Separated by a Common Language

Cathy wrote the other day to ask:

I've been watching "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard" on Masterpiece Theatre in the US. [...] I noticed an interesting phrase Mrs. Pritchard used, "Chinese whispers." I thought at first she meant what Americans mean when we say children are playing telephone or whisper down the lane. Then I thought, in the context it was used in, that it wouldn't be appropriate to suggest the person was playing a child's game. Mrs. Pritchard's right hand man (I can't remember his title) has passed on a bit of gossip that was passed on through several people. Any thoughts?

Coincidentally, the night before, Better Half and I had been watching the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David (surprise, surprise) makes a faux pas in playing telephone at a party, and BH asked, 'That's Chinese whispers, right?' Chinese whispers and the telephone game are indeed names for the same game in BrE and AmE, respectively. (And this came up once before in the comments for a previous post.)

What has thrown Cathy off is the fact that Chinese whispers is much more likely to be used in an extended or metaphorical way than this sense of telephone is. This is probably not too surprising, since telephone has other senses that would make the metaphor less clear. The OED lists Russian scandal as having the same two senses as Chinese whispers (though I've only ever heard the latter):

(a) a game in which a whispered message, after being passed from player to player, is contrasted in its original and final versions; (b) gossip inaccurately transmitted

People disagree about whether Chinese whispers should be avoided due to racist connotations. It makes me a little uncomfy, but then I don't find myself needing to say it very often, so I don't worry about it too much. It also reminds me of an AmE term (at least I've not found a BrE speaker who knows it yet---but I haven't asked that many) for another silly pastime with an ethnically (BrE) dodgy name: the Chinese fire drill. Wikipedia describes it as:

A Chinese fire drill is a prank, or perhaps an expression of high spirits, that was popular in the United States during the 1960s. It is performed when a car is stopped at a red traffic light, at which point all of the car's occupants get out, run around the car, and return to their own (or go to other) seats. Chinese fire drills are sometimes executed when one needs to get something from the trunk of a car. Occasionally, if one of the participants is late to get inside the car, the others might drive off without him/her. People have reported this phenomenon as early as the 1940s, so it is possible that the phrase was current at the time, but simply was not written down that early.

The term is also used as a figure of speech to mean any large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise.

When I was a child (a bit later than the dates in the Wikipedia article), the driver never got involved--because the driver was Mom or Dad. But we'd try our luck and yell "Chinese fire drill!" and judge how much trouble we were going to get into for trying to do it before opening the car doors. It always sounded like a marvelous idea to my young mind, but I don't know that we ever executed a true Chinese fire drill.

If someone were to ask you "How are you feeling in yourself?" or "How do you feel in yourself?" what would you think they were asking?

I've been having a lot of medical appointments lately, and I am asked this nearly every time. (And then my BrE-speaking friends ask me the same thing when I say I've been to the doctor's.) It has struck me as something I'm not accustomed to being asked (and not because I'm a stranger to doctors!). So, I've had a look on the internet, and found that how you feel in yourself is used on American sites, but it tends to be referring to something more like self-esteem than how one feels physically, as in the following examples:

When you act as if you are confident you will not only feel it you will appear it to the world around you and you are likely to find this magnifies how you feel in yourself. [sleepingtiger.org]

There is a tie---an invisible umbilical cord---between how you feel in your body and how you feel in yourself. [firstourselves.com]

Now, at the doctor's office, I'm definitely being asked about my physical self, not my psychological self. But I don't recall being asked this when under the care of American doctors. So, the question is: is this an AmE/BrE difference? Let's ask you! If someone asks how you feel 'in yourself', how would you interpret it? Is this something you're used to hearing in a medical context?

Postscript (18 Nov): Just saw an ad(vert) for Danone Activia pro-biotic yog(h)urt, in which the woman who took the "Activia challenge" says "I feel healthier in myself" (thanks to the yog(h)urt, apparently). Checking out their UK website, it says: "It helps keep your digestive system ticking away nicely in the background so you can get on with life more easily and feel more comfortable in yourself." There are videos of their ad(vert)s on the 'Testimonials' part of the site, but they're not downloading for me at the moment--but they might allow you to hear the use of in myself by a native speaker. In the US, the company is called Dannon and they market the same yog(h)urt, but there's no in my/yourself on the US website.

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!