It's that time of year again. The time when everyone's too busy doing fun things in real life to read blogs. Yet I persevere in announcing my Words of the Year here at the butt-end of the year because I don't want to be unfair to December. (And, of course, I'm doing too much teaching to even think about it any earlier.)
As ever, the point of the SbaCL Words of the Year is to note the riches (or rags) that American and British English bring to each other. A SbaCL WotY is not a new word, and it may not even be a newly borrowed word, but it's a word from one of my countries that has been particularly relevant to the other of my countries in that year. Sometimes they're in the news, sometimes they've been building up a presence for years and just needed a little acknowledgement.
The finalists (in my mind) for this year's US-to-UK WotY were of each of these types. The loser is mugwump: a now-obscure Americanism briefly lifted out of the shadows when lexical dilettante (that's the nicest phrase I have for him) Foreign Secretary (that's the most preposterous phrase I have for him) Boris Johnson called the head of the Labour Party "a mutton-headed old mugwump". Since that's not the word I've chosen, I'll leave you to go and read (or watch a video) about it elsewhere.
But the winner, which has been building up some steam for years, will hang around longer than Johnson's antique epithet. It is:
...to refer to a group of broadcast program(me)s released under the same title in a particular time period. It's tricky to define without using the word series, but one must, because that is the word (or one sense of it) that season competes with in BrE.
Now, I have written about the difference between AmE season versus BrE series before, so I won't do it all again and I encourage you to click on the link to read a more detailed post. To cut a long difference short, the British way would be to say "I haven't seen the second series of Stranger Things (so no spoilers, please!)", but in AmE that doesn't quite make sense because Stranger Things is the series, and the part of it that is 'second' is a season of that series. To unnecessarily throw in some terms of my trade, in AmE season is a meronym of AmE series (it is in the 'part-of' relation), whereas in BrE, AmE season is used as a synonym for BrE series.
British television-watchers (that is to say, almost everyone on this island) have long been familiar with the American sense of season—after all, lots of American television program(me)s are imported to UK television. But what's tipped it into WotY territory are the streaming services, especially Netflix, which often releases an entire season/series of a (AmE) show at one time, enabling serious binge-watching. And on Netflix, they are called seasons. Even when they're BBC products like Uncle here. (Can you see the '2 Seasons' there under the title on Netflix?) Meanwhile on BBC iPlayer, it's on 'Series 3'. (It's also a lovely comedy and if you like lovely comedies you might want to give it a chance.)
The reasons for calling it a season are rather irrelevant in the days of streaming--when 12 episodes show up on a single day, rather than unfolding over months. But the nice thing about season is that it avoids the ambiguity that arises from the two possible interpretations of series.
The AmE term is showing up more and more in British newspapers--including the Telegraph (one of the papers that publishes a lot of complaints about Americanisms). This chart shows how 'ordinal-number+season of' (which, on this corpus's tagging system includes last season of and next season of) has been faring in UK news websites (via the NOW corpus).
The charts look similar for other searches like 'season+cardinal number+of". Of course, there are other types of seasons besides television seasons in these data, but the television ones predominate, as can be seen from this sample of the 2017-B section of the corpus (click to biggify it):
Sports seasons come up once in a while, but the instances of season are mostly about television seasons.
I should note here that Netflix is an equal-opportunity word-spreader. Only a couple of years ago, it was being blamed for Americans saying queue.
So there we go. The first SbaCL WotY of 2017! Many thanks to @eahird for nominating it. Stay tuned for the UK>US WotY. As soon as I decide what it is!
As ever, the point of the SbaCL Words of the Year is to note the riches (or rags) that American and British English bring to each other. A SbaCL WotY is not a new word, and it may not even be a newly borrowed word, but it's a word from one of my countries that has been particularly relevant to the other of my countries in that year. Sometimes they're in the news, sometimes they've been building up a presence for years and just needed a little acknowledgement.
The finalists (in my mind) for this year's US-to-UK WotY were of each of these types. The loser is mugwump: a now-obscure Americanism briefly lifted out of the shadows when lexical dilettante (that's the nicest phrase I have for him) Foreign Secretary (that's the most preposterous phrase I have for him) Boris Johnson called the head of the Labour Party "a mutton-headed old mugwump". Since that's not the word I've chosen, I'll leave you to go and read (or watch a video) about it elsewhere.
But the winner, which has been building up some steam for years, will hang around longer than Johnson's antique epithet. It is:
season
...to refer to a group of broadcast program(me)s released under the same title in a particular time period. It's tricky to define without using the word series, but one must, because that is the word (or one sense of it) that season competes with in BrE.
Now, I have written about the difference between AmE season versus BrE series before, so I won't do it all again and I encourage you to click on the link to read a more detailed post. To cut a long difference short, the British way would be to say "I haven't seen the second series of Stranger Things (so no spoilers, please!)", but in AmE that doesn't quite make sense because Stranger Things is the series, and the part of it that is 'second' is a season of that series. To unnecessarily throw in some terms of my trade, in AmE season is a meronym of AmE series (it is in the 'part-of' relation), whereas in BrE, AmE season is used as a synonym for BrE series.
British television-watchers (that is to say, almost everyone on this island) have long been familiar with the American sense of season—after all, lots of American television program(me)s are imported to UK television. But what's tipped it into WotY territory are the streaming services, especially Netflix, which often releases an entire season/series of a (AmE) show at one time, enabling serious binge-watching. And on Netflix, they are called seasons. Even when they're BBC products like Uncle here. (Can you see the '2 Seasons' there under the title on Netflix?) Meanwhile on BBC iPlayer, it's on 'Series 3'. (It's also a lovely comedy and if you like lovely comedies you might want to give it a chance.)
The reasons for calling it a season are rather irrelevant in the days of streaming--when 12 episodes show up on a single day, rather than unfolding over months. But the nice thing about season is that it avoids the ambiguity that arises from the two possible interpretations of series.
The AmE term is showing up more and more in British newspapers--including the Telegraph (one of the papers that publishes a lot of complaints about Americanisms). This chart shows how 'ordinal-number+season of' (which, on this corpus's tagging system includes last season of and next season of) has been faring in UK news websites (via the NOW corpus).
The charts look similar for other searches like 'season+cardinal number+of". Of course, there are other types of seasons besides television seasons in these data, but the television ones predominate, as can be seen from this sample of the 2017-B section of the corpus (click to biggify it):
Sports seasons come up once in a while, but the instances of season are mostly about television seasons.
I should note here that Netflix is an equal-opportunity word-spreader. Only a couple of years ago, it was being blamed for Americans saying queue.
So there we go. The first SbaCL WotY of 2017! Many thanks to @eahird for nominating it. Stay tuned for the UK>US WotY. As soon as I decide what it is!
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