Separated by a Common Language

Tibs wrote to me in October 2020:

     A few years ago, Americans started adding “of” in places it didn’t occur before. It gradually spread into books, and across the atlantic to here as well.  

I don’t have an exact timing - less than 10 years?  

I find it hard to remember examples, because it’s become part of the scenery, but it’s always a case where leaving out the “of” leaves the meaning identical  

For instance: not that big [of] a deal ... as ordinary [of] a childhood as possible (this one from The Boys on Netflix)

My apologies, Tibs, for making you wait so long. Here we go!

What is it?

When did people start saying it? And which people?

Harold Allen named The Big of Syndrome in the mid–late 1980s (he had died in 1988 before his [AmE linguist-speak] squib was published in American Speech). Allen had noticed expressions like this big of a crowd and that nice of a day ("an innovating syntactic aberration") in the Minnesota speech around him, and urged linguists to study it further. Linda Rapp took up the call and published another short article in 1991. 

Rapp found several examples from 1943 in Harold Wentworth's 1944 American Dialect Dictionary. Wentworth's examples seem to be from West Virginia and central Florida. Another early-ish example (1962) comes from The Andy Griffith Show, which takes place in a (fictional) small town in North Carolina. So those seem like hints that it might have come from the inland southeast. 

But since, unlike Rapp, I'm working in the Age of Linguistic Corpora, I've been able to find some earlier examples. These are from the Movie Corpus.

1932

US/CA

The Death Kiss

If I'm any good of a guesser, he ought to be here by now.

1939

US/CA

The Little Princess

a cup of tea? - Oh no thank you. We're in too big of a hurry. Oh, I see.

1942

TV/MOV

Lure of the Surf

All right. Here. (Miles) I really think it's not that big of a deal.

I had a quick look for the screenwriters' birthplaces—The Death Kiss = Alabama and Hungary and The Little Princess = California and Wisconsin. No one will admit to writing Lure of the Surf (which was apparently mocked for promoting sea fishing while sensible people were worried about U-boats), but the 'self-narrator' was from the Bronx. So, only one of those writers fits with the inland-southeast origin story. All of this is pointing to it being widespread in spoken American English even earlier. If people were saying it in (orig. AmE) movies without comment in the 1930s, it must have felt at least somewhat natural by then. 

Still, before the 1980s, the corpus examples are few and far between. Allen wrote about the "syndrome" just as this pattern was finding real purchase in published English as well as spoken, with that big of a deal leading the way:
     Tibs thought he'd only heard the pattern in the past decade. That could be due to Recency Illusion, or it could be that people in Britain just didn't hear it (or read it) much until the internet age. Sticking with big and deal (because the numbers are easiest to see), we can see it really taking off in the 2000s in published and performed American English. (Sorry, the text in these screenshots is not very clear, but know that the darker the blue, the more typical of a decade the phrase is. We can see big of a deal strongly associated with the 2000s, and much more so the 2010s. Neither of these corpora go into the 2020s.)

big of a deal in COCA

big of a deal in The Movie Corpus

Just to underscore the Americanness of the expression: at the right end of the Movie Corpus screenshot, it shows that 145 of the examples came from a North American film. Only 4 came from British or Irish films. 

Is it British yet?

The of has been coming to Britain, as Tibs noted. The table below shows how often big of a deal/difference occur per million words in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (collected in 2012–13) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-now). In the news corpus, the BrE rate is 4 times lower than the AmE rate for each expression. The news data has a lot fewer of these expressions, presumably because the corpus has more professionally composed and edited text. 

And how is the old version doing?

Other SbaCL posts about of

References

I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...

Mike C from Shropshire asks:

Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. …  Any thoughts?

Pleading and plea-ing

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is fairly particular to much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:

• He pled guilty   = real but prescriptively frowned-upon 
• She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
• He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
• ?? She pled for their forgiveness.  = unnatural-sounding much less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon

As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:

Because of this,  I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.

The British history of pled

Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!

The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:

pled guilty in Hansard

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)

The American history of pled

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants.  But.

In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).

On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.

At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on. 

Pled guilty in speech

I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.) 

The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:

• pled guilty:  356 
• pleaded guilty: 295 

I can look at these in films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA.  Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:

 

	UK	USA
pleaded guilty	.02	.02
pled guilty	—	.07

While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.

Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?

It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.

At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile. Here's more from the up-to-yesterday News on the Web corpus, where pleaded guilty outnumbers pled guilty nearly 40-fold. 

How many of those are Scottish? Well, quite a few, but it would be a lot of work to sort out both 'is this in a Scottish news site' and 'if it's not on a Scottish news site, is it talking about something or quoting someone Scottish?'.  But I did take a sample of 100 and did a quick (more BrE) reckoning of what was what:

• 53 were from Scotland
• 30 were from either English local news or UK national news 
• 10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
• 1 Northern Irish
• 1 Wales
• 5 ?

I'd take the 30 English/UK national with a grain/pinch of salt because I didn't check whether they were about Scottish legal cases. 

Is pled going up in the UK part of the news corpus: yes, but so is pleaded guilty—so it looks like there are just more legal cases in the news 

pled guilty in NOW-GB

pleaded guilty in NOW-GB

Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland.  (There was only one BBC hit in my NOW sample of 100.)

I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 (Scotland) and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 (Scotland) that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled). 

.

When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flat in an attempt to acculturate myself. I can't remember if it was on an ad(vert) or on an early series of The Naked Chef, but I clearly remember the sentence:

            Just bung it under the grill!

I already knew grill (=AmE broiler) from my time in South Africa. It was bung (meaning something like 'put forcibly, carelessly') that struck me. It seemed such an unattractive word, and yet it was being used about some food that was supposed to be wonderful after the bunging. Was this telling me something about British attitudes to food and cooking? Was it supposed to make the dish-making seem so sloppy anyone could do it? The questions clearly stuck in my mind, because the phrase has stayed with me for 25 years.

Bung was the first thing to come to mind when Maryellen Macdonald wrote to me:

You have a long post about cooking word differences, but I don’t think it contains a discussion of “add” vs. “tip”. US recipes say things like “add the carrots” to the pan, whereas UK recipes say “tip in the carrots”.  My husband, the better cook in the household, asked me, “What do they mean tip the carrots? They’re cut up!” Hmm, maybe this little observation-ette isn’t quite sufficient for a post, but, perhaps you can use it somewhere.

I'm not sure which cooking-word difference post she was thinking of, since there are LOTS of them. But it made me think about "recipe verbs". Words like bung and tip are not necessarily cooking words—you can bung or tip a lot of things. But they are the kinds of words one finds in recipes or cooking programmes/shows. 

I started asking my friends for other recipe-verb differences they had noticed. One friend (thanks, David!) pointed me to this parody cooking series, Posh Nosh, in which Richard E. Grant and Arabella Weir are minor aristocracy with an upscale restaurant brand. This particular nine-minute episode includes many great (fake) cooking verbs, instructing you to interrogate (clean?) then later to thrill open your mussels, to pillage some bones and to "gently gush [some AmE broth/BrE stock] until it completely obsesses the rice."

My friends weren't great at coming up with verb differences. (Several nouns were suggested.) Thank you to Ben, Björn, David, Jason, Michèle, Wendi for their suggestions. To complement these, I ended up doing an Advanced Search in the Oxford English Dictionary for region-marked cooking verbs. This post then got stupidly long and AmE biased; the OED is not good at marking words that are general to British English but not to North American. 

For the following, I am marking things as AmE or BrE if either the OED or corpus results fairly firmly put the verb on one side of the Atlantic or the other. But you might know some of the "the other country's" words, especially if you ingest a lot of recipes and cooking programmes/shows. These things have been moving rapidly with mass media.

Some actual cooking verbs

• AmE broil v BrE grill is (part of) the topic one of my first blog posts.  Also: 
• AmE charbroil = cook over charcoal (not very frequent, more common in the modifier form charbroiled)
• AmE panbroil = cook [meat/fish] in pan with very little fat 
  
  
• AmE grill v BrE toast comes up in a long post about cheese sandwiches (BrE toasties)
  
  
• AmE grill v BrE barbecue comes up in a post from the 4th of July
  
  
• orig. AmE nuke & zap: (informal) to microwave
  
  
• orig. AmE pot-roast: to slow-cook meat (esp. beef) in a covered pot/dish
  
  
• orig. AmE stir-fry (but this has been in BrE for most of your lifetimes)
  
  
• AmE plank: From OED: "Originally and chiefly North American. To prepare (meat, fish, etc.) by cooking it on a board over an open fire; (in later use) to cook on a board in an oven"
  
  
• AmE shirr:  to poach (e.g. an egg) in cream rather than water. (I knew the word, but not what it meant!)
  
  
• orig. AmE flip: Not really a recipe verb, but...from the OED:
  

transitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. To cook (items of food) by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle. Now typically with the implication that the subject has a job in a fast-food restaurant (chiefly in to flip burgers).

Some verbs that are often used to modify food words

• roast v roasted (of potatoes, chickens, etc.)—that post also mentions corn/corned beef, which has another post. 
  
  
• skim v skimmed (of milk)
  
  
• minced/ground
  
  
• mashed & smashed:  I've written about mashed potato(es), which BrE can call just mash (now we're back into nouns). A related AmE verbal adjective is smashed. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (2013), North Americans have the collocation smashed potato(es); there are none in the British data. The distinction between mashed and smashed is that a smashed potato is less thoroughly mashed—it will still have some (orig. AmE) chunks of potato in it—and may well include the potato skins. 
  
  These days, you definitely see smashed on BrE menus—sometimes in front of potato but much more often in front of avocado. This Google ngrams graph shows that smashed avocado (blue line) surpassed mashed avocado (green line) in UK books around 2019, but the phrase has not taken off in the US (red line) in the same way, where people just talk about avocado toast without an adjective. (You hear that in BrE too, but it's not as prominent as in AmE.)

Verbs of placing

• BrE bung: to put forcibly, without delicacy. It's very informal word, but that goes with the vibe of a lot of British cooking shows. The closest equivalents are probably stick or throw (both General English), as in stick/throw it in the oven/pan, but bung feels the most informal and dismissive of the bunch. Here are some Google Image results for "bung it in the oven", which show the phrase applied to simple, quick recipes and the people who cook them:

• BrE tip in means, essentially 'pour in', but it's often used for solids. It can apply to chopped carrots, as in Maryellen's example, because you're assumed to be tipping the chopping board over the pan and 'pouring' the carrots in. The magazine that just came with my grocery order has tip in its first two recipes: bread dough is tipped onto a floured surface. Cooked spinach is tipped into a sieve. 
  
  
• add: Mrs Redboots suggested this one. Add is General English, of course, but she notes a different usage:

        American on-line cooks "add" ingredients to an empty pan.  Can you add something when there is nothing there?

Verbs of meat preparation

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

 

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

 

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.

screenshot from examplesof.net

 

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuəs/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

 

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

 

 

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

 

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

 

            Analog(ue) = /ˈanəl*ɡ/  +  -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/  [dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [ɔ] or [ɑ] & BrE [ɒ])

 

            Analogy = /əˈn*lədʒi/   +  -ous  =  analogious >  /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

 

            Analogu(e) + /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + ous  =  analoguous  > /əˈnaləɡjuəs/ [non-dictionary]

 

 

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

 

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

 

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kənˈteɪdʒəs/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdʒəs/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdʒəs/ and AmE /prɛˈstidʒəs/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdʒous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.

(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous­ words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

 

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.

[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.