Separated by a Common Language

A correspondent on the American Dialect Society e-list expressed surprise at the following Briticism spoken by an American character in the American television show/programme Law & Order: Criminal Intent:

He liked to dress in women's clothes - panties, bra - the whole kit.

In BrE, kit is used both more frequently and in more ways than in AmE. Used alone, AmE kit is likely to refer to a set of parts that one can put together to make something--as in She built her car from a kit. It's also used in various combinations. For example, a shaving kit or Dopp kit is a travel bag for men's toiletries. (Dopp is a trade name, but Dopp kit has been generici{s/z}ed.) Kit is also heard in the AmE phrase the (whole) kit and caboodle--that is, the entire collection of things related to a certain task or context:

Dell's modular approach is an attractive proposition for those who wish to avoid lugging around the whole kit and caboodle every time they hit the road. --Newsfactor Network

For some etymological information on this phrase, see The Maven's Word of the Day.

In BrE, kit is used to refer to any collection of related things, particularly equipment or clothing. For instance, in the second (if I remember correctly) episode of the new BBC program(me) Torchwood, newcomer Gwen experiences a lot of whizzy gadgets in a vehicle and says (sarcastically) to her colleagues (again, if I'm remembering correctly), Got enough kit?

The Law & Order quotation above shows the clothing/equipment sense, which is most often used in relation to what one would carry/wear for a sport. Thus tennis kit (typically used without a or the) would consist of the clothes, the shoes and (often) the racket.

The 'clothing' sense of kit is often heard these days in get one's kit off, as in:

Sometimes in life it's nice when people are complimentary about you without trying to get your kit off. --Don Pablo Escobar on bangingtunes.com

Other ADS-list correspondents noted having heard BrE-like kits on another television show/programme and in the cycling world--so it seems to be infiltrating AmE.

I'll stop here because an IBook failing-battery horror caused me to lose (another version of) this entry once already. I need new kit!

Derrick e-mailed the other day with the following request.

My question to you, based on your interesting in both spelling variants and common citation of Wikipedia, is what your opinion is on the official Wikipedia policy on English spelling in articles, described here. [...]It's one of the oldest rules on Wikipedia, resolved in its infancy, and has stood the test of time, consistently resisting attempts to modify it. [...] I've seen proposals to consistently use one spelling method, to extend the software to allow the user to configure which spelling they prefer, and countless other suggestions, but all met a rapid demise. Is this a good rule, and why is it so popular? Thanks for your insight.

I was glad he drew this to my attention. I think it's a popular policy because it's a terribly sensible policy.

Basically, any standard English orthography (spelling system) can be used on Wikipedia, with the following provisos:

1. Articles should use the same dialect throughout.
2. If there is a strong tie to a specific region/dialect, use that dialect.
3. In choosing words or expressions (especially article titles) there may be value in selecting one that does not have multiple variant spellings if there are synonyms that are otherwise equally suitable and reasonable.
4. Follow the dialect of the first contributor.

I've heard British people argue that BrE spelling should be used in international contexts because the UK is the 'homeland' of English. I've heard Americans argue that AmE spelling should be used because Americans outnumber the British. I've heard learners of English from other countries argue in favo(u)r of AmE spelling because American cultural exports are more widely found than British. Whichever decision one makes about how international English should be spelt/spelled, some sector is going to be offended or disappointed. So, let's not favo(u)r either. Let's let the forces of culture decide.

Rule 2 in the list above is exemplified on another Wikipedia page:

Sean Connery
Fact profile: A Scottish-born actor, but has spent much time in America. He now lives in the Bahamas. However, he has retained his British citizenship and still sees himself as Scottish.
Conclusion: Use standard Scottish English for the article on Sean Connery.
Harold Larwood
Fact profile: English-born cricketer, who is notable for his performances for England in the 1932/3 Bodyline series. After retirement he emigrated to Australia, took Australian citizenship and saw himself as Australian.
Conclusion: As his notability relates to the period in which he lived in Britain, use standard British English for the article on Harold Larwood.
Said Musa
Fact profile: Said Musa is the Prime Minister of Belize. He was born in Belize when it was known as "British Honduras" and was under British rule. He also studied law at Manchester University in England, but returned to Belize the following year. He became a politician in independent Belize and has lived there ever since. Belize usually considers itself a Caribbean nation, rather than a Central American nation.
Conclusion: Use standard Caribbean English for the article on Said Musa.
Fiat Regata
Fact profile: The Fiat Regata is an Italian motor car. It is produced in Italy, where there is no national variety of English, by an Italian company. It is sold in many markets, across which many varieties of English are in use.
Conclusion: The country of Italy is within the political and geographical entity of Europe. The government of the European Union has several official languages including British English. This is currently the version employed in the article.

All of these conclusions are debatable (or moot?), of course, but we've got a lovely set of rules as the pivot on which our debate reels. How pleasantly legalistic! (And no, I don't think that's an oxymoron.)

Many ideas for posts, but no time, so here's a placeholder until I have cleared out my inbox:

Paul pointed me to a discussion on a bridge discussion list (that's bridge the game, not the architectural kind, or the dental kind, or the musical kind...) that starts with a puzzle, directed to members of the American Contract Bridge League:

In the phrase "skillful signaling" can you move one letter
and retain correct, preferred English spelling?

I hope that readers of this blog will be able to solve the puzzle. (Find your hint here.)

The American responders find some clever ways to answer this question while missing its point--which just goes to show how separated the common language is.

Previously on SbaCL: I started a discussion of expressions that include names of animals that are special because both the expressions and the animals mentioned in them are local to either BrE or AmE. The discussion started with the AmE raccoon eyes and (slightly cheating) BrE pissed as a newt. While I was having a hard time coming up with more related to British (and not American) animals, Swedish Teacher's Beau yesterday suggested flat as a hedgehog, which works. The thing to understand here is that hedgehogs are very often roadkill (orig. & chiefly AmE). There are only a few examples of this expression on the net and a couple more of flat as a steam-roll(er)ed hedgehog:

The sign said WATCH OUT THIS HOUSE COULD FALL DOWN AND KNOCK YOU FLAT AS A STEAMROLLED HEDGEHOG. --Story by a (BrE) pupil/(AmE) student at Abernethy Primary School
I have to make the point that the McFly version is as flat as a hedgehog on the M1! --'Michael' on Ramair 1350am Forum

But still, I can think of more relating to American animals, possibly because there are more American-and-not-British animals to name.

The groundhog, aka woodchuck, has a day named after it, Groundhog Day, which will be a familiar phrase from the 1993 Bill Murray/Andie McDowell film/movie. The other week, I had to disabuse a friend of the notion that the observation of Groundhog Day and the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil were not products of a screenwriter's imagination, but real cultural treasures of the United States. The superstition is that on the second of February, groundhogs awake from their hibernation and pop their heads out of their burrows. If the groundhog sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter (so he pops back into the burrow), otherwise, spring will come early. The OED records another groundhog expression: a groundhog case--'a desperate or urgent affair'. Thisis mostly a regional term, chiefly used in the southern Midlands and South, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English. Here's a current use of the term:

Groundhog Case A term used by CS professors to describe a student hopelessly below the passing grade mark that absolutely needs to complete the course for a variety of reasons (graduation, marriage, work, MOM, etc...) --Software Engineering Terms glossary, West Virginia University Insititute of Technology

As for woodchucks, there's the tongue-twister How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

On to the skunks! There's the verb to skunk, meaning either 'to defeat, to prevent from scoring' as in (1) or 'to cheat (by not paying)'. These are listed in the OED as originally and chiefly American.

I've played games where I 'skunk' the opponent, winning without any meaningful response, and it's ego-building, but not nearly as fun. --emlprime on Digg

But there's another verb sense of skunk that the dictionaries don't record: 'to be sprayed by a skunk'. If one Googles "got skunked", one finds lots of examples of that sense:

Our dog recently got skunked for the 2nd time in 5 months. --from Berkeley Parents Network advice forum

Another skunk-derived expression is the adjective skunky, meaning 'to smell/taste bad, in a skunk-like way'. This is not completely foreign to BrE (OED doesn't mark it as AmE), but it's not quite as, um, pungent here as one can't be expected here to know what a skunk smells like--but there are few mainland Americans who've escaped this unpleasant bit of education.

To play possum is listed in the OED as 'orig. U.S.', but again, it's one I've had to explain when I've used the phrase in the UK. It means 'to play dead; to feign injury/illness; to pretend to be asleep'. This follows from the fact that (o)possums are thought to play dead in order to trick their predators--in fact, what they do is pass out, but it has the same effect.

Goodness knows, there are probably other local fauna expressions I'm missing. I've speciali{s/z}ed here on a certain size of animal, it seems. Feel free to add other examples in the comments.

When I come home after a long day's hay-feverish work, I often give my eyes a good rub and suffer the mascara-smeared consequences. [Incidentally, the second syllable in mascara sounds like care in (most northern, at least) AmE and like AmE car in (most south-eastern, at least) BrE.] When Better Half sees me after my eye-rubbing catharsis, he'll say something like "Hello, panda eyes." But in my AmE dialect, what I have are raccoon eyes. Think of a black-eye-masked animal in the US, and one naturally thinks of a raccoon. Think of one in the UK, and the panda more readily comes to mind. [Raccoon eyes is also the informal, and descriptive, name of a medical condition--bilateral periorbital ecchymosis.]

This got me thinking on the theme of animal expressions that don't work in other dialects because the animal isn't native to other dialect's area. I'm finding it easier to think of AmE expressions that don't translate into BrE. For instance, while the hedgehog is a native species in Britain, there don't seem to be any hedgehog-based clichés. So, I'm going to cheat a little and offer pissed/drunk/tight as a newt, meaning 'extremely intoxicated'. There are newts in America, but (a) they are different genera than the newts in Britain and (b) salamander is, in my experience, the more common way of referring to them in AmE. (But this may differ in parts of the US with different kinds of newts.) According to Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack, the newts in pissed as a newt weren't originally animals, but young men who were hired to watch gentlemen's horses while they were out on the town. The gentlemen would return from their libations to find that the "newts" had tippled too. However, there's no record of this sense of newt in the OED and Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English says the phrase probably comes from Army officers' slang. Is Albert Jack a quack? (For some clues as to the answer to this question, see Arnold Zwicky's post at Language Log.)

Martin Willett, in the glossary of his Debate Unlimited website, notes that as a newt doesn't need a word meaning 'drunk' in order to convey drunkenness:

Pissed as a newt and pissed as a fart; expressions of extreme drunkeness. The ending “as a newt” can be added to other expressions to express the concept of drunkness e.g. “Did you see Caroline Aherne receive her award last night, she looked, er, relaxed... as a newt.”

On the internet, one also finds cute as a newt (a few times). Since this is on the Urban Dictionary and MySpace, we might suppose it's a recently coined phrase. It doesn't mean 'drunkenly cute', but something more akin to AmE cute as a bug.

Both these BrE phrases can be compared to drunk as a skunk, which involves a North American animal, but nevertheless is said in Britain as well. Like cute as a newt, we can presume that it's caught on in large part because it rhymes--not because of any lack of sobreity in skunks or because of the inherent attractiveness of newts.

This one phrase has taken rather longer than expected, so I'll leave the rest of the American animals for tomorrow (or thereabouts). Stay tuned...

As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television (or, in pleasant but intense weekend bursts, Scrabble tournaments). For a while, I was hearing a fair amount of Scottish-accented speech on The Thick of It, a political satire in which the government's spin doctor is played by (*sigh*) Peter Capaldi (whom I still have a crush on due to Local Hero—undaunted by the many more/less savo(u)ry characters he's played since then). In/on the program(me), the Scots seem to run the government really, and it's generally felt that this was made to reflect real life. Sometimes I think it reflects my real life too, as I work at a university in southern England that has a Scottish Vice Chancellor and a history of Scottish people running various administrative departments.

Linguistically speaking, this means that sometimes the unfamiliar terms that come up in the university's administration-speak are Scottish imports. I'm not sure if we're the only university south of the border in which the year's exam diet is spoken of, but my colleagues who have come from other parts of England to work here find this term as foreign as I do. In Scottish law, a diet is a court session—and in academia it is the series of exams and examination boards (a feat of mind-wrenching bureaucracy necessitated by the classification of degrees) that happens at the end of the academic year—i.e. the examination 'season'.

I was reminded of this today when I was filling out a form concerning a new course. It said:

List all the programmes which will include this course. This should include ALL programmes within and outwith your school.

This was not the first time I'd encountered outwith where I would say outside or possibly (but only if I wanted to sound highfalutin in AmE) without. But this time, I was moved to investigate it, and (whaddya know?) it's marked in my dictionaries as Scottish. (My concise dictionaries say Sc(ottish), while the OED says Now chiefly Sc.) A little further investigation on the (AusE>BrE) uni website reveals that the author of the document is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.

I wondered whether I should start to develop a paranoid theory about the Scottish conspiracy to run my life and drown me in paperwork (for all of my paranoia is deliberate), but then I thought about the fact that all the Scottish people I know are super-nice and very efficient. Contrary to popular stereotypes, they always seem willing to buy a round of drinks. (So what if my sample size is limited to less than a dozen Scots? They're buying!) If these people do have plans to run my life, well, maybe I should let them. Perhaps it'll turn out that all the drink-buying was a ruse, but it's a lot better than the other paranoid fantasies I have to choose from.

I am misunderstood when I say can't--almost as often as I'm misunderstood when I do my modern dance interpretation of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Many BrE speakers have difficulty hearing the difference between most AmE pronunciations of can and can't.

In both dialects, it's not really the 't' that helps us tell the difference between the positive and negative words--that sound is mostly swallowed at the end of the word. It's the vowel that makes the difference. In standard BrE, the vowel quality is the clincher. Can rhymes with pan but can't is pronounced like the AmE pronunciation of Kant (see the comments for more discussion). In other words, the vowel in can't is considerably further back in the mouth than the vowel in can. (One feels the need to mention the old chestnut: Kubla Khan, but Immanuel Kant--but note that Khan and can are pronounced differently.)

In AmE, the vowel quality is very similar between the two forms, but the length of the vowel in can't is shorter. (By a 'shorter' vowel, I literally mean 'shorter'--i.e. not pronounced for as long.) I explained that fact to my students yesterday, and once they knew that they got much better in the "which one am I saying?" test.

Pronouncing can't the other way is a favo(u)rite way for British singers to make themselves sound more American, and for American singers to make themselves sound more British. (I suppose either identiy has some cachet, depending on what kind of sound you're going for.) I've got to run to London to celebrate some fellow Librans (yeah for us!), so will leave it as your homework assignment to identify one example of each!

Nancy e-mailed to ask about AmE cater to versus BrE cater for. This is where the book that I got for my birthday comes in handy. In it, John Algeo writes:

In CIC [the Cambridge International Corpus], cater for is more than 100 times as frequent in British texts as in American; cater to is 3 times as frequent in American texts as in British. In the sense "provide food (at a party)" British prefers cater for or possibly cater at; American also uses the verb transitively: cater a party.

What can I add to that? Just that catering is used more broadly in BrE than in AmE. For instance, a Scrabble comrade describes herself as working in catering. In AmE, I'd expect that to mean that she is an events caterer--someone who shows up to feed people at parties and conferences. In BrE, it means that she works in the food branch of the hospitality industry. In her case, catering is the department of the university that's responsible for the cafés/tea bars/restaurants on site.

Since Algeo so neatly took care of that case of verb complementation, I should move on to another challenge: a complementation difference that Algeo missed. John (coming to us through the Association of British Scrabble Players) writes to say:

One phrase not yet covered (as far as I can tell) is

beat up on = to attack physically or verbally (Websters 11th Collegiate). This strikes me (oops no pun intended) as exclusively North American, the equivalent British phrase being "beat up"

Where does the "on" come from? It appears to be a relatively recent addition. The 1937 version of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition Unabridged lists only "beat up" - (sense b) Slang to thrash (a person) esp. soundly.

John, come and be one of my students--I love the ones who do a bit of research before coming in with a question. Ten (BrE) marks/(AmE) points for laying the groundwork! Let's start by comparing beat and beat up:

(1) Batman beat the Joker

(2) Batman beat up the Joker.

(1) is ambiguous. It either means that Batman struck the Joker or that Batman won against the Joker. (2) indicates that Batman physically beat the Joker until some conclusion was reached--i.e. the Joker soundly thrashed. This involves the completive particle up, which we've seen before. The OED notes that beat up is originally AmE, and the first example of it (in an O. Henry story) is from 1907. Next year we can celebrate its hundredth birthday in print, then.

Then there's beat on:

(3) Batman beat on the Joker

(4) Batman beat on the door.

(3) sounds odd in many dialects, but (4), with an inanimate object, sounds better. If we use beat on with an animate object as in (3), it can sound like the object is not so animate--perhaps the Joker is unconscious or otherwise being very passive about being beaten. (Note that the participial form is beaten in standard BrE and AmE, but can be beat in informal and non-standard contexts, as in the AmE phrase It can't be beat = 'it's the best'.) On also seems to give a more repetitive connotation--it's the same spot on the door/the Joker that is being struck repeatedly. Batman beat the door/Joker sounds a bit more like the door/Joker is being struck all over.

So, now we come to the one that John wondered about:

(5) Batman beat up on the Joker (AmE)

Here we get both some completiveness from up and some impugned inanimacy from on. (Or at least, this is my reading of the situation.) Here, Batman pretty soundly (AmE dialectal) whupped the Joker, but the Joker didn't offer much resistance. As John's dictionary quotation indicates, this is often used figuratively. So, if you don't agree with what I've said here, you can beat up on my ideas in the comments section. I'll be passive about it in the sense that I probably won't be on-line to defend myself when you comment. But if you say something cleverer than what I've said here, I'll only thank you for the beating. After all, blogging is a form of intellectual masochism.

Suzannah e-mailed to ask about the rituals involved when two people say the same thing at the same time. In the US, the schoolyard tradition is to say jinx! (For a discussion of the etymology of the word see World Wide Words.) In general, a jinx is a kind of curse. After simultaneous speech, one tries to be the first to say jinx (or to jinx them, for it can be a verb too), after which the "jinxee" is "cursed" by not being allowed to speak. Wikipedia elaborates the rules as:

"Jinx" is also a term used when two people say the same thing at the same time and the person who says jinx first makes the other person not speak until somebody says his or her name. The only prevention for this state is to yell the word "buttercup" after the jinx. This can be countered by "Jinx no buttercups".

This shows up a limitation of Wikipedia--the rules here are undoubtedly the rules that the author has experienced, but there are plenty of other rules too, since regional variation is rife in children's games and playground activities. (So go now and add your own rules to Wikipedia!) In Suzannah's experience:

When I was in school, if two people said the same thing at the same time you hurried to say "jinx" first - whoever lost wasn't supposed to talk until someone said their name. A bystander could also say it, and both of the people involved would be caught. I learned from a friend who grew up in another area that "pinch poke you owe me a coke" was the answer to this situation, or sometimes just "jinx you owe me a coke". I saw in an old movie (and another friend said she'd seen it in person) where the two people stopped for a second in their conversation and linked pinkies when this happened, then kept going.

(I think we played with something like Suzannah's rule--but usually we just got bored with our friend not being able to talk so we'd unjinx them.) Over at The Law of the Playground there are some more versions. OED doesn't have this sense of jinx but does note that the word is 'orig. U.S.'.

Better Half says that he knows jinx from his days on a South London playground, where they said jinx and fainites. (Though BH remembered the word as "fainlights", making it difficult to look up. Some kind folks at the American Dialect Society set us straight on the spelling.) Fainites (and variations on it--OED lists fains, fains I, fainit...) gives the sayer immunity from jinxing or touching.

Off the playground in BrE, one is more likely to hear snap, which is, as the OED puts it, 'an exclamation used when two similar objects turn up or two similar events take place'. This doesn't have the cursing connotations of jinx and is used off the playground as well. For example, when playing Scrabble, if I announce my score and my opponent has the same score, she might say Snap! or if you reach for something at the same time as someone else, one of you could say it.

This use of snap comes from a card game of the same name, which is similar to the game I played as a child called slapjack--but there are many variations of this game (and other names for it) that are of varying similarity to snap. (Here are two--including one in which one actually slaps jacks.) Essentially, one splits a deck of cards between two people; both lay a card face up on the table and continue doing this, piling the cards on one another, until two cards match (e.g. two jacks). The first one to slap the pile and say (BrE) Snap!/(AmE-dialectal) Slapjack! gets to keep the pile (or in some versions not keep it--depending on whether the aim is to have all the cards or none of them). For young children, one can buy snap cards with pictures.

In my house, slapjack always ended in tears and accusations, and sometimes with being sent to one's room. The name snap sounds much more civili{s/z}ed. But is the game?

I want to write about one thing, and can do so while writing about something someone's asked me to write about, but:

I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
....

OK, here we go. Kate e-mailed to request some coverage of pants, trousers and slacks. In BrE, pants refers to underpants, which sometimes leads to sub-hilarity when an American says something like I look good in pants. Pants is a generic term—those for women can also be called knickers or panties. Pants has another life as a term of derogatory evaluation. Better Half has obliged us with an example:

Superman Returns was completely pants—and he even wears them on the outside.

(For those interested in Greek terms for odd turns of phrase, that's a zeugma, though some would prefer you to call it a syllepsis.)

The BrE word for the bottom half of a suit is trousers—indeed British women wear trouser suits, while their American counterparts wear pantsuits. Trousers is understood, but not much used, in AmE. I'd certainly never apply the word to womenswear in AmE, but do so easily in my approximation of BrE. In AmE, trousers is an old-fashioned, kind of funny word.

What about slacks? BH and I were just saying the other day that we thought we'd only use slacks as an AmE word for certain types of women's trousers. The very same evening, we were watching an episode from the first (BrE) series/(AmE) season of the very clever BBC comedy The Smoking Room, in which a male character's trousers are referred to as slacks. So it looks like BH and I don't know nuffin. (On the positive side, I can start to cite watching comedy DVDs as an important research activity.) Nevertheless, we both think of slacks as a word that's more at home in our mothers' or grandmothers' vocabularies.

But all of this talk just gets me further from what I wanted to talk about. I mean, we're entering the glorious season of Lynneukah (the festival of Lynne), so I should get the space for my big rant here: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH WOMEN'S TROUSERS/PANTS? I've worn skirts through several years of the low-waisted fashion, because no one makes a woman-shaped trouser anymore. They make trouser legs with something to hold them together. Even the ones that call themselves natural waist (I'm talking to YOU, Boden!) reach nowhere near that narrower part of me between my hips and my ribs. So this year (after some rumblings in this direction last year), the fashion mags proclaimed that high-waisted trousers are back! In fact, they seem to believe they are ubiquitous:

And for anyone tired of the smock, and the baby doll, and the high-waist trouser, and sick to death of wearing nothing but grey, or black, or shell (fashion speak for off-white), then I am afraid that next summer you will be disappointed. —The Daily Mail, 18 September 2006

Where on earth are all these high-waisted trousers? This summer I've returned five so-called items to mail order houses, and found just one pair in the High Street (AmE = 'on Main Street', but since there are no (AmE) stores/BrE shops on Main Street, USA anymore, the translation doesn't really work). Which brings me to the heart of my rant. I found another pair of trousers-that-fit-women-with-hips-and-waist in the US in March and both of these pairs of trousers/pants are made of (it makes my skin crawl even typing this) p-o-l-y-e-s-t-e-r. Reader, I am so desperate that I bought them. And by the second wearing, each of them was covered with (here comes the big BrE/AmE distinction that I wanted to get to!) (AmE) PILLS/(BrE) BOBBLES.

BH tells me that I need to get a Remington Fuzz-Away. But then again he is also the man who just said "If I had a band I'd call it Victor Kiam's Love Child."

After saying recently that I'd be reducing the frequency of my posting, I find that I have a lot more to post about. Having finished my sabbatical, I'm back in the land of the listening and the talking, and so my list of things to write about gets longer and longer and their topicality gets staler and staler. I noted about a dozen experiences yesterday that I could have blogged about. How frustrating to have to ration my blog time...

So, before this one becomes untopical:

Britain is having a 'plague' of crane flies, or as the Daily Telegraph (their photo, right) and everyone else around me puts it, daddy long-legs. In AmE, daddy long-legs refers only to certain types of spiders that have very long, thin legs and a small body. In BrE, it can refer to spiders (although then it's usually called the daddy long-legs spider), but also to just about any insect that has similar legs.

I first heard the term used thusly a few months ago, when I went to eradicate a bug in my kitchen and Better Half and his sister protested. BH'sS said, "Don't kill it! It's a daddy long-legs!" I'm not sure that it really mattered to her that it was a daddy long-legs; she is a friend of all creatures great and small. I protested, "No, it's not. It's only got six legs." BH and sister replied that that's how many legs a daddy long-legs has.

The insect in question looked like a daddy-long legs spider, except for being two legs short of spiderhood. It looked kind of like this picture (via Google Images from a website that no longer exists, so I don't know what the insect is). But the plague of crane flies has inspired an epidemic of using daddy long-legs in a more specific sense, to refer to these flying things--usuallly in the expression Ugh, get it out of here! I hate those daddy long-legs! The OED lists the crane fly meaning first, with examples of the term going back to the early 19th century.

I was going to write this and wait a day to post it, but (AmE) what the heck...

The new students arrive this weekend, and will have a week's induction. In the US, the same activities would be called orientation week. Better Half was saying that orientation is a very American word to him, which is interesting, considering that the verb orientate is more common in the UK.

Orientate is a back-formation--instead of being built out of a simpler word (orient) plus a suffix, it was built from a more complex word (orientation), and a perceived suffix was removed. The English Plus website takes a hard line on this:

At best, orientate is a back-formation used humorously to make the speaker sound pompous. The correct word is the verb orient.
Incorrect: Melanie is helping me get orientated to the new job.
Correct: Melanie is helping me get oriented to the new job.
Orientate is more widely accepted in the U.K. than in the U.S.A., but it should be avoided in any formal or standard writing.

I was reminded of this when Patty, an American in Surrey, e-mailed about the British using pressurise where Americans would use the verb pressure, as in:

Have you felt pressurised by a doorstep trader within the last 12 months? --Lincolnshire County Council poll

versus

Some teachers claim they felt pressured to change grades --ABC-7 News Chicago

However, there are examples of felt pressured to in UK sources--for example the following from the BBC:

[about a Radio 1 survey of teens] Alarmingly the results also showed that 24% of respondents felt pressured to have sex for the first time, and that just over a quarter of all the people asked lost their virginity without using any contraception. --Slink, BBC online magazine for 13- to 16-year-olds

The OED lists the verb pressure as orig. U.S.. Their first quoted usage is from Raymond Chandler in 1939, but there is self-conscious (i.e. used in inverted commas/quotation marks) British usage noted from 1960. Pressuri{s/z}e is only used in the figurative sense from the mid-1950s. I should note that while I generally treat -ise forms as BrE and -ize as AmE, either is correct in British English, though people and publications have their preferences. I find that my students believe that -ize is not acceptable in British English. The British examples of this word in the OED have a (AmE) zee/(BrE) zed until the 1970s.

This pressure vs. pressuri{s/z}e dialectal difference only applies to the figurative sense of the verb, of course. Both Americans and British people pressuri{s/z}e vehicles' (AmE) tires/(BrE) tyres and other such things.

An old American friend, Lord Affectation (I've got other less flattering names for him too), has moved to Kent and informed me that "The British call bicycles push irons!" I said, "Your English friends are pushing your leg." Most English people call them bicycles, just like the rest of the English-speaking world. But as the photo (taken near a bike rack on campus) shows, he's partly right. Some people do call them push bikes, including The Gardener (Better Half's Sister's Better Half--BH just called him a young fogey). It's a little old-fashioned, but it succeeds in distinguishing them from motorbikes. AmE sometimes uses pedal bike for this purpose, but bicycle would be more usual. Or just a sign saying No M/C.

The OED has push bicycle and push cycle as well as push bike, which they label as 'informal.' Myself, I've only heard push bike, but push bicycle is around on the web, as well as push tricycle and push unicycle. The OED does not have push iron, but the web holds a small number of examples, some of them in lists of Wigan dialect words. Wigan, it should be noted, is nowhere near Kent.

Of course, BrE has another push-vehicle, the push-chair, known in AmE as a stroller. Related is the pram, short for perambulator, known in AmE as a baby carriage.

Previously, there's been some discussion on this site of the BrE use of sit and stand in the passive, as in:

It was only four months ago that I was sat in a pub at lunch time with my head in my hands. —Nichola at Looking Glass Society
She called back to me, from where she was stood up at the front of the queue, she said, 'Where was it that Morrissey lost his bag?' —The Wrong Boy by Willy Russell

To Americans, this passive use of the verbs sit and stand sounds strange. Interestingly, you don't get the same passive usage for lie so much, with either the (usually intransitive form) lain or the (usually—or at least prescriptively—transitive) form laid. Better Half (who's ok with passive sat) says he wouldn't say this at all--but some (like Rebecca in the comments!) would. Here are some web examples:

Anoron sat in a plush chair within Legolas' room. He was lain on the bed; sheets slewn about him, his bare beautiful body showing as he lay on his side fast asleep. —from what appears to be Middle Earth slash fiction by Anorista
His nose was bleeding and he was laid on the bed face down. —The Daily Mail

Today I was struck by another use of passive sat in the documentation for an examination board, which said something like:

The exam was sat on the 29th.

In AmE, one takes exams rather than sitting exams, as they do in BrE. Since sit in this instance is transitive, with exam as its direct object, it's perfectly grammatical in the passive in BrE.

Students sit exams or write them in BrE, and examiners set exam papers. But in my first teaching job outside the US, I frequently said I have to go write my exams, confusing my colleagues who thought I already had the requisite degrees. I now set papers with the best of 'em. Unfortunately, this means that I have to (BrE) mark/(AmE) grade them too.

Outside the US, I also had to learn to invigilate exams. The first time I heard this term, I said to my South African colleague "Oooh, that sound painful." He said, "Well what do you call it then?" "Proctoring", I said. You can imagine his response.

Keeping with the game theme I started last time...

Over on the American Dialect Society e-mail list, a conversation has come up about that hand-shape game in which a fist beats a 'V' sign, a flat hand beats a fist, and a 'V' sign beats a flat hand. You, of course, know what I mean (having read the title), but it's called a lot of different things. The original query on the ADS list wondered about American variations on the name. Most Americans call it Rock, Paper, Scissors, but some call it Rock, Scissors, Paper. (We also discovered that it's also called Roshambo or Rochambeau and one Missourian grew up calling it by its Japanese name, Jan Ken Pon. Apparently, in China and Japan it involves cloth, rather than paper.)

The most common BrE name for this game is Paper, Scissors, Stone. An Australian on the web says that (s)he's always known it as Paper, Scissors, Rock.

As with almost any game, there is a world association and world championships. I note that it's called the World RPS Society--using the American order. They say:

One of the mandates of the World RPS Society is name harmonization, so we would encourage all players to use the term Rock Paper Scissors or its short form RPS. We feel that this is the best way of helping the sport to grow in the future.

North American linguistic imperialism at work? Here's the (apparently fictional--see comments) story from their website:

The Paper Scissors Stone Club was founded in London, England in 1842 immediately following the issuance of the1842 law declaring “any decision reached by the use of the process known as Paper Scissors Stone between two gentleman acting in good faith shall constitute a binding contract. Agreements reached in this manner are subject to all relevant contract and tort law.” The law was seen as a slap in the face to the growing number of enthusiasts who played it strictly as a recreational activity, since for many constables it was taken to mean that the game could not be played simply for sport. The club was founded and officially registered to provide an environment free from the long arm of the law where enthusiasts could come together and play for honour.
[...] In 1918, the name was changed to World RPS Club in to reflect the growing International representation. At roughly the same time the Club moved its headquarters from London to its present location at Trinity Plaza in Toronto, Canada. Despite the allied victory, the official reason for the move was “England is far too dangerous a place to make a suitable home country for a game of conflict resolution.” Canada was seen as an excellent choice since it was seen as a “safe, hospitable and utterly inoffensive nation, a part of the commonwealth, yet not inhabited by the descendants of criminals.”
In 1925 when the club briefly reached over 10,000 members, the name was changed again to The World RPS Society. The Steering Committee felt that since the membership had reached a new order of magnitude the term club was seen to be “inappropriate, misleading, and mocking.”

These are people who feel strongly about words, as well as about their game!

According to the website (very nice photos!), Norway is in the midst of its national championship, and there it's called Stein, Saks, Papir ('stone, scissors, paper'). Apparently, they've not been bullied into calling it Stein, Papir, Saks.

While I read every newspaper that comes into my house from cover to cover (with the exception of the sport(s) section, which I hie to the recycling while wrinkling my nose), I'm not particularly careful about reading them when they are actually news. So I was just reading the 'Comment' section of the Guardian from 26 August 2006 when I came across this line by Johnjoe McFadden (Irish born, but raised in "the UK" according to his bio):

In Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man, the eponymous hero makes all his decisions by rolling a dice.

I can hear any one of my schoolteachers responding to that sentence with "You mean a die. Dice is the plural of die."

Not necessarily, dear teachers.

Die is certainly the preferred singular in AmE, but in BrE one is likely to see dice as both the singular and the plural, even in edited texts like newspapers. A90Six comments on the forum at wordreference.com:

Many people in the UK would not even be aware that die is the singular of dice. Some even believe that when die is written in games instructions it is a typo with a missing c....
The only time die is really heard is in the expression, "The die is cast," meaning - something has been done or a decision has been made that will now have to run its course and fate will decide the outcome.

Better Half disagrees, and says that in his English mind it should be a die and not a dice in the newspaper, but some of my linguistic colleagues have in the past chided me for using die. More evidence that BH spends too much time with Americans? What do you say?

The history is a bit convoluted--but both forms have been used in the singular since the 14th century.

An Australian man living in the UK said to me recently: "Isn't it so weird how they use Asian?"

The "they", of course, are the British. My own discovery of the difference was linked to several occasions in which I said I was in the mood for Asian food and then found myself steered toward(s) a curry house. In BrE, when Asian is used to refer to a person, culture or cuisine, it is most usually referring to someone or something South Asian (i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka). In the US and, it turns out, Australia, Asian typically refers to people/things from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.).

This, of course, raises the question of what BrE speakers call people from East Asia and what AmE speakers call people from South Asia. For East Asian people in Britain, most people attempt to specify a nationality--Chinese, Japanese and so forth. This can involve some guessing. I have also heard the word Oriental as a noun or adjective referring to people more often in this country than I have in the US (mostly from over-60s), leading me to wonder if (a) it's perceived as less politically incorrect here than in the States, (b) I just hang out with more older, white people in the UK (who might not have caught up with the fact that Oriental is not preferred) than I do in the US (though I don't think that's true, if we take my parents' friends into account), or (c) [white] British people are just desperate for a collective term for East Asian peoples and so give in and use this one.

In AmE, people from South Asia are usually labelled by nationality, which probably results in the mistaken assignment of Indian to some Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. In AmE, one often hears He's Indian--from India or some other clarification to make clear that the 'he' in question is not Native American. In the UK, one does hear Red Indian to refer to Native Americans (again, mostly from older people), and it never ceases to shock me when I hear it.

Not surprisingly, not everyone who's called Asian likes it. See this Guardian (AmE) editorial/(BrE)leader* for some discussion and history of the term in the UK.
*Note that leader or leading article is one of those words that was invented in the US, but went on to become more common in the UK.

And now, under the 'Any Other Business' heading of tonight's agenda:

• As I'm taking on some new responsibilities at work, expect my posts to become a little less frequent. I may get to two a week, but certainly not the three I've been doing. (That's all for this week, folks.)
• I've been interviewed on the site Expat Interviews. I tell you this to advertise them, not me!

Kate, a Canadian attached to a South African, wonders about handbags, having noticed that Britishoid Englishes use that term where North Americans would say purse. What's more confusing is that the word purse is used in BrE, but for a different kind of object than in AmE.

The thing to the right (from phulbari.com) is called a handbag in BrE, and a purse in AmE. One can say handbag in AmE, but it sounds rather old-fashioned. In keeping with that feeling, I'd tend to reserve the term for vintage items (when speaking in American environs). Handbag can be used to refer to most handled women's accessories for carrying around life's essentials—money, lipstick (lippy: BrE informal, orig. AusE), (BrE) mobile/ (AmE) cell phone, Syndol--which itself is a major reason to emigrate to Britain. Longer-handled ones might also be called shoulder bags (as they could be in AmE as well). But in everyday BrE life they all tend to be called just bags--as in I have some Syndol in my bag--want some?

Purse in BrE is a (typically women's) leather/cloth/etc. thing that money goes directly into--like the ones at the left, from Arnold & Arnold. Thus female BrE speakers usually have purses inside their bags. AmE retains this sense of purse in change purse. For North Americans, the things on the left are wallets. If it's in a man's pocket, it's wallet in both dialects--but my dad (like others in his AmE-speaking generation) calls his a billfold.

BrE has a few handbag idioms worth noting. Handbags at dawn (also a great name for a band) or handbags at ten paces is a way of referring to a usually loud, public fight--originally among footballers. This is sometimes shortened to handbags. The OED's earliest citation for this is 1987, but they're looking for earlier ones. To handbag is an established verb in BrE, meaning 'to assault with a handbag', and can also be used figuratively, meaning 'to verbally assault or criticise', as in:

Not since Mrs Thatcher handbagged her cabinet into attending a seminar on climate change at Number 10 had so many senior Tories been seen doing something green in one place. -- The Telegraph

Kate's Canadianness has reminded me that I haven't reported an instance of being assumed Canadian. It happened last weekend at the Scrabble tournament, though to be fair it was after I was explaining the differences between Canadian, American and British spelling. Who but a Canadian would know such things? I would, apparently.

(Links to commercial sites here are just (a) to acknowledge the sources of photos and (b) prevent people asking me "where did you get that bag/purse?" Now you know already. This is not an endorsement of these companies/products, but they are rather pretty, aren't they?)

The first time someone in England suggested we meet at the mall, I thought they were joking around, since they pronounced it to rhyme with pal. I heard this pronunciation on and off again, but when I was invited to meet someone at the [mæl] tonight, I decided this issue needed more investigation.

My dining companions were mixed in whether they'd call it a [mæl] (rhyming with pal) or a [mɔl] (rhyming with tall), but they agreed that they only use the American-like pronunciation [mɔl] when referring to shopping malls--and especially in the phrase shopping mall. They also agreed that calling such things malls feels like a recent borrowing from AmE--that they feel the "real" name for such things is shopping centre. In fact, people usually refer to enclosed shopping areas by their proper names, such as the Putney Exchange or Churchill Square. Better Half and I don't know of any enclosed shopping cent{re/er}s in the UK named X Mall (but I'm sure one of you will point one out if there is one).

This is not to say that the word mall is a recent import to BrE--far from it. But in its native environment here these days it most usually rhymes with pal. For instance The Mall (a tree-bordered walk in St James's Park, London) is usually pronounced as [mæl]. Pall-mall, historically a game, but now (in the form Pall Mall) a street in London, is similarly pronounced with two [æ] sounds in modern BrE. In fact, mall originally meant an alley in which pall-mall is played.

In my childhood in the US, Pall Mall cigarettes were pronounced [pɔlmɔl], but I was taught that the place in England was [pɛlmɛl], rhyming with bell. Apparently, I was being taught out-of-date British English. While today it's pronounced with [æ], the 1904 New English Dictionary records it as [ɛ]. Of course, when you're young, you think your teachers are ancient, but I don't think they were really that ancient. This just goes to show that dictionaries, like any other reference book, go out of date.

And all of this is related to pell-mell (the similar form of which is thought to have affected the pronunciation of pall-mall). This has the bell vowel, but, according to the OED, BrE and AmE stress it differently, with Americans stressing the two syllables equally and Britons putting slightly more stress on the mell. For what it's worth, three English people pronounced this in conversation tonight, and I didn't notice any stronger stress on mell. But I'm not a phonetician, I just play one on the Internet.*

The fact that the shopping kind of mall and the outside kind of mall are often pronounced differently in BrE seems to suggest that people don't see the two types of things as very related. In AmE, both are pronounced the same (the mall being the local shopping cent{er/re} and The Mall being the green area around which the Smithsonian Institute is arranged)--but that doesn't mean that people necessarily see them as related. After all, people don't necessarily see the bird duck and the action duck as being related--although they historically are.

*Joke assistance for the young and/or non-American: In the US, it's illegal for licensed medical doctors to promote products in advertising. In the early 1980s, a (AmE) cough syrup/(BrE) cough medicine was therefore advertised by a soap-opera actor who said "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" and then going on to plug the product. It was such a ridiculous premis{e/s} for an ad(vert) that "I'm not a X, but I play one on Y" became a popular joke. In fact, googling "but I play one on TV" results in over 87,000 hits. As a phrase, it's been discussed at the Language Log. (The link is to the third instal(l)ment of that discussion, but you can link to the earlier ones from there.)

Yesterday was August Bank Holiday in England. This is a fine holiday with many well-loved traditions, such as inching along on the motorway (AmE = highway, expressway, and various regional things like thruway and turnpike) while colo(u)rfully cursing, getting rained on at the beach, withstanding your in-laws, and standing in a long queue (AmE = line) at a DIY superstore then going home to decorate (which usually means painting).

The term Bank Holiday is pretty much equivalent to AmE legal holiday or public holiday. The US and UK have a couple of holidays in common--Christmas and New Year's Day. In the US, public holidays celebrate famous figures (Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents' Day), events (Thanksgiving) or issues/groups of people (Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans' Day). Which holidays are public holidays varies by state. For example, Massachusetts has an extra one called Patriots' Day--which, I might add, is to commemorate the battles of Lexington and Concord in the (AmE) Revolutionary War/ (BrE) American War of Independence, not the New England Patriots (American) football team. Click here for a site that tells you when US federal holidays and traditional secular observances take place.

In the UK, holidays generally allow for days off around Christian feasts (Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Boxing Day--which I've now discussed here) or celebrate the fact that the banks are closed (May Bank Holiday, Spring Bank Holiday [also in May], and August (aka Summer) Bank Holiday). August Bank Holiday is timed to co-occur with the dampening of the weather as hurricane season gets started in the Atlantic. Dates of holidays in the four nations of the UK can be found here,

England has the fewest public holidays in Europe, fewer than Scotland and fewer than the US as well. I practice my own "go-slow" on Columbus Day and Martin Luther King Day, and get downright rude at work on Thanksgiving. I don't do this because I'm patriotic--I just feel I'm owed a few more holidays. Only the May bank holidays fall during the university term, but they fall during exam time, and they don't close the university as there are too many exams to fit into the exam period.

So, I'm absolutely in favo(u)r of more bank holidays, but I would like to campaign to give them better and more diverse names. If the British can't think of things to celebrate, then at least the holidays could be named after other holiday traditions besides the closing of the banks. How about Trains on a Reduced Schedule Monday or Don't even think about driving on the M6 Day?

What British holidays would you like added to the roster?

A quick dispatch from the British Matchplay Scrabble Championships in Staffordshire. (Don't ask me how I'm faring.)

In the pub last night, it was said of someone "Oh, she's a really jammy player." I've heard jammy used in this way before, but this time I just had to swallow my pride and ask Just what does jammy mean, anyway? Turns out it means 'lucky', or as the OED puts it: 'very lucky or profitable'. General consensus was that the word is used a lot more in the Scrabble world than in everyday life (but of course we have a lot of reason to talk about luck in the Scrabble world), and that it might be a little old-fashioned.

It puts a new spin for me on the biscuit name Jammie Dodgers, which I had not heretofore reali{s/z}ed could be a pun. The alternative spelling of jammy could be for trademarking reasons. One also sees the spelling jammy dodger for ones that are not made by Burton's Foods. There is a far-fetched etymology here (search down the page for 'name' to get to it). The writer claims the name goes back to the 1500s [from French jamais de guerre]. But (a) the name works as a literal name--it has jam and dodger is a dialectal word (now used in Australian military, apparently) for sandwich--and this is what we'd call in the US a sandwich cookie, and (b) Burton's Foods has only been making them since 1960. While the biscuit could go back a lot further than that, the story has the hallmarks of folk etymology. Does anyone out there know more about the history of jammie/jammy dodgers? (I've written to Burton's and will update if there's any news.)

See the etymology link if you want to see a photo of a Jammie Dodger--and reviews of Jammie Dodgers. The computer I'm at won't allow me to upload one.

Today I used the AmE expression (treated like) a red-headed stepchild, meaning someone or something that isn't treated on a par with others in their group--through no fault of their own. The person I said it to could figure out what it meant, although he hadn't known it before. But the result is that it got me thinking about redheads.

In these parts, red hair, or more particularly light red hair, is called ginger. This isn't unknown in America, but it's not at all as common as it is in the UK, home of Ginger Spice. It can also refer to reddish-colo(u)red fur on an animal, especially a cat. Referring to people or animals, it can be used in various ways:

as an adjective, referring to the colo(u)r:

Her hair is ginger

as an adjective meaning 'having red hair/fur':

He is ginger

or as a noun, meaning 'a person/animal with red hair':

That Chris Evans is a ginger – nuff said! --BKAW

As you can probably tell from the last example, calling someone a ginger is not the most polite way to describe a person's hair colo(u)r. This follows from the general principle that refering to people using adjectives-turned-into-nouns is a bit rude as it reduces them to a single property. Compare, for example He is gay and He is a gay.

It's my impression that it's tougher to be a redhead, especially a redheaded man, in the UK than in the US (armies of women who henna over their gr{a/e}y notwithstanding). The first Chris Evans quote is indicative, but here's another, followed by a charmingly clueless query from a non-British commenter on a Dr Who forum:

3twelve: ... Chris Evans is a ginger tosser - whose only real fame was due to the Big Breakfast - a uk tv show that he was one of the first presenters on.

wpbinder: What the heck is a ginger tosser?I'm having great fun imagining wpbinder imagining that the worst thing in BrE is to accuse someone of throwing Asian root-based spices around. But no, 3twelve is accusing Evans of being a red-headed onanist. Now, it's one thing to call Evans a tosser (AmE equivalent might be prick--Americans don't use onanistic insults quite as much, and jerk isn't strong enough), but no one seems to call him one without making reference to his hair colo(u)r. Then again, it's hard to think of Americans to compare him to. Ron Howard is more likely to be mocked for not having any hair these days, and Carrot Top, well, mocks himself. Danny Bonaduce, anyone?

You could throw red-headed stepchild back at me as proof that Americans are tough on redheads but (a) it's a pretty old-fashioned-sounding saying that refers to an old-fashioned attitude, and (b) there have been recent reports (on the American Dialect Society e-mail list) of people saying left-handed stepchild instead--presumably because it's easier to understand lefties as more neglected than redheads.

Redheaded people (or those who are attracted to them) are also called ginger-nuts in BrE. A ginger-nut is a hard ginger biscuit. Strangely, these have no nuts. They are fairly comparable to American ginger snaps (I've not seen a British ginger snap, so I can't say what those are like, though the OED seems to feel that they're different from ginger-nuts). Ginger snap can be used in AmE to refer to (as the OED puts it): "a hot-tempered person, esp. one with carroty hair". Now, that has me imagining a screeching baby in a highchair with vegetable puree everywhere. Perhaps I'm just too literal-minded.

Regular commenter Rebecca asked me recently about Americans saying I feel badly. I wasn't so sure it was American, and the OED isn't so sure it is either, as they have it as 'dialectal' (which, for the OED, means 'British dialectal'). On the other hand, I was under the impression that saying I feel poorly was a British dialectal thing, yet I find in the American Heritage Dictionary that it's used in America too. But, looking beyond the dictionary dialect labels, there are arguably some differences here. I'll get to those in a bit. First, some probably unnecessary reflections on the adjectival status of badly and poorly, just to amuse myself.

What is funny about both of these words is that they are -ly forms being used unusually as adjectives, rather than adverbs. Funnier still is the very limited way in which we use them. Typical adjectives can modify nouns in two ways:

Attributively -- that is, within the noun phrase:

the sick parrot

and

Predicatively -- after a linking verb

The parrot is/seems/feels/smells sick

Poorly only goes in predicative position:

The parrot is/seems/feels poorly.

*the poorly parrot
(* always indicates ungrammatical/unnatural phrasings)

That's not so odd, since there are some other adjectives, like glad, that only like to be in predicative position.

But badly is funnier still. It doesn't like to be in attributive position, and seems only to go in predicative position after the verb feel:

I feel badly

?The parrot is/seems badly

*the badly parrot

Using badly as an adjective after feel creates an ambiguity between the adjectival interpretation and the adverbial interpretation:

The parrot feels badly

adjective reading: 'The parrot doesn't feel good.'

adverb reading: 'The parrot isn't good at feeling.' (perhaps because parrots don't have hands!)

Now, why would people go out of their way to add an -ly to the familiar adjective bad when (a) they don't need to, and (b) it introduces an unhelpful ambiguity?

I have two hypotheses. First, maybe people use badly after feel because they're trying to say the opposite of I feel well. Well is an adjective in that case, but it's also an adverb (as in The parrot sings well), and the opposite of the adverb well is badly. So, if you want to say the opposite of I feel well, then it might seem like you should say I feel badly. This could be considered to be a case of hypercorrection (see sense 2 in the linked Wikipedia definition).

My problem with this hypothesis is that I can imagine myself saying I feel badly, but not I am badly. It's hard to search for such things on the web (since you get lots of examples like I am badly dressed or badly in need of a haircut), but the two examples I've found of of I am badly meaning 'I am unwell' are both by French speakers using English--an interference error from French. If we're just using badly to match well, then it would stand to reason that one could say I AM badly, since one can say I AM well. But I can't find much evidence of native English speakers doing that.

My other hypothesis relates more to how I would use I feel badly--which may not be how everyone else uses it, so let me know if you're different. If I'm feeling unwell, I'd say I feel bad (or, if I'm trying to be misguidedly Britishy, I feel poorly). But if I'm regretting something, I might say I feel badly about killing your parrot. (Just an example--no parrots were harmed in the writing of this blog.) I feel badly is limited in this case to emotional states, rather than physical ones. It turns out it's not just my hypothesis, as I've just found this, which makes the same conjecture. Hm, should've done that bit of the research before writing all this.

Now this is NOT the sense of badly that the OED lists as dialectal in Britain. That one means 'unwell, indisposed'. They don't have a lot of examples of it, and the last one is from 1966. So, it looks like badly='regretful, hurt, otherwise emotionally unwell' IS an Americanism.

According to a 1993 addition to the OED, poorly has come to be euphemistically used to mean 'seriously ill'. I believe that this is specifically BrE. They give these examples:

1979 Guardian 31 Jan. 4/4 Last night Adrian was said to be ‘poorly’ in the burns unit of a hospital. 1988 Times 8 Jan. 2/7 Yesterday he was on oxygen and I was up with him all night. He hasn't needed oxygen today but he is still quite poorly. Ibid. 15 Nov. 3/6 Nine children were..still receiving hospital treatment... Two were in a ‘poorly condition’.

I nevertheless maintain that I was justified in using poorly to describe my post-Pimms hangover last weekend. I was verily hospitali{s/z}able.

So: Americans do you use poorly? If so, how sick is a person who is poorly?
And: BrE speakers, do you use badly? If so, is it an emotional or physical state?