Separated by a Common Language

I'm writing on the eve of High Lynneukah, the fourth day of Lynneukah this year. I know I've mentioned Lynneukah before here, but I've never properly explained it, and since I did so earlier today on Facebook, I thought I'd offer the same explanation here. After all, Lynneukah is orig. AmE:

• Lynneukah ('The Joyous Festival of Lynne') is the name of the ritualistic marking of my birthday, over a number of days each (AmE) fall/(BrE&AmE) autumn.
• It was named/founded in the 80s by an ex of mine who noted that I liked to string my birthday celebrations out for as long as possible.
• It is the consecutive days in any year that include 3 October and involve some marking of my birthday--e.g. a card in the (BrE) post/(AmE) mail, a colleague buying me a drink, an email from a long-lost somebody who noticed it in their (AmE) datebook/(BrE) diary.
• 3 October is referred to as High Lynneukah. (Also German Reunification day, but it was High Lynneukah first!)
• Because the definition relies on consecutive days, you can't necessarily tell when it has started. On receipt of the first card, I declare it 'Lynneukah season' and then wait and see what the next few days bring. I typically know it's Lynneukah by day 3.
• It's been as short as 5 days and as long as 12.
• It is a sin to try to artificially prolong Lynneukah.
• You don't have to know me or do anything for me to celebrate Lynneukah. The theme of the day/season is 'being nice to yourself'--so if anyone uses it as an excuse to sleep late or eat chocolate, that's great.

But if you'd like to use Lynneukah to be nice to someone else, then may I suggest a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières (known in the US as Doctors Without Borders)? I'll be making a birthday donation myself, but know that I often wait for an excuse (someone running a race or selling something or taking a collection) to donate to good causes that aren't my regular charities. So, I'm offering you an excuse to donate a little or a lot to a group that does a lot of good in a lot of very difficult situations.

If you're in the US, you can click here to make a donation.

If you're in the UK, you can click here to make a donation (and GiftAid it, if you qualify).

If you're anywhere else, you can see if there's a MSF fundraising branch in your country, but there's nothing (other than the risk of credit card fees for foreign payments) to stop you using the above donation sites.

That said (and thanks for reading through to here), I was trying to think of a birthday-themed topic to blog about, but we talked about the spanking rituals last year, and I can't think of anything else at the moment (requests for next year are welcome). But birthdays are about time, so here's a time-related topic, spurred on by this email from Gordon:

I just came across this phrase, written by a Brit: a week tomorrow. I've never heard it that way, but I interpreted it to mean "a week from tomorrow". It was used multiple times, so I know it wasn't a typo.

A week tomorrow, on October 1st, a book is going to be published. This is not news. Lots of books will be published a week tomorrow, and indeed a week after that (and, for that matter, tomorrow). [source]

What's the story here?

Indeed, that's a very natural way to say (AmE and BrE) a week from tomorrow in BrE, as in these quotations from the Guardian's website:

...a royal ceremonial funeral, which will be held a week tomorrow at Westminster Abbey.

... with each of the three contenders wanting to chalk up a good result ahead of the key South Carolina Democratic primary a week tomorrow.

Luka Modric broke a leg in a Premier League match against Birmingham City last Saturday, ruling him out of World Cup qualifier against England at Wembley a week tomorrow.

BrE can do the same kind of thing for other days than tomorrow (today, yesterday). Where using the name of a day of the week, one needs on, as in the following examples:

A week on Wednesday one of JMW Turner's finest paintings, Pope's Villa at Twickenham, will be auctioned at Sotheby's.

John McCain is expected to make his VP announcement a week on Friday

Where you read a week tomorrow in AmE sources, it generally refers to the past (all examples from the Boston Globe's site):

I've been married a week tomorrow and I am on cloud 9 with my husband!

It will be a week tomorrow and I am still waiting for the car dealership to get approval from CARS.gov.

In these cases, we can read this as 'tomorrow, it will be a week since X happened'. This is no good in BrE, as far as I can tell (web searches and consulting Better Half) logically possible, but perhaps not as likely in BrE--you'd have to probably say I've been married for a week tomorrow. (I could say either in my AmE dialect.)

You can use either of these phrases with other lengths of time, but the longer the time, the less likely you are to find the BrE future-facing version. There are at least hundreds (I haven't gone through and discounted all the irrelevant ones) of cases of a week tomorrow on the Guardian site and only one of a year tomorrow.

Now, we must note that the BrE future-facing a week tomorrow and the past-facing AmE a week tomorrow have different prosody (intonation). If you've read this blog before, you know that (BrE) I'm rubbish at phonology, so I won't try to draw any intonation curves or anything. I'm so rubbish at phonology that I might even be wrong about there being a difference, since when I try to recreate it in my head, they end up sounding like a hundred different things and like each other. But bidialectal or prosodically-gifted folks out there are welcome to weigh in on that.

On a related topic (but certainly not exhausting week differences across the dialects), I'd like to point out day-week combinations in BrE, as in the Elvis Costello song 'Wednesday Week', which starts:

The movies save on conversation
And the TV saves on sight
We met in a head-on collision
So I would say our chances would be slight
You can lead and I will follow
See us dancing cheek to cheek
You'll remember me tomorrow
But you won't give a damn by Wednesday Week

Now, ([orig.] AmE) back in the day, when I was a young thing snubbing (AmE) pop in order to listen to British (BrE) pop, I enjoyed this song very much, not appreciating that I didn't understand it. I thought Wednesday week was just a nonsense date for a song, like the 12th of Never. Now I know that it's a BrE way of saying 'a week from Wednesday'.

Thus concludes this instal(l)ment of my continuing public service of explaining British song lyrics to mistaken Americans like me who (in the 1980s) thought they were cool for (orig. AmE) 'getting' British music.

Happy Lynneukah to all, and to all a good night!

Ben Zimmer, the man responsible for my blogging about shit, has sent me a number of BrE sentences over the past few months. Each of these did not contain the word like where an American like Ben might've expected it. And, really, that was the point of the scatological post that Ben inspired too. He'd noted that BrE speakers are more likely to say I feel shit whereas AmE speakers would have to say I feel like shit. My response then was to say that shit can act as an adjective in BrE--and that is true. After all, one can (if one is BrE-speaking) say something like What a shit film.

But it's also the case that one can say I feel [NOUN PHRASE] in BrE and mean 'I feel like [NOUN PHRASE]'. Ben's example came from The Telegraph, in a story about a man who was injured while using Twitter:

"I guess you could say I feel a right Twit," he said.

For the grammar geeks out there, I'll quote Algeo's British or American English on the topic, "A group of copular verbs (...) have predominantly adjectival complements in common-core English, but also have nominal subject complements in British more frequently than in American." In other words, in AmE or BrE, you could say I feel old (because my students told me yesterday that Brad Pitt is 'a sexy old man'). You could also say I feel like an unsexy geriatric case, because the like phrase in that case plays an adjectival role in the sentence. But in BrE, you can also forgo the like and just go straight to the nouny part of the description. [In the Twit example, we also have the BrE noun-intensifier right, but let's save that for a rainier day.)

Here are some examples showing more of this pattern:

sound: He sounded a complete mess. [Jeremy Clarke in The Independent]

look: Joey Barton has made me look a fool. [Oliver Holt on Mirror.co.uk]

appear: I was trying to appear a total gentleman! [on ducatisti.co.uk]

Smell and taste are not found as regularly in the 'smell/taste like' sense, but a BrE expression one can find with them (and look and sound) is to [PERCEPTION VERB] a treat. So:

The honeysuckle shampoo is just gorgeous and she smells a treat. [customer feedback for a dog grooming salon]

Do you love cooking simple, no fuss meals that taste a treat? [ad(vert) on FilmBirmingham site]

Nokia E63 Handset Looks A Treat [digital lifestyles]

And if something looks or tastes or is a treat, then it can also (BrE) go down a treat--i.e. be received well.

BSC Seminars Go Down a Treat at Health and Safety 09 Show [British Safety Council]

If we were to to say any of these in AmE, we'd probably have to put a like in (and get rid of all the other Briticisms in the examples)--i.e. it looks like a treat, made me look like a fool, etc. The one that really confuses AmE speakers is (BrE) go down a bomb, which is not only ungrammatical for us without the like, but also means the opposite of what we'd think it means. If a performance bombs in AmE, it is horrid and no one likes it. But if it goes down a bomb in BrE, it's fantastic and gets a wildly positive reception. Ben sent me an example that had to do with Susan Boyle--the now-famous also-ran in the Britain's Got Talent television (BrE) programme/(AmE) show, and he's blogged about it here.

There are other things one could say about going down in BrE (you stop that sniggering right now!)...but we'l just leave that on the ever-increasing backlog of stuff to write about.

But if you want to know what really goes down a treat, check out this review of Better Half's work from today's Guardian! Then go and buy the entire SmartPass back catalog(ue), so that we can keep Grover in shoes!

Regular reader Robert WMG wrote in the autumn/fall with the following (and I'm rushing to respond to it before I have to shame myself by writing 'last autumn/fall'):

While talking to a Canadian friend, I said "It's gone five" (meaning "it's after five o'clock" but with definite connotations, depending on context, of "it's later than I thought" or "we're going to be late" or "we're late"). She said that without very strong contextual clues this would be incomprehensible in N. America. Any comments?

Robert describes the situation well. One issue that's not clear is what the 's stands for. You almost always hear it with the 's contracted: it's gone five rather than it has gone five or it is gone five. (See this post for further discussion of it's gone in BrE and AmE.) So, which is it, is or has? Either, it seems. Perhaps BrE speakers out there can enlighten us as to whether they can see any difference in meaning or dialect in the following examples (I searched for the past tense because it was easier):

It was gone four o'clock by the time we left the restaurant so whatever the hell we were talking about it must have been good. (from 'Star Blog')

With that cheeky grin she wished me a happy birthday (it had gone 12 o'clock by now) and that was it, and pardon the pun but for me it was a 'perfect day'. (from kirstymaccoll.com)

(For what it's worth, London-born Better Half thinks the was gone version sounds 'just wrong', but concedes that it might set up things a bit differently in a narrative.)

BrE speakers can also use gone for peoples' ages (with mostly the same connotations as Robert gave for the time-telling gone), i.e. He's gone 60 ('he's over sixty already'). Algeo's British or American English? counts both of these uses of gone as prepositions. If it's a preposition, then you'd use it with a form of the verb to be, but if it's a past-participle form of the verb to go, then you'd generally use it with a form of to have. Of course, the preposition is historically the same word as the participle, but it's drifted away from it to a different (more grammatical/functional) part-of-speech--that is to say, it has undergone grammaticali{s/z}ation.

Another BrE-particular temporal gone is the use of gone as a post-nominal (i.e. after the noun) modifier that means 'ago', as in this example from kultureflash (London):

With Batman a decade gone, Spiderman and Daredevil hits, and Ang Lee's Hulk promising to smash, it's a KA-POW comic book dreamworld just now.

You might hear this in AmE, but then the gone would almost certainly mean 'dead', and it would be found in newspaper memorials (advertisements placed by mourners to remember their dead) and the like (e.g. a decade gone, but not forgotten).

Another use that I believe is mostly BrE (having a hard time confirming its dialect, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this) is post-nominal gone to mean 'pregnant', as in this travel(l)ing-while-pregnant story from The Times:

Four months gone, over the sickness and constantly hungry, I was delighted to find that they had one restaurant serving European and Egyptian specialities and another specialising in modern Indian which satisfied my cravings for spicy food and yoghurt.

I used this on occasion while pregnant, but it always seemed to me to have an unpleasant connotation that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It reminded me of (BrE) up the duff, in that it sounded to me like pregnancy was somehow foisted upon me and that it was not a socially acceptable state to be in. I would love to hear from folks who use X months gone more naturally than I do on whether it has those connotations for you. So...comment away!

As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television (or, in pleasant but intense weekend bursts, Scrabble tournaments). For a while, I was hearing a fair amount of Scottish-accented speech on The Thick of It, a political satire in which the government's spin doctor is played by (*sigh*) Peter Capaldi (whom I still have a crush on due to Local Hero—undaunted by the many more/less savo(u)ry characters he's played since then). In/on the program(me), the Scots seem to run the government really, and it's generally felt that this was made to reflect real life. Sometimes I think it reflects my real life too, as I work at a university in southern England that has a Scottish Vice Chancellor and a history of Scottish people running various administrative departments.

Linguistically speaking, this means that sometimes the unfamiliar terms that come up in the university's administration-speak are Scottish imports. I'm not sure if we're the only university south of the border in which the year's exam diet is spoken of, but my colleagues who have come from other parts of England to work here find this term as foreign as I do. In Scottish law, a diet is a court session—and in academia it is the series of exams and examination boards (a feat of mind-wrenching bureaucracy necessitated by the classification of degrees) that happens at the end of the academic year—i.e. the examination 'season'.

I was reminded of this today when I was filling out a form concerning a new course. It said:

List all the programmes which will include this course. This should include ALL programmes within and outwith your school.

This was not the first time I'd encountered outwith where I would say outside or possibly (but only if I wanted to sound highfalutin in AmE) without. But this time, I was moved to investigate it, and (whaddya know?) it's marked in my dictionaries as Scottish. (My concise dictionaries say Sc(ottish), while the OED says Now chiefly Sc.) A little further investigation on the (AusE>BrE) uni website reveals that the author of the document is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.

I wondered whether I should start to develop a paranoid theory about the Scottish conspiracy to run my life and drown me in paperwork (for all of my paranoia is deliberate), but then I thought about the fact that all the Scottish people I know are super-nice and very efficient. Contrary to popular stereotypes, they always seem willing to buy a round of drinks. (So what if my sample size is limited to less than a dozen Scots? They're buying!) If these people do have plans to run my life, well, maybe I should let them. Perhaps it'll turn out that all the drink-buying was a ruse, but it's a lot better than the other paranoid fantasies I have to choose from.

Nancy e-mailed to ask about AmE cater to versus BrE cater for. This is where the book that I got for my birthday comes in handy. In it, John Algeo writes:

In CIC [the Cambridge International Corpus], cater for is more than 100 times as frequent in British texts as in American; cater to is 3 times as frequent in American texts as in British. In the sense "provide food (at a party)" British prefers cater for or possibly cater at; American also uses the verb transitively: cater a party.

What can I add to that? Just that catering is used more broadly in BrE than in AmE. For instance, a Scrabble comrade describes herself as working in catering. In AmE, I'd expect that to mean that she is an events caterer--someone who shows up to feed people at parties and conferences. In BrE, it means that she works in the food branch of the hospitality industry. In her case, catering is the department of the university that's responsible for the cafés/tea bars/restaurants on site.

Since Algeo so neatly took care of that case of verb complementation, I should move on to another challenge: a complementation difference that Algeo missed. John (coming to us through the Association of British Scrabble Players) writes to say:

One phrase not yet covered (as far as I can tell) is

beat up on = to attack physically or verbally (Websters 11th Collegiate). This strikes me (oops no pun intended) as exclusively North American, the equivalent British phrase being "beat up"

Where does the "on" come from? It appears to be a relatively recent addition. The 1937 version of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition Unabridged lists only "beat up" - (sense b) Slang to thrash (a person) esp. soundly.

John, come and be one of my students--I love the ones who do a bit of research before coming in with a question. Ten (BrE) marks/(AmE) points for laying the groundwork! Let's start by comparing beat and beat up:

(1) Batman beat the Joker

(2) Batman beat up the Joker.

(1) is ambiguous. It either means that Batman struck the Joker or that Batman won against the Joker. (2) indicates that Batman physically beat the Joker until some conclusion was reached--i.e. the Joker soundly thrashed. This involves the completive particle up, which we've seen before. The OED notes that beat up is originally AmE, and the first example of it (in an O. Henry story) is from 1907. Next year we can celebrate its hundredth birthday in print, then.

Then there's beat on:

(3) Batman beat on the Joker

(4) Batman beat on the door.

(3) sounds odd in many dialects, but (4), with an inanimate object, sounds better. If we use beat on with an animate object as in (3), it can sound like the object is not so animate--perhaps the Joker is unconscious or otherwise being very passive about being beaten. (Note that the participial form is beaten in standard BrE and AmE, but can be beat in informal and non-standard contexts, as in the AmE phrase It can't be beat = 'it's the best'.) On also seems to give a more repetitive connotation--it's the same spot on the door/the Joker that is being struck repeatedly. Batman beat the door/Joker sounds a bit more like the door/Joker is being struck all over.

So, now we come to the one that John wondered about:

(5) Batman beat up on the Joker (AmE)

Here we get both some completiveness from up and some impugned inanimacy from on. (Or at least, this is my reading of the situation.) Here, Batman pretty soundly (AmE dialectal) whupped the Joker, but the Joker didn't offer much resistance. As John's dictionary quotation indicates, this is often used figuratively. So, if you don't agree with what I've said here, you can beat up on my ideas in the comments section. I'll be passive about it in the sense that I probably won't be on-line to defend myself when you comment. But if you say something cleverer than what I've said here, I'll only thank you for the beating. After all, blogging is a form of intellectual masochism.

A problem in writing about the differences between American and British English is that it can be hard to notice the Americanisms if you're an American. As long as people understand you, you go along happily saying American things until the time that someone doesn't understand them and a metalinguistic conversation ensues. One of the first times this happened to me was when I made a brilliant Scrabble move that involved hooking an s on the front of nit. I couldn't believe it when my opponent challenged snit, and could believe it less when it wasn't in the official word list. (This was back in the days before British Scrabblers used the international word list.) A snit is a little fit of bad temper, and I got in a snit when I had to take the word off the board. (But not as much of a snit as when I played drywalls for 230 points and it was disallowed. It is now allowed in the international word list. BrE for drywall is plasterboard, which at 12 letters is much more difficult to play in Scrabble.)

My sometime inability to recogni{s/z}e my own dialectal differences came up when Foundational Friend (whom you met last time) listed some of the Americanisms that she's found herself using recently. These included meet with to mean 'have a meeting with'. (The 'experience' sense of meet with, as in meet with disaster or meet with an opportunity, is common to both dialects.)

The OED (2004 draft revision) lists the 'have a meeting' sense of meet with as Now chiefly N. Amer., meaning that it has been used in BrE in the past, but isn't so much now. Their quotations include meet withs from Caxton, Defoe and Walter Scott, but the two 20th-century quotations are American.

However, considering the frequency of meet with in UK newspapers and government documents, I think I can be forgiven for not noticing that meet with is "chiefly N. Amer.", and I wonder whether that geographical label will be suitable for much longer.

Rice Meets With Top Israeli Officials --Headline, The Guardian, 30 July 2006
Sheikh Qaradawi meets with Ken Livingstone during his 2004 visit --photo caption, The Telegraph, 14 September 2005
'Dead baby' mum to meet with hospital chiefs --headline, The Scotsman, 10 August 2006

While the first of these may have come from an American wire service, the following two definitely originated in the UK. Google reported over two million hits for meet with on .gov.uk sites, and while some of these involve other senses of meet with, 48 of the first 50 hits used the 'have a meeting with' sense, and none of those should be due to American wire services.

Still, transitive meet is used in 'have a meeting with' contexts in BrE. For instance, the Scotsman article whose headline is quoted above goes on to use meet rather than meet with, which is curious considering that headlines are typically more sparing with their words than full articles.

THE mother who underwent an operation to remove her "dead" unborn baby only to find she was still pregnant weeks later is to meet hospital bosses. --The Scotsman, ibid.
The Royal Mail will this week meet hundreds of senior managers and their union representatives as the state-controlled postal giant seeks to prevent a walkout over pay. --The Independent, 25 June 2006

It's probably a signal of the relative strength of meet with in AmE that I want to put withs in these contexts. Without the with, meet so-and-so is ambiguous in three ways. As well as meaning 'have a meeting with', it can mean 'make the acquaintance of' or 'happen to encounter' (as in I met Grover on the way here). In my American way of thinking, if the woman in The Scotsman hadn't made the acquaintance of the hospital bosses, then saying meet is fine, but if it's not their first meeting, I'd want to say meet with in order to avoid the other possible interpretations.

Thus, British English speakers often let the context do the work toward disambiguating meet, while Americans spell it out. You could use that fact to try to form or reinforce some broad cultural stereotypes, but I wouldn't recommend it.

This week's The K Chronicles comic has Keith of the Chronicles listing the great things about his experience at a comics convention, including:



This American use of chat up, meaning 'chat with' is new to me, but Jonathan Lighter, author of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, says that it's been in AmE slang for a few years.

I can think of two possible routes by which this might have come into AmE. One is that it's just another case of putting up after a verb, as in eat up, drink up, call up, smarten up, etc. This up usually has a 'completive' effect--e.g. drink up involves and focus(s)es on the finishing of the drink. It seems unlikely that up has this effect in AmE chat up, since there's no clear point at which chat can be completed--one can always move on to another topic and chat some more. (Incidentally, my students claim that Americans use VERB+up constructions like eat up more than the British do. I think they may just be reacting to the artificiality of the example sentences I use in class, but maybe they're right.)

The other possibility is that this chat up came in some convoluted way from BrE. Here's the scenario I imagine. Some Americans hear British people saying chat up. They think it sounds cool (as British things often sound cool to Americans), so they start saying chat up too. The only problem is that they didn't appreciate what chat up meant in its original context, so they start using it just to mean 'chat with'. This kind of thing happens often when words are borrowed from one language/dialect to another. If you don't know the meaning of a word, there are usually several things in the context that it could mean--so you go for the one that makes most sense to you. If you then start using the word with that misapprehended meaning to people who don' t know that it means something else in the source language, then the word comes to have the new meaning in the target language. In the case of chat up this would be easily done. Here's the scene. Some friends are in a nightclub. One friend rejoins the group and a British friend teases him with:

I saw you chatting up that girl

The meaning 'chatting with' makes perfect sense in this context, but the British friend would have really meant 'I saw you hitting on (or flirting with) that girl.' Hence BrE chat-up line = AmE pick-up line.

Sounds like a good story to me, at least. But very difficult to prove.

I can't mention chat up without mentioning a related piece of BrE, pull, i.e. to get the desired effect of one's chat-up line. The verb pull can be used transitively or intransitively, and it can also be used as a definite noun, especially in the phrase on the pull:

transitive

Cilla's not best pleased that she didn't pull a fella when she was away on honeymoon with Yana. She reckons she's got 'married woman' written all over her and that's what's scaring them off. --Corrie Blog

intransitive

Kareena implores Tariq to come clean about their relationship. She won't let Ash dictate who she can see. He's not keen, so suggests that they keep it quiet for now. She has no idea that he's planning to pull at the party. --Eastenders episode guide

noun

And over in Mike’s apartment, Mike is confused at Leanne being in his home. She is dressed in just a towel and is on her way to have a shower, when Mike calls a friend and asks if he was out on the pull last night. Mike believes that he has had a one night stand with Leanne and makes a move on her. She recoils in horror and tries to explain that she is his son’s girlfriend, but poor Mike is left more confused than ever. --Corrie Blog

In BrE, one can also pull a pint (= 'fill a pint glass with beer/ale from a tap') or pull a face (=AmE make a face). There are a lot of pull phrasal verbs that were originally American--for example pull out, as in Should we pull out of Iraq?. Most of these are used in the UK now, so not so interesting to us here. Have any readers noticed AmE uses of pull that are more mysterious to non-AmE speakers?