totting and toting

Nov 9, 2007
JHM wrote in September to ask the following:
A [Financial Times] column used the phrase "tot up" which the context implied was a shortened form for what I would write as "sum up," in other words, to find the total amount. My questions are: 1) Is this a common usage? 2) Would a typical Englishman pronounce "tot up" to rhyme with "tote up?" a) If so, why wouldn't it be spelled "tote up"? b) If not, mightn't it sound more like "taht up," in which case it would it risk being confused with "tart up?"
I'll take JHM's questions in turn:
1). Yes, tot up is BrE meaning 'to add/sum up'. The OED lists it as colloquial, but the fact that it's used in the Financial Times probably means that it's not seen as being particularly colloquial these days. In AmE one is more likely to see/hear tote up. A fixture on American telethons (orig. and chiefly AmE) and other fund-raisers is the tote board, i.e. a representation of how much money has been pledged/collected so far (represented either just as a total figure or a 'thermometer', etc.). Tote boards are also used at racetracks, to show how much the return on a particular bet is. Of course, you have these things in British fund-raisers/racetracks too, but I haven't heard them called tote boards here (and they're not called tot boards either!). The OED lists the related noun tote 'now dialectal' and as originally Australian, with the noun form being short for totalizator--a proprietary name for a kind of machine that tallies numbers up. (In Australia and New Zealand, apparently, the Totalizator Agency Board is the official non-racetrack place where you can bet on horse races--i.e. the equivalent of American Off-Track Betting.)

2-a) Tot up rhymes with hot up, not with tote up. Both verb forms tot up and tote up come from total in some way or another--with the former looking more like it relies on the spelling of the abbreviation of total for its form/pronunciation, and the latter being a clipping of the (pronounced) word total. A similar shortened form is tut to mean tutorial (we used that in South Africa--is it used in British universities that still have tutorials?). It's pronounced to rhyme with hut, rather than like the first syllable ('toot') in the word it stands for, tutorial. So, the spelling of the shortened form has influenced its pronunciation.

b) In (at least southern standard) BrE, tot up and tart up ('to dress in a showy/gaudy manner') have very different vowels. The problem with explaining this to AmE speakers is that AmE generally doesn't have the vowel that's in BrE tot. So, if an American says tot up, it may sound like tart up to a BrE speaker because they're not using the vowel that a BrE speaker would expect to hear. But if a BrE speaker (at least the ones down here in the south) says tot or tart it would be very clear to another BrE speaker which one they're saying. I discussed this vowel back here, where there's a link to recordings of it.
Tote has another, unrelated meaning that is originally AmE: 'to carry'. Of course, the meaning has spread wider than AmE now, especially through the compound tote bag. The etymology of this tote is something of a mystery. It goes back to the 1600s at least, and is often claimed to be of African origin, but there's evidence of it being used that early in parts of America that didn't have many Africans. So, despite a lot of etymological attention to the word, it's still a mystery.
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autumnal holidays

Nov 5, 2007
So far, Bonfire Night has only come up in the comments on another post on this blog. But thinking about it (for it is tonight) has me thinking about all sorts of differences in my experience of autumn (or, more often in AmE, fall) in the US and UK. Forgive me, but this post will be lighter on linguistic gore than most, and heavier on nostalgia and maybe even a touch of homesickness (not something I think of myself as suffering from!).

Autumn/fall was always my favo(u)rite season in the US, but in the UK, I tend to face it with a certain "Oh god, it's going to get dark early" kind of dread. It doesn't help that the UK goes off British Summer Time a week earlier than the US goes off Daylight Savings Time, but the greater problem is that this time of year there is less light up here at +50° latitude than there was at +43°, where I grew up, or +31° or -26°, the last two places I lived. By the time we get to mid-December, when it's invariably overcast in Brighton, it seems to me like the day never gets all the way to proper daytime light levels. Today there are 37 fewer minutes of light in Brighton than in my hometown, and by winter solstice, that difference will be more than an hour--or two hours if I compare it to my last abode.

But it's not just the dark that does me in, it's the relative lack of distractions from the dark. American autumns/falls, especially in the northeast where I'm from, are chock-full of them. Of course, there are the back-to-school rituals (found in the UK too), and Lynneukah, the joyous festival of Lynne (at the start of October--it's not too early to start planning for next year). But after those, we get into the serious autumn rituals.

Watching the changing colo(u)rs of leaves is a big one--so much so that in New England there's a word for tourists/leisurely drivers who arrive in hordes to look at the trees: leaf-peepers. Here's a nice photo of what they go looking for. Where I come from, foliage observation is tied up with other rituals, like going to apple orchards for fresh cider (which in AmE is a rusty-colo(u)red, pressed apple juice, not a fermented drink), hayrides (AmE: 'a pleasure ride in a hay-wagon', OED), bonfires--and, my favo(u)rite, apple cider doughnuts. Bonfires and hayrides are often part of other autumn/fall rituals, such as Homecoming (for which, see Janna's comment describing Homecoming in the previous post on proms).

Then there's Halloween, which has roots going back to Scotland and Ireland (particularly the Scottish tradition of guising), but whose modern form is a recent import from the US to the UK--and a poorly understood import, I'd say. Boy, do people complain about it here. There's a common perception of trick-or-treating as "as a nuisance or even a menacing form of begging" (Wikipedia). After reading this anti-Halloween diatribe on the BBC website, I was relieved to read one British expat in Canada's take on it in the comments:
I moved to Canada from Britain in the mid 90s, and at first, treated trick-or-treating with a healthy suspicion. However, I soon realized, that in my neck of the woods at least, Halloween is more about fun than menace; it's about the treat rather than the trick. In our neighbourhood, it's mainly young kids who come trick-or-treating with their parents. We also get a few older teens who come by, almost self-deprecatingly, and we always compliment them on their costumes, or berate them gently for their lack of effort, but fill their bags nonetheless. No menaces, no threats. I was back in England last Hallowe'en and was surprised to see and hear the healthy antagonism there was against trick or treaters. Friends and family all had signs in their windows, weren't planning to answer the door, couldn't understand why my seven year-old wanted to dress up and go out after dark with a bag looking for treats. I think in England, what has happened is that the message has been lost in translation, and over the years the idea of treat has [been?] supplanted [by?] that of trick. Maybe you should all come over here and go trick-or-treating with my little ones tonight - then you'd have a better understanding of how it *should* work!
Anne, Vancouver, Canada
In other words, in North America, Halloween tends to be a child-cent(e)red event that brings people in a neighbo(u)rhood together in celebration of their children. A couple of differences I've noticed in trick-or-treating here (besides the fact that there's just a lot less of it) are (a) a lot of people give coins instead of (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweets, and (b) adults seem more 'purist' about costumes. I've heard a couple of people complain that a child was dressed as a fairy or a superhero, implying that that is not a Halloween costume. But by the time that the traditions were being (re)imported from the US, few people in the US saw anything wrong with dressing as whatever you liked. Thinking back on my Halloween costumes, I'd been a fortuneteller, a magnet, and a bride--never anything particularly scary. So, (a) contributes to people seeing the holiday as extortionate and (b) contributes to a more sinister (it's all about evil!) view of it than is typically held in the US.

After Halloween, American attention turns to Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November). While there is the position that this holiday is politically/racially insensitive (since it celebrates the saving of European immigrants' asses/arses by Native Americans, many of whom were subsequently subject to genocide), it has a lot going for it too. Bill Bryson writes about it as 'The Best American Holiday' in I'm a Stranger Here Myself:
Thanksgiving is wonderful for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, it has the commendable effect of staving off Christmas. Whereas in in Britain the Christmas shopping season seems nowadays to kick off around about the August bank holiday, Christmas mania doesn't traditionally begin in America until the last weekend in November.
Indeed, the Christmas decorations have been up (not lit, but still...) in Brighton for several weeks now. There have been Christmas cards, Christmas decorations, and most weirdly Christmas food in the shops since September. You get a little of that in the US, but the onslaught is staved off by the retailers' need to keep part of their shelf space free for Halloween and Thanksgiving (BrE) tat (=junk). The reputed busiest shopping day of the American year (at least in terms of traffic, if not sales) is the day after Thanksgiving, known in the retailing world as Black Friday. Thanksgiving gives us a clear sense of when the (commercial) Christmas season begins--at a time that isn't too far away from when Advent begins.

Bryson continues:
Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialization. It involves no greeting cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. I love the fact that at Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball and then go and watch a game of football on TV. This is my kind of holiday.

But perhaps the nicest, certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you a formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can't believe that it hasn't been picked up by more countries.
(Though we should note that many churches have a Thanksgiving Sunday--but that's not typically an occasion when families travel to be together and do all of the other things that go along with American Thanksgiving.)

So those, plus a few things here and there like Veteran's Day (= UK Remembrance Day), the World Series in baseball and the (American) football season (and its many accout{er/re}ments, like tailgating) are some of the rituals that mark autumn/fall in (particularly north-eastern) America and distract us from the fact that the sun is going bye-bye and it's getting cold. We can still think of the weather as being crisp while we're enjoying ourselves with apple cider doughnuts and jumping in piles of leaves.

What do we have in the UK? One childhood autumn tradition is the playing of conkers. This is a game involving horse chestnuts on strings, where you try to knock each other's chestnuts, or conkers. (For a better explanation, click on the link.) More boys seem to play this than girls, and it can involve a lot of forethought, with dedicated players searching long and hard for the best conkers and then making them harder by, for instance soaking them in vinegar and baking them. This tradition may be dying out, with rumo(u)rs of schools banning the game for health and safety reasons. (I had to make that bold, since Health and Safety is such a BrE phrase/obsession. I suppose the AmE equivalent would be liability.)

Besides the half-hearted observance of Halloween, the main autumn ritual in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night. (Remember, remember the fifth of November.) This marks the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of Catholics to blow up Parliament in 1605. Depending on where/who you are in the UK, this may be a bigger or smaller event. In nearby Lewes, it's huge--due to Lewes' history as a site of Protestant martyrdom. Here's a photo of a Lewes Bonfire Night from chrisgray.net--one that is bound to be a bit disturbing to Americans, since it looks like a Ku Klux Klan rally. In fact, Bonfire Night is not known for its political, religious or racial sensitivity. I have practi{c/s}ing Catholic friends who have been offended that I've gone and enjoyed the Lewes festivities since they involve the burning of effigies (Guy Fawkes, traditionally, but they'll burn anyone in Lewes) and throwing bangers (little fireworks) at someone dressed as the/a Pope--albeit nowadays a pope in fireproof clothing and safety goggles. (It's never clear to me whether it's supposed to be the current Pope or the one from 1605.) It also involves a parade that I've described before as something like "Mardi Gras with fire". Lewes has a number of bonfire societies, which can be likened to the krewes of New Orleans Mardi Gras, and each parades around town in themed costumes (not that the themes have to have anything to do with the Gunpowder Plot--some perennial favo(u)rites are stereotyped Native American dress, African 'tribespeople' and smugglers). After parading around town a few times, they lead crowds to their bonfire site, where there is a huge bonfire and the burning of their effigy. The effigy is usually filled with fireworks, and the fireworks shows that follow are always incredible. (So are the crowds.)

Of course, not everywhere is near Lewes or other big Bonfire Night towns, and so most people will celebrate Bonfire night on a smaller scale (if at all), either by going to municipal fireworks or by buying/lighting one's own in the back (BrE) garden/(AmE) yard. (Our window wells were full of spent fireworks Saturday night. Coming from a place where mere citizens are not allowed to have fireworks, I never cease to be surprised by how willing people are to light them close to buildings/people. My friend the Postman's bonfire party this year ended with broken windows and a trip to the hospital.) While I love the fireworks, to me Bonfire Night is a night out to look at fire more than a holiday, since it doesn't involve the kind of planning and preparation (at least not by me) that Halloween (costume-wise) and Thanksgiving (food/hosting-wise) do. But I'm sure for some people, like the Lewes Bonfire Societies, it feels like much more.

So--what British autumn rituals am I missing here? Help me out--I've got a lot of darkness to get through!
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the floor

Nov 3, 2007
Since Better Half and I both lived with each other's dialects for some time before meeting each other, there aren't too many times when our linguistic differences get us into trouble. But one thing that hasn't stopped confusing me is when he calls the ground outside the floor. For instance, we might be walking along the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk and he'll say "Mind the poo on the floor there" or "Look at all the chewing gum on the floor!" (He's just come up with those two examples himself, reminding me of my mother's recurrent surprise at the 'uncleanliness' of England. Of course, my mother lives in a small town in a rural area in the US, so her comparisons to cities in England aren't really fair.)

Anyhow, BH's exclamations about things on the floor almost always knock me for a loop, because to me the floor is something inside a building. Of course, in AmE I can also talk about the forest floor, but I think of that as being a very speciali{s/z}ed usage; it doesn't just mean the ground in the forest, it means all the ferns and mosses and things that one finds on the ground in a forest. Similarly for the ocean floor--to me, it's about an ecosystem, not just a surface.

I've asked various BrE-speaking friends whether they use floor to mean ground, and their replies have been mixed. (But it also should be said that I usually don't think that asking people whether they say X is a very productive or accurate way of finding out if they say X. What we do when speaking is a largely subconscious process, and when we reflect on that process, all sorts of things, not least ideas about how we 'should' speak, get in the way.) Looking in the OED, I find that it lists the sense 'the ground' as obsolete, except in dialects.

Now, as a Saaff Lundun boy descended of a long line of South Londoners, I kind of doubt that BH is hanging on to some old ways that the OED compilers thought of as 'dialectal'. So, my hypothesis is that this usage has been re-introduced to the general language through cricket. (This would contribute to explaining why BH uses it more than most of my girlfriends.) As the OED notes, floor is the ground of a cricket ground--that is to say, the dirt/grass part of the cricket field (too many senses of ground in that last clause). So, the OED also lists to put a catch on the floor as a colloquial way to say 'to fail to hold a catch' in cricket.

I was reminded of the whole floor issue while watching the quiz celebrating Channel 4's 25th anniversary last night. (For certain reasons, I'm watching way too much television lately.) They showed a clip of a program(me) in which Derren Brown gets 'normal' people to hold up an armo(u)red bank car. And in that, in the out-of-doors, the robber demands that the bank guy get 'down on the floor' (i.e. on the street/road). You can see a clip from that (BrE) programme/(AmE) show here on YouTube, but to hear people saying floor, skip to about 7:24. Here, of course, there's the possibility that the speakers have been affected by seeing lots of dramati{s/z}ed robberies that take place inside banks, and so the thing that one says in that condition is Get down on the floor. But it still sounds really unnatural to me--I can't help but think that I'd say Get down on the ground. Next time I rob an armo(u)red vehicle, I'll have to have someone tape me.

So--can you refer to the surface of a road as the floor?
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institutional verbs

Nov 2, 2007
One thing that I like about British English is the range of verbs and phrasal verbs for various interactions with public welfare institutions. I don't know why I have such fondness for them--maybe it's just my fondness for the public welfare institutions. When asked by British folk what I like about living in England, my first two answers are: the National Health Service and the trains. They usually express shock or derision, but then I point out how much healthcare costs (and how unevenly it is distributed) in the US and the fact that in my last American place of residence (a city of about 125,000) the Amtrak passenger train came only TWICE A WEEK and even then you had to drive to a couple of towns away to catch it. After those explanations, my appreciation for what might not be the greatest health and transport services in the world seems a lot clearer. As a (smugly) non-car-owning person with chronic illness, I have very few complaints about the services, and tend to find that the loudest complaints come from healthy folk who drive everywhere. But maybe I should save my prejudices about healthy people for another forum. Some of my best friends are healthy. Well, one of them, at least.

(In case you're wondering what my third favo(u)rite thing about living in England/Britain is, it's: everyone seems to have a hobby or passion [besides sitting in front of the tv/(BrE) telly every night]. What fun! If only everyone in my family had a hobby--it would make Christmas shopping so much easier.)

But enough asides (or since they came first, should I call them atops?). Here are some of the BrE institutional verbs I love:
  • to sign on also known as to go on (BrE) the dole: to register to receive social benefits (AmE: welfare or unemployment insurance). I was going to link you to the episode of Spaced in which Daisy tries to sign on, but no one's uploaded that one to YouTube yet. Just when you start to think that you can depend on the Internet, it goes and disappoints you in a fundamental way.

    One can use sign off to mean 'go off benefits (because one has become employed)', but I'm more accustomed to hearing it used to mean:
  • to sign off: (for a medical doctor) to give a medical certificate (to someone), allowing them medical leave from work. This is usually done by one's (BrE) GP -- general practitioner (AmE: primary care physician [though that's (AmE) HMO-speak] or family doctor). This is often used in the passive--e.g. I've been signed off for the next five weeks. When it's used in the active form, the direct object comes between the verb and the particle: The doctor signed John off, not *The doctor signed off John.
Of course, no welfare system is without its cheats, and BrE supplies some interesting verbs for turning them in:
  • to shop (someone): to turn someone in for some misdeed. This isn't only used for fraud against the government, but it's certainly used for that a lot. The OED has it going back for centuries, but says it's now "only slang or dial". For example:
    Council [AmE: municipal government] launches 'shop your neighbour' dustbin [AmE: trash can] hotline (Daily Mail, 12 Oct 2006)
While it is slang-ish, newspapers and even the government use shop quite easily--although often in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas in order to signal its 'slanginess'.
  • to grass (up) (someone): again, to inform the police/authorities about someone's misdoings. More likely than shop (in my experience) to be used for non-fraud kinds of crimes. There are also the nouns grass and supergrass, meaning a person who grasses. And once one learns that, the name of the band [warning: link makes noise] makes more sense. AmE alternatives that I can think of for this meaning, such as rat, are also found in BrE.
According to someone in this BBC article (which uses both grass and shop):
Most smokers are law-abiding citizens, and I can't believe people will want to shop smokers. It is not the British way.
That it is perceived as 'not the British way' might go a little way to explaining why (in my experience) British universities tend not to have Hono(u)r Codes, in the American sense. At many US universities, one must sign a document promising not to cheat and to report any cheating one knows about. At my UK university, students have to sign statements that they haven't cheated (when they take an exam or submit and assignment), but (as I found when someone grassed on a fellow student) there is no process in place to allow for the investigation of an accusation of cheating that comes from a student, rather than a faculty member.
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smacking and spanking

Oct 28, 2007
A Guardian headline on Friday read:
Ministers defy charities to uphold parents' right to smack
(The on-line version has a different title.) The article goes on:

The government yesterday reasserted parents' right to smack their children despite overwhelming opposition from charities.

Kevin Brennan, the children's minister, said there was no reason to change the law introduced three years ago permitting smacking if it does not leave visible bruising, scratches or reddening of the skin.

After a review of the legislation, he told MPs: "Smacking is becoming a less commonly used form of discipline. While many parents say they will not smack, a majority say smacking should not be banned outright."

As can be gleaned from the prevalence of the word smack in the article (and more generally in the national debate on the topic), this is the normal BrE way to refer to striking a child as a disciplinary measure. As the OED defines smack:
5. a. To strike (a person, part of the body, etc.) with the open hand or with something having a flat surface; to slap. Also spec. to chastise (a child) in this manner and fig.
Smack is generally not used in this way in AmE, as can be seen from the American Heritage Dictionary definition:
v.tr.
1. To press together and open (the lips) quickly and noisily, as in eating or tasting.
2. To kiss noisily.
3. To strike sharply and with a loud noise.
Of course, the final sense there could be used to describe hitting children with an open hand, but it's just not used that way as routinely in AmE as it is in BrE. In BrE, the Guardian headline seems clear. In AmE, I might misunderstand it as 'parents' right to kiss noisily' or 'parents' right to heroin.' (Smack = 'heroin' is originally AmE slang.)

In AmE, one speaks more naturally of spanking children, but of course spank≠smack, since spank (at least in AmE) specifies that it is the bottom that is hit (typically with an open hand, but possibly with a paddle or other instrument), whereas smacking doesn't (although it may be the case that most--or at least the most prototypical--child-smacking is on bottoms). I asked Better Half whether he'd usually refer to bottom-smacking as spanking or smacking, and he felt that he'd tend to use smack to talk about hitting children because spank (to his BrE ear) has sexual overtones. (The first thing he said upon hearing spank was spank the monkey. What a naughty boy.) The OED lists spank as 'dialectal or colloquial', and does not specify that it has to be on the bottom:
1. a. trans. To slap or smack (a person, esp. a child) with the open hand.
This UK site has spank as 'slang', but it is not slang in AmE--and not sexual unless clearly used in a sexual context.

Searching for spank on the Guardian website, I find that it doesn't occur in the current articles on the 'smacking debate' but that it does occur in articles on sport, music (due to a hiphop group called Spank Rock) and sex. So, there's little evidence that the AmE usage of spank for child-bottom-hitting is making its way into BrE. But since the OED entries have not been updated since 1989, it'll be interesting to see if they pick up on any changes in their next updates.
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putting the boot in

Oct 24, 2007
I haven't much time this evening, so I'll take advantage of the fact that reader Frank Pennycook (of Salisbury, UK) practically wrote an entry for me back in August, when he wrote to ask:
Is it correct that the phrase to put the boot in is not used in the US? If so, is there an equivalent?
Yes, it's correct that that is a BrE phrase. The Collins Cobuild Dictionary defines it as:
If someone puts the boot in, they attack another person by saying something cruel, often when the person is already feeling weak or upset.
Frank helpfully supplied some examples:
Mr Brown deployed a number of rehearsed lines against his two "rivals", the suggestion being that it will do him no harm to crush the left. But up against Mr Meacher - surprisingly hapless - and Mr McDonnell, there seemed little point, and each time he put the boot in I wanted to shout 'please don't hurt them'. The audience was overwhelmingly with the Chancellor. [Benedict Brogan, Daily Mail, 13 May 2007]

But European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has rejected the proposal in the strongest possible terms. Just seconds after the foreign secretary sat down he put the boot in, calling the proposal "unacceptable". [Mark Mardell, BBC News, 05 December 2005]
In answer to Frank's second question, I can't think of an equivalent that is just AmE, but Frank describes it rather well as:
metaphorically kicking one's adversary while they are on the ground
So, to kick [someone] when [they're] down is a close alternative, though not exclusively AmE or BrE. Another near-equivalent is to twist (or turn) the knife, which again is not exclusively AmE or BrE.

So, as far as I can tell, BrE has at least one more idiom than AmE does for attacking someone in a weakened state. No comment. Unless you can think of a strictly AmE idiom for this sentiment?
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to hyphenate or not to hyphenate?

Oct 22, 2007
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th edn) recently made the news for deleting a lot of hyphens that had been in the previous edition. According to the AskOxford website:
Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000 hyphens from the text of the Shorter. So it's double bass, not double–bass, ice cream not ice–cream, makeover instead of make–over, and postmodern rather than post–modern. [Italics added because it was driving me crazy that Oxford hadn't marked the self-referential use of these words!]
Now, I neither have the two editions of the Shorter Oxford, nor would I have the time to look up all of the de-hyphenated words if I did have them, but it's long been my impression that British dictionaries (and possibly BrE speakers--we'll come back to this below) and American dictionaries (and speakers?) differ in their relationships with hyphens. When the Association of British Scrabble Players switched over to the international dictionary (including the former US and UK Scrabble dictionaries), one thing that struck a lot of players was how many more verbs could take the re- prefix. (As in relocate or reassemble. I'm afraid I don't still have my old dictionary to tell you which ones weren't allowed.) This was in part because of the BrE tendency to put hyphens between the prefix and the base verb, especially in cases in which not to do so would involve the same letter repeated twice at the end of the prefix and the beginning of the base word. So, BrE prefers re-elect, which is happy without a hyphen in AmE: reelect. The same thing happens with the prefix co-, especially before another o, so that BrE tends to prefer co-ordinate and co-operate, whereas AmE prefers coordinate and cooperate. So, I wondered, do the changes in the Shorter Oxford reflect more AmE-like use of hyphens? I found the following examples of de-hyphenated words in the Shorter Oxford 6 from news items and commentaries about the change: this BBC article, this New York Times article, World Wide Words and the aforelinked OUP press release. Then I compared them to the American Heritage Dictionary, which happens to be on my desk.

Shorter Oxford 5 (2002)Shorter Oxford 6 (2007)American Heritage 4 (2000)
fig-leaffig leaffig leaf
pot-bellypot bellypotbelly
pigeon-holepigeonholepigeonhole
leap-frogleapfrogleapfrog
double-bassdouble bassdouble bass
ice-creamice creamice cream
make-overmakeovermakeover
post-modernpostmodernpostmodern
hobby-horsehobby horsehobbyhorse
fire-drillfire drillfire drill
water-bedwater bedwaterbed
test-tubetest tubetest tube
bumble-beebumblebeebumblebee
cry-babycrybabycrybaby
low-lifelowlifelowlife
up-marketupmarketupmarket

The bold entries in the table show the three cases in which the change in SOED6 is a change in the opposite direction from the AHD4 entry. (And I have to take issue with the AHD's one-word status for hobby horse. Not how I would spell it. I'm less-than-sure about potbelly too.)

Does this mean that BrE is becoming more like AmE?
NOT NECESSARILY!
These changes probably have at least as much to do with the SOED looking more carefully at how these words appear in printed language as they do with any actual language change. After all, there have been only five years between the editions--that's an awful lot of hyphens to bite the dust in such a short time. The NYT article notes, "That ice cream and bumblebee ever had hyphens to begin with suggests an excess of fussiness on the part of older lexicographers" and BrE-speaker Michael Quinion at World-Wide Words says, "The new SOED lists many hyphenless words such as leapfrog, bumblebee, crybaby, pigeonhole, lowlife, and upmarket, which will be a relief to those of us who have been spelling them like that all along."

I do get the feeling, however, (and this is just a feeling) that BrE favo(u)rs keeping words more separate. We can describe a hierarchy of 'one-wordiness' or 'joined-up-ed-ness' of English compound nouns, like this:
fully integrated: lifeboat, prejudge
semi-integrated: sit-in, semi-integrated
not integrated: ice cream, throw up
Using this hierarchy, I'd suppose that BrE writing tends toward(s) non-integration--that is to say, keeping words separate, or at least hyphenated, whereas AmE is happier to have more fully integrated compounds. It's just a hypothesis, though, and you're welcome to test it. (Hey, final-year students! There's a project!) Part of the reason I've formed this hypothesis is the widespread habit in BrE writing of treating some prefixes as separate words. Here are some examples, in which in AmE I'd have to have at least a hyphen, if not a single word, but which one sees not infrequently as separate words in BrE:
over- as a verb prefix
On the other hand, children are very good at expressing what motivates them in a learning context but perhaps over egg the custard a little when it comes to saying that what they find boring. --Scaife & Rogers, 'Kids as Informants'

post- as a prefix meaning 'after'
Public Health Advice ? Post Flood
Before re-occupying your home
The flood water affecting your home or other property may have been contaminated with sewage and other contaminants... --Bridgnorth District Council

sub- as a prefix meaning 'below'
Sub normal growth rate (usually a height velocity below the 25th centile usually. equates to less than 5 cm per year in a pre pubertal child). --from an NHS [Wales] diagnostic guide
And so forth. This is the kind of thing I find myself 'correcting' constantly in student work in the UK (never as much of a problem in the US), so much so that I started to wonder whether I was the one in the wrong in my new dialect-land (as has happened before). But no, my New Oxford Dictionary of English treats all of these as prefixes, requiring hyphens or full integration with the base word. Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edn) doesn't mention the writing of prefixes as separate words, and in its entry on hyphens recommends the use of hyphens with prefixes--as opposed to full integration--in the cases where the prefix joins to a proper name (anti-Darwin) or where the same letter is repeated (re-elect) or an ambiguity ensues (as in the pro-verb/proverb case that I mentioned a while ago).

But before you go any further in thinking about this, I give you the following cautionary quotation, cited on the American Dialect Society e-list recently:
If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.
--John Benbow, Manuscript and Proof, 1937

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can I help who's next?

Oct 19, 2007
This is just a little parable about making dialectal assumptions.

For some time, I've been bothered by a phrase I've been hearing a lot in shops and cafés in Brighton. It happens where there is one (BrE) queue/(AmE) line for several (BrE) tills/(AmE) cash registers (note that BrE and AmE have both of these terms, but use them slightly differently, as discussed a bit back here). The (BrE) shop assistant/(AmE) clerk, upon finding him/herself customerless, calls out: Can I help who's next?

Now, this just sounds weird to me, and I don't recall ever hearing it in my native land. I'd have to say Can I help whoever is next? or Can I help the next person? So, I brought this up at dinner the other night with Better Half, lazybrain and the Poet. All insisted that I shouldn't call this 'British English' because it's 'ungrammatical' and 'lazy'. But, of course, that doesn't make it not British. Certainly not Standard BrE, but there are at least some English people who are saying it.

So then I decided to have a look on the web for the phrase, and what is the first hit that Google gives me? Why, it's a British linguist (Geoff Pullum), then living in the US, who'd noticed its use in American establishments, and therefore discussed it at Language Log. So, some of you may be thinking "Ha! I knew that such ungrammaticality must be an American aberration imported into the youthspeak of Britain!" But by Pullum's account, this is not a new construction, but an old use of who that had been thought to be extinct for at least 150 years. So, what's going on here? Is it that:
  1. this use of who died out in most places but survived in little pockets of AmE and BrE and may be making a comeback?
  2. this use of who is a natural development in English grammar that has erupted on two continents at vaguely the same time after going out of fashion for a while?
  3. the phrase can I help who's next? is an idiom that was (re)invented in one country and found its way to the other?
In the UK, I'm mostly hearing it from younger people (say, in their teens/20s). That doesn't mean that the youth are Americani{s/z}ed...I can't imagine that that many Marks and Spencer assistants/clerks spend a lot of time in the US picking up phrases that seem to be used by a minority of AmE speakers (not necessarily in the touristy areas). And it's not the type of phrase one would expect to hear a lot on The O.C., or whatever's replaced it. But the fact that I'm associating it with youth makes me lean against hypothesis (1). I'm liking (2), but really have no empirical evidence for it. (After all, my impression that it's younger people saying it may just be due to the fact that there are more younger people than older people working in such service industry jobs in Brighton.)

See Pullum's Language Log post for the grammatical gore. (Won't be answering comments this weekend, so please amuse yourselves with the topic!)

Postscript (25 October): Ben Zimmer at Language Log has posted a great clip about whoever versus whomever from the US version of The Office. See comments here for more discussion...
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putting the U in endeavo(u)r

Oct 16, 2007
Frequent commenter (or commentator, if we want to use an -or ending!) JHM sent me a news item back in July (when I was up to my ears in other things--hence its unnewsiness* now) about NASA misspelling the name of its own space shuttle, Endeavour.


The news source was so (AmE) persnickety ('picky, snobbish'--see comments for BrE version) about letting others repeat its content that I've decided to give my link to a blogger who's written on the topic, so see here for before and after photos and more of the story. (This 'before' photo by John Raoux, AP.)

Of course, what's happened here is that whoever made the sign relied on AmE spelling of the word endeavor, not appreciating that the shuttle was named after Captain James Cook's ship. When it comes to names of individuals (including ships!), spellings should stay the same, regardless of whether an American or a British person is writing the name. Of course, when it's being used as a common noun (not a name) or verb, then the spelling changes. 'U'-ful in BrE and related spelling systems, 'U'-less in AmE.

We've discussed a lot of spelling differences here lately, but unlike many of the others that have come up, this one actually has to do with American spelling reformer Noah Webster, who's usually blamed for or credited with (depending on your point of view) many of the spelling differences between AmE and BrE. Webster's spelling changes were not only motivated by the desire for a closer link between pronunciation and spelling (the usual argument for spelling reform), but also by the political motivation that American English should be differentiated from British. In reflecting on American versus European values, he wrote (apparently--I got this from Wikipedia and it only gives a secondary reference):
America sees the absurdities—she sees the kingdoms of Europe, disturbed by wrangling sectaries, or their commerce, population and improvements of every kind cramped and retarded, because the human mind like the body is fettered 'and bound fast by the chords of policy and superstition': She laughs at their folly and shuns their errors...
So, feeling free to shun the 'absurdities' of traditional English spelling, he proposed many changes to the system. Here's a bit from the preface of his Essays and fugitiv writings (1790; quoted in Ford 1912:295) that illustrates some of the changes that he would have liked to have made, but which didn't make it into standard AmE:
In the essays, ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of Gower and Chaucer. The man who admits that the change of housbonde, mynde, ygone, moneth into husband, mind, gone, month iz an improovment, must acknowledge also the riting of helth, breth, rong, tung, munth to be an improovment. There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force ; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it will proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.
But some of the changes that made it into Webster's dictionary did take hold in AmE, particularly the loss of 'u' in (mostly French-derived) words ending in -our (where that -our is pronounced similarly to -er or -or): labo(u)r, colo(u)r, hono(u)r, endeavo(u)r, ardo(u)r, clamo(u)r, humo(u)r. The Merriam-Webster website has a nice little table illustrating some of Noah Webster's proposals and whether they succeeded in AmE.

Are these matters yet settled? Weirdly, the OED does not list the spellings endeavor and glamor, although it does list both versions of the spelling for the other -our/-or words. And BrE does not include the 'u' in certain derivations of these words, as explained at the humo(u)r entry in the OED:
The English formations, humoured, humourless, humoursome, are here spelt like the n. and vb.; but the derivatives formed on a Latin type, as humoral, humorist, humorous, are spelt humor- as in L. hum{omac}r{omac}sus, etc. (This agrees with Johnson's use.)
Given the need to remember when to put the 'u' in BrE (humour, yes; humorous, no), it's not terribly surprising to me that this 'u'-loss was one of Webster's more successful reforms. There's a certain logic and consistency to another of his successful reforms (discussed back here): the use of a single 'l' in words like travel(l)ing. But it doesn't take a lot of 'skil' to see some of the illogicalities and inconsistencies in the spellings introduced in his essay preface, quoted above...

And lest you think that Americans (not me!) are the only people bent on reforming English spelling, note that the Simplified Spelling Society is a UK-based organi{s/z}ation!

Footnote (hey, look how academic I am!)
* This is a Lynneism, not an Americanism.

Reference
Ford, Emily Ellsworth Fowler (compiler). 1912. Notes on the life of Noah Webster, vol. 1. New York: Burt Franklin.
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for those of you making gingerbread...

Oct 13, 2007
That's what I'm up to tonight. I do like to bake with old, familiar recipes, which means using my American cookbooks. As we've seen before, this can get you into trouble. So, for those of you making gingerbread in the wrong country tonight, here's a public service announcement:
(BrE) golden syrup = (more or less) (AmE) light molasses
(BrE) treacle = (more or less) (AmE) dark molasses
Back to the kitchen...

Postscript (the next day): The gingerbread went down well with the Sunday lunch crowd (though next time I'll double the ginger in it), and happily there are two pieces left for Better Half and me to eat at our leisure. But I shouldn't have been surprised when the stuff that I called caramel sauce was requested by the English lunch guests as toffee sauce.
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Abbr.

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