Separated by a Common Language: Search results for "can i get"

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America and Americans (p.s. England, Britain & UK!)

Jul 16, 2014

Here's an argument that doesn't fit well in 140 characters, but I'm constantly being confronted with it on Twitter (and in real life), so I hope you'll excuse me getting it out of my system so that I can just send people a link from now on.

This is the kind of thing I get:

I suggest you stop calling yourselves American. It is arrogant of people from the United States to call themselves Americans because America is a whole continent. They should be called [insert long-winded or whimsical epithet here].

So, let's break that argument down...

I suggest... It is arrogant...
Individuals from the USA call themselves American because that's the word we have. They typically don't have an imperialist agenda intent on taking over or obliterating other people in the western hemisphere, they're (we're) just using the word that's at hand. But let's unpack this a bit more.

Let's say I meet a young man named Tom Jones. Would it be appropriate for me to say to him "It is arrogant of you to call yourself Tom Jones because there's another one who's older and a much better singer than you!"? Or "How arrogant of your parents to name you Tom Jones when there already was one!"?

That is, you're telling people from another country what to call themselves, and you think they're the arrogant ones?

America is a whole continent
On the model of continents generally taught in English-speaking nations, America is two continents: North America and South America. In today's English, these are typically referred to collectively as the Americas. (And loosely, the term Western Hemisphere is sometimes used to refer to the same set of continents, though technically parts of Europe are in that hemisphere too.) There are some contexts in which American is used to refer to people/things from the Americas, as in the Organization of American States--but even they use the plural when referring to the continents: "Today, the OAS brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas" on their English site and (interestingly--is this just because of translation from English?) similar plurals on the Spanish, Portuguese and French pages.

All this is based on the seven-continent model that is generally used in the English-speaking world (and some other places too), but other models are taught in other countries. Another more geologically motivated six-continent model joins Europe and Asia into Eurasia, but still holds North America and South America to be different because they are on different tectonic plates. The use of models that are more regional, perhaps, than geological, probably accounts for why it's often people from other European countries who write to me to complain about my use of America. (I had wondered why they had so much invested in it.) Wikipedia clarifies:

North America and South America are treated as separate continents in the seven-continent model. However, they may also be viewed as a single continent known as America. This viewpoint was common in the United States until World War II, and remains prevalent in some Asian six-continent models. This remains the more common vision in Latin American countries, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Greece, where they are taught as a single continent. From the 19th century some people used the term "Americas" to avoid ambiguity with the United States of America.

If the word refers to continent(s), it can't also refer to a country
Most words have more than one meaning. For instance day can mean a 24-hour period or the part of that 24-hour period when the sun is up. We don't insist that people use it in only one way, because it rarely causes us trouble and when there is trouble we have ways around it. Similarly, thinking of other place names, there are two New Yorks, a state and a city. When it matters, we distinguish between them. When it doesn't, we don't. Upstaters like me sometimes get annoyed when people say New York to mean the city and not the state, but we mostly get over it.

(When I travel, and people ask where I'm from, I say New York. They believe city; I mean state. They don't mess with me; I don't make them listen to a geography lesson. No one suffers.)

So while there's nothing wrong with America or American having more than one meaning, we should acknowledge the fact that it has a dominant meaning, associated with a particular country. (And there are good reasons why that's the dominant meaning. We need to talk about the country more often than we need to talk about the two continents together, at least in English. And also, it's the name of the country--see below.)

Thus, the following uses of America/n are weird in English:

A: I went to America last summer.
B: Oh really? Where?
A: Venezuela.
B: ??

Brazil has a population of over 200 million people, almost all of them American.

People from the USA should be called...
This statement is usually concluded with something that no one knows how to pronounce, like USan or USAn or States(i)an or something. More importantly, it's a word or phrase that no one uses, so it'll be hard for anyone to understand your meaning if you start using it to avoid using American. On Twitter, because I need to pack a lot of meaning into a few characters, I do use the abbreviations USer and UKer, which I say in my head as 'you-ESS-er' and 'you-KAY-yer', but I have yet to say them outside my head. (And I sometimes get a little grief for it on Twitter.) I'm more tempted by UKer because of the geographical problems presented by British (see below).

The problem with all this is...
that the name of the country is America to the same extent that the name of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is Luxembourg and the name of the Republic of South Africa is South Africa. That is, official country names are generally the country's name + some description of the political organi{z/s}ation of the country. The description usually (in the English renderings of the name) precedes the country name, so I'll call it a 'prefix'.

The US and the UK are a bit odd in that the prefixes to the country names are commonly used as names for the countries. So we hardly ever refer to Egypt as the Arab Republic of Egypt and we never refer to it just as the Arab Republic; we call it Egypt. But we do that kind of prefix-only reference to the United States and the United Kingdom. If anything's not fair, I'm going to say it's that. Mexico is also a United States. And United Kingdom is just plain sexist. But we'll muddle through because people understand what we mean when we use those terms (and the UK's proper name is just too much of a mouthful).

(I won't go into the States because I've blogged about that already.)

So I've gone (BrE) off piste in that this is not a US-UK difference. It's not even a bit of American usage that I hear British complaints about. (In fact, Americans chastise me about it more than Brits do.) I could have just sent you to this Slate post about the same kind of thing. But thank you for letting me get it off my chest.

[green part added May 2016]
It's just occurred to me that negro is an interesting comparison case. Negro or negro person is now considered offensive in reference to people in English. It is considered, as far as I can tell, as a neutral way to refer to people in some national varieties of Spanish. To quote Wikipedia:

In Spain, Mexico and almost all of Latin-America, negro (lower-cased, as ethnonyms are generally not capitalized in Romance languages) means 'black person'.

In English and in Spanish, then, the situation for negro is different, though the word ultimately comes from the same source. But as an English speaker, I have no right to insist that Spanish speakers stop using this word to refer to people in Spanish. It's just a way of saying something in Spanish, and I need to adjust my English sensibilities accordingly when listening to Spanish. It would be arrogant (and possibly unforgivable) to suggest that "Spanish people are racist for using the word negro because when I hear it it offends me".

If in another language, where America refers to a continent, the meaning of American{o/a} is more associated with the continent than with a country (or, if at least it is more ambiguous in that situation), then that language will need a more specific way to refer to people from the US in that language. English-speakers will have to learn that America and Americano/a don't mean 'United States' and instead we should say [insert other language's word here]. And speakers of that language would have the right to get annoyed if English speakers forgot that lesson.

But to say that because it's problematic in Spanish (or Portuguese or French), American cannot mean 'of the United States' in English — that is a problem. Just as we don't share the history that makes negro more offensive in one place than in another, we don't share the history/geography that makes America refer to different things. I'm happy to agree that literal translations of American won't work in Romance languages. But what I've provided here is an argument about its use in English.

To argue that the status quo in Romance languages should guide the usage in English is to say that people from one place should be able to dictate what people in another place call themselves. A friend from South Dakota visited me the other day and used the word Indian about Native Americans he knew. He quickly explained "That's what they prefer". That, as far as I'm concerned, is the end of the story. If people call themselves something and want you to call them that too, there aren't many good reasons for calling them something else.

(I'd be interested, if anyone knows: do Indians in India ever protest the use of Indian for American peoples? And in that case, I'm using American as an adjective covering the Americas. Because words can have more than one meaning!)

P.S. I'm sure someone would like to point out American misuse of England, British, etc. I'll just pause first to say: there are an awful lot of misuses of British and English in the UK as well and certainly a lot of misuses from countries other than America too. It's complicated. When these issues come up, I send folks to this video:

Labels: geography , names | 88 comments

anti-Americanismism, part 1

Jul 20, 2011

In my last post, I refrained from saying much about the BBC Magazine piece by Matthew Engel on 'Why do some Americanisms annoy people?', pointing readers instead to Mark Liberman/Language Log's analysis of the so-called Americanisms ~~that annoy at least~~ identified by Matthew Engel. Today the BBC website followed up with '50 of your noted Americanisms', and already Geoff Pullum/Language Log, Johnson, Americans Living in London--and others I've yet to hear about, I'm sure--have posted reasoned replies to this offensive piece.

Why am I offended by this piece? I'll tell you why. Because I've paid for it.

The piece is driving a huge number of people to the BBC News website (as Stan Carey has noted on Twitter). As I type this, it is the 'most shared' piece on the site and the seventh most read (on a very big news day). But it is the journalistic equivalent of (orig. & mostly BrE) piss-poor reality television: let's get people to say things that might be controversial, and then we'll edit it into something that will get people arguing about which words to throw off the island. Two American views are printed as sidebars to the article; both, like the material in the article itself, are from readers who sent in comments. If we can call this journalism, it is completely passive journalism. Perhaps next we can have viewers' thoughts about whether it's going to rain tomorrow, rather than paying all those expensive weather forecasters. (Not to say that viewers' thoughts---or their photos of tornadoes---are never welcome on news program(me)s. That's why we have (mostly BrE) vox pops/(AmE) man-on-the-street interviews** and letters to the editor. But putting up a lightly-moderated forum of people's gripes about language does not constitute news or journalism. We get those for free on the web already. We don't need our public broadcaster for that.)

One could understand commercial television or newspapers doing such things--the more viewers they recruit, the more their advertisers pay them. But this is the BBC. This is what I pay a television licen{s/c}e fee for.* I want its online publications to live up to the organi{s/z}ation's charter to 'inform, educate and entertain'. And when they say 'entertain', I'd like it not to be throwing Christians to the lions or dwarf bowling or just letting people air their prejudices and ignorance with no (orig. AmE) reality check. As Mark Liberman has demonstrated, many of Engel's pet American peeves were not, in fact, Americanisms. Guess what? Some of the contributors to this piece are not much better at distinguishing things that they don't like and things that are American. Geoff Pullum's piece on Language Log makes the case that this outpouring of anti-Americanismism is also anti-Americanism, and I think that you should read his take on that, since he makes some interesting points from an interesting perspective. But I do want to say something about the title.

It's odd, isn't it? Your most noted Americanisms. Does this sound odd to anyone else? It means, according to the introduction to the piece that they are the fifty that were most mentioned in emails to the BBC in reply to Engel's article. Now first, I'd have liked something more than one person's mention of each. Are they presented in order? Most noted Americanisms. Sounds odd, odd, odd. But it does bear a certain phonic resemblance to a phrase that doesn't sound odd. Lo and behold, if one searches "50 most hated Americanisms", one finds that that's how some people, at least, have remembered the title.

So, a quick tour of the fifty, starting with the first twenty-five and a (orig. & cheifly AmE) rain check on the rest. Where I've blogged about them, there's a link. (If you want to comment on the previously blogged topics, please could you do it at the original post? They continue to be read and linked to. I'd like for your comment to be where it can do the most good for people who want to know more about that particular expression.)

1. When people ask for something, I often hear: "Can I get a..." It infuriates me. It's not New York. It's not the 90s. You're not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really." Steve, Rossendale, Lancashire

This definitely sounds American to those old enough to remember when it wasn't said in the UK. But this battle is lost--it's pervasive. Back here I did some wondering about why it sounds odd to BrE ears and not to AmE ones.

2. The next time someone tells you something is the "least worst option", tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

I liked Guardian columnist (and British expat in Brooklyn) Oliver Burkeman's response to this on Twitter:

oliverburkeman Almost always, Americanisms add nuance. "Least worst option" doesn't = "best option", Mike Ayres of Bodmin Cornwall.

3. The phrase I've watched seep into the language (especially with broadcasters) is "two-time" and "three-time". Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost? Grammatically it makes no sense, and is even worse when spoken. My pulse rises every time I hear or see it. Which is not healthy as it's almost every day now. Argh! D Rochelle, Bath

This is originally AmE, but noted by the OED in the Guardian as early as 1960. But are double and triple really equivalent to two-time and three-time? Couldn't the double Wimbledon champion mean that they won two prizes (say, in singles and doubles) in the same year? Double means 'twice as much'; two-time means 'at two times'. Grammatically it makes perfect sense, as it is identical to one-time champion, which seems to be originally BrE.

4. Using 24/7 rather than "24 hours, 7 days a week" or even just plain "all day, every day". Simon Ball, Worcester

I'm sure this one annoys some Americans too. Slang does that. I'm more annoyed that the so-called 24-hour stores here (Asda, the UK arm of Walmart) close late-ish on Saturday, re-open for a few hours on Sunday, close again, then open (on) Monday morning (see example opening times here). Does the phrase 24/7 actually crop up in BrE? (she asked, mischievously).

5. The one I can't stand is "deplane", meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase "you will be able to deplane momentarily". TykeIntheHague, Den Haag, Holland

This is an airlineism. No one says this but flight attendants and pilots, and then only to annoy you. Yes, you.

6. To "wait on" instead of "wait for" when you're not a waiter - once read a friend's comment about being in a station waiting on a train. For him, the train had yet to arrive - I would have thought rather that it had got stuck at the station with the friend on board. T Balinski, Raglan, New Zealand

Johnson's covered this one, and says:

Yes, to "wait on" also means to be a waiter, but writers from Chaucer to Milton to George Eliot used "to wait on" in various senses including "to observe", "to lie in wait for", "to await" and more.

7. "It is what it is". Pity us. Michael Knapp, Chicago, US

Apparently we're supposed/meant to pity people in Chicago who have to hear American English. Six of the fifty people whose 'noted' Americanisms the BBC has noted are in the US. Another four are in countries other than the UK (two of those are in non-Anglophone countries). One can only imagine that the US ones are expatriates from the UK or elsewhere. Engel and others claim that Americanisms are fine in their place (America), but the problem is when they invade British English. But apparently they're not OK in the US either.

8. Dare I even mention the fanny pack? Lisa, Red Deer, Canada

Tisha at Americans Living in London notes (my link added):

Um, fanny doesn't mean the same in the US as it does in the UK. After all this is a country that uses the term faggot to describe a pork dish. A Brit could never get away with saying that in the States!

Not to mention bumming a fag.

9. "Touch base" - it makes me cringe no end. Chris, UK

Yeah, that annoyed a lot of us too. Google "pet peeve" "touch base", if you'd like a show-and-tell. Is it a baseball metaphor? That'll be especially peevable in the UK.

10. Is "physicality" a real word? Curtis, US

Johnson again (emphasis added for that obnoxious American effect): "Yes, first noted in a book published in London in 1827."

11. Transportation. What's wrong with transport? Greg Porter, Hercules, CA, US

What's wrong with transport in California is that it would be a foreign word. And a newfangled Briticism at that. To quote the OED, transportation was "Much used in 17th c. down to c1660; afterwards gradually given up for transport, prob. to avoid association with penal transportation".

12. The word I hate to hear is "leverage". Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to "value added". Gareth Wilkins, Leicester

The pronunciation difference, with BrE preferring 'ee' where AmE prefers the "short vowel" is found in a range of words, including evolution. I haven't noticed the meaning change Mr Wilkins claims (though value added might need translation for AmE readers: 'something extra included in the price'). It is used a lot in business jargon, and 90% of any country's population hates business jargon. [Need a made-up statistic? I got'em right here!]

13. Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all "turn" 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as "turning" 90 last month. When did this begin? I quite like the phrase in itself, but it seems to have obliterated all other ways of speaking about birthdays. Michael McAndrew, Swindon

Really, obliterated? It means something different from celebrate, certainly. Glad you like it.

14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

Hey, give our word back!! (Here's my cart/trolley post.)

15. What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder. Julie Marrs, Warrington

It's the kind of word that's been in English probably as long as it's been English. (First OED citation, ca. 1380.) Here's an old post. As I've been heard to say before, if you object to gotten, then it's your duty to object to forgotten, misbegotten and ill-gotten too.

16. "I'm good" for "I'm well". That'll do for a start. Mike, Bridgend, Wales

I used to take this as an ironic misuse--i.e. being 'incorrect' to give your response a down-home flavo(u)r. If you ever hear me say it, it's ironic. But it's general informal AmE now. (Emphasis on the informal.) An old [and not-quite-relevant! ed.] post on adjectives-as-adverbs.

17. "Bangs" for a fringe of the hair. Philip Hall, Nottingham

Here's an old post. In AmE bangs and fringe would be somewhat different styles. (Nuance!)

18. Take-out rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester

Are the Scots still allowed to say carry-out? Old post--the comments are very informative about the regional variations.

19. I enjoy Americanisms. I suspect even some Americans use them in a tongue-in-cheek manner? "That statement was the height of ridiculosity". Bob, Edinburgh

Oh, Bob! Thank you, Bob! This takes us back to a post called "Language play -- not getting it".

20. "A half hour" instead of "half an hour". EJB, Devon

The OED has citations back to 1420. Needless to say, they're not American.

21. A "heads up". For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a "heads up" on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning. R Haworth, Marlborough

Neither am I, in the way Haworth has related it. To give someone a heads up is to give them a warning. It's informal, figurative. Looking at do a heads up on the web, there's a lot of do a heads up tournament. No idea what that means either. Jargon, or is my AmE too out-of-date?

22. Train station. My teeth are on edge every time I hear it. Who started it? Have they been punished? Chris Capewell, Queens Park, London

A number of BrE speakers commented at an earlier post that they find train station very natural in their dialects. This battle is lost, and one can see why--since BrE has coach station (≈AmE (long-distance only) bus station--e.g. a Greyhound station) and train station (but not railway station) works on analogy with it.

23. To put a list into alphabetical order is to "alphabetize it" - horrid! Chris Fackrell, York

Do you care to explain this, C Fackrell? This seems similar to Engel's complaint about 'hospitalize', in that there is some general opposition to using one of English's lovely productive derivational suffixes. Why is this one so bad? And if it's so bad, why do BrE speakers pressuri{z/s}e people to do things where AmE speakers would pressure them?

24. People that say "my bad" after a mistake. I don't know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that. Simon Williamson, Lymington, Hampshire

Annoys me too. See point about slang, at number 4. But I don't see how it's any lazier than saying my fault.

25. "Normalcy" instead of "normality" really irritates me. Tom Gabbutt, Huddersfield

An oldie but a goodie. Here's what the Maven's Word of the Day said about it. For a long time, it was considered non-standard in AmE too, but we've overcome that and it's now nearly twice as common as normality.

Part 2....can now be seen here.

* You probably smell a rat too. The BBC has had its budgets slashed. The people in charge of such things are all co{s/z}y with the people who run a very sleazy news organi{s/z}ation. I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC website puts things up to meet readership targets or some such thing, in hopes that their budgets and services won't be further attacked.

** Thanks to reader 'jb' for noticing/suggesting this difference. In AmE man-on-the-street is about three times more common than man-in-the-street, which is the BrE form.

Labels: Americanization , more complicated than you might think , prescriptivism | 117 comments

try and, try to; GMEU app

Dec 14, 2016

Our university's website provides helpful information for students about research and writing. It says things like this:

Another big mistake is to try and write an essay at the last minute.

I look at that and itch to edit it, just like early in my time in England, when my department head sent round a draft document for our comments, and I "helpfully" changed all the try and's to try to's. Imposing your American prescriptions on a learned British linguist is probably not the best idea, and it's one of those little embarrassments that comes back to haunt me in the middle of the sleepless night. I had had no idea that try and is not the no-no in BrE that it is in edited AmE.

I'm reminded of this for two reasons:

Marisa Brook and Sali Tagliamonte have a paper in the August issue of American Speech that looks at try and and try to in British and Canadian English (and I've just learned a lot about the history of these collocations from it)
I've been using this new English usage app and testing it on matters of US/UK disagreement. (Review below.)

The weirdness

Try and is weird. I say that as fact, not judg(e)ment. You can't "want and write an essay" or "attempt and write an essay". The try and variation seems to be a holdover from an earlier meaning of try, which meant 'test' or 'examine', still heard in the idiom to try one's patience. Though the 'test' meaning dropped out, the and construction hung on and transferred to the 'attempt' meaning of 'try'.

Though some people insist that try and means something different from try to, those claims don't stand up to systematic investigation. A 1983 study of British novels by Åge Lind (cited in Brook and Tagliamonte) could find no semantic difference, and a statistical study by Gries and Stefanowitsch concluded "where semantic differences have been proposed, they are very tenuous". The verbs be and do seem to resist try and and prefer try to.

There are some cases where try and doesn't mean the same thing as try to, where the second verb is a comment on the success (or lack of success) of the trying:

We try and fail to write our essays. ≠ We try to fail to write our essays.

But in most cases, they're equivalent:

Try and help the stranded dolphin. = Try to help the stranded dolphin.

Try and make it up to them. = Try to make it up to them.

(If the rightmost example sounds odd, make sure you're pronouncing it naturally with the to reduced to 'tuh'. If the leftmost one just sounds bad to you, you may well be North American.)

Though there are other verbs that can be followed by and+verb, they don't act the same way as try and. For one thing, try and seems to stay in that 'base' form without suffixes. It's harder to find examples in the present or past tense (see tables below).

? The student tries and writes an essay.
? The student tried and wrote an essay.

Compare the much more natural past tense of go and:

The student just went and wrote a whole essay.

So, try and is a bit on-its-own. Be sure to/be sure and is the only other thing that seems to have the same grammatical and semantic patterns.

The Britishness

Here's what Hommerberg and Tottie (2007) found for British Spoken and Written data and for American Spoken and Written.

In the forms that can't have suffixes (infinitive and imperative), BrE speakers say try and a lot more than try to. They write try and less, but in in the infinitive, it's still used about 1/3 of the time.

Brook and Tagliamonte found that BrE speakers under 45 use try and over try to at a rate of about 85%, regardless of education level. But for older Brits, there's a difference, with the more educated mostly using try to.

AmE speakers sometimes say try and, but they say try to more. They hardly ever use try and (where it could be replaced by try to) in writing.

Brook and Tagliamonte find much the same difference for British English versus Canadian English.

The "non-standard"ness

Though the try and form goes back before American and British English split up, its greater use in Britain is the innovation here. The try and form only started to dominate in Britain in the late 19th century.

Brook and Tagliamonte note that it's "curious" that BrE prefers try and when it has "two ostensible disadvantages":

it's less syntactically versatile, since it doesn't like suffixation,
it's long been considered the "non-standard" form, repeatedly criticized in even British style guides.

On the second point, Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage (1947) calls it "incorrect" and "an astonishingly frequent error". However, other British style guides are much more forgiving of it. While the third edition of Fowler's Modern Usage (1996) says that "Arguments continue to rage about the validity of try and", it notes that the original 1926 edition said that "try and is an idiom that should not be discountenanced" when it sounds natural. The Complete Plain Words (1986) lists it in a checklist of phrases to be used with care ("Try to is to be preferred in serious writing"), but it got no mention in Ernest Gowers' original Plain Words (1948) or the recent revision of the work by Rebecca Gowers (2014). Oliver Kamm's rebelliously "non-pedantic" guide (2015) calls try and "Standard English". Other British sources I've checked have nothing to say about it. Though it's only recently climbed the social ladder, British writers and "authorities" seem, on the whole, (BrE) not very fussed about it.

American guides do comment on try and. Ambrose Bierce (1909) called it "colloquial slovenliness of speech" and Jan Freeman (2009) calls it "one of the favorite topics of American peevologists". The dictionaries and stylebooks that are less excited about it at least pause to note that it is informal, colloquial, or a "casualism". The American Heritage Dictionary notes:

To be sure, the usage is associated with informal style and strikes an inappropriately conversational note in formal writing. In our 2005 survey, just 55 percent of the Usage Panel accepted the construction in the sentence Why don't you try and see if you can work the problem out for yourselves?

(I can't help but read that to be sure in an Irish accent, which means I've been around Englishpeople too long.)

One hypothesis is that try and came to be preferred in Britain due to horror aequi: the avoidance of repetition. So, instead of Try to get to know, you can drop a to and have Try and get to know. The colloquialism may have been more and more tolerated because the alternative was aesthetically unpleasing.

Try and is an example I'm discussing (in much less detail) in the book I'm writing because it seems to illustrate a tendency for British English to make judg(e)ments "by ear" where American English often likes to go "by the book". (Please feel free to debate this point or give me more examples in the comments!)

Garner's Modern English Usage

And so, on to the app. The Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU) app is the full content of the 4th edition of the book of the same name, with some extra app-y features. I've tested it on an Apple iPod, but I think it's available for other platforms too. On iTunes, it lists at US$24.99.

Full disclosure: Bryan Garner gave me a free copy of this app in its testing stage. I've met Garner in person once, when I'm quite sure he decided I was a hopeless liberal. (The thing about liberals, though, is you can't really be one without lots of hope.) He's a good one to follow on Twitter.

Sad disclosure: I received the offer of the free app not too long after I ordered a hard copy of the 4th edition, which (AmE) set me back £32.99, and, at 1055 pages, takes up a pretty big chunk of valuable by-the-desk bookshelf (AmE) real estate. I bought that book AFTER FORGETTING that just weeks before, hoping to avoid the real-estate incursion, I'd bought the e-book edition for a (orig. AmE) hefty $34.99. So, although I got the app for free, I expect to get my money's worth!!

So far, the app works beautifully, and is so much easier to search than a physical book. Mainly, I've used it for searching for items with AmE/BrE differences. I also used it to argue back to a Reviewer 2 who was trying to (not and!) (orig. AmE) micromanage aspects of my usage that don't seem to have any prescriptions against them (their absence in GMEU was welcome). (Reviewer 2 did like our research, so almost all is forgiven.)

GMEU didn't have everything I looked up (see the post on lewd), but that's probably because those things are not known usage issues. I had just wondered if they might be. But where I looked up things that differed in BrE and AmE, the differences were always clearly stated. Here is a screenshot of try and:

Garner's book is so big because it's got lots of real examples and useful numbers, as you can see in this example. Nice features of the app, besides easy searchability, include the ability to save entries as 'favorites', tricky quizzes (which tell me I qualify as a "true snoot"), and all the front matter of the book: prefaces, linguistic glossary, pronunciation guide, and Garner's essays about the language.

The search feature gives only hits for essay topics and entry headwords. That is probably all anyone else needs. I'd like to be able to search, for instance, for all instances of British and BrE to find what he covers. But I guess that's what I can use my ebook for...

Over the course of his editions and his work more generally, Garner has included more and more about British English, but at its heart, GMEU is an American piece of work. Other Englishes don't really (BrE) get a look-in (fact, not criticism). I very much recommend the app for American writers, students, and editors, but also for British editors, who are often called upon to work on American writers' work or to make British work more transatlantically neutral.

Labels: CanE , grammar , morphology , prescriptivism , verbs | 67 comments

top-ups and refills

Dec 26, 2009

Christmas is a time for dealing with family, and when you have a transAtlantic family, many dialectal conversations arise. But this time, it wasn't my family. Grover's little best friend is a little girl who lives in our (very AmE-sounding) neighbo(u)rhood/(more BrE-sounding) area with her American parents, and they came to our Christmas eve do with the mother's (French) mother and her Brooklynite beau. Many Briticisms were commented upon during the course of the party, but the one that stuck with me was top-up, to which I've become so inured that I wouldn't have immediately thought of it as a Briticism.

The context was mulled-wine serving--about which we must first have an aside. You don't get it as much at Christmastime in the US--probably because we have our standard Christmas drink, egg nog, instead. But when I moved to the Midwest, home of many Scandinavian-descended peoples, I did come to know it well. And, whenever we served it (back in the days when I was living with a Scandinavian-descended person), we served it in hot drink vessels--coffee mugs or the like. In restaurants, it might be in the kind of glass mug in which you'd be served a caffe latte. But whenever it is served in the UK (in my now-extensive experience of southern English Christmas parties), it is served in wine glasses. Is this a universal difference between the US and the UK, I wonder?

But back to our party: Better Half asked whether anyone would like a top-up (of mulled wine) and the Brooklynite commented (something like): "Now there's a linguistic difference. We'd say refill."

And I thought, "Oh yeah, we would, wouldn't we?" Americans refill drinks, the British top them up. In the UK, the common American experience of (orig. and chiefly AmE) bottomless coffee (i.e. free refills) is not common at all, but in the US, the (AmE, often jocular) waitron will flit from table to table, coffee pot in hand, asking "Can I get you a refill?" or "Can I warm that up for you"? If this were to happen in the UK, it would be most natural to ask if the customer would like a top-up.

But the other common use of top-up these days is what you do to a pay-as-you-go (BrE) mobile/(AmE) cell phone. (The picture is a common site in the windows of (BrE) corner shops and (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations in the UK.) Which led me to wonder: what do Americans say for that? Pay-as-you-go phones are much more common in the UK than in the US, but from what I can gather from the interwebs, refill is used in this context too. Here's a 2004 news release about an American "prepay" phone service:

As always, Verizon Wireless prepay service allows customers to refill their minutes over the phone, at a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, online, as well as at RadioShack, Circuit City and other authorized agents.

You could also in the UK use top(-)up for a number of other things that are refreshed by the addition of more of something. For instance, you could get a top-up loan (well, maybe not in the current economic climate), a top-up dose of an(a)esthetic and you can top up your tank with petrol/gas. The phrasal verb top up is only cited from 1937 in the OED, and the noun top-up only from 1967, explaining why it's not as common in AmE. American readers, what would you use in these contexts?

Labels: communication , intoxicants , prepositional/phrasal verbs , shopping , signage , verbs | 49 comments

over-the-counter observations

Jun 29, 2009

As I write this (which is actually a few days before I post it--connection problems at home), I am enjoying two British (or at least not-American) things about which I often ask: How did I ever live without this? Crumpets and Syndol. I’ve written about crumpets before back here, and as usual I’m eating them in a very non-British way—this time, with peanut butter and (AmE) jelly/(BrE) jam. (My other favo(u)rite and very non-British ways are with butter and maple syrup or with melted Cheddar and lots of A1 Sauce. Eating those messy concoctions requires a knife and fork.) Syndol is heaven in an over-the-counter blister pack: (AmE) acetaminophen/(BrE) paracetamol with a muscle relaxant of some kind. [Late addition: I shouldn't believe everything my drug (orig. AmE) pusher tells me. It's not a muscle relaxant. See here and the comments.] It does the trick for tension headaches—and just about anything else you want to throw it at. (Since I can’t take ibuprofen, aspirin or opiates [maybe--see comments], this is a godsend.)

Thinking (rhapsodically) about Syndol has me thinking about expressions that are used in AmE that I didn’t really understand until I had met them the BrE context—because over the counter is one of them. We say this in AmE to mean ‘non-prescription medications’, but I never understood why we say it, because in my American experience only prescription medications come from the other side of the (AmE & BrE) pharmacist’s/(BrE) chemist’s counter. The non-prescription medications are just out there on the consumer-accessible shelves in the (AmE) drugstore/(BrE) chemist’s (shop)/(AmE & BrE) pharmacy. But in the UK, a real over-the-counter category exists for things like Syndol. Plain old paracetamol/acetominophen can be found out on the shelves in many shops—and can be found in other types of shops, like supermarkets, (BrE) petrol/(AmE) gas stations and (BrE) corner shops. But for Syndol and real Sudafed (i.e. pseudoephedrine, my other drug of choice at the pollenous moment), you must go to a pharmacy and must ask for it from over the counter. Upon doing so, you will be faced with a number of questions from the pharmacist or their assistant, such as Are these for you?, Have you taken these before? and Are you taking any [insert name of drug that might interfere]? Give the wrong answer (like that you’ve been taking something for a while and your symptoms haven’t cleared up) and they won’t sell you the good stuff, but will tell you to do something sensible, like seeing your doctor.

I presume that all medications used to be truly over-the-counter in the US too—since shopping used to be more like that in general. I don’t know if it’s just because the UK (and most of Europe, as far as I can tell) maintains the over-the-counter category and the US doesn’t, but one can get much better drugs without a prescription here—including painkillers with codeine, which I also enjoyed until my last two doses of similar-but-prescription-requiring stuff landed me (sorry, British taxpayer) in (BrE) A&E (Accident and Emergency -also known as Casualty)/AmE the Emergency Room (or ER, or, as my friend who works in a hospital insists, the Emergency Department—though I don’t know anyone outside hospital employment who uses that phrase). I only took the recommended dose, I swear! I’d just developed some kind of allergy to opiates. (At the first A&E visit, the doctor insisted that it couldn’t have been the pills that put me in so much pain--hence the second visit, that time via ambulance. Many apologies, British taxpayer! And a tip: be very careful with the phrase cold and clammy if you phone NHS Direct. Unless you want an ambulance at your house.)

I said I was thinking of expressions (plural) that involved this kind of linguistic eureka moment, though to be honest, there’s only one other that I can think of: pratfall, which I mentioned back here.

So, expatriates of one brand or another, have you had similar experiences in which your own language made more sense only after hearing it in another dialect/context? And what are the American things that British expats have become dependent on, and vice versa?

In other business:

I'm planning to announce the winner to the Limerick Competitio n tomorrow (that is, if I manage to contact all my co-judges by then). So act quickly if you have an entry to submit!
Lexiophiles is running their Top 100 Language Blogs again, so nominate a blog you love!
I'm experimenting with Google's AdSense here, having kept this a strictly not-for-profit blog for the past three years. Let me know what you think.

I'll be back soon with a real post about an actual linguistic difference!

Labels: medicine/disease , shopping | 28 comments

breakfast in Brighton

May 31, 2007

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.

Labels: body parts , food/cooking , Sweden , taboo | 34 comments

flapjacks and pancakes

Jan 31, 2022

I cannot believe I've never written a post about the word flapjack. So here it is.

In AmE, flapjack is a synonym for pancake, as is hotcake. Hey, it's a big country. We're allowed to have lots of words for things.

Here in the south of England (at least), those things are often called American pancakes to differentiate them from the more crêpe-like English pancakes (often eaten with lemon juice and sugar). Then there are Scotch pancakes, also called drop scones, which are very much like American pancakes. I've seen one site that claims that Scotch pancakes have sugar in them but American pancakes have butter in them, and I can tell you that my American pancakes have a little sugar and no butter (but some cooking oil) in them, so I'm not believing that website. I'd say the main difference between Scotch pancakes and American ones is the size, with Scotch pancakes being closer to what are called silver dollar pancakes in AmE, which can have a similar circumference to a crumpet or (English) muffin—that is to say bigger than a silver dollar. (All links in this paragraph are to recipes.)

A few immigrant pancake notes:

I was really surprised (when I arrived 22 years ago) to find that in the UK one can buy cold Scotch pancakes in a UK supermarket. I'd never seen such a thing in the US. Maybe frozen ones for heating up, but not pancakes in the bread aisle of the supermarket. Even more surprised when I first saw someone eating them cold, straight out of the (more BrE) packet.
If you order "American pancakes" in England they (a) generally won't come with butter (what's the point?!) and (b) will be covered with so much sweet stuff that you will get a cavity before you've swallowed the last bite. At least around here, the pancakes themselves are pretty sweet, then they tend to put the maple syrup on before they serve it AND dust them with a ton of (AmE) confectioner's sugar /(BrE) icing sugar. I have mostly learned better than to order them, but my child hasn't.
These days, with American pancakes being much more common in Brighton, the actual pancakes can be pretty good (though, as I say, often too much sugar in the batter). When I first moved here and only a handful of places served them, they were invariably undercooked in the middle. I assume this was because the cooks had been trained in English pancakes and couldn't believe a pancake could take so long to cook. The best ones in Brighton are now made by my English spouse, who's taken every food I've ever cooked for him and made it his mission to master it.

Now, for BrE flapjacks. A completely different animal: a (BrE) tray bake made of oats, butter and usually golden syrup (click on the links for where I've covered those terms). I have seen recipes that call for honey instead of the syrup—you need something gloopy and sweet. If you want to get fancy, you can put other ingredients in, dried fruit being the most common addition. Here are some recipes.

BBC Good Food Easy Honey Flapjacks

The closest things in the US are probably granola bar-type things, but they don't tend to be so solidly oaty. What the US does have, though, is oatmeal (raisin) cookies.

I've heard various American exchange students refer to flapjacks as one of the best things about England. The appeal eludes me. I'll eat one to be polite, but I'll gladly ignore them. I count that as a win. Any sweet thing that I can resist is a good kind of sweet thing.

Labels: food/cooking | 73 comments

the floor

Nov 3, 2007

Since Better Half and I both lived with each other's dialects for some time before meeting each other, there aren't too many times when our linguistic differences get us into trouble. But one thing that hasn't stopped confusing me is when he calls the ground outside the floor. For instance, we might be walking along the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk and he'll say "Mind the poo on the floor there" or "Look at all the chewing gum on the floor!" (He's just come up with those two examples himself, reminding me of my mother's recurrent surprise at the 'uncleanliness' of England. Of course, my mother lives in a small town in a rural area in the US, so her comparisons to cities in England aren't really fair.)

Anyhow, BH's exclamations about things on the floor almost always knock me for a loop, because to me the floor is something inside a building. Of course, in AmE I can also talk about the forest floor, but I think of that as being a very speciali{s/z}ed usage; it doesn't just mean the ground in the forest, it means all the ferns and mosses and things that one finds on the ground in a forest. Similarly for the ocean floor--to me, it's about an ecosystem, not just a surface.

I've asked various BrE-speaking friends whether they use floor to mean ground, and their replies have been mixed. (But it also should be said that I usually don't think that asking people whether they say X is a very productive or accurate way of finding out if they say X. What we do when speaking is a largely subconscious process, and when we reflect on that process, all sorts of things, not least ideas about how we 'should' speak, get in the way.) Looking in the OED, I find that it lists the sense 'the ground' as obsolete, except in dialects.

Now, as a Saaff Lundun boy descended of a long line of South Londoners, I kind of doubt that BH is hanging on to some old ways that the OED compilers thought of as 'dialectal'. So, my hypothesis is that this usage has been re-introduced to the general language through cricket. (This would contribute to explaining why BH uses it more than most of my girlfriends.) As the OED notes, floor is the ground of a cricket ground--that is to say, the dirt/grass part of the cricket field (too many senses of ground in that last clause). So, the OED also lists to put a catch on the floor as a colloquial way to say 'to fail to hold a catch' in cricket.

I was reminded of the whole floor issue while watching the quiz celebrating Channel 4 's 25th anniversary last night. (For certain reasons, I'm watching way too much television lately.) They showed a clip of a program(me) in which Derren Brown gets 'normal' people to hold up an armo(u)red bank car. And in that, in the out-of-doors, the robber demands that the bank guy get 'down on the floor' (i.e. on the street/road). You can see a clip from that (BrE) programme/(AmE) show here on YouTube, but to hear people saying floor, skip to about 7:24. Here, of course, there's the possibility that the speakers have been affected by seeing lots of dramati{s/z}ed robberies that take place inside banks, and so the thing that one says in that condition is Get down on the floor. But it still sounds really unnatural to me--I can't help but think that I'd say Get down on the ground. Next time I rob an armo(u)red vehicle, I'll have to have someone tape me.

So--can you refer to the surface of a road as the floor?

Labels: architecture , geography , sport | 56 comments

initials and names

Aug 28, 2009

So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think: 'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered, and those don't even include the ever-growing list in my head of things that fit my original intention of discussing the "words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis" (plus the pragmatic conventions, social constraints and value systems that affect communication and get me into even more trouble). I'd hoped that I'd blog at least three times a week during my (AmE) vacation/(BrE) holiday, but instead I have blogged just twice (ok, now thrice) and received six emails with good requests for new topics plus a number of others in the comments sections of current and old posts plus the 'have you blogged that yet?' conversational asides from Better Half and others at a rate of about three per day. I'm fairly confident that I could blog daily on this topic until retirement age and still have ideas for new posts. But, of course, I'll have to wait until I'm retired to blog at my desired pace. In the meantime, I'll just have to take my vitamins (while trying not to think too hard about how that's pronounced) in the hope that I'll have a long enough retirement to even start to do these dialects justice. If you're interested in reading the faster-paced version of the blog, please remember to eat your five a day, walk your 10,000 steps and use your SPF 50—you've got another 20-some years to wait before it even starts.

And after that bit of solipsistic (ish) reflection, a post that concerns me-me-me! Ok, so it starts with a much more famous writer, but that's just an excuse to get to me. One of the aforementioned six emails was from Marc, who wrote:

I'm listening to Just a Minute on Radio 4, and the subject is "Scott Fitzgerald". It seems to me that Americans always say "F. Scott Fitzgerald". I actually think the Just a Minute usage makes more sense, since his full name is Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. If he chose to call himself "Scott", the alternatives in my mind would be his four-name full name, or Scott Fitzgerald.

Well, his family called him 'Scott' and I'm sure that's how he introduced himself in social situations, but when he published he called himself F. Scott Fitzgerald, as on the cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby (via Wikipedia):

Fitzgerald was named after his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, but the family called him Scott—I don't know why, possibly to differentiate him from some other Francis or because they didn't like the possible nicknames for Francis or because they just liked Scott. But when Americans (like me! like me!) go by their second names (like I do! like I do!), they (I) tend to acknowledge that they (I) have a first name by including the first initial in formal, written contexts.

My story is a little different than Fitzgerald's—when my parents named me, it was with the intention that I would be known by both of my names. When I got to high school, the computeri{s/z}ed attendance (esp. AmE) rosters had room only for first name and middle initial—so my teachers tended to call me by my first name. I didn't like that, so I rebelled (kind of) and reinvented myself (more so) by adopting my middle name as my 'main name' when I started attending college/university courses. But the outcome is the same as Fitzgerald's: when I publish, I do so with my first initial, full middle name, and full surname.

(Sorry, I can't find an image of this in which my name is clear—nor is there a good picture of the next one. That linked picture is a pre-publication mock-up...my lovely co-author's name will also be on it when it's published.)

I must pause for the inevitable question "What does the M stand for?" When I lived in the northeastern US, I had a ready-made non-answer that worked: "It starts with an M and I have an Irish surname. You can figure it out." But when I moved to foreign lands (first South Africa, then TEXAS), I found that the people couldn't figure it out, since they had considerably less exposure to certain Catholic-Irish-American naming practices. (NB: my non-answer doesn't work in Ireland either.) But you're intelligent, worldly people. You can figure it out. Or if not, you can read this. Note that the double-naming Irish-American thing in the north is perceived (at least by folks like me) as being a different tradition than the (largely non-Catholic) double-naming tradition in the South, for which a broader range of possible name combinations is available (as well as the tradition of using a family surname as the second name). See here for some examples.

When I moved to the UK, I started having trouble with my first initial and name. I had come to think of M. Lynne Murphy as my 'brand', but you can see that my employer has decided not to include my initial in my web profile. Furthermore, plenty of people seem to have a hard time referring to my work using my first initial. So, I'm referred to as Lynne M. Murphy and L.M. Murphy (even by people who I work very closely with—Scandinavians seem to be the most frequent reversers). Google Scholar even thinks I'm L.M. Murphy for this publication (even though it links to something that gets my name right). I thus work toward(s) the next research-based funding exercise for higher education in England with fear and loathing, since I have particular reason to fear that citations of my work will not be counted accurately.

When I first moved to my job at Sussex, I had an American colleague, the great Larry Trask, who was born Robert Lawrence Trask. This led some English university folk to ask me "why do all you Americans use your middle names?" Of course, two linguists do not amount to "all Americans", and looking at famous linguists and philosophers who use their middle names, I'm not at all convinced that Americans use middle names more than the British do. After all, two of the people I cite the most, HP Grice and DA Cruse were born in the UK and were/are called by their middle names. But they mostly publish(ed) with both initials, rather than initial-plus-name. Checking Wikipedia, the Cambridge University Press catalog(ue) and my own friends/citations, all of the first-initial users are American:

G Tucker Childs
W Tecumseh Fitch
D Robert Ladd (working in Scotland)
M Lynne Murphy (working in England)
T Daniel Seely
A Ronald Walton
(but here's another one, with an interesting story, who doesn't quite fit in this list)

The most famous living linguist also goes by his middle name, but Avram Noam Chomsky just skips to his middle name with no fanfare. I have no way of checking how many other middle-name users completely omit the first name when publishing. (Know of any others?)

If you're not all that interested in linguists' names (poor you), here is a first-initial-plus-middle-name hall of fame, which cheats a little by including some people who didn't really use the first initial (like Neville Chamberlain).

The AmE tendency to use first initials is tied, no doubt, to the AmE tendency to use middle initials in the names of people who go by their first names. Wikipedia notes that "The practice of abbreviating middle names to initials is rare in the United Kingdom", although certainly some UK authors use their middle initials when publishing—especially if they have common first and last names. Americans are so in love with these initials that we had a president who had an initial and no name to go with it: Harry S Truman. (And I'll repeat a link here because it's the same kind of story.)

But Americans like to spell out the name that they're called by, and so do not tend to reduce their names to just initials + surname, as the British often do in formal/bureaucratic situations. For instance, it's more frequent on forms in the UK to be asked for surname and initials than in the US, where one typically is asked for first name and middle initial (much to the chagrin of those of us who want to be mysterious about our first names). UK credit/debit cards and (BrE) cheque-books (=AmE checkbooks) typically have only initials+surname, though the bank will certainly have your full name on record. American ones more typically have a name and an initial. And this is reflected in signatures, too. Better Half's signature includes neither of his given names—just initials, and it's my impression that this is much more common in the UK than in the US.

But while the English often use just initials in 'formal' (i.e. printed) settings, I've also heard them complain about the American trend for calling people by their initials. (I once belonged to a group of about a dozen Americans that happened to have two people called 'D.J.'—this had nothing to do with turntables. One was male, one female.) I must say, it's not my taste either, but then again there are lots of names that aren't to my taste.

And then there's the question of who uses both first and middle names—e.g. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I direct you to Language Log for that discussion. But in that discussion there is a comment that the first initial + middle name thing is common in Scotland. I'll quote it in its entirety:

David Eddyshaw said,

July 2, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Scots eldest sons frequently have the same first names as their fathers, but actually use their middle names instead, and will abbreviate themselves as e.g.
J. Ewan McPherson
An author relative of mine whose name follows this pattern finds that Americans frequently switch round his initial and forename to conform to their preferred Homer J Rodeheaver pattern. I actually have an American edition of one of his works with this error on the front page.

"Americans frequently switch (a)round his initial and forename"! Oh, don't get me started (again)! (Except to note that forename is much more common in BrE than in AmE.)

Labels: bureaucracy , names | 58 comments

badly and poorly

Aug 23, 2006

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?

Labels: adjectives , adverbs , euphemism , medicine/disease | 39 comments

on the highway/motorway

Jun 17, 2008

Regular reader JHM sent me a link to this article from a Washington Monthly blog, in which an American complains about British (and European, more generally) road signs:

And as long as I'm venting a bit here, what is it with Europeans and compass points? Their road signs tend to be gloriously well designed and easy to decipher, but they never include the words north, south, east, or west. So when you get to a crossroad, all the sign tells you is that one direction takes you to, say, Chard, and the other direction takes you to Axminster. Unless you've memorized the map, or happen to be a local who doesn't really need the sign in the first place, you don't know which direction to go. (If you're lucky, one of the cities on the sign is the one you want to go to, which makes things easy. Usually it's not.) But although I might not know every town and village in the area, I always know from a quick look at a map which general direction I want to go. So why not add the words north and south here? Some sort of EU-wide directive to banish directional notation, or what?

JHM writes to ask:

Does the linked article ring true to you? If it is true that road signs tend not to indicate compass direction, I find this very odd indeed (even though (in New England at least) six or seven times out of ten the posted compass direction has a very low correlation to an actual compass point).

JHM often writes to ask if things that he's read about Britain ring true for me, and I think I always say "yes, it's ringing". I suppose that illustrates the extent to which we get so accustomed to things being one way that we never imagine them being another way. In this case, I have to say "yes, it rings true, but..."

When I lived in South Africa (and had a car), I don't remember ever seeing a sign on a (BrE) motorway/(AmE) highway* with a direction on it. This got me lost in the (AmE) boondocks when I needed to get from a rural hotel in the Northern Province to Swaziland. None of the signs said which way was north or east, and none indicated how to get to the major towns in the province (or to the border). Instead, at each (chiefly AmE) intersection there were signs pointing toward(s) the next town on the road. One thus needed to know every single town along one's route in order to make sense of the signs. I imagine GPS is very useful there these days.

While I don't drive in the UK, on occasions I'm a passenger for a longish car journey (Americans would usually say trip, but that tends to be reserved for shorter journeys in BrE). Initially, I was only travel(l)ing for southeastern Scrabble league matches, and thus only

experienced the A-roads (trunk roads), which are so-called because they are designated by A + a number, e.g. the A27. (There are also B-roads, which are more local.) A-roads are roughly comparable to state routes, like New York State Route 31, which goes through my hometown.** But unlike the US roads, the British roads are not called by different names depending on the direction you're driving in. So, if I give you directions out of my town, I'll talk about 31 East or 31 West . A friend of our family lives on a different route, just outside the village, and her address is "[house number] Route 88 South, Newark, NY", meaning she lives on the stretch of Route 88 that lies south of Newark. (Before you think "hey, I've been to Lynneguist's hometown, note that it's not the Newark that has the big airport you've been to. That one, despite its pretensions, is not in the state of New York. My hometown doesn't have a travel agency, let alone an airport. It has apple orchards. And cows.)

In Britain, people don't talk about "the A27 West" (though Google the phrase, and you'll think me a liar; but really, no one says it! At least not with the same name-like intonation that one says "Route 31 West"). When you join the A27, the sign will tell you about upcoming towns, not whether you're going east or west. If you're on that road driving east from Portsmouth, you have to get past Chichester before you start seeing signs for Brighton, if I remember correctly. So, if you want to get from Portsmouth to Brighton, you'd better know that Chichester is on the way. You need to constantly make decisions about which town to head toward on roads like the A27, since for the most part, they are not limited-access roads with on-ramps and off-ramps. They have roundabouts (often called traffic circles in the US, but rarely seen there--though I believe New Hampshire has quite a few). Lots of them. The signs on the roundabout exits will indicate the number of the routes and some number of upcoming towns/landmarks, as in the picture below.

So far, so much like my South African experience. But then I graduated from southeastern Scrabble events to national ones, and got to be a passenger on the M-roads, the national

motorways--which are more comparable to American Interstate highways. M-roads are dual-carriageways with limited access--ramps rather than roundabouts--and they tend to be used for longer journeys. When one approaches an M-road, one may see compass point names on it--except that they're not really describing the direction of the route, they're describing the destination. That is, instead of saying, for instance "M3 North", they say "The NORTH", along with whatever cities you might get to along the way. (So, in the sign here, it's not saying that Nottingham is in 'The North' so much as it's saying that this road goes to The North, and it goes to Nottingham too.) What's interesting in this picture are the (N) and (S) in parentheses/brackets after M42. You see this in places where you need to take different routes to different entrances to a motorway. Once you're on the M42 going south, there will be no signs along the way that say M42(S), whereas in the US, signs telling you what route you're on and what direction you're going in are planted regularly along the right side of the road. The reason why (M6) in this photo is in parentheses/brackets after M42(S) is to indicate that this roundabout is not taking you to the M6 but to the M42 which takes you to the M6 , which will get you to 'The S. WEST'.

Incidentally, in England people talk about the East (meaning the east of England, not 'the Orient') a lot less than the other directions. There are two reasons for this, I think. (1) There's a lot more West than East here--in that the island juts out, particularly in the Southwest. (2) London is treated (rightly or wrongly, depending on where you live) as the hub of the universe (sorry, Boston), and it's fairly eastward. So, striking out from London, there's very little to the East. Well, there's Essex (Americans: that's where Jamie Oliver is from. English folk: make it a new joke if you're going to make it). So, while you hear/see the North, the South and the West, and the Northeast/west and Southeast/west, you rarely hear about the East.

Back to the American side... as JHM notes, the directions on particular routes may bear little

resemblance to the compass direction when you're on the road. Routes are not perfectly straight lines, and non-Interstate routes can involve a number of different roads that add up to a route in the right direction. For instance, if you look at the map for US Route 20, you'll see that, in spite of its status as an east-west coast-to-coast route, there's a bit in Idaho that runs north-south. Still, we'd instruct people in Idaho to take Route 20 West if they want to get to Oregon, because 20 West is, in essence, its name.

Rather than designating the different types of route by letter, American route types are distinguished by the shapes of the shields on their signs (images/links courtesy of Wikipedia):

	Interstate Highways
	U.S. Routes
	State Routes

And within states there may be other kinds of route. There are systems to the numbering of the routes in both the US and Great Britain, but I won't go into those here, since they're not very language-y. So, if you're interested, see here for the US Routes and Interstate system and here for Great Britain.

Side notes:
* Highway is probably the most dialect-neutral term in the US, and can apply to various types of routes--the key is that there's no stopping and starting on a highway. On the west coast, one tends to hear freeway. For limited-access roads in/around cities, I'd say expressway. Major toll roads, run by individual states, have their own names. In New York, it's the Thruway. Several other states have turnpikes, which is sometimes shortened to pike, as in the Mass Pike--that is, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

** Two things to know about AmE regionalisms when it comes to routes:

Some Americans say route like root, others say it like rout. I grew up with the former, but the latter sometimes creeps into my speech because of other places I've lived. These dialect survey maps indicate that the 'rout' pronunciation is more common in the South and Midwest. In a forum on Canadian English, someone named Kirk says:

About "route," I use both pronunciations of the word depending on context. For instance, I've never heard anyone say "rowt 66"...it's always "root 66" for "route 66." So, if I see an official route as in a state route I definitely pronounce it "root." When I was younger I had a paper route and I almost always pronounced it "rowt" in that context. In other, general usages of the word, I use "root" and "rowt" pretty interchangeably.
My pattern and Kirk's pattern are the same. I grew up saying 'paper root', but now tend to say 'paper rout'.
Southern Californians (and perhaps others) prefix route numbers with the, but Northeasterners like me don't. So, I'd say Take (Route) 5 but an Angeleno would say Take the 5.

Labels: geography , signage , transport(ation) | 73 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK