Separated by a Common Language

Grover and I like to play a bit of (BrE) cod-Pictionary, using the cards from a UK edition of Cranium. She's 8 now, and I've been pretty impressed by her ability to communicate in pictures. So recently we were playing and she drew these two things (here kindly re-drawn for your benefit, as I misplaced the original).

A children's amusement in which the number of puffs needed to blow the filamentous achenes from a dandelion is supposed to tell the time.

 (Bet you weren't planning to read the phrase filamentous achenes today.)

Grover and her dad and the makers of Cranium all knew the expression, but this was the first I'd met it (though I now see it's also the name of a wallpaper that I see often). But though I knew exactly the thing that dandelion clock refers to, I had no expression for it.

Since we're in Untranslatable October, this was exciting, but then I asked my US friends whether they had a word for dandelion clock and some did--either dandelion puff or dandelion puffball. As many American friends had no word for the thing. I'd probably say white dandelion head or dandelion that's gone to seed or something like that. There didn't seem to be a regional pattern to having a name for it or not--some who had a name grew up in the same town as me and still live nearby.

The words don't seem to be all that common--probably the kind of thing that stays on the playground. There are 4 BrE dandelion clock(s) on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The only dandelion puff was in the British section, but written by a North American in a comments section of a blog. (Why you can't always trust nationalities on GloWBE.) In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, there are 9 dandelion puff(s) and 2 dandelion puff(-)ball. There are also two dandelion clock(s) in COCA--one by a British author (AS Byatt) and one with someone using it as if it means the individual seeds, rather than the head.

So I got to learn three new words (for I do consider compounds to be words even if they've got a space within them) from two countries for one thing. Not bad for a day's pictionary.

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Forgot to mention last time: I'm on the Talk the Talk podcast, chatting with the hosts about the language of the 2nd US presidential debate (after Dan Everett talking about Universal Grammar). The Quartz piece I did on Trump's the continues to get a lot of attention, including from Vox.

Thursday's British referendum on EU membership (let's not talk about the result) has given American readers cause to wonder about the hokey-cokey (thanks for pointing this out, Emma). Americans know the song-dance as the hokey-pokey. On referendum day, it was a hashtag on Twitter, with gems like these:

We had one referendum on "in" or "out". If there's another it should be focused on the question whether to "shake it all about" #hokeycokey

— Peter Coles (@telescoper) 27 June 2016

Disappointed there wasn't an option to "shake it all about" :( #iVoted #hokeycokey

— Chris Dutton (@ThatDuttGuy) 23 June 2016

I've just come out from under several painful deadlines and am ready to do some blogging. And the note that I've written to myself is: crosswords. This is why the other deadlines were painful. I could have been writing about crossword puzzles, but I had other stuff to do. Oh, the misery. I had written this note on 11 January, the day that one of the most famous British crossword compilers announced, via his puzzle, that he had terminal cancer.

But more to the point: crossword (puzzle). This word/expression can refer to the same thing in BrE and AmE, but it usually doesn't.

In the UK, the bare term crossword most usually refers to cryptic crossword puzzles. These exist in the US, but not as much as in the UK, where each of the (mainly BrE) broadsheet newspapers has a daily cryptic crossword. Now, these were not the original type of crossword puzzles, and everyone here knows they are cryptic crosswords, but if we look at the adjectives that come before crossword in the British National Corpus, cryptic crossword only occurs once in 100 million words. The most frequent adjective before crossword in the BNC is quick, which names the other kind of crossword that's found in the UK. The reason why quick crossword occurs more than cryptic crossword is not because people write about cryptic crosswords less. It's because when they do write about them, they tend to just say crossword.  (Take for example, the Guardian's Crossword Blog, cited again below, which pretty much only discusses the cryptic sort.)


In the US, the word crossword tends to refer to a different animal than is seen in the UK. If one were to talk about those ones in the UK, they'd have to be called American-style crosswords or something like that. If a puzzle is a cryptic one, Americans will call it a cryptic crossword or sometimes a British-style crossword puzzle. Among those in the know, though, British-style crossword refers to a grid style, as opposed to American-style grids. This picture comes from an eHow page on how to make crossword grids. The one on the left, with less white space is British-style. The one on the right is American-style.



Both cryptic crosswords and quick crosswords in the UK are in the British-style grid. (In the US, you might see British-style grids in school exercises, but not usually in newspapers.) The British-style grid means that you pretty much need to be able to determine the answer for every clue. If you don't know the answer for one of the across items in the leftmost puzzle above, knowing all the other answers will get you just a small proportion of the letters in the one you don't know. If all you've figured out is that they want a five-letter musical instrument whose second letter is I, you won't know until the answer is published whether it's a PIANO or a VIOLA (or some other instrument I haven't thought of).

In the American-style one, you can get the answer in a roundabout way. Since each of the letters of the five-letter musical instrument intersects with another word, you can build the word one letter at a time from other clues. But because of this, American clues are much more ambiguous than British ones. For instance, the clues in British crosswords of both types tell you how many letters are in the answer, and how the string breaks down into words. American ones don't give you that information, though the easiest ones might tell you that the answer has multiple words. American clues are sometimes jokey (more so than UK Quick ones) and the puzzle itself often has a running theme (so can the other types, but this is a [mostly AmE in this figurative sense] calling card of American puzzles). Because there are so many short words in an American-style puzzle (and they need to line up nicely), any American puzzle-solver has a good vocabulary of three-letter combinations that somehow mean something—including compass points and acronyms.

A quick tour of clues—which won't do any of the puzzles justice:

Cryptic (The Independent Cryptic Crossword 7768 by ANAX as discussed in the Guardian Crossword blog):

26ac What can you get for 20p? Oddly, silver key (4)

The answer is ISLE (as in the Florida Keys); the first bit of the wordplay is a plug for the Independent's sister paper i, which belatedly started including a cryptic crossword - one that's as good as any broadsheet's and which we'll look at here in more detail before long.

The Guardian blogger saw fit to explain the I, but have you got the SLE? Oddly is the clue to tell you to look for—the odd-numbered letters in the following word, silver.  (The key is there to make it rhyme. is the definition, of course—see Owen's comment correcting my original mistake! But it's still true that UK cryptics are more likely to allow extraneous words: See  Wikipedia tells me that this kind of thing is more allowable in British cryptic crosswords than in North American ones. Click on the link to see for more UK/North American differences.)  A guide to types of cryptic clues can be found here.)

UK Quick (from Guardian quick crossword 13353):

16 Be transferred by contact or association (3,3)  (RUB OFF)

American-style (New York Times, via Rex Parker's blog):

42D: What the Beatles never did  (REUNITE)

44A: 1970 hit by Sugarloaf (GREEN-EYED LADY)

The last of these was part of a theme (left for the solver to discover) of songs with eye colo(u)rs in their titles.


I love to do the New York Times crossword whenever I get the chance (which isn't much, because when I visit the US all the crossword puzzles in the newspaper are spoken for, and you do NOT do someone ELSE's crossword puzzle. Not if you know what's good for you).*

But I am a fan of the British cryptics—by which I mean that I admire them and like to read about them, but I don't do them myself. (Whenever I convince myself I've got the patience for the clues, I become undone by the inclusion of bits of British cultural knowledge that I don't have—such as anything to do with cricket.) I'm not sure if anyone else sees crossword puzzles as a spectator sport, but it's a good one. And so when Araucaria's cancer puzzle came to light, I was saddened and appreciative [that he wanted to communicate with his fans in this way] as a long-time spectator-fan. As far as I can tell (there's not a lot of data in the corpora), the term crossword compiler is used in both US and UK, but perhaps more in the US, since in the UK crossword setter seems more common. (Recall our discussion of exam-setting too.)

Finally if, like me, you're an crossword-spectating expatriate in the UK with South African connections, I recommend Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose [8], South-African-expat-in-UK Sandy Balfour's memoir of falling in love over puzzles.  You might even like it if you're just some of those things.


*Yes, yes, I could download an app or something. But have I mentioned that I have a job with DEADLINES?! In my life crossword puzzles are for (BrE) holidays/(AmE) vacations or hospital stays. And now that my holidays/vacations involve a child, they're not really for those either.

P.S. (the next day): @MagdalenB sent me this on Twitter. A British crossword setter explains the differences between British and American crosswords (after 2 long minutes of introduction, which can be skipped). I'm right about the cricket!!

Fellow American-academic-in-UK @PurlHussy suggested a Twitter Difference of the Day for me, and I thought: why tweet when I could blog AND tweet? (Um/Erm, because I should be marking/grading essays? Hey, blogging it is!!)

The difference is in how we more informally say 'it is your (or her or his or my) responsibility'. It may seem strange, but BrE and AmE look like they're complete opposites on this one. In BrE, one can say It's down to you to mean 'it's your responsibility to do that', whereas AmE would say it's up to you.

One does see it's up to you in BrE to mean 'it's your responsibility', or more specifically (as in AmE) 'it's your choice'. It's common enough in BrE that the OED marks it as just 'originally' AmE. There are two examples of It's up to you in the British National Corpus (accessed through corpus.byu.edu), both with this 'choice' sense:

I've done it and er I mean it's up to you as to which date you choose. [spoken in a meeting]

"Well, it's up to you of course, Mr Dakin, but this is the third time I've had to stitch her teats and I'm afraid it's going to keep on happening." [from James Herriot's Vets might fly]

 But all the ones that are straight responsibility meanings are it's down to you in the BNC (10 hits):

But if they get arrested it's down to you. [conversation]

Unless you're a tenant, it's down to you to make sure gas appliances receive the regular expert servicing they need. [advert]

Between now and Sunday it's down to you to decide that you definitely want to go ahead [speech]

(Of course there may also be examples of it'll be down to you or whether you do it is down to you or it's down to her or it's down to Nigel, etc. Searching for a single set phrase made it easier to avoid senses of down to that have nothing to do with responsibility.)

Meanwhile, in AmE, the Corpus of Contemporary American English has 398 hits for it's up to you and only one for it's down to you--and in that (fictional) context it might have just meant 'you're the only one left' (hard to tell--the responsibility meaning or the 'only you' meaning would both fit in the context).

So, up and down. Why are two opposite words used to mean the same thing? Because figurative language is slippery stuff, that's why. The OED tells us that up to [someone] is from the game of poker (traced to 1896), and is in general use from 1913. In the poker context it means basically 'it's your turn to make a decision and act on it'. So, it's sort of 'we've got(ten) up to you in the series of people who need to act in this game'. (One could have seen it going the other way, with one going 'down' the list of people whose turn it would be next. But poker is a game of escalation, so it doesn't seem surprising to me that the turn-taking metaphor goes upward.)

The BrE down to [someone] is only traced back to 1970 in the OED.  One can see how this might come about from the 'there's no one else left' reading of down to (as in we're down to one candle). It's down to you says that, for the purpose of its context, the people who could have responsibility for something are reduced to one: you.

From my non-native perspective, it seems to me that up to and down to have different connotations in BrE--up to being choice and down to being serious responsibility.  AmE doesn't make any such distinction and has up to for both.

It's down/up to you to tell us what you think.

I have the lurgi. Better Half has the lurgi. Grover is recovering from the lurgi.

Lurgi, the lurgi or the dreaded lurgi (also sometimes spelt lurgy) rhymes with Fergie and is a lovely informal BrE word with comedic (and possibly dialectal) origins that can now refer to an annoying (but not serious) illness that hangs around and makes one feel miserable. World Wide Words does a lovely job of recounting its history. Wiktionary has more on its meanings. In addition to meaning 'flu-like symptoms' it has a playground use that is somewhat equivalent to AmE cooties, which you can learn more about here or in the following video:


But that's all from me now, 'cause I've got the lurgi.

Cathy wrote the other day to ask:

I've been watching "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard" on Masterpiece Theatre in the US. [...] I noticed an interesting phrase Mrs. Pritchard used, "Chinese whispers." I thought at first she meant what Americans mean when we say children are playing telephone or whisper down the lane. Then I thought, in the context it was used in, that it wouldn't be appropriate to suggest the person was playing a child's game. Mrs. Pritchard's right hand man (I can't remember his title) has passed on a bit of gossip that was passed on through several people. Any thoughts?

Coincidentally, the night before, Better Half and I had been watching the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David (surprise, surprise) makes a faux pas in playing telephone at a party, and BH asked, 'That's Chinese whispers, right?' Chinese whispers and the telephone game are indeed names for the same game in BrE and AmE, respectively. (And this came up once before in the comments for a previous post.)

What has thrown Cathy off is the fact that Chinese whispers is much more likely to be used in an extended or metaphorical way than this sense of telephone is. This is probably not too surprising, since telephone has other senses that would make the metaphor less clear. The OED lists Russian scandal as having the same two senses as Chinese whispers (though I've only ever heard the latter):

(a) a game in which a whispered message, after being passed from player to player, is contrasted in its original and final versions; (b) gossip inaccurately transmitted

People disagree about whether Chinese whispers should be avoided due to racist connotations. It makes me a little uncomfy, but then I don't find myself needing to say it very often, so I don't worry about it too much. It also reminds me of an AmE term (at least I've not found a BrE speaker who knows it yet---but I haven't asked that many) for another silly pastime with an ethnically (BrE) dodgy name: the Chinese fire drill. Wikipedia describes it as:

A Chinese fire drill is a prank, or perhaps an expression of high spirits, that was popular in the United States during the 1960s. It is performed when a car is stopped at a red traffic light, at which point all of the car's occupants get out, run around the car, and return to their own (or go to other) seats. Chinese fire drills are sometimes executed when one needs to get something from the trunk of a car. Occasionally, if one of the participants is late to get inside the car, the others might drive off without him/her. People have reported this phenomenon as early as the 1940s, so it is possible that the phrase was current at the time, but simply was not written down that early.

The term is also used as a figure of speech to mean any large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise.

When I was a child (a bit later than the dates in the Wikipedia article), the driver never got involved--because the driver was Mom or Dad. But we'd try our luck and yell "Chinese fire drill!" and judge how much trouble we were going to get into for trying to do it before opening the car doors. It always sounded like a marvelous idea to my young mind, but I don't know that we ever executed a true Chinese fire drill.

So far, Bonfire Night has only come up in the comments on another post on this blog. But thinking about it (for it is tonight) has me thinking about all sorts of differences in my experience of autumn (or, more often in AmE, fall) in the US and UK. Forgive me, but this post will be lighter on linguistic gore than most, and heavier on nostalgia and maybe even a touch of homesickness (not something I think of myself as suffering from!).

Autumn/fall was always my favo(u)rite season in the US, but in the UK, I tend to face it with a certain "Oh god, it's going to get dark early" kind of dread. It doesn't help that the UK goes off British Summer Time a week earlier than the US goes off Daylight Savings Time, but the greater problem is that this time of year there is less light up here at +50° latitude than there was at +43°, where I grew up, or +31° or -26°, the last two places I lived. By the time we get to mid-December, when it's invariably overcast in Brighton, it seems to me like the day never gets all the way to proper daytime light levels. Today there are 37 fewer minutes of light in Brighton than in my hometown, and by winter solstice, that difference will be more than an hour--or two hours if I compare it to my last abode.

But it's not just the dark that does me in, it's the relative lack of distractions from the dark. American autumns/falls, especially in the northeast where I'm from, are chock-full of them. Of course, there are the back-to-school rituals (found in the UK too), and Lynneukah, the joyous festival of Lynne (at the start of October--it's not too early to start planning for next year). But after those, we get into the serious autumn rituals.

Watching the changing colo(u)rs of leaves is a big one--so much so that in New England there's a word for tourists/leisurely drivers who arrive in hordes to look at the trees: leaf-peepers. Here's a nice photo of what they go looking for. Where I come from, foliage observation is tied up with other rituals, like going to apple orchards for fresh cider (which in AmE is a rusty-colo(u)red, pressed apple juice, not a fermented drink), hayrides (AmE: 'a pleasure ride in a hay-wagon', OED), bonfires--and, my favo(u)rite, apple cider doughnuts. Bonfires and hayrides are often part of other autumn/fall rituals, such as Homecoming (for which, see Janna's comment describing Homecoming in the previous post on proms).

Then there's Halloween, which has roots going back to Scotland and Ireland (particularly the Scottish tradition of guising), but whose modern form is a recent import from the US to the UK--and a poorly understood import, I'd say. Boy, do people complain about it here. There's a common perception of trick-or-treating as "as a nuisance or even a menacing form of begging" (Wikipedia). After reading this anti-Halloween diatribe on the BBC website, I was relieved to read one British expat in Canada's take on it in the comments:

I moved to Canada from Britain in the mid 90s, and at first, treated trick-or-treating with a healthy suspicion. However, I soon realized, that in my neck of the woods at least, Halloween is more about fun than menace; it's about the treat rather than the trick. In our neighbourhood, it's mainly young kids who come trick-or-treating with their parents. We also get a few older teens who come by, almost self-deprecatingly, and we always compliment them on their costumes, or berate them gently for their lack of effort, but fill their bags nonetheless. No menaces, no threats. I was back in England last Hallowe'en and was surprised to see and hear the healthy antagonism there was against trick or treaters. Friends and family all had signs in their windows, weren't planning to answer the door, couldn't understand why my seven year-old wanted to dress up and go out after dark with a bag looking for treats. I think in England, what has happened is that the message has been lost in translation, and over the years the idea of treat has [been?] supplanted [by?] that of trick. Maybe you should all come over here and go trick-or-treating with my little ones tonight - then you'd have a better understanding of how it *should* work!
Anne, Vancouver, Canada

In other words, in North America, Halloween tends to be a child-cent(e)red event that brings people in a neighbo(u)rhood together in celebration of their children. A couple of differences I've noticed in trick-or-treating here (besides the fact that there's just a lot less of it) are (a) a lot of people give coins instead of (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweets, and (b) adults seem more 'purist' about costumes. I've heard a couple of people complain that a child was dressed as a fairy or a superhero, implying that that is not a Halloween costume. But by the time that the traditions were being (re)imported from the US, few people in the US saw anything wrong with dressing as whatever you liked. Thinking back on my Halloween costumes, I'd been a fortuneteller, a magnet, and a bride--never anything particularly scary. So, (a) contributes to people seeing the holiday as extortionate and (b) contributes to a more sinister (it's all about evil!) view of it than is typically held in the US.

After Halloween, American attention turns to Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November). While there is the position that this holiday is politically/racially insensitive (since it celebrates the saving of European immigrants' asses/arses by Native Americans, many of whom were subsequently subject to genocide), it has a lot going for it too. Bill Bryson writes about it as 'The Best American Holiday' in I'm a Stranger Here Myself:

Thanksgiving is wonderful for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, it has the commendable effect of staving off Christmas. Whereas in in Britain the Christmas shopping season seems nowadays to kick off around about the August bank holiday, Christmas mania doesn't traditionally begin in America until the last weekend in November.

Indeed, the Christmas decorations have been up (not lit, but still...) in Brighton for several weeks now. There have been Christmas cards, Christmas decorations, and most weirdly Christmas food in the shops since September. You get a little of that in the US, but the onslaught is staved off by the retailers' need to keep part of their shelf space free for Halloween and Thanksgiving (BrE) tat (=junk). The reputed busiest shopping day of the American year (at least in terms of traffic, if not sales) is the day after Thanksgiving, known in the retailing world as Black Friday. Thanksgiving gives us a clear sense of when the (commercial) Christmas season begins--at a time that isn't too far away from when Advent begins.

Bryson continues:

Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialization. It involves no greeting cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. I love the fact that at Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball and then go and watch a game of football on TV. This is my kind of holiday.

But perhaps the nicest, certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you a formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can't believe that it hasn't been picked up by more countries.

(Though we should note that many churches have a Thanksgiving Sunday--but that's not typically an occasion when families travel to be together and do all of the other things that go along with American Thanksgiving.)

So those, plus a few things here and there like Veteran's Day (= UK Remembrance Day), the World Series in baseball and the (American) football season (and its many accout{er/re}ments, like tailgating) are some of the rituals that mark autumn/fall in (particularly north-eastern) America and distract us from the fact that the sun is going bye-bye and it's getting cold. We can still think of the weather as being crisp while we're enjoying ourselves with apple cider doughnuts and jumping in piles of leaves.

What do we have in the UK? One childhood autumn tradition is the playing of conkers. This is a game involving horse chestnuts on strings, where you try to knock each other's chestnuts, or conkers. (For a better explanation, click on the link.) More boys seem to play this than girls, and it can involve a lot of forethought, with dedicated players searching long and hard for the best conkers and then making them harder by, for instance soaking them in vinegar and baking them. This tradition may be dying out, with rumo(u)rs of schools banning the game for health and safety reasons. (I had to make that bold, since Health and Safety is such a BrE phrase/obsession. I suppose the AmE equivalent would be liability.)

Besides the half-hearted observance of Halloween, the main autumn ritual in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. (Remember, remember the fifth of November.) This marks the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of Catholics to blow up Parliament in 1605. Depending on where/who you are in the UK, this may be a bigger or smaller event. In nearby Lewes, it's huge--due to Lewes' history as a site of Protestant martyrdom. Here's a photo of a Lewes Bonfire Night from chrisgray.net--one that is bound to be a bit disturbing to Americans, since it looks like a Ku Klux Klan rally. In fact, Bonfire Night is not known for its political, religious or racial sensitivity. I have practi{c/s}ing Catholic friends who have been offended that I've gone and enjoyed the Lewes festivities since they involve the burning of effigies (Guy Fawkes, traditionally, but they'll burn anyone in Lewes) and throwing bangers (little fireworks) at someone dressed as the/a Pope--albeit nowadays a pope in fireproof clothing and safety goggles. (It's never clear to me whether it's supposed to be the current Pope or the one from 1605.) It also involves a parade that I've described before as something like "Mardi Gras with fire". Lewes has a number of bonfire societies, which can be likened to the krewes of New Orleans Mardi Gras, and each parades around town in themed costumes (not that the themes have to have anything to do with the Gunpowder Plot--some perennial favo(u)rites are stereotyped Native American dress, African 'tribespeople' and smugglers). After parading around town a few times, they lead crowds to their bonfire site, where there is a huge bonfire and the burning of their effigy. The effigy is usually filled with fireworks, and the fireworks shows that follow are always incredible. (So are the crowds.)

Of course, not everywhere is near Lewes or other big Bonfire Night towns, and so most people will celebrate Bonfire night on a smaller scale (if at all), either by going to municipal fireworks or by buying/lighting one's own in the back (BrE) garden/(AmE) yard. (Our window wells were full of spent fireworks Saturday night. Coming from a place where mere citizens are not allowed to have fireworks, I never cease to be surprised by how willing people are to light them close to buildings/people. My friend the Postman's bonfire party this year ended with broken windows and a trip to the hospital.) While I love the fireworks, to me Bonfire Night is a night out to look at fire more than a holiday, since it doesn't involve the kind of planning and preparation (at least not by me) that Halloween (costume-wise) and Thanksgiving (food/hosting-wise) do. But I'm sure for some people, like the Lewes Bonfire Societies, it feels like much more.

So--what British autumn rituals am I missing here? Help me out--I've got a lot of darkness to get through!

(December 2010 updates in red)

Once upon a time, Grant Barrett forwarded to me the following item from issue 343 (29 March 2007) of Popbitch:

Confessions of an 80s pop fan
ishouldhaveknownbetter writes:
"I met Simon Le Bon at a house party. Everyone was playing it really cool so when he came to say goodbye I just exchanged air kisses, but then as he turned away for some reason I blurted out, 'Simon, I just want you to know that when I was younger I had a whole wall covered in posters of you at jaunty angles'. He went quiet. So I continued, 'And once I had a dream that you and Roger Taylor came to call for me on horses and then we all went out and played on the climbing frames.'
He left the party immediately."

Grant thought a girl [*ahem*] of my generation would appreciate the Duran Duran reference (I never actually bought any of their albums, but did bother to have an opinion on which was the [orig. AmE] dreamiest). He also pointed out the non-Americanness of climbing frame, which he ably figured out is equivalent to (orig. AmE) monkey bars and/or (orig. AmE) jungle gym. Monkey bars is used in the UK now too, and in both dialects it can refer specifically to a contraption like the one below, from US company ChildLife, with a ladder-like structure several feet above the ground.


But in both dialects monkey bars is also used more loosely sometimes to refer to any kind of structure built for children to climb on--i.e. a climbing frame/jungle gym.

Most of the other amusements on a playground have the same names in both dialects, although swing set, to refer to the apparatus involving swings and the frame that they're suspended from, seems to be more popular AmE. Better Half says he'd just call the whole apparatus swings [although the OED does not mark swing set as AmE--see comments]. See-saws are see-saws, but teeter-totter is a dialectal AmE word for the same thing. (I grew up with both terms.)

And those round things that one kid pushes (a)round and (a)round while the kids on it get sick--well, as a child in New York State we called these things merry-go-rounds or roundabouts, but the American Heritage tells me that roundabout in this meaning is 'chiefly' BrE. As a child, I preferred roundabout, because I liked to reserve merry-go-round for the kind of powered thing with horses, also known as a carousel. (Let's ignore the traffic-related meaning of roundabout. That deserves its own post.) Oxford dictionaries like to claim that carousel is spelt carrousel in AmE ('frequently' in OED2, but simply presented as the AmE spelling in my [admittedly out-of-date] Concise). I don't recall seeing it spelt that way anywhere but in an Oxford Dictionary--and, now that I've looked, in the American Heritage, which lists it as an alternative spelling, but not the predominant spelling. The OED also says that attributive use (i.e. placed in front of another noun, to modify it) of carousel, as in carousel music, is chiefly AmE. Nevertheless, their most recent (2007) addition to the carousel entry in the OED On-line is BrE carousel fraud (a kind of scam to reclaim [BrE] VAT/[AmE] sales tax)--indicating that BrE speakers use it attributively too.

Going through my mental playground inventory, the only other dialectal difference that I can think of is AmE sandbox versus BrE sand-pit. But I suppose that this is as good a place as any to mention BrE bouncy castle versus (in my day) AmE moonwalk (or today) bounce house, even though they're generally not found on playgrounds everyday. The naming difference reflects the different ways in which these things are decorated and marketed. The bouncy castle is a big inflated thing that is usually shaped like a castle. Moonwalks tend to have space themes. I've found inflatable castle as an AmE term for the castle shaped ones as well. Apparently, there's some controversy about whether these things were invented first in the UK or the US.

Other business:

• This is it! I've finally got to the end of the answerable queries from March! Now I'm only five months behind!
• As for tomorrow's appearance on Ant & Dec, it might be a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of affair. We spent at least an hour together taping yesterday (charming young men!), but I have no idea what they'll edit it down to. But here's the evidence that we have breathed the same air:

Ant, Lynne, fellow Scrabbler Kat, and Dec (thanks to Stewart for the photo!)

Better Half has found himself surrounded by out-laws (not quite in-laws) who like to get together and play games. My out-laws (BH's family) think this is hilarious, because of BH's reputation as a games-hater, which stems from several throwing-over-the-board-in-disgust incidents from when he was a child. When I met him, he was willing to play Connect Four with his godchildren, but only because he could still obliterate them. I count it as great progress that he now actually volunteers to play Yahtzee and Cribbage and will tolerate a few more games. (God, I've been good for him.) But games still remain a source of transatlantic miscommunication in the family since they, as we've seen already, frequently have different names in different places. The ones I'll cover in this series don't require a lot of discussion, hence my putting them all together like this.

Most of you will know that (BrE) draughts is (AmE) checkers. Or checkers is draughts -- I can't figure out whether I think the earlier term should go first or last in that equation, I can see the connotations going either way. You may also know that Americans spell draught as draft, reflecting the fact that the 'gh' is pronounced 'f', but while I have seen the board game sold as Checkers/Draughts in the US, I've never seen the BrE name of the game translated into AmE spelling. (I'm not going to get into the pronunciation of the vowel...suffice it to say that it too is different in different places.) Where do these names come from? It's a tricky question, since the OED, amazingly enough, includes neither draughts nor checkers. (No, what's amazing enough is my poor dictionary search skills in this instance--see the comments.) The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that draughts is related to dragon and goes back to about 1400. Checkers, alluding to the appearance of the board, arose in America in the 18th century. That "OED" (shall I call it OnEtyD?) also notes that "British prefers [the spelling] chequer, but the U.S. form is more authentic." Another case (cf. -ise) of British spelling being influenced by French. So, (AmE) Chinese checkers is known (though not very widely, it seems) in BrE as Chinese chequers. (Chinese draughts seems much less common, and seems mostly to be used by non-native speakers).

BrE Ludo (left, from Wikipedia), from the Latin for 'I play', is the game that Americans call Parcheesi (right, from Robby Findler's software construction course), though as you can see their boards are slightly different. It derives from an Indian game, and the AmE name is based on the Hindi name--which has been spelled in many ways in English, with pachisi sometimes regarded as 'most authenthic'. Parcheesi is the most familiar spelling in the US, as that's how the game was marketed by Selchow & Righter, 'the house that Parcheesi built'.


Once you know about Ludo, it makes more sense that the game that is called Clue in AmE is called Cluedo in BrE. Cluedo came first, as it was invented, A.E. Pratt of Birmingham, in the 1940s (though he had originally called it Murder). Since the pun wouldn't be appreciated in the US, it was marketed there as Clue. The game is the same, except for the names of some of the characters, weapons and rooms. There are a few linguistic differences in the game:

• Miss Scarlett (UK) v Miss Scarlet (US)
• Rev Green (UK) v Mr. Green (US)
• Mrs(.) White has recently been replaced in US by Dr. Orchid
• According to Wikipedia, the dagger is called the knife in some US editions (it was dagger in mine growing up, so I don't know...)
• The lead pipe was originally called lead piping in BrE

As far as I know, the names of all the rooms are the same, but it's worth noting that conservatory is often pronounced differently in the two. You can hear the difference here. Boards even within countries seem to vary in whether they consider the conservatory to be a glass-enclosed room full of plants or a music room. The original board just had blank areas label(l)ed by room names, but more recent ones illustrate them. I've seen this one on both Clue and Cluedo boards:


The Hollywood film based on the game, incidentally, was called Clue internationally and used the American character names.

I've got other board games to cover under part 2—children's games. There may be a part 3 on card games, if I can find more to mention. Email me if you have any suggestions.

[This post was updated 23 March 2020 with the details of US/UK Clue(do) differences, replacing a no-longer-working link on the topic.]