Separated by a Common Language

And now...the US-to-UK Word of the Year!

Nominated by Rosemary, and supported by Simon K and my spouse, I'm sure this is going to be met with a chorus of "Bah, humbug! I've never heard that" (as was said in the nominations discussion). But these things happen. We are not each the cent{er/re} of the universe, so we don't all experience everything. This one will, however, be known to those who go to trendy foodie pubs--because what the trendy foodie pubs are into at the moment is Americana. There are two near my house that serve (AmE in this sense) barbecue, boasting their own smokehouses. Another now speciali{z/s}es in Buffalo wings (serving them, somewhat incongrously, with hush puppies, which are associated with the cuisine of the American South, not northeastern Buffalo, NY--but I'm sure that any Chinese person looking at a US or UK Chinese restaurant menu sees greater horrors than this). All the other pubs are serving pulled pork, in paninis, in burritos, in soups...  Now that I think of it, I can think of more pubs in my area that are serving American food now than those serving bangers and mash.

And as part of this trend, fancy dishes of pasta with cheese are making it onto menus. This dish has a name in the UK, and that name is macaroni cheese, but when it shows up in these new milieus, served as a side dish or with often other 'gourmet' ingredients, it is increasingly given its slangy American name. And this name is the 2015 US-to-UK Word of the Year:

It seemed a relatively quiet year for transatlantic words (after last year's two-words-per-country madness). As ever I'm very grateful to readers who make nominations for the title--especially those in the US who have a better eye on what's going on there than I do these days.  And so for UK-to-US Word of the Year, I've gone with one that was nominated by Irene C. and supported by Anonymous and Kagi Soracia:

I've seen the word used this year (singular and plural, but more commonly plural, it seems) by US print media (with some TV mentions) to refer to the members of a certain congressional caucus who were first elected in the elections of 2010/2012/2014, and so at this point can't all be referred to as "freshmen", the usual term for first termers. But the point of the caucus is that they are influential as a bloc but aren't leadership, and are in fact opposed to their own partisan leadership. Ironically, the caucus' primary grievance with that leadership has been the way in which congressional procedure has been altered along Westminsterian lines (centralizing power in the speakership, making the position partisan, tightening party influence over committees, the Hastert Rule) since Newt Gingrich became speaker in 1995.

I'm not quite sure the term quite fits as a description of this caucus' position in terms of power, but the term has been used to refer to its members in 2015.

It was news to me, and struck me as somewhat odd, since the term has a particular meaning in BrE that doesn't really migrate to a non-partliamentary system. To quote the BBC UK Politics site (with added emphasis):

The vast majority of parliamentarians do not hold ministerial or shadow ministerial office and are known as backbenchers. They are so-called because they sit on the back benches of the Commons or Lords - ministers and their opposition counterparts sit on the front benches.

In the US system, members of the legislature are not members of the cabinet (which is part of the executive branch of government) and there's no such thing as a shadow cabinet in the US system. There's also no assigned seating in the House of Representatives, so no one has to be 'on the back benches'. For those reasons backbencher struck me as a strange travel(l)er. And yet--this is what words do; they travel and they change. Semantic change is a common theme in this blog's Words of the Year.  In this case, backbencher has gone from being a literal description in the UK to being a metaphorical one in US politics. It seems to refer generally to members of Congress without particular standing (e.g. as Speaker or Whip--and maybe also chairs of important committees?), but particularly to those who like to cause a bit of trouble by not necessarily following the party line.

Ben Yagoda, on his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, wrote about US use of backbencher in 2013. As Yagoda notes, the term goes back to 1910 in UK politics. The first US use to refer to US politicians he's found is from 1988 in the New York Times, quoting Newt Gingrich. Ben has noted elsewhere that Gingrich seems to like Britishisms:

If Jim Wright were a backbench member, I probably wouldn’t have done anything…. But he’s the Speaker, and everything he could have done all his life as a backbencher becomes self-destructive when he becomes third in line to be President of the United States.

I've found an earlier one in The New Republic via the Corpus of Historical American English: 1987. It again refers to Republicans:

It's understandable how Republican backbenchers in the House can come to view politics as a form of warfare

But it wasn't too long before it was also being used to refer to Democrats, as in this 1991 article about Senator Tom Harkin--again in the New Republic, via Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

The congressional leadership eyes with wariness the contentiousness of the Iowan senator [Tom Harkin]. But breaking through the niceties of bipartisan etiquette to savage the opposition is essential to the backbencher's appeal. He practices a deeply rooted politics of frustration, still echoing with the populist oratory of William Jennings Bryan, that has been suddenly galvanized again.

(The first article is by 'The Editors', the second by Sidney Blumenthal. It's possible Blumenthal wrote both.)

Why is backbencher WotY for 2015?  Has its use risen lately?  I can't easily tell,* but it certainly seems that people are noticing it these days. As the US gears up for elections, perhaps it will be heard more. In other words, it seems topical enough for the title.

Thanks again to the nominators!


For the US-to-UK WotY, please see the next post!



* It's difficult to investigate whether its use for US politicians on the rise because that involves clicking through and reading every single context it occurs in to determine whether it's referring to an American or reporting on parliamentary politics elsewhere. It's also hard to find corpora that go all the way up to 2015. COCA ends in 2012, and it has no uses of backbencher after 2010. Of the five uses of singular backbencher in COCA from after 2000, four are about Americans. Of the 11 plural uses, five are about Americans. Searching for it on US newspaper websites gives me a smattering of usages since 2010.

It's that time of year again. Dictionary publishers are already starting to announce their words of 2015, ignoring anything interesting that might happen in November and December. Poor November and December.
The twist on Words of the Year on this blog is that I choose the most 'of the year' borrowings from US-to-UK and from UK-to-US. For past WotYs, see this old post. (And from that post you can click further to read the reasons for various WotY choices.)

I go into this WotY season with no favo(u)rites. What do you think? Are there any US-to-UK or UK-to-US borrowings that are particularly 2015-ish? They don't have to have first come to the other country this year, but they should have had particular attention or relevance in the other country this year. Please nominate them in the comments below (not by email or Twitter, please--it makes more work for me to keep track of many different streams).

I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts on the matter!

----------------------------
Miscellaneous news and shameless self-promotion

I'm giving two talks this month:

• Wed 25 November (13.00), University of Sussex campus: 'Separated by a Common Politeness formula: please in American and British English' Click here for more details. All welcome!
• Fri 27 November, Thanksgiving lunch, English-Speaking Union, West Sussex chapter, Chichester: 'Separated by a Common Language'. Click here for more details. 

I have also started a new blog, and have quickly populated it with some posts. When I started this here blog, I was working on antonyms in the day job and blogging about British and American English as a hobby. Now I'm writing about British and American English as part of my day job, so I've made myself a little outlet for antonym thoughts. That blog is not intended to work like this one--I won't be taking requests for posts, for example, and I'll mostly be using it to keep track of things that amuse or intrigue me, rather than to try to educate people about lexicology. But if it's of any interest to you, it's called Who Shall Remain Antonymous.

And it occurs to me that (BrE-ish) I've not said anything on this blog (at least I don't think I have) about my good news. For 2016, I will be one of the inaugural recipients of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Public Scholar award. What this means is that I will finally have the time to write the book that this blog has threatened to spawn for some time. (The book is actually a closer relation to the How America Saved the English Language talk that I've given many times in England. That is to say, it's more the grandspawn of the blog than the spawn.) I've also been fortunate enough to receive a small grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust to do some work in dictionary archives, which will continue the train of thought I started with this blog post, and contribute research for part of the book.

The blog has also spawned a series of four articles for English Today, to be published starting with the first issue of 2016.

So, that's the bloggy blog spawn for the moment. And as soon as I finish marking these essays (which this very post was a procrastination measure against), I'll have another proper post for you here.

One thing that was particularly rewarding about Untranslatable October this year was that fans started discussing my tweeted offerings in the comments of the blog post that introduced the month.  They've made it clear that at least one of the 'untranslatables' is fairly translatable. Here they are, in the order they were posted on Twitter, with some commentary:

1. BrE marmite: something that people either love or hate, as in ‘Big Brother is television marmite’. After a famous yeast extract spread.

2. AmE redeye: a long-distance overnight airline flight, as in 'I flew to NY on the redeye'. Not all UK dictionaries still mark this as 'North American'. (There's a bit more discussion at the earlier post, where commenters question whether this only applies where there is choice of other times for the flight.)

3. BrE blag: to obtain by trickery/guile, as in 'He blagged a 1st-class ticket'. AmE score is similar, but seems less underhanded. Suggested by @laurelspeth.

4. AmE your mileage may vary: = 'you may have a different experience/opinion'. The abbreviated form YMMV is now known more widely on the internet, but I don't hear it offline and have had to explain it in UK. It comes from the way in which American car manufacturers had to qualify their miles-per-gallon claims in advertisements.

5. BrE plonk: inexpensive (but generally drinkable) wine (i.e. not rotgut). For example, 'you order the pizza and I'll bring the plonk'. Suggested by @AuditorsEditor.

6. AmE to bus (a table): to clear dirty dishes (etc.) from a table at a restaurant. For example, 'please bus your own table'. Also busboy, busgirl: person employed to clear tables at a restaurant/cafe. This is different from 'clear the table' because it can't be used of a table at home. Suggested by @tjathurman

7. BrE horses for courses: means something like 'everyone has different skills, so choose right one for job'.

8. AmE columbusing: explained here. This one may have been premature, since it's a pretty new term, but it is used in circles I belong to.

9. BrE to faff: 'to act unproductively, with elements of dithering and procrastinating'. I find dictionary definitions of this wholly inadequate, and the indecisive element makes it for me rather different from fart around. But there's further discussion at the comments here.

10. AmE leaf-peeping: tourism for the purpose of looking at autumn foliage, done by leaf-peepers.  Suggested by @mwnciod.

11. BrE assessment: collective term (but also sometimes a count noun) for any and all work that contributes to the final mark for a course. That is, exams and/or coursework, considered together.

12. AmE to put in face time: I defined it as 'to make an appearance at social/family event for *just* long enough to meet obligation', but others say they use it for business/networking. The face time is the same, but in my experience the verbs are different--I want to get some face time with people I network with, but I have to put in some face time at a grandnephew's christening. Suggested by @Word_chucker.

13. AmE squirrelly: having a kind of nervous dementedness, hence untrustworthy (pronounced 'skwirly'). Suggested by @tonythorne007.

14. BrE throw a wobbly: This is a bit of a cheat, as it's originally Australian--but it is used liberally in the UK. Means something like 'to lose self-control (in anger or panic)'. I suggested freak out as a close AmE relative, but commenter @niblick_iii felt that 'throwing a wobbly has more connotations of being unnecessary or unreasonable than freaking out' (I'd agree). Also suggested by @tonythorne007.

15. AmE weekend warrior: someone who does an activity (especially a strenuous one) only on the weekend (originally used in relation to weekend military training). Suggested by Simon C.
 
16. BrE sticky wicket: Simon C (suggester) defines it: ‘tricky situation we can get out of if we really concentrate’. Closest AmE is probably in a pickle, but doesn't have that 'we can get out of it' connotation.

17.  AmE -grader: e.g. '5th grader'. For child of certain school year. In the BrE English and Welsh school system of the moment, there's no word that is different from the word for the year: e.g. the year 5s are going on a field trip. But perhaps not-so-different is -former, still heard in sixth-former, but previously heard with a broader range of 'forms'. See this old post for more on how school years work in the two countries. Suggested by @libraryjamie.


18. AmE klatch or klatsch, particularly coffee klat(s)ch: from German kaffeeklatsch: a group that meets informally for coffee and cake in someone's home. There is a long discussion of whether this is equivalent to BrE coffee morning in the comments at the previously mentioned post. The upshot is: it probably was equivalent in certain settings at one point, but these days coffee morning has a strong whiff of 'charity fundraiser' and may apply to larger events outside the home.  Suggested by @SamAreRandom.

19. BrE boffin: essentially egghead with positive connotations. (See this for more discussion.) Suggested by @n0aaa For copious use of it, see the Mitchell and Webb 'Big Talk' sketches.


20. AmE kibitz: (from Yiddish) 'to give unwanted advice (especially to players of a card game)

21. BrE santa’s grotto: a place where kids visit someone dressed as Santa (usually receiving a small gift). Of course, Americans have Santas in shopping malls, and such, but there you 'go see Santa', there's not a universal name for the nook where Santa sits. As a Twitter commenter noted, Americans (of a certain age) are more likely to associate grotto with Hugh Hefner.

22. BrE gubbins: Its individual senses may be translatable, but taken as a whole, it has so many that no one word will do. Here's Merriam-Webster's Unabridged entry for it:







And that is it! The fifth Untranslatable month finished. I'm collecting as if there will be a sixth, but we'll see...

I've been meaning to blog about the British greeting All right?* or You all right? in part because I wanted to get feedback on whether I'm responding correctly, since it is something that flummoxes Americans (and New Zealanders too, it seems). Then this happened in my Intercultural Communication class on Friday:

I was talking about the different parts of a conversation, starting with the opening, and mentioning along the way some of the ways in which the rituals differ in different cultures. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Like the British greeting All right? That confuses Americans--we don't know how to respond.

American Exchange Student: Wait, how do you respond?

Me: Let's try.  (addressing a group of English students in one corner)  All right?

English students (as one):  All right.

English student 1:  You know, it's like if Americans said You okay?

AmExSt: No, it's not. If you say You okay? to me, it means you think I look lost or upset and you're offering to help. So all these people have been saying You all right? to me and I've been thinking "What am I doing wrong? Why do they think I'm lost?"

[sound of a number of pennies dropping (variation on a BrE expression)]



So, it turns out that my strategy of replying All right or All right, and you? is acceptable. Phew.

A difference related to these different interpretations of you all right/okay? is that if you look lost in public in the US, someone will almost certainly come up to you and offer their help/directions (possibly with You okay?). In my experience, all you have to do in New York is open a map, and some local will ask to help.  (I recall this happening on a subway platform and Better Half exclaiming that that would never happen in London.)

In the south of England, if you're lost and want help, you generally have to (get up the courage and pick the right stranger and) ask for help. Or stay lost, which may be preferable. An exception to this generalization would be if the stranger had some official role that makes it acceptable to address someone and offer help. It's not that help is never offered, but you certainly can't count on it. I would not be surprised to hear that this is less true in other parts of the UK, since one thing the southerners have a reputation for is not talking to strangers.


It feels to me like All right? as a greeting is getting more and more common--though the OED has examples of it going back to 1868. (Maybe I was just oblivious to it for a while.) It also feels somewhat masculine to me. I think far more men greet me this way than women, and it is often  followed by the mostly masculine address term mate:  All right, mate?  There may be generational things going on here too--perhaps younger people of both sexes use it more? (Let me know.)




*A lot of people on the internet are writing this as Alright? Not how the dictionaries spell it--and, of course, a frequent misspelling in a lot of contexts.

• I'm only talking about the relationship between British and American English here (as is my theme). These expressions may well have equivalents in other languages or dialects.  
• By Untranslatable I mean that there is no lexicali{z/s}ed equivalent in the other dialect. And by lexicali{z/s}ed I mean that the expression is a word or an idiom--something that language users learn through hearing others say it, rather than something that has been made up anew.
  One can translate things by making up new sentences or phrases that describe the same thing, sure. But it's special when a language has lexicali{z/s}ed an  expression for something--it tells us something about the culture that invented and uses that expression.
• Many of these have started to be borrowed between the dialects--and that's natural. If it's a useful expression and the other dialect doesn't have it, it's a prime candidate for international migration.
• If you have not heard of the word before (even though I've said it comes from your country), then I hope that you might celebrate that you've learned a new expression, rather than complain to me that it's not 'really' American or British. Please know that I'm not posting them without some research, and none of us has a complete vocabulary. That said, if you can improve on my definitions, challenge the 'untranslatability' or give other insight into the untranslatables, please let me know!
• I'm grateful for suggestions of additional untranslatables (though they may not make UotD status until next year), but I won't repeat any expressions that have been used in previous Octobers. The lists for each October are accessible by clicking on the 'untranslatable' label in the right margin, the bottom of this post, or, conveniently, here: untranslatable.
  There are also search boxes at the top and in the right margin of this blog. (The one in the margin works much better.) So please have a quick search before making suggestions, in order to cut down on the time that I spend responding to suggestions. (This is all voluntary on my part, please remember!)

Untranslatables (like Differences of the Day) will appear at 3pm British time (10am US east coast) each weekday on Twitter till the 30th. If you don't use Twitter, you can see them in the Twitter feed to the right here, or wait for the summary at the end of the month. In any case, I hope you enjoy them! 

P.S. (6 October 2015): I forgot to mention another of the 'rules'.  I don't include names for objects, activities or institutions that don't exist in the other country. For instance, there is no American equivalent of the expression Eccles cake, but that's not because Americans hadn't thought to lexicali{z/s}e it, but because they've probably never seen such a thing. This can get a bit tricky to determine when it's not an object we're talking about or when the expression has also taken on figurative meanings--see last year's example three-line whip.

John Wells wrote to ask:

Have you discussed BrE playing the piano/violin vs. AmE playing piano/violin?

Not really, John, and it turns out that it's one of those things that's (all together now!) more complicated than you might think! 

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 689 play* the piano to 309 play* piano. (The * there used as a wildcard in corpus searches; so play* gets us play, playing, played, etc.) That's more than two arthrous (fancy word for having a the) cases for every anarthrous (fancy word for not having a the) one--in American English.

But those numbers need a bit more checking because any dialect would have playing piano music without a the. To get a better comparison, I looked at cases where piano is followed by an adverb (e.g. play [the] piano beautifully/well/loudly/tonight...) so that we can be sure that piano is a noun on its own and not a noun modifying another noun. Doing that, there are 53 arthrous cases and 23 anarthrous ones in COCA. So, pretty much like it was when I didn't take those sane, linguisticky precautions. The British National Corpus, in comparison, has 14 arthrous cases and 1 anarthrous. (But keep in mind that the data from BNC is 20 years older than that in COCA.)

The moral of that part of the story: it would not be right to say that  play piano is AmE for BrE play the piano. Instead, play piano is a lesser-used AmE variant of General English play the piano. The image here, from pianoplayingadvice.com, illustrates both variants living happily together.


Personally, I could say either, but prefer it with the the.  A bit more rooting around in the Corpus of Historical American English shows a bit of anarthrous piano-playing throughout the 20th century, but it really gets going in the 1970s, when the proportions are like those in COCA.

But hold your horses. If we look at other instruments, it gets more complicated.  (I'm rounding the numbers, unless they're <2 .="" comment-2--="">

• Violin: In COCA, the is favo(u)red 3:1.  In BNC, 5:1.
• Harp: In COCA, the 4:1. BNC 8:0.
• Guitar: Ziggy played guitar. Maybe the Spiders from Mars made him do it without the the, but in 1990s UK, the British were following suit and, like 2010s Americans, using play guitar twice as much as play the guitar. 
• Bass: Looks like a reversal! COCA 2:1.  BNC: 1:5.
  I tried discounting cases like playing (the) bass line/notes, but taking them out made no real difference.
• Trumpet: COCA1.4:1. BNC 5:2. 
• Flute: COCA 4:1. BNC 8:1.
  
• Drums: Play drums outnumbers play the drums in both dialects. Is it because it's plural? But what about...
• Spoons: Tiny numbers, but more the in AmE and equal numbers of both in BrE.

I could go on looking for more instruments, but I won't. (Report your findings in the comments if you wish.) It looks like BrE eschews the more often for stereotypical rock instruments than for others -- guitar, bass, drums (Bowie's fault? American rock'n'roll's fault?). I don't see a clear pattern to the US preferences--but in general it's not completely unusual to have anarthrous ones. Bass is the interesting one for its anarthrousness in BrE.

Is it just with play, though? No. Going back to sticking with piano, COCA has half as many practic(e*) piano as practic(e*) the piano. BNC has four practis(e*) with the and one without.

On piano is also common in COCA (about 1/3 as many as on the piano). BNC has 20 on piano to 73 on the piano--very much the same. In this case, some of the on the pianos will have been about particular, physical pianos, as in I stubbed my toe on the piano. There's no possibility of I stubbed my toe on piano. But if a singer were giving credit to her band, she could say ...and Lynne Murphy on piano! or ...and Lynne Murphy on the piano!  (Not me, of course, I only had a year of lessons.) I'm waiting for one of you to go out and listen to dozens of concerts with British and American singers to tell me if they all say on drums! on bass! 

Finally, the why questions.

Why do we put a the before instruments? It's a funny thing. If I lie and say I play the piano, it's not a particular piano that I am playing. It's that I have the potential to play any piano. (Whereas if I say I've draped myself over the piano, it is a particular piano.) It's kind of like the bus in I ride the bus to work. In that case, it's not the particular physical bus we're talking about--that can vary. It's the whole package that goes with bus-riding. I ride a bus that travels along the route between my street/road and my workplace. There's a package that goes along with pianos too. I'm not just playing the instrument, I'm playing music on the instrument. The music that I know how to play on any "the piano" is kind of like the routes that I travel on any "the bus".

In spite of all that, there's no pressing semantic reason for the the. We don't play the cards or play the dominoes even though similarly, if I say I know how to play dominoes, I'm saying that I know the rules for playing on any instrument of that type (any set of dominoes). [Yes, dominoes are the instrument, not the game--though people who only know one domino game tend to call it 'dominoes'. I am particularly fond of Mexican Train.] So why do we usually have a the with musical instruments, but not with game equipment? (The answer: because that's what we learned to do.)

The arthrous version is unhelpfully ambiguous, so maybe that is a contributor to the rise of the anarthrous alternative. If I say I play the piano I could be trying to point out that I know how to play a piano (so invite me to play at your wedding), or it could be saying that I play a particular piano habitually (so don't get rid of it). I play piano doesn't seem to have that ambiguity, so could be seen as more communicatively efficient. The play + bare-noun construction is familiar, since we say things like I play tennis, I play jazz, I play goalie.


If you want to carry the conversation toward(s) other cases of (an)arthrous variation in AmE and BrE, have a look at the past posts with the 'determiners' label. I've written about some of the famous ones already, and your comments on them would be most welcome at those old posts (which are still regularly read). And you're most welcome to carry on the conversation about musical instruments (and games) on this post, of course!

Just in case you want to get even by judging me for failing to not-judge spaghetti on toast, know this: my family eats Kraft macaroni (AmE: and) cheese with (Dad's homemade) strawberry jam on top.  And I'm not going to apologi{z/s}e for that. It's great. (I've no idea how this started. Could there be any link to having a German grandma—sweet noodle dishes? Dan Jurafsky's The Language of Food says that macaroni was originally a sweet almond pasta—but I can't imagine that a 14th century Italian dish affected my family's eating habits.)

I've been to two conferences in the past two weeks, presenting studies on British and American use of the word please. It was a blog post here that inspired this new research direction: three years ago I posted about whether one says please when ordering in restaurants (click that link for lots of discussion!). If you read the comments at that post, you'll see Americans saying things like 

Please winds up feeling impolite with people that you don't have the right to order around, ie anyone other than your children.

and British commenters saying things like 

not saying please makes it sound like a lord giving an order to his butler

--that is, Americans saying please sounds bossy and Brits saying 'you have to say please, or else you'll sound bossy'. The conference papers will turn into one or two journal articles (eventually!). In the meantime, the two studies brought up so many little factoids about please that I could do at least a half a dozen blog posts on them. Let's start with one and see how I go.

This one comes from the work I'm doing with Rachele De Felice of the Survey of English Usage at University College London and that we presented at the Corpus Linguistics 2015 conference. We're looking at requests (1,350 of them in total) in two corpora of corporate emails, one from a British company that will remain anonymous, and the other from an American company you might have heard of. We found, as others have in other data, that twice as many British requests as American ones include please. What's more, in British English please is particularly often used in requests that do not involve much of an imposition--things like please don't hesitate to call if you need assistance, please note that tomorrow is a holiday or please accept our congratulations. They have the form of an imperative sentence (do this!), but the recipient is not actually asked to do much of anything; instead, they're offered something (help, information, congratulations).

This brings us to one of the types of please-imperatives found in the email data: please find attached and its relatives please find enclosed and please find below. There were 20 of these in the British data and two in the American data — all of them with please. So, not only do we have far fewer American please find attached's, we don't have any please-less find attached's. Surely British corporate emailers don't attach documents 10 times more often as American ones do?

The mystery of the missing find attached's is solved when we consider that this is another case where the "command" isn't really much of a command at all. There's no need to boss around the other person to go about finding things, since the sentence is just communicating "I have attached a document for you". In fact, it would be just plain weird to put this into another request form like Could you please find the document attached? or I would be very grateful if you would find the document attached. This underscores that please find attached is not much of a request at all. It is instead a set phrase in imperative form that does a not-very-requesty job.

We found that American business people are actively discouraged from using this set phrase. Here is what the Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style by Bryan A. Garner has to say (highlighting added):





Garner goes on to cite sources from the 19th century onward (all of them American) that agree that please find enclosed is a horrible business-ism that should be avoided. My small forays into (the possibly smaller genre of) British business writing advice has not turned up anything at all about this phrase. (Let me know if you know of any advice in either direction.)

Whatever you think of please find attached, it creates problems for our comparative speech-act research. If we look at British imperatives in our email data and say "84% have please, while only 43% of American imperatives do", it looks like maybe the Americans are bossier--ordering people around without saying please. But that might not be the best way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is: British emailers often only say please because they've put messages into command form that American emailers might put into a declarative sentence. The imperative could be seen as more imperious (or at least officious) than putting the same message into a declarative sentence.

And with that, I'll leave you with a British please sign that Peter Austin posted in the week of our presentation:

	GB our	GB or	US or	US our
hono(u)r	10376	2985	17145	2437
humo(u)r	8903	1632	10461	1560
neighbo(u)r	5364	1029	8128	1037
odo(u)r	673	276	1224	119
tumo(u)r	2546	658	2269	244
vigo(u)r	910	201	745	197
totals	=28772	=6781	=39972	=5594
'foreign' rate	19%		12%

In other words,  19% of the -o(u)r words I searched for in the GB corpus had the AmE -or spelling and 12% of the US -o(u)r words had -our spellings. A few of these may just be by people who can't spell or who are putting on airs by using another spelling system, but they're probably a very few. The percentages for the individual words range from 8.9% (tumo(u)r) to 20.9% (vigo(u)r) for the US data and 15.5% (humo(u)r) to 29.1% (odo(u)r) for the GB data. It's important to use a number of words because the data will be skewed if it's just a word that American use more than British people (or vice versa), regardless of spelling. We can see that happening a bit with odo(u)r.

(I'd originally included colo(u)r in the list, which made the total difference more stark: 24% to 14%. I took it out because I suspected that the use of color in HTML coding might be skewing the result.)

So this can lead us to the hypotheses:

About 12% of US blog data is not written by Americans.
About 19% of UK blog data is written by people using American English spelling.

We cannot say that about 12% of the US data were written by British people, or even that 81% of the British data were written by British people, since -our spellings are used in the rest of the anglophone world. Half of the vigours written on British sites might have been written by Australians or Canadians, for all we know. The -or is more a marker of Americanness than -our is a marker of Britishness. But we also can't say that the people spelling -or are Americans, we can only assume they are people whose education in English spelling used American English standards. So, half of the -or spellings might have been written by people in the Phillipines (where American spelling is used). It's unlikely that it's that many, but I've phrased the hypotheses to allow for these possibilities.

Why is the number of American spellings on British sites larger than the number of British spellings on American sites? Well, it might just be because there are nearly five times as many Americans on the internet than there are Brits. (The US has 86.9% internet penetration on a population of around 318 million, so that's over 276 million internet users. The UK has 89.8% penetration in a population of about 63 million, so that's nearly 57 million internet users. Source.) Of course, there are a lot more countries involved here (and I'm not going to go do all that adding-up at the moment), but that's a reasonable step toward(s) explaining the difference, and one that doesn't involve running around screaming 'the sky is falling on British English'!

So, what this means is that if we look for differences between American and British Englishes on GloWBE and see that a form that's used in Britain is used 10% as much in America, we can't conclude that the Britishism is gaining traction in the US, because there's a fair likelihood that the people who used the Britishism weren't American. If we see one with 40% use in the US, however, we can aver that it's well on its way to being established there.

Anyhow, I'm glad I decided to explain that all in a blog post, as it makes it clearer in my mind for explaining it in about 10 seconds as I fly by that slide in my presentation next week. If you see any flaws in my thinking or math(s), please let me know!

In other news (aka shameless self-promotion):
The Odditorium people have made a podcast of my Catalyst Club talk about little words (especially the). It's a bit odd without the visuals, but they do call themselves 'oddpodcast', after all.



I'm speaking at two conferences in the next two weeks, plus have a few public speaking engagements in the future. Follow the links for more info. If you're nearby, come say (orig. AmE in this form) hello!

23 July (with Rachele de Felice): The politics of please in British and American English. Corpus Linguistics conference, University of Lancaster.

31 July Separated by a Common Politeness Marker: please in British and American English. International Pragmatics Association Conference, Antwerp.  
17 Sept How America Saved the English Language.  The Bedford Culture Club (Horsham, W Sussex). 

Further ahead, titles yet to be confirmed:
27 Sept  Sunday Assembly Brighton.  
27 Nov (Thanksgiving dinner--a day late)  English-Speaking Union, Chichester.