Separated by a Common Language

It's been too long since I've posted here. And it will be a bit longer still. I'm currently in the US doing a tour of dictionary archives as part of my research for some on-going projects. Since I have limited time here, I'm working in the evenings to prep for the days in the archives.


But I did want to let you know about some podcasts that I don't think I've mentioned here on the blog.

Helen Zaltzman, for her Allusionist podcast, interviewed Rachele de Felice and me about our research on please and we had such a good time talking that we just kept on doing it. So, on her following podcast, she included some of our discussion about thank you.

Click here for Allusionist 33: Please

Click here for Allusionist 34: Continental (including thank you)

For more of me talking about polite words, click on the 'politeness' tag at the bottom of this post.


And this was longer ago, but I also appeared on the Relatively Prime podcast talking (again) about maths. Click here for that. 

Upcoming talks:
The Boring Conference, 7 May, London (sold out, sorry! but thrilled to be boring enough to be chosen for it)
Society for Editors and Proofreaders 27th annual conference, 11 Sept, Birmingham.

Another post will come soon-ish!

Being a parent has opened my eyes to differences I probably wouldn't have otherwise noticed. Not so much because of interactions with my English child, but because of the situations in which I see English parents. I have already noted the well done/good job divide, which was very apparent at preschool level. Nowadays, I have to interact with other parents while taking Grover to school (in BrE, I'm doing the school run).

In the 500 meters/metres between our house and the school, we face a constant stream of parents (known and slightly known) heading in the other direction. (Yes, we're always among the last to arrive. Neither G nor I are morning people.) And, minus conversation between Grover and me about who has the smallest hands in her class, here's approximately how the school run went:

Hello_Kitty

Evie's dad*:  Good morning.
Me:  Hello!
Rosie's dad: Morning!
Me: HELLo!
Somebody's (BrE) mum: G'morning!
Me: helloooooo
Me: Hello!
Teacher at the gate: Morning!

*These people may have actual names. I may even know some of them. But your own name shrivels in relevance when you are a parent.

I said the only hellos and everyone else said a variation on good morning. I've two things to say about that:

1. Hello originated in the US in the early 19th century, and though the British use it plenty (--as adverb, mostly AmE) these days, I wonder if in Britain it may retain a tinge (just a [AmE] smidgen! a tiny, tiny, tiny bit!) more of its etymological link with surprise. Oh, hello! Hallo, halloa, hullo were British, but came a bit later than hello in AmE--first OED cite is by Charles Dickens--a year before he started travel(l)ing in the US. Hello only really got going as a greeting after the invention of the telephone, and that spread its use to the UK and elsewhere. For more on its forms and etymology, see the Online Etymology Dictionary.
   
   
2. I feel like, where I'm from (western NY state), one only really says good morning right after someone gets out of bed. It's something you say to people who are still in their pajamas/pyjamas, before they've had their coffee. When it's directed at me by members of my family (for it's only usually your family who sees you in your (AmE) pj's/(BrE) jim-jams), one hears a good dose of sarcasm, as in "Isn't it nice of you to join the waking world three hours after the rest of us got up?".  I might be able to imagine a telemarketer saying good morning to me on the phone, and I see people using it to start the day on social media, but I doubt I'd hear it much from colleagues or people I pass on the street.
   
   I tweeted about this this morning, and I've had some Americans agree that good morning is something you say only to people with noticeable (orig. AmE) bedhead (from Arizona, New Mexico, [?] Sussex), and others not (all in the midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Missouri). I was willing to bet there would be regional variation in this--but Midwest wasn't a region I was betting on. (I lived in central Illinois for five years, and I don't recall feeling affronted or surprised by many people's good mornings, but I was a (AmE) grad student, so maybe I only got up in the afternoons.)  Many aspects of manners are more 'British-like' in the US South, and in areas where there's a lot of Spanish, there might be (what linguists call) interference from buenos dias. But since the people agreeing with me come from very Spanish-influenced areas, perhaps not. The New Mexico tweeter summed up how I'd react:

@lynneguist oh gosh definitely true for me. if someone tells me "good morning", my first thought is "wow, I must look like I just woke up"

— Manuel Fernandez (@maf654321) March 11, 2016

I started this post when it was still morning, but now it's not, so I've moved on to thinking about good day. If I hear it in my head, it's in a sort of brusque RP accent. Good day, old chaps!  But when I look for it with punctuation on either side in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find it occurs at a 4-times-greater rate than in the British National Corpus. (The Corpus of Historical American English tells us it's been dying out since the 19th century. Perhaps hello is to blame--though good day is used for both 'hello' and 'goodbye'.) This is a lesson for those who insist that such-and-such a word is "used by Americans/Britons because I can hear the accent in my head". Your head is unreliable.  (This was the subject of an online debate I had recently--which I'll probably blog about soon.) Our preconceptions about our language can be a lot stronger than our factual knowledge about it.

I'll leave you with this, which is now stuck in my head, and which my mother used to sing in some perverse effort to make me less grumpy in the morning. You can imagine how well that worked on teenage me.

I've been meaning to blog about the British greeting All right?* or You all right? in part because I wanted to get feedback on whether I'm responding correctly, since it is something that flummoxes Americans (and New Zealanders too, it seems). Then this happened in my Intercultural Communication class on Friday:

I was talking about the different parts of a conversation, starting with the opening, and mentioning along the way some of the ways in which the rituals differ in different cultures. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Like the British greeting All right? That confuses Americans--we don't know how to respond.

American Exchange Student: Wait, how do you respond?

Me: Let's try.  (addressing a group of English students in one corner)  All right?

English students (as one):  All right.

English student 1:  You know, it's like if Americans said You okay?

AmExSt: No, it's not. If you say You okay? to me, it means you think I look lost or upset and you're offering to help. So all these people have been saying You all right? to me and I've been thinking "What am I doing wrong? Why do they think I'm lost?"

[sound of a number of pennies dropping (variation on a BrE expression)]



So, it turns out that my strategy of replying All right or All right, and you? is acceptable. Phew.

A difference related to these different interpretations of you all right/okay? is that if you look lost in public in the US, someone will almost certainly come up to you and offer their help/directions (possibly with You okay?). In my experience, all you have to do in New York is open a map, and some local will ask to help.  (I recall this happening on a subway platform and Better Half exclaiming that that would never happen in London.)

In the south of England, if you're lost and want help, you generally have to (get up the courage and pick the right stranger and) ask for help. Or stay lost, which may be preferable. An exception to this generalization would be if the stranger had some official role that makes it acceptable to address someone and offer help. It's not that help is never offered, but you certainly can't count on it. I would not be surprised to hear that this is less true in other parts of the UK, since one thing the southerners have a reputation for is not talking to strangers.


It feels to me like All right? as a greeting is getting more and more common--though the OED has examples of it going back to 1868. (Maybe I was just oblivious to it for a while.) It also feels somewhat masculine to me. I think far more men greet me this way than women, and it is often  followed by the mostly masculine address term mate:  All right, mate?  There may be generational things going on here too--perhaps younger people of both sexes use it more? (Let me know.)




*A lot of people on the internet are writing this as Alright? Not how the dictionaries spell it--and, of course, a frequent misspelling in a lot of contexts.

I've been to two conferences in the past two weeks, presenting studies on British and American use of the word please. It was a blog post here that inspired this new research direction: three years ago I posted about whether one says please when ordering in restaurants (click that link for lots of discussion!). If you read the comments at that post, you'll see Americans saying things like 

Please winds up feeling impolite with people that you don't have the right to order around, ie anyone other than your children.

and British commenters saying things like 

not saying please makes it sound like a lord giving an order to his butler

--that is, Americans saying please sounds bossy and Brits saying 'you have to say please, or else you'll sound bossy'. The conference papers will turn into one or two journal articles (eventually!). In the meantime, the two studies brought up so many little factoids about please that I could do at least a half a dozen blog posts on them. Let's start with one and see how I go.

This one comes from the work I'm doing with Rachele De Felice of the Survey of English Usage at University College London and that we presented at the Corpus Linguistics 2015 conference. We're looking at requests (1,350 of them in total) in two corpora of corporate emails, one from a British company that will remain anonymous, and the other from an American company you might have heard of. We found, as others have in other data, that twice as many British requests as American ones include please. What's more, in British English please is particularly often used in requests that do not involve much of an imposition--things like please don't hesitate to call if you need assistance, please note that tomorrow is a holiday or please accept our congratulations. They have the form of an imperative sentence (do this!), but the recipient is not actually asked to do much of anything; instead, they're offered something (help, information, congratulations).

This brings us to one of the types of please-imperatives found in the email data: please find attached and its relatives please find enclosed and please find below. There were 20 of these in the British data and two in the American data — all of them with please. So, not only do we have far fewer American please find attached's, we don't have any please-less find attached's. Surely British corporate emailers don't attach documents 10 times more often as American ones do?

The mystery of the missing find attached's is solved when we consider that this is another case where the "command" isn't really much of a command at all. There's no need to boss around the other person to go about finding things, since the sentence is just communicating "I have attached a document for you". In fact, it would be just plain weird to put this into another request form like Could you please find the document attached? or I would be very grateful if you would find the document attached. This underscores that please find attached is not much of a request at all. It is instead a set phrase in imperative form that does a not-very-requesty job.

We found that American business people are actively discouraged from using this set phrase. Here is what the Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style by Bryan A. Garner has to say (highlighting added):





Garner goes on to cite sources from the 19th century onward (all of them American) that agree that please find enclosed is a horrible business-ism that should be avoided. My small forays into (the possibly smaller genre of) British business writing advice has not turned up anything at all about this phrase. (Let me know if you know of any advice in either direction.)

Whatever you think of please find attached, it creates problems for our comparative speech-act research. If we look at British imperatives in our email data and say "84% have please, while only 43% of American imperatives do", it looks like maybe the Americans are bossier--ordering people around without saying please. But that might not be the best way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is: British emailers often only say please because they've put messages into command form that American emailers might put into a declarative sentence. The imperative could be seen as more imperious (or at least officious) than putting the same message into a declarative sentence.

And with that, I'll leave you with a British please sign that Peter Austin posted in the week of our presentation:

One of the fun things that you can do with the GloWBE (Global Web-Based English) corpus is ask it to compare collocations (words that regularly go together) across varieties of English. The software does a statistical evaluation so that you can see which collocations are most typical of a particular variety of English in comparison to another. So for instance, if you ask it about words that come before tea in the British and American parts of the corpus, you learn that the top-three most American (and least British) collocates are GOP ('Grand Old Party', i.e. the Republican party), Republicans, and conservatives (because of the Tea Party movement), and the three most British/least American are cream, cuppa and vintage.
All that explanation is just prelude to the difference I want to point out.

I'd seen Susan Waters' paper in Journal of Pragmatics "It's rude to VP [verb phrase]: the cultural semantics of rudeness", in which she looked at which verbs follow rude in Australian English (gathered via Google searches). You'd have to collect data that way to get enough for any real study of what's considered rude in a culture, as there aren't enough examples in existing corpora to make solid conclusions about such things. Nevertheless, I read Waters' paper and immediately went to GloWBE to see what's rude in the UK and US.

I asked GloWBE to compare which words come immediately after rude to in  British and American web-based writing. While I'm really interested in the verbs, I couldn't just search for verbs after rude to because the software said there was too little data. So, here are the words that come after rude to in AmE (left) and BrE (right).


In the columns, TOKENS 1 = the number found in American websites, TOKENS 2 in British. PM stands for 'per million', so the first row of the left table says that there are .06 examples of rude to him per million words in the American data, but .03 per million in the British.  Green ones disproportionately belong to that dialect, and red (or pink) are found less than would be statistically expected. White are found frequently but not statistically differently in both dialects.

We can debate whether there's anything worth saying about the hims and hers--it might just be an accident of the corpus. The words her and him are not found at particularly different rates in the two corpora, so it's not that British people talk about women more than Americans do. The you is  interesting, because it's usually used sympathetically and/or in giving people (possibly uninvited) advice (e.g. If he IS a jerk and rude to you and everyone around you, get out of there). A more American thing to do? Very possibly.

But what I'm really interested in are the two verbs in these tables. According to this data set, the most British-and-not-American rude thing to do is to ask something and the most American-and-not-British rude thing to do is to say something. This goes along with some stereotypes (and even serious analyses) of British and American differences in what is considered 'polite', and so I found it interesting.

In British culture, much more information is considered 'private' and 'personal' than in American, so you don't ask people about themselves or tell them about yourself at anything like the rate that Americans would. (Recall this earlier post about giving or asking for names.) Here are some examples from the GloWBE data:


Of the 21 British rude to ask examples, at most three or four are asking for things or favo(u)rs (e.g. rude to ask to borrow a tool). The others are about asking for personal information. The American rude to ask examples (11 unique examples--plus one duplicate) are also mostly about information (two favo(u)rs). In a couple of the American information-asking cases, it's not rude to ask something, but it's rude to ask it in front of an audience (rude to ask personal questions in public).

Meanwhile, in the typically-American rude to say examples, we have:

it would be rude to say " white people, ”

I think it was really rude to say that people who liked it have low standards

If you have something rude to say about it keep it to yourself

it's rude to say non-curvy women look like little men.

...which gives the impression that Americans feel that people should rein in their opinion-giving or their pigeonholing of people in order to not make anyone feel different or bad. There were 25 American and 15 British rude to says with two of the British ones being rude to say no and another one being rude to say you don't want something. The American data didn't have any such 'rude to refuse' examples.

So that amused me. How about you? It would be rude not to comment on this blog post.

I did two potentially (probably orig. AmE as adjective) fun things recently: I was interviewed for a famous (in one country) radio (BrE) programme/(AmE) show and I (BrE) went to the pictures and saw The Imitation Game. Potentially fun, and mostly fun, but not without worry and embarrassment.

Let's start with the (orig. AmE) radio. I've done a few such things, and in the past I have prepared. I asked producers 'is there anything you can predict I'll be asked?' and I made notes of things I thought would come up. Then the interviewer never wants to talk about what the producer said they would want to talk about, and I think "Why did I bother to prepare?"

This time, it was all very mysterious. The producer contacted me, and I only knew which broadcaster he worked for. He didn't tell me which show/programme it was for, nor who the interviewer was, just that it was going to be about the flow of words between US and UK. The mystery may have had something to do with the fact that the segment was being prepared as a surprise for another radio (BrE) presenter. But I just went with the mystery. I asked no questions other than where and when to show up and I did no preparation because it's so often wasted.

What I should have done, what I should always do, was to make a list of common topics on the blog (the Words of the Year, the things that have got the most comments, etc.) so that it would be available to inspire me. This is what I did not do. I just showed up at the BBC Sussex studios, put on my headphones, and talked (more AmE) with/(AmE & BrE) to someone in another city.

And the first thing the interviewer said was "Quick! List Americanisms that have become common in British English!"  Dear Reader, I could have said movies, I could have said train station, I could have said Can I get a.... I could have said many, many, many things. But I choked. I said various things that have been in BrE so long that no one alive reali{s/z}es they're American, like belittle. I said awesome repeatedly. And then I said you're welcome, when used as a response to thank you. The interviewer was taken with that one.

Fast-forward a few days and I'm watching The Imitation Game, being slightly bothered by words and phrases coming out of characters' mouths that I don't think would have come out of wartime British mouths. But then Alan Turing/Benedict Cumberbatch says You're welcome in response to thank you, and I think: I lied on the radio.

Then I looked for my (more BrE in this use) bag, to get out a pen to write myself a note to look it up later. Then I couldn't find my bag under the seat. Then I spent the rest of the (more BrE than AmE) film wondering if I'd left my bag in the café (AmE) restroom/(BrE) toilet. Which is to say, I have no idea who won the war because my mind was elsewhere for the rest of the (orig. AmE) running time.

Is you're welcome an Americanism? 

One thing I can say for sure is that it's a recent-ism. (I'm talking only here about the response-to-thanks usage, which is different from its use in other contexts: welcomings, offers and invitations, e.g. you're welcome to join us.) The OED's first example of it as a response to thank you comes from 1907, then not another till 1960. All of these are British, but the OED can't always be trusted on this matter because it is based in the UK and historically got most of its materials from the UK. This is mostly a spoken phrase, so it could have had a nice life somewhere else before anyone at the OED noticed it.

Looking at the Corpus of Historical American English, the first you're welcome as response to thank you is from a 1909 story by Myrtle Reed:

"...Come, let's be friends. " He offered his hand. She put hers into it for a moment, then quickly took it away. He noted that it was very cold. " I must be going, " she said, keeping her self-control with difficulty, " Aunt Francesca will miss me. " " Thank you for coming -- and for bringing the violin. " " You 're welcome . Good-bye. " " Good-bye, Silver Girl. I hope you'll be happy. "

We're stuck with fictional uses because people weren't going around recording actual conversation quite yet, but certainly the 1907 British and 1909 American fictional uses must be reflecting something that was already going on in the spoken language. What's weird is that there's no particular evidence here of one place being first. At that point in our history, after independence but before wars and mass media brought us together, you'd think that linguistic innovations would be locatable in one place or the other. So here's a hypothesis: maybe the Irish started it and we were all following their cue.

Why did I think it was American, despite this lack of evidence?

(A) because I knew it was recent.
(B) because someone might've proposed it to me as an Americanism at some point, and I was recalling that.
(C) because you hear it more in AmE than BrE.

Reading around a bit on the topic now, I'm interested to see that several researchers (all cited in Schneider 2005) have found that English speakers are less likely to give a verbal response to thanks than speakers of other European languages and that British English speakers are the least likely of all to verbally respond to thanks with a 'minimizer' like no problem, my pleasure, or you're welcome. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that in Britain thank you/thanks is often used for purposes other than thanking, or maybe it doesn't. (It depends on how the research was done--and I don't have access to all of it at the moment.)

Karen Aijmer's 1996 book Conversational Routines in English makes this point about English speakers not always responding to thanks, but has a footnote "But note the high frequency of you're welcome in American English" (p. 78). Edmondson and House (1981:167) proposed that you're welcome should be label(l)ed as 'formal' in British English, "but definitely not in American, where this token is much more common".

I may be on to something with the Irish suggestion. After all, there were a lot (millions) of Irish people in the US by 1900. Looking online for equivalents of you're welcome in Irish, I find tá fáilte romhat, which seems to literally mean 'you're welcome'. One commenter thinks that might be an anglicism. But maybe it's the other way (a)round: maybe you're welcome is an Irishism in English (to use the technical term, a calque, or loan translation). I don't have the means to check this, but maybe an Irish speaker among(st) you does?

Furthermore, in Schneider's study of present-day responses to thanks (using a discourse completion task), the Irish use a lot more welcome responses than the English do. Not as many as the Americans, but still:

(Schneider 2005: 115)

(And let's just pause to note that the most common English response was the Americanism okay.)

So, I'm not sure if you're welcome is an Americanism or if its use in the Great Britain today is the effect of Americani{s/z}ation. I'm not feeling too bad about my panic-saying of it to the interviewer because, well, it is a much more American thing to say than British thing to say. And maybe it'll be edited out anyway.  Please, let it be edited out anyway.

(I'll update this with news of the mysterious interview once it's been broadcast.)


References

• Aijmer, Karen. 1996. Conversational routines in English: convention and creativity. London: Longman.
• Edmondson, Willis, and Julianne House. 1981. Let's talk and talk about it: a pedagogic interactional grammar of English. Munich: Urban & Swarzenberg. 
• Schneider, Klaus P. 2005. No problem, you're welcome, anytime: responding to thanks in Ireland, England and the USA.  In Anne Barron and Klaus P. Schneider (eds.), Pragmatics in Irish English. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.

I did a TEDx talk at Sussex University a few months ago, and now the video is on-line. The subject is being polite in the UK and US, and it focuses on British thanking and American complimenting. I'm teaching a new course on Intercultural Communication next term, and I think one of the first things I'll ask them to do is to critique my use of the word culture in that video (did I really use it that much?!). Of course, we can also critique my use of the terms British and American--as many people do when writing to me about the blog. And we will do that in my course too, though I don't do it much here just because I want to get on with the business of discussing the phenomena I want to discuss. (And if you're interested in my courses, here is the door in.)

The main, vain thing I want to say about the video is this: all the lighting on me is from below. You know, like you did with a (BrE) torch/(AmE) flashlight to yourself in order to tell scary stories at (AmE) slumber parties/(BrE) pyjama parties (also AmE pajama party--there is another blog post in this. I will do it next). I don't think I usually look this spooky. Please God, don't let me usually look this spooky.
(But if you want to see me looking spooky, I recommend watching this on YouTube, as the embedded version here cuts off the right side of the video.)




There's a lot more to say about thanking in particular, but what I mention at the beginning of the video, then never talk about at all, is please. There is a lot to say about please. There is a lot to research about please. I'm limiting myself here to talking about saying please when ordering in a restaurant--just because it's the place I notice it (and its absence) the most.

Now, when I first came to this country--and for a while after--I would hear British people claiming that Americans don't say please, and I would bristle. Of course we do! We are trained to add the magic word when we request things. We are nice people! I'm a nice person! And anyone who doesn't think so can have a sock in the eye.

But then I lived here a while and my family and friends started to come over and visit. They'd order food in restaurants and I'd hear how abrupt they sounded, leaving off the please. Then I noticed myself and my English friends at our weekly gossip pizza get-together. If I ordered first, then I'd notice that everyone else had said please and I hadn't. When my brother's family came to visit a few months ago, I couldn't stop myself adding please at the ends of their orders because they just sounded so terrible to me without them. And their orders were always without them. And my brother does not have a rude family.

(My bossy, corrective behavio(u)r was no doubt facilitated by being the parent of a preschooler--and the fact that I'm the big sister. As a parent, I try not to add the absent pleases, but to ask: Could you say that again in a nice way?)

But look, even on Sesame Street, where children are taught lessons about politeness, people order food without saying please. Mr Johnson here says I'd like a bowl of hot alphabet soup (with a bit of politeness marking in the I'd like). He could have instead said I'll have the alphabet soup.



Of course, it's not true that every British person always says please when they order food, but I definitely hear more pleases here. (On my visit to the US in July, I continued to add pleases after my brothers' restaurant orders, mostly in whispers to myself, just because it was driving me crazy.)

So, how can it be that Americans think of themselves as  polite when they fail to extend this common courtesy word?

Part of the story is touched upon in my TEDx talk. American interactions are generally aimed at creating/maintaining a sense of equality among the participants. My reading of what we're doing when we don't say please is that we don't really want to point out that we are making requests in these situations--to do so would be to acknowledge that the customer is in a more 'powerful' or 'statusful' position than the waiter. So instead of thinking of it as telling waiters what to do (here I'm quoting myself from Emphasis Writing's e-bulletin):

Americans regard ordering as providing the waiter with the information he needs to do his job.

On the other hand,

The British say please when ordering food in restaurants because they view the action as a personal request to the waiter.

Please unambiguously marks an utterance as a request (it is an IFID: Illocutionary Force Indicating Device). Other means of softening requests involve making the request less obviously a request. Could you bring me a salad? is literally a question about someone's ability; I'll have the salad is a statement of my intentions; I'd like the salad is a description of my mental state. They give the requestee a plausible way around dealing with the request (e.g. Could you...? Not in these heels; I'd like..., Ooh, so would I. ). Not that they would refuse. But hiding a request in another type of speech act is a way of being polite, and that hiding is kind of cancel(l)ed out if an IFID like please is added to say "Look at me! I'm ASKING YOU TO DO SOMETHING FOR ME!"  

Please thus ends up not feeling right in some American contexts. Ben Trawick-Smith discussed this at his Dialect Blog:

while ‘thank you‘ is still important to civilized discourse, I find that ‘please‘ has almost the opposite effect in American English. It can make a question sound urgent, blunt, and even downright rude.

I'm sure people working in service industries in touristy places will have tales of cross-cultural request behaviour. Please let us know about them!

P.S. I've remembered that I've written about something related, so (please) see also: making suggestions.

P.P.S. (12 September) Various pictures of signs like this are making their way round Facebook. Maybe this is what's needed in the UK, so that tourists learn the lingo without some of the rude interventions described in the comments section!



P.P.P.S. To see all comments for this post, please click on the 'load more' link at the bottom of the comments.

Here is a favo(u)rite passage of mine from Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette:

Don’'t ever introduce yourself. The “Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama” approach does not go down well in British pubs. Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness. If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible. Sorry, but that'’s how it is. The British quite frankly do not want to know your name, or shake your hand – or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established (like maybe when you marry their daughter). You will have to adopt a more subtle, less demonstrative approach.

In her book Watching the English (which I don't have with me at the moment--so this is from memory), Fox quotes the reaction of an American couple who were clearly upset and puzzled by this British behavio(u)r. They felt that it was some kind of cruel game for the British to withhold that basic information about themselves. The thing to understand here is this: the British sense of personal privacy is very different from the American one. Asking someone's name, even implicitly by offering yours, is a premature violation of that privacy until some goodwill has already been established between you.

I observe this all the time on the playground. The British parents strike up conversations, and may ask about each other's children's names (which they can then use to encourage their children to play together), but they don't introduce themselves. If you've got(ten) along very well, then maybe--but probably not the first time you've met--you might say 'By the way, I'm [your name here]' before you part company. Maybe.

I saw Better Half speak on two occasions with the mother of a little girl who is close to Grover's age. After the first time, he said "I think she might be someone I worked with years ago." Only at the end of the second (long) conversation did they do the "By the way, I'm..." thing, at which point they discovered that they had worked together and both had recogni{z/s}ed each other, but were afraid to approach the topic in case they were wrong. Contrast this to me meeting another American at a party--within five minutes we've established our names, where we're from, who we work for, and several points of common experience--places we've both been and people we've met who the other might have met. And I am an awkward American. I hate small talk. But establishing these similarities is de rigueur for American conversation (recall our previous discussion of compliments). Because I am awkward, and hyper-aware of certain interactional markers of foreignness in British conversations, I am completely tongue-tied on the playground. I know how not to start a conversation in a British context, but I consider the most common acceptable ways to start a conversation (commenting on the weather or the busyness of the playground) too boring/obvious to start with, so I get stuck.*

It was reassuring, then, to see some quantitative research backing up my own impressions and Fox's observations in Klaus Schneider's new (in-press) paper 'Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English' in the Journal of Pragmatics. Schneider compared the openings of small-talk conversations between teens at parties in Ireland, the US, and England. The majority of English teens (56.7%) start with a greeting only (e.g. Hi), while Americans prefer greeting + identifying themselves (60%) and sometimes explicitly asking for the other person's name. The Irish teens prefer greeting + what Schneider calls an 'approach' (73.3%), in which they refer to the context and evaluate it (almost always in a positive way). His example of an approach is Great party, isn't it?**

Looking at the elements of an opening separately, Americans are more likely to introduce themselves than to greet you with a hi or hello.  In the graph below DISC-ID means 'disclose identity'--i.e. introduce yourself.


(The figure is about a subset of the data, so the numbers don't match the more general analysis of the data in my earlier paragraph. The numbers don't add up to 100% because there are other things you might do besides these three--but these are the most frequent.)

While the data is from teens, it feels pretty representative of what adults do.

So, please, go to some parties and experiment with this and report back here. Just don't do your experiments on me. I'll be standing in the corner, pretending to notice something remarkable in my drink, trying to avoid all the pitfalls of small talk.

And in other news: 

• I've been pathetic about blogging here, haven't I? So I completely didn't deserve to be in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top 25 Language Bloggers this year, and I wasn't. (For the first time. I feel duly punished!) But have a look at the link for the good ones.
• The voters and the judges were kind to my Twitter account (even though they didn't identify me by my Twitter handle in the voting--it was strange). I made it to #9 there. Here's the full list.
• But I haven't been completely neglecting my writing-about-AmE/BrE vocation. Since the last blog, I've talked at TedXSussexUniversity on American/British politeness norms and at Horsham Skeptics in the Pub. I'll link to the TedX talk when it's on-line. The SitP talk is reviewed here. But don't read the review if you want to see me give the talk (too many spoilers!). I'm doing it again at the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub in October. A few other things are in the pipeline...

*In a cross-cultural communication course I used to teach, one of the readings was about Finnish culture, and the point that really stuck with me was that Finns are often puzzled (or maybe annoyed) by English speakers' need to state the obvious. Why say Nice weather!, for instance, when everyone can see what the weather's like? It made Finland sound like some kind of anti-small-talk Nirvana that I'd want to live in, but it's also made me super-critical of myself when I interact with Finns. There is no hope for me--I am awkward in every culture.

** Schneider also notes the predictability of the Great party! line:

Great is clearly preferred by speakers of IrE, but speakers of AmE make use of a wider range of lexical items. These include great, good, nice, especially cool and also fun, as, e.g.in Fun party, huh?

I'll put the little bits before the big piece, just so they don't get lost. Here are a couple of things I've meant to tell you about and another waste of space on a certain journalist's take on Americanisms.


Introduction to British small talk, for Americans
I've done a guest post at the Macmillan Dictionary blog on this topic. Please have a look and share your experiences! 


Find me on Facebook
I now have a Facebook page as 'Lynneguist', which serves as a mirror for my Twitter feed, on which I post the Difference of the Day, links to things of AmE/BrE interest, and commentary on my day-to-day experiences as a linguist-emigrant-immigrant. (And you can leave comments too.) So, if you like that kind of thing, come and "like" me! 


Anti-Americanismism, part 3
I see (thank you readers!) that Matthew Engel is at it again complaining about Americanisms in BrE (and using some in order to do so), this time in the Financial Times.  His main point, that BrE is special and that Britons should care about keeping it distinct from AmE, is not without merit.  But since his focus is on vocabulary, he's missing the fact that there's no evidence of BrE and AmE becoming closer in more systematic ways--i.e. grammar and pronunciation.  In fact, the English (in both senses) dialectologist Peter Trudgill has written (in a paper I cited back here) that the two nations are actively diverging in pronunciation and that there is very little evidence of any grammatical changes.  BrE is by its nature a lexical magpie, and that's something worth acknowledging and celebrating too. (Just look at all the Australianisms in it, Mr Engel!)

Engel wisely keeps his FT article at the general-polemical level, since he's (I hope) discovered that getting into details gets him into trouble. But here's his reaction to the linguists reacting to his post:

What did surprise me was the angry reaction to my talk from American bloggers and blowhards – that’s an Americanism, but a useful one – some calling themselves lexicographers, all of whom seem able to study dictionaries but with no sense of the spoken language, certainly not here in Britain. I once got mailbombed over a column by the National Rifle Association, but their members were actually far more civil and sensible than this lot. 

In the aftermath of my programme I am now being regularly abused as anti-American, or worse. Rubbish (or trash). I lived there, have many friends there; I adore baseball.

Wow, we've got it all here.  The hypocrisy: Americanisms in BrE are OK if they're useful (but I get to decide which are useful). The passive-aggressive taunt: "some calling themselves lexicographers". The downgrading of academic research and the failure to acknowledge that some of the critics are British, living in the UK. The "some of my best friends are... and I love their culture" defen{s/c}e". And, best of all, we seem to have here a parallel to Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: claiming your critics are worse than the NRA.

But the unforgivable sin in Blogland is not to link to or at least mention the alleged lexicographers (like editor-of-at-least-five-dictionaries, Grant Barrett or Oxford dictionaries/Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, or, you know, moi, who's more of a lexicologist, but who has lexicographed every once in a while). And here I am giving Mr Engel more free publicity. What a (orig. AmE) sucker I am.

I'm at the conference of the International Pragmatics Association in Manchester (UK) this week, and I was interested to see that there's a poster in the poster session (which is already posted, though the session's not till tomorrow) on directive speech acts in AmE and BrE. 'Directive speech act' means an utterance that is intended to get someone to do something. Being an impatient sort, I've looked up the author of the paper, Ilka Flöck of Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, and found an earlier paper by her on another aspect of the issue. The PDF is here, if you'd like to read it yourself.

The British (and English people, more specifically) are often stereotyped as being very indirect in their style--that is, implying their meanings rather than saying exactly what they mean. (The stereotypical British use of irony is a classic example of this--saying the opposite of what one means in order to implicate one's true meaning.) Americans, on the other hand, are often stereotyped as being very direct--brash or bossy, even.

So, what happens when people from these cultures make suggestions? For her study, Flöck defines suggestions as follows:

A speech act is understood as a suggestion when the following conditions apply:
- The speaker (S) wants the hearer (H) to consider the action proposed.
- S and H know that H is not obliged to carry out the action proposed by S.
- S believes that the suggestion is in the interest of H.
- S may or may not include herself in the proposed action  (Flöck 2011: 69)

Flöck looked for suggestions in two corpora of spoken English: the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and the British component of the International Corpus of English. Skipping to the end, she found that:

Apart from modest preferences for one or the other head act or modification strategy, no major differences between the two varieties could be observed. Unlike other speech acts, suggestions might therefore not have a strong potential for intercultural misunderstanding.  (Flöck 2011: 79; emphasis added)

That is, on the whole, the British and Americans do not differ in whether they prefer direct or indirect strategies for suggestions. What Flöck did find were some differences in how the indirect strategies are phrased, with the British modifying their requests more (using 'upgraders' and 'downtoners') and Americans relying more on the 'head' of the suggestion--the unadorned sentence and its verb phrase in particular.

Now, I do not want to claim that I am not bossy. I'm a first-born. I'm a teacher. Of course I'm bossy. But at the same time, I do not perceive myself as being anywhere near as bossy as a certain Englishman thinks I am. And I suspect that this might be because of some of the different preferences for phrasing Flöck noticed.  One difference was in the modal verbs used in suggestions. British speakers used more modals of obligation (should, shall), while Americans tended toward(s) can, but Americans also used more Why don't you...?  (Note: the fact that you say either is not counterevidence to this! Both cultures use all these strategies--but at different rates in the corpora.)

The British-preferred modals of obligation are considered by Flöck to be more direct.  That is, they're communicating the directive meaning: 'I think you should do this'. Can on the other hand, is (arguably--depending on how you like your modal verb analysis) ambiguous between a weak obligatory meaning and a capability meaning: i.e. 'you are able to do this and therefore you have the option to do it'. My question is: might should-preferers perceive can as too ambiguous for use in this context, or find its option-giving meaning to be insincere? Or am I basing too much of my hypothesi{z/s}ing on the fact that my husband thinks I'm bossy?

I can also see that Why don't you... might be perceived as bossy. It has no modal at all. It sounds like it's implying that the other person should have already thought of doing the suggested thing.

And I think (but these kinds of self-reportings are notoriously [BrE] dodgy) that I use can (e.g. Can you do it this way? You can try this.*) a bit and that I use Why don't you a lot more than BH would. And when he either automatically does the suggested thing or takes issue with me being bossy, I sometimes say: Wait a minute! It was just a question/suggestion! 

The British indirectness tends to come from the use of modifiers, such as with understaters like a bit, to begin with, for the moment and downgraders like just, perhaps, at least, maybe, probably. With these markers missing, no wonder British people (for it's probably more than just BH) find me bossy.

Because I'm away from my books and because it's hard to google research on US/UK interactions,** I haven't anything more hard-evidency to offer you about mutual stereotypes of bossiness or about suggestion styles. My suspicion is that Americans are more likely to expect negotiation to follow suggestions, whereas the British are more likely to expect compliance (possibly with a bit of griping about it afterwards--this fits with the British complaint culture: see this or this, for example). 

Flöck's paper here at IPrA compares her corpus results to what people do in the classic pragmatics research tool: the Discourse Completion Task (essentially, a written role-play).  And I'll just say, it looks like the DCT doesn't do very well.  Go Corpus Linguistics!

Before I leave, to the long-suffering Better Half: Happy Anniversary!


* Could is not in Flöck's modal comparison chart. I'm assuming that when she says can, she means can and not can/could, but I might be wrong about that. For me, could is much more natural in suggestions than can, and it's a bit more indirect).
** Because one gets everything on American-Chinese interactions that happen to cite something from the British Journal of Psychology and so on and so forth.

References
Flöck, Ilka (2011) "Suggestions in British and American English. A corpus-linguistic study." Paper presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society 2011 [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS], Göttingen, February 2011. 

Flöck, Ilka (2011) "‘Don't tell a great man what to do’: Directive speech acts in American and British English conversations." Poster presented at the 12th International Pragmatics Conference, Manchester, July 2011. 

Of course, I can't exactly remember the conversation that inspired this post. But as we were leaving a café, Better Half said  I'm not being funny, but Costa's coffee has really gone downhill.† And I thought: that's the British idiom I'm going to cover next, because there is just so much Britishness in it.

In fact, in a 2009 paper in Discourse & Society, Judith Baxter and Kieran Wallace describe a particular use of it as:

the typically British idiom ‘I’m not being funny’ [used] to downplay the effect of a sensitive or non-politically correct comment

The phrase I'm not being funny but occurs five times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and zero times in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (both at corpus.byu.edu). The material in the BNC is 20+ years old, and since the phrase seems to be on the rise, I would expect it to occur more often these days. In 2008, it made a BBC list of 20 most hated clichés. There, a 'Rosie Spectacle' comments that it's "usually followed by a highly irritating and officious remark." Let's see if that's true.

All the BNC examples come from the 17.8-million-word spoken part of the corpus:

1. I 'm not being funny but she can't stick up for herself, that girl can't
2. Giles won't tell me but he definitely knows the two people that've laid her. Oh aren't they lucky gits. And I think that I 'm not being funny but I think that Jim did one.
3. I 'm not being funny but I think that's actually maybe quite important, 
4. The contract sorry is very specific. I 'm not being funny but we're nitpicking now at the difference between [...] site instructions and V Os
5. And I 'm not being funny but when Malcolm did it, we would do that [a physical recount] almost two or three days after the stock taking if there were odd counts

Is I'm not being funny but preceding "sensitive", "irritating" or "officious" comments in each case? Well, it depends on what you are sensitive about. In some of these cases, there is clearly the potential for causing offen{c/s}e--for instance, in (1) the person might be saying something critical about a friend. In others, it's not clear that anyone would disagree with the statement, as in BH's comment about coffee, or in (3), a context in which all the interlocutors seem to be agreeing that it's important to be sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired at some event. In my experience, the minimal requirement for an I'm not being funny but prologue is that the speaker is expressing an opinion. The optimal contexts for using it are those in which the statement (a) could be interpreted as a complaint or a criticism or (b) might not be shared by everyone. In the coffee example, it was hardly the type of thing that would have offended me, so I was amused that he'd bothered to preface it in this way. But he still said it, he says, "So you won't think I'm petty. Out of some insecurity." It expresses a strange kind of plea to be taken seriously along with what seems like an implicit apology for having had an opinion.

This relates to various things that Kate Fox discusses in Watching the English. There are the "modesty rules"--i.e. cultural rules that enforce the appearance (but not necessarily the reality) of modesty and the importance of not seeming earnest, but instead always being ready to keep things light with humo(u)r. So, you have an opinion, but the need to appear modest means that you have to avoid sounding self-important. The avoidance of earnestness means that people are always ready to assume that you're joking if you seem het up* about something. So, what do you do if you want to state an opinion? You try to disguise it as a small fact ("she can't stick up for herself"), preface it with I'm not being funny but to signal that something controversial is coming, then let the listener fill in a lot of the opinion (e.g. 'she is weak and probably deserves what she gets if she won't stick up for herself'), so that you don't have to earnestly or controversially say it. 

I should say, one doesn't absolutely need the but in the phrase, but it's very often there. And we can say I'm not being funny to sincerely mean just that--for instance, as a protest when someone starts laughing after you've told them something sad. That's not the pre-emptive use--the 'let me put this negative opinion here' use--that one hears so much in the UK. That said, I think that in AmE, at least, one would be more likely in those more literal cases to say I'm being serious rather than the negated I'm not being funny. 

Blogger is acting very strange these days...I hope you'll be able to post comments below!

Postscript, the next morning:
I blogged in a rush last night, which isn't the best thing for working on something pragmatic.  Let me just add--the funny in I'm not being funny but can indeed (as some people have written to say) be read as the 'queer, peculiar' sense of the word. But that meaning is not unrelated to the 'humorous' meaning. It's best translated, I think, as 'I'm not trying to be difficult, but...'. But I do believe that the choice of funny in this phrase plays on this ambiguity--it's saying both 'I'm not making a joke' and 'I'm not being eccentric'. (Glad to see some comments are getting through--I know some others haven't. What's up with Blogger, eh**?)

† I belatedly found where I'd written down what BH said, so I've replaced my earlier 'the coffee is really disgusting' with the much more British understatement 'has gone downhill'. 'Has become disgusting to me' is what he meant though. This means I've also changed some further references to his statement. And, for the record, I like Costa's coffee and BH has been complaining about everyone's coffee lately...
* orig. BrE dialectal & AmE, now more common in BrE
** The eh is prevalent in Canadian English but also in my not-so-far-from-Canada AmE dialect.

I've been teaching a new course in Pragmatics this year, and this past week we ended it with a discussion of this article:

Jefferson, Gail (2002) Is ‘‘no’’ an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-83.

The author was an important name in conversational analysis and an American who lived for years in the Netherlands. In Dutch, it's common to use nee 'no' as an acknowledg(e)ment token, that is, something that you say to indicate that you've heard what your conversational partner has said. A negative token, like nee, would be used to acknowledge a negative statement.

Knowing about the Dutch nee, Jefferson decided to check how no is used as a minimal response in English, but when she started looking at a set of British conversational data, what she found didn't sit well with her own intuitions about how no is used as a conversational support. To find out why, she compared four sets of data: British doctors and patients, British 'civilians' (her term), American doctors and patients, and American 'civilians'.

Jefferson found that British civilians responded to negative statements with negative tokens 86% of the time, whereas American civilians did so only 27% of the time. British doctors did it 37% of the time, and American doctors not at all. American civilians most usually responded to negative statements with positive tokens like uh-huh, yeah (both originally AmE) and mm-hmm. So, American civilians use negative tokens at similar rates to British doctors (the 10 percentage-point difference is not statistically significant), and both of these groups use it far less than in everyday British conversation.

Jefferson next looked at whether British and American speakers use these nos for different things. She found that AmE speakers use no as an affiliative token, but not as just an acknowledg(e)ment token. That is to say, if an American says no in a conversationally supportive way (as opposed to using no more literally to disagree with the previous utterance) in response to someone's negative statement, they mean to show some empathy for the situation the speaker is describing. An affiliative token tells your conversational partner that you have not only heard them, but that you understand where they're coming from (orig. AmE). For instance, if I say I hurt my back and you say Awww, you'd be showing me that you've not only heard me, but that you feel my pain, as it were. Compare that to a simple acknowledg(e)ment token like mm-hmm, which would seem rather cold to say in such a circumstance.

BrE civilians used no as an acknowledg(e)ment token, where AmE civilians would have to use a positive form. To give a flavo(u)r of how this might lead to cross-cultural misinterpretation, here's a made-up example:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist: No...

If this were affliation, one would interpret my no as 'I know what you mean--that Matt is pretty bad about keeping in touch'. That would be the way an AmE speaker would probably use it.

But if it were just acknowledg(e)ment, then all I'd be saying is 'I heard you say that you haven't heard from Matt'. If I meant that, though, as an American, I'd have to say it a different way:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist [without lifting her eyes from New Scientist]: Uh-huh.

British me would be able to say no there without tearing myself from my magazine--but American me could not.

In their professional roles, BrE doctors seem to be careful to use no only for affliliation--that is, they don't use it for mere acknowledg(e)ment. It's possible that they do not use the negative form for acknowledg(e)ment because they need to be careful not to sound like they're affiliating when they're not. In Jefferson's data, American doctors don't even use it to affiliate--though there were some differences in the types of doctors in her two corpora, so I'm going to stop short of making any hypotheses about that.

So, I asked my students, what do you think happens when these cultures meet? The British shouldn't have much of a problem in understanding the Americans' affiliative use of no, since they use it affiliatively too. But the Americans aren't used to hearing it used as acknowledg(e)ment, and so should interpret it as affiliation. If that's the case, what will they conclude about the British? One of the students came up with the same perception that I have about what happens. (I'm eager to hear yours in the comments.) It's possible that the American would feel they'd been cut off. Once someone affiliates with you, they're essentially saying 'You don't need to explain this to me because I get it (orig. AmE)'. This whole business reminded me of my troubles with the BrE use of never mind.

To tell the truth, I'd never noticed [on a conscious level] the extra nos, in conversation with BrE speakers. But I recogni{s/z}ed the accuracy of Jefferson's observations as I started to think about it consciously--and I even thought that if I were to have imitated certain English acquaintances then I'd probably have been liberal with the interactional nos. I wonder if anyone out there has had any SbaCL moments courtesy of no. Do let us know!