In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)rseems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing.
red sauce
Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:
(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin;(b) adj. (attributive) U.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.
That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinaraon Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.
An Australian ketchup
An American passata
As far as red sauce referring to ketchup in the UK, I have heard it, but not often. Ketchup is the most common word for it in both countries, though Britons are six times more likely than Americans to call it by the full tomato ketchup (six times more likely in the 2012–13 GloWbE corpus, eight times more likely in the more recent NOW corpus). You sometimes hear in BrE the more AusE tomato sauce. In AmE, that doesn't mean 'ketchup', but is the equivalent (more or less: see comments) of the stuff that in BrE is usually called passata.
brown sauce
The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.
In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:
a tangy sauce commonly served as a condiment for beef in the United States. Two of its major producers are British companies
That last bit was news to me. I import A.1. from the States because I love it so. (I find it spicier and less treacly than HP sauce. It's also much darker.) In the UK, I've only ever seen it in Fortnum and Mason (extremely chichi shop), where they charged in the double digits for a bottle, apparently imported from the US. But A.1. (in some formulation) may still be being made in the UK for export to Asia! (The most recent reference to this I've found is 2018.)
Back to brown sauce. The OED definitionhas not been updated since 1888, and it has only the French-cuisine inspired meaning, akin to gravy: "A brown-coloured savoury sauce, esp. one made with browned fat and flour." When I was a(n American) child in the 1970s–80s learning about cooking, I learned this among other sauce terms—though I can't say I've ever heard it in my adult life.
But brown sauce was another bit of my mother's terminology that didn't help when travel(l)ing: she'd talk about her Chinese food preferences in terms of preferring brown sauce over white sauce, and British Spouse didn't understand what she meant. But, she knew what she was talking about. Goodcooking.com has a story about a sauce master at a Chinese restaurant which includes (with recipes):
Two basic sauces are the brown sauce and white sauce. Brown sauce is mainly for meat dishes; beef, lamb, duck, yet he also used it in his Chendu Fish dish, to bind together moo shu and one of his tofu dishes. The white sauce was for fish and seafood, chicken and vegetable dishes. Other ingredients such as black beans, chili with garlic, preserved vegetable, ginger and garlic were added as items cooked and then his sauces were added, seconds before service to bind everything into a flavorful dish.
From the spelling of flavorful, we can guess that this Chinese restaurant was in the US, and from a little knowledge of Chinese food in the anglosphere, I would guess that (a) this might be based in some specific regional Chinese cuisine, and (b) the term is not much used in British Chinese cuisine. Having had a lot of Chinese takeaways/takeout in the US, UK and South Africa, I can report that even if you're ordering a dish of the same name (chicken in garlic sauce, sweet-and-sour pork, General Tso's chicken etc.), they are very different in different places. (Let's just say: my English family always makes a point of having Chinese food when we're in the US.) Yummly.co.uk has many recipes for Chinese brown sauce, but, despite the 'uk' in its URL, all the brown-sauce recipes I checked there have American terminology (cornstarch, scallions, chicken broth/bouillonetc.). If there were any urge to call Chinese sauce base brown in British English, it would probaby be blocked by the clash with the breakfasty condiment.
white sauce
White sauce has at least the following meanings:
In (US, at least) Chinese cuisine, it's the opposite of brown sauce. (This site says it's typical of Cantonese cooking.)
A sauce base made of "roux of butter and flour combined with milk or cream" (OED).
The OED's (2015 updated) entry includes only the last of these, which is often used in French cooking. It's also what my mother used as the opposite of red sauce in Italian cooking, so an Alfredo or similar.
Baking and baked goods are a perennial source of US/UK
miscommunication—in large part because most of our current baking/eating
habits were only invented after the split between American and British
English. We eat different baked goods with newish names and we often use
the same old words in different new ways.
While I've written
many posts that have mentioned cake (see links below), I've come to
feel the need for a much bigger one about cake. This one has been several (very busy) months in the making.
cake itself
The word cake came into English from Old Norse (or another
Scandinavian source) in around the 13th century. Way back then it was a
word for a round loaf of bread that was a bit flattened by having been
turned over while baking. These days we associate it more with
sweet baked goods, usually (but not necessarily) those leavened with
something other than yeast. But its round, bready roots come through in things like
(Scottish) oatcake (which refers to something more like modern crackers than like modern cakes) and northwestern England's barm cakes, one of the many regional names for the kinds of bread rolls with which you might make a sandwich (in the American sense). Later, cake came to mean any round, flattened food, and thus we have fish cakes and crab cakes and rice cakes and the like.
People
only started using cake as a mass noun referring to the substance (rather
than the loaf as a whole) in the 16th century, and from then it
increasingly referred to fancy or sweet bread-like things.
Many Americans would think of cake as a rather normal dessert. But those who've watched the Great British (orig. AmE) Bake Off (GBBO) will have seen that cake and dessert are
treated as different things. Such is the case in English culture (at
least) more generally. Cake is something you'd have with coffee or tea
as a break, not something you'd immediately think of preparing for the
final course of a meal. (Though you will find the occasional cake on a UK
dessert menu.) As we've already seen in the dessert/pudding post, puddings are another matter. Some look and feel like cakes (e.g., my fave sticky toffee pudding), but are not usually considered cakes in BrE. (Please do go to the pudding post, linked above, if you want to comment on puddings.)
Cake(s) as sweet baked snacks
On the other hand, in certain contexts, all sorts of things can loosely count as cake in England that would not be so called in AmE. Say you went to a
coffee shop with your friend. If you were English you might ask them
"Which cake do you want?" And your English friend might say "A (orig. AmE) brownie" or "The apple turnover, please"
or "The carrot cake, please". If you were American, and you wanted the
brownie or the turnover, you'd probably answer that question with "I'm not in the mood for cake, but I'd like that brownie/apple turnover." For
Americans, cakes are cakes and other baked goods are other baked goods.
For the English, cake can be an umbrella term for sweet baked goods eaten in the situations where one usually eats cakes in the narrower sense. (NB: I'm saying English rather than British
because not enough Scottish or Welsh people have offered to buy me
cake in coffee shops. More fieldwork needed.)
If I were Americanly asking someone which thing they wanted in the coffee shop, I'd probably say "Which kind of cake do you want?" because "which cake" doesn't really sound right in AmE, where it more usually refers to a big thing that you slice and not an individual serving of it. If a BrE speaker had a cake with their tea, it would fit on a small plate (under which the server will have inexplicably placed a paper napkin as if it's a doily, rendering the napkin useless—a coffee-shop peeve of mine). If an American had a cake with their coffee, they'd be an incredible glutton, eating enough for a dozen people.
AmE snack cake refers to the overly processed small cakes that are packaged for putting in
lunch boxes. Twinkies are a famous example, but there are lots of other
kinds as well (here's a guide).
You can get such individually wrapped cakes in the UK too, e.g. Cadbury
Mini Rolls are pretty much the equivalent of a Hostess Ho-Ho and the Mr
Kipling brand offers a variety of such products, but I don't know of a generic BrE term
for them. But again, we'd call them a snack cake but probably not a cake.
A very noticeable thing if you watch GBBO is the constant reference to sponge. Americans can use the term sponge cake (emphasis on the cake) but don't use it often because that's the prototypical cake type—and you don't need to specify the most typical type. (I've discussed the psycholinguistic concept of prototypes here.) It'd be like saying cloth shirt—almost redundant.
[Update: see the comments for some more-informed American takes on sponge, which seem to indicate that for AmE sponge is a method (making with egg whites, not butter) and for BrE it's a result (a spongy texture). This fits beautifully with other examples of Americans naming things in reference to the form of the ingredients (pre-assembly) and British using names relating to the form of the result. See previous discussions of mashed potato(es) and scrambled egg(s) and burgers and hot dogsfor other examples.]
But BrE speakers are more likely to call it sponge than to call it sponge cake, if that's the kind of cake they're talking about. A Victoria sponge (aka Victoria sandwich) is a two-layer cake with jam (and often cream) in the middle (no icing/frosting on top)—a very common cake in England. On GBBO they talk about lots of different types of sponge, like genoise or joconde, but that's specialist jargon that you don't tend to hear elsewhere. If you want more about those, see this Wikipedia entry.
A reason that BrE speakers need to talk about sponge is that it's not necessarily the default cake type. Fruit cakes are very traditional and (get ready for a shocker, Americans) even loved
in England. You cannot imagine my disappointment the first time I was
handed a slice of English wedding cake and discovered it wasn't a nice, white sponge cake like I was expecting, but a fruit cake as in the photo to the left. When I got
married in England, I had to insist that one of our cake's layers was not fruit. I
didn't care what it was, as long as it wasn't fruitcake.
(A note on spelling: AmE prefers fruitcake and BrE goes both ways: fruit cake or fruitcake.)
The
traditional English Christmas cake is also a fruit cake. This has been
adopted to a small degree in the US, where there is some tradition of
giving fruitcakes as Christmas gifts. (When/where I was a kid, the
local Lions Club sold them as Christmastime fundraiser. It seems they still do in New Zealand.) But Americans also have the tradition of mocking fruitcakes as the worst cake and the worst gift, starting with Johnny Carson in 1973: "The worst gift is a fruitcake. There
is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it
to each other." American fruitcakes are generally
unfrosted/uniced, whereas English Christmas cakes have white royal
icing(see link) and decoration.
American wedding cakes are often made of white cake, which is a kind of sponge made with only the whites of the egg (here's a recipe—notice how it Americanly never uses the word sponge). Americans also talk about yellow cake, where the yolks are left in. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting is
a well-known combination. I could link to another recipe, but I'll
instead show a picture of a very typical American cake mix—these, like many
things, come in many more varieties in the US than in the UK.
While there aren't as many cake mixes in the UK, there are a lot of long-life
ready-made cakes in boxes. (Something that surprised me when I moved to England.) The popularity of one supermarket chain's
Colin the Caterpillar cake (the birthday cake for one side of my UK family) gave rise to the 'generification' of the caterpillar cake, which gave rise to lawsuits and news stories last year. (Click on the last link for pictures.)
Another cake type I've tweeted about a lot is coffee cake:
Difference
of the Day: 'coffee cake' In AmE, a type of cake, often with a cinnamon
crumble topping or similar, that's meant to be eaten with coffee. In
BrE, a cake flavo(u)red with coffee. I've done this one before, but I
had such a gorgeous AmE one that I had to share: pic.twitter.com/UKK7omY6aO
Other US cake types include(links are to Wikipedia):
angel food cake(a
very light sponge made with egg whites and cream of tartar—an
ingredient that seems to show up in US baking a lot more than UK baking)
devil's food cake, which would probably be called chocolate fudge cake in BrE
pound cake, which
isn't necessarily American, but it's much more common in the US—and
thus shows up nearly seven times as much in AmE as BrE in the GloWbE corpus.
On the UK side, one runs into lemon drizzle cake a lot, while in the US one mostly gets lemon cake or lemon bars.
No discussion of the BrE meaning of cake is complete without mention of the Jaffa cake, which Americans would call a cookie. It is a little disc of sponge cake with a bit of orange jam/[AmE] jelly on top and dark chocolate on top of that. [I'd originally written BrE jelly/AmE gelatin here, which it might well be, but I went with what Wikipedia said.] There was a famous court case about whether such things should be taxed, since there is (or was?) VAT ('value-added tax', approximately AmE sales tax) on chocolate-covered (BrE) biscuits (AmE cookies),
which are a luxury item, but no VAT on cakes, which are, apparently, a
necessity. Part of the decision to label them as cakes was based on the
appraisal that cakes go hard when they get stale, whereas (British)
biscuits go soft when they're stale (thus demonstrating a main
difference between BrE biscuit and AmE cookie).
cake accoutrements & shapes
The utensil with which you lift a slice of cake is a cake slice (BrE 1810s) or a cake server (AmE ?1890s).
The shape of a cake depends on what you bake it in—in AmE a cake pan and in BrE a cake tin. Into the pan/tin you put AmE cake batter or BrE cake mixture. BrE reserves batter for really thin mixtures (and British cakes often seem to have thicker mixtures than American ones).
Ring-shaped cakes made in fluted pans/tins are common in Europe, but it's in the US that they came to be known as Bundt cakes, after the trademarked name of a pan sold by the Nordic Ware company. (See Wikipedia for more.)
Sheet cakes also seem to be an AmE invention—these are unlayered, frosted (and often decorated) sponge cakes made in a rectangular pan. People talked about them a bit more after Tina Fey went onto Saturday Night Live to propose "sheet caking" as a method of dealing with far-right demonstrations.
(I must say, though, that her sheet cake seems tall enough that it must be layered.)
In BrE I've seen a sheet cake referred to as a tray bake, but tray bake is used for all sorts of things that are baked in a low, rectangular pan/tin/tray, including the things Americans would call bar cookies. (For past posts about cookies, see here.)
I've written before about AmE cupcakev BrE fairy cake. In BrE today, cupcake has been imported for bigger, fancier ones.
[Late addition, 27 Dec]: I'd thought I'd written here about BrE loaf cakes v American quick breads, but my memory played tricks on me—I must have been remembering writing about it in The Prodigal Tongue. In the book, I use two banana bread recipes as illustration of how many levels AmE and BrE can differ on, and one of the differences is that at one point in the British recipe, the banana bread is called "the cake". Many sweet, loaf-shaped things that Americans bake and might well slice and butter (banana bread, zucchini (BrE courgette) bread, pumpkin bread, ) turn up as [ingredient] loaf cake in UK coffee shops. (When transferred to BrE cake status, they often have icing drizzled over.) Here's a bit of what I wrote in The Prodigal Tongue:
American baking
has a traditional category called quick breads, that is, breads
leavened without yeast. Quick breads include banana bread, zucchini (= UK courgette) bread, and my mother’s
famous pumpkin bread, as well as American biscuits
(which look a bit like British scones, but don’t feel or taste like them) and
what the British call American-style muffins, including
blueberry muffins and bran muffins (though they’ve proved so popular in the UK
that the American-style is usually
left off these days). In an American cookbook, these recipes are located in the
breadchapter.Banana breads and blueberry muffins are relatively new to Britain,
and they came over without the larger quick
bread category. They thus fell into the cake
category.
This isn't the only American baked good that gets re-classified in BrE. When I've made snickerdoodles for UK folk, I've been congratulated on my "little cakes". (The way I make them—with cream of tartar—gives them a nice cakey texture.) While the cake category is broad in BrE, it's the cookie category that's broad in AmE.
cake expressions
a piece of cakecomes from AmE in the 1960s and means 'easy'. BrE has borrowed it and added a more vulgar version: a piece of piss.
that takes the cake(AmE 1830s) versus that takes the biscuit(BrE
1880s) = 'it is the best/it wins' (though these days it's mostly used
ironically to indicate something that "wins" at being the worst).
off one's cake(BrE informal) = deranged [1880s]; extremely intoxicated [1980s]
bake sale (AmE 1890s)vcake stall (BrE 1600s, but then a more formal business) v cake sale(now more BrE than AmE, but Irish & AmE evidence precedes BrE evidence) = selling donated baked goods as a fundraiser
more links
Before
commenting on this post with comments suggesting or asking questions
about other baked goods, please see these past blog posts. Comments are
welcome on those old posts—conversations on this blog keep on going.
P.S. It's the time of year when I declare the US>UK and UK>US Words of the Year and nominations have been very, very thin this year. Please let me know if you have any nominations for these categories!
My mother could never understand how I was allowed
a (AmE) college/(BrE) university degree without learning to play bridge, but I
was educated in the decade of Trivial Pursuit. I tried to rectify this gap in my education in the early 2000s. After maybe three lessons, the couple who were teaching me had
a fight and that was the end of that! Maybe learning to play bridge be my retirement project. One
of the dozens I have in mind. At any rate, I am not the person to tell you about bridge
terminology, but here’s someone who is.
There are seven chapters on the language of bridge
– vocabulary and idioms from (a)round the world. This post is an edited version of
the chapter on American terminology – written with American spelling.
In which we look across the Atlantic at what the
Americans have to say
George
Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) said that England and America were two
nations separated by a common language. Bridge terminology certainly proves the
point. We say protect, they say balance; we say switch,
they say shift; we say dummy, they [sometimes]
say board; we say peter, they say echo; we say tomahto, they say tomayto;
we say finesse, they say hook; we say singleton, they
say stiff; we say discard, they [often] say pitch.
There’s more. They say push
instead of flat board, down
one instead of one down, ace-fourth instead of ace-to-four, set for beating the contract,
and drawing trumprather than drawing trumps,
as though they always played in twelve-card fits. You will still occasionally
read deuce for the two of a
suit, although the quaint trey
for the three has all but disappeared.
There are some words that have yet to cross the
Pond: tight, meaningdoubleton, as in ‘He held king-queen tight’ and swish, meaning passed out,
as in ‘The bidding went 2♠, swish’. I have also heard (but not seen in print) ‘Four
heartsinthe East’ where the British would say ‘Four
hearts by East’.
The most
extreme of American phrases is ruff
‘n’ sluff for ruff-and-discard. I haven’t seen sluff or slough used anywhere else in bridge literature, so presumably
the lure of the rhyme was too hard to resist, as it was with surf ‘n’ turf.
Americans
like variety in the presentation of their sports results: ‘The Red Sox downed
the 49ers’, for example, or ‘The Chipmunks whupped the Bears’. The
English tend to stick to the ‘Chelsea beat Liverpool’ formula, with the occasional ‘Villa lost to Spurs’
thrown in. Americans [tend to] put the winning team first, whereas the English
usually put the home team first. Either way, the English results are a bit
boring.
Sporting
metaphors abound in American writing, and I have seen bridge articles where a player covers all bases, or makes a clutch shot, or plays a shut-out. I have no idea
what slam-dunkmeans; it sounds as though you had
twelve tricks on top but went one down. I have yet to find mention of a triple-double (basketball) or pass interference (American
football), but I’m sure they’re out there.
We
must fight fire with fire; difficult contracts must be played on sticky
wickets and small slams hit for six Declarer must playablinder, and overbidders should be
caught offside or shown the red card.
There is a nice expression that
I have seen American teachers use, encouraging their pupils to draw trumps
before the defenders can ruff something: Get the kids off the streets.
The French have names for the kings
on their cards (David (from the Bible), Charles (after Charlemagne), Caesar(Julius), and Alexander (the Great).
I understand the Americans have noted it and like the idea. They don’t have any
real kings of their own, so the debate is whether to reuse the Mount Rushmore
quartet, or to go with four from the shortlist of
Martin Luther, Stephen, Billie Jean, Burger, Kong and Elvis. [jk—ed.]
Let’s have a deal. This one features Zia Mahmood, who was
(AmE) on (BrE in) the USA team against Italy in the final of the World
Championships in 2009. …
[The chapter goes on to describe a bridge deal, the bidding and play, in
great detail using the American
terms. It will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who
doesn’t play bridge. If you want to see whether the USA team wins or loses, you
will have to buy the book …]
***
Lynne says: For good measure, here’s a corpus search of that last difference, in/on theteam, which
goes far beyond bridge:
We went for a walk with the neighbo(u)rs, and we saw this sign.
The sign reads "Permissive Footpath avoiding Golf Course", and all the adults in our group (2 English, 1 Spanish, 1 American) found the sign amusing. Jokes about what kinds of permissive activities we might find on the path (or that we might find the path doing) resulted, as well as a conversation about what the sign meant and whether it could have been phrased better.
You can tell from this that we're not seasoned country walkers, we're just lockdown people finding new ways to get some exercise. The term permissive footpath is a term of art in the British land-use bureaucracy, and such signs can be found on many paths. It differs from a public footpath in that the land is privately owned. The landowner is permitting people to walk on their path. This explanationof the term offers other expressions like permitted footpathand concessionary footpath, but these seem to be much less common, and we would not have been able to joke as much about them. (For those puzzled by our amusement: permissive usually means 'characteri{s/z}ed by great freedom of behavio(u)r', which can include 'sexually liberated'.)
So, permissive footpath is not something you'd see in AmE, but that's because there's a lot different about leisurely country walks in the two countries. And this is why this post has taken a couple of weeks to write...
walking verbs
Let's start by mentioning (it has come up on the blog before) that to hike is usually considered an Americanism, in the sense that it's widespread and "standard" in American English, but it's only ever been a dialect word in the UK. The OED cites an 1825 dictionary of west-of-England dialects as one of its earliest sources for it.
While it's been coming back to the UK, all of its senses were more common in AmE first, for example the noun use as in go for a hike and the more figurative use in hike up a price. Some of the figurative uses seem more common in BrE corpora now, though. You can see the change in this Google ngram for price hike, where the red line indicates the phrase in AmE books and the blue in BrE. It looks like the kind of pattern you'd see with parents and slang...they start using the word when the kids are already moving on to a new one, then carry on using it at a higher rate than those who made it up.
In BrE, those who hike as a regular pastime are often referred to as ramblers, but it's far more common to talk about walkingthan rambling. (Rambling and Rambler tend to be used in the names of walking clubs, such as the Essex Area Ramblers, who are responsible for the website that taught me about permissive paths.) Of course, English-speakers everywhere use the verb to walk. But for me (at least) what's different is that I have a town/country divide in my AmE: If I'm walking around town for leisure, I'm going for a walk. If I go out of town to walk (on less even terrain, taking more care with my footwear and supplies), I'm going hiking. Or maybe it's better characteri{s/z}ed as: if I'm on a paved path/road or the beach, I'm on a walk, and if I'm on less even terrain (fields, woods, mountains, deserts), I'm on a hike.
footpaths/trails/ways
In its broadest use, any way that's made for walking is a path or a footpath, but the word footpath is much more common in BrE than in AmE. A footpath can be urban or rural, but is usually distinguished from the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk by being narrower, unpaved, or not running parallel to the road. For instance, a marked "public footpath" in my mother-in-law's suburb is a paved path between houses that let people take a shortcut to the (BrE) railway station, but the "permissive footpath" above is a (AmE in this use) dirt path through a wooded area.
Click to enlarge
Path and pathway are a normal things to call places where people can walk in either country. The GloWBE corpus has a bit more path in AmE than BrE, but I'm not going to to through and find out how many of them refer to the PATH (Port Authority-Trans Hudson) trains in New York. Pathway is about the same in both.
For places to hike, trail is more common in AmE. This is again difficult to do a corpus chart for, because there are lots of other uses of trail (what a snail leaves, a trail of clues, etc.). (It originally referred to things that trailed behind, like the train of a dress or coat.) But if we look at which words occur beforetrail in the two countries, we can see a real tendency for trails to be walking places. Many of these relate to names of famous places to hike, such as the Appalachian Trail.
Click to enlarge
In AmE I'd use trail as a common noun to talk generally about hiking paths. I've just asked the English spouse whether he'd use trail to refer to some of the English ones we know, and he says "No, that's American. That's why we don't understand trail mix. According to the OED, this sense of trail is:
A path or track worn by the passage of persons
travelling in a wild or uninhabited region; a beaten track, a rude path.
(Chiefly U.S. and Canadian; also New Zealand and Australian.)
The US has a National Trails System, established in 1968, which includes Scenic Trails and Historic Trails, all of which have Trail in their name. (See the link for the list.) England and Wales now also have something called National Trails, but that was only founded in 2005, and does look like a case of UK government borrowing an American idea with its language. Most of the "long-distance footpaths" included in the National Trails are named Way: the Cotswold Way, the Pennine Way, the South Downs Way. Some are called Path, e.g. Thames Path, Hadrian's Wall Path. None are called trails.
Scotland has Scotland's Great Trails, formerly known as Long Distance Routes. The rebranding seems to have happened sometime in the past 10 years. Unlike England's National Trails, some are actually named trail, and those names seem to pre-date the national rebranding, raising the question of whetherthis sense of trail is longer-standing in Scotland.
It's not uncommon to find commonalities between Scotland or Ireland and the US—not necessarily because of more recent Scottish/Irish immigration to the US than English immigration. The similarities can be there if the meaning was formerly widespread in English English, but then went out of fashion in England. However, the OED only has examples of this sense of trail since 1807, which makes it more likely that it might have started in the US and been fed back to the UK. Hard to know without much more work than I can put into this!
Related posts
I've written some other posts that cover related concepts to these ones. If you have comments about those terms, please comment at those posts, where it will be much more useful to their readers.
postedThispost relates to rules for where you can walk, including American "Posted" signs and the UK right-of-way / right to roam
This was going to be a post where I tried to cover the many different bird names between US and UK that I've covered on Twitter, but I now reali{s/z}e that I don't have enough blogging hours in a day to do that, so consider this Part One in a series of bird-related posts. This one focus(s)es on (BrE) garden birds—i.e. songbirds and the like. The kind of thing that might nest in a tree, near you. (Note that yardbird is not AmE for garden bird!) Photos are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise
stated, and are generally of adult male birds.
The naming of birds in North America
North America and Europe differ in their native bird species a fair
amount, and so there are different birds to name. But when English-speakers first encountered birds in America, they often used familiar words for the unfamiliar species.
A great source on AmE/BrE bird-name differences is British Names for American Birds by Cecil H. Brown in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol.
2 (June 1992). If you want to read it, but find a paywall, then do contact your public (or
school/university) library, which might have access through JStor , you should be able to register to read it without paying. (See vp's comments below for info.)
Brown discusses four main patterns of application of British names to American birds:
A.
A British monomial [i.e. single name] or base name [i.e as part of a
compound] for British species X is used to label the same species
occurring natively in America.
B. A British monomial
or base name for British species X is used to label species Y occurring
natively in America when (1) species X does not occur natively in
America, and (2) species X and Y are of the same genus.
C. A
British monomial or base name for British species X is used to label
species Y occurring natively in America when (1) species X does not
occur natively in America, (2) the genus to which species X belongs does
not occur natively in America, and (3) species X and Y are of the same
family.
D. A British monomial or base name for
British species X is used to label species Y occurring natively in
America when (1) species X does not occur natively in America, (2) the
genus to which species X belongs does not occur natively in America, (3)
the family to which species X belongs does not occur natively in
America, and (4) species X and Y are of the same order. (Brown 1992: 33)
In other words, A-named birds have the most similarity between the places, and D birds the least. We'll notice the differences most between the names for the C and D categories.
Of the 87 British bird names that Brown studied (for all kinds of birds, not just the types in this blog post), 52 were in category A (i.e. same bird, same name + expansions of the name ), 15 in B, 10 in C, 3 in D, and 7 were exceptions to these categories.
Robin
BrE robin
AmE robin
American robins and European robins are both brown with red breasts, but otherwise they look very different. The
robin found in UK is Erithacus rubecula (left). The one in US is a type of thrush: Turdus migratorius (really; pictured right). Brown categorised this as type C, but this doesn't seem to take into account that the British robin is no longer considered a thrush, but a type of Old-World flycatcher.
It must be said: the UK robin is much (orig. AmE in this sense) cuter. They can also be quite sociable—probably because they're very keen on asserting territorial rights, so they will come and sit quite near you if you're relatively still. I'm sure when I read The Secret Garden as a child, I imagined the American type, but it's much more realistic to imagine the British type.
Both serve as symbols in their cultures, but of different things. In the UK, robins appear on Christmas cards. This is not because you see them more at Christmas(time). It seems that Victorian postmen were called 'robins' because of their uniforms, and so early Christmas cards had red-breasted birds with letters in their beaks as a kind of adorable visual metaphor.
In the US, the robin is known as a first sign of spring, but it seems that's a bit of a myth too, since they don't actually migrate all that far during the winter.
from Bizarro Comics—the joke doesn't work in UK
The bird is named after people—Robin being a variant of Robert. Originally, the British bird-name was redbreast, and one often hears robin redbreastas if it's the bird's first and last name.
In the US, Robin is usually a girl's name now (which might be spel{led/t} in different ways), whereas in the UK, Robin is more usually a boys' name and Robyn the female variant.
Blackbird (late addition)
Commenter Bardiac notes that that word is used differently in AmE & BrE. Indeed, UK blackbirds are thrushes, often not all that black. They thus look like AmE robins, fairly drab. New World blackbirds are of the same family as New World orioles, about which see below, and often more spectacular looking. Click on links for pics.
Tit/titmouse/chickadee
Blue tit (UK)
The UK has many types of titmouse, which have often been called tit. The name is probably from Scandinavia, where the birds have similar names, and it is thought to be in imitation of the birds' chirp. Earlier and dialectal forms include chit and tomtit—again from the trend of giving birds human-like names. Calling them tits is a bit newer-fangled than calling them titmice. The OED says:
In Britain ‘tit’ has largely superseded the earlier name of titmouse, though the latter is still used for several American species. Most tits were traditionally placed in the genus Parus, but this has recently been split into several other genera.
One of the American species is more commonly called the (black-capped) chickadee, again an onomatopoetic name, after its alarm call. Some people assume that Americans don't call these birds tits because of alleged prudery, but this is almost certainly not the case, since Americans do call other birds titmice — the shortened tit form would not have been so common when colonists were originally naming these things. The chickadee naming could have come about because (a) it was seen as being different enough from European tits to warrant a new name, (b) the name was more evocative, or (c) it seemed silly to call a bird a titmouse—similar to AmE preferring ladybug over (BrE) ladybird for description's sake. Nevertheless, as I say, there are other species called titmouse in the US like the tuffed titmouse below, so I think it was just that the name chickadee appealed more. Titmouse counts as Brown's category B.
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse (N Am)
Speaking of Christmas cards, American ones are sometimes illustrated with the black-capped chickadee or the cardinal, neither of which are found in the UK/Europe. The cardinal, of course, is red and cheery. I don't know if the chickadee is particularly Christmassy, or if it's just a cute bird that allows American cards to imitate the British robin ones (since the US got the Christmas-card tradition from the UK in the Victorian age). (See comments for further info.)
Google image search
Goldfinch
If someone says they have a goldfinch in their garden, it'll be the left one in the US (Spinus tristis) and the right one in the UK (Carduelis carduelis). This is Brown's category C.
A bit about cardinals and jays
The (northern) cardinal lives in the eastern half (and a bit) of the US. A recent Twitter discussion I
Cardinal (NAm)
saw questioned whether Catholic cardinals were so-called because they wear red like the bird. Worth noting that this is backwards. Americans often don't reali{s/z}e that their wildlife isn't everyone's wildlife (as another Twitter discussion about raccoons reminded me last week). The birds were so-named (originally cardinal-bird) because they're red like a cardinal's robe, not the other way (a)round.
Blue jay (NAm)
I always think of cardinals and blue jays together, as they are always a welcome flash of crested colo(u)r in our northeastern US (AmE) backyard/(BrE) garden.
I didn't know what the bird was when I snapped the picture below in Brighton, but it turns out it is also a jay, a Eurasian jay, which has some blue in it. So perhaps when Europeans hear Americans talk about blue jays, some imagine this. Jay belongs to Brown's category C.
Eurasian jay
Oriole
Here is Brown's category D. New-World orioles [right] belong to the blackbird family. As Wikipedia says: "Unrelated to Old World orioles of the family Oriolidae, they are strikingly similar in size, diet, behavior, and strongly contrasting plumage, a good example of convergent evolution." There are a lot of different kinds and they're all pretty, so click through to Wikipedia to see more pics.
I had just assumed that sparrow meant the same in both countries because the sparrows I know in the two places look pretty much the same. But as I was preparing to write the next instal(l)ment of this bird series, I noticed that Brown marks sparrow as category D—applying the British name to a different family of birds. It turns out that I think they're the same because, like the starling, the European house sparrow (Passer domesticus, family
Passeridae) is a successful transplant to the Americas. But before that happened, English-speakers in North America had applied the name to birds from another widespread family, Passerellidae.
These are what birdwatchers call LBJs'little brown jobs' or sometimes LBBs 'little brown birds', because they're all over the place and hard to distinguish. (I can't find where LBJ originated, though the job in it is probably closest to a the sense 'A thing of a type specified or evident from the context', which the OED marks as 'orig. U.S.'.) So it's not entirely surprising I hadn't noticed the differences. There are a lot of different species with different looks, but
European house sparrow
American tree sparrow
Parakeet
Ok, parakeets are generally not thought of as garden birds, but I'll include them here because there are plenty in English gardens. They're especially numerous around south London (and so they're sometimes called Kingston parakeets), but they've been spreading out—even into Scotland, it seems. I love watching them in my mother-in-law's garden.
But there is a meaning difference for parakeet. AmE uses that name for the little birds that are kept as pets, what BrE (and some US pet bird enthusiasts) call budgerigarsor budgies, for short. The ones in London are rose-ringed parakeets, or ring-necked parakeets. These would also be called parakeet in AmE, because that's what they are, but Americans have less need to talk about them, as they are not living in public parks. See the comments for info about areas of the US where feral parakeets are found.
AmE parakeet; BrE budgie
Feral parakeet in London
Bird-related vocab
Bird tableis used in BrE to describe some kinds of bird feeder where seed lies on a flat surface. One doesn't find this term so much in AmE—they're just listed as 'bird feeders' in online shopping hubs.
Google image search for "bird table"
The dawn chorus
Recently one of my Twitter Differences of the Day involved the BrEism the dawn chorus,
meaning 'early morning birdsong'. Someone asked me why I thought the
British invented a special term for this and AmE apprarently didn't, and
I flippantly replied "Sentimentality". But there is probably more to it
than that.
It is pretty hit-{and/or}-miss which concepts get lexicali{s/z}ed
in a language/dialect, but in this case, I think Britain has two things
going for it. First, its relative geographical homogeneity: no deserts,
temperate climate throughout, no one more than 70 miles from the coast,
and no one higher than about 1500m above sea level. (It's even more
homogeneous if we only consider England, where most of the media discussed below
comes from.) Some birds will be more common in some places than other
places, but the particular sound of birds singing at dawn is not going to be
a very local phenomenon. Second, there's a lot of nature programming
on television and radio. These two facts together make for a lot of garden
programming and other kinds of national attention
to nature-in-your-immediate area. And so if they talk about something like the dawn chorus,
it'll be (a) immediately familiar to anyone paying much attention and
(b) spread very easily around the country. In the US, I'd expect there's
a lot more variation in what the morning sounds like. We are not 'a
nation of gardeners'—which is not to say that Americans don't garden,
but there's less of a national identity built around it. And the US is
in general less sentimental about local nature—probably because nature
is often less cuddly and Beatrix-Potterish in the US. To my mind, there
is nothing cuter than the North American chipmunk,
but Americans have to hold nature at more of a distance, because some
of it is deadly in its own right (rattlesnakes, crocodiles, grizzly
bears), some of it is unpleasant (skunks), and much of it can
carry rabies.
And it's so populous. If we in my part of New York State were to stop
and say "Look! A squirrel!" every time we saw one like my in-laws (and
now my child) do here in the southeast of England, we'd never get out of
our own (AmE) driveways.
Final fun fact
When I was researching The Prodigal Tongue, I was really struck by how much influence publishing laws (and their circumvention) have had on life. Here's an example. Audubon's Birds of America (1827–1838) had no text in its first edition just pictures, because if there were text (and they distributed it in the UK), they'd be required to provide free copies to public libraries in England. The text was printed in a separate book, so that the relatively inexpensive all-print books could be provided separately from the expensive-to-print pictures.
P.S. Apologies for some formatting problems here. Blogger has changed its interface and (a) a lot of things that used to be easy are now harder, (b) the html-editing page is considerably harder to read, (c) captions seem to easily come unfixed from their images. I might fix some things later, but I've already spent FAR TOO LONG on this post today!
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