Separated by a Common Language

We went for a walk with the neighbo(u)rs, and we saw this sign.

The sign reads "Permissive Footpath avoiding Golf Course", and all the adults in our group (2 English, 1 Spanish, 1 American) found the sign amusing. Jokes about what kinds of permissive activities we might find on the path (or that we might find the path doing) resulted, as well as a conversation about what the sign meant and whether it could have been phrased better.

You can tell from this that we're not seasoned country walkers, we're just lockdown people finding new ways to get some exercise. The term permissive footpath is a term of art in the British land-use bureaucracy, and such signs can be found on many paths. It differs from a public footpath in that the land is privately owned. The landowner is permitting people to walk on their path. This explanation of the term offers other expressions like permitted footpath and concessionary footpath, but these seem to be much less common, and we would not have been able to joke as much about them. (For those puzzled by our amusement: permissive usually means 'characteri{s/z}ed by great freedom of behavio(u)r', which can include 'sexually liberated'.)

So, permissive footpath is not something you'd see in AmE, but that's because there's a lot different about leisurely country walks in the two countries. And this is why this post has taken a couple of weeks to write...

Let's start by mentioning (it has come up on the blog before) that to hike is usually considered an Americanism, in the sense that it's widespread and "standard" in American English, but it's only ever been a dialect word in the UK. The OED cites an 1825 dictionary of west-of-England dialects as one of its earliest sources for it.

While it's been coming back to the UK, all of its senses were more common in AmE first, for example the noun use as in go for a hike and the more figurative use in hike up a price. Some of the figurative uses seem more common in BrE corpora now, though. You can see the change in this Google ngram for price hike, where the red line indicates the phrase in AmE books and the blue in BrE. It looks like the kind of pattern you'd see with parents and slang...they start using the word when the kids are already moving on to a new one, then carry on using it at a higher rate than those who made it up.

In BrE, those who hike as a regular pastime are often referred to as ramblers, but it's far more common to talk about walking than rambling. (Rambling and Rambler tend to be used in the names of walking clubs, such as the Essex Area Ramblers, who are responsible for the website that taught me about permissive paths.) Of course, English-speakers everywhere use the verb to walk. But for me (at least) what's different is that I have a town/country divide in my AmE: If I'm walking around town for leisure, I'm going for a walk. If I go out of town to walk (on less even terrain, taking more care with my footwear and supplies), I'm going hiking.  Or maybe it's better characteri{s/z}ed as: if I'm on a paved path/road or the beach, I'm on a walk, and if I'm on less even terrain (fields, woods, mountains, deserts), I'm on a hike.

In its broadest use, any way that's made for walking is a path or a footpath, but the word footpath is much more common in BrE than in AmE. A footpath can be urban or rural, but is usually distinguished from the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk by being narrower, unpaved, or not running parallel to the road. For instance, a marked "public footpath" in my mother-in-law's suburb is a paved path between houses that let people take a shortcut to the (BrE) railway station, but the "permissive footpath" above is a (AmE in this use) dirt path through a wooded area.

Path and pathway are a normal things to call places where people can walk in either country. The GloWBE corpus has a bit more path in AmE than BrE, but I'm not going to to through and find out how many of them refer to the PATH (Port Authority-Trans Hudson) trains in New York. Pathway is about the same in both.

For places to hike, trail is more common in AmE. This is again difficult to do a corpus chart for, because there are lots of other uses of trail (what a snail leaves, a trail of clues, etc.).  (It originally referred to things that trailed behind, like the train of a dress or coat.) But if we look at which words occur before trail in the two countries, we can see a real tendency for trails to be walking places. Many of these relate to names of famous places to hike, such as the Appalachian Trail. 

In AmE I'd use trail as a common noun to talk generally about hiking paths. I've just asked the English spouse whether he'd use trail to refer to some of the English ones we know, and he says "No, that's American. That's why we don't understand trail mix.  According to the OED, this sense of trail is:

A path or track worn by the passage of persons travelling in a wild or uninhabited region; a beaten track, a rude path. (Chiefly U.S. and Canadian; also New Zealand and Australian.)

The US has a National Trails System, established in 1968, which includes Scenic Trails and Historic Trails, all of which have Trail in their name. (See the link for the list.)  England and Wales now also have something called National Trails, but that was only founded in 2005, and does look like a case of UK government borrowing an American idea with its language. Most of the "long-distance footpaths" included in the National Trails are named Way: the Cotswold Way, the Pennine Way, the South Downs Way. Some are called Path, e.g. Thames Path, Hadrian's Wall Path. None are called trails.

Scotland has Scotland's Great Trails, formerly known as Long Distance Routes. The rebranding seems to have happened sometime in the past 10 years. Unlike England's National Trails, some are actually named trail, and those names seem to pre-date the national rebranding, raising the question of whether this sense of trail is longer-standing in Scotland.

It's not uncommon to find commonalities between Scotland or Ireland and the US—not necessarily because of more recent Scottish/Irish immigration to the US than English immigration. The similarities can be there if the meaning was formerly widespread in English English, but then went out of fashion in England. However, the OED only has examples of this sense of trail since 1807, which makes it more likely that it might have started in the US and been fed back to the UK. Hard to know without much more work than I can put into this!

I've written some other posts that cover related concepts to these ones. If you have comments about those terms, please comment at those posts, where it will be much more useful to their readers.

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotel is rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton home

As I mentioned in the last post, and as I have been wont to mention at any opportunity, I got to go to Barbados recently. It was my first time in the West Indies and it was fabulous—even if I did spend much of it in a windowless conference room.

In the weeks before I went there, I was wont to mention at any opportunity that I was going to Barbados soon. And this is when my (obviously jealous) English friends started pointing out (or was it mocking?) that I didn't say Barbados like they say Barbados. I (in my American way) say the last syllable as if it is the word dose. Theirs sounds like (BrE) doss  or the acronym for 'disk operating system': DOS. In saying it they use the 'rounded short o' vowel that Americans like me don't have.

I was gratified to learn, in the welcoming speeches at the conference, that Barbadians pronounce the last vowel in Barbados like I do, more like the Spanish number dos than like doss. I tweeted about this discovery, and one of my longtime blog correspondents emailed to note (as others had) that in olden times it was often Barbadoes in English, suggesting the "long", or more accurately "tense" o pronunciation that I use. She added "the modern spelling suggests the '-oss' ending".

To which I had to respond—well, the modern ending might suggest '-oss' for you, but not for me. Barbados is part of a partial pattern of difference between BrE and AmE. For my American English, I see the -os in kudos or pathos and I say it with the tense /o/. They rhyme with dose, not doss. But the standard pronunciation of these in Britain is with the -oss sound. And that kind of pronunciation has bled into Barbados. The name Barbados comes from either Portuguese or Spanish for 'bearded ones' (probably because of a tree with beard-like foliage). It's not related to the Greek-derived words pathos and kudos, but the spelling leads us to treat them similarly.

This varies in the US, though. Merriam-Webster gives the doss-type pronunciation first for kudos and pathos (though, of course, with the kind of short-o that Americans use, see link above). American Heritage's first choice for kudos rhymes with doze. But my kudos rhymes with dose. That pronunciation is in both dictionaries, but further down their lists. They both give the dose-type first for Barbados, though. (And they don't give a 'doss' type, but do give a schwa pronunciation more like "Barbaduss".) I suspect that the dose pronunciation for Barbados is preserved in the US because it looks like Spanish, and Americans are used to pronouncing the Spanish o in the tense/long way. (For more on AmE/BrE approaches to Spanish words, see this old post & its comments.)


Thanks to previous UK comment on/mockery of my pronunciation, I went to Barbados also nervous about saying Caribbean. Natural-me says caRIBbean. English people (and now me-when-I'm-speaking-to-English-people-and-wanting-to-avoid-mockery) say caribBEan.  I again heard "my" pronunciation during the opening speeches of the conference. Professor Jeannette Allsopp, co-namesake of the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography, put her stress on the -rib-. I thought: if she does it, I can do it too. Then I noticed other staff and students from the University of the West Indies (UWI) putting their stress on the -be-. This is what Oxford Dictionaries says on the matter:

There are two possible pronunciations of the word Caribbean. The first, more common in British English, puts the stress on the -be-, while the second, found in the US and the Caribbean itself, stresses the -rib-

The 'first' in this quotation is made especially weird by the fact that it's the rib-stressed pronunciation that is listed first in their entry for the word. Phonetician (and frequent travel[l]er to the Caribbean) John Wells tells me that indeed the rib-stressing pronunciation is traditionally the more common in the area. The fact that I heard a lot of younger UWI folk using the more BrE pronunciation is an interesting counterexample to the oft-heard claims that English is being Americanized all over the world. In this case, decades after Barbadian independence, a British pronunciation seems to be making inroads.

The competition between these pronounciations comes from the fact that Caribbean has two possible etymologies. It's either Carib(b)+ean or Caribbee+an. Both Carib and Caribbee are apparent anglici{s/z}ations of the Spanish Caribe (which is probably an adaptation of an Arawak word). Caribbee has pretty much died out now, but it and Carib are both found in the earliest days of European reporting on "the New World". 


So, I'm happy now to say Barbados and Caribbean in my natural way even with British friends who might mock me because (a) they're not wrong, and (b) I GOT TO GO TO BARBADOS AND THEY DIDN'T. 😎

A while ago, I wrote about a difference in AmE and BrE use of street and road, in that in BrE it's more natural to cross the road and in AmE (certainly in a town or city) it's more common to cross the street. (I've also written about in/on the street, so see that post for more on that.) That's common-noun usage, but what about the proper names of vehicular paths?

There's no question that some ways of designating paths are more common in one country or the other. I've never seen a road named [Something] Trail or [Something] Boulevard in the UK (though see the comments for some counterexamples), and in the US there aren't as many Crescents or (BrE) Closes (pronounced with a /s/, not a /z/). But a problem for making generali{z/s}ations about such things is that the naming of streets or roads varies a lot on the local level in both countries, with different names based on regional differences, urban/rural differences, and terrain differences.

The other day Damien Hall (tweeting as @EvrydayLg) pointed out:

Struck since long B4 I lived there by US habit of omitting eg St, Rd in addresses. We don't.

He hypothesi{z/s}ed that it might be because street is more common in the US and therefore the default. But I don't think that's why. Instead, Americans are happy to say things like

go up Main and take the first right onto Union

...because in most cases that will be an unambiguous statement, since there will typically only be one thoroughfare called Main (Street) and one called Union (maybe Avenue) in a town. I often send packages to a friend who lives in Tennessee. I've never bothered to find out if she lives on Woodland Street or Woodland Lane because I only need to put '140 Woodland' (and the city, state and, if I'm nice, the zip code) on the package and it gets there. As you can see from this (AmE) yard sale sign, the practice of not saying street or road is common. (Where there is more than one with the same name, you'll hear the street/road/lane/whatever more regularly.)

(Side note on codes: Five-digit US zip codes only say which town or which part of a city the address is in, unlike six-or-seven-letter/number UK post codes, which generally indicate the town/part-of-city in the first half (letter-letter+1- or 2-digit number) and which street or part-of-street in the second half (number-letter-letter). Nine-digit US zip codes, called ZIP+4, are a more recent addition* that do indicate street, but which I don't actually use. I couldn't tell you what mine is at the US address I use. 
*It says how old I am that I consider something from 1983 a 'recent addition'. )

'Street'-less street names are so unambiguous that most Americans would immediately recogni{z/s}e that the film title State and Main refers to a corner in a town--mostly likely in the cent{er/re} of the town, since those are common street names in American towns and because we refer to (AmE) intersections or the corners at those intersections in that way. 

(I'm sure I've mentioned before that Main Street is a likely street to have in a town as the main street. It is also metaphorically used to refer to 'the inhabitants of small US towns considered as having a narrow-minded or materialistic worldview' (AHD5). So, politicians might worry about 'what will fly on Main Street'. The High Street is the proverbial main street in a British town (it may or may not be named High Street) and is used metaphorically to refer to the commercial market--i.e. 'what will fly on the high street' is what the masses are likely to want to buy.)

British roads need the street or road (etc.) because little is unambiguous when it comes to British road names.

Take my former (more common in AmE) neighbo(u)rhood as an example:
There is a Buckingham Road, which meets Buckingham Place. Buckingham Street runs parallel to Buckingham Road, but doesn't meet Buckingham Place because halfway through it changes its name to Clifton Street. Off the map are Clifton Road, Clifton Hill, Clifton Street, Clifton Place and Clifton Terrace. But we don't need to leave this map to see that there's also a West Hill Street, West Hill Road and West Hill Place. I also feel bad for the people who live on the parallel Albert Road and Alfred Road who probably get each other's (AmE) mail/(BrE) post all the time.

Once I found an unconscious man on Buckingham Place.  Except I didn't know which Buckingham it was. The ambulance people were (BrE) well (orig. AmE) pissed off at me.

If that weren't bad enough, I now live on a road that shares its entire name with another road in the same city. When I tell taxis where to take me I have to say "X Street, off Y Road". We always tell plumbers and such which one to go to (we even give them our post code) and then when they don't show up, we text them to say "no, it's the other one".

A famous exception to the 'one pathway per name' rule in the US is New York City, which has both a 3rd Street and a 3rd Avenue. Except that it doesn't really have a '3rd Street', since you need to put East or West in front of it in order for the house number to be meaningful--so if someone says they live on East 5th, you know it's East 5th Street. In New York and the US more generally Avenue is often abbreviated in speech (as well as writing) to its first syllable (written as Ave. or Av.). 

And so onto the Easts and Wests. In the US, you can reasonably expect that East Main Street and West Main Street are the same thoroughfare, but that house numbering starts from the where they join (or divide, depending how you think of it). East Main Street will run to the east from that (AmE) intersection/(BrE) junction.

In some cities they put the compass-points after the name and that can mean something different. In Washington, DC, it indicates quadrant of the city that that part of the road is in. So, 7th Street NW and 7th Street SW are one long road that runs north/south, but the parts of it in different quadrants of the city. On the other side of the capitol building, the street numbering starts over, and so 7th Street SE and 7th Street NE run parallel to the other 7th Street NW/SW.

So, the other day, I had to find Brunswick Street East in Hove (UK). Somehow (¡Apple Maps!) I ended up on Brunswick Street West. I knew that Brunswick Street East would not be a continuation of West (after all, the road was running north-south), but I hoped it would be the next street eastward. It was not. At least it was eastward. (I hadn't been willing to trust even that.) But I did get to see Brunswick Place, Brunswick Square and Brunswick Terrace in my explorations.

Finding street names is its own challenge. In the US, street signs tend to be affixed to poles at the corners of roads. At some big intersections, they may hang over the road on the wires that hold the (AmE) stop lights/(BrE/AmE) traffic lights. In the UK, they tend to be on buildings or walls near the end of the road. This may require some searching since some are high and some are low. Here's one of my favo(u)rites from Brighton:






House-numbering, of course, is another nightmare. In the US, it's pretty predictable that even numbers will be on one side of the road and odd ones on the other. In the UK, it might be that way (though you've no guarantee that 92 will be across the street from 93--it might be many houses further down). Another UK way is to have consecutive numbering up one side of the road (1, 2, 3, 4,...) to wherever the road ends and then down the other side, so that, say, 52 and 53 may be across the road from one another, but 1 will be across the road from 104. Another way it might be is that the name of the road on one side is different from the name on the other side--so, for example, the people at 15 Vernon Terrace in Brighton live across from the people at 17 Montpelier Crescent. (And Vernon Terrace only lasts for one (AmE) block, after which its name changes and house numbers re-start twice before you get to the sea, which has pleasantly few thoroughfare names.)

I've talked about differences in house numbering on Numberphile, so (BrE) have a look at the video if you are (orig. AmE) nerdy enough want to hear more about house-numbering:

I am supposed to be giving the 'How America Saved the English Language' talk in Ashford at the moment, but it had to be cancel(l)ed because the organi{s/z}er isn't well. I hope it will be rescheduled--but not on a day like today when the Brighton-Ashford train journey/trip would have involved replacement bus service (a hated phrase in BrE, if ever there was one).

So, I dip into the inbox to find a suitable blogging task, and out comes this from Ben S:

I was watching the clip episode for QI and in it Rob Brydon explains the phrase "missing the wood for the trees" REDACTED FANCIFUL ACCOUNT OF ORIGIN OF THIS PHRASE. [Lesson: check any facts that appear on QI. They may be Quite Interesting, but they're not always true. --ed.] But, as an American, I've always heard "missing the forest for the trees"

Hey, speaking of QI, I was on the (orig. AmE) radio/(dated BrE) wireless this past week with Stephen Fry (the host of QI) on Fry's English Delight. By the time you read this, it may not be available for listening-again, but here's the link to the episode. The most very frustrating thing about this program(me) is that it is about spelling. My job is to talk about spelling reform in the early days of the USA. So, to introduce me, Fry announces 'That's Lynn, without an E.' Watch forty-something years of trying to get people to spell my name right go straight down the toilet. Thanks, Steven! (But much fun to be on the program(me).)

Wait, what? You wanted me to talk about the phrase Ben asked about? Oh, all right then. Missing the wood for the trees is the main BrE version of this phrase and missing the forest for the trees is the main AmE version, as shown in this entry from Cambridge Dictionaries Online:
Ben sent me a long message about this because Brydon's tale about the meaning of this phrase treated it as if the wood in it referred to (AmE) lumber/(more BrE) timber--which is also the usual way that an American would understand wood without an s on the end. But that's what was wrong with Brydon's story. The BrE wood here is woods in AmE (AmE kinda-sorta. There's more to say.)

When talking about tree-filled land, BrE has woods as well as wood. Preschools here are filled with children singing If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. (Actually, most people these days sing If you go down to the woods today. Better Half has just declared the original lyric obscene.) But one hears a lot more of wood as part of place-names in BrE than AmE (e.g. Bromwich Wood). And one hears it in as a common noun to refer to foresty places. Here are some examples from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBe), which strike me for their general morbidness (I've 'retouched' one of the lines to remove an irrelevant reference to a sexual act in a wood pile):


Now, I had assumed that Americans use the word forest more than the British do, because I often hear this wood where I would have said forest. But that's not the case--checking a few corpora, the British seem to use forest just as much as Americans. (Since one of those searches was case-sensitive, I don't think it's a case of place-names throwing the numbers.) I had this impression because if I were to Americani{s/z}e some of the sentences above by replacing the BrE wood, I'd put in forest. But that's because of the a. If I were allowed to change the whole noun phrase to be natural to my AmE brain, I'd change a wood to the woods. Now, it may seem strange to have the the there, since that's a definite determiner,* and it implies that we know which woods we're talking about. But it's really not that strange to use the when talking about geographical place-types, since we talk about people liking to swim in the sea or go hiking in the mountains, even if we don't know (or if it doesn't matter) which ones they do it in. To be clear: one can say in the woods in BrE. But since one can also say in a wood in BrE, the British don't say in the woods as much as Americans do.

Back to the 'for the trees' proverb: it is older than old, but in John Heywood's Proverbes (1546) it is given as ye cannot see the wood for trees. The forest version goes back at least into the 19th century in the US. I can only presume that it came to be preferred over the wood version because that version is confusing in AmE, where it would pretty much have to be woods. But, as Brydon, in his misunderstanding of the phrase on QI, demonstrated, it's not just ambiguous to Americans--since wood has more than one meaning in both countries. (If you'd like to see the discussion on QI, it seems to be on YouTube in several places. Probably illegally, so I'm not going to link to it, because those links eventually fail.  But should you want to search for it, it should be in (BrE) series 10, episode 3 'Journeys'.)


* As long as I'm talking about definite determiners, I can mention that I'm the 'Ask a Linguist' linguist in the current issue of the lovely new-ish language magazine Babel. The topic there is the the (or lack of it) in the phrase in (the) hospital. I've covered that before here, but I cover it better in the magazine--which I really recommend for anyone who's interested in language. Subscription info is here.

When I don't know what I want to blog about, I stick a virtual pin into the email inbox and choose the first do-able request/suggestion that I find. This is supposed to be a fair method, though perhaps not as fair as 'first come, first served'. Truth be told, many of the oldest ones in the inbox are in the 'may not be doable' or 'may not be a real difference' category, so I have come to avoid them a bit. At any rate, my 'fair' method might not seem fair this time, since the suggestion I've clicked on is from the same requester as the last blog post.

So, thank you Ben Zimmer for putting another interesting and pop-culture-related suggestion in my inbox. Ben noted the use of in the middle of our street in the Madness song 'Our House', and asked: "Have you talked about this one? I don't think it's possible in AmE for a house to be in the middle of a street."

Yes, that's an interesting one.  But so is the rest of the song.  It's Saturday night--let's do the whole thing!




I should start by noting that this is the only Madness song that made it to the Top 20 singles chart in the US, whereas in the UK they were HUGE, having 20 singles in the Top 20 in the 1980s (more if you count re-issues). So, for British people of my generation, mention Madness and they're as likely (if not more likely) to wax nostalgic about 'Baggy Trousers' or 'House of Fun' as about 'Our House'. Still 'Our House' has had  a lot of attention in the UK. It won the 'Best Song'  in the Ivor Novello Awards, became part of the advertising campaign for Birdseye frozen foods (video) with frontman Suggs, and was the title of a Madness-based West End musical. Unlike some other pop/rock-band-based musicals, like Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You, the Madness musical did not transfer to Broadway or tour the US.

I loved 'Our House' as an American teenager, particularly for its wordplay, but I have to wonder how much I missed in my pre-UK days.  So, for the benefit of my teenage self, here's a stanza-by-stanza playback:

Father wears his Sunday best
Mother's tired she needs a rest
The kids are playing up downstairs
Sister's sighing in her sleep
Brother's got a date to keep
He can't hang around

In my day job, antonyms are my special(i)ty, so I am particularly fond of the juxtapositon of up/down here. However, I don't think that in my youth I understood that this wasn't just a little lyrical nonsense.  To play up is informal BrE for behaving irritatingly or erratically. One's lumbago can play up, the computer might play up, and certainly one's children can play up.  (Late addition: BZ has pointed out the AmE equivalent: act up.)

Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our ...

The chorus, and the point of BZ's original query. To my young American ears, this sounded intentionally funny.  The house is in the middle of the street! Like where the manholes should be! No, no, no.  This is the BrE equivalent of in AmE in the middle of our block. This is a originally AmE use of block to mean 'the length of a street between cross-streets' or 'one side of a square of land with buildings, bounded by four streets'. This sense is not often found in BrE, though most BrE speakers I know are aware of it. Still, they find it odd when Americans apply it to British places since (a) there are rarely regular blocks in British towns ([BrE] Have/(AmE) take a look at this map of Camden Town, London [home of Madness], for instance) and (b) block has a more prominent residence-related BrE sense: 'a building separated into units', e.g. an office block or a block of flats. This sense of block is not marked as dialectal in the American Heritage Dictionary, but do Americans actually say it much? In AmE, I'd always say office building or apartment building.  (For another difference in UK/US use of street, see back here.)

But even if it weren't in the middle of the street, 'our house' would still be in our street, because in BrE addresses can be in the street or road. John Algeo, in British or American English?, writes:

For specifying the position of something relative to a street, British generally uses in and American on. When the street in question is noted as a shopping location, British uses on or in.

Algeo's corpus has equal numbers of in/on the High Street (i.e. the main shopping stree—akin to AmE Main Street, at least, before the Walmartification of American towns). A Google search of British books shows a clear preference for in in this case, however.  (Click here to see the ngram view.)

Our house it has a crowd
There's always something happening
And it's usually quite loud
Our mum she's so house-proud
Nothing ever slows her down
And a mess is not allowed

House-proud is the piece of BrE I remember learning through this song. The meaning is fairly transparent. To be house-proud is to take particular pride in the upkeep and decoration of one's house.  The expression reminds me of Kate Fox's discussion of the English relationship to their homes in her book Watching the English. A related newspaper piece by Fox can be found here—but I really recommend the book. Again.  (Click on the link for mum—I've discussed it on an earlier occasion.)

Father gets up late for work
Mother has to iron his shirt
Then she sends the kids to school
Sees them off with a small kiss
She's the one they're going to miss
In lots of ways

This verse has no glaringly specific BrEisms, but does allow us to note British male predilection for comedic cross-dressing, evident in the video above.

The last unrepeated verse has nothing particularly non-AmE about it either, but I include it here for completeness, and because I like how I can hear the words being delivered as I read them.

I remember way back then when everything was true and when
We would have such a very good time such a fine time
Such a happy time
And I remember how we'd play simply waste the day away
Then we'd say nothing would come between us two dreamers

The song ends with the chorussy bit repeated, with variations, including this one: 

Our house, was our castle and our keep
Our house, in the middle of our street

We can't say that castle and keep is non-AmE; if we needed to talk about castles and keeps, those are the words we'd use. But since we don't have medi(a)eval castles, many Americans might not know this sense of keep. Call me a philistine (you probably won't be the first), but I  didn't know it (despite hearing it in the song repeatedly) or other castle-part terms until I moved to England and started visiting castles. Here's a guide to castle parts for those who want to know.

And in case I haven't already thoroughly shown my age, I'll say this: I was so lucky to be a (orig. AmE) teenager and (AmE) college/(BrE) university student in the 1980s.* At least when I'm going senile and just want to sing songs from my prime, I'll be ok. Oh wait, I just had a Lionel Richie flashback. I'm doomed.



*Whether it was cool to like Madness in the 1980s is another matter, especially for my English generation-mates, such as Better Half. At the time, he tells me, one couldn't like both the ska-inspired London music that included Madness (though Madness were definitely ska-lite) and the New Romantics. But age works wonders on taste, and now we find ourselves nostalgic for music that we were too cool for then. But I am still embarrassed to have done so much dancing to Lionel Richie.

I've had a couple of queries lately about the States as a nickname for the United States of America--with some implication that Americans in Britain learn to say this from the British. One query was (indirectly, through their [BrE] tutor/[AmE] professor) from an American student who has come over on a summer exchange program(me). The other was from Laura, who wrote:

I worked in London for a few months last year and was surprised to hear everyone referring to the U.S. as 'the States' or 'America', both names I rarely (if ever) use. Normally I just say 'the U.S.' or even the full(er) name of 'the United States'. I did a sort of poll on this in a Livejournal community I am a part of, here at Brits-Americans. On the whole, people agreed with me that Americans do not call our country 'the States' (a few more call it 'America' though) and if they do, it is generally only after visiting/living in Britain (or a country outside the U.S., even Canada).

Laura has noticed that this isn't just a British thing, but the student, probably with less travel(l)ing experience, considered it to be BrE--and we can investigate that idea. Others seem to think it's an exchange student thing. I found this claim in a review (warning: .pdf) of Stuff White People Like:

Incidentally, every American exchange student is required by the Geneva Convention to use the term, “The States,” preferably whilst rolling his or her eyes. I did it so effectively that I developed minor eyestrain.)

The obvious reason why Americans only start calling the country America or the States when they're abroad is that an American just doesn't have as much reason to call it anything when in the US--for instance, when someone asks an American where they're from when they're in the US, they'll answer Kansas or Cincinnati, not the US of A or any such thing.

But is it used more in the UK than elsewhere? It's a bit hard to tell, but let's start by looking at where on the web some names for the US are used. Apologies for my primitive skills with html tables, but what I've done is to search for America, the States, the US, the USA, and the United States on the web in two sentential contexts in and out of the UK. First, I searched "are you from x" with the proviso that it should not include any sites that had the phrase "Where are you from"--because otherwise you're flooded with examples like Where are you from? The US. This was important because my aim here was to find uses of these names for the US that were more likely to be written by non-Americans. For the Americans, I searched for "I'm from X". The table shows the total number for the "are you from" searches, followed by the results from just the UK, followed by the proportion of world uses of a term that come from the UK, followed by UK-based writers' preference for the term--and then it repeats that for the "I'm from" searches. So, we can see here that presumed non-Americans in the UK tend to call the country (in web-based writing, at least) the US or the USA. If it were a Briticism, we'd expect UK uses in the Are you from context to be a fairly big proportion of the world uses--but that doesn't seem to be the case. The confounding factor would be if it were British, but the British considered it degrading, in which case they might use it in other contexts, but not the Are you from one.

	Are you from [x]	UK	UK/World	UK%	I'm from [x]	UK	UK/World	UK %
America	1270	18	1%	13%	32,200	922	3%	14%
the States	313	12	4%	9%	23,200	1330	6%	20%
the US	709	59	8%	44%	63,500	2890	5%	43%
the USA	17,500	40	2%	30%	30,000	687	2%	10%
the United States	1270	6	4%	4%	23,200	842	4%	13%

Before looking at the American side of the table, let's consider whether it is degrading. Ben Zimmer has kindly pointed out to me this claim by 'Areff' on alt.usage.english:

[in response to someone's usage of the States] First off, you get Oy!ed for using that expression 'the States'. This is a deprecated usage outside of military and diplomatic contexts. Odd thing is, the British think Americans commonly use 'the States' (they don't), and the Americans think the British commonly use 'the States' (they do, but only because they mistakenly think that's what Americans commonly do).

A lot of people on that discussion board took issue with this claim. I've certainly never found 'the States' to be deprecating (which is all I can imagine he meant by 'deprecated'), and would think that non-diplomatic contexts would be less sensitive to such connotations in any case. But at any rate, our evidence here is that Americans in the UK use the term at a much higher rate than the British do--since it's only the 4th most common on the British side of the table, but the second most common way for Americans to refer to their home country. So I have a hard time buying that Americans in the UK are learning it from the British.

Now on to the American side of the table, we see that on UK websites Americans use 'the States' one-fifth of the time when asked where they're from, but this accounts only for 6% of the world total of people saying they're 'from the States'. But that 6% is bigger than the percentages for any of the other expressions, so perhaps it is a bit more likely in the UK.

For interest, I also checked some other anglophonic countries' sites. The numbers were very small in some cases, but I'll present here the rankings of the terms in Australian, Canadian and South African sites. The figure on the left is the ranking of the 'Are you from' result and the figure on the right is the 'I'm from' version.

	Australia you/I	Canada you/I	South Africa you/I	UK you/I
America	=1/3	1/1	2/1	3/3
the States	=4/5	4/2	=4/5	4/2
the US	3/4	3/3	3/2	1/1
the USA	=1/1	2/4	1/3	2/5
the United States	=4/2	5/5	=4/4	5/4

If Americans do say the States more often in the UK than elsewhere, one of my hypotheses is that it has something to do with language. When I lived in South Africa, I was conscious of referring to the US as America when I was speaking to someone whose native language was not English. One knows that America can be understood by speakers of most languages, but you need more of a grip on English to understand that the States is used as a proper noun. So, it's easier to use it with the (native) BrE speakers than with people who are speaking English as a second language. I also liked saying the States because the US comes out as 'theeyuwess', which sounds pretty mushy coming out of my mouth, and so I found myself having to repeat myself when I said it in South Africa. (The USA just sounds too [AmE] yee-haw jingoistic somehow.)

But why not in Australia? An English friend has wondered whether in the UK the States has an echo of the Colonies. Maaaayybeeeee. I'm preferring a more pragmatic solution. Larry Horn has a principle I like called 'Familiarity breeds CNTNT'--that is, familiarity breeds reduced content; the more familiar something is, the more economical you can be in referring to it. Maybe the States is more common in Canada and the UK because people there have more interaction with Americans and America than Australians and South Africans have.

But in conclusion, from this not-very-scientific investigation, it looks like the people who are most likely to say the States are Americans talking to Canadians or the British. Do we learn it from the British? Do we learn it from each other? Is it an echo of the Colonies? Hard to tell...