Separated by a Common Language

Happy 4th of July, which, apparently, is a good enough name for a holiday, since EditorMark, over on Twitter, informed us today that:

“Independence Day” is more descriptive, but “Fourth of July” is the name given in the 1938 act that extended pay for the federal holiday.

Here at SbaCL Headquarters, we're more about co-dependence than independence, but in hono(u)r of the holiday, my Twittered Difference of the Day^TM was:

BrE 'the American War of Independence' vs. AmE 'Revolutionary War'.

In more formal contexts, I should add, you're likely to find American Revolution in AmE. 

But then I read this New York Times article (pointed out by Not From Around Here) in which the English historian author writes of the War of American Independence.  Oh no, I thought, I got it wrong.  Or did I?  Google gave me nearly ten times as many War of American Independences (1.3 million) as American War of Independences (144k).  Searching just .uk sites, the difference is still there: 69k American independences and 16k American wars. But it still didn't ring true for me, or, it turns out, at least one of my Twitter followers, so I re-checked it in the British National Corpus, which gives us (among its 100 million words) 23 American War of Independences and 3 War of American Independences.  Now, the BNC texts are from the 1980s and early 1990s, and of course most web text is later than that.  And the web is not a reliable corpus, since it isn't balanced between different types of texts and it includes a great amount of repetition.  But still, one has to wonder whether the adjective-placement tide has changed.

Incidentally, the (Anglo-American) War of 1812 is sometimes known as the Second War of American Independence.  It's one of those things that every American schoolchild will have to learn about, but  you'll be hard-pressed to find an English person who's heard of it.  Why? Well, the Americans won it, so they have the bragging rights, but more importantly, for the English, it was just an annoying thing that was going on in the colonies during (and as a consequence of) the Napoleonic Wars.  It'll be those conflicts that English schoolchildren will encounter (in year 8, according to the National Curriculum).

As an aside, revolutionary is typically pronounced differently in US and UK. In AmE it has six syllables: REvoLUtioNAry.  In BrE, it may drop the 'a' (revolution'ry) as part of a general pattern of reduction of  vowel+ry at the ends of words--thus it has one main stress (-LU-) and one secondary stress (RE-), unlike the two secondaries in AmE.  Also, in BrE 'u' may be pronounced with an on-glide (see this old post for explanation).  Both of those "BrE" pronunciation features are not found throughout BrE.  I'd consider them to be features of RP ('Received Pronunciation'), but I'm sure others (you, perhaps?) can comment better on geographical distribution.

I hope that wherever you are and whatever you're celebrating, you're having a lovely fourth of July.  I usually try to (orig. AmE) cook out to mark the day, but I discovered yesterday that our* (AmE) grill/(BrE) barbecue** has been murdered by scaffolders.  My beloved Weber! And this is how I came to celebrate American independence by eating a Sunday roast dinner complete with Yorkshire pudding and parsnips at a pub (with lime cordial and soda).  As I said, co-dependent, not independent.

*Oh, who am I kidding? It's mine. Vegetarian Better Half could not care less.
** I mark this as BrE because in AmE a barbecue is generally the event (this sense also found in BrE) or the food (as in I miss good barbecue--it is a mass noun, and particularly used in the South). When I say it refers to 'the food' I emphatically do not mean overcooked burgers and sausages, the scourge of British summer entertaining.  What constitutes barbecue varies regionally in the US--in some places it's specifically pork, in others beef.  And it will involve smoking and special sauces.  And it will be tender and tasty.  Where you are when you order some barbecue will in large part determine where on the sweet-to-spicy continuum the barbecue will fall.

I follow the Twitterings of the candidates for our House of Commons seat and today each had a tweet that went something like this:

Really enjoyed Older People's Council hustings. Some great questions & interesting answers!

I've heard the word husting(s) at  previous British election times, but this time felt the need to look it up.  Wikipedia tells me:

A husting (called a stump in the United States) originally referred to a physical platform from which representatives presented their views or cast votes before a parliamentary or other election body.

We then have metonymic transfer to a name for the activity that traditionally went on on those types of platform.  There's a nice little explanation of the terms on this University of Texas site.  It starts:

[C]andidates for political office and an entourage of supporters, handlers, and journalists are said to go on the stump, or simply stumping.

It seems like a rather unattractive word to refer to a core activity of political campaigning – traveling from place to place making speeches in front of live audiences.

It goes on to distinguish between this sense of stump and another (orig. AmE) sense of the verb to stump: 'to befuddle' before picking up on hustings:

On the stump or on the hustings?
Sometimes when candidates are on the stump, we say that they are on the hustings. Hustings, according to The Word Detective comes from the Old Norse word husthing, meaning "house assembly."

Centuries ago rulers might convene a husthing, usually composed only of members of the immediate royal household as opposed to a larger popular assembly of constituents, in order to gather advice or issue decrees. The English later adapted the word as husting to refer to the senior court of the City of London, and later narrowed the meaning to refer to the physical platform in that court where the Lord Mayor sat.

Over time this last meaning was generalized to refer to any platform from which political candidates might address their audience, and more commonly today it refers to the campaign trail, which we also know as the stump. Notably, husting usually appears in modern English only in the plural form hustings, and then usually in the phrase on the hustings.

The presence of hustings on this American website indicates that the term is not limited to BrE--but it wasn't something I knew from my Democratic Party days.  A quick corpus search (BNC versus COCA) had hustings occurring three times as often in BrE as in AmE (I was surprised it wasn't more).  The last line of the above quotation indicates an area of difference.  On the hustings accounts for more than half of the occurrences of hustings in the AmE corpus, but less than a third of the occurrences in the BrE corpus.  The singular form husting does not occur in either corpus.  Meanwhile, AmE stump speech, i.e. the speech that a candidate makes repeatedly at different locales, occurs 45 times per 100 million words in the AmE corpus and not at all in the British corpus.

A hustings in BrE, at least, refers to an event where more than one candidate is present to debate and discuss issues with potential voters (as in the Older People's Council event that our candidates went to today). This differs from how the stump has developed--stump speeches are generally made without the presence of the other candidates.  The OED, on the topic of this sense of stump:

 14. Originally U.S.    a. In early use, the stump (sense 2) of a large felled tree used as a stand or platform for a speaker.    b. Hence, ‘a place or an occasion of political oratory’ (Cent. Dict.). to go on the stump, to take the stump: to go about the country making political speeches, whether as a candidate or as the advocate of a cause.
  In the U.S. the word ‘does not necessarily convey a derogatory implication’ (Cent. Dict.). In Britain, though now common, it is still felt to be somewhat undignified.

 And I'm just going to end here without further comment!

Some months ago (sorry!) I had more than one request for treatment of the pronunciation of Barack Obama's name.  There was this from American Jonathan Bogart:

I've heard more than one BBC newsreader pronounce the first name of the president of the United States the way I (an American) would refer to a military quartering, approximately "BERReck." This flies in the face of the way American journalists pronounce it, the way Kenyans -- who might be said to have first dibs -- pronounce it (which is not quite the same, as the r is an alveolar flap and both syllables are equally stressed), and the way the man himself pronounces it: roughly "BuhROCK." I was wondering what the reason for this might be; is this how the BBC has decided to pronounce the name, did I happen to hear a random couple of errors, or do different newsreaders get to choose the way they pronounce the names of world leaders?

And then I had message from Damien Hall, a sociolinguist at York University, who said:

Just checked in at SBaCL again, and found a comment on the latest post about the (?former) British habit of pronouncing the new President 'BA-r@ck Obama'. [DH is using the @ to stand for the schwa sound--i.e. an unstressed, reduced vowel--ed.] I have resisted the temptation to launch into a response on it, as I predict that the response could be quite lengthy (tempting though it was, as my (American) wife and I have talked about this difference: my observation is that almost all Brits used to pronounce 'Barack' with initial stress but, once he became more familiar, many/most learned that that wasn't where the stress went; and my theory is that it just fits into BrE's usual greater tendency to nativise foreign things including stress-patterns, cf garage etc).

In response to American Anne T. at this post:

I've just come from listening to NPR (National Public Radio) on which a British reporter, didn't catch his name, was interviewing Pakistani people about what they expect from Barack Obama. BARack Obama, he said, repeatedly. With a hard first A and stress on the first syllable, instead of BaRACK with a soft first (and second) A and stress on the second syllable. Why oh why?

Which just goes to prove that this blog is not a democracy, since the poor, mispronounced man has been in office for over a year now, and I've failed to respond to what has to be the most requested topic in my inbox.  Since then, I've had further correspondence with Damien, who points out this joke at the pronunciation's expense:

Early on, when he was but a candidate for the Democratic nomination (whom people over here seemed to unanimously think would lose to Hillary Clinton, though that's only my impression, as I was in America at the time), the misperception that his name was pronounced 'BA-r@ck' gave rise to a memorable moment from Andy Parsons on Mock The Week. I can't find a video of it, but the line was essentially this:

Parsons: 'BA-r@ck'? That's a bad name for a candidate, isn't it? Imagine the scene: "Ladies and gentlemen, 'BA-r@ck' Obama!" "Whaat? Oh, OK - 'Oy! Obama! You're SHIT!'"

This is only funny if you know the BrE use of barrack as a verb that means mean 'to heckle, to shout down' (particularly with reference to politicians--see the examples here).  (And, yes, you can say shit on the BBC--but only (BrE) after the watershed.)  Damien also thinks we pronounce the surname differently, with BrE speakers more likely to reduce the first syllable /o/ to a schwa, and Americans more likely to retain a fuller [o].
My excuse for leaving this topic for so long is that, as you know, pronunciation is not my strong point.  So, I asked John Wells, author of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, what he made of this.  He reports:

In the current (3rd) edition of LPD I give the BrE pronunciation as ˈbæræk or -ək, the AmE as bəˈrɑːk or bəˈræk. I don't think it's a BBC decision. It's the usual BrE vs AmE treatment of foreign disyllables: cf cliché, café etc.

We've talked about some of these differences in various places before, especially here.  But we've also talked about the feeling that names should be pronounced as the named person pronounces them--or at least as closely as one can with the sounds at one's dialectal disposal.  Since all the sounds here are available to BBC newsreaders, it's hard for me to feel like the usual treatment of foreign disyllables should apply, since names have a lot more allowance for variation from the standard dialectal rules than non-name words do.  So, the difference is explained, but not justified in my book.

Of course, you'll be able to (indeed, I can too) point out lots of examples in which Americans pronounce British names incorrectly.  But they typically do so from a position of ignorance, rather than intention.  Since it'd be hard to miss Americans' pronunciation of their own president's name, it seems less likely that ignorance is to blame here, though it may well be inattention rather than intention.  (And, as someone with a horrible memory for learned pronunciations, I cannot lead the switch-hunt.) 

So, what do you think?  Excusable or not?  To what lengths should one go in order to accommodate the pronunciation of personal names that flout one's dialect's rules?  Do (AmE) newscasters/(BrE) news readers have different responsibilities for this than the rest of us?  Or, by attempting the 'correct' pronunciation, do they leave themselves open to mocking? (I was trying to find the Saturday Night Live clips in which Victoria Jackson tried to authentically pronounce 'Nicaragua', but apparently they are not on the web. Ho-hum.)

Any organi{s/z}ation with any tangential relation words seems to make Word of the Year pronouncements these days (or these years, at least). I believe there is a correlation between how early the pronouncements are made and whether the organi{s/z}ation is trying to sell you something. The American Dialect Society wait(s) until January (when they have their annual meeting). And that is as it should be--one needs some perspective on the year in order to evaluate its words. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, are keen to get their press releases out in time to serve as subliminal reminders that dictionaries make great holiday gifts.

I have nothing to sell you, but I'm going to give you the SbaCL words of the year a little early this year--just to make sure that I get them out at all while a horrible deadline, not to mention a trip to the States and winter holidays and birthdays come (chiefly AmE) careening (=careering) toward(s) me. Words of the Year will be my airbag. (That metaphor is the evidence, if you need it, that my brain is not handling the pressure well.)

So, without further ado (wait, is that a drumroll I hear?), the SbaCL British-English- to-American-English Word of the Year is:

Joe e-mailed to ask:

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

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

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

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