WotY news and Lynneguist news

Nov 20, 2022

Nominate transatlantic words of the year!

It's Word of the Year season, and before the end of 2022—possibly before the end of the 11th month of 2022—every extant dictionary (and various professional associations and a few marketing companies etc. etc.) will have announced the words that they think sum up something about 2022. Here (BrE) at SbaCL Towers,* we (that is to say, I) wait until the year is at least almost properly finished before considering what 2022 was like for transatlantic English. 

So, let's do the important business of opening nominations!  As ever, the Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year categories are:

  • UK-to-US 
  • US-to-UK 

Some nomination guidance:
  • Good candidates for SbaCL WotY are expressions that have lived a good life on one side of the Atlantic but for some reason have made a splash on the other side of the Atlantic this year. 
  • Words coined this year are not really in the running. If they moved from one place to another that quickly, then it's hard to say that they're really "Americanisms" or "Britishisms". They're probably just "internetisms". The one situation in which I could see a newly minted word working as a transatlantic WotY would be if the word/expression referenced something very American/British but was nevertheless taken on in the other country.
  • When I say word of the year, I more technically mean lexical item of the year, which is to say, there can be spaces in nominations. Past space-ful WotYs have included gap year, Black Friday, and go missing. 

Please nominate WotYs in comments to this blog post, where it'll be easier for me to keep track of them than if they show up on different social platforms. To see more past winners, click here.

I have a few words in mind, so I'll be interested to see if you come up with the same or different ones.

Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year: homer

Cambridge Dictionary chose homer as their Word of the Year. I thought it was a great choice, and you can hear why here:



Homer was protested in Wordle as an "Americanism" (95% of the dictionary look-ups of it came from outside North America). It is fairly familiar in AmE as an informal term for a baseball home run, but it has many other meanings around the world. That's what happens when you take an otherwise common word and put an -er on it. Cambridge Dictionary notes that it has a special meaning in Scotland:

Scottish English informal
a job that a skilled worker, such as a house painter or a hairdresser (= a person who cuts people's hair), does for a private customer in the customer's home, especially when they do this in addition to their main job and without telling their employer or the tax authorities:
I am a fully qualified joiner looking for homers in the Renfrewshire area.

Both of those meanings derive from the noun home plus the -er for something that happens at "home".

But home can also be a verb meaning 'to go/return home', and if you add the -er suffix onto a verb, it means 'one who [does verb]'. So it gets more meanings that way, some of which are in other dictionaries. For instance, homer can mean 'a homing pigeon'. Apparently, it's often used in British crossword puzzles in this sense. Perhaps the crossworders had an advantage for the infamous HOMER Wordle. 

Tweet from Stephen Collins, 31 May: Wordle: still angry about 'homer'. It's been weeks now. Furious.
The British cartoonist Stephen Collins holds a grudge

 

News! New way to follow Lynneguist!

Since 2009, I've been doing a AmE–BrE Difference of the Day (DotD) on Twitter, and spending a lot of my time on that platform. Because of the time that the DotD required, this blog has got(ten) less frequent.

I've never run out of differences to tweet about, but the time has come to re-think how I use my online time and how I communicate with people who are interested in my work (and, more importantly, my hobbies, of which this blog is one).

This blog will continue to be where I write about UK–US linguistic differences—sometimes in a lot of depth.

But my social media presence has been about a lot more than deep dives into particular words. It's been about sharing links to interesting linguistic and transatlantic cultural information and news. It's been about sharing things I've written elsewhere or news of events I'm doing. And it's been about those Differences of the Day—shorter info about linguistic differences, sometimes linked to new or old blog posts.

So, I'm going down the newsletter route. It feels like going back to my roots, since in (AmE) grad school I ran the departmental linguists newsletter (Colorless Green Newsletter it was called) and then when I moved to South Africa, I decided a newsletter was the best way to share with friends and family the things I was learning by living there—I sent that one out (at some snail-mail expense) every three weeks—and it got to its recipients about three weeks later.

Now we have email, so I can do a newsletter on the cheap and you can get it right after I send it.
Sign up here and you will get no-more-than weekly, no-less than monthly updates on what's going on in the Lynneguist world. There won't be Differences of the Day, but there will be lots of linguistic differences to learn about or reflect on, as well as other super-interesting stuff.

Footnote 

*  Here's a link to my Difference of the Day tweet about 'at X Towers', but since I don't know how long Twitter will be around, I'll post a screenshot too:

GloWbE corpus shows plenty of instances of "here/we at [something] towers" in British English, none in American English are in

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a (head of) lettuce

Oct 16, 2022

UPDATE, 20 Oct 2022: The lettuce won! 

The less I say here about the current state of British politics, the better for all of us, but I've had some requests to write about the question:

Can Liz Truss outlast a lettuce?

Truss is, at the very moment I'm writing this, the UK Prime Minister. This might not be true at the moment when you read this. And once she's gone, I assume The Daily Star will stop its livestream of decomposing lettuce in a wig, so I'll post a screenshot of it here, rather than the livestream itself.

Daily Star screenshot: Day Three: can liz truss outlast this lettuce? Iceburg lettuce with face and wig, surrounded by pic of Liz Truss, snack foods, and clock reading 19:22

Oh wait, Lettruss has an early bedtime! Here's another screenshot. 


I wonder how much she gets up to in a day? (Note to self: must resist watching PM Lettucehead instead of working.)

Lettuce Watch got started after The Economist published this unusually straightforward description of Truss's premiership and dubbing her "The Iceberg Lady."  

Liz Truss is already a historical figure. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest in British political history. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of the queen, and she had seven days in control. That is the shelf-life of a lettuce.


Social media got wind of this all, as did US news outlets, and soon Americans wanted to know: who says a lettuce?


(Oh wait, now she's got a disco ball!)



While there's a lot of discussion on names of lettuce types in the comments of my big ol' vegetable post, no one there mentioned the countability problem. That is: for most Americans, lettuce is a non-countable noun. You can have some lettuce, but not a lettuce. If you want to talk about the thing that's been compared to Liz Truss, in AmE you'd need what is sometimes called a partitive noun, like head: a head of lettuce. 

BrE is happier than AmE in calling the thing a lettuce. I'm afraid the numbers on this corpus result are very small because I had to search for "a lettuce" only before punctuation, so that I didn't accidentally get cases of a lettuce leaf or a lettuce sandwich, etc. 



The first US hit is a weird sentence from a suspended-by-Wordpress blog, so I'm not sure it was really written by an AmE speaker. The other is: "You are what you eat, but who wants to be a lettuce?" The British ones include feeding an animal "a lettuce" and putting another ingredient in "the heart of a lettuce". The numbers are small, but they are leaning British and the British examples are more clearly about literal lettuce.

Cabbage tends the same way, but with more examples:



And in case you're wondering, this is not because lettuce or cabbage are mentioned twice as much in UK:




If you can have a lettuce, that is, if it is countable for you, then it is natural for you to talk about two or more lettuces, and we can see here that BrE does that a lot more than AmE does. In AmE, you can talk about two lettuces but it will almost inevitably be interpreted as 'two kinds of lettuce', for example: I am growing two lettuces this year: iceberg and romaine. You could say two lettuces in BrE and mean 'two kinds of lettuce', but you could also use it to mean two 'heads' of one kind of lettuce, as in How many iceberg lettuces do you want me to buy?



Meanwhile, head of seems much more American than British (though Irish English seem to like it for cabbages).



This isn't because the US or Ireland made up head of—it dates way back in English-English:

But head of has clearly been more AmE than BrE since the mid-nineteenth century:

 

You may be able to think of other examples of AmE & BrE differing in whether they treat a noun as count or non-count. Click through here to read blog posts about some of them. 

In case you're wondering about the other items in the screenshots:
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Competition (UK): Win a copy of Ellen Jovin's Rebel with a Clause

Sep 25, 2022

For years, Ellen Jovin has carted a table, chair and reference books—first around New York City and later all across the United States—to volunteer herself as “The Grammar Table.” In doing so, she gives passers-by the opportunity to ask grammar questions, to vent about grammar (or other people’s grammar), and to learn more about English and other languages. She’s now written a book based on her Grammar Table adventures: Rebel with a Clause. I got to read it pre-publication, and this was my review:

Those who learn grammatical rules are doomed to repeat them. And, boy, do they repeat them—tirelessly, senselessly, bringing us to the point where much of the English-speaking world thinks grammar is boring or difficult or scary. Ellen Jovin is on a mission to rescue us from that joyless fate. Her generosity and curiosity about language is second only to her generosity and curiosity with the people who approach her for grammatical advice. We could all stand to be a bit more Ellen Jovin.

 

The publishers have kindly sent me an extra copy of the book to share with my readers—though I must say, it’s me who’s paying for the postage, so I’m going to concentrate my sharing efforts on my UK readers. The American readers at least have the excitement of knowing that they may run into Ellen’s Grammar Table in their public square or strip mall when she sets up her stall there.  (Rest-of-World readers: Sorry!)

 

To make giving away a book more interesting, I’m going to give it to someone who comments on this blog post with a question for Ellen, and (here’s the exciting part!) you are going to get the Grammar Table experience, because Ellen is going to respond to the questions that show up before the contest deadline.* 

 

So, to enter the competition:

  • Comment on the blog with a question for Ellen by [AmE format] October 2, 2022.
  • Sign your message with a name that will identify you (it need not be your full name) and let us know that you’re in the UK.  (You can comment without being in the UK, but you can’t have the copy of the book.) 
  • Click the ‘Notify Me’ box, so that you’ll see the response to your question AND learn whether you’ve won. If you don't see such a box, there are other ways to be notified...see the comments. 

 

After the [non-AmE format] 2 October deadline, I will put the names of the eligible commenters into a real or virtual hat and draw a winner, then announce that winner in a blog comment, with details on how to email me to claim the prize. I will send the book out to them soon after. 



(BrE) Ready, steady, ask some questions!

*Normal commenting etiquette applies. I reserve the right to delete any comments that I find rude or abusive. Any commenter will only be entered into the contest ONCE. 


AND THE WINNER IS....GRHM!!! 
I'm closing down the comments now to give Ellen a break. 

Thank you so much to Ellen for her generosity in answering the questions, and to everyone who asked a question! 


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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)