The time-telling construction exemplified by
quarter of four was among the first Americanisms to be beaten out of me (metaphorically, of course)
ex patria. People challenged me to explain why I'd said
of when I'd meant 'before', and since I couldn't explain it, I gave up saying it. This is the most opaque of the differing time expressions in AmE and BrE, but there are others.
In the table below, the ones that are in bold are particular to one dialect. If they're not in bold, they're used in the other dialect too:
| time | AmE | BrE |
| 10:15 | quarter after 10 | quarter past 10 |
| 9:45 | quarter of 10 | quarter to 10 |
| 10.30 | ten-thirty | half-ten |
In either dialect, one
could say
half past 10, but Americans generally call it
ten-thirty. The BrE
half-ten is informal, but common in speech. What's very confusing, if you're someone who is learning both BrE and Swedish at the same time (ok, so maybe it won't bother you), is that in Swedish
halv-tio ('half-ten') means 'half an hour
until ten', i.e. 9:30.
Some Americans say
quarter till ten, which Michael Swan on the
BBC Worldservice reports is due to old Scottish English. Hence its effect in the US is strongest in Appalachia.
The other main time-telling difference between the UK and the US is the relative prevalence of the 24-hour clock. In the US, 24-hour time-telling is associated with the military, and with spoken expressions like 'oh-four-hundred hours' or 'twenty-three hundred hours'. Since everyone else only counts up to 12 in telling time, we have to append
a.m. and
p.m. on everything.
Until recently, Britain did the same, but increasingly the British are following the Continent in using the twenty-four hour clock in writing, for example on invitations, bus and train
timetables (AmE=
schedules) and digital clocks. In speech, twenty-four-hour time-telling is still a bit artificial. Say you were asked when the next train is. You look at the timetable/schedule, and it says: 18:42, 19:00. It'd be fairly natural to say that the next train is at
eighteen-forty-two (or
six-forty-two), but for the one after, one would be more likely to say
seven o'clock than
nineteen hundred. Saying
*nineteen o'clock is definitely out.
(Better Half chips in that
in the a.m. meaning 'in the morning' is very American.)
Dates, of course, are written differently on either side of the North Atlantic, with North Americans (most strongly US Americans) putting the month before the day and the rest of the world putting the day before the month. I used to be confident that international communication via computer would force a regulari{s/z}ation of date formats, but this doesn't seem to be happening. I assume that underlying mail programs there is a universal way of dating mail, but in the interface it is translated into the format that is local to the recipient. So, emails from my computer have shown up on others' computers in the following formats:
Skickat: den 11 augusti 2006 07:26 [Sweden]
Date: Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:29 pm [Sweden via a US e-mail program]
Sent: 26 July 2006 14:35 [UK]
Sent: Mon 24/07/2006 17:51 [UK]
Sent: Mon 4/24/2006 8:59 AM [US]
There go my hopes for world peace through shared date formatting.
It has been interesting, however, to witness the evolution of the name of that horrible day in September 2001. It didn't take the US media long to settle on
Nine-Eleven (usually written
9/11) as the way to refer to that day and its events. In Britain, it was referred to as
September 11th for some time after this, but
nine-eleven is creeping in. Better Half points out that some Brits have started to refer to the day of the foiling of the
Gunpowder Plot as
five-eleven. This stands for the 5th of November, not the eleventh of May, of course, so it's both an homage to and a corruption of the 9/11 formula. Two such-named plays about the plot were produced for its 400th anniversary last year:
5/11 and
Five Eleven.
Myself, I avoid saying
9-11, and become a bit sad when I hear it with a British accent. Perhaps because I was not living in America during and since the events, the term didn't grab hold of me, and I can't help but perceive it as jingoistic and, well, disrespectful. I found the following bit of blogging (from
By Neddie Jingo) on this phrasing:
I guess I'm bothered by the idea that "Nine-Eleven" has become a shorthand for a bottomless reservoir of symbolism and automatic, reflexive emotional associations, a thing that's so fraught with meaning that "the terrorists were responsible for 9-11" is used as a justification for the most idiotically disastrous war my country has ever embarked on. It's become, in short, a brand name, a thing used to sell the Iraq War to the people paying for it, and I (and, I imagine, a lot of you) would like to see it subverted.
And that's where you, my international friends, can make a difference.
My suggestion: Insist on calling it "Eleven-Nine," just as your own national conventions dictate. Boy, that'd confound a lot of people who desperately need some confounding. Imagine -- just by gently insisting on the rightness of your own nomenclatural convention, you remove at one blow "Nine-Eleven's" mystical associations. You'd also strike a major blow against the notion of American Exceptionalism, of linguistic hegemony, of cultural imperialism. Strike a blow for Relativism.
I think the notion of
9/11 as a brand name is what strikes me here, and explains to me a little while I've felt so uncomfortable with the term.
Let's hope no other dates need names like this.
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