Separated by a Common Language

The comedian Olaf Falafel has made a Government COVID Slogan Generator (play the video and click on it to stop it on a new slogan):

I made you a Government COVID Slogan generator pic.twitter.com/qfCDRrLfzu

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) May 10, 2020

 

As many have pointed out, it's unclear what we're supposed to stay alert for when we can't see the virus or tell who's carrying it. The UK government seems to love to direct its public with three-part  slogans, as we've seen before with "See it, say it, sorted". One reason that the "stay home" message was heeded was its appeal to protect the National Health Service—and the NHS's absence from the new slogan comes at the same time as many are worrying about backdoor machinations to sell off the NHS to private companies. There is the possibility, though that the "stay home, protect the NHS" message needed to be replaced because it had backfired and endangered people by making them reluctant to use NHS services for non-COVID-related problems.

Much more heartening than government messages is the outpouring of NHS-love in the front windows of the UK, where many are putting up pro-NHS messages and messages for other (BrE) key/(AmE) essential workers, with rainbows to cheer us all up. Here's a Google Image search result for "rainbow windows". On the windows, the more common slogan is stay safe.

 

Here's how we did our front window. No slogans, just rainbow:
Stay safe.

 (And if you want to read me railing against the phrase stay safe in American discourse, click here.)

Thomas West recently asked:

AmE/BrE difference of the day: "on the up and up" means "above board, not underhanded" in AmE but appears to mean "rising, on the rise, moving upward" in BrE. Is that right? @lynneguist

— Thomas West (@IntermarkLS) April 16, 2020

I hadn't really noticed this before, but it looks like it's probably a case of an American phrase coming
to Britain and being re-interpreted (which happens now and again—I talk about a few other cases in The Prodigal Tongue and elsewhere on this blog).

The expression originated in AmE in or before the 1860s. It is often hyphenated: on the up-and-up. The OED entry for it starts:

a. Honest(ly), straightforward(ly), ‘on the level’. Originally and chiefly U.S.

1863   Humboldt Reg. (Unionville, Nevada) 4 July 2/1   Now that would be business, on the dead up-and-up.

But then it continues with a second definition that it does not mark as U.S.:

 b. Steadily rising, improving, or increasing; prospering, successful.

1930   Sun (Baltimore) 18 Aug. 6/1   From now on, we are led to believe, law and order will be on the up and up, as the current phrase is.

1937   G. Heyer They found him Dead xiii. 265   He certainly wasn't on the up-and-up when I knew him. He was picking up a living doing odd jobs for any firm that would use him.

1959   Encounter Oct. 25/2   Private travel is on the up and up.

Just the first example in sense b is from an American source—but I really can't tell why they think that either of the first two examples has sense b and not sense a. I would have thought that the first one is saying that the police are going to be less corrupt or disorgani{s/z}ed, and, in the second, I would think that they were saying that he was taking money under the table. But you can see how the two senses can overlap and therefore sense a could morph into sense b, which it definitely has done by the 1959 example.

Sense b comes 50 or 60 years after the first sense, during a time when the UK is getting a lot more exposure to AmE, so it does seem reasonable to think that the phrase came from the US and changed in the UK. The data from Google Books also seem to support this hypothesis:


The b sense is definitely the primary sense in BrE. The (UK-based) Collins COBUILD Idiom Dictionary marks sense a as American but not sense b, and the BBC World Service's Learning English pages give only the 'successful' meaning in their list of up idioms:

To be on the up and up: to be getting increasingly successful.
Example:
His life has been on the up and up since he published his first book. Now, he's making a film in Hollywood.

One of the sources on freedictionary.com explicitly marks the b sense as British:

But all that said, a few commenters on Thomas's original post seem to be Americans saying that they use the 'successful' sense. (I suspect they are younger Americans.) As we've seen above, it's not always clear which one people mean. Looking at a sample in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, though, the sense a meaning predominates:

Click picture to enlarge

Some of the BrE speakers responding to Thomas said that they assumed that on the up and up is an extension of a phrase on the up, meaning 'rising, being successful'. The OED doesn't record that, but there are plenty of examples in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I searched for them followed by a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period, so that I could be sure there wasn't another and up after the first up.)


The examples in this data are often along the lines of "the numbers of X are on the up", so they are clearly about rising numbers and (by extension, often) success.

Now, there is no expression on the down to mean 'decreasing' and the OED hadn't yet noticed the on the up expression, so I have to wonder whether the phrase on the up and up came from the US, got reinterpred in BrE, and then got shortened to on the up (rather than the latter being expanded from the former).  It's harder to get information for on the up in a place like Google Books, because one can't do the punctuation trick and rule out all the examples like on the up grade or on the up line. I had a quick look at the Hansard corpus, the record of UK Parliamentary speech, as that gives a more reasonable amount of data to comb through. None of the examples of on the up before the first appearance of on the up and up (1946) are on the up to mean 'improving'—they are all on the up [noun], using up as a modifier for the noun. The 1946 Hansard example of up and up is used to mean 'growing, successful' (the b sense), as are the subsequent examples (33 of them). The first example of on the up in that meaning is in 1978. So, that is making it look like the phrase was cut rather than expanded in BrE.

Thanks to Thomas for pointing this one out!

And thanks to Jan Freeman and Ben Yagoda for noticing it earlier. I'd forgotten about Ben's post here.

[I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.]

I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them, and theirs. Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except...

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much died during Middle English. (English lost a lot of other kinds of suffixes over the centuries too, in part because suffixes are the kinds of things that get swallowed up in speech and in part becuase they're the kind of thing that become vulnerable when different languages come into contact—as happened for English and Norman French nearly 1000 years ago.) But one English case suffix, rather than disappearing, morphed into something else, and that something is the scourge of English spelling, the apostrophe-s: 's. 

So in the Old-English poem Beowulf, you can read about Grendles guðcræft. That -es on the name of the monster Grendel is the forebear of 's. We can translate it as something like 'Grendel's power' or 'Grendel's warcraft'. That (masculine, singular) genitive case marker says that there's a very close relation between Grendel and the guðcræft. Grendel is the power's source or its possessor.


But when that poem gets translated into Modern English, the translators sometimes translate the -es as an 's and sometimes not:

the might of Grendel (Francis Gummere)  
Grendel's power of destruction (Seamus Heaney)

That's because something else happened in Middle English: English started using of in the way that French uses de to express genitive relations—because French got all up in English's business at that point. Because of that change, of occurs only 30 times in Beowulf (where it has its original meaning of 'away from' or 'off'*), but over 900 times in Gummere's translation of it (where it means next to nothing).

So English has ended up with two ways of expressing those kinds of relations. We tend to talk about them as being 'possessive' relations and of the X in X's Y or the Y of X as 'the possessor'.  But the relation is not necessarily possessive. Think about something like the theft of the bicycle and the bicycle's theft: the bicycle doesn't possess the theft. The relations between the nouns in 's/of expressions are varied and hard to pin down (but they are very close relationships, covering a lot of the same ground as the genitive in Old English).

We don't exactly use 's and of interchangeably, though, and even where we can use both we often have preferences for one or the other. One of the strongest predictors of whether it'll be 's  or of is the animacy of the thing in the X position (the 'possessor'). Linguists often talk about an animacy hierarchy in which expressions that refer to  animate things are preferred in certain positions in sentences over non-animate things. In terms of what's animate, humans (the teacher, Heidi) come above animals (the badger, the parrot) and collectives (the company, the union), which come above objects (the table, the book).  All of the below noun phrases are "grammatical" but the higher up the list we go, the more apt people are to use the 's instead of the of phrase, all other things being equal:

the teacher's size        the size of the teacher
the badger's size         the size of the badger
the union's size           the size of the union
the table's size            the size of the table

A lot is going on in that 'all other things being equal' (a phrase used in both AmE and BrE, but AmE also likes all else being equal). Some other things that swing a possessive in favo(u)r of 's phrasing rather than of phrasing are:

• heavier (more syllables/more complex syntax) possessed NPs rather than lighter ones
  (the table's dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge vs the dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge of the table)
• the need for denser texts, as in newspaper headlines 
• speech (rather than writing)
• informal writing style (rather than more formal writing styles)
• the dialect being spoken

So, on the last point: English in general used to be a much stronger avoidance of 's on inanimate object names. Inanimate possessors have become more and more accepted in English over the last 200 years or so. But that change has been happening faster in American English than British. This is like a lot (but not all!) of other changes in English (see The Prodigal Tongue, or if you really like to read about statistical methods, Paul Baker's book)—the change has roots deep in English's history, but goes faster/slower in different places. In this change's case (like some others), the "newer" form ('s on inanimates) is perceived as less formal and it's more condensed (and therefore quicker to say/read). Both of these properties might characteri{s/z}e some differences between the cultures that maintain the "standard" versions of English in the two countries. AmE tolerates more informality and more brevity in more situations.

So, having been thinking about all this, I did a Difference of the Day on Twitter, showing these two charts:


Here you can see that North Americans are much more happy than others to say the book's cover or the book's title or the table's edge or the table's width (or whatever other nouns might go after book's and table's). Here's the flipside, the of versions, which I didn't post on Twitter.



The table chart goes with what we'd expect to see: BrE doing a lot more with of than AmE. But the book table has AmE doing more of the book than BrE. You know why? Because American talk about books more. No, really:


So that's a lot more detail than you needed in order to see the AmE/BrE difference, but, hey, reading is good for you!

*Why does off look like of? Because they used to be the same word!

Some of the things I've been reading that influenced this post:
Carlier, Anne and Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2013. Genitive case and genitive constructions: an introduction. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Carlier, Anne, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2013. De: a genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path from Latin to French. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Lars Hinrichs. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Terttu Nevalainen, IrmaTaavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, and Minna Korhonen (eds.), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.

Before our irregularly scheduled blogpost, a couple of announcements:

First, I'm on a (BrE) one-off Radio 4 program(me) tomorrow morning (10:30): Americanize! Why the Americanisation of English is a good thing, presented by Susie Dent. It should be available on iPlayer Radio after that.

Second, this blog has been nominated for the annual bab.la Top Language Lovers award 2017. If you'd like to support it (or even if you wouldn't) you can click on the logo and vote:

 And now on to the show. What preposition goes before hindsight?

This was a recent Twitter Difference of the Day, and a conveniently simple thing to blog about during (BrE academic) marking season. I'd asked an American lexicographer to (BrE) have/(AmE) take a look at the chapter about (among other things) lexicography in my book manuscript. I had written with hindsight in my book manuscript and he queried whether I'd "gone native" with my preposition. Indeed, it seems I had. As you can see in the screenshot, the GloWBE corpus shows that AmE prefers in hindsight.





I'd say that BrE prefers in too, since with 929 hits, in is the 'winning' preposition before hindsight in BrE. But add of and with together, and they've got 952 hits. I'd say they probably should be added together because the of number actually stands for the longer with-ful phrase: with the benefit of hindsight.

Using hindsight in this kind of prepositional phrase meaning 'in retrospect', seems to be a mid-20th-century thing. No preposition here is the 'original', as far as I can tell, but the in is probably affected by the expression in retrospect. There's less hindsight used in this way in AmE, but AmE has more in retrospect (about 1.5x more).

As previously announced, this was the sixth October during which I tweeted an 'British–American untranslatable' (that is, item lexicalized in one national dialect and not the other) on each weekday. If you'd like to complain that any of these does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context.

This year's was a bit British-heavy, though in looking back on previous years, I noticed that some had more American ones, so perhaps it all works out in the end. 

BrE rough sleeper  'homeless person who's sleeps outside, as opposed to in a shelter or other temporary accommodation'.  Suggested by John Kelly (@mashedradish)

BrE gongoozler originally, 'an idler who watches canal activities', now more broadly, 'a person who stares for long periods'.  Suggested by Andy M. (on Facebook)

source

AmE to t-bone '(for a motor vehicle) to crash into another vehicle perpedicularly'.  Suggested by Rhonda (on blog). (This one has started to have currency in UK—but the steak cut that it's named after is not traditional in UK butchery.)

BrE busman’s holiday 'leisure time spent doing something very much like what you do at work'. There are some variants used (a little) in the US, but the ultimate source is this phrase. See World Wide Words. Suggested by @meringutan

AmE to kick the tires 'to determine the worth or "health" of something by testing it'. Suggested by @SimonKoppel. This has spread beyond the US, with some people (Australians, in my correspondence) interpreting it specifically as something done by people with no intention to buy. I liked the OED entry that says it's orig. U.S. Not with that spelling, it's not!


BrE (to give someone a) backie (also backy)  '(to give someone a) ride on the BrE parcel shelf of a bicycle'. Suggested by @formosaphile. Responses to this tweet brought up a lot of variants: Australian dink, dinky, New Zealand dub, and a number from the UK, which Moose Allain has put together into a slide show. But none from the US, as far as I've heard.

AmE third base (etc.) as measures of sexual accomplishment. Covered previously here.  Suggested by @Mburked

BrE love rat tabloid term for a male adulterer. Here's Collins Dictionary on it. (Sorry, someone suggested this, but I failed to note who!)

AmE candy striper a usually female, usually teen-aged hospital volunteer. Suggested by @CityMelzer A bit more on the term from Wikipedia.

BrE to blot one's copybook  'to do damage to one's own good reputation'. Here's the discussion of it at World Wide Words.

BrE Johnny Foreigner '[pejorative] personification of non-Britishness', often used satirically. Here's the Collins entry for it.

AmE big box store 'box-shaped single-company retail building at the edge of town'. Possible BrE translations discussed at Wikipedia.  Ta @smylers2

BrE for in, for example, 7:00 for 7:30, which means 'come after 7, but by 7:30, when things will get started'. Or, as Andrew Caines defined it: "You'll be rude if you arrive up to and including 7:00, or any time after 7.29". 

AmE condo(minium) 'building consisting of residential units that are individually owned' or 'an individually-owned unit within such a building'. In AmE condo generally contrasts with apartment (building)—the former is rented, the latter owned. In UK, they're called (blocks of) flats regardless of owned/rented status. In some parts of the US, there are also co-ops. The difference between condos and coops is explained here. I'd tried to conceptualise this in terms of the difference between flat ownership with a leasehold versus a share of the freehold in England, but that's not right (see comments). Suggested by @RebelePublisher 

BrE I’ll be mother 'I'll serve the tea [or other food/drink that needs serving-out]'  Suggested by Rhonda on the blog.

BrE graunch used as a verb or noun onomatopoetically for a grinding/crunching sound, as when gears in a car grind. (OED lists this as [UK] dialectal & New Zealand.) Suggested by April23rd on blog.

AmE (esp. Californian) lookie-loo (and spelling variants) 'nosy person who goes to (AmE) real-estate open houses with no intention of buying'. It's also used (esp. in other parts of the country) as a synonym for (orig. AmE) rubber-necker. Suggested by Michèle, seconded by @cynderness.

BrE paddle 'go into water (especially the sea) without swimming, particularly walking in up to the knees or so'. In AmE, I'd just say wade, which isn't specifically about getting your feet wet for fun. Suggested by @simonkoppel.

AmE Monday morning quarterback 'person who criticizes others using hindsight the others couldn't have had'

BrE ready reckoner 'quick-reference table that gives solutions to simple calculations'. AmE has things like cheat sheet, quick reference, but those could be, say, lists of definitions, rather than a table of calculations.

BrE glamour model euphemistic expression for 'woman who poses topless' (particularly for certain UK newspapers and BrE "lads' magazines").



Will I find enough for a seventh year in 2017? I've already started the list, so maybe.  Feel free to keep suggesting them! Thanks to everyone who's helped this time.

A(n) historian I know has taken to calling me his favo(u)rite linguist. I have a suspicion I'm the only linguist he knows. Nevertheless, flattery gets you a blog post. And a flattering pseudonym.

So, Generous Historian, when he emailed me about Important University Business, included this:

P.S. A little piece of English-language usage that has struck me a couple of times lately and made me think "Lynne might be interested in that", is that people in shops and cafes now invariably say "are you paying by cash", whereas they would have said "are you paying cash" until recently. The ubiquity of card (and, soon, phone) payments is doubtless to blame, but I was interested by the addition of the pointless "by" because it seems characteristic of US-English (where you "beat on" someone, instead of beating them; "meet with", instead of simply meeting, etc.). Any thoughts?

This historian is English, as you might be able to tell. But he's married to an American so I'm not about to let him off lightly for this (AmE) rookie mistake (=beginner's error).

Note that I didn't say that flattery gets you a flattering blog post.

This is how I chided him:*

You notice more prepositions in AmE because they're new info where you weren't expecting it.  But BrE has an awful lot of prepositions where AmE doesn't--e.g. in expressions of time (on Tuesday), with certain verbs (protest at the decision), etc. I submit, as attachment, data to indicate that this is one not an Americanism. :)

The attachment was this screenshot from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE), showing who says pay by cash:
The darker the blue, the stronger the strength of the expression in the particular nation. Since the Irish sub-corpus is about 1/3 of the size of the US or UK (GB) ones, Ireland uses pay by cash not 3 more times than Britain, but three times more.

So, it looks like BrE is getting by cash from Ireland--where it probably arose on analogy with pay by card. (Or maybe BrE is inventing it separately--that can happen with analogies.) I was particularly taken with this example from the Irish data (from the Garda [police] website):

You can pay by cash, cheque, bank draft, or laser card.

Laser card? They have cards with lasers in Ireland? Let me in!!** 

Incidentally, pay cash, which GH says he would say, is the most strongly American of the alternatives (according to GloWBE). Pay with cash is the most neutral on the US-UK comparison, but has the strongest showing in Canada.



Footnotes
* I once got to see a letter of recommendation that had been written about me, which said "She writes devastating footnotes". This remains the best compliment I have ever received. Nevertheless, I fear my epitaph will be "She wrote chiding emails".

** Apparently laser card means 'debit card' in Ireland, based on the name of the first company to offer them. False alarm. Everyone back to normal, please. Don't mind me; I'm just weeping with disappointment.

On Fridays, I sit and work in a cafe with a little group of writing friends, and I've got(ten) into the habit of ordering the same thing for lunch each week (just because it makes calorie-counting easier). Giving me what I've ordered has, alas, not become the habit of the (AmE) waitstaff. So, when my special order was agreed-to but not delivered at a new cafe, I grumpily posted the following on Facebook:



To quote myself, from the previous toast post:

Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast.

That little Facebook post generated more than 40 comments and 2 additional Facebook posts that afternoon. Then I tweeted about it.  All of this was pretty catastrophic for my productivity that day. But, TOAST!

There are two cross-cultural differences that may have triggered my unsatisfactory lunch. The first is a fairly linguistic problem: the on.  The second is a culinary-cultural problem that is linguistic to the extent that it involves the meaning of sandwich.  And appended to that is the bacon sandwich problem.

Problem 1:  on 
The on problem is that I used an AmE meaning for on in my on toast. This usage would be recogni{s/z}ed by a lot of Brits from television, hearing people order a pastrami on rye or some such. (See my past discursion about semantic drift in the naming of pastrami sandwiches here. Note: I've never seen a sandwich on rye bread anywhere but on American television while in the UK.) But on is not what would be said in BrE, especially for toast, because this idiomatic use of on clashes with BrE use of on toast, as in scrambled egg on toast. There, the egg is put on a slice of toast*, but no sandwich is made. (Americans might call it an open-face(d) sandwich--on toast.)

Some overly pedantic British commenters at my FB/Twitter posts (you know who you are) insisted that I had asked for a bacon sandwich placed on top of a piece of toast.* I call them 'overly pedantic' because while I may not always get what I want when I place this order, no one has ever tried to give me a sandwich atop a piece of toast. It is a possible interpretation, but not one that any waiter would go for. To make it known that I wanted the sandwich bread to be toasted, my English friends tell me I should say with toast, but I fear that I might get a side order of toast in this case. I have since had success asking for (and receiving) my sandwich by saying "could the bread be toasted, please?"

If I had said I wanted a toasted bacon sandwich, I would have got(ten) another thing: cooked bacon put between bread and then heated in a (BrE) sandwich toaster/(AmE) [toasted] sandwich maker (or more recently: panini maker). At one of the cafes we work in, such sandwiches are pre-assembled and put in an opaque, label(l)ed bag, which one can select and then hand to the person at the counter, who toasts it for you. It's ok, but not as good as a bacon sandwich on/made with toast. This is my opinion. Or it may be a fact.

Problem 2: the sandwich problem
I've dealt with the sandwich problem before at the baked goods post. Let me just quote myself again:

As an American, I can make a sandwich using sliced bread, a roll, a bagel, whatever. In the UK, sandwiches are made with sliced bread, and anything else is called by the name of the bread it's in--for example, a ham and cheese baguette. A bacon roll is bacon inside a roll that's been sliced in half (usually with ketchup or brown sauce), and is a popular hangover treatment.

Add to the list of things Americans can make sandwiches with: toast. You might think that's the same thing as sliced bread. You might be wrong. (I love this old Calvin & Hobbes comic that recogni{s/z}es that it isn't.)  I have seen British sandwiches toasted (again: the old toastie post), but I can't recall seeing any made with toast. Lots of open-faced things on toast (eggs, sautéed mushrooms, [AmE] canned/[BrE] tinned spaghetti or beans, about which another post must be written), but not with another piece of bread on top.  Americans make lots of sandwiches with toast, particularly when breakfast foods are involved. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw Better Half make a fried egg sandwich with untoasted bread and ketchup.

Of course, when such disagreements occur, one is bound to hear an English person say 'but we invented the sandwich, so we get to say what it is'. I note/ask here (a) putting things between bread was happening a long time before the 4th Earl of Sandwich had the thing named after him, (b) who is this we who invented [or named] sandwiches? You weren't there. The world of foodstuffs-between-bread has changed between the 18th century and now, and you weren't even around for most of that. It's like when football fans (of either type) say "we won!" No, you didn't. You watched someone else win. You may have enjoyed it, but you didn't do it. But there is no doubt that the English are serious about sandwiches. Here's one of three sandwich-filled fridges in a shop in Brighton station. My American food sensibilities generally keep me from buying any of them.




One of my English FB friends responded to my desire for a bacon sandwich on toast with "No such thing. A sandwich is a sandwich, on toast is on toast." To which some Americans replied "but a club sandwich is always on toast". I'm not sure that's always absolutely true (but Wikipedia seems to agree with them), but it is typical. And it's something that's escaped the attention of some dictionary-writers, including the OED:



Problem 2': the bacon butty problem
The other thing that Americans said was: "a BLT is always best on toast". So here is the crux of our problem. Not only do we have different sandwich cultures. We have very specific different bacon sandwich cultures.

To Americans, the prototypical bacon sandwich is the BLT (or bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich).  It's usually made with mayonnaise and the bread is usually toasted. Like so:



To the English, the prototypical bacon sandwich  is the bacon butty aka bacon sarnie.  Just bacon and optionally ketchup or brown sauce on (usually) buttered, untoasted bread (supposedly brown sauce is the more northern way to have it, but most people I know down south prefer it that way too, as do I). (The Wikipedia entry for this is pretty [BrE] rubbish. C'mon UK Wikipedians! Priorities!) This (orig. AmE in this sense) guy took this photo to celebrate his Father's Day breakfast:





And this picture looks just like what I get in the cafes, but they give me much less bacon (which is good for the calorie-counting, not so good for the sandwich). I must note here that in both the non-toasting cafes, the thing on the menu was bacon butty.  So my whole trying-to-get-toast thing was probably doomed from the start.

   


* According to GloWBE, slice of toast is much more common in BrE (63 instances) than in AmE (8), but both can have a piece of toast. The differences are not so clear if one looks at piece/slice of bread.

P.S. [6 June 2014] I forgot about rounds! In BrE, people talk about rounds of toast and rounds of sandwiches.  I always find this confusing. Here's the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary definition:

8 (British English) a whole slice of bread; sandwiches made from two whole slices of bread

• Who's for another round of toast?
•  two rounds of beef sandwiches

So, if it's toast, it's one slice of bread. But if it's a sandwich it's two. If it's cheese on toast, it's one. If it's a cheese toastie, it's two. Got to get that into my head. Except that I just ordered what is described on the menu at this café as "Toast and jam - a round of white or multi-cereal bread..." And I got two slices.  No wonder I get confused. 

And why rounds of sandwiches? Is there any difference in meaning between two beef sandwiches and two rounds of beef sandwiches?  Answers in a comment, please!








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Until I get my act together and revamp the blog to have this info in a margin, I'm going to continue to commit acts of shameless self-promotion at the ends of posts.

Upcoming talks:

• British & American Englishes: fact versus convenient fiction  
• 11 June: English Language conference for A-level teachers, Sussex University (free!)
• 'The most acceptable hypocrisy'?  Polite words in the UK and US. 
• 19 June: The Bedford Culture Club (which is not in Bedford, but in Horsham) (£10) 
•  British and American Englishes: facts and fictions
• 14 August: UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics (for learners of English, requires registration on the whole two-week course)

And I'm halfway through my year of providing mini-essays on British idioms to Focus (UK) magazine, if you're interested.

• I'm only talking about the relationship between British and American English here (as is my theme). These expressions may well have equivalents in other languages or dialects.  
• By Untranslatable I mean that there is no lexicali{z/s}ed equivalent in the other dialect. And by lexicali{z/s}ed I mean that the expression is a word or an idiom--something that language users learn through hearing others say it, rather than something that one makes up anew. One can translate things by making up new sentences or phrases that describe the same thing, sure. But it's special when a language has lexicali{z/s}ed an  expression for something--it tells us something about the culture that invented and uses that expression.
• Many of these have started to be borrowed between the dialects--and that's natural. If it's a useful expression and the other dialect doesn't have it, it's a prime candidate for international migration.

In some cases, I've discussed the expressions before on this blog, so I provide links to those posts. I also include here the links I provided with the tweets and I try to give credit to those who suggested them as untranslatables.

• AmE buyer's remorse: 'regret felt after a purchase'. [Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary definition]. Suggested by @flipdrivel

The interview I did with the Chicago Manual of Style people has brought me quite a few new readers. (Not to mention a 'Hey! I saw you in this newsletter I subscribe to!" during [BrE] the school run. Next thing you know, it'll be the paparazzi.) One of these new readers is Linda, a Washington, DC editor, who wrote to ask if I'd covered toward and towards. And since I've been rather embarrassed for some time that I haven't covered this, Linda's request has gone to the front of the (AmE) line/(BrE) queue.

The first thing to say about toward and towards is that both are found in both Englishes. What is different is which one is more common and standard in each place. In the US, toward is more common, particularly in published work; in the UK, towards is. This is shown in the ratios of the two variants in each dialect. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has about 6 toward for every 1 towards. But the British National Corpus favo(u)rs towards 23:1.

Towards is one of the things that I resisted for a long time after moving to the UK--because of the associations I had for it in AmE. My first teaching job was teaching remedial (AmE) freshman composition in Illinois, and that was where I first reali{z/s}ed that I was a toward-sayer but that there were a lot of American towards-sayers. And I took it upon myself beat the 's' out of these people. I perceived the 's' as something that marked people as unsophisticated hicks. Most advice you can find on the internet these days will tell you that it's fine to use either. I was a young east-coaster in the midwest. Mea maxima culpa.

So, when I came to the UK and was surrounded by those esses, I just had to grit my teeth, much as I've learn{ed/t} to do with the BrE use of reckon (which says 'HICK' in capital letters to my northeastern US self) and whilst (which says 'PRETENTIOUS' to my US self). Live and let live, speak and let speak, as we're taught in Linguist School. [If you want to talk about those two, please use the comments sections at their linked posts.] These days, if I'm writing for a British publication or if I'm proofreading for a British writer, I do use towards.

The reason I've not done toward and towards in seven years of blogging is that I knew it'd bring up all the other -ward(s) words--and that means work, because they're not as straightforward. Toward(s) is almost always a preposition. Something like backward(s) can be an adverb or an adjective. In my dialect, I'd allow the 's' much more easily for an adverb than for an adjective and I'd allow the 's' more for the figurative use of the adjective than the literal. You may have different instincts about these:

• Adjective (literal):  a backward(s) motion
• Adjective (figurative): a backward(s) idea
• Adverb:  You've got that on backward(s)

I am not going to do an in-depth analysis of all of these. Picking out figurative and non-figurative meaning would be just too labo(u)r-intensive. So, at this point, I'm just going to look at adverbs (since they're more like the preposition toward(s) anyhow). I'm using the Global Web-Based English corpus for this because I suspect that there's a high risk for mislabel(l)ing (or 'mis-tagging', in the corpus linguistics parlance) the parts-of-speech of these particular words. By using GlobWE, I at least know that the same 'tagger' did the tagging, so any mistakes should be comparable. In the table, the percentages are within-dialect. So the AmE numbers add up to 100% in each row and so do the BrE ones.

Adverbs	AmE ward	AmE wards	BrE ward	BrE wards
back-	23%	77%	13%	87%
down-	67%	33%	17%	83%
for-	98%	2%	94%	6%
in-	78%	22%	31%	69%
on-	59%	41%	20%	80%
out-	78%	22%	37%	63%
up-	40%	60%	13%	87%

So we can see here that:

• Both dialects prefer backwards and (especially strongly) forward.
• With the exception of forward, BrE prefers -wards, in keeping with its preference for towards.
• With the exception of backwards and upwards, AmE tends to prefer the 's'-less version, in keeping with its preference for toward. 
• AmE's preference for onward over onwards doesn't seem very strong, though.

Showing you the percentages made the numbers clearer, but it hides some interesting things. For instance, Americans use onward(s) (1868 examples, counting both variants) a lot less than the British (5233 examples). Why? A quick glance at the examples shows that many of the UK examples were things like

from 1833 onwards
version 1.5.2 onwards
from primary school onwards

AmE would tend to use on as an adverb in such cases, rather than the -ward(s) form.  So, for example GlobWE has 11 examples of from 2008 onwards and 5 of from 2008 on in BrE. Those numbers are reversed in the AmE portion of the corpus.

The other thing that interests me in those numbers relates to my day job, in which I study antonymy (opposite relations). Why do forward in AmE upwards have different endings from their opposites? I can't come up with any semantic explanation. I'll just have to conclude with something I've been heard to say elsewhere (and may be heard to say again in Ashford and Ealing in September):
If you're looking for logic in vocabulary, then you're looking in the wrong place.

In other news: My second (and last for the time being) contribution to the Numberphile video series is now available--on differences in how numbers are said and used in AmE and BrE. If you're interested in more on that subject, here's the link to my other 'numbers' posts.