I've settled into
Twitter by attempting a "Difference of the Day" each day, as well as passing on other (BrE)
titbits/(AmE)
tidbits of possible dialectal and cross-cultural interest. There's only so much you can do in 140 characters, so most of the "differences" are over-simplified, as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends are happy to point out. Yesterday's tweet inspired a fair amount of fine-tuning by readers. It went:
In hono(u)r of Friday night, the Difference of the Day is AmE take-out (noun) and to-go (adj/adv) vs. BrE take-away.
Let's start with the BrE one.
Take-away is extremely flexible, both grammatically and semantically. It can be:
A noun for the food that's been taken away: We had a Chinese take-away.
A noun for a place that only sells prepared food to eat off-site: We went to the Chinese take-away.
An adjective for such food or place: a take-away pizza
A phrasal verb: Is that to eat here (or eat in) or take away?
On the last point: it's not really a full-fledged verb. You never hear anyone say
We took out or
We took out a pizza (or even worse,
We took out a Chinese). It's used mainly in the infinitive and mainly in the process of making or receiving a food order. After the fact, you'd say
We got a take-away, or some such thing.
A couple of readers pointed out that in Scottish English it would be
carry-out (with the same grammatical range)
rather than
take-away. I'll still call
take-away BrE rather than just English English since (a) it's certainly spread that far, even if it's not the native term; there are businesses that call themselves take-aways in Edinburgh and Glasgow (though probably more that call themselves
carry-outs, it's true) and (b) 'non-Scottish' doesn't necessarily mean 'English'
--there are other parts of the UK too
. On point (a), there are over a million hits for each of
take-away+Edinburgh and
carry-out+Edinburgh, and the Glaswegian equivalents--in fact, one of the first hits is www.glasgowtakeaways.co.uk.
Damien Hall wrote to say:
Damien has remembered correctly. I found this quotation in "The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations" by Frans Hinskens, Peter Auer, and Paul Kerswill (in their edited collection
Dialect Change, Cambridge University Press, 2005):
Whenever dialect mixing leads to the stabilisation of the variants that are typical of the respective ‘pure’ lects along with additional ‘compromise’ variants, one usually speaks of fudging (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 110–118; Britain 2002, 2004). [...] a similar, more recent, example from British English, discussed by Trudgill, concerns central and southern take away, the northern variant carry out, and the intermediate take out, which is used in the southern part of northern England.
Incidentally, if you're getting fish and (BrE)
chips, you generally don't need to mention that it's take-away. As we say in Linguistics, fish and chips are
unmarked for taking-away--it's far less usual to have your fish and chips in a restaurant. A (BrE)
fish-and-chip shop is perhaps the archetype of British take-away establishments, and they most often don't have seating for eating-in.
On to the American:
take-out does not have quite the range that
take-away does, since it shares the work with
to-go (
which we have discussed a little bit already)
. A friend pointed out that he'd say
carry-out for pizza or Italian food. And you know what? So would I. I'm not sure why this is--it doesn't seem to be particularly regional, since my friend is from California, living in Illinois, and I'm from New York state.
The noun
take-out has a very New York City feel to me, but that's probably just because I grew up in a part of the state that didn't really have take-out establishments (fast food, yes; Chinese restaurants, no) in my long-ago (1970s/80s) youth. The fast-food places would ask if you wanted your food
for here or to go. (Indeed, I had to ask that myself during my two stints of McDonald's purgatory-on-Earth.) The pizza places ask if you want it
for carry-out (or also
pick-up)
or delivery. For me in my youth,
getting a take-out was what people on television did--though getting carry-out pizza was a regular treat for us.
A completely non-linguistic aside: it can be funny to reali{s/z}e how atypical one's everyday foods can be. For me, pizza is the food of childhood (perhaps it wasn't so in other parts of the US way back then--I'm not sure. The northeast has had plenty of Italian immigration.) Better Half was introduced to pizza when he was about 13 at Pizzaland, where they served up a half a pizza with a (BrE)
jacket potato/(AmE)
baked potato and cole slaw. I still get the giggles whenever he mentions it. (His sister's mother-in-law made it into her 70s without ever having had pasta. She was not impressed when Sister-in-Law introduced her to it.) I also find it funny that some English people say to me that they couldn't eat pizza often. I reply: but you have sandwiches every day--what's the difference? It's another way of having bread with cheese, meat or veg and condiments. (It becomes clear in most cases that we're never going to see eye-to-eye on this. But as a conciliatory point, I really like British pizza--which is more like what one gets in northern Italy. Thin, olive-oily crusts and top-rate toppings.)
On the other hand, a few English people have asked me how curry here compares to Indian food in the US, and I have to explain that I never had Indian food until I moved to South Africa in my mid-20s--and that I have never lived in an American town that had an Indian restaurant (though some of the towns have changed by now--though their Indian places are generally fairly fancy, not the kinds of places you'd get a take-away/take-out curry from). I still haven't acquired the British native's facility with an Indian menu. I can tell you that I like
dupiazas (or
dopiazas), that
chicken tikka masala is supposedly the national dish of the UK and that
kurmas (or
kormas) are for (orig. AmE)
wimps. Other than that, I have to read all the fine print on the menus.
Here's a cheat-sheet if, like me, you need one...
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