no

I've been teaching a new course in Pragmatics this year, and this past week we ended it with a discussion of this article:

Jefferson, Gail (2002) Is ‘‘no’’ an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-83.
The author was an important name in conversational analysis and an American who lived for years in the Netherlands. In Dutch, it's common to use nee 'no' as an acknowledg(e)ment token, that is, something that you say to indicate that you've heard what your conversational partner has said. A negative token, like nee, would be used to acknowledge a negative statement.

Knowing about the Dutch nee, Jefferson decided to check how no is used as a minimal response in English, but when she started looking at a set of British conversational data, what she found didn't sit well with her own intuitions about how no is used as a conversational support. To find out why, she compared four sets of data: British doctors and patients, British 'civilians' (her term), American doctors and patients, and American 'civilians'.

Jefferson found that British civilians responded to negative statements with negative tokens 86% of the time, whereas American civilians did so only 27% of the time. British doctors did it 37% of the time, and American doctors not at all. American civilians most usually responded to negative statements with positive tokens like uh-huh, yeah (both originally AmE) and mm-hmm. So, American civilians use negative tokens at similar rates to British doctors (the 10 percentage-point difference is not statistically significant), and both of these groups use it far less than in everyday British conversation.

Jefferson next looked at whether British and American speakers use these nos for different things. She found that AmE speakers use no as an affiliative token, but not as just an acknowledg(e)ment token. That is to say, if an American says no in a conversationally supportive way (as opposed to using no more literally to disagree with the previous utterance) in response to someone's negative statement, they mean to show some empathy for the situation the speaker is describing. An affiliative token tells your conversational partner that you have not only heard them, but that you understand where they're coming from (orig. AmE). For instance, if I say I hurt my back and you say Awww, you'd be showing me that you've not only heard me, but that you feel my pain, as it were. Compare that to a simple acknowledg(e)ment token like mm-hmm, which would seem rather cold to say in such a circumstance.

BrE civilians used no as an acknowledg(e)ment token, where AmE civilians would have to use a positive form. To give a flavo(u)r of how this might lead to cross-cultural misinterpretation, here's a made-up example:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist: No...
If this were affliation, one would interpret my no as 'I know what you mean--that Matt is pretty bad about keeping in touch'. That would be the way an AmE speaker would probably use it.

But if it were just acknowledg(e)ment, then all I'd be saying is 'I heard you say that you haven't heard from Matt'. If I meant that, though, as an American, I'd have to say it a different way:
Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist [without lifting her eyes from New Scientist]: Uh-huh.
British me would be able to say no there without tearing myself from my magazine--but American me could not.

In their professional roles, BrE doctors seem to be careful to use no only for affliliation--that is, they don't use it for mere acknowledg(e)ment. It's possible that they do not use the negative form for acknowledg(e)ment because they need to be careful not to sound like they're affiliating when they're not. In Jefferson's data, American doctors don't even use it to affiliate--though there were some differences in the types of doctors in her two corpora, so I'm going to stop short of making any hypotheses about that.

So, I asked my students, what do you think happens when these cultures meet? The British shouldn't have much of a problem in understanding the Americans' affiliative use of no, since they use it affiliatively too. But the Americans aren't used to hearing it used as acknowledg(e)ment, and so should interpret it as affiliation. If that's the case, what will they conclude about the British? One of the students came up with the same perception that I have about what happens. (I'm eager to hear yours in the comments.) It's possible that the American would feel they'd been cut off. Once someone affiliates with you, they're essentially saying 'You don't need to explain this to me because I get it (orig. AmE)'. This whole business reminded me of my troubles with the BrE use of never mind.

To tell the truth, I'd never noticed [on a conscious level] the extra nos, in conversation with BrE speakers. But I recogni{s/z}ed the accuracy of Jefferson's observations as I started to think about it consciously--and I even thought that if I were to have imitated certain English acquaintances then I'd probably have been liberal with the interactional nos. I wonder if anyone out there has had any SbaCL moments courtesy of no. Do let us know!
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to create (intransitive)

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.
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whoa and woah

If there is one arena in which Better Half is not my better, it's spelling. It's not that he's a particularly bad speller, it's just that I like to think of myself as a particularly good one. So, at least a couple of years ago, I rolled my eyes and corrected him when he wrote an interjection meaning 'stop, wait!' as woah! That I can remember correcting BH some years later is indicative of the sadness of my life and my need to always be right, which is pretty hard to be if you're me. I suppose I was reliving 'times I've been right and BH has been wrong' because of another instance of my absolute disability when it comes to accents. I spent some time the other day insisting that a food critic on the television was French, when, in fact, he's Irish. He only dresses French. So, I cling to my 'being right' memories with the tenacity of a starving octopus.

Then I read an article in The Guardian's review section (which I now can't find, so here's a link to an earlier article in the Guardian--by the outgoing poet laureate, no less) that contained a woah. As has been mentioned here before, The Guardian (or The Grauniad) has something of a reputation for bad spelling and typographical errors, so I remarked to myself that BrE writers seem to have a hard time spelling whoa.

Then I was in an English airport and I saw an ad(vert) (I wish I'd taken a photo, but I was too airport-grumpy at the time to think of it--it might've been for Phones4You), that shouted WOAH! WOAH! WOAH! in red and white. At that point, I had to start planning my admission of wrongness to BH.

(I'm sure many halves of long-standing and happy couples are thinking that I did not have to admit that I was wrong. Since BH neither saw the ad(vert) nor remembered the time I corrected him, what was to be gained by interfering with the well-developed roles of She Who Is Right and He Who Must Be Corrected? But, you see, I had to admit I'd been wrong because I have in the past claimed that admitting-when-I'm-wrong is something that I am happy to do, and so in order to prove myself right I have to prove myself wrong--on a regular basis.)

So, my story of whoa (and woah):

The OED lists woah as a variant of woa which is a variant of whoa, which is a variant of the interjection who (not to be confused with the pronoun who--the interjection is pronounced as wo--which is also a variant of all these), which came into the language as a variant of ho! Here are the dates of the OED's quotations for these spellings of the pronunciation /wo/ when it means 'stop!':


who c.1450-1859
wo 1787-1894
woa 1840-1892
woah 1856 (one example--included under the headword woa)
whoa 1843-1898 (but, of course, we know it's still used)
It's interesting that the OED lists woa as a variant of whoa when it has earlier evidence for woa--it implies that whoa is the more standard form. We shouldn't read much into the lack of recent examples of any of these--it looks like nothing has been added to these entries since the first edition.

I don't remember ever seeing the woah spelling (I'd want to pronounce it as two syllables: wo-ah, like Noah) before moving to England, but it's a very popular spelling here. Searching just UK sites, one gets ~170,000 hits for woah and ~255,000 for whoa. Searching some American sites, one gets 33 woahs to 461 whoas on .mil and 8,800 to 39,000 on .edu (the first woahs that came up on the .edu search were quoted from a BBC site, though). Or, if you'd like to see some bar graphs showing US and UK usage of the spellings, try this.

(Can you believe I started this post on the 6th of April? Alas and alack--I wish I had a solid month to do nothing but catch up on this blog.)
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closeout

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.
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redundant

David C wrote this week to ask:

I know the English use 'redundant' where we USns would say 'laid off' but the question came up whether they would use 'redundant' where we would say 'obsolete' in reference to, say, a 5-year old computer.

Let's back up a bit and discuss what David's taken for granted. In AmE a company can lay off its employees but in BrE a company (or a university!) makes its employees redundant. What's a little confusing is that you can be laid off in the UK too, but it means something different. According to this site (among others) a lay-off is expected to be temporary, as opposed to a redundancy in which you really, really lose your job. But this is not the understanding in AmE, where being laid off is the equivalent of BrE redundancy.

In answer to David's question, objects can also be made redundant in BrE--if they've been made worthless, particularly because they've been superseded by something else. Both Better Half and I feel like this is not quite the same thing as obsolete, but we're a bit hard-pressed to explain exactly why. Do others have this intuition?
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collegiality

A British colleague and I were drowning our professional sorrows in a bit of bourbon whisk(e)y at a campus pub yesterday, when an American from another department stopped by our table to discuss the bad news that's affected us. Professor American expressed his dismay at our news and how it had been delivered to us and the campus--that he felt a lack of collegiality in the way that we were treated.

As soon as he went back to his table, my British colleague said "I love that word collegiality. It's really an American thing, isn't it?"

Well, maybe.

If it's not a word that you use much, then Wikipedia is helpful in this case:

Colleagues are those explicitly united in a common purpose and respecting each other's abilities to work toward that purpose. A colleague is an associate in a profession or in a civil or ecclesiastical office.

Thus, the word collegiality can connote respect for another's commitment to the common purpose and ability to work toward it.
Wikipedia also notes that in sociological terms, collegiality is the opposite of bureaucracy.

The word comes from French, and certainly can be found in BrE texts. But in academic life, it certainly is true that it's a word one hears much more on the left side of the pond.
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telling the difference between American and British mothers

Children of North American mothers are over-represented at Grover's (BrE) creche/(AmE) daycare. My theory on this is that the foreigners on campus are more likely to require their child care services, since they're less likely to have relatives living locally to help out and because it's likely that their co-parents will also be academics (since, as newcomers to the country, more of our social life--in the absence of family, school friends, etc--is probably to be found at work). The alternative is to believe it's because we're more pushy than British parents in making sure that our children get to the top of the waiting list. I'm discounting that hypothesis due to evidence that my native-British counterparts are well-practiced in pushiness.

I've mentioned before that I can be fairly inattentive to accents. But I have a sure-fire way of telling which parents are British and which ones North American, which I'll share with you just in case you ever need to sort people by nationality at a playground. First, wait the 5 seconds or so it'll take before the parent is impressed by (or at least wants to give positive feedback about) something the child has done. Say, quacking like a duck or successfully getting from standing position to sitting position without crying or drawing blood. (These work in the 12-to-14-month-old set, at least.) Then listen:
  • The British parent will say Well done!
  • The American parent will say Good job!
I find myself saying both now, because I've become hyperaware that Good job sounds American. We're saying it a lot these days, as Grover took her first steps on Sunday. She seems to have well and truly caught up with the children her age who gestated properly. Hurrah!
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china marker/chinagraph

Sometimes I find myself censoring myself before I use a word just because I have a feeling that it might be an Americanism. (I know I've blogged about this feeling before--but I can't find where!) The thing is, I'm not entirely sure why I get that feeling about words I've never used (nor heard the equivalents of) in the UK before. Nevertheless, it's pretty reliable. And thus it was when I went into a stationer's and said:
I'm not sure if this is what you call them, but I'm looking for what I would call a (AmE) china marker.
I left it to my accent to tell the (AmE) sales clerk/(BrE) shop assistant why I might call it something different than they would. And this person surmised that I was talking about a BrE chinagraph (pencil). (These things are also called grease pencils in AmE.)


Unfortunately, this particular shop, part of a chain, had no such things, no matter what they called them, and they sent me off to the local stationer/art supply shop. By the time I got there, of course, I had forgotten the word chinagraph and so I repeated my question in the same way...only to be sent to another counter, only to be told that they were out of chinagraphs. What's a girl (who wants to write on her glass storage jars, as pictured here) to do?

Thinking a bit more about why I was so sure that the British would not say china marker, I decided it was probably because it's so common for stationery/office supplies to have different names in AmE and BrE. Among the more common of these:

AmE

BrE
ballpoint (pen)
[also the generic term in BrE]


Biro
[old proprietary name]
paper cutter


guillotine
(blackboard) eraser


duster
(pencil) eraser


rubber
thumb tacks


drawing pins
bulletin board


notice board

Then again, the majority of office supplies in any office supply catalog(ue) do have the same names in both countries. So...why have such a strong feeling that china marker would not be the local word? My only remaining hypothesis is that I had heard chinagraph at some point, but the memory only exists at some subconscious level.
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gutted

This mail from American Susanna had me chuckling:

I wanted to tell you my experience with the term gutted. I've always associated it with "eviscerated", especially when applied to a human being. When applied to a document or law or something of that nature, to me it means "emptied of its important features". If referring to things like a burned house, it means destroyed so that nothing remains but the outer shell.

Last year I took to reading the online version of a newspaper in Scotland; I can't remember which one now but I was in the midst of a fascination with the Orkneys so it was probably in that vicinity. In the headline about a break-in and theft at a home, the newspaper said the residents were "gutted". Well! That seemed quite callous to me, to put a word that harsh in the headline. I assumed, you see, that the residents had been killed and eviscerated. So I wrote a note to the editor saying I thought it was pretty bad form.

Imagine my surprise to receive an email from a reader of the newspaper letting me know that the newspaper editor had published my email with a laughing note about the differences in American vs British English! Because, as you know, gutted in British English means some variation of "highly distressed".

I will tread very lightly when emailing non-American newspapers!
A good lesson for all of us!

To give a little more info about BrE gutted--it's a relatively recent, informal (some would say 'slang') term. It was added to the OED in its 1993 edition, with quotations going back only to 1984 (but, of course, it could be much older in speech). Their senses for it are: 'bitterly disappointed; devastated, shattered; utterly fed up'. The last of these doesn't ring true for me--I'd usually interpret it as 'devastated'--that is, a feeling as if you've been emptied out. Of course, it's used for much lesser things as well. Google "I'm gutted" and you'll get lots of sport-related exaggeration.
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scrimmage and scrummage

A while ago, I mentioned the (BrE) rugby term scrum and compared it to the AmE (regional) term dogpile. Chris E wrote today to ask a related question--which jumps to the head of the question queue because it's so simple to answer. Chris wrote:
If you are both a rugby and American football football fan, you will notice many obvious similarities between the two. I played rugby at school in England in the 70s and became familiar with the term scrummage, shortened to scrum in most usage nowadays. In the US, I have understood the word scrimmage to mean at least two things - 1. a term generic to many, if not all sports, meaning a practice game (a friendly in BrEng) 2. a specific American football term with which I'm not familiar.
Can you comment on the root or roots of these? I feel confident that they share a common heritage, but I don't know for sure.
It's simple to answer because the OED does all the work for me. (I can't claim to understand American football and am completely clueless about rugby.) In the OED, scrimmage and scrummage are treated as variations on the same word, and the etymology is given as:

[Altered form of SCRIMISH n., the ending being associated with -AGE suffix. Cf. the parallel skirmage, obs. var. of SKIRMISH n.

This is now used primarily as a sporting term. The older i-form is common in all senses, and has become predominant in American Football, whilst the u-form is preferred in Rugby Football.]

So, yes, they share a common origin. But the fun thing (for me, tireless defender of Englishes*) to notice is that we (again!) have a case of British people messing around with the language and Americans staying true to the original form--contrary to the popular stereotypes. Not that messing around with English is a bad thing, of course. After all, we wouldn't have poetry without some messing around.

* Actually, that's a lie. I'm a very tired defender of Englishes. The tiredness has little to do with the defending, though.
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windows

How to choose among the dozens and dozens of unfulfilled requests? I just clicked blindly in my inbox and found American ex-pat Liz being driven crazy/mad (in 2007!) by her British colleagues spelling window cill rather than sill. Liz works in architecture, so perhaps the UK specialists use cill more than sill, but I've found little evidence of it elsewhere as a preferred spelling. The OED has no entry for cill--and just mentions it as a historical/alternative spelling of sill, but the Oxford-published A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture does list cill first. Searching UK websites, hits for window sill outnumber window cill by more than three to one. So, while one sees cill more often in BrE than in AmE (where, like Liz, I've never seen it), it seems to be a minority spelling. (Historically, it's been spelled/spelt sell and cell too. The earliest use for the 'window-part' sense in the OED is from 1428 and has the spelling sill.)

Since we're discussing windows, let's talk (BrE) double-glazing--i.e. having two panes of glass in a window in order to reduce noise and loss of heat. The AmE equivalent would be double-paned windows, but the AmE term is much less commonly heard term than its BrE equivalent since double-glazed/paned windows don't offer the same level of home improvement in the US as in the UK. I've never lived in a house in the US (I've lost count of how many) that didn't have windows that are structured to have two layers, and I've never lived in a house in the UK (I've lived in four) that had more than one layer of glass in a very (BrE) draughty/(AmE) drafty frame. But this is not to say that most American houses have double-paned/glazed windows--far from it. Instead, they have a window frame with two tracks, with a window permanently in the inner track and the option of a mesh (AmE and AusE) screen or a storm window (i.e. of glass or similar material) for the outer track. In the part of the country I'm from, where it's very, very cold in winter and very, very hot in summer, a spring ritual is to (AmE or BrE) swap/(BrE) swop the storm windows for screens, with a predictable reversal of ritual in the fall/autumn.

Incidentally, when I'm asked what (besides people) I miss about the US, window screens are in the top three. One cannot enjoy a breezy warm evening in England without sharing it with every moth, wasp and mosquito in the neighbo(u)rhood. (The other two in the top three, since I expect you'll ask, are electrical outlets in bathrooms and butter wrappers that are marked with measurements, for easy baking. Electrical outlets are definitely number one--the other two change position with the seasons.)

And as long as we're discussing materials that you can look through, the plastic stuff is called perspex (or Perspex) in BrE and plexiglass (or Plexiglas--or some other combination of capitalization and esses) in AmE. Both of these are originally proprietary names--and another AmE proprietary name for this kind of stuff is Lucite. (Though I'd use Lucite when it's a thicker, less flexible piece--such as in a paperweight or the like.)
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never

John Wells sent me a really concise request (well, I'm reading the request into it):
AmE I should have never done it = BrE I should never have done it
- I don't think you've discussed this one, have you?
No, I've not/I haven't discussed it, but John Algeo has in his book British or American English?
Adverbs of frequency (generally, never, usually), like those of probability, tend to occur in medial position, after the first auxiliary, if there is one. However, with these also American has a higher tolerance for placement before the first auxiliary than does British: She usually is at work from nine to five versus She is usually at work from nine to five.
Concise response!

I'd feel a bit bad about such a short post, though, so here's another never fact. Algeo lists a "distinctively British" sense of never: 'not by any means'. He gives an example from a David Lodge novel (I hear the protagonist of the latest is a linguist...): "You're never Vic Wilcox's shadow?"

A little snooping on the internet brings up an abstract for a 2008 paper by David Willis (or by Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas and David Willis) that comments a bit more on this:

There are a number of contexts in Present-Day English where never marks sentential negation rather than negation quantified over time:

(1) I never stole your wallet this morning.
(2) a. You’re never her mother. b. That’s never a penalty.
...
In (1), unavailable in standard English but widespread in nonstandard varieties of British English, never conveys pure, but emphatic, negation in the past. In (2), possible even for many speakers who reject (1), it conveys a pragmatic meaning beyond pure negation: (2a) can be paraphrased as ‘There is no reasoning by which I can reach the conclusion that you are her mother.’ (quantification over reasons rather than time). In such cases, an inference of surprise, as in (2a), or disbelief, as in (2b), may be made.

We've already looked at special BrE use of never mind, so click the link to see more on that.

So there you go. A post with no self-revelatory anecdotes or gratuitous pictures of baby and with perhaps the lowest proportion of my own words ever! I always tell my students that if they quote their sources rather than paraphrasing in their own words (and citing the source, of course!), then they've missed out on the opportunity to demonstrate to me that they actually understood what they quoted. Oh well/never mind, I hope you'll excuse me from that demonstration--it's time for bed. And I may have fit in an anecdote or self-revelation after all.
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Happy New Year

It's been a while... but here I am to wish you Happy New Year!
Link
But how do you say it? Biochemist writes to ask:
Why do Americans put the emphasis on New - as in: 'enjoy the NOO year holiday' or 'What are you doing at Nooyers?'
Brits refer to the New Year evenly emphasised: 'I'll see you next term, in the new year....' 'Did you have a good time at Christmas and New Year?' and so on.
The 'noo' versus 'new' issue is one that I've discussed before, but the stress difference took me a while to appreciate. I said it to myself a few times and didn't hear the difference Biochemist described. Coming back to it a half-day later, I did hear the difference in my own speech--but it does underscore the point that I'm losing it, dialectally speaking.

At any rate, Biochemist asks why, and of course, the answer is: Americans say it their way because it's what they hear from other Americans, and the British say it that way because it's what they hear from other Brits. One might hope that it's part of a general rule for how to pronounce compound nouns and that the rule differs in the US and the UK, but to my knowledge no one's discovered such a rule. (Some of you may be wondering why I keep calling New Year a compound when it's two words. It may be two words in spelling, but we use it as one word--and so it is pronounced with compound stress of some sort, rather than in the way that we would pronounce new year as a phrase made of adjective + noun, in which case the stress would usually be on the noun.) Here's a bit from the abstract for a research project headed by Sabine Arndt-Lappe and Ingo Plag at Universität Siegen:
It is generally assumed that compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. bláckboard, wátchmaker). However, there is a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. apricot crúmble, Penny Láne, Tory léader) that is unaccounted for in the literature. [...] It turned out that, although making correct predictions for parts of the data, none of the structural and semantic mechanisms proposed in the literature works in a categorical fashion, and that probabilistic and analogical models are more successful in their predictions than traditional rule-based ones.
In other words, English compound stress is irregular. And where there are irregularities (or really complex regularities with different options for applying them), there's the opportunity for cross-Atlantic variability. You could say here that AmE uses the more 'typical' compound stress and BrE is doing something a little funny--if it is your wont to point out ways in which AmE makes more 'sense'. While it's probably wrong to say that one language variety makes more sense than another, it's an awful lot of fun to make that claim when you're an American living in the UK, dealing with condescension about your language on a regular basis. In any case, perhaps Arndt-Lappe and Plag or others will find something to answer Biochemist's question, but it's going to take some digging. Good luck to them! (And thanks to my colleague, Herr Dr Phonologist, for pointing me in the direction of their work.)

This wasn't my first New Year query--the last one has been sitting in my inbox since two New Years ago. It came from Justin, who's probably given up looking for answers to his questions on my blog:
what are Americans meaning when they say "Happy New Year's"? (I'm guessing at the apostrophe.) Is this "Happy New Year's Day" or is there something more interesting going on here?
First, we have to note that Happy New Year is a common expression in AmE--the possessive variation is not the only AmE version. Happy New Year's --with or without an apostrophe-- gets 9.7m Google hits, as opposed to 90.7 for Happy New Year. Of those with the 's, 97,000 are Happy New Year's Day, 678,000 are Happy New Year's Eve. My intuition is that Happy New Year's can be used to mean either of these--or both simultaneously. In other words, we might be using it in order to be vague about which bit of the holiday we're wishing you well for, since it spans two days--or, at least, an evening and a day. Of course, the version without the 's seems to wish people well for the year to follow, not just the holiday itself.

Thanks for coming back to read after my month-plus holiday from blogging. It seems perverse to call it a holiday since it was full of hard labo(u)r--a different kind from last year's. (Not that I went through a hard labo(u)r last year...but this time I was absent for the birth of a book, rather than a baby.) My schedule continues to be relentless, with deadlines smacking me in the face (I wish that they'd whoosh by me like they did for Douglas Adams, but mine are set on a collision course) and a one-year-old whose remaining moments of babydom I am savo(u)ring. So, I'll continue to aim, as I did last year, for a post a week (I may fail) and ask for your patience in waiting for me to respond to your e-mails. Happy New Year!

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Words of the Year 2008

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:

vet (verb, transitive)

meaning:
3. To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness. (OED)

as in:
It raises the singular question of when and how well the Senator's campaign vetted the woman he named to be his running mate. (commenter on NewsTrust, 2 September 2008)
"Wait, wait!" you say. "How can you count that as BrE to AmE? It was right here in my AmE dictionary all along!" Oh, it was, but wasn't it interesting for those of us who live in the UK to see the big deal that was made of this word in the American blogosphere and press--like this article on Slate and this one by the Word Detective. In fact, it was number 2 on Merriam-Webster's top ten words of the year and has provoked a backlash from people who became tired of and even hate the word. Thus, it qualifies as a WotY in that it 'came into its own' in AmE this year.

The Slate article tells us that:
Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s [...] Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945 but only in the context of a quote from "The Anatomy of Courage," a newly published study on the psychological effects of war by the Briton Lord Moran: "A young subaltern with 'dark eyes under long lashes, a pink and white complexion' was sent to Moran for 'vetting.' " The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959 (in an article on picking a new symphony director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic), pops up once in the 1960s, and then several times in the 1980s.
But the word continues to be put in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas of the "scare quote" variety (for instance here and here), indicating that the verb is still considered a bit "foreign". (I'm not claiming here that the writers knew that vet is BrE, just that they don't feel that the word is at-home in their dialect.)

So, congratulations vet! And president-elect Obama!

Onwards and overwards to the SbaCL American-English-to-British-English Word of the Year. It's:
meh

That was rather anticlimatic, wasn't it? Let me try to spruce it up.

Ta-da! It's meh!

Maybe I should stop trying so hard. Meh is an interjection expressing indifference. While there was some debate among readers as to whether it qualifies as AmE-to-BrE, since it's most at home in a cyberspace that doesn't respect dialectal isoglosses, there's a widespread perception that it was populari{s/z}ed by that very American institution, The Simpsons. It's not the kind of word that British grandmothers are going about using (or American grandmothers, for that matter), but it made a splash recently when the Collins dictionary people announced that it would be included in their next edition, and their PR people ensured that the newspapers took up the story. I've since noticed my students using it, particularly on Facebook--one suspects that all the press attention has spread meh's popularity--or at least has made me more sensitive to it.

So, hurrah for meh and meh to hurrah!

Thanks to all who took the time to nominate a word. (Unlike last year, I've actually selected a nominated word. I'm softening up to you people.) Happy Word of the Year, and happy holidays!
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the dreaded lurgi

I have the lurgi. Better Half has the lurgi. Grover is recovering from the lurgi.

Lurgi, the lurgi or the dreaded lurgi (also sometimes spelt lurgy) rhymes with Fergie and is a lovely informal BrE word with comedic (and possibly dialectal) origins that can now refer to an annoying (but not serious) illness that hangs around and makes one feel miserable. World Wide Words does a lovely job of recounting its history. Wiktionary has more on its meanings. In addition to meaning 'flu-like symptoms' it has a playground use that is somewhat equivalent to AmE cooties, which you can learn more about here or in the following video:


But that's all from me now, 'cause I've got the lurgi.
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Down('s) syndrome

Another quick post as I desperately try to meet deadlines...

In September Virtual Linguist wrote about 'How Down's syndrome got its name' (from Dr John Langdon Down, as it happens). I responded in her comments, saying that I'd been taught that the "correct" name is Down syndrome. It turns out that this is a BrE-AmE difference that I hadn't known about. As VL replied:
In the book 'Dr John Langdon Down and Normansfield' by O Conor Ward MD, Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics at University College, Dublin [...], there is this sentence: 'From 1992 the alternative term Down syndrome was adopted in the United States'.
Actually, the date should be 1974, according to several sources, including the site Down Syndrome: Health Issues by Len Leshin, MD:
Many medical conditions and diseases have been named after a person; this type of name is called an eponym. There has been a long-standing debate in the scientific community over whether or not to add the possessive form to the names of eponyms. For quite a long time, there was no established rule as to which to use, but general usage decided which form is acceptable. So you saw both possessive and non-possessive names in use.

In 1974, a conference at the US National Institute of Health attempted to make a standard set of rules regarding the naming of diseases and conditions. This report, printed in the journal Lancet, stated: "The possessive form of an eponym should be discontinued, since the author neither had nor owned the disorder."(Lancet 1974, i:798) Since that time, the name has traditionally been called "Down syndrome" in North America (note that "syndrome" isn't capitalized). However, the change has taken longer to occur in Great Britain and other parts of Europe, for reasons that aren't quite clear to me.

One can see the adoption of Down syndrome in progress by looking at bibliographies on the topic, like this one, in which Down syndrome starts to appear in 1983. The term used in the names of conferences sponsored by National Down Syndrome Congress (US) shift from Down's to Down in 1978. (The NDSC was founded in 1973 under a different name, but their online history doesn't include the original name.)

Interestingly, though, the 'not using 's in medical eponyms' rule doesn't seem to have had as much of an impact for other conditions. Almost no one says Crohn disease and I don't recall ever hearing Alzheimer disease (although it's more frequent on the web than Crohn disease).

The "American version" of the term does appear occasionally in the UK. For example, the Portsmouth Down's Syndrome Trust morphed into Down Syndrome Educational Trust in 1997 (and changed its name to Down Syndrome Education International in 2008). But in the main, UK organi{s/z}ations use Down's. While the American medical establishment and people involved with the syndrome tend to use Down, Down's is certainly used a lot by American laypeople too.
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Words of the Year 2008 - nominations

Word of the Year season has begun, with bloggers calling for Word of the Year nominations and publishers showing little faith in the word-generating power of December. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim. I'd like your nominations for the main categories. The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2008, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness—in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. So click away for 2007's nominations and results and 2006's nominations and results.

Fire away! Please!
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some onomatopoeia

The requests for treatment of various topics are still coming in much faster than I can deal with them. So here's one that goes back almost a year. Roxana wrote to say:
I teach English in Italy, and the books we use come from the UK. The other day I was a bit surprised to read a sentence in "English Files" that went like this: "Do you hoot if the driver in front of you is slow?" (not "toot") I would have said "honk".
Have you come across this?
Yes, cars in the UK hoot (among other sounds) and in the US they honk (among other sounds), and those are but a couple of examples of the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia (words whose sounds imitate what they refer to). "The arbitrariness of onomatopoeia?" I hear some of you thinking. "Surely not!" But I reply "Surely, surely."

Onomatopoeia is always raised by some student when I teach the notion of 'the arbitrariness of the sign'--i.e. the notion that there is no causal connection between the form of a sign (e.g. a word) and its meaning. For example, it's just a social convention that the word for that thing in the middle of your face is nose. You had to learn to associate that combination of sounds with that body part because there's no other way to know that those sounds symboli{s/z}e that thing. And people who speak Zulu had to learn to match a different set of sounds to that thing because there's nothing in nature forcing us to use those sounds for that thing.

But surely, my student reasons, onomatopoeia does involve a natural relation between meaning and form (sound). We call the sound of a gun bang because guns go bang and so forth. Except, of course, that they don't. That's the way that the sound is represented in English, but in French it's pan (with the 'n' pronounced as nasali{s/z}ation on the vowel). And in Icelandic, apparently, it's búmm. While onomatopoeia is iconic, it still relies on the particular sounds that belong to one's language and it relies on some conventionali{s/z}ation. In English, our guns go bang and our bombs go boom because that's what we've learned from other English speakers, not just because that's what guns and bombs sound like. So there's some room for variation among languages, and even within languages, on onomatopoetic matters.

So it is with car horns. In both BrE and AmE, one might imitate the sound as beep, but (especially as verbs for making the sound) BrE likes hoot, which Americans reserve for owls, and toot too, and AmE likes honk (which can also be used for goose noises--OED marks this as 'orig. N. Amer.').

Here I must mention an absolutely charming website, bzzzpeek, on which children from around the world say the sounds of animals and vehicles. If you don't believe me on UK/US differences in onomatopoeia, check with the children. (The UK is the first country on each page, the US is the last--so it takes some clicking to get to.)

Here is a selection of onomatopoeia that I've come across in day-to-day existence. It's mostly come to the fore as Better Half and I clash in our sound effects for the song "Grover Murphy had a farm" (also "Grover Murphy had a bath", "Grover Murphy had some lunch" and anything else I can think to do sound effects for--but of course we use her real first and second name, which, as luck--or possibly careful onomastic planning--would have it, is metrically identical to "Grover Murphy" and "Old MacDonald").

donkeys: in AmE they say hee-haw, but in BrE eeyore--which is basically pronounced like hee-haw without the aitches (the penny drops for many Pooh fans--see the comments here)

frogs: the verb is to croak in both dialects, but in AmE (originally and chiefly, says OED) they say ribbit. This may have made it across the ocean now--Better Half was surprised to learn it's originally AmE, but the British bzzzpeek child has frogs saying croak croak.

emergency vehicles: in BrE children (or adults talking to children) sometimes call these nee-naws after the sound they make, which (traditionally) in Britain is a two-tone sound that's different from the sirens of the US (which are sometimes represented as woo-woo--but I've never heard that used as a noun to represent the vehicles, like nee-naw is). This one is not a case of the dialects representing the same sounds differently, but of having different sounds to represent. One might make the argument that hoot and honk are the same sort of thing--the British drive little cars that go hoot and Americans drive big ones that go honk. Except that the OED has BrE hoots and AmE honks back in the early 20th century, when the size of the cars would have been about the same in the two countries.

trains: we've already discussed the AmE origin of choo-choo and the BrE alternative puff-puff, which seems to be a bit old-fashioned now. BH doesn't use puff-puff, but does use (BrE) puffer train as an equivalent to (AmE) choo-choo train. Grover and I take the train to work/crèche, and as we wait for it, I find myself saying "Here comes the choo-choo train" then feeling ridiculous for doing so, since the train makes a kind of electric hum rather than anything 'puffy' or 'choo-choo-y'.

The thing that's struck me in thinking and talking to BrE speakers about these onomatopoetic items is that the American ones are mostly well-known here, but few people seem to reali{s/z}e that they were originally AmE. Considering how much disdain is felt for some AmE words in BrE, it's interesting that this section of the vocabulary seems somewhat resistant to that kind of prejudice. Or have I just missed it? And have I missed more onomatopoetic differences?
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stabilizers / training wheels

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

Flatlander wrote to ask:
I was watching “Supernanny” the other day (it’s voyeurism, I know) and she made reference to removing the “stabilizers” from a child’s bicycle, meaning the “training wheels”. Is this a common BrE term or just a one-off?
It's not a one-off--one often hears stabilizers (and often reads stabilisers) for these things in BrE. Looking it up on the web, I've also found it on American sites, but particularly where training wheels would not be an appropriate term--for example wheels for balance-impaired adult cyclists for whom training wheels would be a misnomer.

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

Diversity bike wobbles as the training wheels come off

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

Steve Jones wrote to ask me a question--which was kind of confusing, as I know three Steve Joneses. Turns out he's none of them, but he still has a good point:

From an off topic post on a practice US nationality test on one of the web's leading technology sites is this statement.

-What condiment applies to French-fried potatoes?
-Vinegar... no, mayonnaise... no wait, it's that red stuff.

No credit for not being able to name the red stuff. Negative points for even thinking of the words vinegar or mayonnaise.

Now even in the sixty comments nobody mentioned salt and pepper which is what I would use. Is there a difference in the meaning of the word condiment between British and American English?
Better Half and I have visited this particular transatlantic chasm. I'm struggling to remember the details, but it involved him claiming to have put out condiments on the table, and me saying something like "You can't call it condiments when there's only a jar of mustard there", and him retorting that there was mustard and salt and pepper. At which point we began a particularly pointless argument about whether salt and pepper can be called condiments. It's at these points in a mixed marriage at which a spouse like me can do one of two things:
  1. Attribute his use of the word to his adorable Englishness.
  2. Assume he's a culinary cretin who just doesn't know the proper meaning of the word.
Then along comes Steve to save BH from fate (2). BH didn't even know that he has such a guardian angel.

To me, salt and pepper are seasonings but not condiments, and condiments are things that are usually wet and require a recipe to make. Let's compare some BrE and AmE dictionaries to see whether they differ on this point, starting with the British:
a substance such as salt, mustard, or pickle that is used to add flavour to food.
(Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd edn)

Seasoning added to flavour foods, such as salt, or herbs and spices such as mustard, ginger, curry, pepper, etc. ...
(Dictionary of Food and Nutrition, Oxford University Press)

any seasoning for food, such as salt, pepper, sauces
(Collins on-line)
All of the British sources I checked explicitly mention salt and often pepper. And the American?
A substance, such as a relish, vinegar, or spice, used to flavor or complement food.
(American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edn)

something used to enhance the flavor of food ; especially : a pungent seasoning
(Merriam-Webster on-line)
While the AmE definitions could apply to salt and pepper, neither dictionary mentions them.

Searching online for the phrase "salt, pepper and condiments", I got 1,550 hits. Searching UK sites only (using Google.co.uk), there were four. So, it is looking like the urge to separate salt and pepper from condiments is not a particularly British urge.

Why is it this way? I don't know. I can't think of any seasoning-related behavio(u)r that would make salt/pepper more or less prominent in any group's collective mind. In fact, the only salt/pepper cross-cultural difference that I can think of has to do with the number of holes in the containers in which they're served. In the US, a (AmE) salt shaker has several holes, whereas the shaker for ground pepper has fewer holes. In the UK (and elsewhere) a salt-cellar (a term also found in AmE, but not as frequently; see the comments for corrections re this term) has one biggish hole and the (BrE) pepperpot has several smaller holes. Thus, those visiting one country from the other almost invariably put the wrong condiment/seasoning on their food on the first try. But in both countries, salt and pepper are expected to be found on a table and are provided on restaurant/cafe tables--except for those restaurants in which the waiter presents a huge pepper-dispensing phallus, generally after you've had the first bites of your food and when you're in the throes of a really interesting conversation, troubling you to ask "Fresh Ground Black Pepper, Miss?" (you can hear the capital letters there). Obviously, we mere consumers are not to be trusted with the Pepper God fetish. But that happens in both countries too.

There's a strange disagreement between the British and American dictionaries on the etymology. While Collins and Oxford give the Latin condire as meaning 'to pickle', AHD and M-W give it as 'to season'. You'd think it'd be the other way (a)round, given the interpretations of condiment in the two countries.
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Abbr.

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