Separated by a Common Language: verbs

Showing posts with label verbs. Show all posts

smacking and spanking

Oct 28, 2007

A Guardian headline on Friday read:

Ministers defy charities to uphold parents' right to smack

(The on-line version has a different title.) The article goes on:

The government yesterday reasserted parents' right to smack their children despite overwhelming opposition from charities.
Kevin Brennan, the children's minister, said there was no reason to change the law introduced three years ago permitting smacking if it does not leave visible bruising, scratches or reddening of the skin.
After a review of the legislation, he told MPs: "Smacking is becoming a less commonly used form of discipline. While many parents say they will not smack, a majority say smacking should not be banned outright."

As can be gleaned from the prevalence of the word smack in the article (and more generally in the national debate on the topic), this is the normal BrE way to refer to striking a child as a disciplinary measure. As the OED defines smack:

5. a. To strike (a person, part of the body, etc.) with the open hand or with something having a flat surface; to slap. Also spec. to chastise (a child) in this manner and fig.

Smack is generally not used in this way in AmE, as can be seen from the American Heritage Dictionary definition:

v.tr.
1. To press together and open (the lips) quickly and noisily, as in eating or tasting.
2. To kiss noisily.
3. To strike sharply and with a loud noise.

Of course, the final sense there could be used to describe hitting children with an open hand, but it's just not used that way as routinely in AmE as it is in BrE. In BrE, the Guardian headline seems clear. In AmE, I might misunderstand it as 'parents' right to kiss noisily' or 'parents' right to heroin.' (Smack = 'heroin' is originally AmE slang.)

In AmE, one speaks more naturally of spanking children, but of course spank≠smack, since spank (at least in AmE) specifies that it is the bottom that is hit (typically with an open hand, but possibly with a paddle or other instrument), whereas smacking doesn't (although it may be the case that most--or at least the most prototypical--child-smacking is on bottoms). I asked Better Half whether he'd usually refer to bottom-smacking as spanking or smacking, and he felt that he'd tend to use smack to talk about hitting children because spank (to his BrE ear) has sexual overtones. (The first thing he said upon hearing spank was spank the monkey. What a naughty boy.) The OED lists spank as 'dialectal or colloquial', and does not specify that it has to be on the bottom:

1. a. trans. To slap or smack (a person, esp. a child) with the open hand.

This UK site has spank as 'slang', but it is not slang in AmE--and not sexual unless clearly used in a sexual context.

Searching for spank on the Guardian website, I find that it doesn't occur in the current articles on the 'smacking debate' but that it does occur in articles on sport, music (due to a hiphop group called Spank Rock) and sex. So, there's little evidence that the AmE usage of spank for child-bottom-hitting is making its way into BrE. But since the OED entries have not been updated since 1989, it'll be interesting to see if they pick up on any changes in their next updates.

to table

Oct 9, 2007

Ooh, I'm cruising through the backlog of requests now. We're in June now, with Simon writing to request treatment of the verb table, an example of a Janus word in BrE and AmE meeting lingo.

In the US, meetings are often held according to Robert's Rules of Order, a popular guide to 'parliamentary procedure'. (We may not have a parliament, but we have the procedures! The Congress has its own set of rules.) In the parlance of Robert's and AmE generally, if a motion has been made and is up for discussion, it is on the floor, as in the following quotation from the Princeton Union Eagle:

After a few minutes, Weisenburger said to Girard, "There's a motion on the floor, it's been seconded. Do something."

If you want to remove the motion from the floor--that is, to postpone discussion of it until a later time, you can put it on the table, or table the motion. (You'd then say that the motion is or has been tabled.) So, a tabled motion is not on the floor--it cannot be debated. Here are some examples from the minutes of the 2002 Annual General Meeting of the International Thunderbird Class Association (which may be international, but they seem to be based in Washington state, and they use table in an AmE way):

There was considerable discussion on the issue of the mast weight. Most had to do with the question of whether the matter could be taken off the table and voted upon at the current AGM. It was concluded that it could not, due to the failure of proper notification of the membership about such an action.

If a member wishes to have this motion taken from the table it would require a majority vote of those at the AGM, assuming proper advance notification - distribution to the fleet captains as part of the agenda two months prior to the meeting date. [...]

Currently, the motion is on the table, sine dei. There is no specific date upon which it is to be brought back before the AGM.

In BrE (where parliamentary procedure--or Standing Orders--seems to differ depending on the type of bill being debated and in which House), a motion that is being discussed is on the table. So, you table a motion when you want to bring it up for debate. You can also table questions (bring them up for discussion), according to the House of Commons Standing Orders for Public Business:

Notices of questions shall be given by Members in writing to the Table Office in a form determined by the Speaker. [...] a Member may not table more than five such questions on any one day

Both systems speak of the floor, but it seems to me that there are some differences in its use. This guide to the business of the House of Lords makes the distinction between work done on the floor--i.e. in a House of Lords session, with all members able to examine and discuss the matter at hand, and off the floor--i.e. in committee. In my experience of American government, on the floor would be used in a similar way, but I wouldn't say that work in committee is off the floor, really...I'd limit my use of that phrase to describing more informal behind-the-scenes deal-making (or whatever). Perhaps insiders into either government can give us more insight.

Click on the tag below for more Janus words...including the somewhat related moot.

Labels: bureaucracy , Janus words , law , verbs | 19 comments

some light verbs

Oct 5, 2007

On to the May queries! Only 5 months behind!

Marian wrote back then to ask:

Can you tell me why some people make decisions and others take them?

The reason, of course, is that some people speak some dialects and other people speak other dialects. AmE speakers generally make decisions and BrE speakers can also take decisions.

Make and take in these contexts are light verbs. Light verb is defined by the Lexicon of Linguistics as "thematically incomplete verb which only in combination with a predicative complement qualifies as a predicate". In other languages, this usually means a fairly semantically-empty verb that occurs with another verb in a sort of compound-verb (Japanese and Korean have lots of these). In English, the term usually refers to verbs that add very little to the sentence but occur with nouns (usually) that have been derived from verbs. So, in this example's case, one could decide with a regular old verb, or make/take a decision with a light verb plus a nominali{s/z}ation of the verb decide: decision.

Since the light verb doesn't actually add much to the sentence (other than giving it a verb, which every English sentence needs), it doesn't matter much to the meaning of the sentence that we use different verbs, and light verb patterns often vary among dialects. Here are some other variations (from my own experience and John Algeo's book), but note the numbers next to them, to be explained below...

AmE - not-so-AmE

make a copy (38) take a (carbon) copy (31)

take a vacation (/holiday 219) have a holiday (123)

take a look (1841) have a look at (1607)

take a shower/bath (106/86) have a shower/bath (102/114)

take a nap (41) have a nap (36)

get exercise (15) take exercise (71)

The way to think of these is probably not that the left column is (exclusively) AmE and that the right column is BrE, but that the right column includes items that are more at home in BrE than in AmE, and the left column has items that may be found in BrE as well as AmE. The OED shows us, for example, that Caxton (1490) had make with decision and Dickens (1837) used take with bath.

The numbers in the table indicate the number of hits that I got when I searched the (UK) Guardian website for each of these phrases, and as you can see there are many, if not more, of the left-column phrasings on that UK site. Of course, some of those may be by AmE speakers (in quotations) or writers. Some may be from American wire stories, etc. But it's at least good evidence that the AmE versions are not as unfamiliar or 'foreign' sounding in BrE as the right-column versions are likely to be in AmE (from my own and Marian's judg(e)ment, at least).

In fact, I just gave London-born-and-bred Better Half the following fill-in-the-verb quiz:

I need to _____ a copy of that.

I need to _____ a holiday.

You should ____ a look at that document.

You need to ____ a shower!

I want to _____ a nap.

I really should _____ some exercise.

He answered out of the AmE column above for everything but number 6. A fault of the experiment is that he may have been primed to say take for 3-5 after saying take for 2. But mix up the sentences and try them on your better half, friend, child or passers-by and see what they say!

Labels: grammar , light verbs , verbs | 16 comments

bloviate and brunch

Sep 28, 2007

My posts are so long these days. Can I do a short one? I'll try writing about a single word and see what happens.

My friend Maverick (an Englishwoman) was talking to an American friend via Skype, and the following happened:

There was some banter as I had accused of him of pontificating (as opposed to going out and doing research!) He said no, he was 'bloviating'. I had not come across this word before and when I looked it up on google during our conversation I saw that it is used in USA. Is it ever used on this side of the pond?

It's not the most common word in America, either, but it is AmE. To quote the OED (draft 2004) definition, it means "To talk at length, esp. using inflated or empty rhetoric; to speechify or ‘sound off’." Searching for it on .uk sites, one commonly finds comments about it being American, or in 'expand your vocabulary' sites, or in (BrE) inverted commas/(AmE) quotation marks, indicating its newness or foreignness. Some examples:

The verb "to bloviate" is one I learnt in America, and it sums up what Clinton excels at: an effortlessly congenial form of self-promotion. (Times Online, 2004)

The Concise also says croeso (welcome) to some Welsh words with bore da (good morning) and iechyd da (good health) joining thousands of words from all around the English-speaking world: dicky (car boot) and batchmate (classmate) from India, spinny (mad, crazy) from Canada, and bloviate (talk at length in an inflated or empty way) from America. (about the Concise Oxford English Dictionary on Amazon.co.uk)

It's not all that new, however. The OED has found it as far back as 1845, in an Ohio newspaper. In linguistic terms, it seems to be a blend, also known as a portmanteau word--that is, a word that smashes (new technical term) together the form and meaning two words. The OED suspects that it came from blow + -viate as in deviate.

Another blend that I like is brunch--or maybe I'm confusing liking the meal for liking the word. Now, I had assumed that this was an AmE word, since the concept of brunch (particularly the institution of Sunday brunch--see, for example, the site of San Diego's Sunday Brunch Master) is fairly undeveloped in the UK (because everyone's saving their appetites for Sunday lunch). Whenever I suggest to Better Half that we should host a Sunday brunch, his reaction is something like Huh? But it's my favo(u)rite meal of the week, especially when (AmE) coffee cake is involved. That's another one that puzzles BH. He thinks (as do all the cafés (a)round here) that coffee cake means 'cake flavo(u)red with coffee', whereas in AmE it's a type of cake that goes well with a cup of coffee--particularly "in the U.S., a breakfast bread of yeast dough enriched with eggs, butter, and sugar, baked in a sheet topped with streusel [etc.]..and glazed with melted sugar" (OED). (See previous posts on baked goods and weird things people do with them, if you're interested.) So, I had a hard time believing that brunch could have originally been blended anywhere but America.

But how wrong I was! The OED lists it as 'orig. University slang' and its first published example of the word comes from Punch in 1896. Imagine that...

But before you imagine that, observe how pathetically I failed at writing about just the one word I meant to write about!

Labels: blends , food/cooking , verbs | 13 comments

pro-predicate do and verb phrase ellipsis

Sep 27, 2007

Have you read past the scary title of this post? Glad you're still with us! The phenomenon in question is how AmE and BrE speakers differ in their preferences for avoiding repetition of complex verb phrases in main clauses. (Still here?) So which of the following would you say?

(1) I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn't have done.
(2) I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn't have.

If you answered "(1)", then I'd be willing to bet that you're not American. Kevin of Berkeley, California wrote to me about this back in April, saying:

I particularly wonder if the American formulation is as jarring to British ears as theirs is to mine.

(I'll leave it to people with British ears to answer the 'jarring' point.) Since this type of construction was one of those things that I had in mind when starting this blog, I'm fairly surprised that I haven't given it proper coverage yet. I guess I've put it off because I feel the need to go over some basic grammatical concepts first. And then I got slowed down by an obsession with using sentence trees to do so. But while walking home from yoga class tonight (with my mind all open to startling truths), I reali{s/z}ed that one rarely makes new friends by presenting sentence trees to them. So, let's see how well I do without.

First, a little sentence anatomy. Both sentences (1) and (2) above are made up of two sentences (clauses) joined by a conjunction (but). The two clauses are: I ate all the chocolate and I shouldn't have (done). The second clause in both cases means 'I shouldn't have eaten all the chocolate', and in both cases the speaker is avoiding the awkward repetition of a form of the verb eat plus its complement (which in this case is a direct object) all the chocolate. So, eat all the chocolate is old information that doesn't bear repeating, but we have new information to impart, the feeling that the chocolate-eating was in some way a bad thing to do. So, we want to say the clause while leaving out the old information shown in brackets here:

(3) I shouldn't have [eaten all the chocolate].

The usual AmE solution to this problem is just not to say the bit in the brackets. (Bit is such a BrE noun to use, but not so exclusively BrE that I feel comfortable marking it as BrE.) This leaves a sentence without a full verb phrase (or predicate in traditional grammar terms). We have the modal verb (should), the negative marker (n't) and an auxilliary verb (have), which gives tense and aspect (the when and how-it-relates-to-time) information, but no main verb (the heart of any complete sentence) or complements (elements that the verb requires in order to make a complete verb phrase). The continuation of the verb phrase is just understood from context. This leaving-understandable-but-grammatically-important-things-out business is called ellipsis, and we are left with an elliptical construction.

In BrE, however, there is a preference for having a complete clause in these situations, with a main verb included. So, how do you do that without repeating a lot of already-heard, understandable-from-context words? You use a pro-verb (not the same as a proverb! Sometimes hyphens are important!) or a pro-predicate.

You might not have heard of a pro-verb or pro-predicate before, but you've probably heard of their cousin, the pronoun. All of these are pro-forms, that is to say, words that stand for a word/phrase whose meaning is recoverable from context. (English also has pro-adverbs.) If we wanted to use a pronoun to solve our problems with the 'eating all the chocolate' sentence, we could say (4)...

(4) I ate all the chocolate, but I shouldn't have eaten it.

...with it standing for the phrase all the chocolate. But that's still pretty repetitive.

What BrE speakers typically do here is to use do as a pro-predicate that stands for the main verb and its complements (at least). So done in (1) above stands for eat(en) all the chocolate.

Why does this grate on the ears of some AmE speakers, like Kevin? Because we just don't like using a pro-predicate with auxiliary or modal verbs in main clauses (see below for when we do use it). We (and BrE speakers too) are able to use do as a pro-verb, as in (5) where it stands for the main verb eat and nothing else, or as a pro-predicate that stands for an entire verb phrase (without modal or auxiliary verbs--we refer to these collectively as support verbs) as in (6).

(5) I ate all the chocolate, but I shouldn't have done it. [do= 'eat']

(6) I ate some chocolate, and Better Half did too. [do = 'eat some chocolate']

But most AmE speakers cannot use pro-predicate do in a clause with support-verbs in it, as in (1) above. (Note that do has other non-"pro" uses too, and so may be used with modals and auxiliaries in those cases.) There are some AmE dialects that are more tolerant of mixing support-verbs. See this article from American Speech by Mariana di Paolo for an example.

BrE uses support verbs with pro-predicate do very freely. So any of the following could be your answer to the question Have you sent Lynne any chocolate yet?

I have done.
I haven't done.
I will do.
I might have done.
I could do.
I could have done.
I should do.
I should have done.
(etc.)

(Note that the correct answer to that question should be the first one. Otherwise, go for the third one.)

On a(n) historical note, the aforementioned di Paolo article says:

Butters (1983 ["Syntactic change in British English propredicates" Journal of English Linguistics 16:1-6]) adds that pro-do was possible as long ago as Middle English although it was not common in England until about the 1920s in the written sources which have been examined. Butters also presents historical evidence suggesting that pro-do spread from subordinate clauses to main clauses in the early part of this century. Most dialects of present-day English, including American English, probably preserve the conservative forms in dependent clauses, as in the following example:

[...] I usually kinda take a back seat, which I know I shouldn't DO but...

So, we AmE speakers, like BrE speakers, can use pro-predicate do with support verbs in some clauses that are, like the above example, not complete sentences on their own (in this case the dependent clause is: which I know I shouldn't do). I'd have no problem (grammatically speaking) in saying the 'back seat' sentence, with pro-predicate do. But it's not quite as straightforward as 'propredicate do is good in AmE dependent clauses' because examples (1) and (2) above involve the subordinating conjunction even though, putting the shouldn't have (done) in a dependent clause. And I can't (in my native dialect) say that one, or include the do in this one:

(7) I usually take a back seat, even though I know I shouldn't do.

There might be a cline of 'subordinateness' operating here, with even though clauses 'feeling' more independent than which clauses, and therefore less likely to allow a pro-predicate do in AmE. (Or else the 'dependent clause' explanation of the exception is just too general/simplistic.)

Pro-predicate do is one of those Briticisms that I find myself using every once in a while, but I retain a certain self-consciousness about it. As well I should (do).

Labels: auxiliary verbs , grammar , pronouns/proforms , verbs | 54 comments

patroni{s/z}e

Jul 26, 2007

Onward and upward in my quest to reduce the number of unanswered requests in my e-mail inbox. Some of them I've put off answering because the answers are long and complicated and require actual work. This one is the other kind. I've delayed answering it because I don't have any cute stories to tell about it. (Protests that none of my stories are cute should be written up in triplicate and submitted to your local authority figure.)

It comes from Paul of The Beer Card. Or, rather, it came from Paul (in March--forgive me!):

I subscribe to Bridge World, an American magazine, that exhorts its readers to 'please patronize our advertisers'. Every time I see this my instinctive reaction is to send them a sarcastic or condescending e-mail. Is this form of the verb less common in the US?

I did notice that Chambers and American Heritage Dictionary give the meanings in reverse order.

Points to Paul for the dictionary research!

Rather than saying that the 'condescend' sense of patroni{s/z}e is less common in AmE, I'd venture that the 'give financial support to' sense is more common in AmE than in BrE. One reads the please patronize our advertisers/sponsors admonition often in the newsletters of small organi{s/z}ations--charities, churches and the like--whose advertisers are typically small businesses with small advertising budgets. But since patroni{s/z}e is ambiguous (and probably also because it's a 'hard' word), one more often sees please support our advertisers/sponsors-- about four times more often with advertisers and 40 times more often with sponsors, if we can take the Google results as representative.

Trying to test this out further on Google, one is a bit hampered by the fact that Google doesn't allow for US-only searches. So, the below is a comparison of patroni{s/z}e our advertisers on the web in general versus the UK:

	UK	World
patronise our advertisers	1	24
patronize our advertisers	1	80,700

As opposed to support, which is seen more in the UK.

	UK	World
support our advertisers	12,200	323,000

In other words, a site that exhorts you to support advertisers has a 3.7% chance of being a UK-based site (at least as far as Google can tell), whereas a site that encourages you to patroni{s/z}e advertisers has only a .002% chance of being UK-based. So, since BrE readers are less likely to have come across this use of patroni{s/z}e regularly, it's more likely to strike them as odd, and to bring up the other possible meaning, as is Paul's experience. AmE readers, on the other hand, are more accustomed to relying on the object of the verb (in this case advertisers/sponsors) to tell them that it's probably the 'financially support' sense and not the 'condescend' sense that's intended. We (all dialects) do that kind of thing all the time. For instance, we know that different senses of book are at play if a police officer books a massage therapist or books a suspect. (Of course, we can overcome those interpretations with more context--the officer could book a massage therapist for assault or book a suspect (who happens to be a clown) for his daughter's birthday party. But I just raise this example to defend myself against the hordes who might claim that AmE is irresponsible for having a verb with two senses. Most verbs have at least that many!)

Postscript, later that evening: Describing this entry to my friend the Poet this evening, I reali{s/z}ed, of course, that the two senses are not so confusing in speech. For the 'condescend' meaning I (and Better Half, so maybe this is universal) pronounce the first syllable like the word pat, and for the 'financially support' sense, I pronounce it with the same vowel as in pay. The Concise Oxford (what I have at home) only lists the pat pronunciation. American Heritage lists both, starting with pay, but doesn't specify that they go with different senses. Do you have two pronunciations, and are they sense-specific?

Labels: pronunciation , verbs | 16 comments

collective noun agreement

Jul 9, 2007

Sorry for the unexplained gap in posts. I was busy making an honest man of Better Half. I also reali{s/z}e that I've been somewhat selfish lately, just writing about things that I want to write about. Me, me, me. But now I that I'm a responsible member of the venerable institution of marriage, I guess it's all supposed to be about selflessness and compromise and all that jazz. So, back, finally, to responding to some of your requests.

Let's go way back. To November! How neglectful I've been! (Well, kind of--I responded to this correspondent's first question here. And this issue has been mentioned a little before, most recently in the comments for this post.) Jackie, an American who briefly lived in London, wrote to say:

I found British English atrocious. [...] Brits [...] have a strong tendency to use singular nouns with the plural form of verbs, e.g., "The gang are going to have a tough time protecting their patch," and "MIA are looking into terrorist links."

Now, Jackie, I have to say that I'm surprised that a graduate of UCLA's linguistics program(me) would use the word atrocious to refer to another variety of English! Let's all recite together now the descriptive linguists' mantra: Different dialects are different, but that doesn't make them better or worse than your dialect! Both AmE and BrE have 'logical' subject-verb agreement systems, they're just a bit different in the assumptions/preferences behind them.

Let's start with the nouns that are concerned here. It's not just any singular noun that can go with a plural verb form in BrE; it's specifically collective nouns--that is, nouns that refer to collections or collectivities (particularly, in the BrE examples, collections of people). These kinds of nouns are a bit funny. Let's look at Jackie's first example:

BrE: The gang are going to have a tough time protecting their patch.

...which in (most, standard) AmE would be:

AmE: The gang is going to have a tough time protecting its/their patch.

Notice here that while AmE strongly prefers a singular verb with a noun like gang or committee or team, it's a bit looser when it comes to pronoun agreement with such collective nouns. Thus, we can find lots of examples with a singular verb and a singular pronoun, but also examples in which the plurality of a committee (i.e. the fact that it's made up of individuals) comes through in the pronoun, but not the verb:

After questions are concluded, you and any guests will be asked to leave while the committee makes its decision. [From a University of Oregon document]

[A]ll will be notified once the committee makes their decision. [From the Westchester (NY) County Board of Legislators]

The indecision about pronoun agreement (and contrast in pronoun and verb agreement) indicates that the case of collective nouns is complicated. Grammatically, they have singular form. Semantically (i.e. in meaning), they refer to things that are inherently plural. For most nouns, the grammatical and the semantic match up--so it's hard to say whether the agreement between subject noun and verb is being triggered by the word's semantic or grammatical status. But in the case of collective nouns, we can see different varieties of English taking different strategies. BrE prefers semantic agreement (when the collective refers to animate beings, at least), and AmE prefers grammatical agreement--most of the time.

It's not really that simple, though. There are times when AmE speakers use plural agreement, in order to emphasi{s/z}e the individuality of the members of the collective (and this gets some discussion over at Language Log). So, take for example the following:

The jury disagree. [plural verb]
versus
The jury disagrees. [singular verb]

The City University of New York's Writing Centre guide states strongly that the plural verb must be used in this case:

Some words you might not realize are plural:
[...]
Collective nouns that represent a group of individuals who are acting independently. Whereas, for example, the word “jury” would take a singular verb when the jurors act in concert (“the jury decided that ... ”), it would take a plural verb when differences between the group are emphasized.

Wrong: “The jury disagrees [among themselves] on this issue.”

Right: “The jury disagree on this issue.”

And in BrE, when it's very clear that the collective is to be thought of as a unit, not as individuals, then a singular verb is perfectly acceptable, as in the book title:

My Family Is All I Have: A British Woman's Story of Escaping the Nazis and Surviving the Communists

Thus BrE allows a distinction between (a) and (b) below, while (b) would sound more awkward in AmE:

(a) My family is big. [i.e. there are 10 of us]
(b) My family are big. [i.e. the individuals are super-size]

Thus, AmE speakers tend to avoid sentences like (b) and to rephrase them as something like The members of my family are all big.

The moral of the story is: collective noun agreement is tricky. A semantic strategy is probably more flexible than a grammatical strategy, but people can communicate just fine with either strategy!

Labels: count/mass , grammar , morphology , verbs | 27 comments

recuse

Jun 20, 2007

The spellchecker will out me. I was writing an e-mail about Examination Board procedures. (Exam boards are a blight on British academic life, and unheard of in the US. I've mentioned them before, here.) In doing so, I typed the word recuse, as in Anyone with a personal relationship with a student should recuse him/herself from discussions of that student. My mail program didn't like recuse. Thinking 'how am I spelling that wrong?', I went to the Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary!), where I found the word, spelt as I had spelt it, but with the note: Chiefly U.S. and South African (or something like that--I'm away from that particular dictionary now). I think "Aha! So that's why my British spellchecker didn't like it."* (Although it must be said that it's a pretty pathetic BrE spellchecker, since it insists on one 'l' in t ravelling.) The OED only lists it as Now rare, but it's not particularly rare in American legalistic settings. The American Heritage definition of it goes:

To disqualify or seek to disqualify from participation in a decision on grounds such as prejudice or personal involvement.

Wondering how one would say this in British English, I had a look in the University's Handbook for Examiners, where they simply instruct the interested party to "leave the meeting while the student in question is being considered." Of course, one could say disqualify in this setting (albeit a little awkwardly), as in I disqualified myself from the discussion of that student. But where's the fun in that?

*Eek! Spellchecking update! Blogger's (American--sort of) spellchecker doesn't like recuse either! Weird, weird, weird. I started to think that my vocabulary is too rarefied for spellchecking. So I googled recuse. It gets over a million hits. Ten times as many hits as uxorious, but the spellchecker has no problem with uxorious (a word that's not in my active vocabulary). Weird.

Labels: bureaucracy , law , verbs | 12 comments

mooch

Jun 19, 2007

This past weekend was my hen weekend, if one can call anything so civili{s/z}ed a 'hen weekend'. There were no blow-up dolls or L-plates, no public drunkenness, and only a tiny bit of silly headgear. We went to the Cotswolds and ate nice food and went to artists' open houses and had a mooch (a)round the shops. In fact, mooch became the word of the weekend, due to a cross-cultural communication failure.

You see, my friend the Recyclist was there, since she's in the UK for a month, mixing with my UK friends who kept saying things like After lunch we could go mooch round the shops. So, after figuring out what they meant, she explained the meaning of mooch in AmE, and somehow by Sunday it seemed that every tenth sentence had mooch in it.

The OED defines the BrE sense as 'to loaf, skulk, sneak' or 'an act of skulking, loafing, scrounging'. In AmE, I might use scrounge in this sense, though it seems more negative than mooch. Another AmE possibility is troll, as in:

Does this reporter just troll around town looking for the hot cockroach stories? (from comments in Dave Barry's blog)

If you're running in the shoes you had before Brangelina, or kickboxing in the same pink Pumas you troll the mall in, it's time for a new pair my friend. (from Mommies with Style)

The more common sense of mooch in AmE is (from the OED): 'To sponge on or off a person; to go about scrounging.' The noun form of this may be mooch or moocher. The OED doesn't mark the verb sense as AmE, though it didn't seem very familiar to my fellow hens, but the noun sense ('a beggar, a scrounger') is marked as Chiefly U.S.. The verb can be used transitively as well, as in:

Can I mooch some of your chips (AmE: French fries)?

This sense of mooch, in fact this sentence of mooch, was used with gusto by speakers of every dialect when Sunday lunch came (a)round. Upon learning this sense of mooch, my BrE-speaking friends claimed to have 'a-ha!' moments concerning the song Minnie the Moocher, but the lyrics to the song do not make a lot of her mooching.

Thanks to my lovelylovely friends for a lovelylovely weekend!

Labels: epithets , verbs | 16 comments

moving

Jun 8, 2007

In our e-conversation about upping sticks, Nancy F mentioned finding a book called How to Move House and Stay Sane, noting the Britishness of the phrase move house. Americans simply move (and the British can too). So:

AmE or BrE: We're moving this weekend. [intransitive]
BrE: We're moving house this weekend. [transitive]

Now, don't tell me that your dialect's version makes more sense than the other, because they're equally problematic from a literalist, logical point of view. The intransitive version seems like it could apply to exercising one's muscles. The transitive version seems like it involves relocating a building. But, of course, both involve the relocation of the contents of a dwelling and an address-change for the individuals associated with that dwelling. Language isn't about literal, logical description; it's about communication--and these both work, if you know the conventions of the dialect in which they're said.

I was reminded of this when talking to my friend the Recyclist the other day. She's recently come to the UK for an extended stay, and was confused by a television commercial she saw in which moving home was mentioned (and the same day I saw a billboard in London with the headline Moving home?). As an AmE speaker, Recyclist interpreted this as 'moving back in with one's parents'. It took Recyclist a few beats to figure out why people who were 'moving home' would need a mortgage (or whatever it was that the ad(vert) was about). In BrE moving home means the same as moving house, but is perhaps used in advertising to make things sound a bit hom(el)ier.

As long as we're talking about moving, Americans often comment on the (AmE: real) estate agents' signs in the UK that indicate properties in search of tenants. In the US, such signs say FOR RENT. In the UK, they say TO LET. And Americans almost invariably have the reaction: 'I want to put an i in that sign'. Occasionally some (probably young) joker does just that.

(Photo from here.)

Labels: idioms , signage , verbs | 20 comments

to up sticks / to pull up stakes

May 17, 2007

Marking (=AmE grading) season is upon us--meaning that I have about 145,000 words to read before the next batch of 122,000 words shows up on Monday. How much I blog in the next few weeks will tell you just how much I'm avoiding those essays. But in trying to be a good faculty member (if not a good blogger), I'll limit myself to a short entry now. That's what I say to myself at the beginning of each blog entry. Then two hours later...

Today's topic comes to us courtesy of Nancy Friedman, who asked (11 days ago) about upping sticks:

I encountered this idiom for the first time recently in a blog by this fellow.

I did a Google search and discovered 1,300 references, including a book title (subtitle also veddy British: "How to Move House and Stay Sane," where AmE would simply say "Move").

Can you shed light on the origin of the expression? Does it mean "permanently relocating" or simply "taking off for a while"?

It almost sounds like the name of a quaint township. Nether Upping Sticks, perhaps.

I quote the post in part because I was very satisfied to discover that the 'this fellow' has a link to SbaCL on his blog. What a sterling person he is! (And it's so much better to be sterling nowadays!)

In his post, he used up sticks to mean 'temporarily relocate', as he was going on holiday/vacation. It also can be used for a more permanent move, as in: We're going to up sticks and move to the country. (Something that happens a lot in England. It's surprising there's any country left.)

While it is sometimes believed that the phrase refers to picking up one's (sticks of) furniture, the OED traces it to its nautical meaning, i.e. to set up a boat's masts, in preparation for departure. There are some other (folk) theories about its etymology here.

Until I read Nancy's e-mail, I hadn't reali{s/z}ed that up sticks was a Briticism--probably because the AmE equivalent is so close: to pull up stakes. The the phrase originated in the practice of putting stakes down to mark the boundaries of one's property. So, when you moved, you pulled up your stakes and took them to the next place.

In AmE, I'd never use pull up stakes for anything but a permanent move, though, so I find up sticks strange for temporary moves. However, locals don't. Norman Schur's British English from A to Zed (1991; cited at the above link) says of up sticks:

This can describe moving one's entire ménage or simply clearing up after a picnic.

I think one runs into up sticks in BrE more often than up stakes in AmE. There are about 1000 more cases of up stakes when one googles up sticks and move and up stakes and move, but considering that there are a lot more Americans on the web than Brits, that may be taken as supporting my intuition. At the etymology link above (the one with the variant etymologies), someone claims that he only knows up stakes in AusE.

The OED has up sticks as originating in the early 1800s, but cases of pull up stakes have been traced to as early as 1640 (see origin link above) or 1703 (OED). The two phrases are so close that I was tempted to think that one might have its origin as an eggcorn of the other. Alas, there's no evidence for such fancy.

How was that for a short post? Not.

Labels: idioms , verbs | 12 comments

strikes and prying in the Grauniad

May 12, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

The third attempt gets another strike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: idioms , Janus words , journalism , metaphor , sport , verbs | 19 comments

contracted have

Apr 29, 2007

Months ago (I am a bad blogger), Brett wrote to ask:

Can you enlighten me any further on the differences between interpretations of "It's gone" in NA & the UK?

(You can probably tell from the NA [=North America] that Brett is writing from Canada.) Brett covers this issue on his English, Jack blog, where he writes:

I was somewhat taken aback recently when a disucssion on the ETJ mailing list brought to light the different interpretations of the 's in "Where's my car? It's gone." It turns out that most North American speakers of English interpret this as "My car is gone?" while British speakers tend to parse it as "My car has gone."

I suppose part of the reason I've taken so long to respond to Brett here is that I haven't much to add to his analysis. Or should I say: I've not got much? Or should I say: I haven't got much? or I've not much? At least part of the reason that BrE and AmE/CanE differ in their interpretations of 's as is or has is that BrE likes contracting the verb have more than AmE (and presumably CanE) does.

John Algeo, in his book British or American English?, reports that contracted have ('ve) is more common in BrE--about 1.5 times more frequent in BrE overall, but more than 5 times more frequent in BrE when used as a main verb, rather than an auxiliary verb. (Which is just part of the reason that I am annoyed that many people stereotype AmE as contracting more than BrE. If you claim it, back it up, and use some subtlety in your analysis, please!) So, while contractions of the type in (1) the most common uses of 've in both dialects, (2) is much more likely to be found in BrE than in AmE:

(1) I've been thinking. (have = auxiliary verb, expressing tense/aspect)
(2) I've a secret (have = main verb, meaning 'possess')

When have occurs between a subject pronoun and a not, the speaker has a choice--to contract the have with the pronoun (I've not gargled, she's not gargled) or to contract the not (I haven't gargled, she hasn't gargled). In both BrE and AmE, it is more common to contract the not. But the I've/she's not pattern is much more likely to be heard in BrE than in AmE; in Algeo's words the 've/'d not pattern is a "statistical Briticism". In the Cambridge International Corpus, he found for auxiliary have:

BrE: I haven't VERBed is 2.5 times more frequent than I've not VERBed
AmE: I haven't VERBed is 26 times more common than I've not VERBed

The contracted have is less common still in the past tense, but the BrE/AmE difference is more stark:

BrE: I hadn't VERBed is 20 times more frequent than I'd not VERBed
AmE: I hadn't VERBed is nearly 140 times more common than I'd not VERBed

Because BrE has an easier time allowing the contraction of main verb have, it is much more likely to allow negated contracted have as a main verb. However, it is more common in both dialects to insert a do and contract that to the not.

BrE: I don't have any NOUN is 10 times more frequent than I haven't any NOUN.
AmE: I don't have any NOUN is 60 times more frequent than I haven't any NOUN.

BrE: I don't have a NOUN is 6 times more frequent than I haven't a NOUN.
AmE: I don't have a NOUN is 55 times more frequent than I haven't a NOUN.

While writing this blog over the past few months, I've been vaguely aware that while I mark many variant spellings/words as I write, I don't mark my contractions as AmE or BrE. Since the favo(u)red forms are the same in both dialects, I suppose I can (retroactively) justify that lack of dialect-marking. But I've also been aware that I do type (and say) things like I've not (like here and here and here and more places) and they've not (here) and you've not (here), and I have the feeling that that's one area in which I've Britified myself a bit. Or bitified myself a Brit, possibly.

And while I know the comments will probably go all over the place even if I do say the following... If you'd like to discuss contractions involving other verbs, please send an e-mail rather than writing a comment. I will get to other contracted verbs at some point, but don't want to do so in the comments section!

Labels: auxiliary verbs , contractions , grammar , morphology , verbs | 23 comments

touts, scalpers and buskers

Apr 22, 2007

Zhoen thought she knew BrE pretty well, but then...

Just came across a new Br/E expression I'd never heard used before, touting. Which in Am/E is scalping, buying tickets, then selling them right before the event for a very high price.

She included the following contrastive examples in her e-mail:

Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis explains why the photo ID scheme in place for this year's festival could mean the death of the ticket tout. BBC News

Authorities turn up heat on scalpers. boston.com

My first thought on this was that (BrE) ticket touts sometimes have different practices than (AmE) scalpers. Either might buy tickets to an entertainment event and then re-sell them for a higher price, but the English ticket touts that I encounter most often haven't invested in the tickets in the first place. These touts operate in London Underground stations, cadging* Travelcards (day-long tickets) from people who are finished travel(l)ing, in order to re-sell them (or possibly use them themselves). A disembodied voice at Victoria Station instructs travel(l)ers not to give unused tickets to touts because the money is used for illegal activities or drugs (or something like that). One would presume that their business is falling away rapidly, as the Oyster Card (a pay-as-you-go card) is quickly replacing the Travelcard for all but tourists.

So, there I am thinking that ticket tout has a broader meaning/use than scalper, until I read the OED on scalper, which tells us that the original ticket scalpers were:

U.S. slang. One who buys and sells at a profit, but at a price lower than the official one, unused portions of long-distance railway tickets.

So, it's all the same thing, then--although the most recent quotation in the OED for this AmE sense is from 1891. The more recent sense of scalper is not unknown in the UK, but it is an originally AmE word--metaphorically related to the taking of actual scalps.

Thinking about touts/scalpers, led me to think about other street characters, and thus to the BrE word busker, meaning a street musician/performer--the type who puts a hat or violin case out for coins. AmE doesn't seem to have a word for this concept--I think one has to say street musician. How did I ever live without this word and its verb form to busk? My favo(u)rite busker in our old neighbo(u)rhood played the saw (We lived in a very busky place--and no, busky isn't BrE, it's LynneE.) We're actually trying to find him again to hire him for an upcoming event, so if you know a saw player in Brighton, please point him my way! This sense of busk may be related to an earlier sense meaning 'to cruise as a pirate', though the OED doesn't have full confidence in that etymology. But if you see a busker with an eyepatch or a hook for a hand, maybe you can submit that to the OED as etymological evidence.

While we're on the topic of music (wow, look at that pathetic segue!), this has nothing to do with dialects of English, but it does have to do with English, so I hereby note with amusement The Ex's single This Song is in English.

* This is not marked in the American Heritage Dictionary as BrE, but I hear cadge more often in BrE than I ever did in AmE--particularly in phrases like cadge a lift (AmE = beg/get a ride from). Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words has a nice little essay about it.

Labels: epithets , occupations , verbs | 19 comments

diaries and datebooks

Apr 14, 2007

Amanda wrote to ask if her Irish English experience crosses over to BrE:

I am from California, but I was recently given the opportunity to spent two months in Ireland. I heard people there use the word diary to describe what I would call a planner or personal calendar. It was so funny to me to hear an adult male say, "I'll write that in my diary." I think of the personal journal of teenaged girl where she writes about her most recent crush when I hear the word "diary."

Indeed, outside North America, diary is the typical way to refer to what I used to call a (AmE) datebook. (To me, planner is what the stationery companies call them, not what real people call them...but maybe people are more like stationery companies in California.) Diary conveniently verbs into diarise (or diarize), as in:

We invite you to diarise the RWL5 conference and submit abstracts for consideration for papers, symposia and posters. (from here)

AmE lacks a similar verb for recording an appointment. We can (as can BrE speakers) pencil something in, which implies that the appointment is not yet fixed, but we don't have a nice verb for making a definite commitment. Maybe Americans are commitmentphobes. Maybe that's why we won't let a president serve more than two terms. (But thank goodness for that!)

Diary can also in BrE (as in AmE) mean the kind of blank book in which one records the events, thoughts and feelings of one's day, as does journal (though the OED says that journal usually refers to something more elaborate than a diary). Not that girls write in diaries anymore. They write blogs and myspace pages. Maybe this is a good thing, since diary-writing makes you sick! (well, maybe.)

Labels: books , IrishE , office supplies , time , verbs | 30 comments

minding

Apr 5, 2007

After the recent discussion of signs you wouldn't see in America, Amy in San Francisco e-mailed to say:

I recently obtained a few stick-on signs when last in the UK that I prize (for our hazard-ridden basement): "Mind the step" and "Mind your head." It occasioned some talk around here---the very same UK company (Seton.co.uk) through their US branch only sells "Watch your step" and "Watch Your Head" signs. My [British] husband said he always found it somewhat nonsensical to tell someone to watch their own head. I like the signs because they remind me pleasurably of being in UK pubs full of uneven floors and low ancient beams.

Of course, the most famous British warning signs/announcements are in the London Underground (= AmE subway--but note that BrE subway usually means 'pedestrian underpass' (orig. AmE)) and other (BrE) railway stations (=AmE train stations): MIND THE GAP, or sometimes more explicitly: MIND THE GAP BETWEEN THE TRAIN

AND THE PLATFORM EDGE. Click here to hear one version of that announcement, by voice artiste Emma Cl arke. One hears different versions of the announcement on different lines. (Incidentally, one hears artiste much more in BrE than in AmE.) You can read more about minding the gap on Annie Mole's guide to Underground Etiquette, from which the photo at the right comes. See also her fantastic London Underground blog.

Amy's husband's observation, that you can't watch your own head, struck me as fairly sensible, but, of course, American English happily allows us to watch with senses other than sight. For instance if you're told to watch your mouth (i.e. don't be impudent), you don't run for a mirror. This sense of watch, meaning 'take care to pay attention to' is also present in BrE, but it is more common in such contexts in AmE. A BrE equivalent of watch your mouth is mind your language. (This was also the title of a British sitcom in the 1970s, which was, by most accounts, fairly horrid. Better Half has just read this and accused me of wild understatement. He says it was "excrement in visual form". Which brings us back to overstatement.)

Now, mind has many obsolete, obscure and dialectal (especially Scottish and Caribbean) senses that I won't go into here, but for me one of its most salient meanings is 'be obedient to'. That sense is listed in the OED as "Now regional (chiefly N. Amer. and Irish English)". So, one must mind one's parents and mind the teacher. Since Americans often hear imperative mind in this sense, hearing mind the gap or mind your head can sound to us like we're meant to obey the gap or head, rather than to (orig. AmE) watch out for it.

The prominence of the 'obey' sense of mind in AmE also makes BrE child-minder (kind of like [orig. AmE] babysitter, but more usually used to refer to refer to semi-formal day care arrangements) sound ambiguous, as it could mean 'one who obeys a child' as well as 'one who takes care of a child'. Of course, if we want our words to be 'sensible', then babysitter deserves to be mocked, since one needn't sit when one (AmE) babysits. (Note that the sitting here is sitting with the baby, not on the baby.) But, then again, life would be a lot less interesting if languages were 'sensible' all the time.

Both dialects use mind to mean something like 'to be bothered about' in contexts like Do you mind if I smoke? But, as we've seen before, BrE and AmE use never mind in different kinds of contexts and for different kinds of purposes.

[Finally found the problem with comments on this post and have corrected it. For those with an RSS feed, I apologi{s/z}e if this meant that you got this post a half dozen times while I tried and tried again!]

Labels: IrishE , signage , transport(ation) , verbs | 16 comments

revision

Dec 5, 2006

There I go, confusing the students again.

Earlier today, I left a message on a course website, instructing students to bring to the next session any questions they have about (among other things) 'essay writing/revision'. This set off a panic in some that there might be an exam that they hadn't yet known about. That's because the words revise and revision are used very differently in American and British educational contexts.

My intention was to refer to the writing and revision of essays. American college (= BrE university) students become accustomed to the practice of writing, revising and re-submitting draft upon draft of their essays, especially in Freshman comp (i.e. a first-year university course on how to write--particularly, how to write an academic essay). In this context, revision refers to the process of creating a new version of a text, through editing and re-writing. Thus, answers.com gives first draft as an antonym for revision. This sense of revise/revision is not foreign to BrE, but in the context of of what British students expect to do, it is not the first thing that comes to their minds.

Instead, they think of the BrE-only meaning 'to review/study material in preparation for a test/exam'. Thus in BrE one can revise for exams or revise Chemistry, while in AmE the object noun for the verb revise would have to refer to some kind of text: revise an essay. Look up "How to revise" on .ac.uk websites, and one gets lots of information about how to prepare oneself for examinations (see, for example, this). Look up the same phrase on .edu (i.e. mostly American university) sites, and one finds advice pages on how to improve a first draft of an essay (such as this one).

I continue to use revise to mean 'create a new version of a text' in BrE contexts because it is a 'legal' meaning of the word here, and there isn't a very good substitute for it (rewrite scares the students, edit makes them think that they just have to proof[-]read). But usually I take the time to clarify my intention. In this particular course, the fact that they have to revise and resubmit their work has been discussed for ten weeks now, so I relaxed a bit and assumed we were speaking the same language by now. The ambiguity created by my virgule (slash) undid all that teaching, it seems. The ambiguity, of course, is whether essay writing/revision means 'essay writing and essay revision' or 'essay writing and (exam) revision'. I have to tell myself that the ambiguity created the problem. Otherwise I'd have to believe that no one's been listening to me harping on about first and final essay drafts all term, and believing that would be very bad indeed for my self-esteem.

Labels: education , verbs | 21 comments

word sale

Dec 4, 2006

One of my more entrepreneurial students is trying to earn a little cash by (BrE, informal) flogging* a word on eBay. Here's a bit of her sales pitch:

The perfect gift for wordsmiths, linguists and bookworms this Christmas.
Buy your loved one their very OWN word! This auction is for something really special: a wonderful personalised gift for the pain who has everything.
I am a Linguistics student and writer, and I will exquisitely craft an original, 100% unique word for the winning bidder. They can show it proudly to their friends, knowing that this word is their very own and made specifically with them in mind. And if you desire, I can use it in writing and encourage others to do so. Eventually, it could even become a recognised word with your own name featuring in a dictionary definition!
The word will land on your doormat within 5 days of auction end, presented beautifully with a professional definition and an essay explaining how it was made, in full linguistic detail!

I'm very happy to report that she has used a fair bit of the terminology from our course (Approaches to Meaning) in her eBay (BrE) advert/(AmE) ad, and she's used it all correctly. Thus, I believe that I can and should endorse her wordsmithing business. (I hereby endorse it!) But as I try to stay out of business transactions with my students, I'll leave it to someone else to bid on her word. Starting bid is £9.95. Or you can skip the bidding and buy it outright for £100.

*As far as I can tell, the 'sell' sense of flog is BrE. (Note the BBC (BrE) programme/(AmE) show Flog It! ) AmE does have the related sense 'to promote relentlessly'.

Labels: shopping , verbs | 17 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK