Separated by a Common Language

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?

A problem in writing about the differences between American and British English is that it can be hard to notice the Americanisms if you're an American. As long as people understand you, you go along happily saying American things until the time that someone doesn't understand them and a metalinguistic conversation ensues. One of the first times this happened to me was when I made a brilliant Scrabble move that involved hooking an s on the front of nit. I couldn't believe it when my opponent challenged snit, and could believe it less when it wasn't in the official word list. (This was back in the days before British Scrabblers used the international word list.) A snit is a little fit of bad temper, and I got in a snit when I had to take the word off the board. (But not as much of a snit as when I played drywalls for 230 points and it was disallowed. It is now allowed in the international word list. BrE for drywall is plasterboard, which at 12 letters is much more difficult to play in Scrabble.)

My sometime inability to recogni{s/z}e my own dialectal differences came up when Foundational Friend (whom you met last time) listed some of the Americanisms that she's found herself using recently. These included meet with to mean 'have a meeting with'. (The 'experience' sense of meet with, as in meet with disaster or meet with an opportunity, is common to both dialects.)

The OED (2004 draft revision) lists the 'have a meeting' sense of meet with as Now chiefly N. Amer., meaning that it has been used in BrE in the past, but isn't so much now. Their quotations include meet withs from Caxton, Defoe and Walter Scott, but the two 20th-century quotations are American.

However, considering the frequency of meet with in UK newspapers and government documents, I think I can be forgiven for not noticing that meet with is "chiefly N. Amer.", and I wonder whether that geographical label will be suitable for much longer.

Rice Meets With Top Israeli Officials --Headline, The Guardian, 30 July 2006
Sheikh Qaradawi meets with Ken Livingstone during his 2004 visit --photo caption, The Telegraph, 14 September 2005
'Dead baby' mum to meet with hospital chiefs --headline, The Scotsman, 10 August 2006

While the first of these may have come from an American wire service, the following two definitely originated in the UK. Google reported over two million hits for meet with on .gov.uk sites, and while some of these involve other senses of meet with, 48 of the first 50 hits used the 'have a meeting with' sense, and none of those should be due to American wire services.

Still, transitive meet is used in 'have a meeting with' contexts in BrE. For instance, the Scotsman article whose headline is quoted above goes on to use meet rather than meet with, which is curious considering that headlines are typically more sparing with their words than full articles.

THE mother who underwent an operation to remove her "dead" unborn baby only to find she was still pregnant weeks later is to meet hospital bosses. --The Scotsman, ibid.
The Royal Mail will this week meet hundreds of senior managers and their union representatives as the state-controlled postal giant seeks to prevent a walkout over pay. --The Independent, 25 June 2006

It's probably a signal of the relative strength of meet with in AmE that I want to put withs in these contexts. Without the with, meet so-and-so is ambiguous in three ways. As well as meaning 'have a meeting with', it can mean 'make the acquaintance of' or 'happen to encounter' (as in I met Grover on the way here). In my American way of thinking, if the woman in The Scotsman hadn't made the acquaintance of the hospital bosses, then saying meet is fine, but if it's not their first meeting, I'd want to say meet with in order to avoid the other possible interpretations.

Thus, British English speakers often let the context do the work toward disambiguating meet, while Americans spell it out. You could use that fact to try to form or reinforce some broad cultural stereotypes, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Foundational Friend (I'll call her that because it was through her that I met much of my English social circle--including Better Half) stayed over last night and had the misfortune of seeing me this morning. Never a pretty sight--but particularly nasty today as I was horribly sneezy and snotty. I nodded toward a bouquet on the dresser and said, "I'm allergic to mums." FF followed my nod and it clicked. "Oh," she said, "you mean chrysanthemums." Yes, I did, and that must've been the fifth time I've had that exact exchange with an Englishperson. Will I never learn?

(I may learn to say chrysanthemum in full, but I won't learn to bin them when they're given to me. I believe in suffering a little for beauty and kindness.)

Mum for chrysanthemum is another case of American word-clipping that isn't shared by most speakers of British English. Americans also say chrysanthemum, but if you were raised in the funeral business as I was, it's handy to have a quicker way to say the names of common funeral flowers--so I say mums and glads (= gladioli). I notice that most of the examples of glads in the OED (1989) come from outside Britain--Ireland and Australia.

I think UK florists are missing a great opportunity in not clipping their chrysanthemums. Imagine the ads running up to Mothering Sunday: Mums for Mum! (= AmE Mom). Yes, that's Mothering Sunday. While these days it's often called Mother's Day, many Brits consider that to be a crass American name for the day. It's also a different day. Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday during Lent, which means it's generally in March. American Mother's Day is the second Sunday in May. (The first Mother's Day was on the anniversary of the death of Ana Jarvis' mother, which happened to fall on a Sunday that year. Who is Ana Jarvis? She's the inventor of Mother's Day.)

What this all means is that if you're an American expat in a Mothering Sunday country, you buy a card for your mother in March, with the intention of sending it in May. But then since no one's advertising Mother's Day in May, you forget all about it until you find the card in July. Or until your mother phones with stories of all the lovely things your brothers did for her on Mother's Day. Still, it must be worse to be a British expat trying to remember Mothering Sunday ten months after anyone's mentioned Mother's Day.

This week's The K Chronicles comic has Keith of the Chronicles listing the great things about his experience at a comics convention, including:



This American use of chat up, meaning 'chat with' is new to me, but Jonathan Lighter, author of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, says that it's been in AmE slang for a few years.

I can think of two possible routes by which this might have come into AmE. One is that it's just another case of putting up after a verb, as in eat up, drink up, call up, smarten up, etc. This up usually has a 'completive' effect--e.g. drink up involves and focus(s)es on the finishing of the drink. It seems unlikely that up has this effect in AmE chat up, since there's no clear point at which chat can be completed--one can always move on to another topic and chat some more. (Incidentally, my students claim that Americans use VERB+up constructions like eat up more than the British do. I think they may just be reacting to the artificiality of the example sentences I use in class, but maybe they're right.)

The other possibility is that this chat up came in some convoluted way from BrE. Here's the scenario I imagine. Some Americans hear British people saying chat up. They think it sounds cool (as British things often sound cool to Americans), so they start saying chat up too. The only problem is that they didn't appreciate what chat up meant in its original context, so they start using it just to mean 'chat with'. This kind of thing happens often when words are borrowed from one language/dialect to another. If you don't know the meaning of a word, there are usually several things in the context that it could mean--so you go for the one that makes most sense to you. If you then start using the word with that misapprehended meaning to people who don' t know that it means something else in the source language, then the word comes to have the new meaning in the target language. In the case of chat up this would be easily done. Here's the scene. Some friends are in a nightclub. One friend rejoins the group and a British friend teases him with:

I saw you chatting up that girl

The meaning 'chatting with' makes perfect sense in this context, but the British friend would have really meant 'I saw you hitting on (or flirting with) that girl.' Hence BrE chat-up line = AmE pick-up line.

Sounds like a good story to me, at least. But very difficult to prove.

I can't mention chat up without mentioning a related piece of BrE, pull, i.e. to get the desired effect of one's chat-up line. The verb pull can be used transitively or intransitively, and it can also be used as a definite noun, especially in the phrase on the pull:

transitive

Cilla's not best pleased that she didn't pull a fella when she was away on honeymoon with Yana. She reckons she's got 'married woman' written all over her and that's what's scaring them off. --Corrie Blog

intransitive

Kareena implores Tariq to come clean about their relationship. She won't let Ash dictate who she can see. He's not keen, so suggests that they keep it quiet for now. She has no idea that he's planning to pull at the party. --Eastenders episode guide

noun

And over in Mike’s apartment, Mike is confused at Leanne being in his home. She is dressed in just a towel and is on her way to have a shower, when Mike calls a friend and asks if he was out on the pull last night. Mike believes that he has had a one night stand with Leanne and makes a move on her. She recoils in horror and tries to explain that she is his son’s girlfriend, but poor Mike is left more confused than ever. --Corrie Blog

In BrE, one can also pull a pint (= 'fill a pint glass with beer/ale from a tap') or pull a face (=AmE make a face). There are a lot of pull phrasal verbs that were originally American--for example pull out, as in Should we pull out of Iraq?. Most of these are used in the UK now, so not so interesting to us here. Have any readers noticed AmE uses of pull that are more mysterious to non-AmE speakers?

Author's note (2020): This was an early post on this blog, before I learned much of what I've since learned about AmE and BrE. Thanks to those who've pointed out its problems. I've corrected it a little below. I'm happy to say the issue is treated much better in The Prodigal Tongue. I'll put a screenshot of it here (you'll probably have to enlarge it on your screen), but if you'd like the full benefit, I suggest the book!

 

 

 

 

 

David in Dublin emailed about the relative pronouns which and that, saying:

In American English there seems to be a strong distinction, particularly among educated speakers/writers. I'm fairly sure this distinction doesn't exist in the dialect that I speak. However, as the American standard usage is a subset of the local standard usage, it seems that the American version is used by most writers addressing both audiences (say academic publications, software documentation, ...) because American readers will assume you to be uneducated if you misuse them! I have tried to determine if I am really uneducated or if this is a real Am/Br distinction by looking up "which" and "that" in the OED. My reading of the ODE seems to support it being a distinction, but I may be deceiving myself!

You're right, David, non-American Englishes have mostly lost  American English is most particular about a distinction between which and that in restrictive relative clauses. But, as you've noticed, its persistence in American English is limited to certain types of people/discourses. The distinction is far more likely to be observed in writing, especially academic and copy-edited publications. I must admit that I have the distinction, even usually in speech, but it's something that (which!) I acquired as a doctoral student. If you have acquired the distinction, it can interfere with your ability to process writing that doesn't have the distinction--I'll explain why after explaining the distinction in a bit more detail. A relative clause (RC) is a clause (i.e. a sentence within another sentence/phrase) that's used to modify a noun. Relative clauses usually start with a relative pronoun: that, which or who/whom (and sometimes some others that aren't relevant here). There are two types of relative clause. Restrictive RCs reduce the range of things that the modified noun refers to. So, in sentence (1), I use who lives upstairs to indicate that living upstairs is the property that distinguishes this man from other men I could have talked about.

(1) The man who lives upstairs has a new piano.

In contrast, non-restrictive RCs aren't used to identify who/what the noun refers to, but to give more information about the referent of the noun, as in (2). Notice that using a non-restrictive RC is a way to fit more information about one noun's referent into a single sentence.

(2) [pointing to man] That man, who lives upstairs, has a new piano. (= That man has a new piano. He lives upstairs.)

As these examples show, who can introduce either type of clause. In speech we can tell the difference between them because restrictive and nonrestrictive RCs are spoken with different prosody (=speech melody, intonation). In writing, the non-restrictive type is correctly set off by commas. In any English dialect, that can only introduce restrictive relative clauses. In other words, non-restrictive RCs must start with which or who/whom. So all English speakers have a distinction between which and that to that extent. BrE and most other Englishes don't have a strong distinction in the restrictive RC:

(* marks grammatical impossibilities, £ marks stylistic variation common in BrE.) (3) That dress, which [*that] changed my life, is red. [non-restrictive] (4) The dress that [£ which] changed my life is red. [restrictive]

Anyone who has used Microsoft Word's grammar checker will know that if you use a restrictive which, as in (4), it highlights it. That's because it seeks out which relative clauses without commas around them in order to query whether you should have commas. Since that depends on your meaning, the grammar checker has to ask you--it can't tell from the grammar. However, if you use that, it knows that your lack of commas was purposeful. Although I learned the that/which distinction late, I have it very strongly now—probably because I've worked as a copy editor. I frequently misread relative clauses that have which where a that could be--thinking that they are non-restrictive, even though the comma rule for restrictive/non-restrictive RCs should prevent misreading. I then must go back to re-read and re-evaluate my interpretation when I reali{s/z}e that the non-restrictive interpretation doesn't make sense. This confusion almost always happens when I'm reading student writing, so it could be that I've learned to ignore punctuation since it's often fairly random. At any rate, I do appreciate it when people use the distinction in writing--and I do wonder why my BrE colleagues don't seem to have the same disambiguation problem when it comes to reading restrictive whiches. When I first started reading student work in the UK, I was also struck by some students' apparent comfort in writing the man that lives upstairs, rather than the man who lives upstairs. It seemed like I was 'correcting' that far more often here than I had in the US. However, I've not seen anyone else note it as a dialectal distinction and I've noticed it less and less, so perhaps I just had some odd students my first year here. What do the style authorities say about all this? On restrictive that/which, the 3rd edition of Fowler's Modern Usage, a British guide (though the current editor is a New Zealander), quotes the 1926 edition in saying: "Some there are who follow this [distinguishing] principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers." Larry Trask (an American acting as an authority to a British audience!) in Mind the Gaffe doesn't mind whether or not you distinguish that/which in restrictive RCs. For American audiences, the Modern Language Association Handbook (5th edn), the style book for many American academics, simply says, "Note that some writers prefer to use which to introduce nonrestrictive clauses and that to introduce restrictive clauses." The Chicago Manual of Style (14th edn--my AmE books are a little out of date) warns that "Although the distinction is often disregarded in contemporary writing, the careful writer and editor should bear in mind that such indifference may result in misreading or uncertainty. [...] When the commas intended to set off a nonrestrictive clause are omitted, perhaps with the intention of using which restrictively, the reader may well ponder whether the omission was inadvertent" (exactly my problem). All of the guides recommend that you use who instead of that when referring to people. A last point to make is that the American prescriptivist preference for that in restrictive RCs is undone by the other prescriptivist rule that clauses shouldn't end in a preposition. If you want your preposition at the front of the RC with the relative pronoun, then that pronoun cannot be that:

(5) the building that/which I ran into (6) the building into which I ran (7) *the building into that I ran