like-less predicates

Jun 6, 2009
Ben Zimmer, the man responsible for my blogging about shit, has sent me a number of BrE sentences over the past few months. Each of these did not contain the word like where an American like Ben might've expected it. And, really, that was the point of the scatological post that Ben inspired too. He'd noted that BrE speakers are more likely to say I feel shit whereas AmE speakers would have to say I feel like shit. My response then was to say that shit can act as an adjective in BrE--and that is true. After all, one can (if one is BrE-speaking) say something like What a shit film.

But it's also the case that one can say I feel [NOUN PHRASE] in BrE and mean 'I feel like [NOUN PHRASE]'. Ben's example came from The Telegraph, in a story about a man who was injured while using Twitter:
"I guess you could say I feel a right Twit," he said.
For the grammar geeks out there, I'll quote Algeo's British or American English on the topic, "A group of copular verbs (...) have predominantly adjectival complements in common-core English, but also have nominal subject complements in British more frequently than in American." In other words, in AmE or BrE, you could say I feel old (because my students told me yesterday that Brad Pitt is 'a sexy old man'). You could also say I feel like an unsexy geriatric case, because the like phrase in that case plays an adjectival role in the sentence. But in BrE, you can also forgo the like and just go straight to the nouny part of the description. [In the Twit example, we also have the BrE noun-intensifier right, but let's save that for a rainier day.)

Here are some examples showing more of this pattern:
sound: He sounded a complete mess. [Jeremy Clarke in The Independent]

look: Joey Barton has made me look a fool. [Oliver Holt on Mirror.co.uk]

appear: I was trying to appear a total gentleman! [on ducatisti.co.uk]

Smell and taste are not found as regularly in the 'smell/taste like' sense, but a BrE expression one can find with them (and look and sound) is to [PERCEPTION VERB] a treat. So:
The honeysuckle shampoo is just gorgeous and she smells a treat. [customer feedback for a dog grooming salon]

Do you love cooking simple, no fuss meals that taste a treat? [ad(vert) on FilmBirmingham site]

Nokia E63 Handset Looks A Treat [digital lifestyles]
And if something looks or tastes or is a treat, then it can also (BrE) go down a treat--i.e. be received well.
BSC Seminars Go Down a Treat at Health and Safety 09 Show [British Safety Council]
If we were to to say any of these in AmE, we'd probably have to put a like in (and get rid of all the other Briticisms in the examples)--i.e. it looks like a treat, made me look like a fool, etc. The one that really confuses AmE speakers is (BrE) go down a bomb, which is not only ungrammatical for us without the like, but also means the opposite of what we'd think it means. If a performance bombs in AmE, it is horrid and no one likes it. But if it goes down a bomb in BrE, it's fantastic and gets a wildly positive reception. Ben sent me an example that had to do with Susan Boyle--the now-famous also-ran in the Britain's Got Talent television (BrE) programme/(AmE) show, and he's blogged about it here.

There are other things one could say about going down in BrE (you stop that sniggering right now!)...but we'l just leave that on the ever-increasing backlog of stuff to write about.

But if you want to know what really goes down a treat, check out this review of Better Half's work from today's Guardian! Then go and buy the entire SmartPass back catalog(ue), so that we can keep Grover in shoes!
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sarcasm and irony

May 30, 2009
I’m very happy to welcome my first guest blogger, a student who’s finished the work for her Sussex degree in English Language and Film Studies, which included a dissertation comparing British irony and sarcasm to American—the latter of which has seen more academic attention. Rather than twiddling her thumbs while awaiting her result, she has graciously allowed us some insight into her work. Gentlepeople, I give you Solo:


As I’m sure you’re aware, the British are very fond of saying that ‘Americans don’t get irony’ and expressing over-inflated national pride in our astounding power of sarcasm. It of course isn’t the case that Americans don't get irony [see this past post--ed.], and while BrE applications of sarcasm can be very subtle, we’re not the unequivocal masters of the form. For example, I always thought the typically AmE expression ‘I could care less’ to be a particularly stupid grammatical error on their part, until this week when I saw it pointed out here, that the expression is in fact intended sarcastically (see also this past post, which is not so kind to Americans--ed.). Perhaps we misinterpret this because in our arrogance we Brits don’t expect sarcasm from Americans without all the attendant cues, bells and whistles. Or maybe because I’ve mainly seen it written down in novels and forums, rather than heard it said aloud.

Over the course of my research into the differences between American and British (especially English) sarcasm however, it became clear to me that the difference isn’t so much in the way we use it, as in the way we define it. While the AmE definition emphasi{s/z}es negativity and saying the opposite of what is meant, Brits seem to have a far broader definition, which includes humorous exchange, clever wordplay and affectionate insults or criticisms of others (even those we don’t know, which I think may be the most fundamental cultural difference).

To put it another way, there are things we British will do in conversation which we would call sarcastic, but which Americans would not. For example, in the irreverent media, Sir Bob Geldof, of Live Aid fame, is frequently referred to as ‘Saint Bob’. Now this is obviously not entirely sincere, but it isn’t fully contemptuous either; we are mocking his interminable altruism and campaigning, but we also respect all his charity work and dedicated parenting. So although we don’t completely mean that he is a saint, we also don’t mean that he isn’t and I think most Brits would refer to that as sarcasm, but I’m also fairly sure our American counterparts would not. Feel free to correct this flagrant generali{s/z}ation ☺

In AmE ‘sarcasm’ seems to be very much a subordinate term for a specific type of pragmatic use. (Many theorists will argue it’s a subcategory of verbal irony, but I won’t go into that here.) But in my (humble) opinion it has a much broader application BrE. Thoughts would be much appreciated.

I shall furnish this largely speculative theori{s/z}ing with some spurious exemplification:

If a friend of mine were to be self-deprecating above and beyond the call of Britishness, I might say something obvious like “Yeah, cos (=AmE ’cause--ed.) you’re the worst national award-winning photographer St. Martin’s [a top art college—ed.] has ever had,” in a heavily sarcastic tone. Equally I might agree in a very sincere sounding way with “Yeah, you are quite sh*t.” Or I might say “Don’t say that, you’re actually really good,” or “You’re not that bad”--both in a way that made it sound like I didn’t think they were good at all. Then again I might feign ignorance and comment “You were lucky to get in really,” or ask “How did you manage to pass the course?” in an ingenuous fashion.

All of these I would quite happily and definitively class as sarcastic utterances, but my research suggests that under the AmE theoretical rubric, they would fall into other categories. I think our predilection for teasing each other and continually (BrE) ‘taking the piss’ has come to be associated with sarcasm as an everyday conversational form in a way that it has not in AmE, where there seems to be more of a time and place for it.

Regional and gender differences in production of sarcasm have been quite conclusively demonstrated in the literature. Megan Dress and others (2008) carried out some research comparing attitudes to sarcasm and likelihood of use between Northern USans, from upstate New York, and Southern USans from Memphis. They found that the Northerners were far more likely to find sarcasm amusing and assume friendly intentions than their Southern equivalents and therefore much more likely to use it spontaneously. The difference was even more marked between the two sets of men. The Northern perspective seems to be much closer to the British attitude, though the sources Dress et al(.) provide suggest that the examples of use may still not be as broad as the unofficial BrE definition seems to allow. A majority of respondents in this study mentioned the negativity of sarcasm, though not an overwhelming majority. This might suggest that the insistence on sarcasm as a negative form is generated by linguists and literary types more than speakers.
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trucks and lorries

May 25, 2009
Three years ago when I started this blog, I wrote:
Dictionaries of British/American English mostly cover well-known variants like truck/lorry and elevator/lift But these are just the tip of the iceberg. What I intend to cover here are words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis.
But as we've seen already with chips and crisps and jumper and sweater, it's often the case that the relationship between these 'well-known variants' is far more complex than the cross-dialectal dictionaries and word lists give credit for. Such is the case for AmE truck and BrE lorry, as Molly discovered recently. She writes:
I teach translation from Italian to English to language majors [in Italy]. I am lucky this term to have three women in my class on the Erasmus project [EU student exchange system--ed.] who are from the UK. They told me today that British English for "pick-up truck" is "pick-up truck". I asked them "What about a lorry?" and they told me that a lorry is much bigger.
I hope they told Molly that a lorry is much, much bigger, as many of the things that AmE speakers call trucks are not lorries in BrE. This is a lorry (from freefoto.com):


And so is this (also from freefoto.com--henceforth the links will be put in the text):


The really big kind of BrE lorry is an articulated lorry, which has several names in AmE--but I've covered those before, so have a look back here.

An AmE speaker will start to go wrong with their general lorry-for-truck translation rule when they get to this:

This is a (BrE) van--but never an AmE van.

Think of it this way, if it's referred to as a lorry, you'd need to have a special (AmE) driver's license/(BrE) driving licence to drive it, whereas the kind of thing that you could (AmE) rent/(BrE) hire in order to move your worldly belongings from point A to point B would have to be called a van in BrE. [But maybe not--see comments for details!] But in BrE, you might instead opt to hire a man with a van to do your moving for you.

In AmE, van is limited to referring to things like this:


And it refers to those things in BrE too--though they may be called transit vans (after the Ford Transit). In the UK, the white variety of these vehicles (as pictured) are the typical vehicle driven by tradespeople, and a stereotype has arisen for the (BrE) white van man as an unsavo(u)ry character. You can read more about that here.

While/whilst this next vehicle would be called a van or a minivan in AmE, it would be more likely to be called a people carrier in BrE:


As Molly was informed, there's no particularly BrE word for (orig. AmE) pick-up trucks, but then again, there are few pick-up trucks in the UK. Now don't--please don't--get me started about people in the US who use comically large pick-up trucks to do little more than drive to work and through the Taco Bell (orig. AmE) drive-thru. I've lived in Texas. If I start, I might not be able to stop. (But the BBC h2g2 site has a fairly good take on it.) I have only seen one of these monsters in the UK, and if you don't think they look silly in their American context (in [AmE] parking lots/[BrE] car parks full of similar things), then you'll just have to come and see one in the UK. They're hilarious. Or wrist-slittingly depressing. Something like that.


An antipodean P.S.: In South African English, a pick-up truck (just about always a little Japanese model) is a bakkie.
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'can I get' redux

May 12, 2009

The comments on this are now closed, since the student's project is long over. If you'd like to comment on the topic, please see the link to a fuller blog post at the end of this post.

 

This is for an MA student at our university. Here's her plea:

For my dissertation, I'm looking at the recent increase of young Brits using 'can I get' for requests, rather than 'can I have..', which old-school speakers like me use. I'm assuming that the 'can I get..' form is American, but I'm not sure if Americans see the two forms as having any difference in meaning. To me, and older British speakers, 'can I get a glass of water?' means 'do you mind if I help myself to...' if I'm in someone's house. It therefore seems odd to use it in a cafe or a pub, unless you plan to go behind the counter and help yourself. A quick look at an American corpus seems to suggest that American usage of 'can I have...' is used more for questioning if you are allowed something. Is this really the case? I'd be really interested to hear what Americans with an interest in linguistics have to say! Thanks very much.
So, please help her by discussing in the comments. Here's my posting on 'Can I get a latte grande?' from some time ago.
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crisps, chips and tortillas

May 9, 2009
My friend the Maverick received a news item about this bird through an evolutionary psychology e-mail forum:

The video, from the BBC, refers to the Doritos that the seagull eats as (BrE) crisps, but the source that Maverick read refers to them using the AmE term chips, which, of course, is the BrE word for AmE (french) fries.

However, the BrE crisps = AmE chips equation is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. This is demonstrated to us by the (UK) Daily Mail's story about the bird:
The rest of the flock flap around, begging for titbits (=AmE tidbits) and diving for scraps.
Not this fellow. He simply pops to the shops.
And his tastes, it seems, are rather particular. It has to be tortilla chips. [...]
He is now so popular that customers have started paying for his chips.
Crunchy fried potato slices are always (potato) crisps in BrE, but Doritos and other (AmE) tortilla chips are not so straightforward. When taken collectively with the other (BrE) packets/(AmE) bags at the front of the (BrE) corner shop/(orig. AmE) convenience store in the video, the Doritos are crisps, but when referring to Doritos and the like on their own, BrE speakers often use the American import tortilla chips. This is doubly foreign, since not only does chip mean something different than in AmE, but in BrE tortilla more often (in my experience) refers to the Spanish egg-and-potato dish than to the Mexican flatbread. (The 2007 draft entry in the OED also informs us that use of just tortilla to mean 'tortilla chip' is 'chiefly' BrE, and that the term Spanish tortilla is also used for the frittata-like dish--from the quotations, it looks like the Spanish prefix is mostly AmE.)

Better Half and I have a favo(u)rite Mexican restaurant in Brighton, and when we order chips and salsa there (which BrE BH pronounces with a first syllable like Sal and I in my AmE way pronounce with a first syllable more like Saul), we have, more than once, been asked to clarify whether we mean tortilla chips or (BrE) chips/(AmE) fries...in spite of the fact that their own menu reserves the term chips for the tortilla kind and uses fries for the thicker/softer potato kind. Tortilla chips is the more common term in BrE, with 31,500 UK Google hits--but with 14,500 hits, tortilla crisps has a respectable presence.

Cultural side note number 1: Americans are often surprised by the size of crisp/chip packets/bags in the UK. The largest bags in the UK are probably the size of the smallest bag that's not meant for individual consumption in the US, and often at parties in the UK, the host will have opened several individual-size bags (which can be bought in variety packs) into several small bowls. In the US, the biggest bags are comparable to a pillow in size and at parties the chips/crisps are presented in large, deep bowls. This does not--oh no, it does not--mean that the British are unenthusiastic consumers of wafer-thin fried potatoes. They consume, on average 7.2 kg per person per year, as opposed to 4 pounds (1.8 kg) per typical American. I presume that the limits on bag size in the UK have something to do with the limits on supermarket shelf space and home storage space. Because there are no (orig. BrE slang) ginormous bags of crisps/chips in the UK, there's also no need for the chip clip, which Americans use to keep their chips/crisps crunchy between pantry-raids.

CSN 2: British crisp/chip flavo(u)rs are more popular (in relation to plain, salted) and more imaginative than American flavo(u)rs--which, when I was growing up (i.e. before the dawn of 'gourmet' potato chips/crisps), were limited to salted, unsalted and barbecue. Cheese and onion is the nation's favo(u)rite (editorial note: [orig. AmE] ick) and salt-and-vinegar (which was available in New England in my youth, then spread to other parts of the US) must be close to the top. Flavo(u)rs that involve meat (steak and onion, chicken and thyme, prawn [AmE shrimp] cocktail) seem very popular too--a trend that has reached its peak, or perhaps its nadir, in the current offering of Cajun Squirrel flavo(u)r. (orig. AmE) 'Fess up: who among you has tasted them?

An unpleasant side effect of CSN 1 and CSN 2 is that when one's host pours the contents of more than one little crisp/chip packet/bag into a larger bowl, chances are that they'll have mixed together two flavo(u)rs, only one of which will be gag-inducing.

CSN 3: Pringles are served unironically at parties in the UK.

P.S. FuelMyBlog recently saw fit to interview me on my blogging habits. Click on if you see fit to care!
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no

May 3, 2009
I've been teaching a new course in Pragmatics this year, and this past week we ended it with a discussion of this article:

Jefferson, Gail (2002) Is ‘‘no’’ an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-83.
The author was an important name in conversational analysis and an American who lived for years in the Netherlands. In Dutch, it's common to use nee 'no' as an acknowledg(e)ment token, that is, something that you say to indicate that you've heard what your conversational partner has said. A negative token, like nee, would be used to acknowledge a negative statement.

Knowing about the Dutch nee, Jefferson decided to check how no is used as a minimal response in English, but when she started looking at a set of British conversational data, what she found didn't sit well with her own intuitions about how no is used as a conversational support. To find out why, she compared four sets of data: British doctors and patients, British 'civilians' (her term), American doctors and patients, and American 'civilians'.

Jefferson found that British civilians responded to negative statements with negative tokens 86% of the time, whereas American civilians did so only 27% of the time. British doctors did it 37% of the time, and American doctors not at all. American civilians most usually responded to negative statements with positive tokens like uh-huh, yeah (both originally AmE) and mm-hmm. So, American civilians use negative tokens at similar rates to British doctors (the 10 percentage-point difference is not statistically significant), and both of these groups use it far less than in everyday British conversation.

Jefferson next looked at whether British and American speakers use these nos for different things. She found that AmE speakers use no as an affiliative token, but not as just an acknowledg(e)ment token. That is to say, if an American says no in a conversationally supportive way (as opposed to using no more literally to disagree with the previous utterance) in response to someone's negative statement, they mean to show some empathy for the situation the speaker is describing. An affiliative token tells your conversational partner that you have not only heard them, but that you understand where they're coming from (orig. AmE). For instance, if I say I hurt my back and you say Awww, you'd be showing me that you've not only heard me, but that you feel my pain, as it were. Compare that to a simple acknowledg(e)ment token like mm-hmm, which would seem rather cold to say in such a circumstance.

BrE civilians used no as an acknowledg(e)ment token, where AmE civilians would have to use a positive form. To give a flavo(u)r of how this might lead to cross-cultural misinterpretation, here's a made-up example:

Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist: No...
If this were affliation, one would interpret my no as 'I know what you mean--that Matt is pretty bad about keeping in touch'. That would be the way an AmE speaker would probably use it.

But if it were just acknowledg(e)ment, then all I'd be saying is 'I heard you say that you haven't heard from Matt'. If I meant that, though, as an American, I'd have to say it a different way:
Better Half: I haven't heard from Matt.
Lynneguist [without lifting her eyes from New Scientist]: Uh-huh.
British me would be able to say no there without tearing myself from my magazine--but American me could not.

In their professional roles, BrE doctors seem to be careful to use no only for affliliation--that is, they don't use it for mere acknowledg(e)ment. It's possible that they do not use the negative form for acknowledg(e)ment because they need to be careful not to sound like they're affiliating when they're not. In Jefferson's data, American doctors don't even use it to affiliate--though there were some differences in the types of doctors in her two corpora, so I'm going to stop short of making any hypotheses about that.

So, I asked my students, what do you think happens when these cultures meet? The British shouldn't have much of a problem in understanding the Americans' affiliative use of no, since they use it affiliatively too. But the Americans aren't used to hearing it used as acknowledg(e)ment, and so should interpret it as affiliation. If that's the case, what will they conclude about the British? One of the students came up with the same perception that I have about what happens. (I'm eager to hear yours in the comments.) It's possible that the American would feel they'd been cut off. Once someone affiliates with you, they're essentially saying 'You don't need to explain this to me because I get it (orig. AmE)'. This whole business reminded me of my troubles with the BrE use of never mind.

To tell the truth, I'd never noticed [on a conscious level] the extra nos, in conversation with BrE speakers. But I recogni{s/z}ed the accuracy of Jefferson's observations as I started to think about it consciously--and I even thought that if I were to have imitated certain English acquaintances then I'd probably have been liberal with the interactional nos. I wonder if anyone out there has had any SbaCL moments courtesy of no. Do let us know!
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to create (intransitive)

Apr 24, 2009
Grant Barrett, of here and there, wrote about 17 months ago to ask about the BrE intransitive use of create:

I've just come across an intransitive use of create that's Brit-specific. The Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary) defines it thus:

[no obj.] Brit. informal make a fuss; complain: "little kids create because they hate being ignored."

Sounds odd to my American ear.
Grant had read it in the Times, in this context (which discusses another term we've discussed before, wife beater):

"...Then suddenly - I'm not a snob - but we started getting all these loudmouthed yobs in. Younger drinkers, 19 to 30-year-olds, and builders and labourers.

"They weren't fighting - we'd never have let things get to that stage - but they were creating, and it was bad enough to make the other customers start leaving early."

When he wrote to me, I'd not experienced this sense of the word yet. But a month later, I had a child, and a few months after that, she started in childcare and we went through a little period where Grover was a bit too attached to her key worker. Whenever the carer went out of sight, Grover would start creating, they told me. Since then, I have heard it used about other children's tantrum-ish or whin(g)y behavio(u)r.

She graduated (AmE--BrE doesn't use graduate for sub-university transitions) from the Baby Room today and moves to the Toddler Room on Monday. My little Grover, all grown up! I shed a tear today, but I expect she'll be the one creating on Monday.
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whoa and woah

Apr 20, 2009
If there is one arena in which Better Half is not my better, it's spelling. It's not that he's a particularly bad speller, it's just that I like to think of myself as a particularly good one. So, at least a couple of years ago, I rolled my eyes and corrected him when he wrote an interjection meaning 'stop, wait!' as woah! That I can remember correcting BH some years later is indicative of the sadness of my life and my need to always be right, which is pretty hard to be if you're me. I suppose I was reliving 'times I've been right and BH has been wrong' because of another instance of my absolute disability when it comes to accents. I spent some time the other day insisting that a food critic on the television was French, when, in fact, he's Irish. He only dresses French. So, I cling to my 'being right' memories with the tenacity of a starving octopus.

Then I read an article in The Guardian's review section (which I now can't find, so here's a link to an earlier article in the Guardian--by the outgoing poet laureate, no less) that contained a woah. As has been mentioned here before, The Guardian (or The Grauniad) has something of a reputation for bad spelling and typographical errors, so I remarked to myself that BrE writers seem to have a hard time spelling whoa.

Then I was in an English airport and I saw an ad(vert) (I wish I'd taken a photo, but I was too airport-grumpy at the time to think of it--it might've been for Phones4You), that shouted WOAH! WOAH! WOAH! in red and white. At that point, I had to start planning my admission of wrongness to BH.

(I'm sure many halves of long-standing and happy couples are thinking that I did not have to admit that I was wrong. Since BH neither saw the ad(vert) nor remembered the time I corrected him, what was to be gained by interfering with the well-developed roles of She Who Is Right and He Who Must Be Corrected? But, you see, I had to admit I'd been wrong because I have in the past claimed that admitting-when-I'm-wrong is something that I am happy to do, and so in order to prove myself right I have to prove myself wrong--on a regular basis.)

So, my story of whoa (and woah):

The OED lists woah as a variant of woa which is a variant of whoa, which is a variant of the interjection who (not to be confused with the pronoun who--the interjection is pronounced as wo--which is also a variant of all these), which came into the language as a variant of ho! Here are the dates of the OED's quotations for these spellings of the pronunciation /wo/ when it means 'stop!':


who c.1450-1859
wo 1787-1894
woa 1840-1892
woah 1856 (one example--included under the headword woa)
whoa 1843-1898 (but, of course, we know it's still used)
It's interesting that the OED lists woa as a variant of whoa when it has earlier evidence for woa--it implies that whoa is the more standard form. We shouldn't read much into the lack of recent examples of any of these--it looks like nothing has been added to these entries since the first edition.

I don't remember ever seeing the woah spelling (I'd want to pronounce it as two syllables: wo-ah, like Noah) before moving to England, but it's a very popular spelling here. Searching just UK sites, one gets ~170,000 hits for woah and ~255,000 for whoa. Searching some American sites, one gets 33 woahs to 461 whoas on .mil and 8,800 to 39,000 on .edu (the first woahs that came up on the .edu search were quoted from a BBC site, though). Or, if you'd like to see some bar graphs showing US and UK usage of the spellings, try this.

(Can you believe I started this post on the 6th of April? Alas and alack--I wish I had a solid month to do nothing but catch up on this blog.)
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closeout

Apr 1, 2009
I've used my tried-and-tested 'click randomly in the email inbox' method to choose today's topic. Australian Bec moved to the US temporarily (she may well have moved back in the time it's taken me to respond) and found:
I am seeing the word closeout in shops everywhere, online and 'real'. I understand from context that it means something like clearance, but can you tell me if it is an American term, or just a new word or if it is common everywhere and I have just missed seeing it before? It sounds really odd to me.
The OED informs us that Bec is not unobservant--it is an American term and it means clearance (i.e. the selling of a line of stock or a shop's contents until there is no stock left). The OED covers the verb form to close out or , but they note that it's also used as a noun (or an absol. in the OED's vocabulary):
b. To clear out (a stock of goods); to wind up (a business); to sell or finish off. Also absol. U.S.
The examples in the OED mostly have pronouns as the object of close out, and the pronoun goes between the verb (close) and the particle (out), as in close it out. If the object is a full noun phrase, my spider senses tell me that you could put it either before or after the out--but the longer the object noun phrase, the more likely it would be to go after the out. In my experience, though, the noun closeout is currently more common than the verb to close out. That is, I'd be more likely to say They're having a closeout on Acme widgets, rather than They're closing Acme widgets out.

On the noun front, one might say that it's a closeout or a closeout sale. Wikipedia tells me that in the US there are things called closeout stores, which are dedicated to selling off ends of product lines. I've never heard that term (perhaps it is industry jargon), but the same phenomenon exists in the UK--except instead of (US) TJ Maxx, the UK has TK Maxx.

And on that note, I can close out this entry. Or close this entry out.
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redundant

Mar 27, 2009
David C wrote this week to ask:

I know the English use 'redundant' where we USns would say 'laid off' but the question came up whether they would use 'redundant' where we would say 'obsolete' in reference to, say, a 5-year old computer.

Let's back up a bit and discuss what David's taken for granted. In AmE a company can lay off its employees but in BrE a company (or a university!) makes its employees redundant. What's a little confusing is that you can be laid off in the UK too, but it means something different. According to this site (among others) a lay-off is expected to be temporary, as opposed to a redundancy in which you really, really lose your job. But this is not the understanding in AmE, where being laid off is the equivalent of BrE redundancy.

In answer to David's question, objects can also be made redundant in BrE--if they've been made worthless, particularly because they've been superseded by something else. Both Better Half and I feel like this is not quite the same thing as obsolete, but we're a bit hard-pressed to explain exactly why. Do others have this intuition?
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AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)