hustings and stumping

I follow the Twitterings of the candidates for our House of Commons seat and today each had a tweet that went something like this:
Really enjoyed Older People's Council hustings. Some great questions & interesting answers!
I've heard the word husting(s) at  previous British election times, but this time felt the need to look it up.  Wikipedia tells me:
A husting (called a stump in the United States) originally referred to a physical platform from which representatives presented their views or cast votes before a parliamentary or other election body.
We then have metonymic transfer to a name for the activity that traditionally went on on those types of platform.  There's a nice little explanation of the terms on this University of Texas site.  It starts:
[C]andidates for political office and an entourage of supporters, handlers, and journalists are said to go on the stump, or simply stumping.
It seems like a rather unattractive word to refer to a core activity of political campaigning – traveling from place to place making speeches in front of live audiences.
It goes on to distinguish between this sense of stump and another (orig. AmE) sense of the verb to stump: 'to befuddle' before picking up on hustings:
On the stump or on the hustings?
Sometimes when candidates are on the stump, we say that they are on the hustings. Hustings, according to The Word Detective comes from the Old Norse word husthing, meaning "house assembly."
Centuries ago rulers might convene a husthing, usually composed only of members of the immediate royal household as opposed to a larger popular assembly of constituents, in order to gather advice or issue decrees. The English later adapted the word as husting to refer to the senior court of the City of London, and later narrowed the meaning to refer to the physical platform in that court where the Lord Mayor sat.
Over time this last meaning was generalized to refer to any platform from which political candidates might address their audience, and more commonly today it refers to the campaign trail, which we also know as the stump. Notably, husting usually appears in modern English only in the plural form hustings, and then usually in the phrase on the hustings.
The presence of hustings on this American website indicates that the term is not limited to BrE--but it wasn't something I knew from my Democratic Party days.  A quick corpus search (BNC versus COCA) had hustings occurring three times as often in BrE as in AmE (I was surprised it wasn't more).  The last line of the above quotation indicates an area of difference.  On the hustings accounts for more than half of the occurrences of hustings in the AmE corpus, but less than a third of the occurrences in the BrE corpus.  The singular form husting does not occur in either corpus.  Meanwhile, AmE stump speech, i.e. the speech that a candidate makes repeatedly at different locales, occurs 45 times per 100 million words in the AmE corpus and not at all in the British corpus.

A hustings in BrE, at least, refers to an event where more than one candidate is present to debate and discuss issues with potential voters (as in the Older People's Council event that our candidates went to today). This differs from how the stump has developed--stump speeches are generally made without the presence of the other candidates.  The OED, on the topic of this sense of stump:

 14. Originally U.S.    a. In early use, the stump (sense 2) of a large felled tree used as a stand or platform for a speaker.    b. Hence, ‘a place or an occasion of political oratory’ (Cent. Dict.). to go on the stump, to take the stump: to go about the country making political speeches, whether as a candidate or as the advocate of a cause.
  In the U.S. the word ‘does not necessarily convey a derogatory implication’ (Cent. Dict.). In Britain, though now common, it is still felt to be somewhat undignified.
 And I'm just going to end here without further comment!
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finger/fork buffets

Since I'm on (AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday at the moment, I'm taking the opportunity to go through my blog inbox in order to try to reduce the backlog of requests.  Here's a year-and-a-half old one from Chas:
I was reading an Englishman's blog today and encountered the phrase "a champagne reception and fork buffet supper."

Now I have visited the UK, attended part of high school in Jamaica, have various British friends, and even do some freelance editing for a London-based publisher, for whom I beat the prose of British academics into conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style for the North American market.

But I never was invited to a fork buffet supper. The phrase gives me visions of a long table covered with dozens of glistening forks -- and nothing else.
Part of the reason for choosing this one to respond to now is that I can pretty much get away with just writing what I wrote to Chas.  So, to quote myself:
I've never seen fork buffet in the wild, but there are 24,000 Google hits for it.  It's the companion to the term I have heard a lot, finger buffet--i.e. a buffet of finger foods (51,800 hits). 
The OED can be called on to add:
fork supper (also -buffet, -dinner, -lunch(eon, etc.), a meal served at a buffet, etc., consisting of food suitable for eating with fork alone, making the provision of set places at table unnecessary.
The question that I haven't answered is 'what would this be called in AmE?'  Notice that Chas didn't offer an easy equivalent--I don't know that there is one.  I've come across the term standing buffet, but this can as easily (if not more easily) be finger foods, rather than fork-foods.  For a finger buffet, I'd imagine that an AmE invitation would say  'hors d'oeuvres will be served' or  'finger foods will be served', or some such thing.  I ask people in the US with more recent experience of these things to help out in the comments.

(Though, it must be said, I have very recent experience, since I went to a buffet lunch (with forks) after a funeral today. Unhelpfully for us, it was just called lunch.)
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washing up and doing the dishes (and digressions on showers, baths, kettles, and coffee)

Here's a topic that we've partly done before, but it heads to the top of the to-blog-about list just because most of the heavy lifting has already been done for me.  John Wells (of Phonetic Blog fame) wrote to say:
Not sure if you've written about BrE washing up / doing the washing up = AmE washing/doing the dishes.

Who's going to do the washing up?
There was some washing up on the draining board waiting to be done.


As well as a kitchen, scullery, and larder/pantry, in the house where I grew up we also had a wash-up (room devoted to washing up). We boys had to help my father with the washing up there.

Nowadays of course we use a dishwasher (a term obviously of American origin, and still in competition in BrE with washing-up machine).

You'll have heard of the British couple dismayed to be greeted on arrival at friends' house for dinner with Would you like to wash up before we eat? (= BrE 'wash your hands')

Lastly, have you noticed how in Britain we assume that you don't need to rinse the (BrE) washing-up/(AmE) dishes in clear water, while in America you do so rinse them?
Thanks for all that, John!  By the time I was old enough to help out, my parents had a dishwasher, but I still learned how to wash dishes 'properly' from my grandmother.  She taught me that the right way to do it is to first put the kettle on,* so that after you've set the dishes in the drainer, you can pour boiling water over them in order to kill any lingering germs.  My grandmother did not have OCD.  This is just the way things were done.  I doubt many Americans would do that today, but we would run some clean water over dishes to get the soap off.  When I've seen English people not doing that, I must admit, I've been [more than] a little uneasy.**


And now for your commenting pleasure, the almost entirely non-linguistic footnoted digressions!!

*And when we say put the kettle on in AmE, we almost certainly mean putting it on the (AmE) stove/(BrE) hob.  When BrE speakers say it these days, they usually mean 'switching the kettle on', as almost no home (or office) is without an electric kettle.  It's probably the case that it's our lesser interest in tea that's kept us from having electric kettles--we have automatic coffeemakers instead.  I'm in the US at the moment, and had a moment of reali{s/z}ation about the ubiquity of coffeemakers yesterday.  I was in our local nirvana of a supermarket, looking to buy a little caffeinated instant (I drink coffee so milkified it doesn't really matter).  I was initially surprised to find LESS supermarket choice for this item in the US than in the UK.  I mean, many of the UK supermarkets I use would fit (not at the same time, of course) into the produce section of more than a few of the US supermarkets that I visit.  (Supermarkets are a major tourist destination for Better Half and me.)  Given that for any other non-nation-bound product [with the possible exception of cheese] there seems to be twice to ten times as much selection in an American supermarket as in a UK one, I had expected to be able to find a small jar of caffeinated instant coffee.  (There were some larger jars, but not many.  I saw no fair trade options.  Ended up buying a box of little (AmE) packets/(BrE) sachets, but only one brand offered those.)  And then it dawned on me: nearly everyone has a coffeemaker; almost no one has an electric kettle--of course there's not much market for instant coffee.  In the UK, in any place where people gather there will always be a kettle, ready to serve tea--and almost always a jar of instant coffee as a nod to the non-tea-drinkers.

**Which just reminds me of several encounters I've had with a few older English people who aren't terribly interested in showers, preferring baths.  I recall one in particular who declared that he couldn't see how having the water wash over you would get you really clean.  I replied, in a characteristically brash American manner, that I viewed baths as an opportunity to wallow in one's own filth.  (They're lovely for a sit and a think, but not what I would use to get clean.)  He claimed that the filth would be left in the (BrE) bath/(AmE) tub.  And I countered "No, because the soap with which you remove the filth floats, and so as you raise yourself from the tub [bath], you pass the lower half of your body through a film of soap, dead skin, and dirt, which clings to your skin until your next bath rearranges it." He had no answer to this.  I like to think that he went home and took a shower.  Of course, the relative paucity of decent water pressure in British showers may be at the root of any British-held beliefs that showers are insufficient cleaners.  The combination of poor water pressure and (in some places, like where I live) very hard water does indeed slow down the removal of filth.
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protesting prepositions

For the second time in my life, I was on strike today.  I mean, really on strike as in having my pay docked for it, not like the one-woman strike I held in order to protest the rat infestation in my office at a former place of employ.  That one worked.  The rats relented.  This time, we're seeing some effect of staff and student protests and our counterproposals to the management's plan for over one hundred (BrE) redundancies/(AmE) layoffs, and I hope that will continue and that the strike draws attention to wider problems that, in my estimation, start with the government's classification of higher education as part of Business, Innovation and Skills (formerly Trade and Industry) rather that part of a department of education.  (There was such a department, but this (BrE) government / (AmE) administration turned it into a department for 'children, schools and families' and reclassified universities as part of the business world.) 


Happily, the only pay that I get for noticing AmE/BrE differences is my Google ad income, so I am free to notice them on a strike day.  That £4.50 per month will (N Amer & Irish colloquial, in this position) sure see me through the grim times.  <subliminal>Click! Click! Click! This child needs shoes!</subliminal>

And what did I notice today?  Well, this phrase in the BBC coverage of the strike, for one thing:
Hundreds of staff from the University of Sussex staged a strike in protest at job cuts, as students occupied a lecture theatre for an eighth day.
In protest at?   My first thought: 'Are the (AmE) copy-editors/(BrE) subeditors at the BBC on strike too?'  My second thought: 'What can a quick corpus search tell me about this preposition choice?'  A lot, as it turns out.

I used (as I usually do these days) Mark Davies' wonderful interface for the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and searched for in protest with six prepositions:  at, against, of, over, to, and about.  The last two only occurred at tiny rates in both corpora, so I haven't included them in the table below.  These are the results, expressed as percentages within each dialect:



   BrE        AmE
       at     703
       against     2434
       of<142
       over718

So, there you have it.  In British English, one generally strikes in protest at something but in American, there is no clear preference for a particular preposition (unless I'm not thinking of it?).  Personally, I'd edit my own writing toward(s) in protest againstAs we were just discussing the other day, American English does seem to be more of-ridden than BrE.

But another interesting aspect of this story is that the American figures represent a lot less (or fewer, if you insist) data, in spite of the fact that COCA is four times bigger than BNC.  Taking this into account, BrE uses in protest+PREPOSITION more than seven times more often than AmE does.  So I thought:  'that must mean that AmE doesn't like to use protest as an abstract noun as much as BrE does, and so we tend to use the verb.'  But searching the verb protest shows that AmE doesn't use that more than BrE does either (though the difference is not as stark as for the prepositional phrases I searched--in the BrE corpus it occurs 2427 times per million words, and in AmE it's 1968 per million).  In all uses of the noun BrE uses it more (but only 1.38 times more, not the 7x more of the in protest phrases). 


So, do the British have more to protest?  Or do Americans prefer other ways of talking about protesting?  I think I know the answer as far as higher education is concerned...
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off (of) and out (of)

Andy S wrote to say:
I'm interested in the Americanism off of which sounds very odd to British ears. I'd be interested to know more about it.
Indeed, Americans would often get off of a [much more common in AmE--in BrE it can have a more restricted meaning] couch, whereas British folk would get off the [available in AmE, but I suspect that the frequency varies regionally] sofa.  That's not to say that off of is the only way we put it in AmE, as evidenced by  Paul Simon's admonition to Gus to hop off the bus.  And Americans didn't make it up.  In the OED, one can find the following examples:

a1616 SHAKESPEARE Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1623) II. i. 98 A fall off of a Tree.
1667
A. MARVELL Corr. in Wks. (1875) II. 224 The Lords and we cannot yet get off of the difficultyes risen betwixt us.

 

Nevertheless, it came to be regarded as 'non-standard' in Britain. In AmE (according to Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1991 [via Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd edn]), off of is 'widespread in speech, including that of the educated . . . but is rare in edited writing'.
But, in a weird twist, AmE speakers are more likely to say go out the window/door than BrE speakers, who more typically go out of the window.  According to a corpus study by Maria Estling published in English Today (1999; 15:3.22-7; via John Algeo's British or American English), when going through windows or doors, BrE uses out of twice as often as out and AmE uses out more than six times as much as out of in this context.  But BrE differs a lot in spoken (72% out) versus written (80% out of).  Algeo investigated this further and found that both BrE and AmE prefer out more strongly with door, but Americans 'more strikingly so'.  BrE users are twice as likely to say out with door but AmE speakers are nine times more likely to say out the door.

Algeo goes on to list several more cases in which BrE uses out of and AmE either doesn't, or is less likely to:
  1. Algeo reports that he's found equal numbers of from King's Cross ([BrE] railway station/[AmE] train station) and out of King's Cross, but no cases of out of Grand Central.  I'm not sure if he checked more than just Grand Central though...and whether he knows that Penn Station would be a better test case (because NY Penn Station gets more than four times the traffic of Grand Central, and there are Penn Stations in other cities too).  Checking on the web, I find that trains out of Penn Station gets 901 hits, while trains from Penn Station gets 18,100, backing up Algeo's evidence for a difference.
  2. BrE says out of hours to mean 'outside normal business hours', while AmE would use after hours in most similar contexts.
  3. BrE kicks people out of the team 96% of the time in Algeo's data (versus off the team) AmE always kicks people off the team.
  4. BrE sometimes (28% of the time in A's data--the Cambridge Intertnational Corpus) has things being out of all recognition instead of beyond all recognition.  AmE always uses the latter.
Why would anyone ever use a compound preposition with of if they don't need to?  When I want to give my students an example of a really meaningless word, I use of.  I mean, what does it add to anything?  Well, it adds a preposition, and we need prepositions to glue bits of sentences together and tell us which parts go with which parts.  For instance consider the phrase:
The Chairperson of the Committee of Ministers welcomes the deposit, by the Russian Federation, of its instrument of ratification of Protocol.  [Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers]
 And without the ofs:
The Chairperson the Committee Ministers welcomes the deposit, by the Russian Federation, its instrument ratification Protocol.
The ofs tell us to process the sentence like this:


(I've tried to make the ofs go under the noun phrases they're attaching to.)

So, why do you need the glue of of if you've already got a workable preposition?  Probably (in part) because there's some ambiguity about whether out and off are prepositions.  In many situations, they are adverbial.  You can tell the difference in that prepositions require objects--i.e. noun phrases--to go [usually] after them, but an adverb modifies the verb, rather than gluing a noun to a sentence.  So:

I jumped off  [adverbial; tells something about the direction of your jumping]
   versus
I jumped off the table [preposition; indicates a relationship between the me-jumping and the table]
(For the record, the AmE part of my brain is screaming for an of in the second example.)
If we understand the off to be an adverb, then we'd need a preposition in order to glue the table onto the sentence.   But wait one (AmE) gumdanged minute!  There are other adverb/preposition pairs that don't have an of variant.  What's up with that?

Well, I don't know--I've not researched this, so this is middle-of-the-night rambling, but notice that we don't get *in of or *on of.  (* is linguists' way of marking an impossible grammatical construction.)  The of seems to signify a movement away, a 'from' meaning. (Notice we do get into and onto-- a 'toward' meaning matches on or in--so we do make compound prepositions with them too.)  Why do off and out allow of, while other 'away'-meaning preposition/adverbs, like away, down and up, use from instead? Oh, I don't know...it's past 2 in the morning--stop with the questions already!  The most likely answer is 'because that's the way people have started saying it', but I'm tempted to think it's because the others are further to the adverbial side of the preposition-adverb continuum than off and out are and that they therefore need a stronger prepositional support.  But then again I don't know that I actually believe it, so I'm going to shut up already [final positioning of already is AmE, influenced by Yiddish].  Good night!
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Separated by a Common Twitter: competition results!

Thanks to Twitter-followers who re-tweeted to me their nominations for 'most impenetrable to cross-ponder' tweet.  We have a winner, Transblawg (Margaret Marks) who sent two--one that I declare the winner, and one that I declare a runner-up.  First, the winner (I'm deleting the identities of the original tweeters, since they didn't ask to be here...):

KP v.lucky to wring that lbw decision out of Enamul Haque: that was missing off-stump by a mile! Bangladesh 163-5 and in trouble

Of course,  anything with personal initials/names is going to be hard for anyone to read, but with a little BrE knowledge, one can figure out at least what the roles of KP and Enamul Haque are.  The tweet, for anyone who needs translation, is about cricket, the only sport that Better Half follows, but still one whose scoring system has to be explained to me every single time he tries to engage me in a conversation about the game.  KP is Kevin Pietersen, who was (BrE) bowling (equivalent to pitching in baseball--except that it's done differently) and Haque must be an umpire.  'That lbw decision' refers to a leg-before-wicket call made by the umpire.  In this case, spelling out the initials doesn't help much, does it?  You have to know that the aim of the bowler in cricket is to knock the bails (little pieces of wood) from a wicket (three little poles, called stumps, with the bails on top--image from Wikipedia). The batsman (baseball equivalent = batter) tries to hit the ball, preventing it from getting to the wicket.  But the leg-before-wicket law means that the umpire can decide that the batsman is out because the ball would have hit the wicket, had the batsman's leg (or the pads on it) not been in the way.  The three stumps are called the off stump (which is on the off-side, nearest the bat) the middle stump and the leg stump (on the on-side, the leg side).  So, to translate: Kevin Pietersen is very lucky that EH decided that the ball Pietersen had bowled would have hit the stumps, since, in the tweeter's opinion, it was nowhere near the outermost stump.  The rest is the score, to be read as 'Bangladesh is 163 for 5', which means that they've scored 163 runs and lost 5 wickets (yes, I had to look that up).  In other words, you're only told the number of runs for the team that is batting.  The team that gets more runs wins, so you know from this information how many runs the other team needs to get when it's their turn to bat.  But don't expect me to tell you more than that.  Instead, I'll point you to a site where an American tries to explain cricket to Americans.

I'll ask the winner to send her address and her choice of biscuits/cookies to me directly.  Here's the runner-up that she sent:
blooming knackering. I've got a sales conference in a couple of weeks too. I liked garden leave!! boo hoo
And maybe this should have been the winner, since it's not in the jargon of a sport, but in general BrE--but since it means sending the biscuits/cookies to the same place, perhaps I'll just declare it a (BrE-prominent) draw/(AmE-prominent) tie. A glossary for the tweet:
blooming = is a bowdleri{z/s}ed version of the vulgar BrE modifier bloody--akin in this context to saying (AmE) darned.

knackering = exhausting, tiring (slang). 

garden leave (also gardening leave) is, to quote the OED: "Brit. (euphem.) suspension from work on full pay for the duration of a notice period, typically to prevent an employee from having any further influence on the organization or from acting to benefit a competitor before leaving."
Janibach sent the only American tweet among the entries, which was related to American football--and not as impenetrable for the average British reader as the cricket tweet:
Who do you want the Cleveland Browns to take in the draft. Where are they in line? #NFL
The NFL (National Football League) occasionally comes to the UK to play exhibition games, and some games, including the Superbowl, sometimes make it onto wee-hours television.  That doesn't mean that the average Briton knows much about the sport--but still, this one is fairly decipherable (It was the wrong time of year to get tweets about less transparent things like first downs and Hail Mary passes).  Cleveland Browns are pretty clearly a sports team (since they follow the code of city name + plural common noun found in many team names across the English-speaking world).  The AmE spelling of draft for draught has been populari{z/s}ed for several senses of the word even in BrE, and particularly when referring to American military conscription.  While reference to drafts in the context of selecting players for a team may not be usual in BrE, it's part of a general sense that BrE does have: "The withdrawing, detachment, or selection of certain persons, animals, or things from a larger body for some special duty or purpose; the party so drawn off or selected" (OED).  And while BrE speakers would usually say in or on the queue rather than in line, they can certainly understand it.

This probably was an unfair contest in that respect--since BrE speakers are generally subjected to more AmE than AmE speakers are to BrE, a winning tweet would probably have had to use either fairly low-frequency words or very current slang in order to be more impenetrable than the BrE entries.  Ah well.

I'm tempted to go through all the entries (as there were only six), but having spent most of my Saturday night at this already, I think I'll stop and leave the others as inspiration for future blog posts.  Thanks to all who (re-)tweeted!  Catch me in Brighton, and I'll buy you a cuppa (bring your own biscuit).
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Separated by a Common Twitter competition

I've just announced (in several <140 character parts) a competition over on the Twitter feed.

Here's what I tweeted (with added linkage for you blog-based readers):

-----------------
Competition: RT to me a tweet (not by u) that is (unintentionally) so full of Americanisms or Briticisms that it would flummox a UKer/USer.

The prize: I'll send you a packet of whatever cookies/biscuits you most miss from UK or US.

My entry to competition: RT @Nancy4Brighton...the Speaker has interrupted PMQs to ask MPs to stop 'barracking' - it puts the public off...

Competition deadline: midnight Greenwich time, Friday.

--------------

Obviously, the intended audience for this competition is expatriates who are missing their baked goodies, but if you'd like me to use the post to send you some biscuits/cookies that you could buy at your local shop/store if only you weren't too internet-addicted to get out of your chair, well, I can do that too.

(The plan is to buy biscuits/cookies in one country, carry them to other country and post locally...so while I will try to send you biscuits/cookies, I cannot guarantee that you won't get a package full of ex-biscuits/cookies, aka crumbs.)

I'll post winning entries on the blog this weekend.
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nimrods and other idiots

Tim L wrote (a long time ago) to ask about nimrod:
Have you stumbled across the difference in meanings of the word "nimrod" in American and other Englishes?  It was a surprise to me to learn that it meant something other than dimwit, and a bigger surprise to learn that it meant dimwit only in American English.  The history is mysterious
       http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nimrod
though the Bugs Bunny explanation is widely touted on the 'net.
Nimrod, as you may know, is the name of a character in Genesis--Noah's great-grandson, and based on that it can be used to refer to 'a great hunter'.  But like many Americans, I knew it first as a word for an idiot, or as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, 'A person regarded as silly, foolish, or stupid.'  It's the kind of thing that would make one giggle if one heard it in Sunday School.  I was also unduly amused when I discovered that there's a Biblical personage named Dorcas--because of the name's similarity with the American slang term dork which these days means something very much like nimrod, but has also been used to mean 'penis'.

So, coming from an American perspective, it's surprising and strange to find that in the UK it's best known as a type of military (BrE) aeroplane/(AmE) airplane.  It sounds like having a plane named (AmE) doofus or (BrE) der-brain or (BrE) div or (particularly northern BrE) numpty.  So, speaking of "Nimrod accidents" will probably bring up different pictures in the minds of British or American listeners.
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conformity and date-writing

Here's a guest post from my lovely friend, psychologist Julie Coultas, who's been seen on this blog before in the guise of 'Maverick'.  I hope you enjoy it too!

Vive la diffĂ©rence! As a research psychologist, I welcome the difference between BrE and AmE. Here is one of the reasons why. An American student from the University California at Santa Barbara (SB from now on) came over to work with me last year, as she wanted to extend some conformity research that I had been doing. I run experiments to find out when and how people copy each other. Why people copy each other is another matter! Many years ago one of my experiments manipulated how people wrote the date, and we discovered that people will copy the manner in which other people write the date (e.g. change from 14/5/09 to 14th May 2009). A trivial behavio(u)r you might remark – but it is a strong indicator that when we are aware that our behavio(u)r is different to the majority we often change it to fit in with the ‘group’. In my earlier experiments we found that we could get people to change from the rare behavio(u)r (14th May 2009) to the social norm (14/5/09) more easily. It was almost as if people reali{s/z}e when their behavio(u)r is not the social norm.

After lengthy discussions with SB about how we could set up an experiment to look at how much people conform, we decided to manipulate an essential difference between BrE and AmE – yes, the manner in which we write the date. Americans write the date May 14th 2009 and British write the date 14th May 2009. Now, I don’t want to get into discussion about which is the ‘correct’ way to write the date but it does seem intuitively more simple to put the day before the month as this way it is in order of increasing size of time period. Of course, I am influenced by the BrE social norm! I want to be part of my cultural group.

At the time that we were planning our experimental study, 400 American students had arrived on our British campus for 8 weeks of study. We decided to see whether we could get American students to write the date in the British manner. We manipulated the date on two forms that the students were given when they took part in our experiment. We told them that the study was about architecture and creativity and asked them to build marshmallow and (AmE) toothpick/(BrE) cocktail stick towers in a given amount of time. At the start of the experiment, they signed a consent form that had room for one signature and, importantly for this study, the date. That way we could see how the American students usually wrote the date. Then when they had built their marshmallow towers they had to sign another form in order to be entered for a prize (BrE) draw/(AmE) drawing. This form had nine forged signatures, American email addresses and dates. We manipulated these dates so that a proportion were BrE (14th May 2009) and a proportion were AmE (May 14th 2009). We did not use any numerical dates (14/5/09) as it could become confusing for the participants.

Now the question is – can we get people to change the way that they write the date? In this particular case, can we get people to change their social norm? Well, as in many psychology experiments, there was that additional variable that changed the outcome of the whole experiment! By the time we had finished planning the experiment, the American students had been in the UK for two to three weeks. A large number of students had not been outside the USA before arriving on the British campus and so were adjusting to cultural differences. In one of the classes that these students attended, a register where they wrote their name and the date, illustrated a behavio(u)ral change across the first few weeks. In the first 2 weeks, all the students wrote AmE date, in the third week, 22% were writing BrE and by week 7, 88% were writing BrE. So even without our experimental manipulation, American students were being influenced by the social norm.

Working on this study with SB (an American student) over a period of 8 weeks gave us many opportunities to remark on cultural differences. For instance, we bought (orig. AmE) cookies and drinks as an incentive for these students to take part in the study. I was strictly instructed by SB in the type of cookies and (BrE) crisps/(AmE) chips to buy – they had to be familiar to the students otherwise they would not be interested. We almost had a breakdown in communication when SB saw the (BrE) sell-by date on one of the packs of cookies! If we write the date differently, we also read it differently. We always have to be calculating is it the 7/5 or 5/7? Things like that can make a difference when buying goods or arriving on the right day for a meeting.

Finally, let me describe one finding from our study that is not related to AmE and BrE date signing. In a previous study we found that people were more likely to change from 14th May to 14/5 than from 14/5 to 14th May. You could almost argue that 14/5 is the social norm in the UK. Many people would counter that it depends on the situation in which they are writing the date. Despite these considerations, we can state quite categorically that people do change the way that they write the date dependent on how many other people write it in a certain way. In the study with the American students, SB and I found that they changed from 14/5/09 to 14th May 2009 (from the numerical to the analogical) far more than in my previous study. We call this our ‘stranger in a strange land’ phenomenon. These students were out of their comfort zone and were more likely to copy the majority behavio(u)r to fit in with the group. Or maybe American students are more conformist than British students?
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)