Separated by a Common Language

I've been unwell (which is a very BrE way to put it, see this old guest post) a lot this winter, which seems to be the price one pays for procreating. They say that minor illnesses are good for developing children's immune systems, so I try not to resent the germs that infect poor little Grover. But I supposedly have a developed immune system. Shouldn't I be immune to some of these preschool bugs?  At least our norovirus kept us away from the preschool this week, when Erythema infectiosum has been going around. Or, as the note to parents said, slapped-cheek disease. Never heard of it? Neither had I. A little research showed that the more common nickname for it in AmE is fifth disease. That didn't really help either.  All in all, it sounds like a fairly pathetic entry into the childhood illnesses roster. (The child illustrating the infection's Wikipedia page looks like he's having a pretty good time with it!)

Before the stomach bug, it was a bad cold that had downed Grover and me. Both since my last blog post. (Better Half stays curiously well. Maybe I don't have a British-enough immune system.) Pity us!

In fact, you should pity any expat or immigrant with a minor ailment (or [BrE] the dreaded lurgy), because the one thing you want when you're feeling (chiefly BrE) grotty is the comforts of childhood--which are thin on the ground when one is separated from one's childhood by miles, oceans and passport controls, not to mention the decades. When I'm ill, I want two things, which, in my home culture, are known to have magical-medicinal properties: cold, flat ginger ale and chicken soup.

The ginger ale can be achieved. Saint Better Half only had to go to three shops before finding some.  Here, it goes by the BrE name American ginger ale, which I find amusing because (a) where I come from, we think of it as Canadian, (b) I can see no other kind of ginger ale for sale, so why do they need the adjective? One can only guess that it's to distinguish it from ginger beer, a much spicier drink, which is far more common in the UK than ginger ale (which in the UK is thought of as a mixer and not a drink in its own right). I can feel a tangent coming on. Whoops, here we go... Ginger ale consumption in the US is fairly region-specific. I come from the kind of place (the northeast) where it's a drink that you can buy cold in a single-serving bottle from a (orig. AmE) convenience store/(BrE) corner shop, but this isn't true throughout the US. And if there is a down-home 'American' ginger ale, then it's not the stuff that's used as a mixer. The Canadian mixer type is 'pale, dry' ginger ale (like this Schweppes or Canada Dry). But there is also 'golden' ginger ale, which is darker, heavier and gingerier (more like a traditional ginger beer). This is rarer in the US and even more regional. You'll know if you're in one of the regions for it if the names Vernor's or Blenheim mean anything to you (or a few others...see Wikipedia).  At any rate, it's the dry stuff that one wants if one's had a (more BrE than AmE) tummy bug. Because ginger is good for nausea, you know. It should have lots of ice, so that it gets watery and flat and rehydrates you without causing any more gastrointestinal upset.  But I live in England with a man for whom ice trays are one of those mysterious plastic things that come with a fridge yet have no clear connection to it, so I water mine down with water straight from the (BrE) tap/(AmE) faucet. Hey, I'm not well. I'm desperate.

Hm, over 600 words and I haven't even started to get to the point of this post. A record? Probably not.

The point is the soup.

See, we Americans know that chicken soup is the cure for the common cold. And, when you're recovering from a stomach virus, a nice chicken soup is a good second foray (after toast) back into the land of the digesting.  But, of course, you can't make it yourself. You're sick, after all. Stay in bed. And who wants to cook a whole chicken when no one feels much like eating? This is what the (orig. AmE) can-opener was invented for.  

It is perfectly possible to find 'chicken soup' in the UK. The problem is finding the kind that is good for a cold. Send your English (and vegetarian) husband out in the rain to buy a (AmE) can/(BrE) tin, and he will come home with five kinds of wrong before you send him out again whispering cock-a-leekie to himself.  The tins/cans of wrong will include various cream-based, coconut-based, curry-based concoctions--not what an ailing American soul needs.

The problem, I have come to understand, is prototypes.

So here comes the linguistics. Soup in either British or American English will include puréed and strained things like tomato soup, things with lots of cream in them, broths like the cock-a-leekie to the right, with pieces of meat and vegetable. All these things come within the boundaries of the category 'soup' in English. But categories have more than boundaries (and those boundaries are often 'fuzzy'. Yes, that's the technical term). Categories, as represented in our minds, also have peaks...or cent{er/re}s...or cent{er/re}s that are peaks. Pick a metaphor that works for you.  That cent(e)ry peak or peaky cent{er/re} is known as the prototype of the category, and a particular thing (like cock-a-leekie) is deemed to be part of a category (like SOUP) if it is close enough to/has enough in common with the prototype.  To quote a fine reference book on the matter:

According to one view, a prototype is a cluster of properties that represent what members of the category are like on average (e.g. for the category BIRD, the prototype would consist of properties such as ‘lays eggs’, ‘has a beak’, ‘has wings’, ‘has feathers’, ‘can fly’, ‘chirps’, ‘builds nests’ etc.).  Category members may share these properties to varying degrees—hence the properties are not necessary and sufficient as in the classical model, but instead family resemblances.  In the alternative approach, the mental representation of a concept takes the form of a specific, ideal category member (or members), which acts as the prototype (e.g. for BIRD, the prototype might be a representation of a specific robin or sparrow).

In other words, when deciding whether or not something belongs to the BIRD category, one measures its birdiness against some (possibly very abstract) notion of an ideal bird.  Now, it's reasonable to believe that there might be some room for dialectal variation in what the prototype of a particular category is. But we have to be careful here--it's not just a matter of what is more frequent locally that determines what the prototype is.  Chickens and ducks might be the most common birds down on the farm, yet the farmer will not treat them as if they are the prototype against which 'birdiness' should be judged--that hono(u)r stays with the birds that (BrE) tick/(AmE) check more of the 'bird' boxes like 'can fly' and 'chirps'.

As far as I know, not much work has been done on regional variation in prototypes. The only example I can think of is a small study by Willett Kempton (reported in John Taylor's Linguistic Categorization) on Texan versus British concepts of BOOT, showing that even though both groups considered the same range of things to be boots, there was variation in their ideas of what constituted a central member of the BOOT category, with the Texan prototype extending further above the ankle than the British one.

Though I've not done the psychological tests that would tell us for sure, I'm pretty sure that the American SOUP prototype is along the lines of this:

a warm broth with pieces of meat, vegetables, and/or starchy things (e.g. noodles, barley, rice, matzo balls) in it

And the English one is more along the lines of this:

a warm, savo(u)ry food made from vegetables and possibly meat that have been well-cooked and liquidi{s/z}ed

 These are not the definitions of soup, but the core exemplars of what belongs to the SOUP category, from which the 'soupiness' of other foods is measured. So, each culture has soups that don't conform to these ideals, but they nevertheless have enough in common with them (e.g. being liquid, considered food rather than drink, containing vegetables) to also be called soup.  The differences in the prototypes might have some effects on the boundaries of the category. So, for instance, since the English prototype has more emphasis on liquidi{s/z}ation, you'd expect the extension of the word soup to tolerate less in the way of (orig. AmE) chunky pieces than the AmE use of the word, which is stemming from a prototype that likes pieces and therefore will tolerate bigger ones (see point 3 below).

My experiential evidence for the differences in prototype are as follows:

1. American dictionaries (American Heritage, Merriam-Webster) explicitly mention the likelihood of solid pieces of food in soup, while British ones (Collins, Oxford) don't.
2. The soup of the day in English restaurants is very often a puree. In US restaurants, that's much more rare--the people want stuff in their soup.
3. Some of the things I have made and called 'soup' have been met with a puzzled "that's more of a stew, isn't it?" from the Englishpeople I've served it to.
4. Some of the most common soups in England are generally smooth: leek and potato, tomato (often 'tomato and basil', which to me is like eating pasta sauce with a spoon), carrot and coriander. Whereas American soups are often full of solid things: chicken noodle, beef and barley, vegetable (which brings us to...)
5. Order 'vegetable soup' in England and it will almost certainly be smooth. Order it in the US and it will almost certainly be a broth with diced vegetables. 

But this could be more rigorously tested, so I mention here that dialectal differences in prototypes might be an interesting area for a student dissertation project to cover.  (Are any of our second years reading this?)

Two more things to cover before I go. (I must be feeling better...I haven't collapsed in a heap yet.)

First, notice that I've been saying 'English' rather than 'British' when talking about the prototype differences. The two most famous Scottish soups, cock-a-leekie and Scotch broth, are broths with (more BrE) bits in them, so the prototype might be different up there.

Which brings us to broth. It's a word found in both AmE and BrE, but in AmE it basically means BrE (but also AmE) stock--that is, a liquid made by cooking things in water, then straining the things out. In BrE, it can be used to mean a stock with stuff in it (hence Scotch broth).  So, when I've expressed my longing for a more American-style soup to an Englishperson, I've been told "oh, you mean a broth". But AmE also has bouillon, which is again broth, but I'd call it bouillon if I were drinking it out of a mug (as I used to have to do in the days when I had to go on clear liquid diets a lot. I'm not the healthiest character), especially if I'd made it with a (AmE) bouillon cube (or powder), which in BrE would be a stock cube (or, more colloquially, an Oxo cube--the dominant brand).

I'm going to stop there and go to bed, trying not to think about how much easier my life would be if I could write this many words in grant proposals in an evening.  That way lies insomnia.

P.S. [Jan 2024]  Here's another American take on stock v broth, which doesn't work so well in BrE. From All Recipes: Soups and Stews magazine.

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

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

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

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. David Eddyshaw said,

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

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

According to some stories of the origins of Boxing Day (a public holiday in the UK and many Commonwealth countries), the servant-having classes would box up their Christmas leftovers and give them to the servants, who would have the day off. So, in the spirit of leftoverness, here are some random observations from this trip to the US that relate to previous blog entries. But let's not carry the metaphor too far; I don't think that blog writers are the masters to servant readers. It's almost the other way (a)round on this blog.

Leftover #1: The July entry on candy/sweets led to some discussion in the comments about which British (BrE) sweets/(AmE) candies are most similar to American Smarties (as opposed to the chocolate Smarties found in the UK, Canada and elsewhere). I found a roll of Smarties (pictured right) in my parents' pantry and forced a taste test on Better Half. His verdict: "It has the chalky texture of a Parma Violet, and the taste of a Love Heart (AmE generic name = Conversation Hearts). May I spit it out now?"

Leftover #2: High-waisted trousers/pants are not as hard to find in the US as in the UK (and one can get them in natural fib{re/er}s here too!). I was reminded of the question "How long does it take to lose one's instincts about one's native dialect?" when wandering around Macy's in the local mall. When I saw the sign directing shoppers to MEN'S PANTS, my first instinct was to titter. The resulting crisis of dialectal identity was cut short by the next line on the sign, which utterly puzzled me: MEN'S FURNISHINGS. According to the thesaurus in the Free Dictionary, this refers to 'the dry goods sold by a haberdasher'. This department store has only become a Macy's since I was last here, so I'm quite sure that the sign is new, but the phrase sounds old-fashioned. Checking on the web, I find that it's used at some 'better' US department stores, including Nordstrom, where the heading "Men's Furnishings" covers "Accessories, Dress Shirts, Sleepwear and Robes [= BrE dressing gowns], Underwear and Socks". It seems to mean 'the clothing that a suit-wearer needs, besides a suit'. (Although shoes have a separate heading, not under 'Men's Furnishings' or 'Accessories'.) Searching for this on .uk sites, I mostly find US sources, and while the American Heritage Dictionary includes "furnishings Wearing apparel and accessories," the OED does not have such specific senses, the closest being "Unimportant appendages; mere externals." So, I think that we can conclude that this is an Americanism--but do let me know if you have evidence to the contrary. The phrase women's furnishings is much rarer.

Leftover #3: My two-year-old nephew received for Christmas a toy kitchen with toy groceries. His mother read the label of a tube-shaped item and asked "What the heck are 'chocolate digestives'?", leading to our discovery that these American-bought toy groceries (made in China) "came from" a British supermarket: Sainsbury's. I went through the (more BrE) packet and while 21 of the labels were understandable in AmE, 11 of them were either for products not found in the US (mushy peas!) or had names that don't work in AmE, such as mince (= AmE ground beef), macaroni cheese (= AmE macaroni and cheese), orange lollies (=AmE popsicles), non-biological (= a type of laundry detergent, 'non-biological' is the only product description given on the front of the box--so you'd have to know that it's a detergent descriptor). Could this be considered to be British cultural imperialism, off-setting the American type?


Happy Boxing Day!

Mark Liberman over on Language Log has blogged about the following sentence, which appeared in the Guardian today:

Quite who Fatah al-Islam are, or where they came from, is a matter of dispute.

Liberman finds the sentence-initial quite who very strange, preferring exactly who or just who. He suspects that it's BrE, though he shows through a search for these structures in the Guardian archives that quite who is the least common of the three even in BrE.

Quite who is no doubt less common than Just who or Exactly who, but it may be more common in speech than in writing. I approached Better Half on his way out of the shower this morning and asked him what he thought of Quite who he is is a mystery and Quite who does he think he is? His immediate reply was that they were fine things to say, but that they'd sound better spoken than they'd look written. (Then he gave me one of his 'Can I go now?' looks.)

To me, quite who sounds a bit worse than quite why, so I did a little investigation of this on my lunch hour. I haven't figured out how Liberman searched for just sentence-initial examples, so my methodology here is probably a bit different. I've searched for the following phrases on the Guardian website (representing BrE) and on the Boston Globe website (representing AmE), then looked at the first 50 and counted how many were sentence-initial. I'm counting as 'sentence initial' only those that start with an upper case letter or are preceded by a colon or semi-colon and those that are immediately preceded by just a discourse particle of some sort (e.g. Well, quite why that is...). There are many more that are clause-initial in subordinate clauses or that are complement clauses, but I'm not counting those. (*Some of these figures are more reliable than others. In particular, the just what figures include some things that weren't really sentences, but noun phrases, e.g. Just what the doctor ordered! Just what I didn't need! But scanning for capital Js was all I had time for.)

phrase	BrE hits		BrE S-initial	AmE hits	AmE S-initial
quite how	452		42%	21	4%
exactly how	1160		14%	1650	10%
just how	2770		32%	3720	16%
quite why	109		72%	8	12.5%
exactly why	227		6%	380	6%
just why	114		34%	89	30%
quite what	419		16%	146	0
exactly what	3940		0	5360	8%
just what*	1140		20%	2300	24%
quite who	7		43%	6	0
exactly who	261		8%	232	16%
just who	1030		48%	223	32%

What's striking here (or should that be quite what's striking here?) is how much more sentence-initial quite we see in BrE. But then, almost all of the percentages are greater for BrE than AmE. My theory is that the Guardian is more prone to ask (rhetorical) questions than the Globe (since newspapers here identify more with political positions than they do in the States, and therefore aren't shy about having leading questions with telling presuppositions here and there). But the differences between the BrE quite percentages and the AmE ones are pretty severe, which seems to support Liberman's hypothesis that sentence-initial quite is a Briticism.

Liberman goes on to say:

What I can't figure out is why Americans should object to "quite who" in subject position but not elsewhere. It seems to have something to do with polarity -- thus my judgments are:

I don't know exactly who is responsible.
I know exactly who is responsible.
I don't know quite who is responsible.
*I know quite who is responsible.
...
Do British speakers have different rules about the scope of polarity-licensing operators? Or is (this sense of) quite not really a polarity item for our British cousins, despite the evidence in the table above? Perhaps some well-informed and sociolinguistically-inclined syntactician or semanticist will enlighten this befuddled phonetician.

When referring to polarity here, Liberman is talking about how certain words have to go or not-go with negative words like not or nobody. (For example, already goes in positive sentences, but it has to be yet in negative ones: *I haven't slept already. So already is a negative polarity item.) I favo(u)r the 'quite is not as polar in BrE as in AmE' hypothesis.

Quite differs in many ways between BrE and AmE, and maybe some of these are related to Liberman's puzzle. First, there's the use of quite in BrE as a marker of agreement. Here's Robert Burchfield in Fowler's on the topic:

quite 1. A colloquial use that often puzzles or amuses visitors to Britain is the use of quite (or quite so) to express agreement (= 'I quite agree') with a previous declarative statement: e.g. 'The minister should have resigned.' 'Quite.' Other ways of expressing agreement exists (...), but quite, quite so and rather are the ones that are likely to be regarded as distinctly British by visitors.

Now, I think of quite as being the way that a BrE speaker dismisses someone else while paying lip-service to agreement. Here's the kind of thing I'm thinking of, from a Pirates of the Caribbean fan fiction site:

"Seishin, we should really get moving if you intend to finish this business soon" said her first mate, Victor, from the docks.
"Quite" she said shortly. Ignoring the plank, she jumped of the rail and landed neatly next to him.

In this context, the quite-sayer knows that Victor is right, but probably doesn't want to hear it from him (either because he interrupted her thinking about something else, or because she doesn't like her first mate bossing her around). Agreement quite is certainly not always said in a 'short' way, but it's a stereotypical way of using it.

Second, there's the fact that quite is often (but not always, the story is complicated--see Fowler's!) used to weaken the force of an adjective in BrE, while it strengthens the force in AmE. So, a sentence like that book was quite interesting is probably enthusiastic praise in AmE, but probably a damp squib of praise in BrE.
Now, these are not (quite!) the senses of quite that are operating in Liberman's examples, nevertheless I'm wondering whether some of these facts are somehow connected.

If there is one arena in which Better Half is not my better, it's spelling. It's not that he's a particularly bad speller, it's just that I like to think of myself as a particularly good one. So, at least a couple of years ago, I rolled my eyes and corrected him when he wrote an interjection meaning 'stop, wait!' as woah! That I can remember correcting BH some years later is indicative of the sadness of my life and my need to always be right, which is pretty hard to be if you're me. I suppose I was reliving 'times I've been right and BH has been wrong' because of another instance of my absolute disability when it comes to accents. I spent some time the other day insisting that a food critic on the television was French, when, in fact, he's Irish. He only dresses French. So, I cling to my 'being right' memories with the tenacity of a starving octopus.

Then I read an article in The Guardian's review section (which I now can't find, so here's a link to an earlier article in the Guardian--by the outgoing poet laureate, no less) that contained a woah. As has been mentioned here before, The Guardian (or The Grauniad) has something of a reputation for bad spelling and typographical errors, so I remarked to myself that BrE writers seem to have a hard time spelling whoa.

Then I was in an English airport and I saw an ad(vert) (I wish I'd taken a photo, but I was too airport-grumpy at the time to think of it--it might've been for Phones4You), that shouted WOAH! WOAH! WOAH! in red and white. At that point, I had to start planning my admission of wrongness to BH.

(I'm sure many halves of long-standing and happy couples are thinking that I did not have to admit that I was wrong. Since BH neither saw the ad(vert) nor remembered the time I corrected him, what was to be gained by interfering with the well-developed roles of She Who Is Right and He Who Must Be Corrected? But, you see, I had to admit I'd been wrong because I have in the past claimed that admitting-when-I'm-wrong is something that I am happy to do, and so in order to prove myself right I have to prove myself wrong--on a regular basis.)

So, my story of whoa (and woah):

The OED lists woah as a variant of woa which is a variant of whoa, which is a variant of the interjection who (not to be confused with the pronoun who--the interjection is pronounced as wo--which is also a variant of all these), which came into the language as a variant of ho! Here are the dates of the OED's quotations for these spellings of the pronunciation /wo/ when it means 'stop!':

who c.1450-1859
wo 1787-1894
woa 1840-1892
woah 1856 (one example--included under the headword woa)
whoa 1843-1898 (but, of course, we know it's still used)

It's interesting that the OED lists woa as a variant of whoa when it has earlier evidence for woa--it implies that whoa is the more standard form. We shouldn't read much into the lack of recent examples of any of these--it looks like nothing has been added to these entries since the first edition.

I don't remember ever seeing the woah spelling (I'd want to pronounce it as two syllables: wo-ah, like Noah) before moving to England, but it's a very popular spelling here. Searching just UK sites, one gets ~170,000 hits for woah and ~255,000 for whoa. Searching some American sites, one gets 33 woahs to 461 whoas on .mil and 8,800 to 39,000 on .edu (the first woahs that came up on the .edu search were quoted from a BBC site, though). Or, if you'd like to see some bar graphs showing US and UK usage of the spellings, try this.

(Can you believe I started this post on the 6th of April? Alas and alack--I wish I had a solid month to do nothing but catch up on this blog.)

Was out with my friend the Blinder tonight, talking about my plan to re-establish a gym routine and improve my diet. (Let's see how long that lasts.) I need to make my plan as numbers-driven as possible, and need to involve Better Half in the process in order to discourage his practice of showing me how much he loves me by making me more food. (Today I was packed two lunches.) So, I said that we need a new scale, as the one we have now (which I've had since 1987--it's lived on three continents) measures in pounds, whereas BH understands weights better in stones. The Blinder said, "There's one for your blog," and I replied "I've already done it!" But guess what? I haven't! All this writing I do is just running together; I've written about scales in the lexical semantics textbook I'm writing. The exciting implication of all that is that I can basically cut-and-paste bits from that manuscript and call it an exciting preview of my forthcoming textbook. Recycling! It's good! The only problem here is that the bit that I'm cutting and pasting is part of a larger discussion of noun countability. You'll just have to buy the book to make sense of it all, won't you now? [I'll paste in links to the catalog(ue) entry when it's finally published. Here I am, four years later, adding that link.]

Historically, the name for a weighing device is scales. It is plural because scales had two clear parts in which one thing was weighed against another. So, they looked like this:

(a)
Modern scales don’t involve balancing things in two plates (photo from here):

(b)AmE has changed along with the scales, so that item (b) is usually called a bathroom scale, but scales is still used for the older kind. In BrE and AusE, however, it is still called scales, no matter whether it has two salient parts or not. When Anna Wierzbicka (Semantics: primes and universals) asked Australians why the word is plural, they answered that it was because there are lots of little numbers on the contraption. This seems to be a case of the word leading the thinking about an object. That is, because they say scales instead of scale, some people think about scales as being 'made up' of little numbers because they need to make sense of the fact that this singular object gets a plural name. Wierzbicka also notes that Australian English has shifted from speaking of a pair of scales, to a set of scales (for (b)). There, it looks like the name scales was broadened to cover (b) as well as (a), but when people started to think of numbers (of which there are many) rather than the plates on which measurable bits are put (which come in pairs in (a)-type scales) as the 'plural' part of scales, they shifted to thinking of scales as sets, rather than pairs.

Hm, aren't you just dying to take a lexical semantics course now? Or at least in the market for a textbook? Hey, maybe I can get you a discount...