Separated by a Common Language: idioms

Showing posts with label idioms. Show all posts

caught + ADJ

Sep 2, 2025

A shorter (maybe), quicker and earlier post this month, since I am going to be travel(l)ing without much internet access in September and am (orig. AmE) freaking out* about how much work I have to do before the autumn/fall semester begins.

In a recent Language Log post, Victor Mair points out a difference in how American and British teens might react to this shirt:

Grey t-shirt with Chinese writing and English translation: I love study, learning makes my mother happy

Americans would tend to say I wouldn't be caught dead in it but BrE speakers would more likely say I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

To me, these bring up different images, since caught is a more dynamic verb than seen. Those who are caught are generally trying not to be caught. I wore the t-shirt, but I wanted to avoid being seen in it. But those who are seen can't help being seen. If you say 'I wouldn't be seen dead in it', it sounds to me like you fear someone putting the t-shirt on you after you've died. But maybe that difference in imagery is just me. Most people aren't so literalist about their idioms.

Anyhow...what's the history of these phrases? The OED has American caught dead from 1870 and American seen dead in 1887, then a Scottish-authored found dead in 1923, followed by British seen deads in the 1930s. So it's likely it started in the US, but then got translated a bit in UK.

1870– colloquial. (I, etc.) wouldn't be seen (also caught) dead and variants: (I, etc.) would be ashamed to be seen or found in a place, with someone, or doing something; (I, etc.) want nothing to do with (something or someone). 1870 I do not know anything about him, sir; I never traveled a mile with him, nor a square, and would not be caught dead with either of them. Miscellaneous Documents Legislature Pennsylvania 1429Citation details for Miscellaneous Documents Legislature Pennsylvania 1887 I quietly told him that if I knew myself, I would not be seen dead in the aforesaid articles. Outing March 540/2Citation details for Outing 1923 The sort of man..who would not be found dead in a bow-tie with a turn-over collar. N. Munro, Jimmy Swan in Warm Weather in B. D. Osborne & R. Armstrong, Erchie & Jimmy Swan (1993) ii. xxxiv. 465Citation details for N. Munro, Jimmy Swan in Warm Weather 1931 No decent person would be seen dead with a specimen like that! T. R. G. Lyell, Slang, Phrase & Idiom in Colloquial English 671Citation details for T. R. G. Lyell, Slang, Phrase & Idiom in Colloquial English 1937 In the whole of France there wasn't a hat she would be seen dead in. M. Sharp, Nutmeg Tree ix. 103Citation details for M. Sharp, Nutmeg Tree 1966 Do you think I'd be seen dead in gear like that? A. E. Lindop, I start Counting ix. 110Citation details for A. E. Lindop, I start Counting 2023 I wouldn't be caught dead in this place! @diannafeike 7 March in twitter.com (accessed 14 Mar. 2023)

from the OED

Other 'be caught ADJECTIVE' phrases are also more American. (In this corpus result, the Token 1 column is number of hits in the US corpus, and the Token 2 column is UK).

Corpus of Global Web-Based English results CAUGHT DEAD 84 30; CAUGHT UNPREPARED 21 10;CAUGHT OFF-GUARD 44 29;CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED 33 22; CAUGHT UNAWARE 20 15

As well as caught unaware, there's the more frequent caught unawares (which might not have been tagged as an adjective in the corpus, leading to its absence from the chart above). Another AmE caught expression is caught short:

from the OED

So, generally, caught is used with adjectives to describe being in a situation you're not prepared for. With a noun, we also have caught by surprise (more than 2x more US hits in GloWbE).

But not all caught + adjective phrases with connotations of unreadiness are more American. Caught red-handed has more UK hits in the GloWbE corpus (less than 2x more), and that makes sense since red-handed is from Scotland in the early 1800s. (The red is the blood of the person you've just murdered.) That's a more literal caught, though—being caught by the police (or someone).

*I've only really just appreciated that anything that looks bold when I'm in the blogger editor doesn't look bold when the post is published—at least not on my browser. So, I'm going to start putting bold things in another colo(u)r just to underscore the difference. If anyone wants to give me a tip on how to retroactively change the font across the blog to make the bolds stand out more, please let me know via gmail (lynneguist).

Labels: adjectives , crime/punishment , idioms , verbs | 12 comments

tips, dumps, fly-tipping, fly-posting, post no bills

Aug 10, 2025

On my way home from work, I pass the windowless side of an end-of-terrace house, on which this sign is posted:

Sign: No fly-tipping / Enforcement officers patrol this area / Offenders will be prosecuted. Maximum fine £50,000 and/or imprisonment. Brighton and Hove City Council

Such signs are a common sight in England, and not immediately transparent to AmE speakers, who are more accustomed to 'No dumping' signs:

Three red/white/black signs with words and pictographs: No Dumping: Warning - This Property Is Protected by Video Surveillance, Violators will be Prosecuted ; No Dumping: Violators Will Be Prosecuted, Private Property No Trespassing, 24 Hour Surveillance; No Dumping: Violators Will Be Prosecuted

from SmartSign.com

(There's more we could say about these signs, but we haven't got space for that right now. For more on NO TRESPASSING, see this old post on AmE POSTED signs.)

The Brighton sign is an official local-government sign, while anyone can buy those US examples. The equivalent anyone-can-buy it signs in the UK might have both the terms tipping and dumping:

Red and white sign: red circle with line through it, under which is "No dumping or tipping"

from morelock.co.uk

Tipping (first cited UK early 1800s), like dumping, relates to tipping, and thereby releasing, the contents of a truck or cart into an area for waste, hence BrE tip for what AmE would call dump: a (probably official) place where the waste from a particular area can be left (for processing, piling up, burial, etc.). The verb dump ('to fall with sudden force') goes back to Middle English, but it's only in the late 1700s, in the US, that it starts to be used transitively to refer particularly to getting rid of waste. (See this old post for more on AmE dumpster. See the comments of this old post for discussion of dump truck.)

Tipping or dumping could be legal, but fly-tipping is specifically 'illegal dumping'. Why fly? It's not to do with the insects that inevitably follow illegal dumping. It's the fly in the expression on the fly: that is, in motion or 'on the wing'. Dumping/tipping that is "on the fly" is without prior arrangement and probably surreptitious. You're taking a load of waste away from where it's not needed, and you just leave it someplace that is conveniently unobserved. The term fly-tipping is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s, and the back-formed verb fly-tip only comes up in the 1980s.

On the fly developed different uses in BrE and AmE in the mid-1800s. In BrE it could be a slang term for begging (or committing crimes) while moving about/around town. (See Green's Dictionary of Slang.) With that extension, fly-tipping makes some sense as a term for an illegal activity. In AmE, on the fly became a description of a baseball that's been hit, but has not yet touched the ground—so you want to catch the other team's ball on the fly. (The term fly ball comes some decades later, as a result.)

fly-posting

If you know that fly-tipping is illegally dumping waste "on the fly", then it's easier to see what BrE fly-posting means: putting up posters on the move—all over town. (Often, but not necessarily, illegally.) If you don't make the on the fly connection, you might think it's about posting (orig. AmE) flyers (late 1800s). But since flyer also comes from that same 'quickly, while moving' sense of fly, you're not far off.

From a Brighton & Hove News article "Council brings in new rules to tackle flyposting and stickering"

An earlier term for this is bill-sticking (late 1700s, esp. in 1800s), which one occasionally still sees in the UK, especially the agentive noun bill-sticker. We rarely call flyers or posters bills or handbills these days, but that's what they were from the late 1700s and into the 20th century.

While it's possible to find uses of fly-posting in the US, it's a much rarer term there. Instead of signs saying No Flyposting you might see a stencil(l)ed Post No Bills.

Post No Bills stencil, white on black wall, in foreground. Man cleaning pavement/sidewalk with hose and cityscape in background

(From Alex Westerman's essay about POST NO BILLS in New York City.)

For a while, it was funny to post pictures of Bills next to such stencils (or to add one's own):

Post No Bills, painted white on black wall, beside taped-up pictures of Bills that are famous to Pittsburghers, including Bill Murray and Bill Gates

from Pittsburgh Orbit

(This calls to mind my earlier post on POSTED signs in the US, also linked-to above. And my post re bills versus notes. Neither of these is terribly related to the issues in this post, but, hey, someone might be wondering.)

Another bill/Bill joke, seen in UK and Australia, responds to No Bill Posters signs.

Sign affixed to wall: BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Graffito beneath it: BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT

from Bill Posters Soundcloud

While you don't tend to see POST NO BILLS in the UK now, it does seem to have been used in the UK in the early 20th century. I've found a couple of these signs (now sold) on auction sites:

Battered metal sign, red with white lettering: G [crown graphic] R – POST NO BILLS

From GWRA auctions

An AmE informal term for (often illegal) postering is wheatpasting, after the paste used to fasten the posters so that they cannot be easily removed.

Labels: crime/punishment , idioms , signage , verbs | 15 comments

the fine/small print

Jul 13, 2025

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context:

GloWbE results showing fine:small in the phrase IN THE _____ PRINT at a ratio of 87:9 in US and 15:93 in UK.

GloWbE results showing fine:small in the phrase READ THE _____ PRINT at a ratio of 157:22 in US and 47:126 in UK.

Before we get into the how, when, and where of this, let's start with the what. There are three uses of the fine/small print to sort out, which arose in this order:

the original, literal meaning: printed characters that small in dimension and (relatedly/therefore) light in line thickness, and therefore difficult to read

e.g. I can't read such small/fine print without my glasses.
the extended meaning the fine/small print: supplementary text to a contract or other document that expresses terms and conditions, typically printed in a small/light font

e.g. They hid the extra penalty fees in the small/fine print.
more figurative uses (again with the): important, technical/non-obvious information that one might not have paid attention to, but that might have serious repercussions.

e.g. "The fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim." (Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)

In the literal sense 1, the OED has examples of small print all the way back to the 1500s; fine print only appears in 1761. All the first citations are from England, but all their examples of fine print from the 1850s onward are American.

In the extended sense 2 (from what evidence we have), the fine print shows up first—in an American case-law reporter in 1891. The small print is first found in a yachting manual published in London in 1900.

It's hard to say when these expressions got more figurative. The OED only gives a separate figurative sense 3 for fine print (first example, 1948) with just "also figurative" at sense 2 for small print. It's a bit annoying that the two are treated differently, but it appears to be because the figurative examples of fine print in AmE are just more figurative. In the 'figurative' fine print examples, like the Obama one above, we're looking at deeds rather than words. But the not-really-about-print examples of sense 2 for small print involve language (if not print), as in this example from the Telegraph:

1971
Some interest attaches therefore to the ‘small print’ of the Queen's speech and how far it avoids firm undertakings on some of the more controversial measures.

So, to sum up, it looks like, for some reason, AmE liked the phrase fine print more than small print for the literal stuff, and then it added an extended meaning relating to contractual language. You can see the frequency of the phrase rising as it gets more uses—and the neglect of small print in the Corpus of Historical American English:

Then after the meaning was extended, it looks like it was calqued into BrE—which is to say BrE took the idea and put it into the more familiar phrasing small print.

I wondered whether there were broader differences in the use of fine in its 'slim, delicate' linear senses in AmE and BrE. I found a few things, but they don't add up to much of a picture:

fine line: consistently more AmE than BrE hits in singular
fine lines and wrinkles: This phrase had 3x more hits in BrE than AmE in GloWbE (2012–13), but only about 1/3 more in the more recent News on the Web (NoW) corpus. It's strongest in Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, though, so maybe it originated in advertising in Asia?
draw a fine line between (two similar things): The OED's first example of that is BrE in 1848; the GloWbE corpus now has more US examples than UK, but the numbers are very small.
fine-tip, fine-point (of a pen, etc.): much more AmE in GloWbE and NoW. (The number of hits for fine nib were tiny, but more in BrE. Fine-nibbed pen had more in AmE.)

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Labels: adjectives , idioms , law | 4 comments

in (one's) stride, at (a) pace

Nov 11, 2024

This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table, ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema/(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the wherewithal to support it, click!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelwithaclause/rebel-with-a-clause

Now back to our (somewhat) regularly scheduled grammar-gazing.

to take (something) in (one's) stride

Ellen asked on social media whether people say take it in stride or take it in one's stride:

When I see a split like that, I think dialects.

The version with a possessive pronoun, to take in one's stride, is the more British (and non-North American) version:

And the shorter version, to take in stride, is the North American:

The phrase is a metaphor from horse racing. As the OED defines it:

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

It seems to come from the UK in the early-mid 1800s, and then takes off in its possessiveless form in 1930s US. (The possessive-ful lines are low in the following graph because I had to choose just one possessive form to search—I chose his for the illustration because it's the most frequent in this phrase in Google Books.)

It's not clear to me whether AmE speakers back then were familiar with the racing expression. If not, then the expression might not have been recogni{s/z}ed as metaphorical, and therefore might be more likely to change.

But then again, I'm not sure the possessive is absolutely needed—you wouldn't take something in someone else's stride. So maybe Americans dropped the possessive in both literal and metaphorical usage. A horsey person might have to tell us.

at (a) pace

At pace (meaning 'moving fast') is a similar expression—a prepositional phrase involving a noun that alludes to walking—and it has no possessive or other word introducing it. But that doesn't help us explain the American loss of the possessive in in stride, since at pace is a more British and much more recent expression.

An older version has the indefinite determiner: at a pace. That's found in similar numbers in AmE and BrE. And then there's the very old (Middle English) expression apace, which means much the same thing and sounds much like at pace. It's possible that at pace is an eggcorn for apace, or that it's at a pace without the a, or maybe it's a bit of both—i.e. different people have come to the same form from different angles.

why?

So we have two phrases that originally had a determiner* (a possessive pronoun or an article) between a preposition and a noun for a stepping action, and in just one place (but not the same place) the expression has been getting shorter. Why? Well, the basic answer is: language changes and it doesn't ask anyone's permission. If it changes in one place it doesn't need to change in the other. And for set phrases like this, change is likely to be piecemeal. Just because one phrase loses its determiner, doesn't mean all such phrases will.

Since these expressions have got(ten) more and more figurative over the ages (referring to properties like ease and speed, rather than literal steps or paths), the determiners have had less and less work to do. Since they are unstressed syllables, they're easy to swallow up. So, if they go, we might not miss them, and if they stay they probably won't bother us. C'est la parole.

*You'll see above that OED calls these things possessive adjectives. I don't. They act more like determiners (e.g., a(n), the and this) than like adjectives like good or corporate.

Labels: determiners , idioms , metaphor , prepositions | 9 comments

Bedfordshire, the hay, and the sack

Apr 21, 2024

Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to bed, where they've come from and who uses them now.

to Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire, a county north of London, has been a humorous synonym for bed since the 17th century.

Here's what the OED has (in an entry last edited in 1887):

Humorously put for bed.

1665

Each one departs to Bedford-shire And pillows all securely snort on.

C. Cotton, Scarronnides 19

1738
Faith, I'm for Bedfordshire.
J. Swift, Complete Collection of Genteel Conversation 214

This seems not to have made any inroads to AmE. Here are go to Bedfordshire and off to Bedfordshire in Google Books. Of course some of them might literally be about going to the county where Luton Airport is, but it's pretty likely that most are the idiom.

Hit the hay

From Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (via Bad Robot)

Liberman says "the phrase seems to be an Americanism". The OED defines hit the hay and roll in the hay but its earliest citation for hay in this sense is crawl into the Hay (1903); the first hit the hay they have is from 1912 (though, of course, it probably existed in speech much earlier). They also have leaving the hay (P. G.Wodehouse, 1931—English, but a great user of Americanisms) and being great in the hay (Norman Mailer, 1959). This all gives the sense that the hay might have been a more agile synonym for bed than it is today, when most of us are not so used to thinking of hay as mattress material.

Though still more used in AmE, hit the hay is no longer foreign to BrE.

Hit the sack

Sack was a synonym for bed much earlier than hay (1829 first citation). The OED says of sack:

(a) A hammock; a bunk; (b) a bed; frequently as the sack; to hit the sack: see hit v. II.11c. slang (chiefly U.S.; originally Navy).

Hitting the sack doesn't show up in citations till 1943, though, so it was probably influenced the use of hit in other expressions like hitting the hay. Its US/UK usage pattern looks much like hit the hay's:

And others?

I was interested to learn that turn in is from the 17th century and, it seems, originally nautical slang. It comes from a time when sailors slept in hammocks rather than bunks—not sure if that's related. Going that far back, it's common to both Englishes. (Go to) beddy-bye(s) is also found in both Englishes in similar numbers. The first OED citation is from Australia in 1901.

Labels: idioms | 26 comments

second-guess

Feb 18, 2024

Image from here

At the Bavard Bar in St Leonard's a few months ago, a Bavardier asked me if I'd noticed the difference between the US and UK meanings of second-guess. I hadn't! She felt that the US meaning was overtaking the UK meaning, but whose meaning is really whose?

Here's what Oxford Languages says:

Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more second-guess verb 1. anticipate or predict (someone's actions or thoughts) by guesswork. "he had to second-guess what the environmental regulations would be in five years' time" 2. NORTH AMERICAN criticize (someone or something) with hindsight. "juries are often reluctant to second-guess doctors"

But more than the one meaning is North American. The Oxford English Dictionary lists it, in any meaning, as 'originally and chiefly North American', with evidence of the 'anticipate' sense form 1941 and of the 'judge' sense from 1946.

It looks like only the first of those meanings ('anticipate by guesswork') initially went to the UK, while that meaning perhaps lost steam in the US. The American Merriam-Webster dictionary lists the 'criticize' meaning first.

For me, 'judge with hindsight' doesn't capture how I use second-guess. Here's me using it in The Prodigal Tongue, talking about the acts of faith we need to take in communicating:

when you’re talking with people from other places, you cannot second-guess every noun and verb you utter.

If we use a substitution test to see which of the definitions above fits with it, it's not very satisfying.

you cannot anticipate every noun and verb you utter.
you cannot judge with hindsight every noun and verb you utter

Neither seems to me to capture what I meant, which was something more like:

you cannot spend time doubting and re-thinking every noun and verb you utter

This sense of 'doubt' seems to come through when second-guess is used with a reflexive (-self) pronoun, as in I spend too much time second-guessing myself and, it turns out, there are about 2.5 times more second-guessing of oneself in the American part of GloWbE corpus as in the British part:

Results table from GloWbE corpus shows 48 US instances of 'second-guess* *self', 19 GB instances

Wiktionary's definition might be more in line with my intuitions of the meaning.

(idiomatic) to vet or evaluate; to criticize or correct, often by hindsight, by presuming to have a better idea, method, etc. quotations ▼
Please don't try to second-guess the procedure that we have already refined and adopted.
Once she began listening to her instincts and didn't second-guess herself the entire time, her artwork improved noticeably.

Their use of the originally BrE verb to vet seems to capture what I meant in my sentence: 'One cannot vet every noun or verb for its dialect-appropriateness before it comes out of one's mouth.' I'm betting this usage has arisen by 'contamination' from a similar, but centuries-older phrase: have second thoughts about.

That's not to say I always use it in the 'vetting' way. Here's an example from an email I sent, replying to a question of whether students would like to join the staff in a reading group:

I don't think we should second-guess whether students would want to do it; I think we should just invite them.

This one has more the 'anticipate' sense. I don't think I picked that up in the UK. Rather, I think the phrase does more than one thing for AmE speakers.

So, is my fellow Bavardier right that things are changing in the UK? Let's look in the News on the Web corpus, since that covers the past 14 years, whereas the GloWbE data were from 2012. Using the same search string as I used in GloWbE (second-guess* *self), there is still 2.5 times more in the US subcorpus than in the British subcorpus. If we just search for second-guess* (without the *self), it's 2.2 times more in the US.

But we can see it really picking up in BrE since 2017:

Now corpus results table shows single-figure 'second-guess* *self' results until 2017, low double figures after.

So it feels kind of 'new' in BrE. But while it's older in AmE, there's certainly a great increase in its use in the past few years. Perhaps it's that increase in the US that's allowed it to be picked up in the UK:

Rather than me second-guessing your thoughts on this, why don't you just tell us in the comments?

Labels: idioms , verbs | 23 comments

go west/south

Dec 18, 2022

Jim recently (ish) wrote to ask me about this line he read in Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz:

At the time, I hadn’t completed a deal with the BBC and the whole thing could have gone west.

Jim wondered about that gone west, which seemed to be equivalent to AmE gone south.

Twenty-some years in the UK, and I hadn't knowingly encountered that meaning of go west. But it's definitely out there.

Cambridge Dictionary gives the sense that Horowitz probably intended, and marks it as "UK informal".

Labels: idioms , music | 21 comments

fit for purpose / fit to purpose

Aug 14, 2022

So I tweeted this recently...

Difference of the Day: I seriously cannot believe that I've never done BrE 'fit for purpose'. Thanks for suggesting it @MHanson62. What to give for an AmE equivalent? Nothing so well used... #DotD pic.twitter.com/u2flTPlXZt
— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) July 13, 2022

(click on it to get the whole picture from Twitter)

Here's another view of how much more fit for purpose is used in BrE, and how relatively recent it is:

(click to enlarge)

But then Stephen P wrote to point out this tweet by an American with fit to purpose:

In searching for that tweet on Twitter, I discovered other Americans writing fit to purpose. Their numbers are dwarfed by the number of BrE speakers saying fit for purpose, but it's an interesting development!

The moral of this story: prepositions change easily. That's because prepositions don't have much meaning in themselves.

This one doesn't seem to have shown up yet on Ben Yagoda's Not One-Off Britishisms, but then again, is it a Britishism in the US? Did Americans pick up fit for purpose and change the preposition, or did they pick up the rarer to and make it their own? There's the second moral of this story: calling something a "Britishism" or an "Americanism" is a complicated business. (And if you want to know how complicated, I have a book to sell you...)

Labels: Britishization , idioms , prepositions | 22 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK