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American words (most) British folk don't know

Sep 27, 2020

Some years ago a survey went (a)round from the University of Ghent on English vocabulary knowledge. I recall doing the survey and I believe I shared it on social media. Perhaps you did it too. Last week I read the published results: Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas by Marc Brysbaert and colleagues.

The point of the research was to establish how well known various words are in order to help psychologists (etc.) choose words for experiments. I was pleased to see that it included a table showing words that differed most for AmE and BrE speakers. So, my plan is to write two blog posts where I go through the lists of unevenly known words and see what I can say about them (or what I have already said about them). I'm starting with the words that were much more familiar to Americans and I'll put them into categories, rather than going down the list as published.

Here's the (half) table. (Sorry it's not very clear. All the words will be mentioned below.) The unfortunate headings 'Pus' and 'Puk' mean 'prevalence for US respondents' and 'prevalence for UK respondents'. These are not the prevalence scores that one can find in the data files from the paper (which are z-scores with positive and negative values), though, so I think they are just percentages—i.e. 90% of US respondents knew manicotti, but only 16% of UK ones did. The main point about them is that the scores are much higher for American respondents than British ones.

Many of these words are relatively unknown in the UK because they refer to things that are not common in the UK. So, less linguistic difference than cultural difference. Many reflect the US's ethnic diversity.

Glorious food

The Italian American angle

The first two are pasta-related. Manicotti are a kind of large tube pasta, which are stuffed, usually with ricotta, to make the dish pictured to the right. The name is used both for the empty pasta and for the dish. It comes from the Italian for 'little sleeves', but is, according to Wikipedia, "an Italian-American dish". BrE speakers are more likely to know the very similar pasta/dish canneloni, which is also found in the US and Italy. The difference? "Manicotti tubes are ridged, larger and slightly thicker. Cannelloni tubes are smooth, a touch smaller and slightly thinner."*

Ziti is a smaller tubular pasta. Size-wise it is between penne (popular in both countries) and rigatoni. Rigatoni is what my family traditionally had for Christmas Eve dinner, and I usually have to explain that word to BrE speakers as well. (The study confirms that Americans are much more likely to know rigatoni.) Wikipedia notes that "Ziti in the US is most commonly associated with the Italian-American dish of baked ziti. In Sicily it is traditionally served at a wedding feast." For more on pasta more generally, click through to this old post.

Provolone is an Italian cheese that you can get in the UK, but you just don't see as much as in the US. I like it on hot pastrami sandwiches, but it's usually in Italian dishes. Whether you pronounce the e at the end (when using the word in English) is a matter of personal preference—or possibly regional affiliation.

Fresh-water foods

Tilapia is a fresh-water fish that is apparently easy to farm. Its popularity in the US is fairly recent—I only learned it on a trip back to there maybe 15 years ago. Wikipedia says: "Tilapia is the fourth-most consumed fish in the United States dating back to 2002". It's originally from Africa, and the name is a Latini{s/z}ation of a Setswana word for 'fish'. Apparently you can get tilapia in the UK, but it's just not as common. My guess is that an island nation has less need of fresh-water fishes to eat.

Crawdad is a synonym for crayfish (or crawfish), which are abundant and popular as a food in some parts of the US. The word crayfish is used in both UK and US, and crawfish will have come over from the UK. The OED's etymology is helpful:

Etymology: Middle English crevice , -visse , < Old French crevice (13–15th cent. in Littré); compare crevis (masculine), crevicel diminutive in Godefroy; in Old French also escrevisse , modern French écrevisse , Walloon grèvèse , Rouchi graviche (Littré); < Old High German crebiȥ Middle High German krebeȥ , a derivative of stem *kraƀ- in krab-bo crab n.¹
In Southern Middle English the second syllable was naturally confounded with vish (written viss in Ayenbite), ‘fish’; whence the corrupted forms [...], and the later crey-, cray-fish. The variants in cra- go back to Anglo-Norman when the stress was still on second syllable, and the first liable to vary between cre- and cra-; they are the origin of the modern craw-fish, now used chiefly in U.S.

So, the craw- came from the UK and later was mostly forgotten there. The -dad seems to have been added in the US as a "fanciful" variation, according to Oxford. Their example sentence includes more synonyms:

‘Whether you know them as mudbugs, ditch bugs, river lobsters, crawlybottoms, crawdads, or crawfish, anyone who has spent time in streams is familiar with crayfish.’

The Mexican-Spanish angle

I've covered (AmE) garbanzo bean versus (BrE/AmE) chick pea in the Big List of Vegetables.

Tomatillos are a member of the physalis family that look kind of like green tomatoes with husks. (Wikipedia gives Mexican husk tomato as an alternative name. The GloWBE corpus only has that one in South Asian countries.) You don't see these much in UK. For the type of physalis you frequently see in the UK, here are some old tweets of mine.

A tamale consists of a leaf wrapped around a filling—often a corn husk around a maize dough called masa.

Other foods, other cuisines

Kabob is simply a different spelling from what BrE speakers are used to. In BrE it's usually kebab. Since it comes from Arabic (and other languages that got it from Arabic), it's not surprising that the spelling varies—that happens easily when different people are moving a word from one alphabet to another. The cultural place of this food is very different, though. Americans tend to think of shish kabobs—little pieces of food (especially meat) on a stick, typically cooked over fire. In the UK, one often thinks of doner kebabs, which AmE speakers might call gyros, getting the idea from Greek rather than Turkish. That's the compacted meat cooked on a big spit, then sliced off for putting in a pit(t)a bread or similar. In the UK, that kind of kebab is stereotypically found at the end of a night of binge drinking.

(Late addition: here's a corpus view. Note that K-Bob is not a spelling of this food. It's a prolific commenter's handle on a political website. Kubab and Kibib are names of other things as well.)

In AmE hibachi is usually a tabletop (AmE) grill/(BrE) barbecue or a kind of iron hot plate used in Japanese restaurants. The word comes from Japanese, but has shifted in meaning. Wikipedia can tell you more.

Kielbasa means 'sausage' in Polish, but in AmE it refers to a specific type of sausage, which Wikipedia tells me "closely resembles the Wiejska sausage". You can find the word kielbasa in the UK in Polish shops, but it remains to be seen how many of these will survive Brexit.

Goober (or goober pea) is a regional (mostly southern) word for

the peanut. It came into English from a Bantu language (perhaps Kikongo or Kimbundu), brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. Americans who don't use this as a word for peanuts will still know it as a brand name for chocolate-covered peanuts—a mainstay of (AmE) movie theater/(BrE) cinema concession stands.
Goober can also refer to a foolish person—but that might have a different etymology. (Goober Pyle was a kind but simple character on The Andy Griffith Show—which still shows in repeats on US television.)

Medicine / disease

Two of the items in the list are generic drug names. I've written about acetaminophen (BrE paracetamol) in another post. Albuterol is a bronchodilator (asthma inhaler) known in the UK as Salbutamol, but I'd bet most BrE folk are more familiar with the trade name Ventolin. In the UK, this comes in a blue inhaler, while preventative inhalers' sleeves are mostly brown, so they're often referred to by colo(u)r: take your brown inhaler twice a day and your blue inhaler as needed.

Staph is short for Staphylococcus bacterium. Americans worry about getting staph infections. I'm sure British people do too, but they haven't obsessed about this particular germ enough to it a nickname. (At least, not until MRSA came along. That's is a very severe kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection, but Americans talked about staph infections long before that was in the news.) I remember staph being mentioned a lot in relation to gym mats at school. A partner to staph is strep — which (looking at the data file) is also much, much better known in AmE than BrE. Now I see I've written about both of these germs before. So please have a look at the post on infections for more info!

I'll stick chiggers in this category. They're not a disease, but they feel like one. Chiggers are the larvae of a kind of mite. They burrow under the skin and it itches LIKE HELL. They exist in the UK and some people call them chiggers here, but the word comes up a lot less. Where I'm from, you get chigger "bites" from walking around in grass with bare ankles. There is less cause for walking around in grass with bare ankles in the UK, thanks to fewer lawns and colder weather, so I assume that's why people talk about them less. Wikipedia lists other names for them, which I've looked for in the GloWBE corpus. I give the US/UK (in that order) numbers after the names: berry bugs (1/0), harvest mites (1/2), red bugs (4/1), scrub-itch mites (1/0), and aoutas (0/1). Chigger is the most common name for them in both countries, but with 48 hits in AmE and just 7 in BrE.

Other cultural references

Kwanzaa is an African-American holiday that takes place between Christmas and New Year. I assume that's what Americans were recogni{s/z}ing in kwanza, rather than the Angolan currency.

A sandlot is a piece of undeveloped land. The word is used especially when such land is used as a playing field, e.g. sandlot baseball.

A luau (or lūʻau) is a traditional Hawaiian party with food and entertainment.

And all that's left is...

Conniption. Origin unknown. It means a tantrum, hysterics, a fit of rage, and the like. It's often used in the phrase conniption fit (which means the same thing). Here are a few examples of its use from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

They had a conniption when he starred in a movie
Your mom'd have a conniption fit if she heard you talkin' like that.
wealthy Americans have conniptions at the possibility of a tax increase

--------

So that's that! I'll do the words from other side of the table, known by Brits and not by Americans, in the next post. I won't promise it'll be next week. I might take the weekend off for my birthday!

Labels: food/cooking , holidays , medicine/disease , rituals , sport | 49 comments

Book Week 2019: Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet

Dec 2, 2019

Welcome to the final review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019, I explain what I'm doing. The 'week' has turned out to be eight days. If you're perturbed about that, I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your subscription fees for this blog.

On with the show. Today's book is:

Because Internet

Understanding the new rules of language (US subtitle)
Understanding how language is changing (UK subtitle)

by Gretchen McCulloch
Riverhead, 2019 (N America)
Harvill Secker, 2019 (UK)

Gretchen McCulloch describes herself as an internet linguist: writing about internet language for people on the internet. She actually does a lot more than that, with daily blogging at All Things Linguistic for years and being one half of the Lingthusiasm podcast team and writing on all sorts of linguistic themes for all sorts of publications. So, I expect many readers of this blog will already know her and have heard about this book.

US Cover

I expected Because Internet to be good, knowing Gretchen's work, but I also probably (in my grumpy, middle-aged, oh-do-we-have-to-talk-about-emojis-again? way) expected it to be faddish. There have been too many just-plain-bad, (orig. AmE) jumping-on-the-bandwagon books about emojis, and I've got(ten) a bit sour on the topic.

This book is so much more than I expected it to be.

I should have known better. Having read and heard much of her work, I should have expected that this would be a truly sophisticated approach to language and to general-audience linguistics writing. So far in Book Week 2019, I've recommended the books as gifts for A-level students/teachers, science lovers, and language curmudgeons. This book is good for all those groups and more.

UK cover

The key is in the subtitle(s).* This is not just a book about emojis and autocomplete (and, actually, autocomplete isn't even in the index). This is a book about the relationship between speech and writing and how that's changed with technology. It seamlessly introduces theories of why language changes, how change spreads and how communication works in a time when the potential for change is high and the potential for changes to spread is unprecedented.

That seamless introduction of linguistic concepts is the reason I've started this book from the beginning and not skipped around (unlike for other books in Book Week—where the rule is that I don't have to read the whole book before I start writing about it). In most books about language for non-linguists, I'm able to skim or skip the bit where they talk about the basics of how language works and the classic studies on the topic and the ideas springing from them. McCulloch covers those issues and those studies (the Labovs, the Milroys, the Eckerts), but since this is intertwined with looking at how language is changing in the 21st century—because (of the) internet—it was worth my while to read straight through. The great thing about the language of the internet is: even when it looks really different from non-internet language, it's still illustrating general principles about how language, communication, and society work. But it also shows how society is changing because of technology, particularly in changing who we are likely to interact with or hear from, In the process, it gives a history of the internet that's enlightening even for those of us who've lived through it all. (I've just flipped open to a section about PLATO at the University of Illinois. One of my student jobs was working in a PLATO lab, playing Bugs-n-Drugs [aka Medcenter] while signing people in and out. That game was not good for my hypochondria, but I have awfully fond memories of PLATO.)

Another thing to appreciate about McCulloch's book is how unreactionary it is. She doesn't set up her discussion as "You've heard people say these stupid things about the internet, but here's the TRUTH." (A style of writing that I can be very, very guilty of.) She mostly just makes her case gracefully, based on what the language is doing, rather than reacting to what other people say the language is doing. Rather than 'This, that and the other person say emoji are a new language, but they're not', she just gets on with explaining how emoji fulfil(l) our communicative need to gesture. It's a positive approach that academic linguists will have had trained out of them by the requirements of academic publishing.

This is a bit of a nerdview 'review'. Usually reviews tell you some fun facts from the book they're reviewing, whereas I'm telling you what I've noticed about its information structure. That's because that's what I really look for in books as I prepare to write a new one. In terms of information, in this book you'll learn, among other things:

which "internet generation" you belong to and how your language is likely to be different from other generations'.
what punctuation communicates in texting/chat and how that differs from formal writing
how language change can be traced through studying strong and weak social links and geographic tagging on Twitter

Inevitably, the book is mainly about English, in no small part because English rules the internet. But it does make its way to other languages and cultures—for instance, how Arabic chat users adapted their spelling to the roman alphabet and how emojis are interpreted differently around the world. In the end, she briefly considers whether space is being made for other languages on the internet.

It's a galloping read and you'll learn all sorts of things.

So, on that happy review, I declare Book Week 2019 FINISHED.

* I love the transatlantic change in subtitles, since it completely illustrates the point of chapter 8 of The Prodigal Tongue: that Americans like to talk about language in terms of rules, and Britons in terms of history/tradition. I've also written a shorter piece about my personal experience of it for Zócalo Public Square.

Labels: books , computers | 3 comments

STD, STI

Jul 6, 2016

Is a Manchester sexual health clinic
trying to tell me something?

I just feel that I should say this up front: there is nothing autobiographical about this post. There. Got that out of the way. The topic only came up because I was in a conversation that involved an allusion to leaflets in doctors' (AmE) offices/(BrE) surgeries.

Those leaflets are sometimes about (AmE, old-fashioned) social diseases. In either country it's possible to find references to Sexually Transmitted Diseases or STDs or Sexually Transmitted Infections or STIs. Is there a difference? Not really. To quote one (US) site on the matter:

STI stands for sexually transmitted infection, and many people, mostly the medical community, have begun transitioning from “STD” to “STI” in an effort to clarify that not all sexually transmitted infections turn into a disease. For instance, the vast majority of women who contract HPV (human papilloma virus) will not develop the resulting disease cervical cancer. In fact, most cases of infection will clear up within two years. Additionally, people who use this term believe that it also eliminates some of the shame that’s been associated with the acronym “STD.”

The UK seems to be far ahead of the US in adopting the "new" term.

The GloWBE corpus has about 5 times as many STD(s) in AmE as STI(s), but about 1.2 times as many STIs in BrE as STDs. The numbers for the non-abbreviated forms were not as strongly separated by country, but there were still more sexually transmitted diseases in the US and infections in the UK.

GloWBE is useful because relatively current and country-coded, but it's counting up phrases from the web and there's no guarantee of the Britishness of someone writing a comment on a British news site (etc.). I wanted to check further because the UK numbers weren't as stark as I had expected. The friend in the aforementioned conversation has a nurse for his partner, a (UK) nurse, and his experience/impression was that in the medical profession it is almost always STI in the UK. That's been my impression too.

So, I searched for the terms on the National Health Service (UK) website and found about 4 times as many sexually transmitted infection(s) as sexually transmitted diseases but similar numbers of STI and STD. This seemed to be because almost whenever the NHS site uses the abbreviation, they use both abbreviations, as in "Sexual health testing for people with symptoms or who have had sex with someone who has a confirmed STI/STD" on a list of clinic services. In some cases, when I clicked through on a hit for STD there was no visible STD on the page, just STI. Which is why, boys and girls, it is generally better to use a corpus rather than Google for getting word-frequency counts. Some SEO magic seems to be going on on there.

On the National Institutes of Health (US) website there are twice as many sexually transmitted diseases as sexually transmitted infections.

Was STI coined in the UK? Not necessarily, but it's hard to tell. Only sexually transmitted disease (first citation, 1962) is in the OED. Searching Google Books, I find instances of sexually transmitted infection going back at least as far, but there's no clear separation between US (red) and UK(blue) books at the start of the term's history.

Why has STI caught on more in the UK? Some possibilities:

A more enlightened approach to sexual health?
Better management of terminology due to the dominance of the National Health Service in delivering patient information and treatment?
It fits better with other names for illnesses in the dialect?

In terms of the last point, a first thing to wonder is whether STD is more popular in the US because Americans are more used to calling such things diseases, as in venereal disease. The answer seems to be "no". Venereal disease is and was just as well used in BrE, as far as I can tell.

What about the word infection, is that more common in BrE more generally? The answer is complicated, so I've decided to make that a separate post. It's half-written, so it might even be the next one!

And I leave you with what may be my favo(u)rite disease joke, from Cyanide and Happiness:

Labels: medicine/disease , sex | 46 comments

grammar is not the enemy

May 3, 2016

I'm saddened these days by a lot of things going on in the UK, particularly regarding the current government's treatment of education and healthcare. But, you know, I'm not a Conservative or even a conservative, so it's not surprising I'm not too happy with them. What's moving me to write today is the sadness I feel about aspects of the reaction to what's happening in education.

Spot Lynne's (BrE) barnet in the picture

A bit of background: the Tory (BrE) government/(AmE) administration has made and continues to make many changes to schools and education in England. (The other countries of the UK can do their own thing—and as far as I can tell, they're being more sensible.) The changes include a lot more testing of spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) with more specific and more daunting requirements on grammar at earlier ages. To give a comparison, the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 4-11) mentions grammar (or grammatical) 35 times in 2015, compared with 6 times in 2010.

SPAG testing is just one aspect of sweeping changes to education in England under Secretaries of State for Education Michael Gove (2010-2014) and Nicky Morgan (2014-present), but it is an aspect that has been the focus of much attention and anger.

Our family took part today in the Let Our Kids Be Kids school strike protesting against the year-2 SATs* tests, because we do believe that the current policies are making a mockery of education by focusing on standardi{s/z}ed testing, particularly at (BrE) infant-school level. There is no evidence basis for any of the changes that are being made to education—in fact, all the education research I've seen says that formal education shouldn't start till age 7, that homework doesn't belong in primary years, that academi{s/z}ation does not necessarily help ailing schools (and that it's likely to kill rural primaries), and so on and so forth.

But what worries me sometimes in the rhetoric of the anti-testing movement is anti-grammar sentiments—separate from the anti-testing or anti-early-schooling sentiments. I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside "learning should be fun!" The implicit—and sometimes made explicit—message is that grammar takes the joy out of language. Fun and joy, as far as I'm concerned, are more about teaching than about subject matter. I want to take a moment to say "up with grammar!"

To borrow an analogy from a friend, not wanting your child to learn about grammar [by which I mean: describing how sentences and words are structured] is like not wanting your child to learn about molecules and atoms. Yes, you can happily interact with matter without knowing that it is made up of elements, which are made up of atoms, and that those can combine with others to make all sorts of wonderful things. Not being able to explain the chemistry and physics involved will not stop you from making or enjoying a milkshake. But do you really not want to have a clue that there is more to the world than meets the eye? I've found it very useful to know what I learned at school about matter—even though I grew up and had to discover that there might not be any such thing as electrons. All the same, having a basic knowledge of a model of how matter works makes it easier for me to understand the science I hear about in the news. It helps me understand a little bit better when I read about new medical treatments. It also points out to me how little I know, and makes me a bit more curious about the things I don't know. It helped me learn about the scientific method and encouraged me to wonder at the scales of the universe.

Learning about how language works is like that. Learning about it can lead you to appreciate it more and to be less prejudiced about it, and if you go further with it, you might be able do a lot of things with that knowledge. Speech and language therapists can use it. Teachers can use it. Editors can use it. Cognitive psychologists can use it. Computer programmers and software designers can use it. Having a theory of what language is and how it works — what sentence is, what a word is — has lots of applications and can open up all sorts of other areas for investigation.

As Bas Aarts (of University College London's Survey of English Usage) explains in his response to being a scapegoat for anti-grammarism, any grammatical exercise is a test of a particular model of the grammar of the language. At university level, our students compare models. But we don't present more than one at school level, generally—not for language, not for physics, not (generally) for evolution. A problem in grammar teaching/learning sometimes is that several different models are available and no one's pointed that out, and so concepts from one are mixed up with concepts from another and things stop making sense.

What can you do by learning a single model of a grammar in school? Well, you can have conversations about your language, about other languages, about your writing, about whatever you're reading. Students' lack of metalanguage for talking about language and writing is something I've complained about elsewhere.

Does that need to happen in the early years of school? No. And it doesn't need to be tested in pressure-filled rote ways. But if you are not confident in your (or your school staff's) knowledge of grammar and you don't have the resources (including TIME) to get that knowledge and confidence up, then teaching-to-a-test is what ends up happening.

As I've written about before, grammar teaching has never been very strong in the UK. I don't want to repeat everything I wrote at that blog post (relying a lot on Dick Hudson and John Walmsley's research), so I do recommend clicking on that link. This has left us with a situation where everyone involved in the discussion has different half-developed ideas of what grammar means and which models are relevant. And in that situation, it's really easy to see why people are anti-grammar. Grammar in that case seems like hocus-pocus that's used as a means to keep some kids back. That may be the meaning of the SATs test, but it's not the meaning of grammar.

The only grammar/language teaching to trainee teachers at my UK university was for those who were upgrading themselves from classroom assistant to teacher. (And that programme has since been cancel[l]ed.) It was just assumed that people who had studied literature and had university degrees would be able to teach what an adverb is, should the curriculum ask for grammar. And perhaps back in the day when many of our teachers were trained, there was no inkling of an idea that grammar would be taught at primary level. (Foreign language was made compulsory at primary level in 2010. Many current teachers would not have started their careers with that in mind either.)

In the US, the nature of grammar teaching will vary more as there is more state-by-state variation in curricula. (There is now a national 'Common Core' that is like the UK National Curriculum—but it specifies much less than the National Curriciulum does and the statements about grammar are more about "using standard grammar" than analy{s/z}ing sentences [link is PDF].) I've just checked the website of the Texan university where I last taught in the US (in 1999) and Modern English Grammar is still on the requirements for a Bachelor of Science in Education (English) for middle-school (AmE) grades upward—though now they're allowing people to substitute Introduction to Linguistics for it. (I used to teach both of those—and loved them.) In the US university-level grammar (not linguistics, but grammar) textbooks are big business. In the UK, I've not found a real equivalent to the grammar textbooks we taught with in the US. Again, my older post on grammar teaching covers other aspects of this.

My dream would be for kids to be able to learn about language by using observation, experimentation, discovery, categorization. All that good stuff. Learning how to think, not what to think. The ultimate transferable skill. And while many are working hard to make sure schools have access to the training and confidence to incorporate more linguistic discovery into their work, it seems like an impossible ask at a time when teachers are under an incredible amount of pressure from a government that likes to serve its educational reform with budget cuts.

Another good way to learn about grammar is by learning a language other than your own. Our experience teaching linguistics at university level is the exchange students can out-grammar all our UK-educated home students, because they've had to do metalinguistic thinking—thinking about languages—before. You don't need to learn the language by learning grammar—but being faced with the fact that your language does things differently from others gives insight into what grammar is.

In the meantime, here's a video of the strike rally that we attended today, from the Channel 4 news. The reporter is trying to be clever (I eventually figured out) by naming grammatical constructions he's about to say. It's fair to say, he didn't study much grammar either. (Best bit: when causal connective turns into casual connective. I'm thinking like could be added to the grammar tests as a casual connective.)

But even though I'm slightly taking the mickey out of that reporter, I do think it's not really fair when people pick on grown-ups' inability to answer the test questions. If schools only taught facts and theories that you'd remember as an adult, schooling would be very short indeed. What's important is not whether decades-later-me can explain what an electron is or what the French and Indian War was about or how to tell a preposition from a subordinating construction (ok, maybe I need that one for my job). What's important is

the thinking skills I honed when learning those things
the communication skills I developed in tasks related to those things
the knowledge that any part of the world can be analy{s/z}ed in interesting ways
the echo of those things in my mind, reminding me that things do have names and explanations and I could go look them up if I wanted to

P.S. Lots of other linguists and educationists and other interested people have written a lot of other things about this, but I couldn't take the time to link to them all. Feel free to suggest further reading in the comments!

* The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in the US is for (AmE) college/(BrE) university admissions. Lazily quoting Wikipedia, no one really knows what it stands for in England, as it's variously referred to as: "Statutory Assessment Tests, Standard Attainment Tests,Standardised Achievement Tests and Standard Assessment Tests".
The linguistic note here is that in the UK, it's pronounced as a word: Sats. In the US, the SAT is always S-A-T.

Labels: education , grammar | 38 comments

might of, would of, could of, should of

Feb 4, 2016

A few years ago, The Telegraph ran an article about Americanisms on the BBC—or rather, an article about complaints about Americanisms on the BBC:

Nick Seaton, Campaign for Real Education, said: “It is not a surprise that a few expressions have crept in but the BBC should be setting an example for people and not indulging any slopping Americanised slang.”

(Tangent: I had to look up slopping, which doesn't seem to be used much as an adjective. Is he using the British slang 'dressing in an informal manner' or the American slang for 'gushing; speaking or writing effusively'? Or is slopping here being used as a euphemistic substitution for another word that ends in -ing?)

But (of course!) half of the 'Americanisms' in their closing list of 'Americanisms that have annoyed BBC listeners' weren't Americanisms. One (face up) was first (to the OED's knowledge) used by Daniel Defoe, the Englishman. Another (a big ask) is an Australianism. But one that really bothered me was this:

'It might of been' instead of 'It might have been'

Three reasons it bothered me:

Shouldn't it might of been be corrected to it might've been rather than it might have been? That is, of is a misspelling of the similar-sounding 've here. Might've is perfectly good contraction in BrE as well as AmE. Is the complaint that people should say have because they shouldn't be contracting verbs on the BBC, or are they complaining about spelling 've wrong?
We're talking about broadcast television and radio, which are spoken media. You can't see the spelling of what the presenters are saying. So how do they know the presenters said might of and not might've? Of course, they could have seen it on the (orig. NAmE) closed-captioning/subtitles. But BBC subtitles usually make so little sense that I can't believe anyone would take them as an accurate record of what's been said. (Here's a Daily Mail collection of 'BBC subtitle blunders'.)
I read of instead of 've a lot in my British students' essays. A lot. There's no reason to think they're getting it from American influence, because they'd have to read it and they probably don't get the chance to read a lot of misspel{ed/t} American English. The American books or news they read will have (we hope) been proofread. I suspect that errors like this aren't learn{ed/t}from exposure at all: they are re-invented by people who have misinterpreted what they've heard or who have a phonetic approach to spelling, sounding out the words in their minds as they write.

This particular Telegraph list is one of the things that I mock when I go around giving my How America Saved the English Language talk. But so far, when I've talked about it, I've just said those three things about it. I have never looked up the numbers for who writes of and who writes 've after a modal verb. I think I've been afraid to, in case it just proved the Telegraph right that it's a very American thing.

I need not have feared! Not only was I right that I see it a lot in the UK, I was also right to feel that I probably see it more in the UK, because —you know what?— the British spell this bit of English worse than Americans.

Here are the numbers from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The numbers stand for how many times these variations occur within about 387 million words of text from the open internet.

non-standard of	American	British
might of	392	672
would of	926	1634
could of	458	821
should of	442	683
standard 've	American	British
might've	506	277
would've	4921	3121
could've	2379	1502
should've	1685	1140

I've put the higher number in each row in blue bold in my table in order to reflect how it shows up in GloWBE. The blue-bold indicates that those numbers showed up in the darkest blue in the GloWBE search results, like the GB column here:

(The Canadian numbers are distracting—they're not based on as much text as GB and US.)

The darker the blue on GloWBE, the more a phrase is associated with a particular country. So, it's not just that the of versions are found in BrE—it could be said (if we want to be a bit hyperbolic) that they are BrE, as opposed to AmE.

In both countries, the 've version is used more than the misspelling. Nevertheless, the American numbers were darkest blue for these spellings—indicating the correct spellings are more "American" in some way—though note that the British 've versions are just one shade of blue lighter—the difference is not as stark as in the previous table.

The moral of this story

It looks like the BBC complainers and the Telegraph writer assumed MODAL+of was an Americanism because they disapprove of it. But remember, kids:

Not liking something is not enough to make it an Americanism.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda

When I discovered these facts, I immediately tweeted the would of (etc.) table to the world, and one correspondent asked if the American way of misspelling would've isn't woulda. The answer is: no, not really. Americans might spell it that way if they're trying to mimic a particular accent or very casual speech (I coulda been a contenda!). It's like when people spell God as Gawd—not because they think that's how to spell an almighty name, but because they're trying to represent a certain pronunciation of it. No one accidentally writes theological texts with Gawd in them. But people do write would of in formal text 'accidentally'—because they don't know better, not because they're trying to represent someone's non-standard pronunciation. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 75% of the instances of coulda occur in the Fiction sub-corpus; authors use it when they're writing dialog(ue) to make it sound authentic.

But you do get coulda, shoulda and woulda in an AmE expression, which accounts for about 10% of the coulda data. I think of it as shoulda, coulda, woulda, but there does seem to be some disagreement about the order of the parts:

The phrase can be used to mean something like "I (or you, etc.) could have done it, should have done it, would have done it—but I didn't, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much now". (A distant relative of the BrE use of never mind.) Sometimes it's used to accuse someone of not putting in enough effort—all talk, no action.

The English singer Beverley Knight had a UK top-ten single called Shoulda Woulda Coulda, which may have had a hand in populari{s/z}ing the phrase in BrE (though it's still primarily used in the US).

Another shoulda that's coming up in the GloWBE data is If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it. And I can't hear that now without thinking of Stephen Merchant, so on this note, good night!

—————

Postscript, 5 Feb 2016: @49suns pointed out that I haven't weeded out possible noise from things like She could of course play the harmonica. Good point. British people do write could of course (etc) more than Americans do because they use commas less. Americans would be more likely to write could, of course, play the harmonica—and with the commas it wouldn't be caught by the search software. As well as of course, there's of necessity and other things 'noising up' the data.

I'm not going to re-do all the tables because I've posted this now and many have commented on it. But the good news (for this post) is that the conclusions about of is pretty much the same if we limit the search to modal + of + verb; it's still more frequently British—especially when preceding been, the case that was complained about in The Telegraph. Here's a sample.

An interesting case at the bottom is should of known, which reverses the pattern. This is just because should [have] known—often in should [have] known better—is a much more common phrase in AmE than in BrE. Searching should * known, we get:

Looking more closely at that group, I found that 6 of the 21 American should of knowns were from song lyrics (none of the UK ones were), and one was using it as an example in telling people that they shouldn't write should of.

The online interface doesn't like me searching for modal+of+verb, so I've had to search for *ould+of+verb, leaving out might and in the post I also left out must. But having re-searched those, I can tell you: still dark blue in British, not in American.

The other thing I haven't done, which someone (or someones) else has suggested is what happens after negation. That is a lot more complicated, since there are more variations to consider (since both the n't and the have can be contracted). I'm really interested in that, so I'm going to write a separate post on it next week. Till then!

Labels: contractions , spelling , verbs | 93 comments

theatre / theater

Jan 26, 2016

The most obvious difference in American and British theat{er/re} is the spelling, but on top of that there are a number of meaning differences. And then the meanings interfere with the spellings again. Much fun, but this is why I can't write short blog posts. Here we go...

the spelling

Theater is one of those American spellings that is attributed to Noah Webster.* But like most of successful American spelling reforms, it wasn't made up by an American. It was a long-standing spelling in England, and the predominant spelling at the time when the English colonies in America were first being settled. The OED says:

The earliest recorded English forms, c1380, are theatre and teatre; from c1550 to 1700, or later, the prevalent spelling was theater (so in Dictionaries from Cawdrey to Kersey), but theatre in Holland, Milton, Fuller, Dryden, Addison, Pope; Bailey 1721 has both, ‘Theatre, Theater’: and between 1720 and 1750, theater was dropped in Britain, but has been retained or (?) revived in U.S.

The word started as theatrum in Latin, and in French it lost its -um. The French pronunciation makes sense with the -re spelling, but the modern English pronunciation does not. However we pronounce that syllable, in whichever English accents we have, it is the same syllable that is spel{led/t} -er in words like butter or later. It's thus no wonder that English writers preferred the -er for some time (and Americans have preferred it for most times), since it is the more Englishy spelling, if by 'Englishy spelling' we mean (as I do) 'spelling that reflects English pronunciation'.

The fashion (for these things are fashion) of using the French spelling has won out in Britain for this and many other words of its ilk: centre, calibre, litre, lustre, sombre, etc. But the fashion is not consistent. Cloister, coriander, and disaster (among others) have -re spellings in French from -rum spellings in Latin, but -er spellings in all standard contemporary Englishes. And then there's metre and kilometre but perimeter and thermometer, etc. Note, though, that despite their common Latin/Greek etymology (metrum), they have different vowels in the me syllable in BrE. American pronunciation of kilometer as 'kill LAH mitter' drives some Brits I know batty, as it obscures the relation between the met{er/re} and the kilomet{er/re}. They prefer 'KILL-o-meetah'. (I just tried to get Better Half to say it. He said 'kill LAH mitter' and explained 'I'm disarmingly transatlantic'.)

This particular difference has a lot in common with the -or/-our difference: variant spelling in early modern English, then American English settling on the more phonetic spelling, and British English settling on the more French spelling. I've more to say about that, but that's going in the book.

(By the way, I'm trying to get into the habit of listing BrE/AmE variants alphabetically. I may not always succeed, but it's why the ones in this post are listed in those particular orders. I'm also trying to alternate which goes first in British/American, US/UK, BrE/AmE, etc. )

the meanings

Let's be quick and put them in a table.

place where you...	What Americans usually say	What the British usually say
watch a play	theater*	theatre
watch a film/movie	(movie) theater*	cinema
hear a (university) lecture	lecture hall, auditorium	lecture theatre
have surgery	operating room; OR	(operating) theatre

There are of course other uses of theat{er/re} that extend from the 'drama place' use--e.g. political theat{er/re}. They are generally the same in both countries, but for spelling.

spelling again!

Photo by Kevin Dooley (Flickr)

While theater is the general American spelling, one does see theatre in the US in place or organi{s/z}ation names, like the Signature Theatre Company in Arlington, Virginia. The same happens with centre in American place names (but never for the 'middle' meaning of center), such as Robinson Town Centre, a (AmE) outdoor mall, or p ower center/(BrE) retail park in Pittsburgh. The namers of these places are taking advantage of the fact that you can spell names however you like, and using the British spelling to make the place sound ‘classy'. Needless to say, we don’t see the reverse in the UK.

I particularly like the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, which just mixes it all up. And movie theatres like the one above are to be congratulated for combining a British spelling and an American meaning. Crazy fun.

* This post originally said theater was in Webster's 1828 dictionary, but, as David Crosbie points out in the comments, it was not, though center and caliber and maneuver (vs. BrE manoeuvre) are there. (Sorry--I'd depended on and possibly overinterpreted someone else's work. You can consult the 1828 dictionary here.) The word does not occur at all in Webster's 'Blue-backed speller'.

Labels: education , film , French , medicine/disease , pronunciation , spelling , theat{er/re} | 101 comments

looks like Xing

Jan 2, 2016

One of my new year's resolutions is to read all the unread newspapers in the house before buying another. It is a Very Big Task. I started before Christmas and thought I'd have it done before New Year's Day, but I still have a substantial pile. We only buy the Saturday Guardian, but it has lots of sections and I can read at most two over the weekend--then the rest pile up.

So there I was reading the front section from 19 December, and I came across this (emphasis added):

After at tidal wave of hype, promotion and anticipation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks like justifying even the most optimistic box office predictions over its first weekend on general release.

I read that several times, then read it to Better Half several times. He kept insisting it was completely fine. I kept being incredulous--not so much that looks like justifying could be said in someone's English, but that I'd been here 16 years and never noticed it.

Then I went to link to the article in order to write this post, and found that the on-line version is different.

After a tidal wave of hype, promotion and anticipation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has finally gone on general release. It debuted in the UK, most of Europe and parts of Asia and South America on Wednesday and Thursday, while Friday sees the first public screenings in the US. And all the indications are that even the most optimistic predictions of its box office performance will turn out to be justified.

The change to the text may have come about because the Guardian has a large international readership, particularly in the US, and so they employ their own production team who translate BrE to general English when needed. And American English just doesn't really do looks like VERBing. If the rest of the paragraph hadn't changed, I would have translated it as:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks like it will justify even the most optimistic box office predictions

In other words, if you say look like in British English, you can follow it with a verb phrase* headed by an -ing form in order to indicate a prediction. In American English, you can't, so we have to use a full sentence as a complement for looks like (this is also available in BrE). This isn't the first time that we've seen differences in linking verbs with like in AmE and BrE.

Of course, I couldn't take it for granted that this is widespread in BrE, just on the basis of the film editor of the Guardian and BH. So, I looked in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English for 'looks like *ing' (where * stands for any string of letters). The list of results is telling (keeping in mind that COCA is 5.2 times larger than BNC):

BNC

COCA

Of the top five -ing words following looks like in the British corpus, three are verbs. The top four in the American corpus are pronouns that happen to end in -ing (these are further down the list in the BNC). Since COCA is 5.2 times bigger than BNC, the rate of looks like being in BrE:AmE is 364:1. And of the five looks like beings in COCA, two do not involve this particular type of structure (and are fine in my AmE), as in:

If somebody strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. That looks like being weak.

The looks like justifying structure makes a prediction. The looks like being weak example doesn't make a prediction, but instead describes something in a more timeless way. We can tell that they're different because they can't be paraphrased using the same grammatical structures.

looks like construction	comparison paraphrase	prediction paraphrase
it looks like justifying the prediction (BrE only)	≠ it looks like what justifying the prediction looks like	it looks like it will justify the prediction (general English)
that looks like being weak (general English?)	that looks like what being weak looks like (general English)	≠ that looks like it will be weak

I went through the 70 BNC examples of looks like being and 69 could be paraphrased as a prediction, for example:

She looks like being one to watch > She looks like she will be one to watch. (in a future race)
the Boogie Night on Dec 8 looks like being another worthwhile event > the Boogie Night on Dec 8 looks like it will be another worthwhile event
Yellow looks like being this year's colour > Yellow looks like it will be this year's colour
it looks like being a wet day tomorrow. > it looks like it will be a wet day tomorrow.

(Though I didn't find it the first time I looked it up, I could have saved myself a lot of time this morning by just citing Algeo's British or American English, where he says that in the Cambridge International Corpus, BrE has 12.5 looks like being per ten million words, and AmE has 0.1. Note to indexer: I looked up like, but it's only under look like.)

This -ing complementation seems to only work with look like. Its synonym seem doesn't do it (*It seems [like] justifying the prediction). As for other sensory linking verbs, BH says he could accept It sounds like justifying the prediction (though it looks like is much better), but not It feels like justifying the prediction--but I can find no evidence of the prediction interpretation for these verbs in BNC.

----------------
* If you remember grammar terminology from school, you might want to say "that's a gerund!" But gerund is a term from Latin grammar that just gets kind of confusing in English. They'll tell you that a gerund is an -ing form used as a noun, but we can tell the -ing word isn't a noun here because it has an object in the way that a verb has an object: just following justifying. If justifying were a noun here, it would act like justification (another noun) would have to act in the sentence: it could only have an object if linked by a preposition. So:

verb: justifying the predictions
noun: the justifying of the predictions

Labels: grammar , verbs | 42 comments

All right?

Oct 25, 2015

I've been meaning to blog about the British greeting All right?* or You all right? in part because I wanted to get feedback on whether I'm responding correctly, since it is something that flummoxes Americans (and New Zealanders too, it seems). Then this happened in my Intercultural Communication class on Friday:

I was talking about the different parts of a conversation, starting with the opening, and mentioning along the way some of the ways in which the rituals differ in different cultures. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Like the British greeting All right? That confuses Americans--we don't know how to respond.

American Exchange Student: Wait, how do you respond?

Me: Let's try. (addressing a group of English students in one corner) All right?

English students (as one): All right.

English student 1: You know, it's like if Americans said You okay?

AmExSt: No, it's not. If you say You okay? to me, it means you think I look lost or upset and you're offering to help. So all these people have been saying You all right? to me and I've been thinking "What am I doing wrong? Why do they think I'm lost?"

[sound of a number of pennies dropping (variation on a BrE expression)]

So, it turns out that my strategy of replying All right or All right, and you? is acceptable. Phew.

A difference related to these different interpretations of you all right/okay? is that if you look lost in public in the US, someone will almost certainly come up to you and offer their help/directions (possibly with You okay?). In my experience, all you have to do in New York is open a map, and some local will ask to help. (I recall this happening on a subway platform and Better Half exclaiming that that would never happen in London.)

In the south of England, if you're lost and want help, you generally have to (get up the courage and pick the right stranger and) ask for help. Or stay lost, which may be preferable. An exception to this generalization would be if the stranger had some official role that makes it acceptable to address someone and offer help. It's not that help is never offered, but you certainly can't count on it. I would not be surprised to hear that this is less true in other parts of the UK, since one thing the southerners have a reputation for is not talking to strangers.

It feels to me like All right? as a greeting is getting more and more common--though the OED has examples of it going back to 1868. (Maybe I was just oblivious to it for a while.) It also feels somewhat masculine to me. I think far more men greet me this way than women, and it is often followed by the mostly masculine address term mate: All right, mate? There may be generational things going on here too--perhaps younger people of both sexes use it more? (Let me know.)

*A lot of people on the internet are writing this as Alright? Not how the dictionaries spell it--and, of course, a frequent misspelling in a lot of contexts.

Labels: interjections , politeness | 68 comments

playing (the) musical instruments

Sep 22, 2015

John Wells wrote to ask:

Have you discussed BrE playing the piano/violin vs. AmE playing piano/violin?

Not really, John, and it turns out that it's one of those things that's (all together now!) more complicated than you might think!

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 689 play* the piano to 309 play* piano. (The * there used as a wildcard in corpus searches; so play* gets us play, playing, played, etc.) That's more than two arthrous (fancy word for having a the) cases for every anarthrous (fancy word for not having a the) one--in American English.

But those numbers need a bit more checking because any dialect would have playing piano music without a the. To get a better comparison, I looked at cases where piano is followed by an adverb (e.g. play [the] piano beautifully/well/loudly/tonight...) so that we can be sure that piano is a noun on its own and not a noun modifying another noun. Doing that, there are 53 arthrous cases and 23 anarthrous ones in COCA. So, pretty much like it was when I didn't take those sane, linguisticky precautions. The British National Corpus, in comparison, has 14 arthrous cases and 1 anarthrous. (But keep in mind that the data from BNC is 20 years older than that in COCA.)

The moral of that part of the story: it would not be right to say that play piano is AmE for BrE play the piano. Instead, play piano is a lesser-used AmE variant of General English play the piano. The image here, from pianoplayingadvice.com, illustrates both variants living happily together.

Personally, I could say either, but prefer it with the the. A bit more rooting around in the Corpus of Historical American English shows a bit of anarthrous piano-playing throughout the 20th century, but it really gets going in the 1970s, when the proportions are like those in COCA.

But hold your horses. If we look at other instruments, it gets more complicated. (I'm rounding the numbers, unless they're <2 .="" comment-2--="">

Violin: In COCA, the is favo(u)red 3:1. In BNC, 5:1.
Harp: In COCA, the 4:1. BNC 8:0.
Guitar: Ziggy played guitar. Maybe the Spiders from Mars made him do it without the the, but in 1990s UK, the British were following suit and, like 2010s Americans, using play guitar twice as much as play the guitar.
Bass: Looks like a reversal! COCA 2:1. BNC: 1:5.
I tried discounting cases like playing (the) bass line/notes, but taking them out made no real difference.
Trumpet: COCA1.4:1. BNC 5:2.
Flute: COCA 4:1. BNC 8:1.
Drums: Play drums outnumbers play the drums in both dialects. Is it because it's plural? But what about...
Spoons: Tiny numbers, but more the in AmE and equal numbers of both in BrE.

I could go on looking for more instruments, but I won't. (Report your findings in the comments if you wish.) It looks like BrE eschews the more often for stereotypical rock instruments than for others -- guitar, bass, drums (Bowie's fault? American rock'n'roll's fault?). I don't see a clear pattern to the US preferences--but in general it's not completely unusual to have anarthrous ones. Bass is the interesting one for its anarthrousness in BrE.

Is it just with play, though? No. Going back to sticking with piano, COCA has half as many practic(e*) piano as practic(e*) the piano. BNC has four practis(e*) with the and one without.

On piano is also common in COCA (about 1/3 as many as on the piano). BNC has 20 on piano to 73 on the piano--very much the same. In this case, some of the on the pianos will have been about particular, physical pianos, as in I stubbed my toe on the piano. There's no possibility of I stubbed my toe on piano. But if a singer were giving credit to her band, she could say ...and Lynne Murphy on piano! or ...and Lynne Murphy on the piano! (Not me, of course, I only had a year of lessons.) I'm waiting for one of you to go out and listen to dozens of concerts with British and American singers to tell me if they all say on drums! on bass!

Finally, the why questions.

Why do we put a the before instruments? It's a funny thing. If I lie and say I play the piano, it's not a particular piano that I am playing. It's that I have the potential to play any piano. (Whereas if I say I've draped myself over the piano, it is a particular piano.) It's kind of like the bus in I ride the bus to work. In that case, it's not the particular physical bus we're talking about--that can vary. It's the whole package that goes with bus-riding. I ride a bus that travels along the route between my street/road and my workplace. There's a package that goes along with pianos too. I'm not just playing the instrument, I'm playing music on the instrument. The music that I know how to play on any "the piano" is kind of like the routes that I travel on any "the bus".

In spite of all that, there's no pressing semantic reason for the the. We don't play the cards or play the dominoes even though similarly, if I say I know how to play dominoes, I'm saying that I know the rules for playing on any instrument of that type (any set of dominoes). [Yes, dominoes are the instrument, not the game--though people who only know one domino game tend to call it 'dominoes'. I am particularly fond of Mexican Train.] So why do we usually have a the with musical instruments, but not with game equipment? (The answer: because that's what we learned to do.)

The arthrous version is unhelpfully ambiguous, so maybe that is a contributor to the rise of the anarthrous alternative. If I say I play the piano I could be trying to point out that I know how to play a piano (so invite me to play at your wedding), or it could be saying that I play a particular piano habitually (so don't get rid of it). I play piano doesn't seem to have that ambiguity, so could be seen as more communicatively efficient. The play + bare-noun construction is familiar, since we say things like I play tennis, I play jazz, I play goalie.

If you want to carry the conversation toward(s) other cases of (an)arthrous variation in AmE and BrE, have a look at the past posts with the 'determiners' label. I've written about some of the famous ones already, and your comments on them would be most welcome at those old posts (which are still regularly read). And you're most welcome to carry on the conversation about musical instruments (and games) on this post, of course!

Labels: determiners , more complicated than you might think , music | 59 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

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