as is my usual courtesy to people-I-mention-who-have-blogs) or to our previous discussion of AmE/BrE differences in the use of the word maverick? The solution of course is to make a roundabout way of doing both, as I have in this paragraph, but I'll have to (chiefly AmE) figure out a less verbose way of doing it before she points out something else to blog about...

So, Maverick got some good deal on magazine subscriptions and has started reading Time magazine. Though she receives the European edition, she finds that it doesn't make much allowance for the fact that its readers won't necessarily be speakers of American English. So, she was confused by the following sentence (or one like it--not sure if the on-line edition is exactly the same) in an article about recently shamed New York governor Elliot Spitzer:

Just last year, Spitzer had signed a law that lengthened jail time for johns from three months to as much as a year.

Maverick had assumed that john meant 'pimp', and so she was led astray, as it actually means 'prostitute's client'. Now, I think this means that Maverick doesn't watch Law and Order or CSI or any of the other 'gritty' American murder mysteries that are on (UK) Channel Five all the time. The OED marks this meaning of john (there are many more that I don't want to get into here) as 'orig. U.S.', meaning that it has made inroads into BrE.

Maverick and later Better Half tried to think of a BrE word for a man who pays for sex and came up dry. I've heard (BrE) punter used in this way, and there are thousands of examples of it on the web, including:

Meanwhile, lads' magazines continue their assault on British women with articles that aggressively blur the line between girlfriend/boyfriend and prostitute/punter relationships. -- Katherine Viner in the Guardian

The trio all use a website where "punters" - the men who visit prostitutes - go to discuss their encounters. -- Finlo Rohrer in BBC News magazine

Better Half and Maverick both protested, "But punter really means 'gambler'." Yes, I've heard that before, but it's a tough word to (orig. AmE) get a handle on (especially as a newcomer to these isles) because its meanings slide all over the place. The first sense that the OED (draft revision Sept 2007) has for it, dating back to the 18th century, is 'A person who plays against the bank at baccarat, faro, etc.' It then was generali{s/z}ed (as early as the 19th century) to mean any type of gambler and from there to mean someone who pays for something, and particularly a man who pays for a prostitute's services. As a side note, in AmE punter is one who (AmE) punts (drop-kicks the ball) in (American) football, and in the UK another kind of punter is one who propels a punt (a kind of flat-bottomed boat) down a river. The latter kind of punter is not marked as BrE in dictionaries, but much more punting goes on in the UK than in the US.

Back to john, in the OED, it defines the prostitute-client sense as:

A ponce; the client of a prostitute. slang (orig. U.S.).

Now, ponce is another difficult word. But according to the self-same OED (draft revision Mar 2007), it means 'pimp', not 'client':

derogatory slang (chiefly Brit.).
1. A man who lives on money earned by another person (esp. a woman); a kept man. Also: a person (usually a man) who lives off a prostitute's earnings; a pimp.

But I've only heard it used to mean:

2. depreciative. An effeminate or affected man or boy; (also) a male homosexual.

Searching for ponce + prostitute on Google.co.uk, I can only find evidence of it meaning 'pimp', and not 'john/punter'. So, it looks to me like a bad AmE-to-BrE translation in the OED--they haven't got(ten) to the Js yet in the current revision--but I expect this will be changed!

Postscript (1 April--but not an April Fool's joke!): Here's another example of punter, and how easy it is for a newcomer to misinterpret it. It's from The Guide (The Guardian's entertainment listings section, 29 Mar-4 Apr 2008), in a listing for Lucy Porter's stand-up show:

As she said of one of her younger punters, "I want to rip his clothes off -- but only so I can wash and iron them."

Now, they are not claiming that Porter turns tricks, though I originally thought that it meant someone she'd taken home (since they'd just said that "her specialist subject is relationships"), but Better Half was quick to dispel this impression by explaining to me that the 'younger punter' is a member of her audience.

So, last weekend the hospital released me to continue my treatment as an outpatient, then two days later on my first outpatient visit , they re(-)admitted me. Now I'm released again, but have been told to bring a packed bag to my outpatient visits...so you can expect my posts to continue to be erratic for a while. The good news is that I don't actually feel poorly, so I can blog when I have access to the Internet. The bad news is that I have plenty of time and desire for blogging when in (the) hospital, but no access to the blog. Catch-22.

So, the combination of dealing with a lot of different doctors and watching daytime reruns of ER left me thinking about the differences in doctors' titles/roles in American and British hospitals. I must admit that, despite having watched a lot of medical dramas and having read a lot of medical thrillers and memoirs in my youth (the better to feed my hypochondria), I've never been clear on what exactly an (AmE) attending physician is/does or how a (BrE) senior house officer relates to a (BrE) registrar. So, with a lot of help from Wikipedia, I've been trying to teach myself the ins and outs of these titles.

Let's start before we get to the hospital ward. In the UK, your regular doctor, the one you see in their (AmE) office/(BrE) surgery, is your GP or general practitioner. In AmE, the insurance-driven name for such people is primary care physician, but most people would just call that doctor my doctor or their family doctor (who works in or operates a family practice--a term that is found in both countries, but in my experience is more common in the US). The term general practice is also known in the US, but one doesn't hear people talking about their GPs.

When your GP/primary care physician decides that you require more speciali{s/z}ed attention, they refer you to a specialist--but in BrE they're likely to say that they're referring you to a (specialist) consultant. The experience of such referral can be somewhat different in the two countries. Let's say your usual doctor wants you to see a gastroenterologist. In the US, they say "I'm going to refer you to Dr. Guts." Then you get an appointment with Dr. Guts and meet Dr. Guts at that appointment. In the UK, you are referred to Mr Entrails' clinic (more on the 'Mr' shortly). Maybe you will see Mr Entrails--you're likely to on the first visit, at least--but you might see someone else in his clinic team, or firm (the term that Wikipedia reports--not one I've come across in the patient's seat). The consultant Mr Entrails has overall responsibility for your care, but a variety of more junior doctors might see you. Mr Entrails' clinic will most likely be located on hospital grounds, whereas American Dr. Guts will probably see you in an office complex--often one built specifically for medical offices.

In a hospital context, there are different titles (and responsibilities) for specialist doctors at different levels of training. In the UK, there's apparently been a move to 'moderni{s/z}e' medical career paths in the National Health Service, though I've seen little evidence of the changes reported on this NHS site. It says that a new title, Specialty Registrar [StR], replaces Senior House Officer [SHO] and Specialist Registrar from August 2007. But I was being seen by SHOs and Specialist Registrars at our hospital. So, I don't know if the new title applies only to people who have started since August 2007 or whether it's been abandoned, since when one hits the link for further info on the NHS site, one gets a 'page not found' message. For a comparison of new and old titles, see the table on this Wikipedia page. I'm going to stick with the old titles, since they're the ones I've experienced. [NB: Yes, it's specialty, not (BrE) speciality. This is one of many examples of BrE medical jargon being closer to AmE than to non-jargon BrE.]

So, in the UK, you're a medical student, then once you qualify as a doctor, you go on to be a house officer (Pre-Registration House Officer in the old system, Foundation House Officer in the new). After this, the doctor has a choice of going the GP route (which involves more training, but not all the titles I'm about to reel off) or undergoing specialist training for a minimum of two years as a Senior House Officer, followed by 4-6 years of further training and increased responsibility as a Specialist Registrar. One takes exams to go from one level to the next, with the highest level being Consultant. The amount of time one needs to train for these various positions varies by the specialty, culminating in the Certificate of Completion of Training after exams from the specialist college (e.g. the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists). All of this is overseen by the General Medical Council, which determines the standards for entry onto the specialist registers that allow one to work in hospitals as a consultant.

In the US, you're a medical student, then for your first year in the hospital you are an intern, which may or may not be considered the first year of your residency, during which you are a resident (physician). This can also be called house officer, as in the UK. After residency, one may or may not get a fellowship for sub-specialty training, before going on to be an attending (physician) [or staff physician] the equivalent of a (BrE) consultant.

In the UK, medical training begins at the undergraduate level--which is to say, people can be 'medical students' from their first year (BrE) at university. In the US, medical school is for (AmE) graduate/(BrE) post-graduate students, and the undergraduate students do pre-med degrees, which cover a lot of science, but also, like other US undergraduate degrees, a liberal arts curriculum. (Law training differs in a similar way in the two countries.)

At least, that's how I understand all this. Anyone with better knowledge is welcome (as ever) to correct me in the comments.

Now, a few words on what you call these people. In the US, medical doctors, no matter their specialty or status, are usually called Dr. [Surname]. In the UK, there's a kind of reverse snobbery, in that GPs and more junior specialists are called Dr [Surname], whereas surgeons and other consultants go back to being Mr or Mrs or Miss--though I've only met men in the consultant role so far, so I can't vouch for the actual use of Mrs and Miss. (Note that BrE tends not to put a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period at the end of title abbreviations like Dr, Mr or Mrs, while AmE almost always does.) Here, I'll rely on Wikipedia again:

In the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other areas whose culture was recently linked to the United Kingdom, the title Doctor generally applies to both academic and clinical environment. "Registered medical practitioners" usually do not have a doctorate; rather, they have the degree of Bachelor of Medicine (usually conjoint with Surgery). Cultural conventions exist, clinicians who are Members or Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons are an exception. As an homage to their predecessors, the barber surgeons, they prefer to be addressed as Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss, even if they do hold a doctorate. This is first because they have normally achieved another degree - that of Master of Surgery (MCh from the Latin magister chirurgiae) from a university. When a medically-qualified person passes the notoriously difficult examinations which enable them to become a member of one or more of the Royal Surgical Colleges and become "MRCS", it is customary for them to drop the "doctor" prefix and take up "mister". This rule applies to any doctor of any grade who has passed the appropriate exams, and is not the exclusive province of consultant-level surgeons. In recent times, other surgically-orientated specialists, such as gynaecologists, have also adopted the "mister" prefix. A surgeon who is also a professor is usually known as "Professor", and similarly a surgeon who has been ennobled, knighted, created a baronet, or appointed a dame uses the corresonding title (Lord, Sir, Dame). Physicians, on the other hand, when they pass their "MRCP" examinations, which enable them to become members of the Royal College of Physicians, do not drop the "Doctor" prefix and remain doctor, even when they are consultants. In the United Kingdom the status and rank of consultant surgeons with the MRCS, titled "mister", and consultant physicians with the MRCP, titled "doctor", is identical. Surgeons in the USA and elsewhere may have the title "doctor".

So, there we go. Probably a topic that interests me much more than you, but what are blogs for, if not self-indulgence?

Oh, and by the way, one of the registrars has added to the Canadian count. So, that's 12. The nurses just asked where I was from. Score one for the nurses!

I had a house-guest this week, and since I'm a bit behind in things, I was thinking I'd answer a really simple query. So, heading back to the April correspondence, I found Doug of Colorado writing about boogers in my inbox. I thought, 'oh, I'll do bogy and booger, that'll be quick!' But even as I began to write the title for this post, I reali{s/z}ed that this is going to get out-of-hand very quickly.

So, we start with snot. (Which just reminds me of Chiffon margarine ads from my American childhood: When you think it's butter, but it's not, it's Chiffon! That jingle writer did not have a good ear for potential mondegreens. We eight-year-olds thought it was hilarious.) Bits of fairly dry nasal mucus (you know what I mean) are colloquially called bogies (or bogeys) in BrE and boogers in AmE. The first vowel in the AmE version is generally pronounced like the oo in book. This is also the vowel that is found in the usual AmE pronunciation of the originally-AmE word boogie ('to [disco] dance'), though many BrE speakers pronounce it with a long /u/ sound, so that the first syllable is like the sound that a cartoon ghost would make (Boo!). In fact, the OED has only the boo! pronunciation, while the American Heritage has both, with the book-vowel one listed first. The long /u/ is also used for both oos in the usual BrE pronunciation of (orig. AmE) boogie-woogie, while AmE uses the book vowel for both.

It was only when I looked up bog(e)y in the OED that I discovered that one of the golf senses for bogey, 'a score of one stroke above par for a hole' (OED), is (or possibly was) AmE. The first (BrE) definition in the OED, 'The number of strokes a good player may be reckoned to need for the course or for a hole', seems to me to mean 'par'. I don't know a lot about golf (and I count myself lucky for that), but I only knew the AmE meaning. (American golfers, do you know the more 'par-like' meaning?) For the verb bogey ('to complete (a hole) in one stroke over par'), the OED lists this as 'orig. U.S.' It's a bit hard to believe that the verb has come over here, but not the noun. UK golfers, what's your experience?

(Apparently bogey is also Australian slang for a bath, and bogie is a Northern English--particularly Newcastle--dialectal word for 'A kind of cart with low wheels and long shafts'. But now I'm just getting distracted by the OED.)

And then there's the bogeyman. American Heritage lists four alternative spellings for this: bogeyman, boogeyman, boogyman, boogieman. OED has only bogyman (listed under bog(e)y) plus an example with the e: Bogey man. The capital B in some examples reflects bog(e)y's origin as a 'quasi-proper name' (OED) for the Devil. The AmE variations in spelling reflect the fact that it has many pronunciations in the US (probably regional in nature). In the order the AHD presents them, they are:

1. with the book vowel: bʊg'ē-măn'
2. with the long /o/, as in the golfing term bogey
3. with the long /u/, as in boo! or BrE boogie

Myself, I grew up (in western New York state) with the first pronunciation, and would naturally use the last AmE spelling, but somewhere along the line I became conscious of bogeyman as the 'correct' spelling. That didn't affect my pronunciation of it.

I have a tangentially related (because there's an oo involved) anecdote from this week. Our house-guest was an American linguist who lives in Japan. Predictably, there were BrE/AmE conversations, particularly about water. But the best part (for me, at least) was when she noted that the café called Moorish Brighton wasn't particularly 'Moorish'. I'd claimed before we went there that it was Moroccan, but we found that it had all sorts of Mediterranean foods. It was only when she pronounced the café's name that I reali{s/z}ed it was a pun. I'd been pronouncing the oo with a /u/-ish vowel (which is typical in BrE or AmE) and just not getting the joke. She pronounced it with an /o/-like vowel (which the OED lists as a BrE alternative, oh well). Eureka! Moorish Brighton is (BrE) moreish!

Joe e-mailed to ask:

I understand that in Great Britain the terms lefty and righty refer to people's political leanings and not their handedness as in the U.S. Is this true, and if so how do the British refer to a left-handed or right-handed person, especially in the context of sports (which is where the issue most often arises here)?

That's mostly true, Joe. Better Half, an avid cricket fan, reports that left-handed batsmen (NB: batter, as in baseball, is AmE, though it's gaining frequency in the UK to refer to cricket players--much to many fans' horror) are referred to as left-handed batsmen. One can also in BrE and AmE call such a person a left-hander. (There are much more derogatory/slang terms--see below.) Most AmE speakers wouldn't think of the diminutive lefty as derogative; in fact, they may consider it to be affectionate. While lefty/righty as handedness labels are found in BrE as well as AmE, they are not used so freely in that way.

Originally from AmE in reference to baseball, we get the slang term southpaw, which has been populari{s/z}ed world-wide through boxing. (Northpaw for right-handers is markedly less common.) It's sometimes considered to be a bit derogatory, particularly since it refers to a human by the name of an animal body part. But as derogatory epithets go, it's got nothing on some of those listed for BrE here. (I'm sure there must be a similar list for AmE, but I'm not finding it--might any of you lefties know?)

As BrE political terms, lefty (also leftie) and the less-common righty (or rightie) are not particularly derogatory either--though, like any epithet, they could be used with belittling intent. Better Half asked me how an American would refer to a socialist, if not by lefty. An awful lot of Americans would probably answer pinko, which is rarely used without derogatory intent and is frequently used in phrases like pinko-commie bastard. The fact of the matter is, while it would be unsurprising and not insulting in the UK to refer to some (certainly not all!) members of the current party in power (Labour) as 'good old socialists', there are few localities in America (Vermont comes to mind) where one could publicly use the word good to modify socialist and not start a fight. Most AmE nicknames for political positions are derogatory or extreme. The most neutral terms are probably left-winger and right-winger, but of course these days almost everyone likes to claim to be 'moderate' or 'middle-of-the-road', etc. Twenty years ago, liberal became a word that was considered a label of shame or an accusation for even the "non-conservative" candidates in the US. (That was back in my student-politico days. The Young Republicans --one of whom recently went to prison in the Abramoff scandal [so there!]-- used to do the L-for-Loser sign on their foreheads while chanting "Liberal" at my colleagues and me.) Conservative has not suffered the same fate in the States. Nor should it--it's a useful word, which makes the 'loss' of liberal as a usable political description all the more sad.

We're finally going on our honeymoon, so there will be no posts here for at least 10 days. So, here's something for you to entertain yourselves and each other with...

If you are a (native, not like me!) British citizen (or 'subject', if you prefer), would you call yourself or any one of your fellow citizens a Brit? Do you think of the noun Brit as a term used mostly by foreigners?

I've polled three people today, and these are my results so far:

Better Half says it's not a noun he'd use, but he doesn't find it offensive when foreigners use it about him. So, for him Brit is neutral and foreign. (As opposed to pom and limey, which are foreign and insulting. The former of these is fairly unknown in the US, but well-known in the Antipodes.)

The Syntactician says "I don't use it and wouldn't like to be called one because to me it conjures up ex-pats of the worst kind."

And the friend who puts a B in BOMB (she'll know what that means, at least!) says that it can be neutral or insulting, depending on the context, and 'when abroad' is a time when she'd be likely to use it.

The thing that one notices when writing a blog like this is that the AmE speakers use the term a lot more than the BrE speakers. When referring to themselves individually, of course, BrE speakers are more likely to use a more specific term, relating to their country of origin (England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland--but let's not get into the problem of whether that's British or not--it's in Greater Britain, if not Great Britain!). I suppose BrE speakers are less likely than AmE speakers to want to (or need to) generali{s/z}e about the British.

I have noticed that use of Brit as a noun modifier is more common (Brit wit, Britblogs, etc.). I'm not as interested in that. Nor is it particularly interesting that there are music awards called The Brits. No, what's interesting to me is what we call people and how they feel about it. So, native Britishers, what do you think?

Zhoen thought she knew BrE pretty well, but then...

Just came across a new Br/E expression I'd never heard used before, touting. Which in Am/E is scalping, buying tickets, then selling them right before the event for a very high price.

She included the following contrastive examples in her e-mail:

Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis explains why the photo ID scheme in place for this year's festival could mean the death of the ticket tout. BBC News

Authorities turn up heat on scalpers. boston.com

My first thought on this was that (BrE) ticket touts sometimes have different practices than (AmE) scalpers. Either might buy tickets to an entertainment event and then re-sell them for a higher price, but the English ticket touts that I encounter most often haven't invested in the tickets in the first place. These touts operate in London Underground stations, cadging* Travelcards (day-long tickets) from people who are finished travel(l)ing, in order to re-sell them (or possibly use them themselves). A disembodied voice at Victoria Station instructs travel(l)ers not to give unused tickets to touts because the money is used for illegal activities or drugs (or something like that). One would presume that their business is falling away rapidly, as the Oyster Card (a pay-as-you-go card) is quickly replacing the Travelcard for all but tourists.

So, there I am thinking that ticket tout has a broader meaning/use than scalper, until I read the OED on scalper, which tells us that the original ticket scalpers were:

U.S. slang. One who buys and sells at a profit, but at a price lower than the official one, unused portions of long-distance railway tickets.

So, it's all the same thing, then--although the most recent quotation in the OED for this AmE sense is from 1891. The more recent sense of scalper is not unknown in the UK, but it is an originally AmE word--metaphorically related to the taking of actual scalps.

Thinking about touts/scalpers, led me to think about other street characters, and thus to the BrE word busker, meaning a street musician/performer--the type who puts a hat or violin case out for coins. AmE doesn't seem to have a word for this concept--I think one has to say street musician. How did I ever live without this word and its verb form to busk? My favo(u)rite busker in our old neighbo(u)rhood played the saw (We lived in a very busky place--and no, busky isn't BrE, it's LynneE.) We're actually trying to find him again to hire him for an upcoming event, so if you know a saw player in Brighton, please point him my way! This sense of busk may be related to an earlier sense meaning 'to cruise as a pirate', though the OED doesn't have full confidence in that etymology. But if you see a busker with an eyepatch or a hook for a hand, maybe you can submit that to the OED as etymological evidence.

While we're on the topic of music (wow, look at that pathetic segue!), this has nothing to do with dialects of English, but it does have to do with English, so I hereby note with amusement The Ex's single This Song is in English.

* This is not marked in the American Heritage Dictionary as BrE, but I hear cadge more often in BrE than I ever did in AmE--particularly in phrases like cadge a lift (AmE = beg/get a ride from). Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words has a nice little essay about it.

I haven't got a lot of time tonight to talk about this, but I'm very interested in discussions I've seen regarding Barack Obama's racial identity--particularly because the meanings of social category names is a major (though at the moment suspended) research interest of mine. On the Obama issue see, for example, this article and this one, both from salon.com. The first one claims that Obama is not really black in American terms, since he is not decended from American slaves.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Black History Month (in October, as opposed to February in the US), at least in my English town, is focused on "the history of Asian, African and African Caribbean peoples." Plainly, the use of black varies, at least around the edges, in the two countries. As in AmE, the primary BrE sense of black is 'person of sub-Saharan ancestry',* but AmE's main second sense tends to be restrictive (i.e. 'descendants of American slaves'), while BrE allows more inclusive interpretations.

But that's all I can afford (time-wise) to say at the moment, so I'll leave it at that and will promise more on black after one of my students finishes the research for his BA dissertation (AmE thesis) on the meaning of black in the UK today.


*And no, I'm not counting among 'persons of sub-Saharan ancestry' the Afrikaners or other people whose ancestors (somewhere between Lucy and grandma) are European. And yes, I am aware that most 'black' people in America have some European ancestry (the one-drop rule, and all that). As I said, I need to be brief!

Ta-da! Here are the results of the first annual SbaCL Words of the Year Awards, celebrating the words that demonstrated a lessening of the separation of our common language in 2006. I thank readers of this blog for their nominations. My selections from among those nominations have been based upon the timeliness of the nomination (in other words, if the word enjoyed a particular surge in popularity this year) and the success of the word in the relevant dialect--i.e., whether people are actually using the word.

The first category is Most Useful Import from American English to British English. This is a difficult category because of the regularity with which words travel from AmE to BrE these days. Nominations included Size 00, through when used to describe an inclusive range (e.g. the numbers 1 through 5), and cookie. Only the first of these meets the timeliness criterion, but I think it must be disqualified on two counts. First, its lack of nativi{s/z}ation in BrE is evident from the fact that no one seems to be able to agree how to pronounce it. Second, it remains a name for an American thing. American size 00 is equivalent to British size 2. The term size 00 was in the news a lot, but it is regularly noted as an American phenomenon.

So, the winner of best AmE import to BrE is...

Ben Zimmer of The Language Log forwarded the following to me some time ago. It originally appeared in the Financial Times (UK), but was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times:

George Bernard Shaw suggested mischievously that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language."

Here is a book title — if not a book — that proves it: "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win."

To Americans, imbued with the frontier spirit, a maverick is an admirable person, independent in thought and action.
But the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition: "a masterless person; one who is roving and casual." A former British Cabinet minister recently was described as a "maverick voice." This was not meant as a compliment.

The mavericks described in "Mavericks at Work" are to be emulated, not disparaged. (Stefan Stern, 'That office "weirdo" might be a maverick", 29 Oct 2006)

At first this didn't sit entirely right with me because of a party I threw--which I'll come back to shortly. But I was reminded of it today when the new New Scientist (9 Dec 2006) arrived with the cover screaming: MAVERICKS: POWER OF THE LONE VOICE. NS is a UK-based magazine, but it has an international readership and is usually edited with consciousness of its varied audience. I was therefore curious to see if the word maverick had positive or negative connotations in the special section dedicated to 'lone voices', like the creationist geologist and the doctor who fed himself bacteria to prove it causes stomach ulcers. The fact of the section itself hints at the possibility that the editors intend to counter the usual assumption that being a maverick is a bad thing. But for the most part, the word is used positively:

Such mavericks are crucial to progress, but are they a dying breed? (Editorial, p. 5)

In other places, it's used as an adjective:

If science were a matter of combining unambiguous data from perfectly conducted experiments with flawless theories, assessing the claims of "outsider" scientists and their maverick ideas would not be that hard. (Harry Collins, 'How we know what we know', p. 46)

Neither of these seems to indicate that the BrE sense of maverick is necessarily "masterless". Indeed the OED lists the sense 'An unorthodox or independent-minded person; a person who refuses to conform to the views of a particular group or party; an individualist' and does not mark this as AmE. So, is the Financial Times writer misrepresenting the BrE situation? Not entirely. One can find plenty of examples, like the one the article cites, of maverick being used with negative connotations in BrE sources:

I suppose that in the years when we were trying to persuade people that Berlioz was a great composer, and not just a maverick or an oddity --David Cairns on Hector Berlioz website

Scientists in Britain tend to exclude controversial "maverick" colleagues from their community to ensure they do not gain scientific legitimacy, new research has shown. --Cardiff University news release

While there are probably similar AmE examples out there, they're harder to come by. (For the ones I've found, a bit of deeper digging often reveals that the writer is not a native AmE speaker.) Part of the reason for this, says my armchair ethno-psychology, is the usual British aversion to self-promotion. (I know plenty of self-promoting Brits, but many more who find the notion extremely unseemly.) In order to be a maverick, one needs not only to be a non-conformist, but also to carry oneself as if one's own ideas are superior to the other ideas on offer. In other words, a maverick has a bit more hubris than a mere eccentric has, and hubris is socially unacceptable.

But getting back to the party I threw... It was a (BrE) fancy dress / (AmE) costume party with a "Metaphorty" theme: everyone had to come as a metaphorical thing they'd been accused of being. I'll come back to this--perhaps in the next post--to talk about some of the metaphors that didn't translate among the BrE- and AmE-speaking guests. The point for the now is that one friend came as a maverick--dressed as Brett Maverick. (I wasn't sure that actually counted as a metaphor, but it was a party, so who cares?) She, an Englishwoman, definitely saw being a maverick as a positive thing.

An Australian man living in the UK said to me recently: "Isn't it so weird how they use Asian?"

The "they", of course, are the British. My own discovery of the difference was linked to several occasions in which I said I was in the mood for Asian food and then found myself steered toward(s) a curry house. In BrE, when Asian is used to refer to a person, culture or cuisine, it is most usually referring to someone or something South Asian (i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka). In the US and, it turns out, Australia, Asian typically refers to people/things from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.).

This, of course, raises the question of what BrE speakers call people from East Asia and what AmE speakers call people from South Asia. For East Asian people in Britain, most people attempt to specify a nationality--Chinese, Japanese and so forth. This can involve some guessing. I have also heard the word Oriental as a noun or adjective referring to people more often in this country than I have in the US (mostly from over-60s), leading me to wonder if (a) it's perceived as less politically incorrect here than in the States, (b) I just hang out with more older, white people in the UK (who might not have caught up with the fact that Oriental is not preferred) than I do in the US (though I don't think that's true, if we take my parents' friends into account), or (c) [white] British people are just desperate for a collective term for East Asian peoples and so give in and use this one.

In AmE, people from South Asia are usually labelled by nationality, which probably results in the mistaken assignment of Indian to some Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. In AmE, one often hears He's Indian--from India or some other clarification to make clear that the 'he' in question is not Native American. In the UK, one does hear Red Indian to refer to Native Americans (again, mostly from older people), and it never ceases to shock me when I hear it.

Not surprisingly, not everyone who's called Asian likes it. See this Guardian (AmE) editorial/(BrE)leader* for some discussion and history of the term in the UK.
*Note that leader or leading article is one of those words that was invented in the US, but went on to become more common in the UK.

And now, under the 'Any Other Business' heading of tonight's agenda:

• As I'm taking on some new responsibilities at work, expect my posts to become a little less frequent. I may get to two a week, but certainly not the three I've been doing. (That's all for this week, folks.)
• I've been interviewed on the site Expat Interviews. I tell you this to advertise them, not me!

Today I used the AmE expression (treated like) a red-headed stepchild, meaning someone or something that isn't treated on a par with others in their group--through no fault of their own. The person I said it to could figure out what it meant, although he hadn't known it before. But the result is that it got me thinking about redheads.

In these parts, red hair, or more particularly light red hair, is called ginger. This isn't unknown in America, but it's not at all as common as it is in the UK, home of Ginger Spice. It can also refer to reddish-colo(u)red fur on an animal, especially a cat. Referring to people or animals, it can be used in various ways:

as an adjective, referring to the colo(u)r:

Her hair is ginger

as an adjective meaning 'having red hair/fur':

He is ginger

or as a noun, meaning 'a person/animal with red hair':

That Chris Evans is a ginger – nuff said! --BKAW

As you can probably tell from the last example, calling someone a ginger is not the most polite way to describe a person's hair colo(u)r. This follows from the general principle that refering to people using adjectives-turned-into-nouns is a bit rude as it reduces them to a single property. Compare, for example He is gay and He is a gay.

It's my impression that it's tougher to be a redhead, especially a redheaded man, in the UK than in the US (armies of women who henna over their gr{a/e}y notwithstanding). The first Chris Evans quote is indicative, but here's another, followed by a charmingly clueless query from a non-British commenter on a Dr Who forum:

3twelve: ... Chris Evans is a ginger tosser - whose only real fame was due to the Big Breakfast - a uk tv show that he was one of the first presenters on.

wpbinder: What the heck is a ginger tosser?I'm having great fun imagining wpbinder imagining that the worst thing in BrE is to accuse someone of throwing Asian root-based spices around. But no, 3twelve is accusing Evans of being a red-headed onanist. Now, it's one thing to call Evans a tosser (AmE equivalent might be prick--Americans don't use onanistic insults quite as much, and jerk isn't strong enough), but no one seems to call him one without making reference to his hair colo(u)r. Then again, it's hard to think of Americans to compare him to. Ron Howard is more likely to be mocked for not having any hair these days, and Carrot Top, well, mocks himself. Danny Bonaduce, anyone?

You could throw red-headed stepchild back at me as proof that Americans are tough on redheads but (a) it's a pretty old-fashioned-sounding saying that refers to an old-fashioned attitude, and (b) there have been recent reports (on the American Dialect Society e-mail list) of people saying left-handed stepchild instead--presumably because it's easier to understand lefties as more neglected than redheads.

Redheaded people (or those who are attracted to them) are also called ginger-nuts in BrE. A ginger-nut is a hard ginger biscuit. Strangely, these have no nuts. They are fairly comparable to American ginger snaps (I've not seen a British ginger snap, so I can't say what those are like, though the OED seems to feel that they're different from ginger-nuts). Ginger snap can be used in AmE to refer to (as the OED puts it): "a hot-tempered person, esp. one with carroty hair". Now, that has me imagining a screeching baby in a highchair with vegetable puree everywhere. Perhaps I'm just too literal-minded.

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):

America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.

This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:

There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?

By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:

From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.

Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

• I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.


• Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.


• I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)

*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.