It's been a killer week work-wise, so here's a very short post.

Flatlander wrote to ask:

I was watching “Supernanny” the other day (it’s voyeurism, I know) and she made reference to removing the “stabilizers” from a child’s bicycle, meaning the “training wheels”. Is this a common BrE term or just a one-off?

It's not a one-off--one often hears stabilizers (and often reads stabilisers) for these things in BrE. Looking it up on the web, I've also found it on American sites, but particularly where training wheels would not be an appropriate term--for example wheels for balance-impaired adult cyclists for whom training wheels would be a misnomer.

Training wheels doesn't seem to be in the OED, so I'm having a hard time finding out if it was originally AmE. It is used currently in BrE (14,100 hits on UK Google), but I get the feeling that (a) stabilizers is the more usual way to refer to the things on children's bicycles, and (b) training wheels is more likely to be used metaphorically. Training wheels is a more transparent metaphor than stabilizers is, since the word stabilizer is pretty ambiguous--can refer to a food additive, something to keep dye from running, parts of various types of vehicle/craft, etc. For example, a headline from the Times Higher Education Supplement (14 Feb 2003) reads:

Diversity bike wobbles as the training wheels come off

For more on z versus s in BrE spelling, see back here.
For more on bicycles, see this one.

Can you tell that my maternity leave has finished? Little, tiny posts nearly a week apart--how sad! But the real sadness is that I now know the point of maternity leave, and that point is CAKE. You go to get-togethers with other new mothers and everyone orders cake. You meet for coffee with friends and colleagues who want to meet the baby, but, what the hell, why not order some cake too? People come to visit, they bring you cake. The baby has a 'birthday' every month, so let's bake a cake. Yes, I have seen the cake. I have eaten of the cake. And now I must desert the cake.

So, here's your little cakeless observation of the week, brought on by Grover's newest toy--the one in the cent{re/er} of this photo (from Bright Starts). It took some work, but I finally convinced Better Half that this is a blue zebra. (Grover agreed with me from the start.) But I'm starting to wish that I'd called it a stripey donkey, because I am mocked (not by Grover, who is too bidialectal to notice and would be too polite to mention it even if she weren't) every time I say zebra in the way that I learned to say it, with the first syllable pronounced like zee (the American name for the letter that's called zed in BrE). In British English, the first syllable is pronounced as it would be in the French zèbre, i.e. zeb.

This is one of those pronunciation differences that is not the result of a general pronunciation rule that differs between AmE and BrE--instead, it's just a lexical oddity, like vitamin (first i as in bit in BrE, but like in bite in AmE) or tomato (you know the song). BrE is probably influenced by a tendency toward(s) shorter vowels and greater awareness of French, while AmE isn't. In spite of the fact that the only non-dual-citizen in the household (ha! who's the minority now?) will only accept the zeb pronunciation, the OED lists the zee pronunciation first. (People from other regions of the UK will have to let us know if they use the zee-bra pronunciation there. Zeb seems to be standard in the Southeast.)

On my listening to it (as you can see from my description of the sound in the last paragraph), it sounds like the BrE version puts the syllable break here zeb•ra, rather than here ze•bra, but as far as I know, that's against English syllabification rules, which favo(u)r complex onsets (i.e. a consonant cluster at the beginning of a syllable) of increasing sonority (i.e. the explosive /b/ before the more vowel-like /r/) over plosives in the coda (i.e. putting the /b/ at the end of the previous syllable). So, I'm assuming that I'm wrong about that syllabification (i.e., that it's just my perception of the less-familiar-to-me pronunciation and not the reality of it) and that both versions put the syllable break before the /b/--but I'd be happy for real-life phoneticians (rather than a dabbling lexicologist) to weigh in on the matter.

I pronounce it (to the extent that my American articulatory organs allow) in the British way when I say (BrE) zebra crossing (a pedestrian [AmE] crosswalk marked by stripes on the road--as seen on the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road). But when talking to my baby about toy animals, I revert to my mother tongue--now my mothering tongue.


P.S. Apologies for all the (annoying, I know) parenthetical comments, which make my sentences (oh, won't someone stop me?) so difficult to parse.

P.P.S. Two mentions in Language Log this week. Wow, I'm somebody now! Thanks Ben and Arnold!

Regular reader JHM sent me a link to this article from a Washington Monthly blog, in which an American complains about British (and European, more generally) road signs:

And as long as I'm venting a bit here, what is it with Europeans and compass points? Their road signs tend to be gloriously well designed and easy to decipher, but they never include the words north, south, east, or west. So when you get to a crossroad, all the sign tells you is that one direction takes you to, say, Chard, and the other direction takes you to Axminster. Unless you've memorized the map, or happen to be a local who doesn't really need the sign in the first place, you don't know which direction to go. (If you're lucky, one of the cities on the sign is the one you want to go to, which makes things easy. Usually it's not.) But although I might not know every town and village in the area, I always know from a quick look at a map which general direction I want to go. So why not add the words north and south here? Some sort of EU-wide directive to banish directional notation, or what?

JHM writes to ask:

Does the linked article ring true to you? If it is true that road signs tend not to indicate compass direction, I find this very odd indeed (even though (in New England at least) six or seven times out of ten the posted compass direction has a very low correlation to an actual compass point).

JHM often writes to ask if things that he's read about Britain ring true for me, and I think I always say "yes, it's ringing". I suppose that illustrates the extent to which we get so accustomed to things being one way that we never imagine them being another way. In this case, I have to say "yes, it rings true, but..."

When I lived in South Africa (and had a car), I don't remember ever seeing a sign on a (BrE) motorway/(AmE) highway* with a direction on it. This got me lost in the (AmE) boondocks when I needed to get from a rural hotel in the Northern Province to Swaziland. None of the signs said which way was north or east, and none indicated how to get to the major towns in the province (or to the border). Instead, at each (chiefly AmE) intersection there were signs pointing toward(s) the next town on the road. One thus needed to know every single town along one's route in order to make sense of the signs. I imagine GPS is very useful there these days.

While I don't drive in the UK, on occasions I'm a passenger for a longish car journey (Americans would usually say trip, but that tends to be reserved for shorter journeys in BrE). Initially, I was only travel(l)ing for southeastern Scrabble league matches, and thus only experienced the A-roads (trunk roads), which are so-called because they are designated by A + a number, e.g. the A27. (There are also B-roads, which are more local.) A-roads are roughly comparable to state routes, like New York State Route 31, which goes through my hometown.** But unlike the US roads, the British roads are not called by different names depending on the direction you're driving in. So, if I give you directions out of my town, I'll talk about 31 East or 31 West . A friend of our family lives on a different route, just outside the village, and her address is "[house number] Route 88 South, Newark, NY", meaning she lives on the stretch of Route 88 that lies south of Newark. (Before you think "hey, I've been to Lynneguist's hometown, note that it's not the Newark that has the big airport you've been to. That one, despite its pretensions, is not in the state of New York. My hometown doesn't have a travel agency, let alone an airport. It has apple orchards. And cows.)

In Britain, people don't talk about "the A27 West" (though Google the phrase, and you'll think me a liar; but really, no one says it! At least not with the same name-like intonation that one says "Route 31 West"). When you join the A27, the sign will tell you about upcoming towns, not whether you're going east or west. If you're on that road driving east from Portsmouth, you have to get past Chichester before you start seeing signs for Brighton, if I remember correctly. So, if you want to get from Portsmouth to Brighton, you'd better know that Chichester is on the way. You need to constantly make decisions about which town to head toward on roads like the A27, since for the most part, they are not limited-access roads with on-ramps and off-ramps. They have roundabouts (often called traffic circles in the US, but rarely seen there--though I believe New Hampshire has quite a few). Lots of them. The signs on the roundabout exits will indicate the number of the routes and some number of upcoming towns/landmarks, as in the picture below.

So far, so much like my South African experience. But then I graduated from southeastern Scrabble events to national ones, and got to be a passenger on the M-roads, the national motorways--which are more comparable to American Interstate highways. M-roads are dual-carriageways with limited access--ramps rather than roundabouts--and they tend to be used for longer journeys. When one approaches an M-road, one may see compass point names on it--except that they're not really describing the direction of the route, they're describing the destination. That is, instead of saying, for instance "M3 North", they say "The NORTH", along with whatever cities you might get to along the way. (So, in the sign here, it's not saying that Nottingham is in 'The North' so much as it's saying that this road goes to The North, and it goes to Nottingham too.) What's interesting in this picture are the (N) and (S) in parentheses/brackets after M42. You see this in places where you need to take different routes to different entrances to a motorway. Once you're on the M42 going south, there will be no signs along the way that say M42(S), whereas in the US, signs telling you what route you're on and what direction you're going in are planted regularly along the right side of the road. The reason why (M6) in this photo is in parentheses/brackets after M42(S) is to indicate that this roundabout is not taking you to the M6 but to the M42 which takes you to the M6 , which will get you to 'The S. WEST'.

Incidentally, in England people talk about the East (meaning the east of England, not 'the Orient') a lot less than the other directions. There are two reasons for this, I think. (1) There's a lot more West than East here--in that the island juts out, particularly in the Southwest. (2) London is treated (rightly or wrongly, depending on where you live) as the hub of the universe (sorry, Boston), and it's fairly eastward. So, striking out from London, there's very little to the East. Well, there's Essex (Americans: that's where Jamie Oliver is from. English folk: make it a new joke if you're going to make it). So, while you hear/see the North, the South and the West, and the Northeast/west and Southeast/west, you rarely hear about the East.

Back to the American side... as JHM notes, the directions on particular routes may bear little resemblance to the compass direction when you're on the road. Routes are not perfectly straight lines, and non-Interstate routes can involve a number of different roads that add up to a route in the right direction. For instance, if you look at the map for US Route 20, you'll see that, in spite of its status as an east-west coast-to-coast route, there's a bit in Idaho that runs north-south. Still, we'd instruct people in Idaho to take Route 20 West if they want to get to Oregon, because 20 West is, in essence, its name.

Rather than designating the different types of route by letter, American route types are distinguished by the shapes of the shields on their signs (images/links courtesy of Wikipedia):

	Interstate Highways
	U.S. Routes
	State Routes

And within states there may be other kinds of route. There are systems to the numbering of the routes in both the US and Great Britain, but I won't go into those here, since they're not very language-y. So, if you're interested, see here for the US Routes and Interstate system and here for Great Britain.


Side notes:
* Highway is probably the most dialect-neutral term in the US, and can apply to various types of routes--the key is that there's no stopping and starting on a highway. On the west coast, one tends to hear freeway. For limited-access roads in/around cities, I'd say expressway. Major toll roads, run by individual states, have their own names. In New York, it's the Thruway. Several other states have turnpikes, which is sometimes shortened to pike, as in the Mass Pike--that is, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

** Two things to know about AmE regionalisms when it comes to routes:

1. Some Americans say route like root, others say it like rout. I grew up with the former, but the latter sometimes creeps into my speech because of other places I've lived. These dialect survey maps indicate that the 'rout' pronunciation is more common in the South and Midwest. In a forum on Canadian English, someone named Kirk says:
   
   

   About "route," I use both pronunciations of the word depending on context. For instance, I've never heard anyone say "rowt 66"...it's always "root 66" for "route 66." So, if I see an official route as in a state route I definitely pronounce it "root." When I was younger I had a paper route and I almost always pronounced it "rowt" in that context. In other, general usages of the word, I use "root" and "rowt" pretty interchangeably.

   My pattern and Kirk's pattern are the same. I grew up saying 'paper root', but now tend to say 'paper rout'.
   
   
2. Southern Californians (and perhaps others) prefix route numbers with the, but Northeasterners like me don't. So, I'd say Take (Route) 5 but an Angeleno would say Take the 5.
   

Better Half, Grover and I were waiting to cross the street/road yesterday. BH and I were both annoyed when the oncoming car that was making us wait suddenly turned left instead of passing us. Simultaneously, we made sarky (BrE informal, = sarcastic) comments. The funny thing about our comments was that each of us had accommodated the other's dialect. That is to say, BH used an AmE term and I used BrE:

BH: Nice use of your (AmE) blinkers! (=BrE indicators)
Me: Nice (BrE) indicating! (=AmE signal(l)ing)

In AmE, the more formal term for blinkers is turn signals.

Is dialect accommodation the definition of true love?

Getting back to Kelley of Delaware's queries (which I started answering here):

Every weekend this time of year there are dozens of yard/garage sales in my town. Do such things exist in the rest of the English-speaking world, and, if so, what are they called?

I can't speak for the rest of the English-speaking world, but similar things do exist (to some degree) in England, though not by the names yard sale or garage sale. These things are allegedly named after the locations in which they occur, however the ones I've passed by this week (in NY state) that have been advertised as 'yard sales' or 'garage sales' were mostly actually in (chiefly AmE) driveways (BrE drives) next to (AmE) yards or garages. AmE has other terms for such kinds of sales, including tag sale (popular in New England). Many of these terms can be seen at the Dialect Survey map here.

(Side note: The pronunciation of garage was a point of discussion at dinner tonight. Better Half's mum said it in her normal way, so that it rhymed with HAIR ridge carriage, and my mom expressed her admiration of BHM's unfamiliar pronunciation. BHM countered that the AmE (and sometimes preferred BrE) pronunciation gər-RAZH was nicer. Garage is one of the few words (maybe the only word?) that BrE speakers have complimented my (AmE) pronunciation of. This is another case in which the AmE pronunciation is closer to the original [French] pronunciation than the BrE--which only matters if you're one of those people who think 'older' means 'better'.)

Of course, part of the reason that people don't have yard sales in Britain is that they would not call the un-built-upon fronts of their properties yards. That would instead be the front garden (at least, if it's planted). (This was a point of contention between an American and an English friend this summer. The American kept calling the Englishwoman's garden a yard, and the Englishwoman kept letting the American know that she felt insulted by this description.) Nevertheless, there is nothing called a front garden sale either. I've not seen many sales of household merchandise on/in residential properties in the UK, but those that I have seen have been advertised as moving sales. Obviously, that term only applies to certain situations, when people are trying to get rid of things that they don't want to cart to their new abode. There may be a term for non-moving household sales that I've not come across. (Answers in the comments, please!) But these kinds of things are pretty rare--at least in my neck of the English woods.

What the UK does have (and the US generally doesn't) are car boot sales. These take place in public spaces, usually a (BrE) car park/(AmE) parking lot [or a field--see comments]. People put the things that they want to sell into their car's (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk, then set up a little stall of their wares (often using a folding table, etc.) by their car in the car park/parking lot (typically paying a fee to the organi{s/z}er/landowner). These happen all year round--there is one that happens every week, for example, at Brighton station. Big ones like that often have professional sellers, who may be selling new or used goods (so they resemble flea markets). Others, like the one at a school near our house, are more geared toward(s) the occasional seller.

Both countries have other types of sales in which people donate their used goods for a one-off sale (and possibly social event) to benefit a charity--for example a church. In the greater part of the US, these are called rummage sales, although they may have other regional names. In the UK, they are jumble sales. White elephant sale is a term that I heard as a child in the US (and it was already old-fashioned at that time), but that I've seen more often in the UK.

When I asked Better Half if he knew of any BrE equivalent of yard sale, he drew a blank and noted that such things are a rarity in Britain. One reason for this is that most British homeowners wouldn't have the space for such things. Front gardens/yards tend to be very small, drive(way)s are quite short, and garages are a luxury in town cent{er/re}s. Another reason is that most British homeowners just don't have the space to store as much unwanted junk for as long as American homeowners can--and thus they can't store up a sale's worth of merchandise. BH's mum, for example, has a good-sized three-bedroom house. But as is typical of a post-war London home, she has no basement, no attic to speak of, no garage, and no walk-in closets. In that situation, one doesn't wait long to get rid of clothes that don't fit, gifts that didn't hit the mark, and decorations that have been replaced. People have various ways to get rid of unwanted stuff (and, it must be said, they tend to buy less junk in the first place), with charity shops (AmE: thrift stores) playing a major part in the second-hand economy.

My father and Brother Number 2 were giving Better Half walking directions to somewhere or other today, when they said that he'd have to cross the street. BH replied that if he were to do it, it'd be (BrE) crossing the road. Which led Dad and BN2 to expatiate on the AmE difference between streets and roads. They agreed that they could cross the street in town, but would cross the road in the country. In general, the term road is found much more often for street names in towns in the UK than it is in the US, where it tends to be reserved for either country roads or sometimes biggish thoroughfares in cities (e.g. Rochester, NY has a Winton Road within the city, but I don't think there are any streets named road within the village limits of my hometown). This led me to create a new joke:

-Why did the chicken cross the street? -Because she lived in town.

You're not going to tell me that jokes have to be funny, are you?

 

P.S. for more on this topic, see this more recent post: Talking about streets and roads

James Henry wrote to say:

I had a hard time believing that an utterance such as 'He was cited for drink-driving,' wasn't a typo, or some other error. Apparently it is standard usage, and I'm left wondering if there are 'drink tanks' in the UK.

If there aren't (AmE) drunk tanks in the UK, I'd guess that it has at least as much to do with a tolerance for public drunkenness as with linguistic considerations (though they seem to be warming to the idea of American-style 'tanks' in Scotland). But (BrE) drink-driving does take a lot of getting used to for those accustomed to (AmE) drunk driving. Incidentally, the crime of drink/drunk driving is known in different ways in different parts of the US: either DWI 'Driving While Intoxicated' or DUI 'Driving Under the Influence'--though these days most people in most places know both terms.

Drink-driving and drunk driving are both compound nouns (never mind whether there's a space in it--it is a compound). While the first words of those are morphologically related (i.e. they're both derived from the word drink), they differ in grammatical category; that is, drunk is an adjective, based on the participial form of the verb drink, and drink (in this case) is the base form of the verb. How can I tell that drink in drink-driving is a verb, rather than a noun ['a drink']? Because its origins are in the phrase drink and drive--both verbs. In early days (the 1960s) it was sometimes called drink-and-driving.

This is far from being the only case in which BrE and AmE make compounds of the 'same' words in different grammatical guises. One that creates misunderstandings is AmE potted plant (participle + noun) versus BrE pot plant (noun+noun) for a plant that's been planted in a pot. In AmE, pot plant is understood to involve the slang noun pot (orig. AmE) meaning (AmE-preferred) marijuana/(BrE-preferred) cannabis. So, when British (or South African, etc.) speakers talk of tending their pot plants, AmE speakers can be expected to raise eyebrows.

Just within the topic of intoxicants, one can find more examples of morphological mismatch between the dialects. For instance a BrE headline (on what is probably an American wire story) reads (after I've corrected the punctuation and capitali{s/z}ation problems in it):

Britney Spears 'No Drink Or Drug' Problem

Now, if BS were to cop to (AmE slang, = 'to admit to') such a problem, she'd probably say that she has a (AmE) drinking problem (particple+noun), rather than a (BrE) drink problem (noun+noun). (The article itself uses the more dialect-neutral noun+noun alcohol problem.)

But drug problem in that headline is interesting too, as in BrE one often sees/hears drugs problem, which sounds strange in AmE. Here's another headline from another British source:

Britney Spears' Ex-Hubby: She Had 'Drugs Problem' With Me

The quotation marks/inverted commas in both of these headlines are amusing, since, being in the wrong dialect, they are clearly not quoted speech from Britney Spears, Kevin Federline or "their people". I'm collecting such dialectally incorrect quotations for a future post. It's not so surprising when they're in headlines, in which the notion of quotation is taken very loosely indeed, but they also occur in the main text in most newspapers. If you have other examples of quotations that are dialectally suspicious, please e-mail them to me.

And as long as I'm on bloggy business at the end here... Apologies for my recent (comparatively) low posting volume. If you're wondering why that is, see here. I'll be working (and blogging) more reasonable hours during my Easter break from teaching.

And THANK YOU for nominations to Metro's blog award. While I don't think that I have a serious chance of winning an award (not with the likes of Phileas Blog in the competition), they have noted your enthusiasm for this blog (and your ability to understand self-serving hints). Thanks very much--it means a lot to me! I'll nominate you for the Best British Blog Readers awards, whenever Metro gets around to having that competition.

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

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

Merry Christmas from Better Half and me!

The American Heritage Dictionary lists bollard as 'Chiefly British', and indeed this is a word that I hadn't encountered before I lived here, though I'd certainly encountered the things before.

A bollard (in its most frequent sense in BrE) is a post that is used to get in the way of traffic--for instance to keep cars from driving or parking on the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk (like the ones on the left) or to direct cars toward(s) the correct lane (see right). There's a scene I like in the film The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz that involves some paranoid bollards. But then again, I like every scene in that film. It's not a film that would be to everyone's taste (I saw it in a Paris cinema's season of 'British eccentrics'), but it's one of those films in which the city (London) is at least as much of a character as those that are played by actors.

Prior to my residence in Britain, I would have called bollards posts. Oh, what an impoverished vocabulary I had back then! But then one does come across more bollards in the UK than in the US. Sometimes they're there for no obvious reason. For example, on a two-way road near my house, there is a bollard that makes traffic going down hill give way (AmE yield) to traffic that's coming up the hill. Since the road is wide enough at this point to let the traffic go both ways, the bollard is just there to slow down the cars that are going down the hill. I can't see why they didn't choose another way to slow the traffic that wouldn't involve the creation of traffic (BrE & regional AmE) queues (general AmE lines). For instance, one could use a (BrE [originally] & regional AmE) sleeping policeman (other AmE speed bump; BrE & AmE speed hump; BrE road hump). Better Half has just called this bollardy arrangement a chicane, another word that only entered my (passive) lexicon after I moved here. The term comes from motor racing, where it usually refers to a little kink in the racetrack, but it's extended here to include the type of traffic slowing measure described above, and like the one (that's barely visible) in this picture from Lancashire.


Sometimes the word bollard is used (in BrE) to refer to the thing on the left, though such things are usually termed traffic cones in BrE and pylons in (at least my dialect of) AmE. Pylon, of course, can also refer to the electrical type of thing to the right--in either dialect. A strange piece of lexicographical trivia is that American Heritage doesn't record the 'traffic cone' sense of pylon, while the OED does (and marks it 'U.S.').

.........

In other news, I was away playing Scrabble again this weekend (hence the lack of blogging), and, as often happens in such situations, I was twice mistaken for Canadian. That brings the Canadian count to five instances in five months. (I also got one instance of "I usually don't like American accents but...".)

Perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't have a chance to blog, as I believe the blog is starting to work against me. I mocked mushy peas, and, lo and behold, five days later my application for UK citizenship was turned down. They say it's because some of my paperwork didn't arrive on time, but I think we can read between the peas...

An old American friend, Lord Affectation (I've got other less flattering names for him too), has moved to Kent and informed me that "The British call bicycles push irons!" I said, "Your English friends are pushing your leg." Most English people call them bicycles, just like the rest of the English-speaking world. But as the photo (taken near a bike rack on campus) shows, he's partly right. Some people do call them push bikes, including The Gardener (Better Half's Sister's Better Half--BH just called him a young fogey). It's a little old-fashioned, but it succeeds in distinguishing them from motorbikes. AmE sometimes uses pedal bike for this purpose, but bicycle would be more usual. Or just a sign saying No M/C.

The OED has push bicycle and push cycle as well as push bike, which they label as 'informal.' Myself, I've only heard push bike, but push bicycle is around on the web, as well as push tricycle and push unicycle. The OED does not have push iron, but the web holds a small number of examples, some of them in lists of Wigan dialect words. Wigan, it should be noted, is nowhere near Kent.

Of course, BrE has another push-vehicle, the push-chair, known in AmE as a stroller. Related is the pram, short for perambulator, known in AmE as a baby carriage.