adverbial dead

May 23, 2008
For my birthday in October, Better Half promised me a weekend away before the birth of Grover. But since I (a) spent the first half of my third trimester in (the) hospital and (b) was cheated out of the second half entirely, that didn't happen. So this week he took Grover and me for a plush few days in the New Forest. And there, in the village of Hythe, I photographed this sign:

This was convenient, as I'd been meaning to take a photo of such a sign in Brighton, but since I'm not a tourist in Brighton, I rarely have my camera with me. So, it was great to see one while I had my camera at the ready on our mini holiday/vacation.

Needless to say (since I've posted a photo of it), this is not a sign you'd see in America. There, such a sign would probably have an unmodified slow or go slow.

In this context, dead is an adverb modifying slow. It makes me chuckle involuntarily for two reasons: (a) dead slow is not as idiomatic in AmE as in BrE and therefore the literal meaning occurs to me when I read it, and (b) in BrE adverbial dead is frequently a colloquialism, and therefore it seems a bit funny to see on a sign.

Since I get the literal meaning of dead slow when I read it, it strikes me as an oxymoron. If something's dead, it seems to me, it wouldn't move at all, so it couldn't be slow. But that "logic" is misplaced, since AmE, like BrE, uses dead as an adverb with other adjectives that indicate a glimmer (or more) of life--for example dead certain and dead tired. So, we could use dead with slow, but we tend not to.

If one hears a lot of colloquial BrE, one knows that dead can go with just about any adjective in certain informal registers. For example:
Dom looks dead sexy in eyeliner and black nail varnish (=AmE nail polish) [comment on blog.pinknews.co.uk]

... I also watched "Sky High", which was dead good. [...] It's odd really, some of it is DEAD POSH, like the lobby and the millions of people tidying plates away at breakfast, and some of it ISN'T, like the mucky marks on the walls and the water dripping on your head in reception. [...] We then had a LOVELY bit of tapas (ooh, it was DEAD nice, roast potatoes and hot garlicy [sic] tomato sauce, ACE!) ... [a (orig. AmE) mother-lode of deadness in a description of a Singapore holiday from MJ Hibbett--I haven't bothered to mark all the other Briticisms in that]
The OED, however, classes dead slow as a non-colloquial usage (going with dead calm and dead tired) rather than this all-purpose colloquial intensifier. At any rate, it all sounds dead British.
Read more
Labels: , , | 32 comments

more on orthographic r

May 14, 2008
Language Log has a discussion by Mark Liberman, reacting to a BBC News Magazine article on whether a certain country should be called Burma or Myanmar, that is relevant to our on-going observations about the contrast between 'r' in BrE orthography (spelling) versus its Received Pronunciation in post-vocalic (after vowel) contexts. The upshot is:

Leaving aside the notion that the local pronunciation is a "corruption", the BBC's discussion omits the most interesting part of the story, at least from an American point of view. They should have asked John Wells, whose discussion of the question I linked to at the time ("Myanmar is mama", 10/15/2007). And the explanations that I've heard and read this time around — yesterday on NPR, for example — again miss the key point. So here it is.

There is no 'r'!

Never was. Not in Burma and not in Myanmar. The 'r' is an orthographic imposition of post-rhotic British colonialists.
Click on the links to read more.
Read more
Labels: , , | 41 comments

snarky, sarky and narky

May 10, 2008
In the comments for the last post, Jo asks:
(By the way, had you run into the geeky AmE "snarky" to mean sarcastic? I'd always wondered where that word had come from, and now I think I see a family resemblance.)
As I said there, I love the word snarky because I find it rather evocative. But there are a couple of assumptions to challenge in Jo's query. First, it doesn't seem to be exclusively AmE--the first OED example of it is from the very English book The Railway Children. It comes from the dialectal verb snark, meaning 'to snort' and also 'to nag, find fault' (which has some cognates in other Germanic languages). AmE speakers may use it more commonly than BrE speakers these days, or it may still be regional--I don't know--but these may be reasons why Jo assumes it's AmE.

Second, it doesn't quite mean 'sarcastic', like BrE sarky, though it could readily be used of someone who was being sarcastic. It means something more like 'irritable, bad-tempered' (OED). If someone's being sarcastic, it's often a symptom of bad temper, so one can see how the two have come to be linked in (some of) our minds. An AmE word that comes to mind is snit, which means a little fit of bad temper. I wonder if the case could be made for some sound symbolism between /sn/ and bad temper. /sn/ is onomatopoetic in words for nose-breathing-actions: sniff, snort, etc. And bad temper is getting one's nose out of joint or possibly turning one's nose up at something (and we get /sn/ in snob...). [There seems to be at least one academic paper on the topic, so I won't go any further on this...probably not news.]

Now, a BrE speaker may be led to believe that snarky is AmE because they're more accustomed to (BrE) narky, which the OED gives as a synonym of snarky. This is derived from to nark 'annoy', hence (BrE) narked 'annoyed'.

Now, I was surprised to learn that the 'police informer' sense of nark is related to this. It comes from a sense of nark meaning 'nose'--so a nark noses around for the police. But in AmE we also have narc, short for 'narcotics officer'. I always believed that the informer sense was based on narcotics too. This is why one shouldn't make assumptions about etymologies based on the apparent similarities between contemporary words. It's likely that narc was influenced by nark, and that narky, snarky and sarky have influenced each other. Still, they have different roots.
Read more
Labels: , | 35 comments

blinkers and indicators

May 9, 2008
Better Half, Grover and I were waiting to cross the street/road yesterday. BH and I were both annoyed when the oncoming car that was making us wait suddenly turned left instead of passing us. Simultaneously, we made sarky (BrE informal, = sarcastic) comments. The funny thing about our comments was that each of us had accommodated the other's dialect. That is to say, BH used an AmE term and I used BrE:
BH: Nice use of your (AmE) blinkers! (=BrE indicators)
Me: Nice (BrE) indicating! (=AmE signal(l)ing)
In AmE, the more formal term for blinkers is turn signals.

Is dialect accommodation the definition of true love?
Read more
Labels: | 20 comments

bowls

May 8, 2008
I'm embarrassed by how much television I've been watching lately. On further reflection, perhaps that's not true--maybe I'm just embarrassed by how much television I've found myself admitting to watching. But it does raise lots of bloggable issues, so here I go again with the admitting.

Better Half came home tonight to find me watching The Big Bang Theory with a sleeping baby on my lap. (My excuse: I was stuck--I couldn't very well disturb the baby, who hates to nap and so must be tricked into doing it on my lap. So, nothing to do but power up the remote control.) In this episode, the boys are preparing for the "Physics Bowl". When they started practi{c/s}ing for the Bowl with physics quiz questions, BH said, "Oh, that's what they're doing! I couldn't figure out why physicists would get so excited about bowling!"

The AmE bowl in Physics Bowl is the same as the more general College Bowl--a contest between (usually) students in which they answer (usually) academic questions. The UK equivalent to the College Bowl is University Challenge, a television program(me) in which students from different universities (or colleges within the Oxbridge/London universities) compete on television. (Perhaps some Americans will have seen this in the book/film Starter for Ten--if it was released over there...) University Challenge was based on the College Bowl, but it has overtaken its ancestor in terms of popularity. The College Bowl was televised in the US from the 1950s until 1970, but University Challenge is a television institution that's still very popular today. My own bowl experience was to be in the History Bowl when I was in the 8th grade. In that case, it was a county-wide competition for which I had to learn much more than I ever wanted to know about the Erie Canal. (I stayed home on the day of the final, insisting that I was [AmE-preferred] sick/[BrE-preferred] ill, but I think my mother was right in insisting that it was just butterflies. Oh, the regret.)

I'm fairly certain that the name of these kinds of contests (which hasn't made it into the OED or American Heritage) is derived from the use of bowl to refer to certain post-season football (=BrE American football) games, such as the Rose Bowl, which are played between (AmE) college (= BrE university) teams. (Plus the Super Bowl, which is played between professional teams.) They are so-called because of the bowl shape of the stadiums (or stadia, if you prefer--the spellchecker doesn't) in which they were first played.

The kind of bowl(ing) that Better Half was imagining is generally called bowling in AmE, but ten-pin bowling in BrE. (In AmE bowling can also refer to variants like candlepin bowling. You can look these things up if you'd like to know the difference! The social class implications of bowling in America are noted in the comments of a recent post.) This distinguishes it from the game more traditionally played in England, (lawn) bowls, which is closely related to the continental games boules/pétanque and bocce (which is the more familiar game in America, thanks to Italian immigrants). Another kind of bowling found in the UK (more than the US), particularly in the Southwest, is skittles, the game from which modern indoor bowling is derived. This provides me with an excuse to post one of my photos of the Children's Parade in the Brighton Festival. This year the theme was favo(u)rite games, and one school chose skittles. (It's not the best photo I took, but I've suddenly had qualms about posting a photo of other people's children.) In the US, I imagine most people would associate skittles with a (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweet.

(...which compels an anecdote. I was at a party in Waco, Texas once and met a man who told me he was in Research and Development at M&M/Mars, one of the bigger employers in town. I asked what he'd developed. His wife proudly put her arm in his and beamed, "He invented Skittles!" As you can see, one meets Very Important People in Waco. And I should join Anecdoters Anonymous.)

The verb to bowl is used to describe what one does with the projectile in all of these games, but is also used to describe how the ball is delivered (or not) to the bat in cricket--and hence the person who does that delivering is the bowler. The closest thing in popular American sports is the pitcher, who pitches a baseball.

Going further afield, another bowl that differs is found in the (AmE) bathroom/(BrE informal) loo. While AmE speakers clean the toilet bowl, BrE speakers stick their brushes into the toilet's pan. I'm not absolutely sure that BrE speakers don't also use bowl in this sense (do you?), but it jars whenever I hear people speak about the toilet pan, as it makes me imagine something very shallow.

Those are the bowl differences I've noticed myself, although the OED also gives a special Scottish English sense: a marble. Their only example is from 1826, so you Scots will have to tell us whether it's current!
Read more
Labels: , , , , , , | 27 comments

uh, er, um, erm and eh

May 4, 2008
When I was young, some of my favo(u)rite books were by British authors. The title of one, Five Dolls and a Monkey, I was interested to find, is (until I publish this post) cited only once on the web. Am I the only person who loved that book? After I grew out of Five Dolls, I made my way through Agatha Christie's oeuvre. And in one or the other of these books I first encountered er and erm, as in this transcription of a comedy sketch (please keep in mind that this is an example of the English poking fun at themselves—as they do so well—and not poking fun at African Americans):
CLIVE (playing an interviewer):
Erm, I think it can be truly said that the Americans have, er, their soul singers, and we English have ars-oul singers. And, er, Bo is one our leading, er, soul singers.
DEREK (playing 'Bo Duddley'):
Arsehole singers, yes.
CLIVE:
Bo, I-, I wanted to ask you first of all, erm, .....
DEREK:
Yes.
CLIVE:
This is obviously a sort of, er, boogie, er, .....
DEREK:
This is a boogie, erm, .....
CLIVE:
What? Jive stuff, is it?
DEREK:
Jive boogie woogie song, erm, and, erm, it is-, it is a, a story of ..... well, shall I, shall I sort of go through it?
CLIVE:
Yes, I-, I-, I was thinking that some of the lyrics for, er-rm, English speaking audiences might be a little obscure.
DEREK:
Absolutely. Well let me .....
CLIVE:
I wonder what the-, what-, what-, what it really is all about?
DEREK:
Well, let me-, let me just go through it, erm, for you. Ah: (sings and plays piano:) "#Mamma's got a brand new bag!" Er, "Mamma's got a brand new bag", er, this means, erm, that the-, the Harlem mother has gone out into the bustling markets of Harlem .....
CLIVE:
Yes.
DEREK:
..... er, to buy a gaily coloured plastic bag. Erm, and there's a certain amount of pride in this: Mamma's got a brand new bag.
CLIVE:
I-, I suppo-, I suppose a gaily coloured plastic bag is, er, a bit of status symbol in Harlem.
DEREK:
It certainly is. Certainly is. Obviously, er, you know, sign of a birthday or something like that.

Now, when I was a 12-year-old reading British novels, I liked to read them out loud, in my best "English" accent, probably gleaned from Dick Van Dyke's murder of Cockney. One of the unfortunate effects of this was that I pronounced Hercule Poirot as something like "Ercule Pirate" (never mind that he's Belgian—he was in England and so must speak as my 12-year-old self believed the English to speak). But another effect was that I believed that when British people paused in speech, they made sounds that rhymed with my American pronunciations of her and worm. And for much of my life, I continued to believe that there were millions of English-speaking people somewhere (or somewhen) pronouncing /r/s in their hesitations. 

 But then I had a baby, and the penny dropped. I regret to say that this is not because motherhood has made me smarter/cleverer. It's because you spend a lot of time watching tv with the subtitles on while trapped under a baby. Watching in this way, I've become addicted to Eggheads, but when it's not 6 p.m., I often end up watching Friends or Scrubs, since one or the other seems to be on at all times. And it was only when seeing er and erm in the subtitles for American characters in these American sitcoms that I reali{s/z}ed: it's not that the British put different sounds into their filled pauses, it's just that they typically spell those pauses er and erm instead of uh and um. Since many BrE dialects do not pronounce the /r/ after vowels in such contexts, the /r/ here is just to indicate that the vowel is not a proper 'e' but a long schwa-like vowel. And before any of you complain that I should not have been allowed to have a doctorate in Linguistics if it took me this long to figure out something this basic, let me tell you: I've thought the same thing myself. I think the technical term for this is: Duh! When I mentioned a few posts ago that I'd be covering er/erm/uh/um soon, reader David Up North (as I'll call him to differentiate him from the other Davids I've mentioned before) wrote to ask:

I was interested to see in the comments to your latest blog that you were planning an article on 'er' and 'erm'. I wondered if you'd be covering 'eh?' as well? It's often pronounced (or possibly replaced by) 'ay?' (or something like that – rhymes with 'hey', but I don't recall ever seeing anyone writing either as 'eye dialect' representations of the sound, they usually use 'eh?'). It came to mind because I've occasionally seen Americans transcribe the sound as 'aye?' – which is obviously wrong.

I can't imagine why an American would transcribe eh as aye (pronounced like I in every dialect I know) and haven't seen it happen, myself. I speak a northern AmE dialect that, like Canadian English, ends many sentences with eh? (Famously parodied by the Great White North sketches on SCTV: How's it going, eh?) And when we write that, we spell it eh and pronounce it to rhyme with day. (I was happy to discover upon moving to South Africa that SAfE has the same kind of interjection, but it's pronounced hey. It was very easy to adjust to. Much better than when I moved to Massachusetts and was mocked relentlessly for the ehs that I'd never noticed myself saying.) 

 The problem we're seeing here is that these interjections are usually spoken and generally only written when one is trying to represent natural speech. Since they're not part of the written language (since they're not needed in the same way when the language isn't immediately interactional), people aren't used to spelling them, and thus the spellings have been slower to become standardi{s/z}ed than the spellings for nouns and verbs. Even within AmE, I find that the informal version of yes is spelt in different ways (yeah, yeh, yea, ya) by different people. To me, yeah is informal 'yes', and yea is pronounced 'yay' and is a positive vote, yay is what you say when you're giddy and ya is what South Africans say instead of yeah. I believe that my spellings are the 'standard' spellings for AmE, but, as I say, I've seen a lot of variation and it's hard to 'correct' such spellings, since the 'standard' is not as well-established for these mostly-spoken sounds. It's worth noting that all of these discourse particles have meanings, though they can be hard to put into words. My favo(u)rite quotation from the OED's entry for er is:

1958 Aspects of Translation 37 The really astute Englishman..must feign a certain diffident hesitation, put in a few well-placed — ers.
The interjections' meanings are generally the same in AmE and BrE, but what may differ, as indicated by the above quotation, is how often and why people use them. One reason to use er/uh is to feign hesitation—to make it seem like you're reluctant to say something. Another reason is to hold your place in the conversation—to indicate that although you're not saying anything at this very second, you intend to finish your thought, so no one should interrupt you. It may be that people in different places from different backgrounds use these sounds for these purposes at different rates and in different situations. I believe that the stereotypes would have it that the British use er/erm to hesitate--not to rush into committing themselves to any proposition--and that Americans use um/uh because they're inarticulately rushing to commit themselves to all sorts of opinions. Nevertheless, both American uh/um and British er/erm have the potential to be used in either way by individuals.
Read more
Labels: , , , , , | 72 comments

academic titles and address

Apr 30, 2008
American reader Lance wrote yesterday to ask about how academics are addressed in BrE. I know, this must be a record for me, responding to a query via blog in less than 24 hours, but I have to stay up until some boiled water cools...so what the heck. (Ah, parenthood--or at least parenthood in the UK, where less chlorination of the water means sterili{s/z}ing any water that comes near your baby until the child's first birthday. In the US, you can get away without sterili{s/z}ing at all, apparently. But I'm sure that most British folk will argue that less chlorination is better. No fluoride in the water here either.)

So, seeing as time is limited, I'm going to let Lance do a lot of the talking:
In your 27 June 07 blog entry, you discussed the differences in British and American university positions.

What you didn't mention -- and I need to figure out, for reasons too lengthy to burden you with -- is how university-level academics are addressed.

I'm aware, for instance, of the reverse snobbery among British doctors that leads to GPs being addressed "doctor" while specialists are addressed as "Mr/Mrs" (you also wrote about this). Is there something similar at work among academics?

He then goes on to list his questions, which I'll answer one by one. But before I start, I must stress that I've only worked at one university in the UK--and one that prides itself on its 'radical' history. So, I expect that people from other (BrE, informal) unis will have other experiences to report in the comments.
1) Do British academics with Ph.Ds go by "Doctor"? I ask because I ran across this web page. A corresponding US university web page would refer to all these people as "Dr. XYZ" instead of "Professor XYZ." Part of this is, of course, because every lecturer at a US school is a professor, but it's also because Ph.Ds here seem to jealously guard the privilege of being called "Doctor."
Me at Sussex graduation.
For some reason, our UK academic-gown
(BrE) hire company thinks US doctorates
wear tams instead of mortarboards
In the US, just about all (AmE) tenure-track academic positions have Professor in their titles (Assistant, Professor, Associate Professor, (full) Professor). All of those people can be called Professor [Name]. In the UK,  Professor is only the highest level. It's not a level that everyone expects to reach when they start their careers, and I can think of UK academics who I would consider to be top in their (narrowly defined) fields who made it all the way to retirement without making it past Senior Lecturer (roughly, Associate Professor in US terms). So, it's the reverse of the situation in the US, where any academic might be called professor, but where not every professor has a doctorate. (In particular in the creative arts, a Master of Fine Arts is considered to be a suitable qualification for a professorship. In most other fields at most universities, a doctorate is de rigueur.) So, in the US, it's 'special' to have a doctorate. But in the UK, there are far more academics with doctorates than there are professors, so it's 'special' to be professor. In both cases, it's the higher status term or address that's used—so it's unlike the reverse snobbery of surgeons.

The University of Southampton web page that Lance cites lists the members of the University Executive Group (i.e. the top committee at the university). All of the academics listed there are 'Professor' because usually only professors are considered for top posts like Vice Chancellor or Dean. The 'Misters' on the list are presumably not academics (e.g. the Director of Finance). It was rather depressing to read that only one out of the 10 top people at Southampton is a woman—but then, it's no different at my own university.
2) If the answer to #1 is "no" or "it depends," what are the rules?
Well, the answer wasn't 'no', so I feel a little silly including this question. But I need it in order to have a 2 between 1 and 3.
3) If graduate students at a UK school are called "post-grads," what are graduate teaching assistants called?
Their positions are called Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) at my university, but this term is limited to positions that are part of a means to recruit students to a (post-)graduate program(me). In other words, you're a GTA if you're getting some kind of (AmE) tuition/(BrE) fee remission. Otherwise, you're a part-time tutor like other part-time tutors, and at my university, as of a few years ago, the title of that position is Associate Tutor. Such people would be called Dr(.)* So-and-so if they have a doctorate and Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss So-and-so if they don't.

Actually, they'll only be called by those titles in print. At our university, with the exception of some foreign students (including, when they first get here, some Americans) who are uncomfortable with such informality, students and faculty† are on first-name terms. I wonder whether this might be different at other UK universities. (Is it?)

American colleges/universities differ among themselves with respect to terms of address for faculty members when used by students. At the large, research-led, state universities where I studied, everyone addressed each other by their given names. But when I and my friends ended up teaching at smaller, private colleges, we found ourselves being addressed as Professor or Doctor. (My former employer encouraged Professor rather than Doctor, so as not to create a noticeable division between the doctors and non-doctors.)
4) Are post-grads going for their doctorates addressed differently than post-grads studying for their masters?
Everyone's just addressed by their names. If we needed to put their titles in something in print, it would be their regular non-academic titles (Miss, Mr, etc.). In the UK we do make a distinction between research degrees and taught degrees, though not in the terms of address. Most masters students are on taught degrees, which like bachelor's degrees, involve taking courses and possibly writing a (BrE) dissertation/(AmE) thesis at the end. A research degree is one that doesn't involve taking courses--just researching toward(s) a (BrE) thesis/(AmE) dissertation. Many British universities are now heading away from the tradition of research-only doctorates and looking toward(s) American universities for models for partly-taught doctoral program(me)s. I must say, I think this is a good thing. Graduates of North American doctoral program(me)s (orig. AmE) have a big jump on many British graduates in the job market, because we were forced to study much more than the narrow area that we wrote our dissertations/theses on. So, even though I'm a semanticist/pragmaticist, I had to take doctoral-level courses in all areas of linguistics, and it's allowed me to confidently say in interviews "oh yes, I could teach that, if you needed me to" (and to even have some ideas about how to teach it). But the doctoral program(me) that I entered took me five years to complete, which is a normal amount of time in the US. In the UK, research-only doctoral program(me)s are three years, and most of the newfangled teaching+research doctorates that I've seen are four years.

* BrE usually writes abbreviated titles like Dr and Mrs without (BrE) full stops/(AmE) periods, whereas this would be considered an error in AmE. But it's too messy to type (.) at the end of every title here, so I haven't.

† Postscript (later in the day): I should have mentioned that the use of faculty to mean 'members of teaching staff' is originally and chiefly AmE, though it's heard more and more in BrE.
Read more
Labels: , , | 42 comments

rack

Apr 27, 2008
From the "Is this too personal to blog about?" file:

Better Half caught a bit of the sitcom Scrubs the other day (hard not to--between E4 and E4+1, it's broadcast for at least 6 hours each day), in which someone referred to a female character's rack. BH was not yet familiar with this AmE slang term, which the Online Etymological Dictionary explains as 'Meaning "set of antlers" is first attested 1945, Amer.Eng.; hence slang sense of "a woman's breasts" (especially if large), c.1980s.' Unfortunately, BH has taken the opportunity to make a new rhyme to sing to Grover:
Baby has a snack
from her mummy's rack.
At least the juxtaposition of BrE mummy and AmE rack is amusing...

Speaking of amusing, George Saunders provides a service for British travel(l)ers in his American Psyche column in The Guardian yesterday: "Many of you will travel to the US this summer, where a pound will now buy you a luxury condo in Beverly Hills. Here's a lexicon, so no one will suspect you're British and marry you just because he/she finds the British adorable." Click here to read his lexicon.
Read more
Labels: , | 22 comments

toasty and toastie

Apr 23, 2008
Back in the comments for the milk and tea post, a debate has arisen about toast racks. Since mine is the only opinion that reflects the One Real Truth, I repeat my contribution here, so that everyone may benefit (again):
Toast racks are evil. The entire point of toast is that it should be warm. That way, the butter melts into it and it's yummy. The toast rack is the most efficient way to make toast cold fast.

The American way is to serve toast piled up, sometimes wrapped in a cloth napkin in a basket, so that the heat is retained. Many British people find this horrible. They say "but the toast gets soggy!" I do not understand this fear of soggy toast--and I believe that the sogginess of piled-up toast is much exaggerated. (I like it soggy with butter, after all.)

But cold toast, that is something to be feared!
Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast. I have a toast-based lifestyle. I have at least one friendship that is built on toast. And now I've thought of a linguistic angle on the toast rack issue, giving me a legitimate excuse to cast blame on toast racks again and more.

The linguistic angle is the adjective toasty, meaning 'warm and co{s/z}y'. Although the OED does not mark this as AmE, I've had to explain it to English folk a number of times and all of the OED's examples for this sense are American, so I think we can safely say that it is 'chiefly AmE'. (The OED offers another sense, 'having a slightly burnt flavour', which is particularly used by tea [chiefly AmE] buffs regardless of dialect.) So, why does BrE lack this evocative adjective of comfiness? It must be the toast racks! Since toast-racked toast is cold and cardboard-like with a coating of waxy butter keeping the jam at a safe distance from the bread, one would never associate it with the lovely feelings one has when, say, wrapped in a (AmE) comforter (duvet) by an open fire with a mug full of cocoa (= hot chocolate) while snow gently falls outside. Or when one puts one's feet into slippers that have been left near a radiator. Ooooh, lovely.

I've had to explain toasty to BrE speakers on a number of occasions because of its comparative form toastier, which is a relatively frequent eight-letter (AmE) bingo/(BrE) bonus word in the world of competitive Scrabble. In fact, it's probably more often played not as a bingo/bonus, but as part of a cross-play in which one adds the R at the end of an already-played seven-letter bingo/bonus, toastie. This one is a word that Americans might have to ask about (although they might mistakenly assume that it's an alternative spelling of toasty). A (BrE) toastie is a toasted sandwich; so, you might (or I might) go to the (BrE) tea bar or café and order a cheese toastie. In AmE this would be a toasted cheese (sandwich) or a grilled cheese (sandwich). For me, the AmE terms differ in that a toasted cheese is made under the (AmE) broiler/(BrE) grill, but a grilled cheese is made in a frying pan (which may be called a skillet in AmE)--although I've met AmE speakers who don't make that distinction. If it were made in one of those sandwich-press things, I think I'd call it a grilled cheese, but I can't be sure about my intuition on that--one doesn't see those machines as often in the US. In the UK (Land of Sandwiches), every tea bar has them, and they make toasties. Making such sandwiches in frying pans is not so common--I've introduced my in-laws to the wonders of the grilled (i.e. fried) sandwich through what I like to call the Three C Sandwich: cheddar, chicken and cranberry sauce. (Make it with half-fat cheddar (Waitrose's is best) and diet bread, and it can be done for under 200 calories. Be sure to put the cranberry sauce between the cheese and chicken, so that it doesn't soak the bread.)

And while this probably should be a separate post, another thing to note about toasties/toasted sandwiches is the order in which their fillings are listed. In the US, I'd have a toasted cheese or a toasted bacon and cheese, whereas in the UK, I'd be more likely to have a cheese and bacon. In both countries, it would be cheese and tomato (though, of course, the pronunciation of tomato would differ). These are what is known in the linguistics trade as "irreversible binomials": two words on either side of a conjunction (and in these cases) that idiomatically occur in a particular order. So, one says bread and butter rather than butter and bread and gin and tonic rather than tonic and gin. A generali{s/z}ation that one can usually make about such food binomials is that the first item is the one that's more "substantive"--the "meat", as it were, in the formula (hence meat and potatoes/meat and two veg, not potatoes and meat or two veg and meat). So, the gin is the stronger item in gin and tonic and it goes first, and bread is the heart of the bread-and-butter combination. BrE and AmE agree that in cheese/tomato combinations, the cheese outweighs the tomato in importance, but often disagree in the combination of cheese and meat. Better Half (although vegetarian) says that he'd say cheese and bacon but ham and cheese, but the latter may be AmE-influenced. Cheese and ham is heard in the UK (and it was all I heard in South Africa), but in the US ham and cheese is irreversible. Because it's not quite as irreversible in the UK, I'd say that there's some unsureness about which item is the 'important' bit in a ham/cheese or bacon/cheese sandwich (the cheese because it's basic to the toasted sandwich experience, or the ham because it's meat?), whereas in the US meat reliably trumps cheese.

The photo of the toast rack, in case you're the type of perverted soul who wants a toast rack, is from the website of an American company, The British Shoppe (I take no responsibility for the [chiefly BrE] twee spelling), where it's listed as 'Toast Rack (English style)'.
Read more
Labels: , , , | 75 comments

language play--not getting it

Apr 17, 2008
It's come up before on this blog that it sometimes happens that people will see an error or non-standardism in English, spoken or written by a speaker of another dialect, and assume that that way of saying/writing is standard in the other dialect. It's a shame, though, when such 'errors' are intentionally non-standard, because then the assumption that it's "just a different dialect" leads the assumer to miss some nuance of the communication. For instance, sometimes I'll say to Better Half, Ya done good. By putting it into a non-standard dialect (and not a dialect that I speak), I'm trying to add a bit of light-hearted affection to the compliment--something that's not communicated by You did well. Better Half knows enough about AmE to get this, but if I said it to a student, they might assume that that's part of the standard dialect that I usually speak and not get that I was trying to build rapport.

Anyhow, a nice example of this 'assuming it's standard' behavio(u)r came up on recently on the (AmE) copy-/(BrE)sub-editors' blog The Engine Room. There, blogger JD admitted to having believed until recently that Americans spell cemetery "sematary" because of the spelling in the title of the Stephen King book, Pet Sematary. In the book, one is supposed to understand that it's misspelt because children wrote the "cemetery's" sign.

That reminds me of being informed by BrE speakers that "thru is the American spelling of through". No, it's not. It's an abbreviated spelling form that is used mainly on signs (or painted on a road surface), and thus it's become the typical way of spelling it in drive-thru. You won't see thru replacing through in American newspaper articles (though it might be handy for an occasional headline--but I cannot recall seeing it in any) or novels--and you'd better not use it in essays for school/college/university.

Do you have any stories of misunderstood intentions due to "it must be the way they say it in American/British English" assumptions?
Read more
Labels: , , , , | 63 comments
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

The book!

View by topic

Twitter

Abbr.

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