Separated by a Common Language

Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don't you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!

— Daylin Leach (@daylinleach) 7 February 2017

Leach was apparently inspired to use this term because it had previously been applied to Trump by protesters in Scotland when he visited there in 2016. For example:

Scotland voted to stay & plan on a second referendum, you tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon. https://t.co/iKyEIxf8ej

— Hamfisted Bun Vendor 🔞 (@MetalOllie) 24 June 2016

Now,  there is some similarity between this winner and yesterday's US>UK runner-up mugwump, in that they are both funny-sounding insults hurled by one politician at another. But mugwump wasn't a winner because people in the UK aren't going (BrE) about/(AmE) around using the word mugwump just because one politician did. Shitgibbon, on the other hand, has stuck. Searching it just now on Twitter, I get it in about a half-dozen American tweets per hour. ([AmE] Your mileage may vary, especially depending on the hour and your timezone.) Mostly, the tweets have noun phrases like orange shitgibbon and refer to the very same person as in Leach's tweet. But the usage does seem to drift a bit, with, for instance, reference to "shitgibbon trolls"—which may be a way of calling the trolls 'Trumpist', or it may just be used generally to insult them.
 
This post is very indebted to Ben Zimmer's Strong Language/Slate post linked-to in the first tweet above. But do have a look at it for more on the linguistics of the word. At that point Ben had traced the epithet to UK users on music bootlegging sites in 2000. With a little more digging and a little help from UK journalist David Quantick, Ben was able to confirm the word's existence in 1990, when it was used in the pages of the British music magazine NME. His follow-up article is here.

Shitgibbon joins wanker and bollocks in the ranks of UK>US WotYs that help keep this blog banned in schools. Americans do seem particularly attracted to British "bad" words.

As I mentioned in the last post, I was at the BBC (on) Monday recording a Word of Mouth episode with Man Who Cries "American English is ruining Britain" Matthew Engel. One of his examples of Americanisms taking over was people in the UK saying poop instead of poo. I wish I'd known then what I just looked up in the OED.

My answer at the time was, basically, words for f(a)eces are the type of thing that would change often, because of what Steven Pinker calls "the euphemism treadmill". "Polite" words for a taboo subject become impolite once they have been associated with the taboo for too long. Some Americans are using poo more now because it sounds "less dirty" than poop, and perhaps poop sounds a bit more "fun" and a bit less graphic in for some BrE speakers. (Or maybe not. If you've switched your poo(p) word, let us know why.)

I doubted whether poo had been around long enough for Engel and Michael Rosen (the host) to have used it in their own childhoods (Rosen concurred), and therefore concluded that its loss was hardly a blow to British traditionalism. If British people are saying poop now (they're still mostly saying poo, I should note), that might be a short-lived trend. 

So, tonight I thought: "I wonder if I was right about poo being so new in BrE." And so I looked it up. And what I found was great:

Poo to mean 'f(a)eces' is first recorded in American English in the OED (1960 Dictionary of American Slang). Green's Dictionary of Slang found it in 1950 in Walter Winchell's 'On Broadway' column. (He does have an 1830s citation too, but suspects it's a misprint for pee.)
Late addition (next day): I now see there's a 1937 UK usage of poo-poo that I missed in Green's dictionary (the timeline interface is a bit tricky).

The next few examples in the OED and GDoS are mostly Australian. In the 1980s we start really seeing poo in British English--which was pretty much what I'd thought. The count-noun use (a poo, rather than some poo) is recorded in the OED as 'chiefly British' (indeed it is).

This seems like a good time to share with you a favo(u)rite song of the Lynneguist household, Kid Carpet's 'Doing a poo in the forest' (so that it gets stuck in your head too):




I would bet that the current usage of poo came to the UK as an Australianism, though, since there's more evidence of its popular use there--and plenty of Australians (and at some points, Australian television) in the UK.

[Note that if you want to look these things up for yourself in the OED, they're under the spelling pooh. I've sent a message to the OED suggesting that poo should be a co-headword there, so that it's searchable.]

But it gets better!

Poop was used in British English long before poo was. If poop is coming back (not a nice image, sorry), it's more of a resurgence (the images are getting worse) than a new immigrant.

The verb to poop while 'now chiefly US' goes back to the 16th century in English--though then it was more about farting. The 'defecating' sense is recorded in a dictionary of Cornwall dialect in 1882.

The early noun uses of poop in the 'solid' sense are American, with a single 19th century example, then more from the 1920s. But poop catches on in Britain in the 1940s.

So poop is older than poo in British English, and both were may have been American first.
[I've edited this to reflect the correction above.]

I wish I'd known that on Monday, but there you have it now! Not sure whether the poo discussion will make the editing cut (we'll find out in a couple of weeks, probably), but this blog post can stand as supplementary reading in any case

From Cllr James Baker's website

Want to bring out the pedant in me? Invite me to help fight the stigma attached to mental health. Then watch me shout: "There is no stigma attached to mental health! There is a stigma attached to mental illness!"

I have these little shoutings fairly regularly these days--because I live in England, the home of mental health stigma.






From the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE):


It doesn't matter which preposition you use, if it's a stigma and there's mental health nearby, it's probably British:


Yes, yes, some of those mental healths will have nouns after them like problems or professionals, but in BrE, most of them don't. For instance, for the 12 British stigma around mental health examples, only two follow up with problems or issues. For the others, it is just mental health that carries the stigma:



Now, when people ask me to give money for cancer or child abuse, I object that I don't want cancer or child abuse to have my money. Simple pedantry for pedantry's sake, because I'm 100% confident that the people collecting money really mean that it's money to fight cancer or child abuse. And so I thought it was with the British and mental health--they're saying it that way, but they obviously mean 'the stigma about not having mental health' rather than 'the stigma about mental health'. But it's phrased so often in this way in BrE that I wonder: maybe they didn't obviously mean that. Maybe there is a stigma about mental health. There seems to be a stigma about talking about one's own mental health, and there is (relative to American sensibilities) a stigma against pursuing mental health (e.g. seeing a therapist).

I'm being a bit facetious here, but the phrasing does go with the stereotype of the British stiff upper lip. A stigma about admitting to any mental state at all...

When I looked into mental health and mental illness a bit more, I was surprised to find that the number of mentions of mental illness were about even in BrE and AmE (in GloWBE still). But the British mention mental health much more:

Why? A clue is in the number of nouns that follow mental health. The green parts in these tables are the phrases that are statistically much more American (left) or much more British (right):

Many of the BrE ones have to do with how the National Health Service is structured, but also you can see here ways of not saying mental illness: mental health problem(s), mental health difficulties, and even mental health illness(es). AmE has some odd ones (from a pedantic point of view too): mental health symptoms (do we ever talk about symptoms of physical health? No. Illnesses have symptoms, not health) and mental health benefits (if the meaning of benefits here is the same as in disability benefits, then it's a benefit for not being healthy).  (Note stigma shows up again in the BrE list.)

We've seen other cases before of Americans trying to use "cool" British words--especially slightly "colo(u)rful" words, and getting it wrong ([more used in BrE] viz. wanker, snog). Here's a lovely example from the New York Daily News (which I saw via Oliver Burkeman):



There's a pile-up of Britishisms here: arse (=AmE ass), Mummy (=AmE Mommy), footy (=AmE soccer--or whatever informal equivalent of soccer there is. Socky?). But the sore thumb sticking out here is bollocks (click link to see its Word of the Year discussion). Yes, bollocks sometimes--sometimes--is an equivalent to AmE bullshit in the sense of 'nonsense, (BrE) rubbish'  But calling bullshit on (something/someone) is an American idiom, and you just can't stick new words (especially new words with not-quite-the-same-feel) into idioms. Kicking the pail is not the same as kicking the bucket; a bird in the hand is not worth two in the shrub, etc.

Who knows, maybe call bollocks on will catch on among the readers of the Daily News, and then we'll have yet another case where borrowing a word from one dialect to another brings a reduction in meaning and a change in usage with it. But I'm betting that British readers are hoping otherwise...


P.S. my arse! or my ass! also qualifies as an idiom, but the two dialects share it, albeit with different forms of the word. (See the link at arse above for more of the arse–ass story.)

P.P.S. Yes, there are a few examples of it on the internets. In those cases, taking the US idiom and replacing 'bullshit' with 'bollocks'. But the facts that (a) Urban Dictionary hasn't noticed it, and (b) two Brits on Twitter pointed it out to me as a bad translation underscore that it's a weird usage. 

In 2011, Douglas Bigham asked me if I'd write a piece about "the c-word" for the Popular Linguistics website, which he was trying to get started at the time. He observed:

It *seems* to me that "c---" is less gendered in the UK, but can only be directed at a woman in the US.

(He didn't censor the word, but I have. I'd say it in a linguistics lecture, but putting it on a page is a bit too in-your-face for a blog that wants to be used in schools. I think I've screwed my chances with the nanny software already, though. Of course, I'm talking about the word that's an anagram of the name of a certain Danish king.)

The article never happened (I'm sorry!) and the site closed (I hope unrelatedly, but I will admit my contribution by non-contribution, if necessary). But today I am moved to write a bit about the word because of this (slightly censored for this blog) message I got on Facebook this morning:




I will come back to why I got this message and why I've hidden his full name. Let's just deal with the BrE/AmE difference first.

This message looks like it's from the USA (and his Facebook profile agrees), because he called a woman a 'dumb c-'. Looking at the GloWBE corpus, there are two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine. This is not to say that it can't refer to either sex in either country, but there are definite different tendencies, and they give the word a different feel in the two places. The shift from feminine to masculine in BrE is (of course) part of a more general tendency to use words for women (or our parts) as the ultimate way to put down a man. Which just sums up the status of womanhood in our culture rather neatly.

(The data for stupid c--- are a bit more mixed, but still tending toward(s) AmE=female, BrE=male. And, as we've seen before, the nationality of GloWBE data is probably 15-20% corrupted by the internationality of web data.)

In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like. The statistical analysis in the GloWBE corpus marks it as a particularly British word, with 1634 British uses to 467 American ones. The statistically "most British and not American" words to come before it are that, fat, black, some and the. (The American data shows up no 'strongly American' collocates.) That shows us that it's often used referentially in BrE--i.e. to talk about people rather than to address them directly, as in "Some c- of an economics analyst on BBC News 24 just tried to equate...".

The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans. And it does offend. For me in my American state-of-mind, only certain racial insults are viler than this word. It was a very long time before I could say it out loud at all (I don't think I ever even heard it till [AmE] college/[BrE] university), and I am not usually one who is shy about words.

But the intent with which words are uttered is what really matters and this reminded me of something else that happened recently:
This was in the UK, and what the man yelled (really aggressively at a woman in an open-windowed car) was "YOU STUPID COW". While cow isn't a taboo word, it can be used very aggressively (and also often playfully) to refer to women in BrE. (Worth noting here that everyday life in the UK provides ample evidence against the American stereotype that the English, as a people, are polite.)

I wouldn't claim that  cow got started as a substitute for the coarser anatomical word (women have been insulted by all sorts of animal names for centuries), but I think that in cases like this road-rage incident there's a link. The former c- word for women is now used for men, but cow provides a similar articulatory gesture.

I've seen lots of cases of women reclaiming the c-word as an anatomical term, but less so reclaiming it as a word for people, rather than people-parts. (Compare the word for a female dog, which has been reclaimed often as a word for women showing strength of character in the face of sexism.)

a bit on the mansplaining...

I'd like to say a bit about what led to this point. It started when the Linguistic Society of America shared a link on its Facebook page:

 

That's a bad piece of  (AmE) subhead /(BrE) standfirst writing. What it means is that studies are equivocal about whether bilingualism helps cognitive development. What it says is that there might not be any advantage to bilingualism. Linguists know well about these debates, and so I posted an ironic comment on the article:

"not show any real benefits"? Like speaking two languages isn't a real benefit?

I later added a smiley face. But without the smiley face  Mr Jason, above, felt the need to explain to me that there are studies that have said that there are cognitive benefits of bilingualism and other studies that have said there are not. (He deleted his explanation before I received his personal message.) I went back-and-forth in my mind a bit about how to respond to it, and I went with this comment-reply:

Sorry, is this what they call 'mansplaining'? It was a critique of the phrasing. I do know this. I do teach it!

And in the morning, I got the private message you see above. Before reporting him to Facebook and blocking him, I did get a look at his public profile. According to that, he had studied English Applied Linguistics at a Wisconsin university less than 10 years ago. I am not including his full name here, because, honestly, it's not worth whatever further abuse he might be willing to give. I have once before received a very similar Facebook message from another  young man (that one in Ohio) after I beat him repeatedly on an online game and he accused me of cheating. (I no longer play on-line games against people I don't know.) I know a male Scrabble champion who gets such cheating-accusation abuse all the time. All they needed to do was google his name to know how silly their accusations would sound. But that seems to be expecting too much of some people. So here are some helpful rules if you want to insult people on the internet.

Rule #1 for insulting people on the internet: find out who you're insulting first.
Rule #2 for insulting people on the internet: don't insult people on the internet.

(I bother with rule #1 because you might learn something interesting. )

Now, you might say here that I did not follow rule #2. I would disagree that I literally insulted, though I will admit that it seems to have had the same effect. I used the word mansplaining in order to call out a behavio(u)r. I did not call the person anything. Maybe that one needed a smiley-face too.

I had weighed whether to call it mansplaining (and even when I did, I did so indirectly), but in the end I went with it (and even got a 'like' and a supportive message about it). I've posted this Jason's message on my Facebook page and have been discussing it with my friends this morning. One (male) friend, whil{e/st} being sympathetic to my situation and angry on my behalf, said

this is why I'm not a fan of the word 'mansplaining'. Let's not taint the name of a whole gender because of these morons.

And I've got mixed feelings about that. I replied (in part):

I have had my joke explained to me three times and it has been by a man each time. Any genitals-free behavio(u)r can be done by anyone, sure, and I have used 'mansplain' at least once of a woman, but that doesn't mean it's not gendered behavio(u)r. Just like I argued two weeks ago(?) that I felt it important to call out creepy behavio(u)r as 'creepy' I think this needs to be called out for what it is. [...C]alling it out with the 'man' is to acknowledge male privilege, and I think men (and whites and straights) need it pointed out once in a while that they are coming from a position where they've assumed some things based on that privilege. I 40% agree with you, but I 60% agree with me.

The creepy thing relates to another debate with my Facebook friends. When an inappropriate appreciation of my photo was posted in the '10th blogiversary' post, I went back and forth a bit about whether to just delete the comment or to thank him for the other part of the comment, followed by "but let's keep it non-creepy, please".

In that case I got a mix of advice in both directions. I put up the "thank you for your kind comments on the blog, but please let's keep it non-creepy" comment and deleted it almost immediately (I don't know whether the post will have gone out to people who were following the thread by email) and then deleted his comment (because I do have a comments policy and I just didn't want to spend my time debating it with strangers). I found it interesting that several female friends suggested paraphrases of the comment (mostly without the warm thanks part) that changed creepy to inappropriate or that asked for "no personal comments, please" or that I not post a photo of myself. I reacted to those suggestions [in part] with:

I don't mind personal comments. I don't like creepy comments. If I'm going to [comment on] it, I'm going to say 'creepy'. [...]  'Inappropriate' doesn't tell him what was inappropriate about it. Creepy does. Some guys don't reali{s/z}e what creepy is [...]

I post pictures to be more human. Having a face isn't an invitation for somewhat sexual comments about it. I do have a comments policy where I say that I reserve the right to delete things that aren't in the spirit of helpful conversation. But I'm not interested in banning comments about appearance. If someone says "You look just like one of my cousins!" or "I think your hairstyle has got more British while you've lived there" (I don't think it has!), that can be a bit of fun.

So, as I said above, I 60% think that when unfortunate behavio(u)r is gendered, it's important to point out the genderedness of it. That way, you hope that the person who's creeped you out, or exasperated you, or insulted you might go ahead and think about their sociali{s/z}ation to act in this way and to maybe pause to think a bit more about the things they've been led to believe about the world.  Maybe before "helping"  someone who's said something that they think "needs help", they might pause to wonder whether there's another possible interpretation of what she's said (it could have been a joke) or whether she might know more about the topic than you do.

The act of explaining things to people who don't need an explanation can be done by any gender of person to any other gender of person, sure. And it is usually done with no malice. But there's a reason it's been called 'mansplaining' and it is exhausting. Women get their jokes misunderstood or explained to them because there is a cultural assumption that women aren't funny. Many men (in many cultures) are put in positions from childhood where they are listened to, treated as authority, expected not to keep quiet and play along. And so on and so forth.

The main reason not to call out genderedness of gendered behavio(u)r (the other 40%--but it's important to note that my 60/40 split sometimes reverses) is that it makes people defensive when they're treated as a phenomenon and not an individual. And so they might not learn. But if the genderedness isn't pointed out, then they might not consider everything there is to learn there. I tweeted my ironic comment (my joke, if you will) as well:

"there may be no real advantage to being a bilingual" a New Yorker article says. Except that you know two effing languages!!

— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) 13 June 2016

At the time I'm writing this, 30 people have retweeted it, and 80 have 'liked' it, so I think many are getting the joke. But another three men have tweeted back to 'explain' the line about 'no real benefit of bilingualism' to me. Another follower called one of them out for mansplaining, and the explainer protested that he hadn't mansplained--he just hadn't read the article. So to him, explaining an article you haven't read to a person who has read it (and made a joke about it) isn't mansplaining. To me it is a perfect example. But it may well be the naming of it as a gendered behaviour that (apparently) kept him from thinking more deeply about the matter. This is why sometimes my 60/40 thinking flips to 40/60. I could try to deal with the situation by saying "let's all be good humans and treat each other with respect", and that's what I want in the end. But I think it's hard to think about what "being a good human" means without being able to reflect on sexist privileges, beliefs, and behavio(u)rs. If you've grown up male (and comfortably masculine) in a culture where masculine power and the masculine point-of-view is the default, then your perspective on what it means to be treated badly in that culture starts from a position with a limited view.

Of course, the other reason not to point out sexism is that there are a lot of scary men out there. They send threatening messages. They call the other scary trolls' attention to you. And in Jason's land they're allowed to own guns. America has become a violent opera about the dangers of damaged masculinity. It's a complete Catch-22. Don't call out sexist behavio(u)r, and sexist behavio(u)r is allowed to thrive. Point out sexist behavio(u)r and you might have to live with more (and worse) of it.

(I'm sticking to sexism here, but I think the argument and the dangers are fairly transferable to other kinds of discriminatory structures and behavio(u)rs and the privilege they create. But that might not be for me to say!)

In case you are ever accused of mansplaining or any other kind of unhelpful 'splaining, here are some responses that you might consider:

"Whoops! Sorry about that!"
"It hadn't occurred to me that I was doing that, but thanks for pointing it out."
"Fair enough. Never mind!"
"Hm. That's given me something to think about, thanks."

If you use the last one, please note that you can do the thinking without involving the person who felt mansplained-to. Don't expect them to give you a sticker for working it out. Don't expect that they want an argument about why what you did wasn't really mansplaining. Just take it as someone else's observation on your behavio(u)r. (You don't even have to reply at all on social media.) And then, if you want to be helpful, try to see it from their side.

on  irony

And, yes, it's dangerous to try to achieve irony on the internet. Next time, I'll try to remember the smiley face. British people often comment on Americans' alleged inability to interpret ironic statements (here are two old posts about that: one two and a BBC piece on the matter). There are definite regional differences in this, however, and that may have been a factor here.  I'm a northeasterner. (It may also be relevant that I'm an academic.)  I do irony, and I enjoy it when others enjoy it too.

p.s. avoiding mansplaining

I forgot to add my easy mansplaining-prevention tips for any gender:

1. If you feel the urge to explain something (especially to a stranger, especially on social media), pause to ask yourself: was I asked a question? 
2. If you were asked a question, consider: might this be a rhetorical question?
3. If you weren't asked a non-rhetorical question, there is no need for you to explain.

Regarding the second item: it's not a bad idea to avoid rhetorical questions in writing.
Regarding the third item: this doesn't mean you can't have a conversation about the topic. But rather than trying to explain, you could ask a question and find out more about the other person's relationship to the topic. You could say why you too think the topic is interesting. There are many things you could do that don't involve making yourself seem like a mansplainer...

p.p.s. I've reali{s/z}ed that you can't search for this post on the blog because I've been coy. So: cunt.

Since I presented four Words of the Year in four posts, I thought it might be useful to have one post that lists all four. Then I thought: why not have a look at all of the US-to-UK and UK-to-US Words of the Year since I started doing them in the first year of the blog?  Yeah, why not?  So here's a (orig. AmE) round-up of the words to date, followed by some reflection/critique of my picks to date.

From US to UK I've declared these Words of the Year (click on them to be taken to the original post):

2006: muffin-top
2007: cookie
2008: meh
2009: staycation
2010: shellacking
2011: for the win - FTW
2012: wonk
2013: Black Friday 
2014 (adjective): awesome
2014 (noun): bake-off

From UK to US I've declared these Words of the Year:

2006: wanker 
2007: (baby) bump
2008:  to vet (e.g. a candidate)
2009: to go missing 
2010: ginger (redhead)
2011: kettling
2012: bollocks
2013: bum
2014 (adjective): dodgy
2014 (noun): gap year

My thoughts on these:

• I think I've got(ten) better at it over the years. The first year is a bit of an embarrassment, because muffin top is probably originally Australian. It may have been reinforced in the UK by use from the US—at least that was my perception at the time--but I would not have picked it today.
• We see more 'naughty' words in the UK-to-US direction. The only time I've been tempted to have a 'naughty' one in the US-to-UK direction was in 2012 when my British brother-in-law (and various students of mine) took on the AmE use of douche as an insult (short for douchebag). As discussed in those posts, when people take on words for taboo things from other languages or dialects, they often use them in ways and contexts that they wouldn't in their native dialect. This is especially the case of wanker (and derivatives) in AmE, where it just sounds like a funny thing to say and probably does not (for most US users) give rise to images of male masturbation. Americans often find British words for taboo things 'quaint'. At the same time some British folk find Americans prudish in their reactions to our shared taboo words. 'The c-word' has far more currency in the UK and the social barriers involved in the use of 'the f-word' differ considerably. That's a topic for another post. Possibly on this new blog.
• A number of the US-to-UK words feel rather dated. This is in large part due to the necessity that the word be 'of the year' in some way. British English speakers use lots of Americanisms, but in order to be WotY, I look for active discussions of them or use of them in the news, etc. Meh.

But I don't feel too bad about some of these seeming like weak choices in retrospect. I'm very happy with some of them. And other Word of the Year declarers, including the one I get most excited about, the American Dialect Society, have had misfires too. In the end, it's a bit of fun. And in the words of T. S. Eliot:  "last year's words belong to last year's language/And next year's words await another voice."

I'm sure you'll let us know what you think!

I've been in blog-paralysis because everything I want to blog about would take a Very Long Time to write about and I'm supposed to be writing about other things. But along came Mrs Redboots on the Lynneguist Facebook page, making me blog by saying an oft-repeated falsehood about American English.  I don't mean to disrespect Mrs Redboots. Plenty of people believe this one. Even people who were educated at Cambridge and who are given Guardian podcasts to spout about American English. But I do mean to fight the misperception. So:

 Americans do not say tidbit because they would titter at BrE titbit.
 Americans say tidbit because that's the original form of the word.

It's a really easy one to blog about because I've said it before in the comments of another post, where another reader repeated the myth that tidbit arose from American prudishness. So I'll repeat myself here:

The original form of ti{d/t}bit is generally held to be tidbit from tid or tyd (special, choice) plus bit and goes back to the 1600s.

 To give the OED etymology for it (just so you know I'm not making this up!):

In 17th cent., tyd bit , tid-bit , < tid adj. + bit n.¹; later also tit-bit , perhaps after compounds of tit n.³tid-bit is now chiefly N. Amer.

(Except that we North Americans don't put a hyphen in it. As we've seen before, the British like hyphens in compounds--or former compounds, as this may be considered--a lot more than Americans do. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English there is just one tidbit with a hyphen, compared to 217 without. But still, the 20-year-old British National Corpus has 6 hyphenated tit-bits to 27 titbits, so this 1989 OED version is in need of a spelling update.)

The 'perhaps after compounds of tit' part refers to things like titmouse or titlark. That particular tit refers to small things--so you can see how people might reanaly{s/z}e the word as meaning 'small morsel' rather than 'choice morsel' and change its pronunciation accordingly. Tid meaning 'tender, soft, nice' (as it was recorded in Johnson's Dictionary) was never all that common anyhow--it is assumed by later scholars that it was restricted to some dialect(s). It wasn't long after tid bit is first recorded in the OED (ca. 1642, but that isn't the first time it was used, of course) that the first instance of tit-bit shows up (1690), but it was a while before it took over completely in Britain. So, the more prevalent 17th-century form went to America, where it happily carried on, ignorant of the mutations happening in the family it left behind in England.

I'm going to restrain myself from going into the whole story of why this word came up in Mrs Redboots' and my conversation, as that was related to yesterday's Twitter Difference of the Day, and there's another blog post in that.  Look at me! Keeping it short!

It's our last full day in the US after a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation of nearly a month.  I'd thought I'd catch up on blogging during this downtime, but I started to enjoy actually being on holiday/vacation. Imagine that!

As we rushed to get everything done before leaving my parents' house and my hometown, I asked Better Half to run across the street/road to the (AmE) drug store/(BrE) chemist's to buy a (AmE & BrE) greeting/(BrE) greetings card for my soon-to-be nine-year-old niece. He came back with a very (orig. AmE in this sense*) cute card that was arguably marketed at a younger age group, explaining (with alarm in his voice) that he couldn't bear to buy a (orig. AmE) tweenie-appropriate (not his words) card addressed to 'a spunky girl'.

An hour or so later, we searched with desperation for a place to have lunch with my parents. We'd checked in at the airport, but there is now nowhere in ROC to have anything but a cookie or a pretzel outside (of) the security zone, and our usual diner across the road had closed down. (We found later that JFK is no better--couldn't find a 'proper' restaurant in which to eat after collecting our luggage/before going to our foodless hotel. I blame Homeland Security. And, America, why don't you put sensible things in your airports after security? Like a drug store/chemist's where one could buy baby food and sunscreen in order to get around the 3-oz./100 ml rule? UK airports [orig. AmE i.t.s] rule, oh yeah!)  We ended up at a local (orig. AmE i.t.s) chain restaurant about which the less said, the better. But it thrilled by being in the same (orig./chiefly AmE i.t.s) plaza (i.e. set of retail businesses sharing a [AmE] parking lot/[BrE] car park) as this gym:





And this had BH clamo(u)ring** for a blog post on spunk. 

Spunk came up, so to speak, in my last post, because the American Heritage Dictionary gave it as a synonym for gumption. And there I had the footnote:

* I've no doubt that some readers will find this definition humorous, as spunk is BrE slang for 'semen'. But the primary meaning in AmE (also found in BrE, and originating from a Scots/northern England dialect for 'spark') is 'Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' (OED).

In the comments, a couple of US readers claimed familiarity with the 'semen' sense of spunk, but its use in US business names indicates that it is the 'spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' sense that is called to mind first in AmE. (My research has, however, led me to an adult entertainment business in Australia called "Spice and Spunk Strippers". You're welcome.) In BrE, the 'seminal fluid' meaning has been around since at least 1890, and the other meanings (of which there are many) have been around longer, but many of the other meanings (e.g. 'a spark', 'a match', 'a lively person') seem to be more rooted in northern dialects and may not have had much currency down south when the 'semen' meaning took off. Two meanings that aren't marked as dialectal in the OED are 'tinder' and 'One or other of various fungi or fungoid growths on trees, esp. those of the species Polyporus, freq. used in the preparation of tinder'--and perhaps it is that sense from which the 'semen' sense comes (here's a photo of the fungus, you can judge).

Spunky meaning 'Full of spunk or spirit; courageous, mettlesome, spirited' is not marked as dialectal in the OED, but some of the earliest citations seem to be Scottish. (Well the first one, Burns, definitely is, and the second one has the word lassie in it. For some reason the links to the OED sources aren't working for me.) There is no 'semen-y' meaning in the OED, but it certainly exists. The OED does include a 'US & dial' meaning 'Angry, irritable, irascible', but that's not a sense that I hear used, and the citations are all from the 19th century.

At any rate, the semen sense seems to have taken over British minds--or at least the minds of the under-50s, as far as I can tell. I'd be interested to hear whether people in other parts of the UK have the same impression of the spunk(y) situation. Americans, meanwhile, mostly use the word in with positive connotations--and with a definite feminine bias. Here are the top nouns that follow spunky in the Corpus of Contemporary American English:




So, this is yet another example of Americans innocently using words that sound "dirty" in BrE. And before you comment, please note that there is a £5 tax on this blog for typing fanny pack.***



Oh--and before I go:
If you've ever wondered what a Lynneguist sounds like (after 12 years of anglification), wonder no more! Patrick Cox's latest World in Words podcast is an interview with me about all sorts of things, like how my immigrant vowels have shifted, criticism-softening devices in BrE, and language and social class. He promises a part 2 after his holiday. I had a lovely time (that's me all Britified) speaking with him, as we have converse experiences--he's an Englishman living in the US. I hope it might be of interest to some of you too...




*There are several 'in this sense' originally-AmE items here, so henceforth I abbreviate 'in this sense' as 'i.t.s'.
** Quote: "You could blog about that."
*** Payable to: http://www.msf.org/

This post is inspired by the following quotation from darling, two-year-old daughter Grover:

"Bastard.  (BrE) Mummy said it!"

 Before she (orig. AmE) outs me as a (orig. AmE) potty mouth at her (AmE) daycare/(BrE) crèche (or nursery), I'll have to take the matter into hand and save my sparkling wit (in response to Better Half's all-too-accurate parodies of me) for (BrE) after the watershed.

Because it's late at night (or early in the morning), I'll let Wikipedians do the work for me:

United Kingdom

According to Ofcom, the watershed on standard television in the UK starts at 9:00 p.m., and finishes at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. Programmes that are 15+ are shown during this period. However, some 12+ shows can be shown before 9:00 p.m., such as The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and Doctor Who. On premium film or pay-per-view services requiring a subscription, the watershed starts at 8:00 p.m. However, 12, 15 and 18 rated films can be shown on PIN protected channels (such as Sky Movies) at any time of the day. Viewers are required to enter their PIN to view. There should be a gentle transition to adult material, and 18-rated material is not allowed to be shown before 9:00 p.m.
See also for the UK: The Ofcom Broadcasting Code - Section 1

United States

The term "watershed" is not used in this context in the United States. In the US, the "safe harbor" for "indecent" programming begins at 10:00 p.m. and ends at 6:00 a.m. the next morning (all time zones). However, content that is considered "obscene" (including explicit human sexual intercourse) is never allowed by the FCC rules for broadcast stations. Those content rules only apply to channels broadcast terrestrially and not those only available on cable. Consequently, restricted-access networks (like the premium channels HBO and Showtime and adult channels Playboy TV and Spice) have taken advantage of considerably more leeway in their programming.

The term is an extension of other uses of watershed:  'the ridge or crest line dividing two drainage areas; water parting; divide' (which some dictionaries list as 'Chiefly BrE') and later ' an important point of division or transition between two phases, conditions, etc.' (Late addition, June 2017: Michael M has pointed out that World Wide Words has a good account of the AmE/BrE difference in the watery kind of watershed.)

If I needed an equivalent for after the watershed in AmE, I think I'd say not in prime time, which isn't exactly the same thing.  The watershed is a dividing line between the times when stricter and looser 'decency' codes have to be followed, whereas prime time is the part of the evening in which television networks expect to have the most viewers and therefore where they put their choicest programming (8:00 to 11:00 or 7:00 to 10:00, depending on the time zone).  It's also when they charge the most for advertising time.  In BrE, this is more commonly known as peak time, though since the major broadcaster (the BBC) is (orig. and principally AmE) commercial/(BrE)advert-free, it's less directly about advertising revenue.  While prime time is not the only time when children might be watching, not in prime time is often used to mean 'not appropriate for a general audience'.  This gives a double meaning to the name of Saturday Night Live's original troupe, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

On American (chiefly AmE) network television (i.e. distributing programs to local affiliates; not cable/satellite), the rules are fairly restrictive at all times, so I was surprised when I first moved to the UK and saw things like Something for the Weekend (which was really horrid) or The Sex Inspectors (experts watch couples getting it on and give them pointers on improving!  The website describes it as post watershed), right there on free TV at a time when the equivalent US stations are showing the nighttime news.  (Did the US ever import this format?)  The reason why most of the good American television comes from HBO and Showtime is that those, as pay channels, do not have the same content restrictions as their free broadcast counterparts (and they've decided to use that power for good rather than evil).

At any rate, either Better Half will have to wait until the watershed from now on before he points out my pedantries and hypocrisies, or I'll have to rein in my tongue-in-cheek responses. Or else Grover will be teaching the entire pre-nursery room some choice AmE phrases.    I think I know which one is most likely.