Separated by a Common Language

Smylers got in touch recently with this observation:

I found myself being surprised by the word “mobility”, and was wondering if there's a BrE/AmE difference? Enterprise Rent-a-Car emailed to say they're introducing a new brand: Enterprise Mobility. 

That made me think of vehicles adapted for wheelchair users, or those who otherwise have limited personal mobility. But apparently it's the overall brand for various transport services; “mobility” is being used to mean “travelling in a vehicle”, rather than “travelling on foot”.

There's no reason why the unqualified word should have one or the other meaning. But to my British brain, “mobility” makes me think of “mobility scooters” or “mobility aids” — such as those provided by Mobility People, whom you linked to in 2008:

It's an interesting one. 

The word mobility seems a bit more common in BrE in the the News on the Web corpus: you find about 11 mobility per million words in the US, versus about 13 per million in the UK. Those British uses tend to relate to a couple of domains: physical (dis)ability and social class.

It's not that Americans don't use mobility in that way. You can definitely find phrases like mobility scooter (as can be seen at this US electric wheelchair retailer) in AmE. (Though when I asked my brother what those things are called, he didn't use the word mobility, just scooter.) Nevertheless, this (dis)ability-related use of mobility used a lot more in BrE:

The (dis)ability-related uses of mobility really take off in this corpus after 2021. For instance, mobility issues (which could refer to different kinds of mobility, but mostly doesn't) had only 0.30 per million (across countries) in 2019, but 0.85 per million in 2022. 

Both AmE and BrE use mobility for metaphorical movement, as in social mobility. 

mobility + noun

Noun + mobility

Adjective + mobility

Having spent so many years on Twitter doing "Differences of the Day",  I have a lot of (forgive me the jargon) content that could be moved over here, to the blog. Today, I'm moving over the information from tweets that I did during my "fire week" in March 2018: five days of AmE–BrE differences relating to fire-fighting. This choice has been inspired by Frank Abate, an American lexicographer who regularly sends me the BrEisms he's come across in reading the news.  So, this post is mostly copy-pasted-edited from tweets—the smaller text is info I've added since the tweets.

Ways of referring to people who fight fires as a job:

• AmE and BrE both use fireman and firewoman (though News on the Web corpus has both of these at higher rates in UK now)
• orig. AmE fire fighter (or firefighter) is used about twice as much in US
• BrE fire crew and fire (safety) officer (which is a higher rank) are not much used in US.

(Fire) appliance is much more common in news/officialese in BrE than AmE (and get a look at NZ!). This goes back to mid-1800s, and refers to a fire engine (used in both countries). AmE has fire truck, but that's a more informal term than engine/appliance.

Fire appliance in the News on the Web corpus.

That reminded me of a sign on the fire station near my house in Brighton:

Finally, fire hydrant was originally an Americanism, but is now used in the UK too. They look rather different, though.

UK hydrants are marked by yellow signs with an H, which tell firefighters that there's access to a pipe nearby. I wish I could remember what I watched on television last week that had an American hydrant in an allegedly UK setting. It's one of those things that will really stand out to those who know. Two points to any commenter who can name the show or film!

UK hydrant sign (pic from here)

US fire hydrant (pic from Wikipedia)

And here's a handy-dandy guide to reading a UK hydrant sign from the Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service.

If you liked this, you might be interested in these earlier posts about:

• the sound a siren makes
• other kinds of vehicles

Long ago, I was asked about so fun versus such fun. Martin Ball, this one's for you! 

So, fun started out in English (1600s) as a verb meaning to 'trick, cheat, deceive'. You could fun someone out of their money. Then by the 1700s, it had become a noun meaning 'light-hearted enjoyment'. At that point, it was very much considered to be slang. Its respectability as a noun has increased over the centuries, but it may still feel a little informal. 

Elephant & Piggie books = much recommended

When it's a noun, you can modify it for amount with the kinds of amount-modifiers (quantifiers) that go with uncountable nouns:

1. we had a lot of fun 
2. The evening wasn't much fun

In my last newsletter, I reacted to this news story:

The article is about addressing teachers as sir or miss, which happens in American schools too (I'm sure there's a lot of variation in that across schools and regions). But in the newsletter I mentioned BrE referential use of the words when talking about the teacher (rather than talking to the teacher). I said: "I’m often taken aback when my child (like any ordinary English child) refers to her teachers as Sir and Miss"—which she often does.

My former colleague David replied to say that he found this odd, since as "a moderately ordinary English child in the north of England in the 1960s," he addressed his (all male) teachers as Sir, but would refer to them by name or description (e.g., our English teacher). He concluded that "referring to teachers as Sir and Miss may be either more recent or more southern."

While the usage may have been new in the 1960s, it definitely existed then, apparently even in the north.

On to Miss. The first referring-to-(not addressing)-a-teacher citation for Miss is from 1968 in a book by an author from Salford (in the northwest). (You'll spot another Miss example from that book in the Sir examples above. I've reported the error.)

Did Miss really only appear a decade after referential Sir? I doubt it. We have to rely on written records, usually published ones, and there aren't a lot of written records in the voice of schoolchildren. Fiction helps, but it has its biases and gaps. 

And then, of course, there was the 1967 British film To Sir, with Love, in which Sir is used as if it is the name of the teacher played by Sidney Poitier. Is it a term of address there, or referential?  Well, the title always seemed weird to me—certainly not a way I'd address a package. This Sir seems halfway between address and reference. We could label packages with the second-person pronouns that we usually used to address people, i.e., "To you", but we tend to use the third person: "To David". Rather than addressing the recipient, it seems to be announcing the recipient. 

Reader Sam* recently wrote to me with the following: 

A usage that surprises me every time I hear it is “meant” in the sense of “supposed” or “should be”.  For example, in a BBC news item today the correspondent said that there were “meant to be elections this year in Pakistan.” The emphasis seems to be on obligation rather than intention.

[...] do you think this is a recent development, or has British English always had this usage?

In the passive, to be meant has for long had the sense ‘to be destined (by providence), to have special significance’:

When I need you, you are here. You must see how meant it all is—Iris Murdoch, 1974.

During the 20c this use was joined by another passive use in which meant followed by a to-infinitive means little more than ‘supposed, thought, intended’:

For today he was meant to be having dinner with Stephanie at the Dear Friends—A. N. Wilson, 1986.

This altered meaning is now so familiar that its relative newness can cause surprise.

By the third edition (2016), the 'supposed/thought' angle is not even discussed, which seems to indicate that it's no longer seen as a potential usage problem in British English:

In the meaning ‘to intend’, mean can be followed by a to-infinitive (when the speaker intends to do something: I meant to go), by an object+to-infinitive (when the speaker intends someone else to do something: I meant you to go) and, more formally, by a that-clause with should (I meant that you should go). Use of mean for +object+to-infinitive (☒ I meant for you to go) is non-standard.

The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry revised in 2001) has this sense:

In passive, with infinitive clause: to be reputed, considered, said to be something. Cf. suppose v. 9a.

1878   R. Simpson School of Shakspere I. 34  It is confessed that Hawkins and Cobham were meant to be buccaneers, and it is absurd to deny the like of Stucley.

1945   Queen 18 Apr. 17/1   ‘Such and such a play,’ they [my children] will say, ‘is meant to be jolly good.’

1972   Listener 9 Mar. 310/1   America..is meant to be a great melting-pot.

1989   Times 30 Mar. 15/1   It [sc. evening primrose oil] is also meant to be good for arthritis.

None of these (Oxford-published) sources mark these usages as particularly British, but over in America, Ben Yagoda at his Not One-Off Britishisms blog discussed meant to in 2019 as a British usage that is 'on the radar' in American English. 

Mean has many senses that (chiefly AmE) smush (also smoosh) into each other, making it tricky to analy{s/z}e.  Take an example like America is meant to be a great melting-pot (that hyphen is very British, by the way). It probably means 'reputed' (i.e. people say it's a melting pot). But it could mean  'intended' (i.e. the Founding Fathers wanted it to be that). Meant in the rest of the 20th-century OED examples can be replaced by reputed, but reputed doesn't seem like the right synonym for the A. N. Wilson example in Fowler's or the Pakistan election example in Sam's email. 

In the GloWbE corpus (data collected in 2012–13), is meant to usually doesn't look very British. For example, here are the results for "is meant to be [adjective]". As you can see (if you click to enlarge), items like is meant to be fun occur at similar rates in American and British. The results are very similar for is meant to be a (as in is meant to be a melting-pot). 

The bar chart shows that the American examples are fewer overall, but not all that different (the black line is to facilitate comparison). 

There is something interesting going on in that adjective list, though: Americans are using is meant to be with very similar adjectives: fun, funny, humorous, entertaining plus odd-one-out free. The British adjectives are more diverse, which probably signals that this 'supposed to be' meaning is more established in BrE and Americans use it in more limited ways.**

In Sam's example there were meant to be elections, the grammatical subject of be meant to is the existential/dummy subject there. If we look for that, a US/UK divide seems clearer. North Americans don't really say there [be] mean to, which will be why that example stood out for Sam:

There does occur slightly less in the US data overall—about 7% less than in British. So that might be a contributing factor. But, to me, it looks like the is meant to construction just isn't as much at home in AmE as it is in BrE at this point. And that's to be expected, since it's a usage that seems to have started in Britain only after American independence. 

I should probably say something about the usual translation of be meant to: be supposed to as in The weather is supposed to be nice. This is much older than meant in the sense of 'expected/assumed'—the OED's first example is from 1616. The 'ought to' meaning, as in I'm supposed to be in bed by now, comes much later—the OED's first citation is from 1884 in Britain. So, we can't call supposed to "AmE" as opposed to BrE. But since meant to has taken on some of supposed to's jobs, and meant to is more British, it's not surprising to find more supposed to in AmE:

I'm really meant/supposed to be in bed by now. So I shall leave it at that! 

------------

*@LKMcFarlane, 

@Miranda_Neville & @PamRosenthal, 

@aaj1an  
and possibly others have raised this topic with me years before. Sorry it's taken so long! 

**Note that there's always the risk in GloWbE data that writers represented in a particular column are not really from that country. For instance, this data might include British commenters on American websites and vice versa. So, to be safe, I checked that is meant to is also found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which doesn't rely so much on internet English. It is.