Separated by a Common Language

We're finally going on our honeymoon, so there will be no posts here for at least 10 days. So, here's something for you to entertain yourselves and each other with...

If you are a (native, not like me!) British citizen (or 'subject', if you prefer), would you call yourself or any one of your fellow citizens a Brit? Do you think of the noun Brit as a term used mostly by foreigners?

I've polled three people today, and these are my results so far:

Better Half says it's not a noun he'd use, but he doesn't find it offensive when foreigners use it about him. So, for him Brit is neutral and foreign. (As opposed to pom and limey, which are foreign and insulting. The former of these is fairly unknown in the US, but well-known in the Antipodes.)

The Syntactician says "I don't use it and wouldn't like to be called one because to me it conjures up ex-pats of the worst kind."

And the friend who puts a B in BOMB (she'll know what that means, at least!) says that it can be neutral or insulting, depending on the context, and 'when abroad' is a time when she'd be likely to use it.

The thing that one notices when writing a blog like this is that the AmE speakers use the term a lot more than the BrE speakers. When referring to themselves individually, of course, BrE speakers are more likely to use a more specific term, relating to their country of origin (England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland--but let's not get into the problem of whether that's British or not--it's in Greater Britain, if not Great Britain!). I suppose BrE speakers are less likely than AmE speakers to want to (or need to) generali{s/z}e about the British.

I have noticed that use of Brit as a noun modifier is more common (Brit wit, Britblogs, etc.). I'm not as interested in that. Nor is it particularly interesting that there are music awards called The Brits. No, what's interesting to me is what we call people and how they feel about it. So, native Britishers, what do you think?

Continuing on my backlog of old requests: a colleague who's involved in a Catalan-English dictionary project forwarded (back in March) part of a conversation arising from an unfamiliar translation in the project. The Catalan phrase in question was apparently (no) trobar ni caps ni peus, and the lexicographer was questioning the translation of it as (not) to make heads or tails (of something), because she, a BrE speaker, would have said (not) to make head or tail (of something). Indeed, the plural version is the AmE version, and the singular the BrE version. (This is backed up by John Algeo in British or American English. He found only the singular in BrE texts in his corpus, and only plural in AmE texts.)

I suppose the reason I didn't write about that earlier is because there's not a lot more to say about it! It's unclear why the AmE version gained the plural markers. The phrase head or tail is defined by the OED as 'one thing or another', so etymologically speaking, the singular makes some sense. Growing up with the AmE version, I visuali{s/z}ed the things that one 'could not make heads or tails of' to be chaotic things--sort of like a Breughel painting as done by Jackson Pollock, where you wouldn't be able to find the heads or the tails of the beings in it. The BrE version lends it self to a visual that is imprecise, but not necessarily chaotic. But then, how one pictures such things must be a highly individual experience...

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?

Continuing to make my way through ancient requests, Susie wrote back in January (oh, the neglect!) to request coverage of directly. She's probably given up on reading this blog by now, but at least I hadn't promised to discuss it directly.

The word directly, of course, is found in both AmE and BrE, as in:

Try to involve everyone, not just those directly in front of you. [University of Kent Careers Advisory Service, Tips on Making Presentations]

But the use of directly to mean 'shortly' or 'very soon', is mostly AmE--though the OED indicates that it's also BrE dialectal (but which dialects? do you know?). It's that sense of the word that's used when a (AmE) salesclerk/(BrE) shop assistant says:

I'll be with you directly.

...before they ignore you in order to deal with another customer.

For this meaning, shortly works in BrE (as well as AmE), but when I asked Better Half what he'd say instead of I'll do that directly, he said that he'd say I'll do that later. When I countered that that doesn't mean the same thing, he claimed that as a British person, he was less likely than an American to want to tie himself down to anything more specific. I think he was joking (he's rarely not joking), but if you'd like to protest or support his contention, feel free to do so in the comments!

Afterthought (the next morning): A good South African equivalent is just now, which confused (or maybe annoyed) me to no end when I first arrived there and went to a party with a co-worker. He kept saying We'll leave just now and so I'd fetched my bag or whatever and found myself waiting while he drank another drink, and another, and had another conversation...

Note that the dialectal differences involving directly and just now are not about whether they are used to talk about time, which they generally are in a lot of dialects, but whether they're used to mean 'not immediately, but soonish', which tends to be more dialect-specific. Just now in my native AmE dialect can mean 'in the very recent past' and directly can mean 'immediately' in most dialects.

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!

My family (AmE) is/(BrE) are here this week, so I haven't a lot of time for blogging. You'd think that there would be a lot to blog about, with six Americans clashing with English culture constantly, but the linguistic conversations are mostly of the "Chips are French fries!" variety, and the miscommunications mostly occur when asking waiters for water (OK, I'll blog about that next).

Most menus need a fair amount of translation, both for the dishes that are not eaten as much in America and for the food names that are different. So far, the one that's caused the most raised eyebrows was beef and herb faggots. Better Half described these as English meatballs, which seemed like a reasonable description, but all of the recipes I've found this morning (for beef or pork faggots) involve a fair amount of offal--which is not what comes to mind when I think 'meatballs'. Here is a recipe for the curious.