Separated by a Common Language

We're finally going on our honeymoon, so there will be no posts here for at least 10 days. So, here's something for you to entertain yourselves and each other with...

If you are a (native, not like me!) British citizen (or 'subject', if you prefer), would you call yourself or any one of your fellow citizens a Brit? Do you think of the noun Brit as a term used mostly by foreigners?

I've polled three people today, and these are my results so far:

Better Half says it's not a noun he'd use, but he doesn't find it offensive when foreigners use it about him. So, for him Brit is neutral and foreign. (As opposed to pom and limey, which are foreign and insulting. The former of these is fairly unknown in the US, but well-known in the Antipodes.)

The Syntactician says "I don't use it and wouldn't like to be called one because to me it conjures up ex-pats of the worst kind."

And the friend who puts a B in BOMB (she'll know what that means, at least!) says that it can be neutral or insulting, depending on the context, and 'when abroad' is a time when she'd be likely to use it.

The thing that one notices when writing a blog like this is that the AmE speakers use the term a lot more than the BrE speakers. When referring to themselves individually, of course, BrE speakers are more likely to use a more specific term, relating to their country of origin (England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland--but let's not get into the problem of whether that's British or not--it's in Greater Britain, if not Great Britain!). I suppose BrE speakers are less likely than AmE speakers to want to (or need to) generali{s/z}e about the British.

I have noticed that use of Brit as a noun modifier is more common (Brit wit, Britblogs, etc.). I'm not as interested in that. Nor is it particularly interesting that there are music awards called The Brits. No, what's interesting to me is what we call people and how they feel about it. So, native Britishers, what do you think?

Continuing on my backlog of old requests: a colleague who's involved in a Catalan-English dictionary project forwarded (back in March) part of a conversation arising from an unfamiliar translation in the project. The Catalan phrase in question was apparently (no) trobar ni caps ni peus, and the lexicographer was questioning the translation of it as (not) to make heads or tails (of something), because she, a BrE speaker, would have said (not) to make head or tail (of something). Indeed, the plural version is the AmE version, and the singular the BrE version. (This is backed up by John Algeo in British or American English. He found only the singular in BrE texts in his corpus, and only plural in AmE texts.)

I suppose the reason I didn't write about that earlier is because there's not a lot more to say about it! It's unclear why the AmE version gained the plural markers. The phrase head or tail is defined by the OED as 'one thing or another', so etymologically speaking, the singular makes some sense. Growing up with the AmE version, I visuali{s/z}ed the things that one 'could not make heads or tails of' to be chaotic things--sort of like a Breughel painting as done by Jackson Pollock, where you wouldn't be able to find the heads or the tails of the beings in it. The BrE version lends it self to a visual that is imprecise, but not necessarily chaotic. But then, how one pictures such things must be a highly individual experience...

Onward and upward in my quest to reduce the number of unanswered requests in my e-mail inbox. Some of them I've put off answering because the answers are long and complicated and require actual work. This one is the other kind. I've delayed answering it because I don't have any cute stories to tell about it. (Protests that none of my stories are cute should be written up in triplicate and submitted to your local authority figure.)

It comes from Paul of The Beer Card. Or, rather, it came from Paul (in March--forgive me!):

I subscribe to Bridge World, an American magazine, that exhorts its readers to 'please patronize our advertisers'. Every time I see this my instinctive reaction is to send them a sarcastic or condescending e-mail. Is this form of the verb less common in the US?

I did notice that Chambers and American Heritage Dictionary give the meanings in reverse order.

Points to Paul for the dictionary research!

Rather than saying that the 'condescend' sense of patroni{s/z}e is less common in AmE, I'd venture that the 'give financial support to' sense is more common in AmE than in BrE. One reads the please patronize our advertisers/sponsors admonition often in the newsletters of small organi{s/z}ations--charities, churches and the like--whose advertisers are typically small businesses with small advertising budgets. But since patroni{s/z}e is ambiguous (and probably also because it's a 'hard' word), one more often sees please support our advertisers/sponsors-- about four times more often with advertisers and 40 times more often with sponsors, if we can take the Google results as representative.

Trying to test this out further on Google, one is a bit hampered by the fact that Google doesn't allow for US-only searches. So, the below is a comparison of patroni{s/z}e our advertisers on the web in general versus the UK:

	UK	World
patronise our advertisers	1	24
patronize our advertisers	1	80,700

As opposed to support, which is seen more in the UK.

	UK	World
support our advertisers	12,200	323,000

In other words, a site that exhorts you to support advertisers has a 3.7% chance of being a UK-based site (at least as far as Google can tell), whereas a site that encourages you to patroni{s/z}e advertisers has only a .002% chance of being UK-based. So, since BrE readers are less likely to have come across this use of patroni{s/z}e regularly, it's more likely to strike them as odd, and to bring up the other possible meaning, as is Paul's experience. AmE readers, on the other hand, are more accustomed to relying on the object of the verb (in this case advertisers/sponsors) to tell them that it's probably the 'financially support' sense and not the 'condescend' sense that's intended. We (all dialects) do that kind of thing all the time. For instance, we know that different senses of book are at play if a police officer books a massage therapist or books a suspect. (Of course, we can overcome those interpretations with more context--the officer could book a massage therapist for assault or book a suspect (who happens to be a clown) for his daughter's birthday party. But I just raise this example to defend myself against the hordes who might claim that AmE is irresponsible for having a verb with two senses. Most verbs have at least that many!)

Postscript, later that evening: Describing this entry to my friend the Poet this evening, I reali{s/z}ed, of course, that the two senses are not so confusing in speech. For the 'condescend' meaning I (and Better Half, so maybe this is universal) pronounce the first syllable like the word pat, and for the 'financially support' sense, I pronounce it with the same vowel as in pay. The Concise Oxford (what I have at home) only lists the pat pronunciation. American Heritage lists both, starting with pay, but doesn't specify that they go with different senses. Do you have two pronunciations, and are they sense-specific?

Continuing to make my way through ancient requests, Susie wrote back in January (oh, the neglect!) to request coverage of directly. She's probably given up on reading this blog by now, but at least I hadn't promised to discuss it directly.

The word directly, of course, is found in both AmE and BrE, as in:

Try to involve everyone, not just those directly in front of you. [University of Kent Careers Advisory Service, Tips on Making Presentations]

But the use of directly to mean 'shortly' or 'very soon', is mostly AmE--though the OED indicates that it's also BrE dialectal (but which dialects? do you know?). It's that sense of the word that's used when a (AmE) salesclerk/(BrE) shop assistant says:

I'll be with you directly.

...before they ignore you in order to deal with another customer.

For this meaning, shortly works in BrE (as well as AmE), but when I asked Better Half what he'd say instead of I'll do that directly, he said that he'd say I'll do that later. When I countered that that doesn't mean the same thing, he claimed that as a British person, he was less likely than an American to want to tie himself down to anything more specific. I think he was joking (he's rarely not joking), but if you'd like to protest or support his contention, feel free to do so in the comments!

Afterthought (the next morning): A good South African equivalent is just now, which confused (or maybe annoyed) me to no end when I first arrived there and went to a party with a co-worker. He kept saying We'll leave just now and so I'd fetched my bag or whatever and found myself waiting while he drank another drink, and another, and had another conversation...

Note that the dialectal differences involving directly and just now are not about whether they are used to talk about time, which they generally are in a lot of dialects, but whether they're used to mean 'not immediately, but soonish', which tends to be more dialect-specific. Just now in my native AmE dialect can mean 'in the very recent past' and directly can mean 'immediately' in most dialects.

Sorry for the unexplained gap in posts. I was busy making an honest man of Better Half. I also reali{s/z}e that I've been somewhat selfish lately, just writing about things that I want to write about. Me, me, me. But now I that I'm a responsible member of the venerable institution of marriage, I guess it's all supposed to be about selflessness and compromise and all that jazz. So, back, finally, to responding to some of your requests.

Let's go way back. To November! How neglectful I've been! (Well, kind of--I responded to this correspondent's first question here. And this issue has been mentioned a little before, most recently in the comments for this post.) Jackie, an American who briefly lived in London, wrote to say:

I found British English atrocious. [...] Brits [...] have a strong tendency to use singular nouns with the plural form of verbs, e.g., "The gang are going to have a tough time protecting their patch," and "MIA are looking into terrorist links."

Now, Jackie, I have to say that I'm surprised that a graduate of UCLA's linguistics program(me) would use the word atrocious to refer to another variety of English! Let's all recite together now the descriptive linguists' mantra: Different dialects are different, but that doesn't make them better or worse than your dialect! Both AmE and BrE have 'logical' subject-verb agreement systems, they're just a bit different in the assumptions/preferences behind them.

Let's start with the nouns that are concerned here. It's not just any singular noun that can go with a plural verb form in BrE; it's specifically collective nouns--that is, nouns that refer to collections or collectivities (particularly, in the BrE examples, collections of people). These kinds of nouns are a bit funny. Let's look at Jackie's first example:

BrE: The gang are going to have a tough time protecting their patch.

...which in (most, standard) AmE would be:

AmE: The gang is going to have a tough time protecting its/their patch.

Notice here that while AmE strongly prefers a singular verb with a noun like gang or committee or team, it's a bit looser when it comes to pronoun agreement with such collective nouns. Thus, we can find lots of examples with a singular verb and a singular pronoun, but also examples in which the plurality of a committee (i.e. the fact that it's made up of individuals) comes through in the pronoun, but not the verb:

After questions are concluded, you and any guests will be asked to leave while the committee makes its decision. [From a University of Oregon document]

[A]ll will be notified once the committee makes their decision. [From the Westchester (NY) County Board of Legislators]

The indecision about pronoun agreement (and contrast in pronoun and verb agreement) indicates that the case of collective nouns is complicated. Grammatically, they have singular form. Semantically (i.e. in meaning), they refer to things that are inherently plural. For most nouns, the grammatical and the semantic match up--so it's hard to say whether the agreement between subject noun and verb is being triggered by the word's semantic or grammatical status. But in the case of collective nouns, we can see different varieties of English taking different strategies. BrE prefers semantic agreement (when the collective refers to animate beings, at least), and AmE prefers grammatical agreement--most of the time.

It's not really that simple, though. There are times when AmE speakers use plural agreement, in order to emphasi{s/z}e the individuality of the members of the collective (and this gets some discussion over at Language Log). So, take for example the following:

The jury disagree. [plural verb]
versus
The jury disagrees. [singular verb]

The City University of New York's Writing Centre guide states strongly that the plural verb must be used in this case:

Some words you might not realize are plural:
[...]
Collective nouns that represent a group of individuals who are acting independently. Whereas, for example, the word “jury” would take a singular verb when the jurors act in concert (“the jury decided that ... ”), it would take a plural verb when differences between the group are emphasized.

Wrong: “The jury disagrees [among themselves] on this issue.”

Right: “The jury disagree on this issue.”

And in BrE, when it's very clear that the collective is to be thought of as a unit, not as individuals, then a singular verb is perfectly acceptable, as in the book title:

My Family Is All I Have: A British Woman's Story of Escaping the Nazis and Surviving the Communists

Thus BrE allows a distinction between (a) and (b) below, while (b) would sound more awkward in AmE:

(a) My family is big. [i.e. there are 10 of us]
(b) My family are big. [i.e. the individuals are super-size]

Thus, AmE speakers tend to avoid sentences like (b) and to rephrase them as something like The members of my family are all big.

The moral of the story is: collective noun agreement is tricky. A semantic strategy is probably more flexible than a grammatical strategy, but people can communicate just fine with either strategy!

My family (AmE) is/(BrE) are here this week, so I haven't a lot of time for blogging. You'd think that there would be a lot to blog about, with six Americans clashing with English culture constantly, but the linguistic conversations are mostly of the "Chips are French fries!" variety, and the miscommunications mostly occur when asking waiters for water (OK, I'll blog about that next).

Most menus need a fair amount of translation, both for the dishes that are not eaten as much in America and for the food names that are different. So far, the one that's caused the most raised eyebrows was beef and herb faggots. Better Half described these as English meatballs, which seemed like a reasonable description, but all of the recipes I've found this morning (for beef or pork faggots) involve a fair amount of offal--which is not what comes to mind when I think 'meatballs'. Here is a recipe for the curious.

Recyclist continues to let me know about bits of BrE that have confused her during her stay here. A recent one was flannel (in its longer form, face flannel), which is the BrE translation for AmE washcloth. Face flannels are so-called because they were once made from flannel fabric, but these days they're (AmE) terrycloth/(BrE) terry. If you stay in European (including UK) hotels or bed-and-breakfasts, you are less likely to be supplied with a washcloth/flannel than you would be in an American hotel (where I've never not been given a washcloth/flannel). You will, of course, be given towels. My understanding (though you can read other understandings here) is that this is because facecloths are considered too personal to share. People who use them bring their own when they stay away from home. Cotton flannel fabric (originally flannel was wool(l)en) is sometimes called flannelette--moreso (in my experience) in BrE than in AmE. So, Better Half talks about our flannelette sheets, and I talk about our flannel sheets.

It was a couple of weeks ago that Recyclist encouraged me to write about flannel, and she's asked me since if I've covered it yet. I replied that the stated mission of my blog was to cover the bits of cross-Atlantic English that everyone wouldn't already know about, and that flannel/washcloth is kind of like elevator/lift--the kind of difference that anyone with the slightest bit of cross-cultural knowledge would know. She insisted that it wasn't. I figured out later, when I discovered that Recyclist also hadn't heard of Brixton, that I just assume that any (slightly Anglophilic) American of my generation would know certain BrE words from certain songs. I must have learned flannel from Squeeze's 'Tempted':

I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a flannel for my face
Pyjamas*, a hairbrush, new shoes and a case
I said to my reflection
Let's get out of this place

The spellchecker will out me. I was writing an e-mail about Examination Board procedures. (Exam boards are a blight on British academic life, and unheard of in the US. I've mentioned them before, here.) In doing so, I typed the word recuse, as in Anyone with a personal relationship with a student should recuse him/herself from discussions of that student. My mail program didn't like recuse. Thinking 'how am I spelling that wrong?', I went to the Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary!), where I found the word, spelt as I had spelt it, but with the note: Chiefly U.S. and South African (or something like that--I'm away from that particular dictionary now). I think "Aha! So that's why my British spellchecker didn't like it."* (Although it must be said that it's a pretty pathetic BrE spellchecker, since it insists on one 'l' in travelling.) The OED only lists it as Now rare, but it's not particularly rare in American legalistic settings. The American Heritage definition of it goes:

To disqualify or seek to disqualify from participation in a decision on grounds such as prejudice or personal involvement.

Wondering how one would say this in British English, I had a look in the University's Handbook for Examiners, where they simply instruct the interested party to "leave the meeting while the student in question is being considered." Of course, one could say disqualify in this setting (albeit a little awkwardly), as in I disqualified myself from the discussion of that student. But where's the fun in that?

*Eek! Spellchecking update! Blogger's (American--sort of) spellchecker doesn't like recuse either! Weird, weird, weird. I started to think that my vocabulary is too rarefied for spellchecking. So I googled recuse. It gets over a million hits. Ten times as many hits as uxorious, but the spellchecker has no problem with uxorious (a word that's not in my active vocabulary). Weird.

I just read "A global reach for mind and mouth", an article in the 8 June Times Higher Education Supplement by Nick Saville of the Cambridge University English for Speakers of Other Languages program(me). They're the people who make up (some of) the exams that non-native speakers of English take in order to have their ability in English certified. The article concerns a study that Cambridge ESOL commissioned on the future of the English language, and says:

Demos [the thinktank that did the study] paints a picture of a world in which English is presently dominant as the leading language of international commerce and government. This position has largely been consolidated by English being the predominant language of computing and the internet. However, of the estimated 1.3 billion speakers of English in the world, there are only 330 million native speakers -- and this puts Britons in a minority within a minority.

The report says, moreover, that the UK had rested on its laurels and that its approach towards English is more suited to days of empire than to a world of global commerce and travel. The British have failed to address the need to learn other languages adequately (we have the lowest levels of bilingualism in the European Union) and are equally disdainful of those who speak other forms of English than our own, especially new varieties such as Spanglish (a Spanish-English dialect), Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) or Singlish (a Singaporean, Malay, Indian and English melange).

It goes on to discuss how Cambridge ESOL copes with this. I started reading this article expecting something completely different than what I got, however. The article takes up about 3/4 of a tabloid page and never once mentions American English (or the United States or North America) by name. It doesn't mention any other nations whose main language is English either, but in discussing the role of English in the global marketplace, it just seems weird not to namecheck AmE--particularly in pointing out the spread of English through computing and the internet and British disdain for other varieties of English.

American English: the elephant in the global English living room.

In our e-conversation about upping sticks, Nancy F mentioned finding a book called How to Move House and Stay Sane, noting the Britishness of the phrase move house. Americans simply move (and the British can too). So:

AmE or BrE: We're moving this weekend. [intransitive]
BrE: We're moving house this weekend. [transitive]

Now, don't tell me that your dialect's version makes more sense than the other, because they're equally problematic from a literalist, logical point of view. The intransitive version seems like it could apply to exercising one's muscles. The transitive version seems like it involves relocating a building. But, of course, both involve the relocation of the contents of a dwelling and an address-change for the individuals associated with that dwelling. Language isn't about literal, logical description; it's about communication--and these both work, if you know the conventions of the dialect in which they're said.

I was reminded of this when talking to my friend the Recyclist the other day. She's recently come to the UK for an extended stay, and was confused by a television commercial she saw in which moving home was mentioned (and the same day I saw a billboard in London with the headline Moving home?). As an AmE speaker, Recyclist interpreted this as 'moving back in with one's parents'. It took Recyclist a few beats to figure out why people who were 'moving home' would need a mortgage (or whatever it was that the ad(vert) was about). In BrE moving home means the same as moving house, but is perhaps used in advertising to make things sound a bit hom(el)ier.

As long as we're talking about moving, Americans often comment on the (AmE: real) estate agents' signs in the UK that indicate properties in search of tenants. In the US, such signs say FOR RENT. In the UK, they say TO LET. And Americans almost invariably have the reaction: 'I want to put an i in that sign'. Occasionally some (probably young) joker does just that.


(Photo from here.)

I was in a meeting with a Pro Vice Chancellor last week (who would be a Vice Chancellor in most US universities, but in the UK the Chancellor position is mostly ceremonial, and the true head of the university is the Vice Chancellor--at least at a lot of universities). At that meeting he said that I had earned a Blue Peter badge--and added "You can put that one on your blog!" So, here I am doing that.

Blue Peter badges came up in a lunchtime conversation in Sweden last week, and happily there was a Scottish Welshman (or was he a Welsh Scot? I got confused) to explain that a Blue Peter badge is fairly equivalent to a gold star. In other words, it's a mark of merit that children get for extra special efforts.

The Blue Peter badge comes from the television program(me) Blue Peter, a children's show that's been on the BBC since 1958. The badges come in different colo(u)rs and are awarded to children for various kinds of good deeds. The badges are valuable in more than just sentimental ways, in that they allow holders free entry into various attractions--but this has not been without controversy. Trade in counterfeit and second-hand Blue Peter badges led the Edinburgh Zoo to stop accepting badges as entry passes. Apparently, Blue Peter badges are now issued with photo ID cards, so that holders of badges can prove their legitimacy.

I've never seen a BPb in the flesh, but they appear to be made of plastic, which is not necessarily what an AmE speaker would expect from something called a badge. With my AmE ears on, I would assume that a badge was cloth, like Girl Scout (in Britain and elsewhere, Girl Guide) badges. There are other kinds of badges (e.g. police badges), but the word badge is not used quite as generally in AmE as it is in BrE. In AmE, the BPb would probably be called a pin.

The type of usually round, plastic-coated thing-with-a-pin at the right (from the 'button collection' at the International Institute of Social History) is called a button in AmE and a badge in BrE.

And as my social studies teacher Mr Russell used to say, "That's all she wrote when the pencil broke." The 'pencil' in this case being my concentration...

The title of this post is also the title of one of the first books I read after moving to the titular town. (I recommend it if you know the town, or have reason to get to know it.) It's also what I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Tonight I'm in an airport hotel outside Copenhagen, after another heavenly work trip to Sweden. The only thing that keeps me from believing that I really have gone to Heaven when I'm in Sweden is the preponderance of icky fish in the diet. It's charming the way that my Swedish friends constantly offer me food with fish in it, even when they know that fish is the one thing I cannot keep in my mouth long enough to swallow. (OK, it's not the only thing...but they haven't had reason to discover my relationship with broccoli.) It's not that they're cruel or forgetful, it's just that it doesn't occur to them that anchovy toast or caviar paste actually contains fish products--until I embarrass myself by refusing their kind offers.

But tomorrow I fly early enough to be home before I would have been awake on a normal day. And the only way I'll be able to get through the day is to have a nice protein-o-rific breakfast. Known in those parts as a cooked breakfast.

And the reason for letting you in on my breakfast plans? Oh, just to give unneeded autobiographical background to discussing some queries from Dennis in Wisconsin. Dennis has been noting down (I don't know for how long) sentences in British books that contain words he doesn't understand and can't locate the meanings for. A number of these fit into the category of 'breakfast'. So, here's a tour (in alphabetical order) of British breakfast foods in literature (mostly murder mysteries, from what I can tell. Can't solve crimes on an empty stomach, I guess):

"He had consumed a jumbo dogknob and beans for breakfast that morning" Grave Music, Catherine Harrod-Eagles, p. 5.

Sorry to start with this one. It's just crude. Dogknob here is most likely referring to a sausage--probably a hot-dog-like (i.e. red) sausage. Knob is slang for 'penis', and dogknob red is a crude description of a certain shade of colo(u)r. Moving right along...

"After a breakfast of two eggs and couple of rashers of the greenback he liked..." A New Lease of Death, Ruth Rendell, p. 27.

Because this comes in rashers (a word I haven't heard much in AmE--we tend to call them slices), we can tell it's bacon. I haven't found a definition for it, but since it is contrasted with smoked back bacon on this butcher's site, I think we can assume it's unsmoked back bacon. (Leave a comment if you know otherwise!) The type of bacon that's eaten in the US is called streaky bacon in BrE. If you buy it in Britain it's unlikely to crisp up the way that American bacon does--I'm not sure if it's because it's more thickly sliced or if there's something else different about it. (Your theories?) It won't be maple-cured, that's for sure.

And next on to...

"[Slider's tray held] two fried eggs, double fried bread, sausage, bacon and tomato, tea an' a slice." Blood Lines, Catherine Harrod-Eagles, p. 3

That's a slice of bread. If it didn't say double fried bread just before, I'd have assumed that this was a fried slice, which is certainly not as inedible as fish or broccoli, but not something I'd choose to eat. I looked fruitlessly for a picture of fried bread on the web, but did find a video on how to make it--I'm not sure if the humo(u)r in it is intentional. (The resulting fried slice is far more attractive than anything I've seen in the caffs [BrE slang = 'cafés'] that I frequent.) The same team has made a video on how to make a Full English breakfast.

"Carver went off with his breakfast into the guv'nors' dining-room, but Slider preferred to mess with the ORs, and exchanging friendly nods with some of the sleepy night relief just coming off, who had stayed for a cuppa and a wad, he took his tray to the window table." Blood Lines, p. 2

Dennis didn't ask about cuppa, but I had to highlight it anyhow, as it's just so BrE. It refers, of course, to a cup of tea, which for many Britons is a drink, a security blanket and a way of life. Wad is (apparently military) slang for a (BrE) bun ([postscript:] more probably a sandwich--see comments).

Of course, there is much, much more that could be said about breakfast foods (some of which has already been said on this site--hit the food/cooking label to go to more food discussions). But for tonight, I'm sticking with what Dennis gave me.

There's a very strange noise coming from the hotel bathroom, so if I don't post again, you can imagine that I came to an untimely (because I won't have had my English breakfast) and grisly end, at the hands (or tentacles) of a toilet monster.