Separated by a Common Language

I've just come out from under several painful deadlines and am ready to do some blogging. And the note that I've written to myself is: crosswords. This is why the other deadlines were painful. I could have been writing about crossword puzzles, but I had other stuff to do. Oh, the misery. I had written this note on 11 January, the day that one of the most famous British crossword compilers announced, via his puzzle, that he had terminal cancer.

But more to the point: crossword (puzzle). This word/expression can refer to the same thing in BrE and AmE, but it usually doesn't.

In the UK, the bare term crossword most usually refers to cryptic crossword puzzles. These exist in the US, but not as much as in the UK, where each of the (mainly BrE) broadsheet newspapers has a daily cryptic crossword. Now, these were not the original type of crossword puzzles, and everyone here knows they are cryptic crosswords, but if we look at the adjectives that come before crossword in the British National Corpus, cryptic crossword only occurs once in 100 million words. The most frequent adjective before crossword in the BNC is quick, which names the other kind of crossword that's found in the UK. The reason why quick crossword occurs more than cryptic crossword is not because people write about cryptic crosswords less. It's because when they do write about them, they tend to just say crossword.  (Take for example, the Guardian's Crossword Blog, cited again below, which pretty much only discusses the cryptic sort.)


In the US, the word crossword tends to refer to a different animal than is seen in the UK. If one were to talk about those ones in the UK, they'd have to be called American-style crosswords or something like that. If a puzzle is a cryptic one, Americans will call it a cryptic crossword or sometimes a British-style crossword puzzle. Among those in the know, though, British-style crossword refers to a grid style, as opposed to American-style grids. This picture comes from an eHow page on how to make crossword grids. The one on the left, with less white space is British-style. The one on the right is American-style.



Both cryptic crosswords and quick crosswords in the UK are in the British-style grid. (In the US, you might see British-style grids in school exercises, but not usually in newspapers.) The British-style grid means that you pretty much need to be able to determine the answer for every clue. If you don't know the answer for one of the across items in the leftmost puzzle above, knowing all the other answers will get you just a small proportion of the letters in the one you don't know. If all you've figured out is that they want a five-letter musical instrument whose second letter is I, you won't know until the answer is published whether it's a PIANO or a VIOLA (or some other instrument I haven't thought of).

In the American-style one, you can get the answer in a roundabout way. Since each of the letters of the five-letter musical instrument intersects with another word, you can build the word one letter at a time from other clues. But because of this, American clues are much more ambiguous than British ones. For instance, the clues in British crosswords of both types tell you how many letters are in the answer, and how the string breaks down into words. American ones don't give you that information, though the easiest ones might tell you that the answer has multiple words. American clues are sometimes jokey (more so than UK Quick ones) and the puzzle itself often has a running theme (so can the other types, but this is a [mostly AmE in this figurative sense] calling card of American puzzles). Because there are so many short words in an American-style puzzle (and they need to line up nicely), any American puzzle-solver has a good vocabulary of three-letter combinations that somehow mean something—including compass points and acronyms.

A quick tour of clues—which won't do any of the puzzles justice:

Cryptic (The Independent Cryptic Crossword 7768 by ANAX as discussed in the Guardian Crossword blog):

26ac What can you get for 20p? Oddly, silver key (4)

The answer is ISLE (as in the Florida Keys); the first bit of the wordplay is a plug for the Independent's sister paper i, which belatedly started including a cryptic crossword - one that's as good as any broadsheet's and which we'll look at here in more detail before long.

The Guardian blogger saw fit to explain the I, but have you got the SLE? Oddly is the clue to tell you to look for—the odd-numbered letters in the following word, silver.  (The key is there to make it rhyme. is the definition, of course—see Owen's comment correcting my original mistake! But it's still true that UK cryptics are more likely to allow extraneous words: See  Wikipedia tells me that this kind of thing is more allowable in British cryptic crosswords than in North American ones. Click on the link to see for more UK/North American differences.)  A guide to types of cryptic clues can be found here.)

UK Quick (from Guardian quick crossword 13353):

16 Be transferred by contact or association (3,3)  (RUB OFF)

American-style (New York Times, via Rex Parker's blog):

42D: What the Beatles never did  (REUNITE)

44A: 1970 hit by Sugarloaf (GREEN-EYED LADY)

The last of these was part of a theme (left for the solver to discover) of songs with eye colo(u)rs in their titles.


I love to do the New York Times crossword whenever I get the chance (which isn't much, because when I visit the US all the crossword puzzles in the newspaper are spoken for, and you do NOT do someone ELSE's crossword puzzle. Not if you know what's good for you).*

But I am a fan of the British cryptics—by which I mean that I admire them and like to read about them, but I don't do them myself. (Whenever I convince myself I've got the patience for the clues, I become undone by the inclusion of bits of British cultural knowledge that I don't have—such as anything to do with cricket.) I'm not sure if anyone else sees crossword puzzles as a spectator sport, but it's a good one. And so when Araucaria's cancer puzzle came to light, I was saddened and appreciative [that he wanted to communicate with his fans in this way] as a long-time spectator-fan. As far as I can tell (there's not a lot of data in the corpora), the term crossword compiler is used in both US and UK, but perhaps more in the US, since in the UK crossword setter seems more common. (Recall our discussion of exam-setting too.)

Finally if, like me, you're an crossword-spectating expatriate in the UK with South African connections, I recommend Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose [8], South-African-expat-in-UK Sandy Balfour's memoir of falling in love over puzzles.  You might even like it if you're just some of those things.


*Yes, yes, I could download an app or something. But have I mentioned that I have a job with DEADLINES?! In my life crossword puzzles are for (BrE) holidays/(AmE) vacations or hospital stays. And now that my holidays/vacations involve a child, they're not really for those either.

P.S. (the next day): @MagdalenB sent me this on Twitter. A British crossword setter explains the differences between British and American crosswords (after 2 long minutes of introduction, which can be skipped). I'm right about the cricket!!

So, there I was, enjoying a nice evening of nothing while on (AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday, when Dave Summers of Ohio tweeted me to ask:

Heard "disentangle" the other day. Is that perhaps BrE for "untangle"?

To which I replied, "No, it's AmE too". But then I wondered whether the rates of their use were different and I found that they were. Voilà! A Difference of the Day for my Twitter feed (which has been very sporadically updated while I've been on holiday/vacation as it gets hard to tell where one day starts and another ends). So, I tweeted:

AmE and BrE have both 'disentangle' and 'untangle'. But disentangle:untangle ratio = 2:3 in AmE and 3:1 in BrE.  (Source = COCA and BNC at Mark Davies' Corpora site.)

And I was all ready to call it a night when Gordon Hemsley of Georgia tweeted to say:

I actually think those words mean different things to me. Disentangle implies more than one thing; untangle can be 1.

...and while I thought he was probably right, I also know that it's very often the case that the stories we tell ourselves about how the differences between synonyms are often very different from how we actually use them. So, here I am researching this little thing at 1 in the morning instead of any of the other two things I have to do before bed or the opportunity to sleep that I really should take before restarting the academic term. Sigh-di-sigh-sigh-sigh.

Dictionaries don't tell us of any dialectal differences between these words, nor do they really mark Gordon's division of labo(u)r for the two words. The dictionaries I've looked at give two meanings for disentangle (or if not two meanings, then examples of both of these meanings): (1) to free something from its entanglement with something else, (2) to bring out of a tangled state, unravel.

I've started my investigation by looking at cases where the word from occurs within five words after the base forms of the verbs (untangle, disentangle). If you're removing the tangle in one thing, you probably wouldn't have a from--we don't untangle a knot from itself, we just untangle a knot.  So the from examples can be assumed to involve removing a tangle of two things (the first sense of the word, above). An example from COCA:

He managed to disentangle himself from his kayak before it was pulled into the hole.

In both dialects, there is a strong preference for using disentangle with from. So, more than 1/3 of  disentangles are closely followed by a from, and far fewer untangles have a from after them.
   

	COCA (AmE)	BNC (BrE)
disentangle ... from	36% [76/210]	37% [28/103]
untangle... from	11% [35/319]	15% [4/26]

So far AmE and BrE aren't looking very different. The next question is how they act when only one thing is involved, and a tangle is removed from it. To look at that, I've looked at all the forms of each verb (i.e. untangle, untangled, untangling, etc.) followed by a/an/the and then a singular noun.
   

per 100 million words	COCA (AmE)	BNC (BrE)
disentangl* a(n)/the sg-N	8	20
untangl* a(n)/the sg-N	26	12

This is far from a thorough investigation of these two words, but what the numbers here seem to be saying is that AmE has a strong preference for untangle with singulars and that this isn't shared by BrE. This is to say that Gordon's hunch was right in terms of how these words work in AmE and that the BrE use that Dave heard probably struck him as strange because it wasn't obeying the untangle-goes-with-singulars preference. Note that these differences are about preferences and probabilities of the uses of two senses of the words, not about one word (or even one sense of a word) being 'British' or 'American'. But they're still differences.

You know, this was an awful lot like work! I've only got three more days off.* Enough of this!**


* Vacation/holiday is, of course, irrelevant, since the blog isn't part of the job that I'm taking a break from. As my hobby, the blog is, I suppose, what I should be doing on my holiday/vacation. You know, instead of getting sleep or spending time with my family. Priorities, eh?

** Except to tell you that the 'fight with' sense of tangle is originally AmE. Just because I can't stop telling you things.

As I noted in the UK-to-US WotY post, this hasn't been a particularly 'big' year for American imports to Britain. Those that were nominated were mostly things that were not clearly American before they were British; that is (in many cases), though an American may have been first to use them, they immediately entered general English. Other nominations didn't seem to have anything particularly "2012" about them--they'd been steadily climbing in BrE for 10 or 20 years, with no particular notice or peak in 2012. But one nomination, by reader Joe, stood out for me.  Ladies and germs, the 2012 US-to-UK Word of the Year is


That the newspaper had to provide a footnote translation of wonk (using another Americanism that's come into BrE, geek) is evidence of its relative newness in BrE.*

Two matters for this belated blog post:  Words of the Year nominations and the Untranslatables Month summary.

WotY Nominations
Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:

1. Best AmE-to-BrE import
2. Best BrE-to-AmE import

The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2012, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.


Untranslatables II
Last year, as a birthday treat to myself, I declared October to be Untranslatables Month, which meant that I tweeted an expression that was unique to one dialect or another, in that its meaning was not captured by an expression in the other dialect. This year, I did it again, but made the job easier on myself by deciding not to tweet on weekends. Here's a summary of the 'untranslatables' I tweeted. In some cases, you can follow links to places where I (or someone) have discussed them in more detail.

• BrE lie-in (noun). The act of staying in bed later in the morning than usual. Sleeping not required, but lazing is. Example: 'The family was away, so I had a lie-in on Saturday as an early birthday treat.'  (AmE & BrE both have sleeping in for when one sleeps late.)

• AmE cater-corner, kitty-corner, catty-corner (regional variations), adj & adv, meaning 'diagonally opposite to'. Example: 'I live kitty-corner to the bordello'.

•  BrE builder's tea. Very strong (hot, of course), basic (i.e. not a special cultivar/flavo[u]r) tea with milk and lots of sugar. The 'lots of sugar' part is in most definitions for it, but some of my correspondents don't consider 'sweet' to be a necessary feature.

• AmE Nielsen rating. The television rating system that determines advertising rates, used figuratively as a measure of popularity. Example: 'When you give babies a choice of what to listen to, a kind of baby Nielsen rating, they choose to listen to mothers talking to infants' (from The Scientist in the Crib).

• BrE It's not cricket. 'It shouldn't happen because it's not fair/proper'. Occasionally heard in AmE too.

• AmE poster child. Figuratively, an emblematic case of something, esp. a cause. Originally a child on posters promoting a charity. This one has come into BrE--as untranslatables often do (because they're useful). In the US, it's especially associated w/the (US) Muscular Dystrophy Association, which is also responsible for the US's longest-running charity telethon. It's interesting how different diseases are 'big' in terms of fundraising in different countries...

I've been doing 'Untranslatables October' on Twitter for the second time (made slightly easier this year by the fact that I've given up tweeting on weekends). I'll do a summary at the end of the month.

An American 'Untranslatable' was visit with, which had been suggested by Ros Clarke. I defined it as 'to pay a social call and chat with someone, esp. if you're having a good catch-up.'

Ros then asked "do you think that paying the social call is an important part of visit with?" No and yes, I would say. For instance, one could say

We visited with each other for a while after we met on the pathway.

But if there is a social call, it is the caller who is doing the visiting. At least, that's my intuition:

He came over and visited with me.      Sounds normal to me.
He came over and I visited with him.  Sounds weird to me.
I went over and he visited with me.     Sounds really weird to me. 

But one could also say:
He came over and we visited with each other.

It's always worth mentioning when things that Americans say are actually British in origin, and the 'pay a social call' sense of visit with is one of them. The OED marks it as Now U.S.  Interestingly, it's apparently not from the days before the British settled in the 'new world'. In other words, it's evidence that Americans didn't just start importing newfangled Britishisms (see my last post!) in the 21st century. The first example is from a letter in 1850, the second is from a major piece of British literature:

1871   ‘G. Eliot’ Middlemarch (1872) I. i. i. 8   The small group of gentry with whom he visited.

Besides visiting with there's also with-less intransitive visit, which is 100% American and just about chatting. In that sense, you and your friend could visit for hours, meaning that you talked with each other for a long time. If the subject of this 'chat' visit is just one of the chatting parties, then you can have a with in order to identify who you're talking with.

I searched for examples of visited with in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. There are 282 of them, though some are not this visited with, but things like the town he visited with his mother or visited with great interest. I looked at the first page of them (100). Most of the examples do involve someone coming to where someone else is and talking with them:

And the White House made a surprise stop for barbecue in Washington, but left the restaurant a surprise when lunch finished on Wednesday, an unpaid tab. President Obama visited with service members and local barbers...

There's only one example in the 282 with a reciprocal pronoun (each other; no cases of one another).

But there's one case where the visited-with person is the one who moved:

We're speaking with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe. We visited with him on his visit to the United States.

 ...though in this case, it may very well be that the radio people (we) visited the place where Tsvangirai was staying, and therefore were the 'movers'. They area also the 'movers' in that they are the ones who sought the interview. The sentence certainly gives me the image that the NPR reporter went to Tsvangirai's hotel or the Zimbabwean embassy or something, though it could be the case that they talked on the phone. In other words, when visit with is used non-reciprocally, I do get the image that the subject of the sentence acted in order to get the conversation started--either by moving to where the other person is or by setting up the meeting. Perhaps I've got that connotation more strongly than other Americans do.

Finally, a note on the noun visit. Most uses of the noun visit are general English (i.e. not UK- or US- or anywhere-specific). But one can shift the 'chat' verb visit into a noun, and get things like We had a nice visit over dinner/the phone/coffee. This is not something one would hear in the UK. Instead you might (informally) have a good natter (which Collins English Dictionary defines as 'prolonged idle chatter or gossip').

* I have lots of examples of this in a talk I've been giving a lot lately: 'How Americans Saved the English Language'. If you'd like to hear it, all you have to do is have your local speaking club invite me at a convenient time and pay my expenses to get there. At this point, the next one is Lewes, East Sussex in December. I'll give details closer to the date.

What do the following expressions have in common?

• sleepover
• slumber party
• pajama party

Yeah, right, they all refer to the same kind of thing. But look more closely--what else do they have in common? OK, I'll tell you. They are all American ways of describing the same thing--all of which are known in BrE, but used to lesser or greater degrees. 

Of course, the last one  is pyjama party in BrE, but don't let the spelling fool you. While/whilst pyjama party is not marked as having American origin in the OED, this Google ngram tells the story: first there was pajama party (blue line), then there was pyjama party:
 

Slumber party is very American, and I can't say I've ever heard a BrE speaker use it, but it's something they know from American films and books.

So, my question to my English friends was: if all these things are AmE, what did you call it when you were a kid? Their answer: they didn't have a noun for it. They'd sleep at their friends house, sure, but they'd just stay the night or stay over at Jen's. All verbs, no nouns. My friends also told me that they thought of the noun-described things as 'very American', 'the stuff of American books'. But don't let the lack of nouns make you think that British sleeping-over was just, you know, sleeping without the rituals of a nounified event. My friends all insist that staying at a friend's had to involve a midnight feast (which might be as early as 9:00). The OED defines this as:

n. a feast or snack at midnight; spec. a night-time feast held by children in their bedroom or dormitory, usually without the knowledge of their parents, teachers, etc.

I'd heard this phrase before in Charlie and Lola, but hadn't reali{s/z}ed what an institution they are. For a hint of how much of an institution, see this Guardian Word of Mouth blog about it. My friends attributed their knowledge of midnight feasts to Enid Blyton, but she certainly didn't invent the idea.

These days, the OED marks sleep-over (as they spell it) as 'chiefly U.S.', but my friends and their children use it liberally (though, it must be said, it so happens that many of Grover's little friends have a North American parent, so my sample is probably biased). Grover (who started big-kid school this week--it's a year earlier in UK than US) is absolutely obsessed with the notion (stress: the notion) of having a sleepover with her friends. Her favo(u)rite game with her friends has been, from an early age, 'going to bed'. Let me tell you, if you're going to have a small child at a late age, get one who likes to play bed-based games like 'going to sleep', 'bear cave', 'moles in holes', and 'driving a car' (just be sure that you're in the 'back seat', where the pillows and headboard are). Just come up with lines like 'my eyes are closed because I'm a blind mole' or 'the wind is in my face', and you're guaranteed late mornings in bed. 

Before I go, a note to readers nearby. I'm giving my talk 'How Americans saved the English Language' in a couple of places soon:

• Thurs, 27 Sept, 4:00pm at Sussex University English Colloquium, Jubilee Building G08
• Tues, 8 Oct, 8:00pm at Brighton Skeptics in the Pub, Caroline of Brunswick Pub. Details here.

I did a TEDx talk at Sussex University a few months ago, and now the video is on-line. The subject is being polite in the UK and US, and it focuses on British thanking and American complimenting. I'm teaching a new course on Intercultural Communication next term, and I think one of the first things I'll ask them to do is to critique my use of the word culture in that video (did I really use it that much?!). Of course, we can also critique my use of the terms British and American--as many people do when writing to me about the blog. And we will do that in my course too, though I don't do it much here just because I want to get on with the business of discussing the phenomena I want to discuss. (And if you're interested in my courses, here is the door in.)

The main, vain thing I want to say about the video is this: all the lighting on me is from below. You know, like you did with a (BrE) torch/(AmE) flashlight to yourself in order to tell scary stories at (AmE) slumber parties/(BrE) pyjama parties (also AmE pajama party--there is another blog post in this. I will do it next). I don't think I usually look this spooky. Please God, don't let me usually look this spooky.
(But if you want to see me looking spooky, I recommend watching this on YouTube, as the embedded version here cuts off the right side of the video.)




There's a lot more to say about thanking in particular, but what I mention at the beginning of the video, then never talk about at all, is please. There is a lot to say about please. There is a lot to research about please. I'm limiting myself here to talking about saying please when ordering in a restaurant--just because it's the place I notice it (and its absence) the most.

Now, when I first came to this country--and for a while after--I would hear British people claiming that Americans don't say please, and I would bristle. Of course we do! We are trained to add the magic word when we request things. We are nice people! I'm a nice person! And anyone who doesn't think so can have a sock in the eye.

But then I lived here a while and my family and friends started to come over and visit. They'd order food in restaurants and I'd hear how abrupt they sounded, leaving off the please. Then I noticed myself and my English friends at our weekly gossip pizza get-together. If I ordered first, then I'd notice that everyone else had said please and I hadn't. When my brother's family came to visit a few months ago, I couldn't stop myself adding please at the ends of their orders because they just sounded so terrible to me without them. And their orders were always without them. And my brother does not have a rude family.

(My bossy, corrective behavio(u)r was no doubt facilitated by being the parent of a preschooler--and the fact that I'm the big sister. As a parent, I try not to add the absent pleases, but to ask: Could you say that again in a nice way?)

But look, even on Sesame Street, where children are taught lessons about politeness, people order food without saying please. Mr Johnson here says I'd like a bowl of hot alphabet soup (with a bit of politeness marking in the I'd like). He could have instead said I'll have the alphabet soup.



Of course, it's not true that every British person always says please when they order food, but I definitely hear more pleases here. (On my visit to the US in July, I continued to add pleases after my brothers' restaurant orders, mostly in whispers to myself, just because it was driving me crazy.)

So, how can it be that Americans think of themselves as  polite when they fail to extend this common courtesy word?

Part of the story is touched upon in my TEDx talk. American interactions are generally aimed at creating/maintaining a sense of equality among the participants. My reading of what we're doing when we don't say please is that we don't really want to point out that we are making requests in these situations--to do so would be to acknowledge that the customer is in a more 'powerful' or 'statusful' position than the waiter. So instead of thinking of it as telling waiters what to do (here I'm quoting myself from Emphasis Writing's e-bulletin):

Americans regard ordering as providing the waiter with the information he needs to do his job.

On the other hand,

The British say please when ordering food in restaurants because they view the action as a personal request to the waiter.

Please unambiguously marks an utterance as a request (it is an IFID: Illocutionary Force Indicating Device). Other means of softening requests involve making the request less obviously a request. Could you bring me a salad? is literally a question about someone's ability; I'll have the salad is a statement of my intentions; I'd like the salad is a description of my mental state. They give the requestee a plausible way around dealing with the request (e.g. Could you...? Not in these heels; I'd like..., Ooh, so would I. ). Not that they would refuse. But hiding a request in another type of speech act is a way of being polite, and that hiding is kind of cancel(l)ed out if an IFID like please is added to say "Look at me! I'm ASKING YOU TO DO SOMETHING FOR ME!"  

Please thus ends up not feeling right in some American contexts. Ben Trawick-Smith discussed this at his Dialect Blog:

while ‘thank you‘ is still important to civilized discourse, I find that ‘please‘ has almost the opposite effect in American English. It can make a question sound urgent, blunt, and even downright rude.

I'm sure people working in service industries in touristy places will have tales of cross-cultural request behaviour. Please let us know about them!

P.S. I've remembered that I've written about something related, so (please) see also: making suggestions.

P.P.S. (12 September) Various pictures of signs like this are making their way round Facebook. Maybe this is what's needed in the UK, so that tourists learn the lingo without some of the rude interventions described in the comments section!



P.P.P.S. To see all comments for this post, please click on the 'load more' link at the bottom of the comments.