Separated by a Common Language

We buy the Guardian every Saturday because Better Half just cannot live without the Guide. It's a lot of paper to buy just to get the television listings, but this doesn't deter BH. It's a nightmare for me, though. Once a newspaper crosses my threshold, the only section that I can bear not to read is the sport(s) section. On a good week, it takes me a full seven days to get through the whole paper. I haven't had a good week in ages.

So, excuse me if I treat the following as news, 'cause it is to me. The British pound is worth more than two US dollars now, which gives all news outlets an excuse to write about British shopping tourism in the US. The Guardian joined this particular fray (21 April) by playing the game that BH and I play at the airport: guess the nationality. They stood outside Macy's in New York City and guessed at which shoppers were British. They had a hard time distinguishing the Brits from the Scandinavians, but they're pretty easy to tell from Americans:

New Yorkers claim they can detect British exchange rate shopaholics a mile off, through a combination of the rabid Buy Now look in their eyes, the British male's sideburns - American men usually shave them off - and over-reliance on Diesel clothing, and the women's slight scruffiness compared with their highly-groomed American sisters.

I think the scruffiness comparison only works in urban America. There are a lot of other clues, though. Middle-aged women in sweatshirts with embroidery or appliqué: probably American. Older men whose hair hangs below the tops of their ears and their collars: probably British. And so on and so forth.

But back to the article. The first couple they approach is/are indeed British. The second is/are Danish. Then we come to the third:

The third attempt gets another strike.

I thought I understood that sentence until I read the next one, which, in my estimation, contradicted its predecessor.

Avril and Stuart MacFarlane from Edinburgh are very much over here for the shopping.

Finally, I reali{s/z}ed that a baseball metaphor was getting in the way. If an attempt at something is described as a strike, an AmE speaker would naturally assume that it was a failed attempt, since in baseball a strike is (rather illogically) a failed attempt to hit a ball. The strike in the Guardian article is, of course, more related to the sense used in to strike gold or to strike oil--i.e. to succeed in finding something. Interestingly, the use of the noun strike to mean 'an act of discovery' is originally AmE too. But still it didn't sit right in my brain, as the baseball sense is rife in AmE, both on and off the playing field. A common saying is three strikes and you're out, meaning (as in baseball) that a person should only be given three chances before they're not given any more. This metaphor carried over into American legislatures, where three strikes laws have been passed in various states. Such laws guarantee that the penalties for a third criminal offense are extremely steep -- characteristically, life imprisonment for a third felony. This has contributed to America's prison overpopulation problem.

Now turning to another topic, which is only related by the Guardian connection, Strawman wrote to point out a correction in Monday's Guardian. (And he actually asked about it on Monday. I can only assume that Straw leads a life of leisure if he can actually read a newspaper on the day it comes out. I believe he also won a prize last year for playing more tournament Scrabble games than anyone else in the country that year. Some people know how to live...) The correction said:

American (or Canadian) usage slipped into a report, Robbers superglue man to bike (page 26, May 4), about a South African crime victim: "Paramedics used chemicals and petroleum jelly to ... pry the man's skin from the bike." Pry: to make an impertinent or uninvited inquiry (Collins). British English calls for "prise".

...and Strawman wrote to ask whether Americans indeed use pry to mean prise. All the time! (And also to mean 'to be nosy', as it is used in BrE.) But the Guardian is not absolutely correct in its implication that pry=prise is just a North Americanism; the OED lists it as 'dial. and U.S.'--i.e. it is used in some British dialect(s) too, particularly, it seems, in Suffolk and Essex. Incidentally, the OED lists the alternative spelling prize before prise, but in AmE, as in the Guardian, prise seems to be preferred nowadays.

The Guardian is sometimes (as it was in Strawman's e-mail) nicknamed the Grauniad, because of its past reputation for typos. I liked the fact that the entry for Grauniad in Urban Dictionary includes an unintentional misspelling. (Or at least I am pretending to like that fact because I think it's ironic. I'm not sure like is the right word here.) The definition also has misinformation in it. Par for the course in UD.

This entry is mostly an excuse to post a picture of the pretty (and, in person, pretty imposing) Christmas tree at Rockefeller Centre, which Better Half and I visited a week ago. This was the first time I'd been to New York City during the (AmE-preferred) holiday/(BrE-preferred) festive season, and I was excited to watch the ice skaters in the rink below the tree. But when we got there, all I got was an opportunity to teach Better Half an AmE (or, as the OED puts it, "Chiefly N. Amer.") word: Zamboni. This is a proprietary name for a machine (in vehicular form) used to resurface ice in ice rinks, introduced in 1962 (patented in 1965) by Frank J. Zamboni & Co. of Paramount, California. BH had never seen one before, however he was not content to watch it do its job for more than 10 minutes before declaring that we weren't going to see any ice skaters. Instead, we merried ourselves with the fantastic light show at Saks Fifth Avenue.

A few days later, in a (AmE) book store/(BrE) bookshop, I spotted a children's book called Z is for Zamboni: A Hockey Alphabet, illustrating that in AmE hockey refers to a sport played on ice. In BrE, one must say ice hockey to refer to that sport, and hockey refers to what Americans would call field hockey.

Merry Christmas from Better Half and me!

Better Half is a bit obsessed with the Ashes, which, because it's taking place in Australia, involves listening to the radio at very unsocial hours. One of these days I will do a post on cricket metaphors in BrE (as I have started to do for baseball in AmE--though there is a lot more to do in that field, so to speak). I incidentally heard the following on the radio very early this morning by Geoffrey Boycott ("a horrible , nasty man," says BH, "but very entertaining"):

If you're going to be a hooker, you should be a controlled hooker, not a compulsive hooker...

I said, "there should probably be court-ordered therapy on the NHS for compulsive hookers." BH agreed.

A correspondent on the American Dialect Society e-list expressed surprise at the following Briticism spoken by an American character in the American television show/programme Law & Order: Criminal Intent:

He liked to dress in women's clothes - panties, bra - the whole kit.

In BrE, kit is used both more frequently and in more ways than in AmE. Used alone, AmE kit is likely to refer to a set of parts that one can put together to make something--as in She built her car from a kit. It's also used in various combinations. For example, a shaving kit or Dopp kit is a travel bag for men's toiletries. (Dopp is a trade name, but Dopp kit has been generici{s/z}ed.) Kit is also heard in the AmE phrase the (whole) kit and caboodle--that is, the entire collection of things related to a certain task or context:

Dell's modular approach is an attractive proposition for those who wish to avoid lugging around the whole kit and caboodle every time they hit the road. --Newsfactor Network

For some etymological information on this phrase, see The Maven's Word of the Day.

In BrE, kit is used to refer to any collection of related things, particularly equipment or clothing. For instance, in the second (if I remember correctly) episode of the new BBC program(me) Torchwood, newcomer Gwen experiences a lot of whizzy gadgets in a vehicle and says (sarcastically) to her colleagues (again, if I'm remembering correctly), Got enough kit?

The Law & Order quotation above shows the clothing/equipment sense, which is most often used in relation to what one would carry/wear for a sport. Thus tennis kit (typically used without a or the) would consist of the clothes, the shoes and (often) the racket.

The 'clothing' sense of kit is often heard these days in get one's kit off, as in:

Sometimes in life it's nice when people are complimentary about you without trying to get your kit off. --Don Pablo Escobar on bangingtunes.com

Other ADS-list correspondents noted having heard BrE-like kits on another television show/programme and in the cycling world--so it seems to be infiltrating AmE.

I'll stop here because an IBook failing-battery horror caused me to lose (another version of) this entry once already. I need new kit!

England are (BrE; AmE = is) out of the World Cup competition. For people like me this means an end to excellent crowd-free shopping opportunities. It also means that I should write about the (BrE) football/(AmE) soccer words I've been noticing, before it all seems completely irrelevant.

While British people can watch football games, they're more likely to watch football matches (unless they write for BBC News Online, in which case they're oddly out of step). American English would refer to matches for tennis, but generally not for team sports. If you look up baseball match on Google, you find the source is generally Australian, European or US-immigrant.

Of course, the sport itself is referred to as a game--and not just any game, but The Beautiful Game. A well-worn cliché in these parts is Football is a game of two halves--i.e. 'don't count on things staying the same way, they might change'. This is applied to just about anything. Sometimes it retains its original sense, and other times it just means 'X has two aspects':

Attractiveness is a game of two halves. (New Scientist)

New Zealand, like football, is a game of two halves. (The Times (Ireland))

Sisters, like football, is a game of two halves. (CD review on Rate Your Music)

Your report “Virgin’s £30m German peace price” (Business, last week) reminded me of the fact that business, like football, is a game of two halves. (The Sunday Times (UK))

(I haven't found the original source of this phrase. Anybody know?)

This World Cup has seen the coining of a new tabloidific word. (And it's not tabloidific, which I just made up all by my lonesome--you can googlewhack it with any other word on this blog.) It's the acronym WAGs (pronounced [wægz]) for 'Wives and Girlfriends', but also used in the singular, where the acronym doesn't make as much sense:

For those footballer W.A.G. (Wives And Girlfirends!) wannabees, we've cherry-picked some fabulous designer goodies to have you looking as high-maintenance as Victoria, Colleen and Cheryl in no time. (Tiscali shopping site)

Presumably this term was born out of frustration with the thwarted desire to refer to Footballers' (AmE=Soccer Players') Wives--thwarted, that is, by the marital status of many of the most watched football couples. Marina Hyde at the Guardian pegs it as "what promises to be this year's most tediously predictable new OED entry" and it was last week's Word of the Week at Macmillan English Dictionary's site. It's not a very kind term, since wag also means a joker, but footballers' wives (and girlfriends) are treated as a kind of national joke anyhow.

Are there any wives of American sports figures who are famous just for being wives of sports figures and shopping a lot?