Separated by a Common Language

Scene from a Marriage:

BH and L, the father and mother (respectively) of 5-month-old baby G, stand in their kitchen. G has recently begun eating (BrE) baby rice/ (AmE) rice cereal.

BH: (holding up two plastic measuring spoons) Should we sterili{s/z}e these?

L: Why are there two?

BH: Because I can't find the teaspoon and one's a half-teaspoon and one's a tablespoon. I don't know how many half-teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and it's a teaspoon of rice and a tablespoon of milk.

L: Three teaspoons to a tablespoon, but you can just eyeball it. Three parts milk to one part rice.

BH: Eyeball it? What, are you a cop?

L: Why would a cop say 'eyeball it'?

BH: Because only cops in cheap American detective shows say that.

L: No--graphic designers say it...

BH: No, the cop eyeballs the suspect.

L: ...cooks say it; tailors say it.

BH: No way.

L: Why would a cop say it? It's about measuring.

BH: No, it's about staring.

L: No, it's about measuring.

BH: Prove it.

L: (wild-eyed) Is that a challenge? (determinedly) I'll take your challenge!

(Pan to beautiful but neglected baby...sound of maniacal typing at a computer keyboard. Fade to black.)

So while Grover sleeps on Better Half's chest, I'll fill you in on the outcome of my --ahem-- L's research. The (British) OED sides with BH, giving the verb to eyeball as AmE slang for 'to look or stare (at)'. But one shouldn't trust the 1989 edition of the OED to be up to snuff on American colloquialisms. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edn), on the other hand, gives two senses, both marked as 'informal':

1. To look over carefully; scrutinize.
2. To measure or estimate roughly by sight: eyeballed the area of the wall that needed paint.

So, it looks here like the OED is up-to-date on senses of eyeball that are known (as AmE slang) in the UK, but not on all AmE senses of the verb. In spite of the ignorance professed above, I have to admit knowledge of the first sense--it just wasn't coming to mind after I, I mean L, used the other sense. But I use the measuring sense often. Since the AHD lists it second, we can assume that it's a later addition to the language than the 'scrutini{s/z}e' sense, but Wiktionary lists it first, giving the impression that it might be a better known sense now. (I've put some feelers out trying to find out when the measuring sense arose. Will update if I get any info. Or will take hard evidence [personal memories are very unreliable when it comes to etymology] in the comments section, please!)

An old American friend, Lord Affectation (I've got other less flattering names for him too), has moved to Kent and informed me that "The British call bicycles push irons!" I said, "Your English friends are pushing your leg." Most English people call them bicycles, just like the rest of the English-speaking world. But as the photo (taken near a bike rack on campus) shows, he's partly right. Some people do call them push bikes, including The Gardener (Better Half's Sister's Better Half--BH just called him a young fogey). It's a little old-fashioned, but it succeeds in distinguishing them from motorbikes. AmE sometimes uses pedal bike for this purpose, but bicycle would be more usual. Or just a sign saying No M/C.

The OED has push bicycle and push cycle as well as push bike, which they label as 'informal.' Myself, I've only heard push bike, but push bicycle is around on the web, as well as push tricycle and push unicycle. The OED does not have push iron, but the web holds a small number of examples, some of them in lists of Wigan dialect words. Wigan, it should be noted, is nowhere near Kent.

Of course, BrE has another push-vehicle, the push-chair, known in AmE as a stroller. Related is the pram, short for perambulator, known in AmE as a baby carriage.

We bought this piece of furniture (from a charity shop) for our kitchen last week, and I am learning to call it a Welsh dresser. It is a low cabinet with an open case of shelves on top. It has a little surface in front of the shelves where one could, say, slice bread. I was stymied in trying to find an American equivalent for this--which may go to show that I am suffering attrition of my native dialect. I've been calling it a cabinet when describing it to Americans, but the more specific name for it is hutch (as I found after searching US furniture retailers' sites). This is a word I know, but perhaps I never got to know it well enough, as I'd never lived in a house with one before now. That's my excuse for forgetting it, at least. Better Half protests "Rabbits live in hutches!" Strictly speaking, according to the furniture sellers, it's the top part that's the hutch, but since I didn't know until recently that the top and bottom halves were separable, I've always assumed that the whole thing is a hutch. (Without the top hutch part, it would be a sideboard--as long as it's in the dining room or kitchen.)

BH often reduces Welsh dresser to dresser, as in We bought a dresser for the end of the kitchen. This, to me, is weird (technical linguistic term), since I think of a dresser as belonging in a bedroom or dressing room. I suppose one could dress a chicken on a Welsh dresser...

While we're in the kitchen...the built-in work surface is called the counter or countertop in AmE, but tends not to be called this in BrE. Location-wise, it's generally referred to as the side, as in The plates are on the side or Cut the carrots on the side (which, of course, is ambiguous). You wouldn't, however, say I bought a new side for the kitchen or The side is formica. Referring to the thing, instead of the location, it can be called a worktop or work surface.

The things with doors above and below the counter/worktop are what I would call kitchen cabinets. Better Half calls them kitchen cupboards, which also works in American English. In BrE, it seems, a cabinet is free-standing.

Out for lunch Saturday with Better Half's Mum and her Better Half, when BHM'sBH declares "I hate it when English people take on American corporate jargon." I expected he was talking about thinking outside the box and investing in excellence. The latter is one of my pet peeves, as well as the current call-to-arms/pens by my university's management. ( I also hate that my university has a management team now instead of an administration.)

But no, BHM'sBH instead went on to talk about how he can tell who works for an American company when they open their mouths at Starbucks and say "Can I get a..." instead of "Can/May I have a...". If you ask to get a coffee, by his reasoning, you're asking to come (a)round to the other side of the counter and fix yourself a coffee. BH agrees with BHM'sBH that in the context of ordering a coffee can I get a means 'can I get myself a'.

Checking out can I get a on Google UK, some of the examples are:

can I get a qualification?
Can I get a regular health check at my GP surgery?
can i get a gmail invite?
Can I get a refund of unused portion of a season ticket...?
Can I get a refund on my parking permit?
Can I get a business grant to start up a new business in the Harrogate district?

Most of these are from FAQs, and are sincerely about ability ('Am I able to get a refund? How do I do it?'), rather than requests for things to be given. That's not surprising, as writing Can I get a decaf latte? on my website is unlikely to result in a hot beverage showing up beside me. (That's what yelling to BH in the kitchen was invented for.) The gmail invite example is the only one that stands out as a UK-located (but not necessarily UK) person requesting something using can i get a.

BrE speakers have no problem with saying I got a coffee on my way to work, meaning 'I took a coffee away from someplace where I ordered it'.

In can I get a, get is the converse of give:
Can I get a coffee (from you)? = Can you give me a coffee?

But it's not that the get/give opposition is American-only: on UK Google, one gets twice as many hits for get presents as for receive presents. Since one typically doesn't go and get one's presents from the giver ( one tends to passively receive them), it's clear here that British folk have the lexical/logical wherewithal to understand can I get a as a request.

I think is the real problem is that one learns early the 'polite' ways to ask for things, and this way is not in the British canon of polite requests. While get can mean a passive action of receiving, it also has other senses that are closer to take--which probably colo(u)rs people's perceptions of get's connotations. So, if you're brought up on saying can I have a, then can I get a might sound a little more greedy/impolite.

But why doesn't it sound less polite to American ears? (Especially if it's a relatively new locution there too?) Three possibilities, which don't rule one another out:

1 - Perhaps it does sound less polite to Americans too. To me can I get a sounds a little more brusque and self-cent(e)red than can I have a. (But maybe I've been influenced by my surroundings.)

2 - Perhaps it is slightly less polite in both dialects, but it's less important to sound "polite" in America. (The word polite is a bit loaded here. I'm using it to mean something like 'indirect/genteel'.) The US is known for its solidarity politeness system and for its individualistic culture. In a solidarity culture, one wants to act as if everyone's on the same social level. The UK is historically a deference culture, in which people's societal roles are more distinguished and great pains are taken not to inflict oneself on others unnecessarily. The UK has been shifting toward solidarity styles since at least the second world war, but is still not as far along that path as the US. The importation of (and unease with) can I get a may be a symptom of that shift.

3 - Or perhaps it's just that anything that sounds American grates on British ears and sounds less polite, just by association with Americans and stereotypes of Americans.

I think it's probably a combination of all of these.

Today's query comes from Kirsten in Australia:

Would you be able to explore/explain the expressions brown-bagging or brown-bag lunch?

I first heard it used by an American colleague visiting our Melbourne office. Searching references on the net I gather it is used to refer to a home-made lunch in a school or business situation (as opposed to buying from fast food or cafeteria). I have some questions about the term:

• Could you please confirm the correct meaning/usage in the US?
• Is the term used/understood in the UK?
• Is it typical for Americans literally to carry home-made lunch in brown bags?

Kirsten has the AmE meaning generally right (more on this below), and it is AmE (or more generally North American English) and not BrE. On her last question, it's probably less common in these days of hyperconsumerism to use brown paper bags (I'm sure people are using Tupperware [often used generically in AmE] and designer insulated bags and such), but it's certainly traditional to use paper bags. Originally, this was a way of re-using small shopping bags, but by the time I was a child, one could buy packages of lunch-sized brown paper bags. (I always wanted my mother to buy them and give me a fresh paper bag each day, but my mother was generally more sensible than that.) When I was a child, up until about age 9-10, you wanted to have a lunch box--a new one each year, usually with a cartoon or toy character or pop star or something on it. For me it was (click on the links for added fun!):

• First grade: White and yellow flowers on a olive-green background (this one was vinyl, and purchased before I knew what was 'cool' on the playground; can't find a photo on the web--must not be 'collectible' enough)
• Second grade: Miss America
• Third grade: The Partridge Family

You can tell how important these things were, given that I remember them 35 years later. But just as important was the shift to brown paper bags in the fourth grade. By that time, I recogni{s/z}ed that lunch boxes were 'little kid' stuff, and I needed to have brown paper bags in order to look more grown up, like I didn't have an investment in Barbies or ElectraWoman and DynaGirl (boy, do I wish now that I had that lunchbox. I'll just have to console myself with listening to the theme tune over and over).

Kerstin says that the term brown bag is not used in Australia, but hearing it conjures up something less savo(u)ry than homemade lunch:

To my Australian ears (and those of my Australian colleagues) "Brown-bagging" sounds a very unsavoury term - We don't use the specific phrase for any particular meaning, but it conjures up images of responsible dog owners cleaning up after their pets. Or less revoltingly, but still not particularly pleasantly, an allusion to discrete packaging used to disguise porn, alcoholic beverages, or bribes.

The use of brown bag (noun) or brown-bag (verb) in AmE can also refer to drinking alcohol from a bottle that's wrapped in a paper bag, a way around the general proscription on street drinking in the US (now making its way to the UK).

When I asked Better Half if he was familiar with the term, he said that it would be avoided in England because "brown is a problem"--that is, its association with egestion. But innocent American that I am, I knew the term brown-nose ('chiefly' AmE, according to the OED: a sycophant) for years before I reali{s/z}ed that it had anything to do with bottoms, so I'd never think such a thing of the humble brown paper bag. (Though filling paper bags with [more frequent in BrE] poo/[more frequent in AmE] poop and setting them alight on someone's front step is a classic Halloween prank--though it's never happened on my watch.)

The verb brown-bag is primarily used with a rather empty object, it, as in this newspaper headline Save a buck [AmE slang: 'dollar'], brown-bag it or in the common phrase "I'll be brown-bagging it". The 'it' in the first example does not refer to the buck. It could arguably refer to the lunch, but I think it's the kind of near-meaningless it that one finds in expressions like to wing it. The it there could refer to something, but when we put that something in place of the it, the meaning seems to lose something. I'll be brown-bagging my lunch sounds like it refers to the wrapping of a brown bag around the food for a lunch. But I'll be brown-bagging it sounds like it refers to coming to a lunch event with a meal in a brown bag.

And then there's the venerable academic (etc.) institution, the brown-bag lunch (as in I'm going to a brown-bag lunch, rather than in I brought a brown-bag lunch). This is an uncatered event that occurs over the lunch hour (12-1 in the US), usually a somewhat informal talk by an expert on a subject. In the case of this series of such lunches at the University of Pittsburgh, they are also referred to as Brown Bags.

While I see lots of 'lunchtime concerts' advertised in the UK, it seems rarer (than in the US) to have 'lunchtime talks'. Here, the lunch hour is more jealously guarded to keep work out. (For instance, in the US, I was used to the staff in university offices staggering their lunch hours so that the office would stay open all day. In the UK, the university--except for the catering facilities--basically shuts down between 1 and 2, although we've recently started teaching in the lunch hour--a change brought on by lack of classroom space, more than willingness to give up lunch. Unfortunately for working/studying parents, the university crèche still closes from 1 to 1:55.) But where they do occur, they're more likely to be called lunchtime talks, with instructions as to whether bringing a lunch is necessary/acceptable, rather than fitting all that information into the neat little title Brown Bag. I think there must be a connection here between the rarity of organi{s/z}ed bring-your-own-lunch events and the relative (to the US) infrequency of (AmE) potlucks (or potluck suppers , or [AmE dialectal] covered-dish suppers). I had to've gone to at least one of these a month when I was in graduate school (what with the departmental potlucks, the potlucks organi{s/z}ed by political groups I belonged to, and just friendly potlucks). Have I been to a single one in the UK, even under another title? Just picnics--and then they can be quite comedic. For Grover's half-birthday picnic we asked people to bring a dish to share and noted that I'd be bringing the cakes. Better Half kept suggesting other dishes we could bring--salads, side dishes, main courses, but I kept saying "No, we're bringing the cake". He'd say "what if everyone else brings cake?" And I'd say "they know we're bringing the cake, so they'll bring (chiefly BrE) savo(u)ry stuff." "You over-estimate their attention to the invitation," he warned. Not only did EVERYONE bring cake (or biscuits or cookies or muffins), they all brought at least three different things, not just 'a dish'--and in several cases this was three different kinds of sweet baked good, rather than anything lunch-like. I think I made two mistakes here:

1. misplaced faith in the apparently transparent (but really culturally loaded) 'bring a dish to share' potluck notion (though I didn't use the usual AmE turn of phrase bring a dish to pass--i.e. 'pass around')
2. making the invitation for 2:00, rather than within the national lunch hour of 1-2--so that people were less sure about whether we would be eating lunch together or not.
3. not listening to BH, who is always right, or so he tells me. (You'll notice that I only thought I made two mistakes--you understand that this third is dictation, right?)
   

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link.

The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss):

America has become more interested in the outside world since September 2001. If their first, bewildered question was "Why do they hate us so much?" it has, in time, been followed up by questions about what life in the outside world is actually like.

This premis{e/s} itself may be the most faulty part of the article. There have always been people in the US who are interested in what the outside world is like. But, having been an expat both before and after September 11th, I've felt that the proportion of 'what's it like to live there?' to 'why do they hate us?' conversations has changed in the opposite direction of that suggested by the author. Just in March, I was trapped in a conversation at an American party, where a man who'd never needed a passport kept drilling me on the hatred subject, refusing to believe that I didn't suffer as an American abroad. On the two occasions in which I've had dental work in the US since the terrorist attacks, I've been stuck with Dr Dentist's hands in my mouth while he lectures me on why he'll never return to France because of its government's stance on the war. When travel(l)ing with Better Half in the US, I'm always amazed when people ask where he's from and then say "That sounds nice. I have no interest in going there. There's enough of America to see." Why, exactly, did they feel the need to say that?

Anyhow, back to language. The author goes on:

There's an easy test to apply about how substantial this new interest is, or whether the outside world is actually being listened to. Can American writers reliably report the styles of speech of one of their nearest linguistic cousins?

By the end of the article, it's clear that this is not a very good test at all. As the author notes, creating realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction, and few writers master it even in their own dialect. And while Europeans can't help but be exposed to a lot of American culture (through media, retail, politics and tourists), there are few British novelists who ably write American voices without crossing the border into parody.

The author's segue into the main discussion of dialogue in novels starts on a filmic tangent:

From Cary Grant to Dick van Dyke to Woody Allen's inadvertently hilarious Match Point ("I was raised in Belgravia"), English audiences have been retching in the stalls at American film's idea of English speech.

Dick van Dyke's portrayal of a Cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins remains a byword for American misapprehension of British speech, but seems a bit unfair here in relation to American writers' reportage of the British 'voice', since an Australian wrote the Mary Poppins books. While it is easier to come up with examples of British (and Australian and South African) actors taking on American accents than vice versa, this probably has at least as much to do with the "economic migration" of British film actors toward Hollywood as to do with the quality of American acting. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones was warmly embraced here, and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accents, while not perfect, are rarely marked as a distraction.

The article goes on to discuss the stereotyping of (particularly upper class) British speech as 'pompous' and overly wordy, and this is undebatable. One never hears Brits in American films or novels saying "I reckon...". The pomposity is linked to Americans' tendency to cast Englishmen (complete with ridiculously pompous speech styles) as villains. As Leo Benedictus in the Guardian notes, "Sophistication in all its forms is a sure sign of evil, and American audiences find nothing more sophisticated (or untrustworthy) than a snooty Brit." (I can't help but relate Americans' association of sophisticated, wordy language as a sign of untrustworthiness to the otherwise unfathomable electoral success of George W Bush. Well, that and Republican money an a crooked Supreme Court, of course.)

People here often say to me "you don't sound American" or "oh, I thought you were Canadian." One could believe that this is because British people have wonderful ears for accents and recognize a couple of features that are shared between my part of New York and Ontario. But that's pretty unlikely. The only time any American has accused me of sounding Canadian was when I moved to Massachusetts and was relentlessly mocked for saying eh? at the end of each utterance. (This was useful in South Africa, where I easily adapted to saying hey at the end of each utterance.) No, I think there are three reasons why I don't 'sound American' to some Brits, listed here in order of perceived importance:

• I don't sound like a hick* or a mafiosa. That is, the British get their ideas of what Americans sound like from stereotyped performances, just as Americans do for the English.


• Everyone lives in mortal fear of travel(l)ing Canadians, who go bonkers when accused of being American.


• I make certain accommodations for British ears, namely avoiding intervocalic flaps. (Click here to hear a flap in the middle of the word letter and here to hear it with a regular /t/ sound.)

*AmE has lots of unflattering epithets for rural folk, including: hick, hayseed, hillbilly, redneck, rube, country bumpkin, yokel. The last couple aren't marked in my Concise Oxford as 'US', so presumably they are known in Britain too. (Better Half is not here to serve as my editor today!) But while hick is now considered to be an Americanism, it's another of those words that started out in England and was forgotten here. See The Word Detective on the subject.

Welcome to the first SbaCL book review--one of many to come, I hope. Thanks to the folks at Tandem Literary and Ballantine Books, we can celebrate this first review with a chance to win the book. Read further for details.

Today's book is Britannia in Brief: The Scoop on All Things British by Leslie Banker and William Mullins (Ballantine, 2009), an American wife and British husband team. In other words, here's the book that Better Half and I could have written if we'd thought of it first and weren't so gloriously behind schedule with everything else in our lives--like the laundry. Especially the laundry.

The book does what it says on its label: it is a sort of (AmE) Cliff Notes/(BrE) York Notes for Americans wanting to (orig. AmE) bone up on Britain. The chapters cover the geography and history, social structures, arts and culture, politics and government, food and drink, language and daily practicalities of UK life. Having been here 10 years, I didn't learn a lot reading this book--but, boy, if I'd had it 10 years ago, it would have saved a lot of people a lot of explaining. When I first sat down with the book, I tested it by looking up the things that I thought should be in it. Blue Peter? (AmE) check/(BrE) tick. Newspaper slants and allegiances? √ The 1966 World Cup? √ Jeffrey Archer? √ It passed all of my tests but one...but we'll get back to that.

The parts I found most helpful (as a long-standing resident) were in the first chapter--though I'm sure that newer arrivals will find the quotidian and cultural aspects the most immediately gratifying. The section entitled 'Snapshots of British History' starts with Julius Caesar and end with the 7/7 bombings of 2005, filling in enough details on the Glorious Revolution, the Battle of Britain and the Falklands War to give an American a sense of what these things were about. The longer section on Northern Ireland similarly outlines the Troubles and gives the sage advice that "it's better not to express any opinions on the matter of Northern Ireland unless explicitly asked. [...] All in all, it's just better to say that you hope things work out."

What about the bits on language? While there is a chapter on language, there's plenty of vocabulary information throughout the book, including a very useful two-page list of acronyms toward(s) the end. (There's also a two-page glossary, which hits some important words, but whether it includes the one you'll need to look up--well, that's another matter.) The language chapter provides some names whose pronunciation needs explanation (e.g. Leicester = "lester", Berkeley = "barclay") and an introduction to Cockney Rhyming Slang. These are followed by a couple of zesty sections on words with 'dirty' meanings in BrE (but not in AmE) and ratings of how offensive "swear words" are--with handy thermometer graphics. A section on the Welsh language serves the authors' obsession with the alleged lack of vowels in Welsh. (I lost count of how many times 'unpronounceable' and 'Welsh' co-occured in the other chapters.) For the record, Welsh has plenty of vowels, it just spells them with different letters than the English use. I didn't always agree with their list of 'prevalent British names rarely heard in the US'--sometimes because I thought the names weren't particularly prevalent in the UK, but mostly because they left Nicola off the girls' list. But these are minor points.

The book ends with a quiz that should probably replace the UK Citizenship test, since it tests things that UK citizens generally know, like the name of the pub on Coronation Street and who Brenda and Phil the Greek are (unlike the real test, whose questions native-born citizens typically fail).

The book is terrifically up-to-date, which does mean it'll become outdated all the faster. And this may be its failing in the one section that I found really wanting: the 'British comic gems you may be less familiar with'. Appropriately, this starts with the Carry On films. But it then hops on to Monty Python--which (a) is not something anyone is less familiar with (as they acknowledge), and (b) overshoots The Goon Show (and particularly Spike Milligan), which was one of the first things I tried to look up in the book (and one of the greatest influences on Python). The other comedians listed are all currently practicing, and some of them have crossed the pond rather often. Rather than Steve Coogan and Catherine Tate (whom I'd run into soon enough if I were a [orig. AmE] newbie to Britain), I would have liked to have read about the Goons, Tony Hancock, the Two Ronnies and Morecambe & Wise--the types of comedians who influenced later ones and whose presence is still felt--albeit a little more obliquely than the Coogans and Tates--in the culture. In other words, with such a rich comedic history, it's a shame to have so much focus on the present.

But that's one section of one chapter in an otherwise surprisingly comprehensive book. The authors have shown a real knack for getting to the heart of Britishness and presenting it in bite-size helpings. I'd heartily recommend this book for any (North) American who:

• is about to embark on a year abroad/work placement/move to the UK
• is going to visit people in Britain
  
• is in love with someone in Britain
• is slightly obsessive about Britain

And here's your chance to own a copy. Your task, should you choose to compete, is to write a (preferably humorous) limerick illustrating a US/UK cultural misunderstanding. Make your submission to the comments section. (Make them clean-ish, please.) Other readers are welcome to weigh in on which they think are the wittiest and best written, which will influence the judges (three of my friends and me) when we make our decision on 30 June. In order to enter, make sure we have a way to contact you--either through your Blogger profile or by sending an e-mail to me with your e-mail details. Happy limericking!

Americans have a well-established distaste for taxation without representation. This is part of the reason why, this past Wednesday, I became a British citizen (while retaining my American citizenship as well). Since 2004, the naturali{s/z}ation process has involved a test on "Life in the UK" (which serves as an indirect way of making sure you have some knowledge of the English language as well) and a citizenship ceremony at the end of the process. This is based on the US system and strikes some native Britons as un-British. I was hoping to have some good SBaCL stories to tell about the experience, but there was little of linguistic interest at the ceremony. But I did affirm my allegiance to the Queen, her heirs and successors. My UK-born friends think this is hilarious, as they've never had to do so, and are confident that they would get a lot of questions wrong if tested on the details of the history and structure of their government. But they know the answers to the questions that really matter if you want to get along in British culture, like: What is Blue Peter? Who is David Essex? Who has right-of-way at a roundabout? and Who's paying for the next round?

Two days after becoming a citizen, I was on my way back to the US. What a fickle soul I am. Better Half and I have just had a lovely weekend in New York City, which was only marred for BH by the fact that the place is crawling with Englishpeople. "But I used to be special!" he cried. "People used to love my accent! Now everyone's got one!" BH's loss of specialness is directly attributable to the pathetic condition of the American dollar. After it dipped to nearly $2 to £1, British Airways added an extra flight a day to accommodate British Christmas shopping trips, and the UK newspapers are full of price comparisons of iPods and designer handbags/purses in London versus New York, with analyses of whether it's worth the trip, once you've paid airfare and import duty. Depending on what and how much you're buying, it very well may be worth it. On other comparisons of NYC and London, BH and I agreed that NYC wins on the politeness and helpfulness of its citizenry (one cannot open a map/guidebook in public without someone approaching you to offer their help), while London wins on the relative pleasantness of its underground (=AmE subway) trains and stations--though NYC definitely wins on the cost of public transport(ation).

While we don't turn our noses up at the bargains, our reason for being here is to visit family and friends for the holidays. While visiting with the first couple, The Interpreters, I had my first cross-cultural miscommunication of the trip. BH was telling tales from our previous busy day, during which we went to the theatre and the cinema. After asking for a repetition of "the theatre and the cinema", Interpreter S noted to Interpreter K "I would've said we went to the movies and a play. Theatre and cinema sounds so much better." We had seen the new Christopher Guest film For Your Consideration, which BH liked better than I did, though I told The Interpreters about my continued affection for Parker Posey. Upon hearing this, Interpreter S said "I went to school with Parker Posey." Since I'd been under the impression that Parker Posey had grown up in Mississippi, and that Interpreter S most certainly hadn't, I was (BrE informal) well confused and asked which school that was. "SUNY Purchase," IS responded. And there was my "a-ha" moment. When AmE speakers say "I went to school there," they often mean 'I went to (BrE) university/(AmE) college there'. (SUNY Purchase = State University of New York at Purchase.) In BrE, school denotes primary or secondary school, but not university.

It's not common for me to misunderstand Americans speaking AmE. Perhaps I became more British than I reali{s/z}ed last Wednesday!

For my birthday in October, Better Half promised me a weekend away before the birth of Grover. But since I (a) spent the first half of my third trimester in (the) hospital and (b) was cheated out of the second half entirely, that didn't happen. So this week he took Grover and me for a plush few days in the New Forest. And there, in the village of Hythe, I photographed this sign:

This was convenient, as I'd been meaning to take a photo of such a sign in Brighton, but since I'm not a tourist in Brighton, I rarely have my camera with me. So, it was great to see one while I had my camera at the ready on our mini holiday/vacation.

Needless to say (since I've posted a photo of it), this is not a sign you'd see in America. There, such a sign would probably have an unmodified slow or go slow.

In this context, dead is an adverb modifying slow. It makes me chuckle involuntarily for two reasons: (a) dead slow is not as idiomatic in AmE as in BrE and therefore the literal meaning occurs to me when I read it, and (b) in BrE adverbial dead is frequently a colloquialism, and therefore it seems a bit funny to see on a sign.

Since I get the literal meaning of dead slow when I read it, it strikes me as an oxymoron. If something's dead, it seems to me, it wouldn't move at all, so it couldn't be slow. But that "logic" is misplaced, since AmE, like BrE, uses dead as an adverb with other adjectives that indicate a glimmer (or more) of life--for example dead certain and dead tired. So, we could use dead with slow, but we tend not to.

If one hears a lot of colloquial BrE, one knows that dead can go with just about any adjective in certain informal registers. For example:

Dom looks dead sexy in eyeliner and black nail varnish (=AmE nail polish) [comment on blog.pinknews.co.uk]

... I also watched "Sky High", which was dead good. [...] It's odd really, some of it is DEAD POSH, like the lobby and the millions of people tidying plates away at breakfast, and some of it ISN'T, like the mucky marks on the walls and the water dripping on your head in reception. [...] We then had a LOVELY bit of tapas (ooh, it was DEAD nice, roast potatoes and hot garlicy [sic] tomato sauce, ACE!) ... [a (orig. AmE) mother-lode of deadness in a description of a Singapore holiday from MJ Hibbett--I haven't bothered to mark all the other Briticisms in that]

The OED, however, classes dead slow as a non-colloquial usage (going with dead calm and dead tired) rather than this all-purpose colloquial intensifier. At any rate, it all sounds dead British.

I've got a few posts brewing in my head that require me to (a) take my camera out with me and (b) remember to take pictures of the relevant things when I get to them. So far, I've only managed (a), which, it must be admitted, is pretty pointless without (b). But there's a lot of pointless activity in my life at the moment, like an afternoon investigating new textbooks after being told that mine couldn't be ordered--only to discover that the bookshop already had the books in stock, they just looked them up the wrong way. And waiting for the phone and internet to be re-connected after my neighbo(u)r told the people working on our house that the wires at the front of the building were extraneous and should be removed. And investigating and correcting the recent mistaken change to my tax code which left me paying three times as much as I owed this month. It's the camera one that really irks me though, since it's the only one I must blame myself for.

So with those plans thwarted, I have clicked onto a random post in my 'to be posted about' mailbox and found JHM, writing:

I've been on an Agatha Christie binge of late, and have subsequently been up to my eyeballs in potential questions on BrE. Seeing as these stories were written between the 30s and the 70s, however, it becomes complicated from your vantage, because even trying to compare fifty-year-old AmE usage to modern AmE would present problems.

Even so, one usage that seems fairly consistent over time, and that tends to confuse me, is the BrE use of "cupboard." I see that you've covered this to some degree, but I still have a few questions. [...] My word for the small, doored-off areas either hanging from the ceiling or under a [ed: AmE] countertop is cupboard (which I pronounce /cubbard/, making it a further annoyance when I see the word spelt, as the two seem not to match at all, and besides which, my "cups" usually hang from hooks below the cupboard, and are one of the few items not to be found inside one). So, first minor question is whether BrE by and large has the same pronunciation.

Now, it seems to me that BrE never seems to use closet, but prefers cupboard for just about anything that has a door. In my case, a cupboard is never something in which a corpse (at least one still in one piece) could be either found or put, but this seems commonplace in my stories. What are the bounds of the BrE cupboard, when does closet become more likely, and is all of this an artifact (ed: BrE artefact) of obsolete usage?

First, let me recommend that people who haven't read it click on the link to get to the post on (BrE) Welsh dresser, since it answers some questions. It's one of those sad posts from the beginning of the blog that would have received many more comments had I had readers at the time. Please feel free to comment on it there--it's never too late to comment on this blog's posts and it's one of those posts that gets a lot of hits via search engines, so your comment may help someone nice. Or possibly someone nasty. But if you help someone nasty, you're still being nice. Unless you're aiding and abetting in something nasty, that is. And I don't think anyone could hold you accountable and take away your niceness badge if your comment happens to lead to the Great Welsh Dresser Robbery of 2011 or the exploits of the Countertop Ripper in 2015.

I expect JHM that your rendition/rendering of the pronunciation is a bit misleading in terms of the second vowel. Since the stress is on the first syllable, most people would pronounce it with schwa-type sound. So, it sounds more like the word bird than bard. Like you, the British do not say 'cup-board', so the word is pronounced similarly in AmE and BrE--except for the way in which you'd expect it to differ: in what is done with an /r/ after a vowel.

On the meaning, one of the reasons why one doesn't hear closet much in BrE is because there just aren't many of them. Our current (three-bedroom) home has none. Our last (two-bedroom home) had none. My first (one-bedroom) home here had none. Instead, people generally keep their clothes in free-standing wardrobes, which move from house to house with them. (I have met/needed this beast only once in my dozen or so past American abodes.) Most Americans will be familiar with the furniture sense of the word just from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe--but I'm not sure that all reading the book would recogni{s/z}e that the wardrobe isn't a closet. Closets are becoming more popular in the UK in new-build/remodel(l)ed homes.

But that aside, BrE has held on to other meanings of closet to a greater degree/longer than AmE has. The original meaning was 'a private room' and this has been extended in various ways to refer to small rooms in general or small rooms of particular types. The OED tells me that this meaning is (or was when that entry was written) common in the North of England, Scotland and Ireland, where bed-closet means 'a small bedroom'. That meaning seems to have gone by the wayside in AmE, probably because there are so many storage-closets there. So, the small rooms in American homes are for storage, the word for small rooms closet is applied to them, there are no smaller rooms in the homes, so it's odd to refer to bigger rooms as closets too, and eventually people no longer reali{s/z}e that they could be using the word for other types of rooms. At least, that looks like a likely progression of events.

This has some knock-on effects idiom-wise. A skeleton in the closet (which goes back at least to the 19th century in BrE) transmogrifies into a skeleton in the cupboard in modern BrE, while it stays in the closet in AmE. On the other hand, (orig. AmE) come out of/be in the closet (as gay, etc.) has been imported directly into BrE. One can find a few instances of come out of the cupboard or come out of the wardrobe (as gay) on UK websites but they're few and far between. It's possible, though, that the imagery for the two is not quite the same in AmE and BrE minds. Do Americans imagine the closet-dweller as hunched among hangers and clothes and shoes and British people imagine them as just being in a small, private room? I imagine that the range of imaginings on an individual level vary a lot no matter where one lives.

Some types of closets in AmE are cupboards in BrE (or vice versa), such as a broom closet/cupboard. But this discussion reminds me that RMWG (another of my frequent, initial[l]ed correspondents) wrote a long time ago:

My American colleague is having problems with the concept of airing cupboards. I have done my best to explain, but as an American who presumably now has experience of them, perhaps you could do better.

Airing cupboards are called the same thing in the US, there are just far fewer of them. I got to know them in old houses in New England. More Americans would have a (non-airing) linen closet, which in BrE would be a linen cupboard.

On our recent trip to the US, Better Half didn't know what I meant when I said that I wanted to give a donation to the local food closet, which is run by a friend of our family. Food closet is essentially the same as (orig. AmE) food bank, the term that has come to be used in the UK (and is still used in the US too). I read with some surprise the Swindon Food Bank's claim that food banks are a 'ground-breaking concept'--since they've been around for decades in the US. But the first one in the UK was founded only in 1999.

Of course, closet is also found in the BrE term water closet, but please go back here to discuss that.

Back to JHM, he followed up his first email with:

[...] my reading has introduced me to the boxroom which, aside from their being convenient places to try to hide potentially incriminating evidence, seem to answer to an American's description of a closet. Is boxroom still in use? is it readily recognizable, if not commonplace?

I've never come across box(-)room in the wild, and the OED defines it only as 'a room for storing boxes, trunks, etc.'. It looks like it has developed in meaning a little bit, judging from this exchange on Gumtree:

> Hi, I'm currently looking for a place to live in London, and I'm simply wondering what a "box room" is?
>> very small room often with no window.
>>>or it can simply mean a very small single room, where you can just [s]queeze a bed & small desk or bedside table in - I'd ask about the window for each property - as I've never looked at a box room that didn't have a window personally, but I can see how in Cities that could apply! - I expect people try to rent out broom/laundry cupboards as commutor [sic] "bedpods"
>>>>studio flat for £180 per week in zone 1 or 2 [link added for clarification--ed.]

In sum, I'd have to say that it's not a closet in the AmE sense and is not used all that much for storage rooms these days. Better Half adds that he gets the connotation of 'no windows' with box room, and that the adjective boxy is applied to rooms to mean that there's no room to swing a cat. (Not that good-conscienced, vegetarian BH has ever tried the cat-swinging bit.) To my AmE ears, a boxy room would just be one that has only 90-degree angles and probably walls of a uniform size.

Since we were corresponding at Thanksgiving time last year, JHM added:

As a seasonal bonus question, I wonder if you could discuss the use of the word larder in BrE [...]. I recognize the word, but don't have any idea how I might use it. There is the pantry, a small closet for dry goods, and the aforementioned cupboard, and the refrigerator (which seems to me what is referred to by larder in my stories. My grandfather would have used an ice box before refrigerators, but larder brings to my mind images of a cave, or walk-in refrigerator (perhaps since it sounds a bit like lair, I couldn't say). Does modern BrE have larders? What are they?

As the name hints at, larders were originally for storing bacon or other meats in the pre-refrigeration days. It is still used by extension for a large cupboard where food is stored. So, some old homes may have larders, which should be cooler than the rest of the house. (E.g. they may be on a side of the house that gets no sun or may have stone or porcelain parts to help keep the temperature down.) There's some information on BrE dialectal terms for larder in this Wikipedia entry. These days, one hears it in contexts like raid the larder, used like raid the refrigerator to mean something like 'get snacks'.

AmE ice box (or icebox) is still sometimes heard, having shifted its meaning from a literal 'box with ice' to 'refrigerator'. It's what my grandparents usually called the fridge. In some AmE dialects ice chest is used--though for many people that would refer to an insulated (orig. AmE) cooler (BrE: cold/cool box and these days one often gets cool bags--which reminds me, I need to get one. How about this one?). I can't imagine that there are many people under 60 years old using these terms for refrigerators--but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. One does still see/hear it in the names of certain sweet recipes.

As a cultural aside, Americans might wonder how the British live without built-in storage space. (UK houses also rarely have basements and residents may not have much--or any--access to an attic.) The answer is simple: they generally keep less stuff. I'm always reminded of this when I visit the US and see the seasonal stuff that a lot of people decorate their homes with. During our August visit, the shops there were already full of Hallowe'en (BrE) tat like this and plenty of people in my hometown decorate their porches with an ever-changing display of seasonal flags or banners like these. Some have special sets of china or linens for Christmas as well as decorations for every room and the great outdoors. One just doesn't see all this much in the UK. Where would you put it when it's out of season? Rather than sticking something that has outlived its usefulness or stylishness into a cupboard, closet or attic, a lot of UK residents would drop it by the nearest (or dearest-to-them) (BrE) charity shop/(AmE) thrift store. People often brought in single items or small bags of things to the shop where I used to work and we keep a constant 'Oxfam bag' going in the house--whereas I think Americans usually do their charity-giving after bigger clear-outs--often just before moving (house) or after dying (in which case they get out of doing most of the packing themselves). I must admit that some gifts I've received from some Americans (who do not appreciate that I have nowhere to put that cute/funny/weird thing that made them think of me--our place is smaller than a single floor of their three-stor(e)y+basement+garage houses) have gone straight to the charity shop. But not yours, of course. I cherish that. It is just so really, really extra cute and weird.