Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts

what 'polite' means: Culpeper, O'Driscoll & Hardaker (2019)

I've studied the word please off and on for a few years now.* Currently, I'm trying to finish up a study that I started an embarrassing number of years ago. Now that I've returned to it, I have the pleasure of reading all the works that have been published on related topics in the meantime. They couldn't inform my study design, but they must now inform the paper I hope to publish. One of these is a chapter by Jonathan Culpeper, Jim O'Driscoll and Claire Hardaker: "Notions of Politeness in Britain and North America," published in the book in From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness, edited by Eva Ogiermann and Pilar GarcĂ©s-Conejos Blitvich (Cambridge UP, 2019). 

Their question, what does polite mean in the UK and US, was a research project on my to-do list. When I was a younger scholar, I'd have been (a) royally annoyed with those authors for getting to it first, (b) sad, sad, sad that I didn't get to do a fun piece of research, and (c) consumed with self-loathing for not being quick enough to do the project myself. It is both the blessing and curse of middle age that I now look at anything anyone else has done with gratitude. Good! Now I don't have to do it! 

Let's start with why it's interesting to ask about "notions of politeness" in the two countries. Here's a clue from an earlier post about use of please when ordering at restaurants. I asked:
So, how can it be that Americans think of themselves as polite when they fail to extend this common courtesy word?
I argued that Americans (subconsciously) find the lack of please in these contexts "more polite." In the comments section for that post, some people—mostly British people—could just not accept that a food order without a please could be described as polite. To them, to be polite includes saying please. If you're not using the word please, it's just not polite. 

Now, part of the reason for that disagreement is that I was using the word polite in linguistic-theory-laden ways. The distinction between how the word politeness is used in linguistic discussions and how it's used in everyday life has become such a problem for us linguists that we now talk about polite1 and polite2 to distinguish commonplace understandings of polite (1) from our theoretical uses (2). The failures of communication in my previous blogpost probably stemmed from having three understandings of politeness at play: the linguist's polite2, American polite1, and British polite1. 


Postcard from the How to be British series


 

Culpeper et al. set out to contrast British and American polite1. They point out that academic research on the topic of British/American politeness is "full of stereotypes that have largely gone unexamined." These stereotypes hold that British culture favo(u)rs maintaining social distance by using indirectness and avoidance in interaction, while Americans are more interested in creating interactional intimacy by being informal and open. The authors asked: how do AmE and BrE speakers use the word polite? If differences exist, then do they conform to the stereotypes, or do they tell us something new? To investigate this, the authors used two sets of data.


Part 1: clustering 'polite' words in the OEC

First, they searched the Oxford English Corpus, where they found thousands of instances of polite. In AmE, it occurs 6.8 times and in BrE 8.8 times per million words. They then used corpus-linguistic tools to determine which words polite was most likely to co-occur with in the two countries' data. They then used statistical tools to group these collocates into clusters that reflect how they behave linguistically. (I'll skip over the detail of the statistical methods they use, but it suffices to say: they know what they're doing.) For example in the British data, words like courteous, considerate, and respectful form a courteous cluster, while words like cheery, optimistic, and upbeat are in the cheerful cluster. 

The British and American datasets were similar in that polite co-occurred at similar rates with words that formed cheerful and friendly clusters. This seems to go with the common stereotype of American politeness as outgoing and inclusive, but contradicts the British stereotype of reserved behavio(u)r. 

The most notable difference was that British polite collocated with words in a sensible cluster, including: sensible, straightforward, reasonable, and fair. This cluster didn't figure in the American data. The British data also had a calm cluster (calm, quiet, generous, modest, etc.), which had little overlap with American collocates. British polite, then, seems to be associated with "calm rationality, rather than, say, spontaneous emotion." 

Other clusters seemed more complex. Courteous and charming came up as British clusters, while American had respectful, gracious, and thoughtful clusters. However, many of the words in those clusters were the same. For example, almost all the words in the British courteous cluster were in the American gracious cluster. That is, in American courteous and attentive were more closely associated with 'gracious' words like open-minded and appreciative, while British courteous and attentive didn't intersect with more 'gracious' words. Respectful is a particularly interesting case: it shows up in the courteous cluster for the British data, but has its own respectful cluster in American (with words like compassionate and humane). 
 
Looking at these clusters of patterns gives us a sense of the connotations of the words—that is to say, the associations those words bring up for us. Words live in webs of cultural assumptions. Pluck one word in one web, and others will reverberate. But it won't be the same words that would have reverberated if you'd plucked the same word in the other web. It's not that compassionate wasn't in the British data, for example—it's that its patterns did not land it in a cluster with respectful.  In American, respectful seems to have "a warmer flavour" with collocates relating to kindness and positive attitudes toward(s) others, while in the British data respectful has "older historic echoes of courtly, refined, well-mannered behaviour." 

Part 2: 'politeness' and sincerity on Twitter

Their second investigation involved analy{s/z}ing use of polite and its synonyms in a particular 36-hour period on Twitter. The data overall seemed to go against the stereotypes that American politeness is "friendly" and British is "formal", but once they looked at the data in more detail, they discovered why: US and UK words differed in (in)sincerity. In the British data, respectful seemed to "be used as a vehicle for irony, sarcasm and humour", while in the American data friendly "appears to have acquired a negative connotation" about 17% of the time, in which "friendly" people were accused of being untrustworthy or otherwise undesirable. This also underscores the idea that American respectful has a "warmer flavour" than British respectful. It's intriguing that each culture seems to be using words stereotypically associated with them (American–friendly; British–respectful) in ironic ways, while taking the less "typical of them" words more seriously.  

Yay for this study! 

I'm grateful to Culpeper, O'Driscoll and Hardaker for this very interesting paper, which demonstrates why it's difficult to have cross-cultural discussions of what's "polite" or "respectful" behavio(u)r. The more we're aware of these trends in how words are interpreted differently in different places, the better we can take care in our discussions of what's polite, acceptable, or rude. 


*If you're interested in the fruits of my please labo(u)rs so far, have a look at:

Read more

spreading linguistic misinformation

Today's xkcd is timely...





...considering that Cambridge Linguistics Extra (at Linguist List) yesterday published a blogpost by me on linguistic misinformation. Click through for more...

The post is a promotion for my series in the journal English Today. So far, half of the series has been published--an article on the cognitive biases that colo(u)r our view of other Englishes and one on whether it makes sense to speak of 'British' or 'American' English. The series has allowed me to practi{c/s}e expressing ideas for the book I'm writing.
Read more

accent attitudes

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking.  Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether AVIC is on its way out, perhaps mostly found in older generations.  Here's what I found:

In 1985 (see references below), Stewart et al. published a study for which American subjects had been asked to rate the social status of people with standard American or standard British accents. They found that:

speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents’ own (American) accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. For American listeners, this finding contrasts with their reactions to other ethnic accents (p. 103)
But that was more than 25 years ago. And just 10 years ago, Bayard et al. (2001) found that American accents were more positively evaluated in New Zealand and Australia, and America. Here's their graph showing the reactions to accents in their sample of Cleveland University students:



You might not be able to read the graph, but that dotted line at the top represents the North American accent, as spoken by a woman. Below that is North American male. Leaving third place to....Australian men! Yes, the English accent (as spoken by a man) is way down in 4th place now.

But my favo(u)rite graph of the ones I've come across is this one, from the undergraduate research journal at Brigham Young University. It shows the results of asking Brigham Young students to rate the intelligence of people with different accents.




The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.  My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.

Better Half often complains that while he was treated like a god (the god of what, I don't know) when he first went to live and work in the US in the early 1990s, nowadays he's "nothing special" when we go to the States. He attributed this to New York City being overrun by the British, particularly when the pound was much, much stronger than the dollar. But I think he also finds it to be true when we're away from the big city where British people tend to travel. So, perhaps this is a symptom of a general trend for (standard-AmE-speaking) Americans to have more dialectal self-esteem than they used to.  You're welcome to speculate on the reasons for this in the comments--provided that you aren't too rude.


Any other business
  1. Thanks and more thanks to all of you who voted for SbaCL and my @lynneguist Twitter feed in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top Language Lovers for 2011.  I'm grateful/flabbergasted/proud to see Separated by a Common Language ranked 5th among Language Professional Blogs (and 37th overall) and @lynneguist ranked 2nd in the Twitter category and 4th overall. Big, big thank-yous to all who had a hand in that!
  2. Thanks again for your help in locating instances of Dialect Fail and Dialect Success in transatlantic novel-writing. The Brighton Book Festival talk ('Whose Language is it Anyway?') was a success, in no small part because of your helpful suggestions.
  3. Before you ask, that talk is not available on video--but I'm very happy to give it in other venues. Please email me if you're interested! Talks (with audio publisher/video producer Better Half) are underway to recreate parts of my Lynneguist talks in snazzy podcast form. No release dates have been imagined yet, but you know I'll tell you when they're available.
  4. I had some interesting comments from English teachers (both school teachers and language-school ESL teachers) after the talk--they'd learn{ed/t} that some of their closely held beliefs about English were fictions, and thought that their colleagues would have benefited from the talk as well.  So, that got me thinking that it might be good to do some workshops with teachers on American/British differences, standards and prejudices. (It might also be useful to do them with publishers/editors, perhaps.) If there are any schools out there who might like to be guinea pigs for such a thing, please get in touch!



References:


Anderson, S. et al. (2007) How accents affect perception of intelligence. Intuition 3:5–11.

Bayard, D., A. Weatherall, C. Gallois, and J. Pittam (2001) Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia, and America. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:22–49.

Stewart, MA, EB Ryan, and H Giles (1985) Accent and social class effects on status and solidarity evaluations. Personality and  Social Psychology Bulletin 11:98–105.
Read more

sarcasm and irony

I’m very happy to welcome my first guest blogger, a student who’s finished the work for her Sussex degree in English Language and Film Studies, which included a dissertation comparing British irony and sarcasm to American—the latter of which has seen more academic attention. Rather than twiddling her thumbs while awaiting her result, she has graciously allowed us some insight into her work. Gentlepeople, I give you Solo:


As I’m sure you’re aware, the British are very fond of saying that ‘Americans don’t get irony’ and expressing over-inflated national pride in our astounding power of sarcasm. It of course isn’t the case that Americans don't get irony [see this past post--ed.], and while BrE applications of sarcasm can be very subtle, we’re not the unequivocal masters of the form. For example, I always thought the typically AmE expression ‘I could care less’ to be a particularly stupid grammatical error on their part, until this week when I saw it pointed out here, that the expression is in fact intended sarcastically (see also this past post, which is not so kind to Americans--ed.). Perhaps we misinterpret this because in our arrogance we Brits don’t expect sarcasm from Americans without all the attendant cues, bells and whistles. Or maybe because I’ve mainly seen it written down in novels and forums, rather than heard it said aloud.

Over the course of my research into the differences between American and British (especially English) sarcasm however, it became clear to me that the difference isn’t so much in the way we use it, as in the way we define it. While the AmE definition emphasi{s/z}es negativity and saying the opposite of what is meant, Brits seem to have a far broader definition, which includes humorous exchange, clever wordplay and affectionate insults or criticisms of others (even those we don’t know, which I think may be the most fundamental cultural difference).

To put it another way, there are things we British will do in conversation which we would call sarcastic, but which Americans would not. For example, in the irreverent media, Sir Bob Geldof, of Live Aid fame, is frequently referred to as ‘Saint Bob’. Now this is obviously not entirely sincere, but it isn’t fully contemptuous either; we are mocking his interminable altruism and campaigning, but we also respect all his charity work and dedicated parenting. So although we don’t completely mean that he is a saint, we also don’t mean that he isn’t and I think most Brits would refer to that as sarcasm, but I’m also fairly sure our American counterparts would not. Feel free to correct this flagrant generali{s/z}ation ☺

In AmE ‘sarcasm’ seems to be very much a subordinate term for a specific type of pragmatic use. (Many theorists will argue it’s a subcategory of verbal irony, but I won’t go into that here.) But in my (humble) opinion it has a much broader application BrE. Thoughts would be much appreciated.

I shall furnish this largely speculative theori{s/z}ing with some spurious exemplification:

If a friend of mine were to be self-deprecating above and beyond the call of Britishness, I might say something obvious like “Yeah, cos (=AmE ’cause--ed.) you’re the worst national award-winning photographer St. Martin’s [a top art college—ed.] has ever had,” in a heavily sarcastic tone. Equally I might agree in a very sincere sounding way with “Yeah, you are quite sh*t.” Or I might say “Don’t say that, you’re actually really good,” or “You’re not that bad”--both in a way that made it sound like I didn’t think they were good at all. Then again I might feign ignorance and comment “You were lucky to get in really,” or ask “How did you manage to pass the course?” in an ingenuous fashion.

All of these I would quite happily and definitively class as sarcastic utterances, but my research suggests that under the AmE theoretical rubric, they would fall into other categories. I think our predilection for teasing each other and continually (BrE) ‘taking the piss’ has come to be associated with sarcasm as an everyday conversational form in a way that it has not in AmE, where there seems to be more of a time and place for it.

Regional and gender differences in production of sarcasm have been quite conclusively demonstrated in the literature. Megan Dress and others (2008) carried out some research comparing attitudes to sarcasm and likelihood of use between Northern USans, from upstate New York, and Southern USans from Memphis. They found that the Northerners were far more likely to find sarcasm amusing and assume friendly intentions than their Southern equivalents and therefore much more likely to use it spontaneously. The difference was even more marked between the two sets of men. The Northern perspective seems to be much closer to the British attitude, though the sources Dress et al(.) provide suggest that the examples of use may still not be as broad as the unofficial BrE definition seems to allow. A majority of respondents in this study mentioned the negativity of sarcasm, though not an overwhelming majority. This might suggest that the insistence on sarcasm as a negative form is generated by linguists and literary types more than speakers.
Read more

compliments, nice and lovely

My first out-of-North-America experience was when I moved to South Africa at the age of 27, in order to take up a post at a large, English-medium university there. I'd been teaching for three years at my (AmE) graduate school by that time, and my teaching in South Africa was going fairly well, but a vague anxiety plagued me (as well as the not-so-vague anxieties that went with living in the city that had the highest murder, rape and [orig. AmE] carjacking rates in the world at that time). Although I was teaching my heart out, I had the feeling that my students weren't too impressed by me or my teaching. But after the term, when I read their teaching evaluation forms, I found that they rated me very highly. It was then that I worked out what had made me anxious: I missed receiving nearly constant compliments from my students.

Now, when I was teaching in the US, I was barely aware of the fact that I was being complimented. It would have been things like a student saying that he liked the course more than he thought he would, or another noticing that I'd had a haircut and saying something positive about it, or another expressing an enthusiastic appreciation of my kindness in lending her a book. In South Africa, my (mostly white, English-background--this was right after the downfall of apartheid) students were, for the most part, polite and committed to their course, but they showed little interest in me as a person. Of course, that wasn't a problem. The problem was that as an American, I was used to near-constant positive reinforcement from students, colleagues, friends, strangers...just about everyone. Once I reali{s/z}ed that the problem wasn't my teaching or my relationship with my students, but my expectations about them, that particular anxiety abated.

That aspect of living in South Africa was good general training for being an American abroad, as if you're outside the US, you'll probably have to get used to a less compliment-driven culture--and to outsiders' estimations of American compliment behavio(u)r.

One frequently comes across the notion that Americans are insincere--after all, they couldn't possibly be that enthusiastic about everything, could they? But the problem with such reasoning is that it comes from a different starting place than the behavio(u)r it judges. OK, sure, the waiter who is depending on you for a tip may be insincere in his compliments, but the friend-of-a-friend you've just been introduced to or the business contact you're meeting probably isn't. It is in Americans' nature to subconsciously look for points of connection with anyone they meet because mainstream American culture is solidarity-based (see Brown & Levinson 1987). This is to say that communication is based on the goal of creating a sense of equality and belonging. This, in turn, is due--paradoxically--to the facts that American culture rests on a belief in the primacy of the individual (rather than the group) and that it is achievement-oriented, rather than ascription-oriented--i.e. it's about what one does rather than what one is (we saw this recently in the discussion of social class). The individualism means that we can't just rely on the knowledge that we belong, we have to be reassured of it fairly regularly. In the words of Stewart and Bennett (1991: 139):
By defining people according to achievement, Americans can fragment their own personalities or those of other people. They do not have to accept others in their totality [...]; they may disapprove of the politics, hobbies, or personal life of associates and yet still work with them effectively. It is this trait of seeing others as fragmented, combined with the desire to achieve, that provides Americans with the motivation to cooperate.
In other words, I don't have to approve of you in order to compliment you, I just have to find a fragment of you that I can approve of in order to develop a relationship of some sort with you. One can see why this might be taken as insincerity in some quarters, but if I tell you I like your shoes and that you play the tuba well, it's almost certainly the case that I really do like your shoes and think you're tuba-tastic. So, it's a sincere attempt on my part to cement our relationship with shared values--at least as far as shoes and brass instruments are concerned.

If compliments are positive things that bring people together, why isn't everyone in the world complimenting so much? One reason is that they might not need to. If your social position is more stable, if you don't start new relationships all that often, then you might be able to take for granted the good things and commonalities in your relationships. Another reason could be that compliments are more costly in the interactional economy of other cultures. For example, in some cultures (I can never remember which ones!), if you compliment someone on their hat, they will insist that you have it. In that kind of culture, you'd not be appreciated for complimenting people on their things willy-nilly, and so compliments are more scarce. Similarly, in a culture in which praising oneself is taboo, compliments will be given more carefully, since to accept a compliment is to praise yourself. When I told my friend the Blinder that I was going to write about compliments, she said "you must write about the English inability to accept compliments". I'll let Kate Fox (2004: 408) start us off:
The English are no more naturally self-effacing than other nations, but [...] we have strict rules about the appearance of modesty, including prohibitions on boasting and any form of self-importance, and rules actively prescribing self-deprecation and self-mockery. We place a high value on modesty, we aspire to modesty.
If someone compliments you and you accept it by saying thank you, you are implicitly agreeing with the compliment and therefore breaking the 'modesty rule'. Thus, if you compliment an English person on how well she did something, she's likely to claim that anyone could have done it or to point out the bits she could have done better. As Fox notes, the self-deprecation is often ironic and humorous. Still, the fact that the modesty rule is stronger in the UK than in the US makes a compliment more 'costly'. The other reason that compliments aren't quite as free-flowing in the UK is that the culture here is traditionally deference-based (preserving hierarchies and differences between people--viz. the class system; maintaining a sense of personal privacy), although it has been shifting toward solidarity over the past century. Thus, members of the mainstream British culture are not so reliant on the approval of others as Americans are.

Now, the reason I started wanting to write about compliment behavio(u)r was because I had read the following in George Mikes' How to be an Alien (1946:31), the seminal book on being foreign in England:
If you live here long enough you will find out to your greatest amazement that the adjective nice is not the only adjective the language possesses, in spite of the fact that in the first three years you do not need to learn or use any other adjectives. You can say that the weather is nice, a restaurant is nice, Mr Soandso is nice, Mrs Soandso's clothes are nice, you had a nice time, and all this will be very nice.
Reading this, I was a little surprised, because I had got(ten) the impression, somewhere along the line, that nice was a crass American thing to say, so I got myself into the habit of saying the far more English-to-my-ears lovely wherever I would have said nice. I may have got(ten) this impression from people mocking Americans for saying Have a nice day (something that even Americans have been embarrassed to say since about 1980), or it may just be that I've heard general complaints about nice (without reference to America), as discussed by Ben Zimmer recently on his new blog--where you can see that nice already had a bad reputation well before Mikes wrote his book. At any rate, the frequency of nice noted by Mikes has also been noted in American compliments. Nessa Wolfson (1981) studied compliments in a number of cultures. In cultures where compliments are most 'costly', they tend to be rather indirect. For instance, Indonesians identified (the translation of) "You have bought a new sewing machine. How much did it cost?" as a compliment in their culture. But of America, where compliments are (BrE) cheap as chips, Wolfson notes, "The most striking feature of compliments in American English is their total lack of originality”:
22.9% of AmE compliments include nice
19.6% include good
85% of compliments fall into one of three patterns
53.6 % in the pattern: NOUN-PHRASE is/looks (really) ADJECTIVE
16.1% in the pattern: I (really) like/love NOUN-PHRASE
14.9% in the pattern: PRONOUN is (really) (a) ADJECTIVE NOUN-PHRASE
I haven't found an equivalent study of British compliments, but I don't imagine that they're much more creative, given Mikes' assessment of Englishpeople's adjectival vocabulary. (Hey, soon-to-be-final-year students--there's a possible dissertation topic!)

It must have been months ago that I first stated my intention to write about compliments, but I'd passed them up so far, favo(u)ring shorter posts. One of the things I would have liked to have done here is to go back through the comments on the blog in order to see whether I could tell which nationality was more apt to send "Hey, I love your blog"-type comments. The thought of going through thousands of comments, knowing I'd rarely be able to tell where the commenter was from, kept me from writing this for a while. So, I've not done it--and I don't recommend that you try! But feel free to pay a little more attention to your cross-cultural compliment experiences and report your observations in the comments.

Further reading/sources:
  • Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge University Press.
  • Fox, Kate. 2004. Watching the English. Hodder.
  • Mikes, George. 1946. How to be an Alien. Penguin.
  • Stewart, Edward C. and Milton J. Bennett. 1991. American Cultural Patterns (rev. edn.). Intercultural Press.
  • Wolfson, Nessa. 1981. Compliments in cross-cultural perspective. TESOL Quarterly 15:117-24.
Read more

diapers, nappies and verbal inferiority complexes

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those of you (particularly the American yous) who like signage discussions will probably enjoy it.

But there was a comment in the post that got me a bit down. Orac shows a photo of a sign for a "Baby Nappy Changer Unit" in a public toilet/restroom (which funnily uses the more Canadian washroom in the sign--it's at the Tower of London, so perhaps they're going for the most transparent term, given the tourists). About this sign, Orac says:
It sounds so much more civilized that [sic] "diaper."
And my question is why? Nappy, the modern BrE equivalent to (AmE) diaper, is a baby-talk version of napkin--though no one these days calls the things that you put on babies napkins.* So, nappy, etymologically speaking, is on a par with other baby-talk words like doggy, horsie, and choo-choo. The OED's (draft 2003 definition) first citation for it in print comes from 1927, and it's hardly complimentary of the word:
1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 7 Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).
Diaper, on the other hand comes from a Latin, later French, with a root meaning 'white'. The first citation for it is from the 14th century, where it refers to a type of cloth, and it has its place in Shakespeare (probably not referring to a baby's napkin in that case, but to a napkin or towel). So, why does a babyfied word sound more 'civilized' to an educated AmE speaker than a good, old latinate word? Methinks that this is a symptom of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

AVIC strikes Americans from all walks of life. It's why my mother thinks that it's "pretty" when an Englishperson rhymes garage with carriage. It's why Americans think people with English accents are more intelligent than they are. It's why I get e-mails from Americans who despair of their fellow citizens' diction and thank me for championing the 'correct ways'. (I e-mail back and explain that I'm doing no such thing and that their reasoning on the matter is flawed. I wonder why they never send a reply...) Of course, there's a similar syndrome affecting some BrE speakers: British Verbal Superiority Complex; however, I've not found this to be quite as evenly distributed through the population as AVIC is in the US.

Now, there are times to think that some (uses of) language is(/are) better than others. One thing that Orac and commentators on his blog praise is the directness and honesty of certain signs. I don't always agree with their examples, but directness and honesty are admirable qualities in signs. (One that is pictured on the blog, but that I've never understood, is the BrE convention of putting polite notice at the top of a sign that orders people around. What's wrong with please?) Other things that make some (uses of) language arguably better than others are consistency within the system (e.g. in spelling) and avoidance of ambiguity. But these are issues about the use of the language, and both BrE and AmE can be (and often are) used in clear, consistent, direct, honest ways.

So, back to my old mantras:
  • 'Different' doesn't mean 'better' or 'worse'.
  • 'British' doesn't necessarily mean 'older' or 'original'.
  • 'Older' doesn't mean 'better' either!
  • Let's enjoy each other's dialects AND our own!

(One can be obnoxiously preachy in either dialect too.)

Happy Labor Day to the Americans out there. (I won't re-spell it Labour, since it's a name.) And I will admit my prejudice that American Monday-holidays generally have better names!


* I can't resist a few side-notes on nappy and napkin.
  • AmE uses sanitary napkin for a feminine hygiene product, while BrE uses sanitary towel.
  • Then there's the AmE meaning of nappy, which derives from the more general sense of 'having a nap'--as fabric can (BrE: can have). In AmE this also refers to the type of tightly curled hair that is (pheno)typical of people of sub-Saharan African ancestry--particularly when said hair is not very well cared for. This was the meaning in play when (orig. AmE) shock-jock Don Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". When the news story was reported in the UK, there was some confusion (see, for example the comments here), with some people thinking that Imus was claiming that the women wore diapers or napkins on their heads (Ă  la Aunt Jemima).
  • Then there's the old napkin versus serviette drama in BrE and related Es. In some (e.g. South African and some BrE speakers), the former is reserved for cloth table napkins, and the latter for paper. Elsewhere, serviette just marks you out as being 'non-U'--i.e. not upper class. Serviette is virtually unknown in AmE.
Postscript (8th September): Found a lovely example of AVIC (and its cure, in this case) in last week's Saturday Guardian Review section, in an article by AM Homes about American writer Grace Paley:
Grace often retold the story of how, at 19, desperate to be a poet, she took a course taught by WH Auden. When she used the word "trousers" in a poem, Auden asked why she was writing in British English - why didn't she just say "pants"? Paley explained that she thought that was just what writers did, and then never did it again.
Read more

cheers

The hardest thing to cope with for an English learner of Swedish is not the gender system in nouns, nor the voiceless palatal-velar fricative, nor the verb-second syntax. No, the toughest thing to learn is how to make do without a word for 'please'. I end up saying Tack ('thank you') in all sorts of places, just in order to make some polite noise when I don't know what else to do.

How often one should thank others is something that differs from culture to culture, and something that people tend to notice as over- or under-present in cultures that are not their own. British expats in America are often heard to say that they miss people saying please and thank you. For what it's worth, as an American in Britain, I miss people saying (AmE) Excuse me or sorry when they knock into me in shops or on the street. (Whenever my mother comes to England, she has cause to exclaim But I thought the English were supposed to be polite!) The worst case of this involved a 9-year-old American guest who was shoved to the floor when she was unfortunate enough to get between a Londoner and an open Tube train door. There's no explaining away that kind of behavio(u)r, that was just rude. Otherwise, my theory is that the reason that British people apologi{s/z}e less often than Americans when they knock against you in a public place is that they're in denial about having made physical contact with a stranger. (See the discussion of notions of privacy in the comments back here.)

One hears a lot more thank yous in Britain during a typical exchange at a (AmE) store check-out counter/(BrE) shop till. Somehow, I've caught on to this, and when I'm working at the charity shop/thrift store, I say thank you when the customer gives me an item to ring up, when they give me their money, and at least once at the end of the transaction. The customer says thank you at least when I give them their change and when I give them their purchase. So, that's a minimum of five thank yous per transaction, but in real interactions, I've counted up to eight. An American encounter would typically have two or three, mostly toward(s) the end of the interaction, and would not include the initial thanks for putting the item-to-be-purchased on the counter. Perhaps because they say thank you more, the British have more ways to give their thanks. One informal means of giving thanks is to say ta, which the OED says is "An infantile form of ‘thank-you’, now also commonly in colloq. adult use." Another is cheers (which is the word I started out intending to write about, since I had a request months ago from Ben Zimmer).

Cheers is interesting because it is so flexible. In AmE, it is simply used as a salutation in drinking (or sometimes with a mimed glass in hand, as a means of congratulations). In BrE it has this use, but is also used to mean 'thank you', 'goodbye' or 'thanks and goodbye'. I first learned these uses of cheers in South Africa, where my American colleague and I learned to pronounce it as chizz, following the example of our South African colleague Chaz (Charles). Using cheers to simply mean 'goodbye' is probably more South African than British (the OED doesn't note this sense, and notes that the 'thank you' meaning is as recent as the mid-1970s), but I find it very useful for those situations in which one wants to close an e-mail with thank you for something that hasn't been done yet. A British colleague noted recently noted with incredulity that Swedes often close e-mails with thanks in advance, wondering whether that was a direct translation from Swedish. It is (tack i förskott), but I had to point out that Americans write this too (whether or not we have knowledge of Swedish!), as we (or at least some of us) have been taught that it is presumptuous to thank someone for something they've been asked to do but haven't done yet. Since cheers is ambiguous between Hail, good person! and Thank you!, I use it to express gratitude while avoiding the feeling that I'm breaking that letter-writing rule that I learned from Miss Pitrella back in whatever grade/year that was. (If anyone is watching me from the Beyond, it's Miss Pitrella.) However, it was Ben Zimmer's impression that cheers "always struck me as UK-derived, yet my sense is that in email context it's used more in the US than the UK." This is not my experience at all, but you can side with Ben in the comments if you like.


So, cheers from Sweden! Or as I tend to think of it, Heaven on Earth (at least when the weather is as gorgeous as it has been this week). Heading back to the UK tomorrow (which, according to the Swedish newspaper I was reading today, is smutsig).

Postscript (the next morning): Woke up this morning reali{s/z}ing some the things I hadn't said in this post. One is that the reason why please and thank you are a little more important in Britain is that Britain is more on the 'deference' side and the US more on the 'solidarity' side on the scale of politeness systems. I discussed this a little back here. This means that Americans start out assuming that everyone's equal/friendly, whereas the British start out assuming some status distinctions between people, and therefore treat strangers (and expect to be treated by strangers) with a bit less familiarity and a bit more polite caution. (Note that this doesn't mean that there aren't big social differentiations in America--just that in many situations we feel it's more polite not to make a big deal of them.) This doesn't directly explain the lesser amount of excuse me behavio(u)r when bumping into people, which is why I had to come up with my little theory above.

Another place where the English say thank you more often is when travel(l)ing by bus or coach (in AmE, they're both bus--we don't differentiate lexically between the cross-town and more comfy long-distance types). If the exit of the bus is by the driver's seat, then one says thanks or thank you to the driver. In Watching the English (if I'm remembering correctly), Kate Fox describes this as insincere English behavio(u)r. Personally, having heard American friendliness described as 'insincere' by many non-Americans, I have a real problem with outsiders describing others' behavio(u)r as 'insincere'. (Kate Fox is an insider, but as an anthropologist, she was taking the outsider's role.) Non-Americans often say to me that they can't abide the insincere way in which Americans are so friendly and complimentary with people they don't even know. I don't think this is insincerity, but optimism and enthusiasm--which can seem unseemly in cultures in which earnestness is unseemly (see Kate Fox again).

I'll stop there before I write another post's worth!
Read more

suckers for an accent

Paul pointed out this article and discussion on BBCNews about the tendency for Americans to assume that the British are brighter (and their lack of recognition of non-RP accents as British). Better Half says that he's not sure whether Americans think he's smarter because of his accent, but he does think Americans (in America) find him more interesting and give him more attention because of it. American women often also find the accent sexy... Better Half says for the record that he didn't say that last sentence--though the fact that he's had more American girlfriends than British may provide some corroboration.



Read more

british overstatement

The British are masters and mistresses of understatement, one is told. Yeah, well, maybe.

For your consideration, my current list of most hated, painfully overused words:
  • essential
  • fanatical
  • excellence
I've grumped about excellence once before, and I'm sure that it's come in from US corporate-speak. So let's concentrate on the adjectives, which seem to represent the full extent of many advertising copywriters' adjectival vocabularies.

The bus that goes past my house says that it offers Essential Travel for our City. If I weren't boycotting the word, I could shop at Essential Records or Pet Essential or let (AmE prefers rent) property at Time Essential and listen to The Essential Mix on Radio 1 or read the dozen or so publications that say they are the essential guide to the city and what's going on in it before heading over to the Essential Festival, essentially.

If fanatical is less used, it's only because there seems to be a rule that it must only be used in alliterative phrases. The Odeon cinema (AmE prefers movie theater) chain is Fanatical About Film. Upper Crust sandwich shops are Fanatical about Freshness. And everyone else is Fanatical about Football.

Another relevant example is brilliant (informally, brill), which in recent years was the overstater of choice among young people. Now it's amazing, which I hadn't noticed until a Swedish colleague pointed it out. We were in my office when a student came and asked to borrow a book. Our interaction went something like this:
Me: Here you go.

Student: Amazing! Thanks!

Me: You can give it back to me at seminar.

S: You're amazing! Thanks!

SwedCol: [muffled giggles]

These are not the words of an understating culture--and yet they are so repetitively and unimaginatively used. One can't really find too much fault with the young people, as youth everywhere get infected by the buzzwords of their age. But the advertisers? Aren't they supposed to make us want to buy their product, rather than wanting to track them down in their offices and bludgeon them with thesauruses?

Could it be that overstatement is so foreign to British culture that those who try to do it cannot help but do it badly? Perhaps overstatement should be left to Americans, who do it so effortlessly. Mission Accomplished!
Read more

sounding English/American

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):
America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.
This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:
There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?
By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:
From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.
Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

  • I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.

  • Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.

  • I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)


*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.
Read more

chav

A recent list of American (well, North Carolinian) university student slang includes the word chav, defining it as:

CHAV - working class boor. From British slang. "“This club used to be nice, but now it's full of chavs."

I find this borrowing of the British term a bit sad, since it necessarily involves some semantic shift or drift. It's not so much that I'm against linguistic change and borrowing, but chav describes a very particular social phenomenon, which is generally not found in the same way in the US--with the notable possible exception of Britney Spears. The word becomes less useful if it just refers generally to 'working class boors'.

Britain, on the other hand, does not have exact equivalents of the American phenomena rednecks, trailer trash or wiggas, although there are overlaps between the latter two and chavhood.

A key difference between the US and UK social stereotypes is their relation to race and class issues. The US categories all implicitly or explicitly reference race--rednecks are whites who stereotypically have racist attitudes, trailer trash is a subcategory of white trash, and wiggas are (typically/originally upper middle class) whites who emulate 'urban black' styles. While chavs are generally white, and while their style and slang often echoes an 'urban' Black American aesthetic (e.g. bling), the relationship is less direct than for wiggas. Football (AmE: soccer) also plays a heavy role in chav style, whether in emulation of favo(u)rite players (or their wives), or in the display of football-nationalistic symbols (e.g. England team wear). Click here for a football-themed post on World Cup words.

Chavhood is also associated with Gypsydom, although more through shared stereotypes than actual lineage. The word itself is thought to be Romany in origin (see Michael Quinion's excellent site), and pikey, an offensive word for Gypsies (or Travel(l)ers, a preferred term in Britain), is often used as a synonym for chav.
Read more

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)