Separated by a Common Language

This item ran as a Twitter Difference of the Day back in September, and I've been meaning since then to explore it a bit more. My thanks to Colin Fine, who pointed out a Canadian tale of 'the customer isn't always right' story, in which the writer consistently used dull where (British) Colin would have used blunt. Since gradable adjectives are my favo(u)rite kind of word ever, I've been thinking about it on and off since.

'The most important tool' by Simeon Berg, shared under a Creative Commons licen{s/c}e

I hadn't noticed that British folk talk about blunt knives and not dull knives because Americans can talk about blunt knives too. Hearing blunt knife hadn't bothered me (and I hadn't noticed the lack of dull knives), because I hadn't (BrE) twigged that it means something different in the UK than it means to my American mind. It's one of those differences that can easily hide.

In AmE, blunt is generally used to refer to things that aren't pointy (though they might have been). So, if I poke you with a stick, you would be better off if it were a blunt stick, rather than a sharp, pointy one. Using that meaning, an AmE blunt knife would be one without a sharp tip.

That 'not-pointy-sharp' meaning works in BrE too. In BrE, I could poke you with the sharp end of a pencil or its blunt end. (Stay away from me. I'm clearly in a poking mood.)

But BrE also allows for blunt to be the opposite of sharp when referring to an edge, not just an end. So, blunt knife in that case means that the knife is not good for cutting (whether it's good for poking people with is another matter).

AmE uses dull for the edge, and thus has lexicali{s/z}ed (i.e. put into words) the contrast between the 'edge' and 'end' ways that something can be not-sharp. The chart below shows the nouns that are statistically 'more American' (left, green) and 'more British' (right, green) in the GloWBE corpus. (These are not the nouns that are used most with dull, but the ones that are not used in the other country much. See the 'ratio' column for the strength of the noun's 'Americanness' or 'Britishness' in this context.)  (Dull Tool is scoring so high because 12 of the 18 hits are the title of a Fiona Apple song, which goes 'you're more likely to get hurt by a dull tool than a sharp one'.) The 'more BrE' uses of dull have to do with its 'boring' or 'not bright' senses, which exist in AmE too, but perhaps aren't used as much.



In both Englishes, sharp is the opposite of both dull and blunt in their literal 'cutting' senses. So if we talk about a sharp knife in either English (or a blunt knife in BrE), then it's ambiguous as to whether we're talking about the edge or the tip, but context often lets us know. If you're talking about cutting vegetables, the edge is more relevant; if you're talking about poking people, you're probably describing the tip. Where the context is not enough, you'll have to use more words to make it clear—e.g. The tip of that knife is really sharp. AmE doesn't have that ambiguity in the 'not-sharp' end of its vocabulary: the choice of dull or blunt disambiguates it.

Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don't you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!

— Daylin Leach (@daylinleach) 7 February 2017

Leach was apparently inspired to use this term because it had previously been applied to Trump by protesters in Scotland when he visited there in 2016. For example:

Scotland voted to stay & plan on a second referendum, you tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon. https://t.co/iKyEIxf8ej

— Hamfisted Bun Vendor 🔞 (@MetalOllie) 24 June 2016

Now,  there is some similarity between this winner and yesterday's US>UK runner-up mugwump, in that they are both funny-sounding insults hurled by one politician at another. But mugwump wasn't a winner because people in the UK aren't going (BrE) about/(AmE) around using the word mugwump just because one politician did. Shitgibbon, on the other hand, has stuck. Searching it just now on Twitter, I get it in about a half-dozen American tweets per hour. ([AmE] Your mileage may vary, especially depending on the hour and your timezone.) Mostly, the tweets have noun phrases like orange shitgibbon and refer to the very same person as in Leach's tweet. But the usage does seem to drift a bit, with, for instance, reference to "shitgibbon trolls"—which may be a way of calling the trolls 'Trumpist', or it may just be used generally to insult them.
 
This post is very indebted to Ben Zimmer's Strong Language/Slate post linked-to in the first tweet above. But do have a look at it for more on the linguistics of the word. At that point Ben had traced the epithet to UK users on music bootlegging sites in 2000. With a little more digging and a little help from UK journalist David Quantick, Ben was able to confirm the word's existence in 1990, when it was used in the pages of the British music magazine NME. His follow-up article is here.

Shitgibbon joins wanker and bollocks in the ranks of UK>US WotYs that help keep this blog banned in schools. Americans do seem particularly attracted to British "bad" words.

It's that time of year again. The time when everyone's too busy doing fun things in real life to read blogs. Yet I persevere in announcing my Words of the Year here at the butt-end of the year because I don't want to be unfair to December. (And, of course, I'm doing too much teaching to even think about it any earlier.)

As ever, the point of the SbaCL Words of the Year is to note the riches (or rags) that American and British English bring to each other. A SbaCL WotY is not a new word, and it may not even be a newly borrowed word, but it's a word from one of my countries that has been particularly relevant to the other of my countries in that year. Sometimes they're in the news, sometimes they've been building up a presence for years and just needed a little acknowledgement.

The finalists (in my mind) for this year's US-to-UK WotY were of each of these types. The loser is mugwump: a now-obscure Americanism briefly lifted out of the shadows when lexical dilettante (that's the nicest phrase I have for him) Foreign Secretary (that's the most preposterous phrase I have for him) Boris Johnson called the head of the Labour Party "a mutton-headed old mugwump". Since that's not the word I've chosen, I'll leave you to go and read (or watch a video) about it elsewhere.

But the winner, which has been building up some steam for years, will hang around longer than Johnson's antique epithet. It is:

 season 

...to refer to a group of broadcast program(me)s released under the same title in a particular time period. It's tricky to define without using the word series, but one must, because that is the word (or one sense of it) that season competes with in BrE.

Now, I have written about the difference between AmE season versus BrE series before, so I won't do it all again and I encourage you to click on the link to read a more detailed post. To cut a long difference short, the British way would be to say "I haven't seen the second series of Stranger Things (so no spoilers, please!)", but in AmE that doesn't quite make sense because Stranger Things is the series, and the part of it that is 'second' is a season of that series. To unnecessarily throw in some terms of my trade, in AmE season is a meronym of AmE series (it is in the 'part-of' relation), whereas in BrE, AmE season is used as a synonym for BrE series.

British television-watchers (that is to say, almost everyone on this island) have long been familiar with the American sense of season—after all, lots of American television program(me)s are imported to UK television. But what's tipped it into WotY territory are the streaming services, especially Netflix, which often releases an entire season/series of a (AmE) show at one time, enabling serious binge-watching. And on Netflix, they are called seasons. Even when they're BBC products like Uncle here.  (Can you see the '2 Seasons' there under the title on Netflix?) Meanwhile on BBC iPlayer, it's on 'Series 3'. (It's also a lovely comedy and if you like lovely comedies you might want to give it a chance.)

The reasons for calling it a season are rather irrelevant in the days of streaming--when 12 episodes show up on a single day, rather than unfolding over months. But the nice thing about season is that it avoids the ambiguity that arises from the two possible interpretations of series.
 
The AmE term is showing up more and more in British newspapers--including the Telegraph (one of the papers that publishes a lot of complaints about Americanisms). This chart shows how 'ordinal-number+season of' (which, on this corpus's tagging system includes last season of and next season of) has been faring in UK news websites (via the NOW corpus).

The charts look similar for other searches like 'season+cardinal number+of". Of course, there are other types of seasons besides television seasons in these data, but the television ones predominate, as can be seen from this sample of the 2017-B section of the corpus (click to biggify it):


Sports seasons come up once in a while, but the instances of season are mostly about television seasons.

I should note here that Netflix is an equal-opportunity word-spreader. Only a couple of years ago, it was being blamed for Americans saying queue.


So there we go. The first SbaCL WotY of 2017! Many thanks to @eahird for nominating it. Stay tuned for the UK>US WotY. As soon as I decide what it is!

Better late than never (I hope) here is the summary of the SEVENTH 'Untranslatable October'—my
annual tweeting of an 'British–American untranslatable' (that is, item lexicalized in one national dialect and not the other) on each weekday. If you'd like to complain that any of the following does not qualify as 'untranslatable', please first read my provisos about what's meant by untranslatable in this context. Yes, it's an imperfect word for the situation. But so is nearly every other word in nearly every situation.

BrE safeguarding legalistic processes for protecting vulnerable people. See Wikipedia for description. (Starting to be seen in US, but nowhere as prevalent/broad.) Suggested by @Gnorrn

AmE podunk (adj.) - There are lots of words for small towns or remote places, but podunk is interesting for its use as an adjective, describing to a place of little importance, as in: Her degree is from some podunk college.  Suggested by @kirkpoore.

The 2016 gurning competition winner at the Egremont Crab Fair

BrE to gurn - to make (or BrE pull) a grotesque face. (In Scotland the word also means 'complain peevishly'.) Gurning competitions are a long-held tradition, particularly in Cumbria.


AmE shut-in (n.) - a person confined to their own home due to (physical or mental) infirmity.

BrE health and safety - it refers to safety regulations, but the phrase's cultural importance goes far beyond what a phrase like OSHA regulations would do in the US. Sometimes mocked as Elf and Safety, a joke that takes advantage of two Londony dialect features: h-dropping and th-fronting (th->f).


AmE blue-ribbon - as in blue-ribbon panel. Not the same meaning as winning a prize, it's about people who are chosen on the basis of their high reputation for some other activity. See Wikipedia.


BrE fry-up - a breakfast of separate, mostly fried foods, usually including eggs, sausages, bacon, some starch, and, around here, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans. Now, this is a debatable inclusion, as it could be argued that the fry-up itself doesn't exist in the US. We'd never put some of those things on a breakfast plate. I took the position here that a full English (breakfast) (which is sometimes treated as a synonym of fry-up) would not be a legal untranslatable for my purposes, because it assumes certain types of ingredients and breakfasts with those ingredients are not found in the US (so the US doesn't have the expression because it doesn't have the thing). But since fry-up is more ambiguous about what's on the plate, and Americans do eat fried, separate foods on a plate for breakfast (especially in diners) and we don't have a word for it (other than listing the things on the plate), it counts as something that could be an expression there but isn't. Suggested by @mhanson62 

AmE recuse - to challenge in a legal context on the grounds of conflict of interest. Hence to recuse oneself: to remove oneself from discussion or position so as to avoid conflict of interest. I got complaints about this one because Englishfolk thought "but it's a word we use all the time". But really, it wasn't until recently a word that Brits (except for Scottish legal types) had much exposure to.  I know because I wrote a blog post about it 10 years ago.

Hanging out on the stoop in NYC. Image from here.

BrE parp - an onomatopoetic word for (as opposed to a straight imitation of) the noise of a fart (unlike raspberry, refers only to the fart-noise, not to the imitative lip-noise)

AmE stoop - the front steps of a (porchless) house. Used especially in northeastern US, borrowed from Dutch

BrE lock-in - a time when customers are locked in a pub (by their agreement!) to continue drinking after legal drinking hours. Suggested by @lilyglowember

AmE lock-in - an event in which teens are locked into a church/school/community cent{er/re} for a night of wholesome fun, study, or fundraising. wiseGEEK has more.  (Suggested by many people after the BrE lock-in.)

BrE break one's duck - (of an individual, usually) to score a first point. Explained further by World Wide Words. Suggested by @lawwife2005

AmE padiddle Also: pediddle, or as we said it in my family, perdiddle. It's a game in which you call out the word and possibly kiss or punch (depending on whether it's with your sweetheart or siblings) the person next to you when you see a car with a headlight out. (In my family, it was perdiddle for a headlight, padaddle for a tail light. By extension, it becomes a name for a car with a faulty light (and that's the meaning I'm deeming the Untranslatable). Here's Wikipedia on it.  Suggested by @sethadelman

BrE a good degree - an undergraduate degree that is easily 'usable' for employment or (post)graduate study. Which is to say, a first or 2:1 (pronounced 'two-one') in the English degree classification system. US degrees are not classified, but instead students' transcripts, with grade-point averages, are used as evidence of academic success. There's no cut-off between the 'good' and the 'bad'.

AmE chicken scratch - cramped, illegible handwriting. Some discussion as to whether BrE spider scrawl is the same. To me they bring up different images of the type of writing, but maybe they are close enough to count as translatable. Several correspondents pointed out that there are chicken-related expressions for bad handwriting in many languages.

BrE well that’s me told then - a passive-aggressive response given when the responder finds their interlocutor patroni{s/z}ing. On Twitter we discussed whether AmE That'll teach me! is the same, but there was some agreement that, as @xtnjohnson put it, "that’ll teach me implies some genuine self-reproach — this [BrE} phrase deftly shifts focus to the other party". But thinking further on it now, I think the usage is translatable as:  I stand corrected.

AmE bully pulpit - a position of political power from which one can 'inspire or moralize' World Wide Words covered it here.

BrE fall between two stools - to either not be or not take one of two good alternatives

AmE to go stag - (for a man) to go to an event without a date. Suggested by @SimonKoppel

BrE the family home - a legalistic term that's become common in journalism. The Shelter charity offers a definition and discussion here.  Suggested by @cococoyote. @arielmc_g  pointed out that primary residence might serve as a US legal equivalent, but that doesn't have the traction or connotations that family home has beyond the courtroom.

Of course, on the first of November, I started having ideas for next year's list--but I am pretty sure I'll reduce to a week then. It is definitely more work than my usual Differences of the Day.

Today is the last day of the Term from Hell. I should be posting more regularly in the new year. (Thank you to a few people who expressed concern for my well-being because of the lack of posts!) Next up will be the Word of the Year posts, for US-to-UK and UK-to-US words that have made a splash in 2017. Nominations still welcome!