Here's a quick topical one.

Picky writes today to ask about a New York Times headline:

Clinton Urges Hewing to Irish Peace Process

Picky asks:

Hewing? What means she "hewing"? The text doesn't seem to help.

It's unclear to me that Clinton actually said hewing. In the text of the article, the meaning becomes rather clearer:

On Monday, Mrs. Clinton, now the secretary of state, addressed a more select audience of 100 lawmakers in the imposing chamber of North Ireland’s Stormont assembly, exhorting them to stick with a peace process that the Clintons have made something of a family project.

Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Dictionary) defines the relevant sense of hew to as:

to uphold, follow closely, or conform (usually fol. by to): to hew to the tenets of one's political party.

Is this an Americanism? Well, what I can tell from a very quick look is that the OED does not include this sense, but Random House, American Heritage and Merriam-Webster do. The first 20 UK hits for "to hew to" are by Americans or Brits quoting Americans. So, it's looking likely that it is an Americanism. Not the most common phrasing in the world, but certainly one I recogni{s/z}ed.

Looking a little further, I found it in a poem by Seamus Heaney. The poem uses hew beside cleave, another word that can seem to be its own opposite (a Janus word):

A Hagging Match

Axe-thumps outside
like wave-hits through
a night ferry:
you
whom I cleave to, hew to,
splitting firewood.

This raises the question whether it is also Irish English, or whether Heaney is just more aware of this sense than a typical east-of-Greenland speaker.

The earliest use I've been able to find (thanks to Wordnik!) is from The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush by Francis Lynde, first published in 1913. So, nothing there contradicting the feeling that this is AmE.

And that exhausts the time that I can dedicate to this tonight. So, can anyone else do any more/better on the topic? Is to hew to American and not British English?


Relevant P.S. (after the original post): I've just had a look in the British National Corpus (1 million words) and the TIME corpus of American English (1 million words). BNC has zero occurrences of hew-to and hewing-to, and the only hewn-to examples are passives in the more physical sense of the verb (the stone had been hewn to build the farms of the dale). TIME had 38 of hew-to, 29 of hewing-to, and one relevant example of hewn-to. I've briefly checked the 4-million word Corpus of Contemporary American English just to make sure it's not just a TIME thing, and there are plenty of examples there too. So, it's looking pretty American to me.

(original post's) P.S. I've been congratulated for trying to raise money for MSN/DWB, but haven't actually raised any (except through other means than this blog). Congratulations are very nice, but money for a wonderful cause is nicer. Do have a look back here if you'd like to think about helping out.

One of my newer internet addictions is Ross Horsley's My First Dictionary, which is wicked in every sense of the word. One must (if one is me) pause here to note that the 'excellent' sense of wicked is originally AmE. Several of my UK students have assumed that they'd have to explain this trendy BrE slang to me, but I was saying wicked pissa cool with my Bostonian university mates before my current students were even born. (I had a Master's degree by the time my youngest students were born. Who is going to cure me of this senescence?) MFD makes me feel incredibly uneasy and extremely amused at the same time. I don't know if that's a good thing, but I like it. This dose of MFD, from 26 June, raised a lot of discussion of BrE versus AmE in the comments: The comments at MFD were mostly about (mostly BrE) pussy versus (mostly AmE) kitty and the use of having as a light verb in the first sentence. But what struck me, because Better Half strikes me with it all the time, is the use of stroke for where AmE speakers would use the (originally Scottish English) verb pet. So, when I say to Grover Are you petting the kitty cat? Better Half is not far behind with Stroking! Stroking the cat! (He tolerates kitty, no doubt because of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink effect of pussy.) I'm starting to say stroke in this context, in the interest of marital harmony and getting my own back later, but to my AmE ears, it sounds a bit more, um, sexy. This, of course, makes not a lot of sense, since (orig. AmE) (heavy) petting is about (probably orig. AmE) feeling people up. But why should English and my feelings toward(s) it start making sense at this late date? At any rate, I thought an introduction to a very funny website would work as an introduction to our very funny limerick competition. As promised, the judging involved a panel of my friends, whom you may know through their SbaCL-character alter-egos: the Blinder, Maverick, the Poet--and of course Better Half. (With the exception of the ubiquitous last judge, the links take you to their first appearances on the blog.) I asked each to send me their three favo(u)rites, assuming that the cream would rise to the top and there would be a clear front-runner. But there was too much cream. A few got two votes, thus limiting the field a little for my final judging. It came down to Dunce's Rubber and Richard English's Hooters, re-published here:

An eager young Yank on the make Thought he'd finally had his big break. She asked for a rubber but she wasn't a scrubber. Just had to erase a mistake. My girl has a fine pair of hooters Attractive to gentleman suitors. But don't rush too far They're both on her car And she toots them to warn slow commuters.

My decision comes down to the fact that one of these poets had other efforts in the judges' top threes. So, congratulations, Richard English! Your copy of Britannia in Brief will be on its way to you soon, and the authors have asked to reprint the winner on their blog. (Let us know if that's not ok with you!) On a last humorous note, British-Canadian singer-songwriter Luke Jackson (shouldn't he have a hyphenated name?) has sent me a link to the video for his song 'Goodbye London'. This animated treat might strike a chord for the American exchange students out there who've headed back home.

Ben Zimmer, the man responsible for my blogging about shit, has sent me a number of BrE sentences over the past few months. Each of these did not contain the word like where an American like Ben might've expected it. And, really, that was the point of the scatological post that Ben inspired too. He'd noted that BrE speakers are more likely to say I feel shit whereas AmE speakers would have to say I feel like shit. My response then was to say that shit can act as an adjective in BrE--and that is true. After all, one can (if one is BrE-speaking) say something like What a shit film.

But it's also the case that one can say I feel [NOUN PHRASE] in BrE and mean 'I feel like [NOUN PHRASE]'. Ben's example came from The Telegraph, in a story about a man who was injured while using Twitter:

"I guess you could say I feel a right Twit," he said.

For the grammar geeks out there, I'll quote Algeo's British or American English on the topic, "A group of copular verbs (...) have predominantly adjectival complements in common-core English, but also have nominal subject complements in British more frequently than in American." In other words, in AmE or BrE, you could say I feel old (because my students told me yesterday that Brad Pitt is 'a sexy old man'). You could also say I feel like an unsexy geriatric case, because the like phrase in that case plays an adjectival role in the sentence. But in BrE, you can also forgo the like and just go straight to the nouny part of the description. [In the Twit example, we also have the BrE noun-intensifier right, but let's save that for a rainier day.)

Here are some examples showing more of this pattern:

sound: He sounded a complete mess. [Jeremy Clarke in The Independent]

look: Joey Barton has made me look a fool. [Oliver Holt on Mirror.co.uk]

appear: I was trying to appear a total gentleman! [on ducatisti.co.uk]

Smell and taste are not found as regularly in the 'smell/taste like' sense, but a BrE expression one can find with them (and look and sound) is to [PERCEPTION VERB] a treat. So:

The honeysuckle shampoo is just gorgeous and she smells a treat. [customer feedback for a dog grooming salon]

Do you love cooking simple, no fuss meals that taste a treat? [ad(vert) on FilmBirmingham site]

Nokia E63 Handset Looks A Treat [digital lifestyles]

And if something looks or tastes or is a treat, then it can also (BrE) go down a treat--i.e. be received well.

BSC Seminars Go Down a Treat at Health and Safety 09 Show [British Safety Council]

If we were to to say any of these in AmE, we'd probably have to put a like in (and get rid of all the other Briticisms in the examples)--i.e. it looks like a treat, made me look like a fool, etc. The one that really confuses AmE speakers is (BrE) go down a bomb, which is not only ungrammatical for us without the like, but also means the opposite of what we'd think it means. If a performance bombs in AmE, it is horrid and no one likes it. But if it goes down a bomb in BrE, it's fantastic and gets a wildly positive reception. Ben sent me an example that had to do with Susan Boyle--the now-famous also-ran in the Britain's Got Talent television (BrE) programme/(AmE) show, and he's blogged about it here.

There are other things one could say about going down in BrE (you stop that sniggering right now!)...but we'l just leave that on the ever-increasing backlog of stuff to write about.

But if you want to know what really goes down a treat, check out this review of Better Half's work from today's Guardian! Then go and buy the entire SmartPass back catalog(ue), so that we can keep Grover in shoes!

Grant Barrett, of here and there, wrote about 17 months ago to ask about the BrE intransitive use of create:

I've just come across an intransitive use of create that's Brit-specific. The Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary) defines it thus:

[no obj.] Brit. informal make a fuss; complain: "little kids create because they hate being ignored."

Sounds odd to my American ear.

Grant had read it in the Times, in this context (which discusses another term we've discussed before, wife beater):

"...Then suddenly - I'm not a snob - but we started getting all these loudmouthed yobs in. Younger drinkers, 19 to 30-year-olds, and builders and labourers.

"They weren't fighting - we'd never have let things get to that stage - but they were creating, and it was bad enough to make the other customers start leaving early."

When he wrote to me, I'd not experienced this sense of the word yet. But a month later, I had a child, and a few months after that, she started in childcare and we went through a little period where Grover was a bit too attached to her key worker. Whenever the carer went out of sight, Grover would start creating, they told me. Since then, I have heard it used about other children's tantrum-ish or whin(g)y behavio(u)r.

She graduated (AmE--BrE doesn't use graduate for sub-university transitions) from the Baby Room today and moves to the Toddler Room on Monday. My little Grover, all grown up! I shed a tear today, but I expect she'll be the one creating on Monday.

I've used my tried-and-tested 'click randomly in the email inbox' method to choose today's topic. Australian Bec moved to the US temporarily (she may well have moved back in the time it's taken me to respond) and found:

I am seeing the word closeout in shops everywhere, online and 'real'. I understand from context that it means something like clearance, but can you tell me if it is an American term, or just a new word or if it is common everywhere and I have just missed seeing it before? It sounds really odd to me.

The OED informs us that Bec is not unobservant--it is an American term and it means clearance (i.e. the selling of a line of stock or a shop's contents until there is no stock left). The OED covers the verb form to close out or , but they note that it's also used as a noun (or an absol. in the OED's vocabulary):

b. To clear out (a stock of goods); to wind up (a business); to sell or finish off. Also absol. U.S.

The examples in the OED mostly have pronouns as the object of close out, and the pronoun goes between the verb (close) and the particle (out), as in close it out. If the object is a full noun phrase, my spider senses tell me that you could put it either before or after the out--but the longer the object noun phrase, the more likely it would be to go after the out. In my experience, though, the noun closeout is currently more common than the verb to close out. That is, I'd be more likely to say They're having a closeout on Acme widgets, rather than They're closing Acme widgets out.

On the noun front, one might say that it's a closeout or a closeout sale. Wikipedia tells me that in the US there are things called closeout stores, which are dedicated to selling off ends of product lines. I've never heard that term (perhaps it is industry jargon), but the same phenomenon exists in the UK--except instead of (US) TJ Maxx, the UK has TK Maxx.

And on that note, I can close out this entry. Or close this entry out.

Any organi{s/z}ation with any tangential relation words seems to make Word of the Year pronouncements these days (or these years, at least). I believe there is a correlation between how early the pronouncements are made and whether the organi{s/z}ation is trying to sell you something. The American Dialect Society wait(s) until January (when they have their annual meeting). And that is as it should be--one needs some perspective on the year in order to evaluate its words. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, are keen to get their press releases out in time to serve as subliminal reminders that dictionaries make great holiday gifts.

I have nothing to sell you, but I'm going to give you the SbaCL words of the year a little early this year--just to make sure that I get them out at all while a horrible deadline, not to mention a trip to the States and winter holidays and birthdays come (chiefly AmE) careening (=careering) toward(s) me. Words of the Year will be my airbag. (That metaphor is the evidence, if you need it, that my brain is not handling the pressure well.)

So, without further ado (wait, is that a drumroll I hear?), the SbaCL British-English- to-American-English Word of the Year is:

Regular reader Robert WMG wrote in the autumn/fall with the following (and I'm rushing to respond to it before I have to shame myself by writing 'last autumn/fall'):

While talking to a Canadian friend, I said "It's gone five" (meaning "it's after five o'clock" but with definite connotations, depending on context, of "it's later than I thought" or "we're going to be late" or "we're late"). She said that without very strong contextual clues this would be incomprehensible in N. America. Any comments?

Robert describes the situation well. One issue that's not clear is what the 's stands for. You almost always hear it with the 's contracted: it's gone five rather than it has gone five or it is gone five. (See this post for further discussion of it's gone in BrE and AmE.) So, which is it, is or has? Either, it seems. Perhaps BrE speakers out there can enlighten us as to whether they can see any difference in meaning or dialect in the following examples (I searched for the past tense because it was easier):

It was gone four o'clock by the time we left the restaurant so whatever the hell we were talking about it must have been good. (from 'Star Blog')

With that cheeky grin she wished me a happy birthday (it had gone 12 o'clock by now) and that was it, and pardon the pun but for me it was a 'perfect day'. (from kirstymaccoll.com)

(For what it's worth, London-born Better Half thinks the was gone version sounds 'just wrong', but concedes that it might set up things a bit differently in a narrative.)

BrE speakers can also use gone for peoples' ages (with mostly the same connotations as Robert gave for the time-telling gone), i.e. He's gone 60 ('he's over sixty already'). Algeo's British or American English? counts both of these uses of gone as prepositions. If it's a preposition, then you'd use it with a form of the verb to be, but if it's a past-participle form of the verb to go, then you'd generally use it with a form of to have. Of course, the preposition is historically the same word as the participle, but it's drifted away from it to a different (more grammatical/functional) part-of-speech--that is to say, it has undergone grammaticali{s/z}ation.

Another BrE-particular temporal gone is the use of gone as a post-nominal (i.e. after the noun) modifier that means 'ago', as in this example from kultureflash (London):

With Batman a decade gone, Spiderman and Daredevil hits, and Ang Lee's Hulk promising to smash, it's a KA-POW comic book dreamworld just now.

You might hear this in AmE, but then the gone would almost certainly mean 'dead', and it would be found in newspaper memorials (advertisements placed by mourners to remember their dead) and the like (e.g. a decade gone, but not forgotten).

Another use that I believe is mostly BrE (having a hard time confirming its dialect, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this) is post-nominal gone to mean 'pregnant', as in this travel(l)ing-while-pregnant story from The Times:

Four months gone, over the sickness and constantly hungry, I was delighted to find that they had one restaurant serving European and Egyptian specialities and another specialising in modern Indian which satisfied my cravings for spicy food and yoghurt.

I used this on occasion while pregnant, but it always seemed to me to have an unpleasant connotation that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It reminded me of (BrE) up the duff, in that it sounded to me like pregnancy was somehow foisted upon me and that it was not a socially acceptable state to be in. I would love to hear from folks who use X months gone more naturally than I do on whether it has those connotations for you. So...comment away!

Reader Tim wrote recently to ask:

I noticed the phrase "are nothing to do with" in David Crystal's The Fight for English (p168) and it seemed peculiarly British to me. I would have used "have nothing to do with" instead. Google backs me up, saying its relative frequency is 10 times higher on UK websites than on the Internet in general:

"are nothing to do with"= 115,000 / "have nothing to do with" = 8,700,000 = 1:76

"are nothing to do with" site:.uk = 21,000/ "have nothing to do with" site:.uk = 156,000 = 1:7

Is it a well-recognized regionalism?

Now, I love queries that come with the homework already done. Farrrr superior to the ones with no greeting, no signature, no please and no thank you that demand that I explain why their spouse says such-and-such or why other people are idiots who say this-and-that. (I'd write "you know who you are", but such lack of self-consciousness in making demands of complete strangers is evidence of a lack of, well, self-consciousness.) And Tim did a good job of comparing the two phrases...except for one little problem. Can you spot it?

Before we get to the methodological issues, I'll answer his question. No, it's not a well-recogni{s/z}ed difference between BrE and AmE. Every source I've checked lists the two phrases as variations on each other, without noting anything about dialect, and sources on BrE/AmE differences (like Algeo's British or American English?--my usual [chiefly AmE] go-to book for verb variations like this) don't mention it either. But I share his intuition that are nothing to do with sounds "less American" than have nothing to do with. Note that here we're only talking about the use of these phrases when they're describing states and not when they're describing intentional behavio(u)r. So, if I want to proclaim that something has no impact on me, I could say (if I felt equally comfortable with either phrasing): It is nothing to do with me or It has nothing to do with me (or it's nothing to do with me, which hides whether it's a be or a have--but see this post for BrE/AmE differences in contractions). But if we're talking about shunning someone, it has to be have and not be: She'll have nothing to do with me since I insulted her pig.

Back to the methodology: Tim has made do with the limitations of the internet in studying US versus UK: comparing the UK to the whole world and assuming that anything peculiarly BrE will stand out in the .uk sites. It's hard to get around that, since few US URLs end in a reliable country code. What one can do instead is to search something like .edu versus .ac.uk or .gov versus .gov.uk, or search a couple of reasonably similar newspaper sites, but Tim's .uk versus 'the whole world' analysis is telling...except for one little problem.

The problem is comparing are and have. Both are the plural forms of their respective verbs, but have is also the base form. So, many of the have examples have their equivalent in be nothing to do with rather than are nothing to do with (as in it could be/have nothing to do with). So, let's try re-running the searches with the third-person singular forms is and has, which won't have this dual purpose (remembering that some of the has examples will have the 'shunning' meaning):

	all sites	.uk sites
is nothing to do with	1,440,000	85,900
has nothing to do with	13,400,000	333,000
ratio	1:9	1:4

So, the difference here is not as dramatic as Tim's figures would suggest, but what hasn't changed is that he's right in his intuition that be nothing to do with is more common on .uk sites than in the rest of the world. But much of the rest of the world is speaking Britishoid Englishes. To try to get out that influence, let's try it once more with .edu versus .ac.uk:

	.edu sites	.ac.uk sites
is nothing to do with	4340	1140
has nothing to do with	232,000	2030
ratio	1:53	1:2

Now there's a big difference! (Not quite as big as Tim's original difference, but big enough.) I suspect that the 'shun' meaning is less common on academic sites than on general sites, which include lots of places where people can be relatively free about declaring whom they are shunning--so I believe this might be a truer reflection of the relative Britishness of be nothing to do with.

So, well done, Tim! (Despite my methodological quibbles, which we in the educational establishment call a "teaching opportunity". At least that's what we call it when we want to show off a bit.)

Today's query comes from Kirsten in Australia:

Would you be able to explore/explain the expressions brown-bagging or brown-bag lunch?

I first heard it used by an American colleague visiting our Melbourne office. Searching references on the net I gather it is used to refer to a home-made lunch in a school or business situation (as opposed to buying from fast food or cafeteria). I have some questions about the term:

• Could you please confirm the correct meaning/usage in the US?
• Is the term used/understood in the UK?
• Is it typical for Americans literally to carry home-made lunch in brown bags?

Kirsten has the AmE meaning generally right (more on this below), and it is AmE (or more generally North American English) and not BrE. On her last question, it's probably less common in these days of hyperconsumerism to use brown paper bags (I'm sure people are using Tupperware [often used generically in AmE] and designer insulated bags and such), but it's certainly traditional to use paper bags. Originally, this was a way of re-using small shopping bags, but by the time I was a child, one could buy packages of lunch-sized brown paper bags. (I always wanted my mother to buy them and give me a fresh paper bag each day, but my mother was generally more sensible than that.) When I was a child, up until about age 9-10, you wanted to have a lunch box--a new one each year, usually with a cartoon or toy character or pop star or something on it. For me it was (click on the links for added fun!):

• First grade: White and yellow flowers on a olive-green background (this one was vinyl, and purchased before I knew what was 'cool' on the playground; can't find a photo on the web--must not be 'collectible' enough)
• Second grade: Miss America
• Third grade: The Partridge Family

You can tell how important these things were, given that I remember them 35 years later. But just as important was the shift to brown paper bags in the fourth grade. By that time, I recogni{s/z}ed that lunch boxes were 'little kid' stuff, and I needed to have brown paper bags in order to look more grown up, like I didn't have an investment in Barbies or ElectraWoman and DynaGirl (boy, do I wish now that I had that lunchbox. I'll just have to console myself with listening to the theme tune over and over).

Kerstin says that the term brown bag is not used in Australia, but hearing it conjures up something less savo(u)ry than homemade lunch:

To my Australian ears (and those of my Australian colleagues) "Brown-bagging" sounds a very unsavoury term - We don't use the specific phrase for any particular meaning, but it conjures up images of responsible dog owners cleaning up after their pets. Or less revoltingly, but still not particularly pleasantly, an allusion to discrete packaging used to disguise porn, alcoholic beverages, or bribes.

The use of brown bag (noun) or brown-bag (verb) in AmE can also refer to drinking alcohol from a bottle that's wrapped in a paper bag, a way around the general proscription on street drinking in the US (now making its way to the UK).

When I asked Better Half if he was familiar with the term, he said that it would be avoided in England because "brown is a problem"--that is, its association with egestion. But innocent American that I am, I knew the term brown-nose ('chiefly' AmE, according to the OED: a sycophant) for years before I reali{s/z}ed that it had anything to do with bottoms, so I'd never think such a thing of the humble brown paper bag. (Though filling paper bags with [more frequent in BrE] poo/[more frequent in AmE] poop and setting them alight on someone's front step is a classic Halloween prank--though it's never happened on my watch.)

The verb brown-bag is primarily used with a rather empty object, it, as in this newspaper headline Save a buck [AmE slang: 'dollar'], brown-bag it or in the common phrase "I'll be brown-bagging it". The 'it' in the first example does not refer to the buck. It could arguably refer to the lunch, but I think it's the kind of near-meaningless it that one finds in expressions like to wing it. The it there could refer to something, but when we put that something in place of the it, the meaning seems to lose something. I'll be brown-bagging my lunch sounds like it refers to the wrapping of a brown bag around the food for a lunch. But I'll be brown-bagging it sounds like it refers to coming to a lunch event with a meal in a brown bag.

And then there's the venerable academic (etc.) institution, the brown-bag lunch (as in I'm going to a brown-bag lunch, rather than in I brought a brown-bag lunch). This is an uncatered event that occurs over the lunch hour (12-1 in the US), usually a somewhat informal talk by an expert on a subject. In the case of this series of such lunches at the University of Pittsburgh, they are also referred to as Brown Bags.

While I see lots of 'lunchtime concerts' advertised in the UK, it seems rarer (than in the US) to have 'lunchtime talks'. Here, the lunch hour is more jealously guarded to keep work out. (For instance, in the US, I was used to the staff in university offices staggering their lunch hours so that the office would stay open all day. In the UK, the university--except for the catering facilities--basically shuts down between 1 and 2, although we've recently started teaching in the lunch hour--a change brought on by lack of classroom space, more than willingness to give up lunch. Unfortunately for working/studying parents, the university crèche still closes from 1 to 1:55.) But where they do occur, they're more likely to be called lunchtime talks, with instructions as to whether bringing a lunch is necessary/acceptable, rather than fitting all that information into the neat little title Brown Bag. I think there must be a connection here between the rarity of organi{s/z}ed bring-your-own-lunch events and the relative (to the US) infrequency of (AmE) potlucks (or potluck suppers , or [AmE dialectal] covered-dish suppers). I had to've gone to at least one of these a month when I was in graduate school (what with the departmental potlucks, the potlucks organi{s/z}ed by political groups I belonged to, and just friendly potlucks). Have I been to a single one in the UK, even under another title? Just picnics--and then they can be quite comedic. For Grover's half-birthday picnic we asked people to bring a dish to share and noted that I'd be bringing the cakes. Better Half kept suggesting other dishes we could bring--salads, side dishes, main courses, but I kept saying "No, we're bringing the cake". He'd say "what if everyone else brings cake?" And I'd say "they know we're bringing the cake, so they'll bring (chiefly BrE) savo(u)ry stuff." "You over-estimate their attention to the invitation," he warned. Not only did EVERYONE bring cake (or biscuits or cookies or muffins), they all brought at least three different things, not just 'a dish'--and in several cases this was three different kinds of sweet baked good, rather than anything lunch-like. I think I made two mistakes here:

1. misplaced faith in the apparently transparent (but really culturally loaded) 'bring a dish to share' potluck notion (though I didn't use the usual AmE turn of phrase bring a dish to pass--i.e. 'pass around')
2. making the invitation for 2:00, rather than within the national lunch hour of 1-2--so that people were less sure about whether we would be eating lunch together or not.
3. not listening to BH, who is always right, or so he tells me. (You'll notice that I only thought I made two mistakes--you understand that this third is dictation, right?)
   

A True Story (would I lie to you?)

Once upon a time, a young American academic moved to South Africa. When it came to be exam season, her boss asked her to (BrE--and other Es) invigilate an exam.

"Invigilate? That sounds painful!" she cried.
"What do you call it then?" asked the bossman.
"(AmE) Proctoring!" she replied---reali{s/z}ing just a little too late how that sounded...

(Hat tip to Maverick for the request.)

Scene from a Marriage:

BH and L, the father and mother (respectively) of 5-month-old baby G, stand in their kitchen. G has recently begun eating (BrE) baby rice/ (AmE) rice cereal.

BH: (holding up two plastic measuring spoons) Should we sterili{s/z}e these?

L: Why are there two?

BH: Because I can't find the teaspoon and one's a half-teaspoon and one's a tablespoon. I don't know how many half-teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and it's a teaspoon of rice and a tablespoon of milk.

L: Three teaspoons to a tablespoon, but you can just eyeball it. Three parts milk to one part rice.

BH: Eyeball it? What, are you a cop?

L: Why would a cop say 'eyeball it'?

BH: Because only cops in cheap American detective shows say that.

L: No--graphic designers say it...

BH: No, the cop eyeballs the suspect.

L: ...cooks say it; tailors say it.

BH: No way.

L: Why would a cop say it? It's about measuring.

BH: No, it's about staring.

L: No, it's about measuring.

BH: Prove it.

L: (wild-eyed) Is that a challenge? (determinedly) I'll take your challenge!

(Pan to beautiful but neglected baby...sound of maniacal typing at a computer keyboard. Fade to black.)

So while Grover sleeps on Better Half's chest, I'll fill you in on the outcome of my --ahem-- L's research. The (British) OED sides with BH, giving the verb to eyeball as AmE slang for 'to look or stare (at)'. But one shouldn't trust the 1989 edition of the OED to be up to snuff on American colloquialisms. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edn), on the other hand, gives two senses, both marked as 'informal':

1. To look over carefully; scrutinize.
2. To measure or estimate roughly by sight: eyeballed the area of the wall that needed paint.

So, it looks here like the OED is up-to-date on senses of eyeball that are known (as AmE slang) in the UK, but not on all AmE senses of the verb. In spite of the ignorance professed above, I have to admit knowledge of the first sense--it just wasn't coming to mind after I, I mean L, used the other sense. But I use the measuring sense often. Since the AHD lists it second, we can assume that it's a later addition to the language than the 'scrutini{s/z}e' sense, but Wiktionary lists it first, giving the impression that it might be a better known sense now. (I've put some feelers out trying to find out when the measuring sense arose. Will update if I get any info. Or will take hard evidence [personal memories are very unreliable when it comes to etymology] in the comments section, please!)

I found myself doing something that I take others to task for: assuming that a usage that differs from my own is 'wrong'. Well, at least I had the good sense to look it up before blogging about it. You see, I was reading along (belatedly as ever) in the 22/29 December 2007 issue of New Scientist, in an article titled 'Death by chocolate' by Claire Ainsworth, and I came across this sentence:

If you're reading this after scoffing your fifteenth chocolate Santa, don't panic: we humans have been safely enjoying the beans of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, for millennia.

I wonder how many other readers would find the use of the verb scoff strange here. I only know scoff as meaning 'to deride, mock', and so I assumed that what had happened here was that a BrE-speaking author or (BrE) subeditor/(AmE) copy editor had misspelt the verb to scarf because in their dialect, the /r/ wouldn't be pronounced--and so if they'd not seen the word written down before, they might reason that it's really scoff--a familiar verb that is also onomatopoetic for the action of whipping food into one's mouth. (Some linguists call such errors--where an unfamiliar word is replaced with something that seems to 'make more sense'--eggcorns.)

Except that my reasoning is completely backward. It's fairly frequent that, when faced with two versions of a word, people believe that the version that they came across first is the older version. But, of course, the world doesn't work that way. The OED records scoff as meaning 'devour' from 1846, and lists it as 'slang and dialectal'. Another version of the word, scaff is dated back to 1797, and a slang dictionary records the variant scorf in 1864. On the other hand, the OED doesn't have documentation of AmE scarf until the 1960s. (Though others have found it as early as 1938.) So, instead of an 'r' being lost by speakers of a BrE non-rhotic dialect, we probably have speakers of an AmE dialect (probably one of the non-rhotic ones) inserting an 'r' in the spelling of the word.

The 'eating' meaning of scoff is not particular to BrE--it's used in AmE too, though not by me. (And, of course, the unrelated 'deride' meaning of scoff and the 'neckwear' meaning of scarf are both dialect-neutral and unrelated to the 'eating' homonyms.)

I would have known all this earlier had I not been on my honeymoon in August when the issue was raised and discussed on the American Dialect Society e-mail discussion list. Once again, my personal life interferes with my quest for know-it-all-dom.

Lazybrain has been reading Anne Tyler's Digging to America, and asked about the phrase diagramming a sentence:

I hadn't come across this term before, although in my 'progressive' education I missed out on being taught formal grammar so I wouldn't swear to the fact that it is not used in Britain.

Most American and British native English speakers who are younger than 50 missed out on the technicalities of English grammar in school because grammar teaching went out of fashion in the 1960s-70s. But if you're an American, you're more likely to be familiar with the phrase diagram a sentence for a few reasons: (a) the verb to diagram is 'chiefly' AmE, according to the OED, (b) there were pockets of resistance to the downgrading of grammar in the US (which would have been harder to maintain the the UK because of national standards, and later the introduction of a national curriculum), and (c) it was probably a more popular activity in the US even before the 1960s, because grammar study enjoyed more status there.

Dick Hudson (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London) has written a helpful concise history of grammar teaching in England and, with John Walmsley, a much longer academic paper on the subject (published in Journal of Linguistics (2005), 41:593-622; warning: link=PDF file). Before the dropping of grammar in the 1960s, the status of grammar as an area of study was a bit different in the US and UK. As Hudson and Walmsley write:

Up to the outbreak of war, it seems, little serious work on grammar was being pursued in Britain, still less on the grammar of English. The work which was published was produced primarily by free-lances or practising teachers and was orientated to the needs of schools, journalists or civil servants. But although there existed only the most rudimentary institutionalised framework for academic work on the grammar of contemporary English in Britain, and little motivation to produce anything outside such a framework, writing grammars only constitutes a small part of the country’s linguistic endeavour as a whole: the energies of the next generation were being absorbed by other tasks.

Outside the UK, by contrast, the first half of the twentieth century was a productive period for English grammars. Major works were published in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany - in English, but not by British authors. During the same period, other important grammars appeared in the United States (Curme 1935, and the first of Fries’s grammars - American English Grammar, Fries 1940). The latter is significant in that it is the first grammar of English to be based on a specified, limited corpus of material – 2,000 personal letters written to U.S. government departments, together with excerpts from 1,000 others.

After the war...

While work on the description of English proceeded apace on the mainland of Europe, it was not apparently seen as sufficiently prestigious, intellectually challenging or stimulating, to draw scholars in England into its sphere of influence. A perceived gap in scholarship can, though, act as a spur to filling it. The question that exercised some scholars’ minds was how to do this. In the United States, the new insights provided by structuralism were already beginning to work through into descriptive grammars.

Now, Hudson and Walmsley here are writing about academic work on grammar, but there seems to be some reflection on this in what as happening in schools. In his brief history, Hudson writes:

The early 20th century [i.e. pre-1960s] saw a steady decline in the quality of grammar teaching in English schools, and increasing calls for its abandonment. One reason for this decline was the complete lack of university-level research on English grammar, which led a government report in 1921 to conclude that [it is] “…impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is…”. Another reason was an energetic campaign on behalf of literature, presented as a liberal and liberating alternative to the the so-called 'grammar-grind'.

Meanwhile, in the US, (AmE) students/(BrE) pupils were learning to diagram sentences using the Reed-Kellogg system. Because I went to a Catholic school rather than a (AmE) public/(BrE) state school (and the Catholic schools, at least then, were less easily swayed by educational fashions), I did learn to diagram sentences--and I couldn't get enough of it. (Had I known then that I could get paid to do such things as a grown-up, I would have been a less awkward adolescent, I'm sure.) But I should note that 'diagramming sentences' is not the same thing as drawing sentence [or phrase structure] trees (i.e. what most syntacticians do nowadays), although sentence trees are indeed diagrams of sentence structure. 'Sentence diagram' generally refers to Reed-Kellogg diagrams, a different animal, and I'm thrilled to have an excuse to post this one from Capital Community College's grammar guide (which I read about on bOINGbOING yesterday). It shows the grammatical relations among the words and phrases of the preamble of the US constitution. (Hey, maybe the UK doesn't need sentence diagramming, since it has no written constitution. Any American my age can recite a modified version of this preamble [leaving out 'of the United States' in the subject], to a tune, because we learned it while watching Saturday morning cartoons.) The preamble goes:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And it can be diagrammed like this:



Dick Hudson also has a web page addressing frequently-asked questions about grammar teaching, which includes:

Q. Wasn't there once a thing called 'sentence diagramming' that was part of grammar teaching?

A. Yes, and in many countries it's still a popular activity - e.g. in the USA, which is well provided with web sites explaining how to do it. The system that's widely used in the USA and parts of Europe was invented in the 19th century and is rather rigid, but it has its uses as a way of showing how a clause is built out of a verb and its subject, with various bits and pieces added to each of these and to each other. Modern linguists have devised much better ways of diagramming sentences which would be very useful in KS3 [ed: Key Stage 3] classrooms. For a good illustration of how they might be used for teaching syntactic structure, try the VISL web site in Denmark, which was built for school children; but there are plenty more to choose from (e.g. one for KS3 teachers on my web site).

In my last job in the States, I really enjoyed teaching a grammar course for Education majors. (I taught it in the summer term [i.e. during vacation time], which meant that most of the students had already failed the course at least once and were re-taking it. Gotta love a challenge like that!) And these are the types of diagrams that that course required. I hadn't done such diagrams since I was 12 or 13, but I have to say I really enjoyed them--even if they're not the types of diagrams that come with academic-linguistic approval.

Perhaps because it's the season of giving, I've been noticing more often the BrE use of constructions like She gave it me where in my native AmE dialect I'd have to say She gave it to me or She gave me it. The last two examples are frequently discussed in linguistic theory, under the title of "Dative Alternation". So, let's start with a little terminology, just for terminology's sake.

In sentences like these, the three nouns (or pronouns, in these cases) play different semantic roles, which correspond to grammatical positions and grammatical cases in the sentences:

She is semantically the 'giver' or the 'agent (of giving)'. Grammatically, it is the subject of the sentence and in subjective (or 'nominative') case (i.e. it is she not her).

It is the 'given' or the 'patient' or 'theme' (depending on whose terminology you use) in these sentences; it is the thing that is affected/moved by the giving action. It is in accusative case, although in English, the form of it is no different in the nominative or accusative (or dative, for that matter). Grammatically speaking, it is the direct object [DO] of the sentence.

Me is the 'givee' or the 'goal' in these sentences--it's where the patient 'it' ends up at the conclusion of the described action. We say it's in the dative case, although there is no formal marking on the pronoun that distinguishes the accusative from the dative forms of pronouns in modern English (so accusative and dative can be collectively called 'objective' case in English). Grammatically, it is the indirect object [IO] of the sentence when it doesn't have the to with it, and it is the object of the preposition to when the to is there (although for various reasons, many grammarians call it the 'indirect object' with or without the to).

The thing to know about case in English is that noun case was marked in Old English, with five cases distinguished and case marking on nouns as well as pronouns. But Modern English has very little case marking--and that which it has is concentrated in the pronoun system (e.g. I versus me and my). Because Modern English doesn't mark case on regular nouns and only distinguishes subjective (nominative), objective (accusative/dative) and genitive (possessive) on pronouns, we rely on word order to let us know which semantic roles and grammatical relations the nouns are serving. On the other hand, languages that have more robust case systems (like German or Latin) allow for much freer word order. Here's what Everything2.com says about Old English dative:

Dative: The dative case is the indirect object of the sentence. The indirect object is anything that is benefited by an action, best translated as 'to' or 'for'. For example, in the sentence "I gave the keys to Alex," or more realistically, "I gave Alex the keys," 'Alex' would be in the dative case, without a preposition. It's important to note that, although in modern English the word order rules for indirect objects are quite strict (you can't say "I gave to Alex the keys," or "I gave the keys Alex"), this is not true by any means in Old English. The indirect object is clear no matter where it is in the sentence because of inflection, and thus the dative was frequently shuffled around as need dictated. Like the accusative, the dative was used with prepositions, mostly abstract, non-movemental (similarly to modern German).

In discussing Modern English, linguists write a lot about 'dative alternation', by which they typically mean the possibility of saying either:

She gave me it. or She gave it to me.

But I've seen a lot less written about She gave it me, or similar things like

About a week and a half ago I lost my new bluetooth headset. I was gutted, my wife had just bought it me as a Xmas present and I had lost it. [The Orange Place of Rich, Jan 2007]

and

The students also started asking me if I knew this or that model, offering to show it me so that we could do it later in the class... [HLT Magazine, Jan 2004],

which are found in British English.

Now, sitting at home, I'm limited in the sources that I can access on this topic, but I did find the following in a 1928 review of Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles by George O. Curme (Language, Vol. 4, No. 2):

In Old English, the dative normally followed the direct object when both forms were personal pronouns. It still keeps its old position here, altho it has lost its old distinctive form: 'Show it me' (Pinero, Sweet Lavender, Act II). In America it is more common to employ here the new dative with to: 'Show it to me.' It seems self-evident here that to me is a dative, not a prepositional phrase. It corresponds to the British simple dative me. Moreover, we find in American English the old simple dative alongside the new dative with to: 'I give it to you' or 'I give it you' (Oemler, Slippy McGee, Ch. V). In this position we have two dative forms, the older simple dative and the new dative with to. The new dative is the result of our desire to give the dative a more distinctive form. In America the old simple dative is now common only before a noun used as a direct object. I gave you a book. Elsewhere we feel that the dative should have a distinctive form.

By 1937 (Language Vol. 13, No. 3), we have Frederic Cassidy writing:

To use [Jespersen's] Give it him argument to deny a word-order distinction of DO and IO, then is a self-contradiction of the worst sort. At least among nouns, there certainly is such distinction.

But even among pronouns what is the true situation? The normal word-order is the same as among nouns, and almost without exception the reverse word-order holds only when it is the DO. In short, this exceptional order is not a free pattern, but a 'bound form' or petrified phrase [...]. It never became an active pattern; neuter it being usually DO and therefore needing no word-order distinction, could violate the ordinary pattern under pressure of rhythmic or other considerations. The nominal order, on the other hand, is a living pattern, permitting all possible combinations of nouns and pronouns and when new words are used, we follow this pattern.

Now, I don't know how Cassidy's claim that DO-IO order is restricted to it DOs relates to Curme's claim that DO-IO order was the usual order for pronouns in Old English. (Did Curme overlook the fact that it was usually it in that position, or was them equally likely to occur in that position in OE?) The it observation remains true in BrE today, though. There are about 6000 UK Google hits for bought it me (once I sorted out the ones that were about buying something called It's me or the dog), but only three for bought them me.

Looking for advice on how to use these forms, there's not much via the Internet. (If I'm going to continue to blog from home, I should really bring my style books back from the office!) The Columbia Guide to Standard American English doesn't acknowledge the existence of the DO-IO order:

Dative is the grammatical case that marked Old English (and Latin) nouns and pronouns functioning as indirect objects or the objects of certain prepositions. Today the preposition to accomplishes periphrastically the dative function as indirect object, as in I gave the keys to him, or syntax does the job alone by putting indirect object before direct object: I gave him the keys.

Then we have a Swiss English-teaching site overtly denying the existence of the DO-IO object order:

The simplest way to look for remnants of dative case in English is to ask yourself whether the preposition "to" is being used or whether there is a verb present which would normally require the use of the preposition "to". For example - "give" is the easiest to remember. You don't say "give it me", rather "give it to me". In this case the verb "to give" is said to be a dative verb, and "me" becomes dative. Note that me is exactly the same in accusative and dative case - this is why dative and accusative are said to have merged into what many people call "object case". [[English] Grammar primer part 2: Dative and Genitive Case]

Within BrE, there is the perception that the DO-IO order (without to) is (in Better Half's words) "common". The Teaching Grammar site at University College London lists Give it me as 'non-standard' but acceptable in some dialect(s), but doesn't say which ones.While BH associates it with London working class, there's more discussion of it on the web as a feature of Lancashire speech. (Very far away from London, in case English geography is not your strong point.) On the BBC Lancashire site, it says:

Lancashire is a rich area in which to study accent, dialect and grammar as Willem explains: "If I were say, playing with my pen in a very annoying way, and you were to take the pen away from me, I might tell you, "Hey, that's my pen, give it me!" but there's also speakers who wouldn't say "Give it to me!" but who would say "Give me it!" and then there's also speakers who would say "Give it me!" This last order "Give it me!" is not very common in Britain in general, but what we find in Lancashire is it's actually the preferred pattern."

The reason I was moved to blog about this phenomenon is that I was hearing it a lot on television last week. One instance was in an ad(vert) for Somerfield supermarkets, in which a woman is complimented on her dress, and she replies "Nigel bought it me". Whether there's been an increase in DO-IO orderings on the television, I cannot say for sure. Still, it strikes me as a symptom of increased tolerance of different dialects on British television and of the increase in use of regional dialects in advertising in particular, where 'northern' can translate into 'trustworthy' or 'down-to-earth'. For more on that point, see voiceover artist Emma Clarke's blog...

JHM wrote in September to ask the following:

A [Financial Times] column used the phrase "tot up" which the context implied was a shortened form for what I would write as "sum up," in other words, to find the total amount. My questions are: 1) Is this a common usage? 2) Would a typical Englishman pronounce "tot up" to rhyme with "tote up?" a) If so, why wouldn't it be spelled "tote up"? b) If not, mightn't it sound more like "taht up," in which case it would it risk being confused with "tart up?"

I'll take JHM's questions in turn:

1). Yes, tot up is BrE meaning 'to add/sum up'. The OED lists it as colloquial, but the fact that it's used in the Financial Times probably means that it's not seen as being particularly colloquial these days. In AmE one is more likely to see/hear tote up. A fixture on American telethons (orig. and chiefly AmE) and other fund-raisers is the tote board, i.e. a representation of how much money has been pledged/collected so far (represented either just as a total figure or a 'thermometer', etc.). Tote boards are also used at racetracks, to show how much the return on a particular bet is. Of course, you have these things in British fund-raisers/racetracks too, but I haven't heard them called tote boards here (and they're not called tot boards either!). The OED lists the related noun tote 'now dialectal' and as originally Australian, with the noun form being short for totalizator--a proprietary name for a kind of machine that tallies numbers up. (In Australia and New Zealand, apparently, the Totalizator Agency Board is the official non-racetrack place where you can bet on horse races--i.e. the equivalent of American Off-Track Betting.)

2-a) Tot up rhymes with hot up, not with tote up. Both verb forms tot up and tote up come from total in some way or another--with the former looking more like it relies on the spelling of the abbreviation of total for its form/pronunciation, and the latter being a clipping of the (pronounced) word total. A similar shortened form is tut to mean tutorial (we used that in South Africa--is it used in British universities that still have tutorials?). It's pronounced to rhyme with hut, rather than like the first syllable ('toot') in the word it stands for, tutorial. So, the spelling of the shortened form has influenced its pronunciation.

b) In (at least southern standard) BrE, tot up and tart up ('to dress in a showy/gaudy manner') have very different vowels. The problem with explaining this to AmE speakers is that AmE generally doesn't have the vowel that's in BrE tot. So, if an American says tot up, it may sound like tart up to a BrE speaker because they're not using the vowel that a BrE speaker would expect to hear. But if a BrE speaker (at least the ones down here in the south) says tot or tart it would be very clear to another BrE speaker which one they're saying. I discussed this vowel back here, where there's a link to recordings of it.

Tote has another, unrelated meaning that is originally AmE: 'to carry'. Of course, the meaning has spread wider than AmE now, especially through the compound tote bag. The etymology of this tote is something of a mystery. It goes back to the 1600s at least, and is often claimed to be of African origin, but there's evidence of it being used that early in parts of America that didn't have many Africans. So, despite a lot of etymological attention to the word, it's still a mystery.

One thing that I like about British English is the range of verbs and phrasal verbs for various interactions with public welfare institutions. I don't know why I have such fondness for them--maybe it's just my fondness for the public welfare institutions. When asked by British folk what I like about living in England, my first two answers are: the National Health Service and the trains. They usually express shock or derision, but then I point out how much healthcare costs (and how unevenly it is distributed) in the US and the fact that in my last American place of residence (a city of about 125,000) the Amtrak passenger train came only TWICE A WEEK and even then you had to drive to a couple of towns away to catch it. After those explanations, my appreciation for what might not be the greatest health and transport services in the world seems a lot clearer. As a (smugly) non-car-owning person with chronic illness, I have very few complaints about the services, and tend to find that the loudest complaints come from healthy folk who drive everywhere. But maybe I should save my prejudices about healthy people for another forum. Some of my best friends are healthy. Well, one of them, at least.

(In case you're wondering what my third favo(u)rite thing about living in England/Britain is, it's: everyone seems to have a hobby or passion [besides sitting in front of the tv/(BrE) telly every night]. What fun! If only everyone in my family had a hobby--it would make Christmas shopping so much easier.)

But enough asides (or since they came first, should I call them atops?). Here are some of the BrE institutional verbs I love:

• to sign on also known as to go on (BrE) the dole: to register to receive social benefits (AmE: welfare or unemployment insurance). I was going to link you to the episode of Spaced in which Daisy tries to sign on, but no one's uploaded that one to YouTube yet. Just when you start to think that you can depend on the Internet, it goes and disappoints you in a fundamental way.
  
  One can use sign off to mean 'go off benefits (because one has become employed)', but I'm more accustomed to hearing it used to mean:
  

• to sign off: (for a medical doctor) to give a medical certificate (to someone), allowing them medical leave from work. This is usually done by one's (BrE) GP -- general practitioner (AmE: primary care physician [though that's (AmE) HMO-speak] or family doctor). This is often used in the passive--e.g. I've been signed off for the next five weeks. When it's used in the active form, the direct object comes between the verb and the particle: The doctor signed John off, not *The doctor signed off John.

• to section: to commit someone to a mental hospital--so-called because it is
  done under various sections of various mental health acts (according to Wikipedia, that's the Mental Health Act 1983 (England and Wales), the Mental Health (Northern Ireland) Order 1986 and the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003). There are a number of examples of its use in this clip from the recent television comedy Peep Show. AmE uses to commit (as in to have someone committed) for putting someone into a mental instutition--but so does BrE.
  
  There used to be a hair salon that specialised in dreadlocks and hair extensions (and more specifically, dreadlock hair extentions) that was called Sectioned. I thought it was the perfect name for such an establishment--right up there with Barber Black Sheep.

Of course, no welfare system is without its cheats, and BrE supplies some interesting verbs for turning them in:

• to shop (someone): to turn someone in for some misdeed. This isn't only used for fraud against the government, but it's certainly used for that a lot. The OED has it going back for centuries, but says it's now "only slang or dial". For example:
  

  Council [AmE: municipal government] launches 'shop your neighbour' dustbin [AmE: trash can] hotline (Daily Mail, 12 Oct 2006)

While it is slang-ish, newspapers and even the government use shop quite easily--although often in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas in order to signal its 'slanginess'.

• to grass (up) (someone): again, to inform the police/authorities about someone's misdoings. More likely than shop (in my experience) to be used for non-fraud kinds of crimes. There are also the nouns grass and supergrass, meaning a person who grasses. And once one learns that, the name of the band [warning: link makes noise] makes more sense. AmE alternatives that I can think of for this meaning, such as rat, are also found in BrE.
  

According to someone in this BBC article (which uses both grass and shop):

Most smokers are law-abiding citizens, and I can't believe people will want to shop smokers. It is not the British way.

That it is perceived as 'not the British way' might go a little way to explaining why (in my experience) British universities tend not to have Hono(u)r Codes, in the American sense. At many US universities, one must sign a document promising not to cheat and to report any cheating one knows about. At my UK university, students have to sign statements that they haven't cheated (when they take an exam or submit and assignment), but (as I found when someone grassed on a fellow student) there is no process in place to allow for the investigation of an accusation of cheating that comes from a student, rather than a faculty member.