Separated by a Common Language

I'm afraid to say that this is more of me not getting around to blogging. So many things on the list, but my day job has been taking over my nights.

But several people have asked to hear the interview with me and Ben Yagoda from Radio 4's Today Programme (AmE program, of course), aired earlier today. Though I'd thought you could to listen to radio (but not TV) from abroad on BBC iPlayer, apparently you cannot (or cannot anymore).  It's here as a video, as social media makes it easier to post videos than to post mp3s, and is a .mov file. I hope your computer's media player can play it. The title's rather biased representation of who's on is courtesy of Better Half, who originally posted this on his Facebook feed. Since we're in different time zones at the moment, I haven't got the power to wake him up and make him change it.

By the way, after these years of protecting BH's privacy by giving him a pseudonym, I find I don't want to any more. Instead I want to introduce you to him. His first novel is released in the UK in September and in the US in October, and you can click through those places to read (a little) more about it. Yay, Phil!

Here is a favo(u)rite passage of mine from Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette:

Don’'t ever introduce yourself. The “Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama” approach does not go down well in British pubs. Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness. If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible. Sorry, but that'’s how it is. The British quite frankly do not want to know your name, or shake your hand – or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established (like maybe when you marry their daughter). You will have to adopt a more subtle, less demonstrative approach.

In her book Watching the English (which I don't have with me at the moment--so this is from memory), Fox quotes the reaction of an American couple who were clearly upset and puzzled by this British behavio(u)r. They felt that it was some kind of cruel game for the British to withhold that basic information about themselves. The thing to understand here is this: the British sense of personal privacy is very different from the American one. Asking someone's name, even implicitly by offering yours, is a premature violation of that privacy until some goodwill has already been established between you.

I observe this all the time on the playground. The British parents strike up conversations, and may ask about each other's children's names (which they can then use to encourage their children to play together), but they don't introduce themselves. If you've got(ten) along very well, then maybe--but probably not the first time you've met--you might say 'By the way, I'm [your name here]' before you part company. Maybe.

I saw Better Half speak on two occasions with the mother of a little girl who is close to Grover's age. After the first time, he said "I think she might be someone I worked with years ago." Only at the end of the second (long) conversation did they do the "By the way, I'm..." thing, at which point they discovered that they had worked together and both had recogni{z/s}ed each other, but were afraid to approach the topic in case they were wrong. Contrast this to me meeting another American at a party--within five minutes we've established our names, where we're from, who we work for, and several points of common experience--places we've both been and people we've met who the other might have met. And I am an awkward American. I hate small talk. But establishing these similarities is de rigueur for American conversation (recall our previous discussion of compliments). Because I am awkward, and hyper-aware of certain interactional markers of foreignness in British conversations, I am completely tongue-tied on the playground. I know how not to start a conversation in a British context, but I consider the most common acceptable ways to start a conversation (commenting on the weather or the busyness of the playground) too boring/obvious to start with, so I get stuck.*

It was reassuring, then, to see some quantitative research backing up my own impressions and Fox's observations in Klaus Schneider's new (in-press) paper 'Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English' in the Journal of Pragmatics. Schneider compared the openings of small-talk conversations between teens at parties in Ireland, the US, and England. The majority of English teens (56.7%) start with a greeting only (e.g. Hi), while Americans prefer greeting + identifying themselves (60%) and sometimes explicitly asking for the other person's name. The Irish teens prefer greeting + what Schneider calls an 'approach' (73.3%), in which they refer to the context and evaluate it (almost always in a positive way). His example of an approach is Great party, isn't it?**

Looking at the elements of an opening separately, Americans are more likely to introduce themselves than to greet you with a hi or hello.  In the graph below DISC-ID means 'disclose identity'--i.e. introduce yourself.


(The figure is about a subset of the data, so the numbers don't match the more general analysis of the data in my earlier paragraph. The numbers don't add up to 100% because there are other things you might do besides these three--but these are the most frequent.)

While the data is from teens, it feels pretty representative of what adults do.

So, please, go to some parties and experiment with this and report back here. Just don't do your experiments on me. I'll be standing in the corner, pretending to notice something remarkable in my drink, trying to avoid all the pitfalls of small talk.

And in other news: 

• I've been pathetic about blogging here, haven't I? So I completely didn't deserve to be in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top 25 Language Bloggers this year, and I wasn't. (For the first time. I feel duly punished!) But have a look at the link for the good ones.
• The voters and the judges were kind to my Twitter account (even though they didn't identify me by my Twitter handle in the voting--it was strange). I made it to #9 there. Here's the full list.
• But I haven't been completely neglecting my writing-about-AmE/BrE vocation. Since the last blog, I've talked at TedXSussexUniversity on American/British politeness norms and at Horsham Skeptics in the Pub. I'll link to the TedX talk when it's on-line. The SitP talk is reviewed here. But don't read the review if you want to see me give the talk (too many spoilers!). I'm doing it again at the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub in October. A few other things are in the pipeline...

*In a cross-cultural communication course I used to teach, one of the readings was about Finnish culture, and the point that really stuck with me was that Finns are often puzzled (or maybe annoyed) by English speakers' need to state the obvious. Why say Nice weather!, for instance, when everyone can see what the weather's like? It made Finland sound like some kind of anti-small-talk Nirvana that I'd want to live in, but it's also made me super-critical of myself when I interact with Finns. There is no hope for me--I am awkward in every culture.

** Schneider also notes the predictability of the Great party! line:

Great is clearly preferred by speakers of IrE, but speakers of AmE make use of a wider range of lexical items. These include great, good, nice, especially cool and also fun, as, e.g.in Fun party, huh?

Many thanks to the intrepid readers who have nominated words and phrases for SbaCL Words of the Year this year. Yesterday, kettling was announced as the BrE-to-AmE WotY. Tonight's post does the other (AmE-to-BrE) half of the job.  Unusually, both Words of the Year come from readers' nominations. Am I getting less bossy and opinionated and more generous in my old age? We can only hope so.

And so the AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year is (you're going to hate this):

FTW

Yes, you are going to hate it. And you will hate it for one or more of the following reactions:

1. "WTF does it mean?"
2. "That's internet-speak, which is border-crossing by nature. Why should we think of this as inherently AmE?"
3. "That's not a word! It's an alphabetism [or initialism]! At best, it's a phrase!"
4. "My nomination was so much better."

@HarrysSmile 
god, love sophia grace and rosie, essex girls ftw!

@tweet_han
Big bang theory FTW!

@sunny_hundal
What I need is a 'Labour Insider' (unhappy SpAd will do) who has same axe to grind & can repeat himself every week. Journalism job FTW!

@LouiseMensch 
This made me laugh. tithenai.tumblr.com/post/321518623… Catholics FTW
[Editor's note: it made me laugh too. Go ahead, (BrE) have/(AmE) take a look!)

* (Or we could think of it as a lexicali{s/z}ed construction--and I like to think of things that way. But let's not try to squeeze too much of a linguistics degree into this post. It's already way past anybody's bedtime.)

In English orthography, word is easily defined as a unit of language that is written contiguously, with a space on each end. The notion of orthographic word is, however, circular since spaces were introduced into the written code in order to mark the boundaries between words. A more satisfying definition would help explain why such boundaries are perceived in the flow of language. Orthography is also an unreliable indicator of wordhood. Some languages do not have a written form, some orthographies
(e.g., Chinese, Lao) do not mark word boundaries, and any orthographical system is subject to fossilization and arbitrary fashions. For example, on most linguistic criteria, the compound noun ice cream is a single word, in spite of the space within it.

There is no clear linguistic definition of word, however. The most theoretically useful definitions are based on grammatical or phonological criteria [...], but their usefulness is limited by the fact that a) grammatical word and phonological word do not delimit the same set of expressions and that b) no grammatical or phonological criteria for wordhood are applicable to all types of words in all languages.

Jeremy H wrote me the following:

I have noticed two usages which, in England, seem familiar only to journalists. One was in a headline in the Mail today: "This port ain't big enough for the both of us". I have never heard "the both" uttered in BrE. The other is "You and me both".

Starting with the both: I think of the AmE expression as 'this town ain't big enough for the two of us', and indeed two outnumbers both by about 17:4 in the context [adjective] enough for the ___ of [pronoun] in the Corpus of Contemporary AmE (COCA) (and there's exactly one of these things in British National Corpus [BNC], and it has two too).

The this town... line is usually associated with western films (a variation on it was said by a character named Duke in Bandits of the Badlands (1945)). But there are earlier occurrences (the oldest ones with two), and the earliest one I've found is in Anthony Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870)--not a western, unless you count Wiltshire as 'the West' (and apparently some people do consider it to be part of the West Country).  There, the eponymous character says: "Heytesbury isn't big enough for the two of us".  There's also a 1903 "Ostrokov is not big enough to hold the two of us, and that consequently, while I am vicar here, you shall never be rabbi." in the American magazine The Living Age (though the quoted text clearly not set in America, and I don't know who the author is).  So, today's stereotype-busting lesson: it's men of the cloth who deserve the reputation for saying such things, not cowboys or sheriffs.

Comparing just the both of [pronoun] (the both of us, the both of you, the both of them, plus some alternative forms of those pronouns) in the BNC and COCA is kind of interesting. That is, it had better be interesting because I just spent too much of my Friday night looking at it.  (In parentheses are the hits when the is excluded. They're less reliable, since they include contexts with possessive pronouns.)

Instances of the both of [pronoun] and (both of [pronoun]) per 10 million words

dialect	spoken	written
AmE (COCA)	10.8 (97)	5.6 (141)
BrE (BNC)	12  (21)	1.1(123)

Since the both of occurs more in speech than in writing, it looks as though it's considered to be somewhat informal in both dialects, but more so in BrE.  In BrE spoken, the the version is 57% of the total both of [pronoun] hits, versus AmE's 11%.  The other way to use both with a pronoun would be [pronoun] both.  There, we find 311 per 10m in BNC and 296 per 10m in COCA. This looks pretty similar.  (I did find some strange codings in COCA--though not enough to make the figures very different. But since when is coffee a personal pronoun?)

Meanwhile, the two of [pronoun] is about twice as frequent in COCA than in the BNC. I haven't done further analysis of this because I can't seem to weed out the possessive pronouns (none occurred in the both data), but I can look more specifically at particular instantiations of this construction: the two of us and the two of you, and compare it to the equivalent [pronoun] two constructions. (Though, it must be said, this method can't sort out things like I want to give you two puppies. But we'll just have to assume that this kind of "noise" is constant across the dialects. It might not be.)

Instances per 10 million words

dialect	the two  of us	we two +        us two	the two     of you	you two
AmE (COCA)	34	8.9	37.3	81.6
BrE (BNC)	15.1	10.8	12.6	61.8

That COCA has 20% spoken data and BNC only 10% may go some way toward(s) explaining the differences, since you might need to specify the number of referents of a pronoun more often in a speech context. But I don't think that's the whole story--after all, the numbers have the two of you occurring about three times more often in AmE and just under half of the AmE instances are spoken.   So, the two of [pronoun], like the both of [pronoun], seems more common in AmE than BrE, and BrE doesn't seem to be making up for it by using many more [pronoun] two or [pronoun] both.  So, do Americans just specify numbers of pronoun referents more often than BrE speakers/writers do? Or have I left out another means of sticking a number "on" a pronoun? Probably we need a much more thorough analysis with more comparable corpora (the BNC is 20 years old) before we can tell.

Moving on to Jeremy's second item, [pronoun] and [pronoun] both is much more common in AmE (40 per million words) than BrE (0.26 pmw)--although AmE didn't invent it. The OED says:

Both may follow, instead of preceding (as in A. 1), the two words or phrases connected by and; now only in the case of two ns. (two pronouns, or n. and pronoun) subjects of the same plural verb, but formerly (and still dialectally) in all other cases. In this use both may often be replaced by too or also.

They include the example:

1561    T. Hoby tr. B. Castiglione Courtyer (1577) P vij,   It shalbe good for him and me both.

I wrote this whole entry before remembering to look at John Algeo's British or American English? I approached it with contradictory wishes: (1) If he discusses all this, I'll have wasted hours of my Friday night. I hope he hasn't discussed it. (2) My corpus evidence is pretty shaky. I hope he discusses it.  I got wish (1). Algeo does mention, however, that AmE prefers both of these [plural noun] whereas BrE prefers both those [plural noun].  Oddly, though, this preference does not extend to both (of) those, where both varieties prefer the of version.

And before I go: 
Today (wait! it's not today anymore! help!) was my third Twitterversary. If you're not on Twitter, you probably have a rich and interesting life. But you're not on Twitter.  And oh how much I've gained from Twitter!  Forget LinkedIn--this is the way to network. While I have to be very careful about not following too many accounts or trying to read everything that's posted (I could easily make it my full-time job), I learn so so much through it every day. I was interviewed for a film about Twitter this week, and I kept coming back to a similar theme: Twitter helps me appreciate how complex the world is--from the macro level of international affairs to the micro level of people's daily triumphs and struggles. So, hurray for Twitter! And hurray for my followers there, who enrich my understanding of national varieties of English every day. If you'd like to meet me there, you can find me here.

It's our last full day in the US after a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation of nearly a month.  I'd thought I'd catch up on blogging during this downtime, but I started to enjoy actually being on holiday/vacation. Imagine that!

As we rushed to get everything done before leaving my parents' house and my hometown, I asked Better Half to run across the street/road to the (AmE) drug store/(BrE) chemist's to buy a (AmE & BrE) greeting/(BrE) greetings card for my soon-to-be nine-year-old niece. He came back with a very (orig. AmE in this sense*) cute card that was arguably marketed at a younger age group, explaining (with alarm in his voice) that he couldn't bear to buy a (orig. AmE) tweenie-appropriate (not his words) card addressed to 'a spunky girl'.

An hour or so later, we searched with desperation for a place to have lunch with my parents. We'd checked in at the airport, but there is now nowhere in ROC to have anything but a cookie or a pretzel outside (of) the security zone, and our usual diner across the road had closed down. (We found later that JFK is no better--couldn't find a 'proper' restaurant in which to eat after collecting our luggage/before going to our foodless hotel. I blame Homeland Security. And, America, why don't you put sensible things in your airports after security? Like a drug store/chemist's where one could buy baby food and sunscreen in order to get around the 3-oz./100 ml rule? UK airports [orig. AmE i.t.s] rule, oh yeah!)  We ended up at a local (orig. AmE i.t.s) chain restaurant about which the less said, the better. But it thrilled by being in the same (orig./chiefly AmE i.t.s) plaza (i.e. set of retail businesses sharing a [AmE] parking lot/[BrE] car park) as this gym:





And this had BH clamo(u)ring** for a blog post on spunk. 

Spunk came up, so to speak, in my last post, because the American Heritage Dictionary gave it as a synonym for gumption. And there I had the footnote:

* I've no doubt that some readers will find this definition humorous, as spunk is BrE slang for 'semen'. But the primary meaning in AmE (also found in BrE, and originating from a Scots/northern England dialect for 'spark') is 'Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' (OED).

In the comments, a couple of US readers claimed familiarity with the 'semen' sense of spunk, but its use in US business names indicates that it is the 'spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' sense that is called to mind first in AmE. (My research has, however, led me to an adult entertainment business in Australia called "Spice and Spunk Strippers". You're welcome.) In BrE, the 'seminal fluid' meaning has been around since at least 1890, and the other meanings (of which there are many) have been around longer, but many of the other meanings (e.g. 'a spark', 'a match', 'a lively person') seem to be more rooted in northern dialects and may not have had much currency down south when the 'semen' meaning took off. Two meanings that aren't marked as dialectal in the OED are 'tinder' and 'One or other of various fungi or fungoid growths on trees, esp. those of the species Polyporus, freq. used in the preparation of tinder'--and perhaps it is that sense from which the 'semen' sense comes (here's a photo of the fungus, you can judge).

Spunky meaning 'Full of spunk or spirit; courageous, mettlesome, spirited' is not marked as dialectal in the OED, but some of the earliest citations seem to be Scottish. (Well the first one, Burns, definitely is, and the second one has the word lassie in it. For some reason the links to the OED sources aren't working for me.) There is no 'semen-y' meaning in the OED, but it certainly exists. The OED does include a 'US & dial' meaning 'Angry, irritable, irascible', but that's not a sense that I hear used, and the citations are all from the 19th century.

At any rate, the semen sense seems to have taken over British minds--or at least the minds of the under-50s, as far as I can tell. I'd be interested to hear whether people in other parts of the UK have the same impression of the spunk(y) situation. Americans, meanwhile, mostly use the word in with positive connotations--and with a definite feminine bias. Here are the top nouns that follow spunky in the Corpus of Contemporary American English:




So, this is yet another example of Americans innocently using words that sound "dirty" in BrE. And before you comment, please note that there is a £5 tax on this blog for typing fanny pack.***



Oh--and before I go:
If you've ever wondered what a Lynneguist sounds like (after 12 years of anglification), wonder no more! Patrick Cox's latest World in Words podcast is an interview with me about all sorts of things, like how my immigrant vowels have shifted, criticism-softening devices in BrE, and language and social class. He promises a part 2 after his holiday. I had a lovely time (that's me all Britified) speaking with him, as we have converse experiences--he's an Englishman living in the US. I hope it might be of interest to some of you too...




*There are several 'in this sense' originally-AmE items here, so henceforth I abbreviate 'in this sense' as 'i.t.s'.
** Quote: "You could blog about that."
*** Payable to: http://www.msf.org/

I probably unfairly privilege Ben Zimmer when he comes into my blog-suggestions inbox (which is to say, I'm about to cover a suggestion of his only 13 months after he suggested it). As a lexicographer, he knows what counts as an answerable question (so many that I'm sent are not), and, as a language columnist, he has a good sense of which topics might have a bit of (orig. AmE) mileage in them.

The suggestion he sent me last July was BrE use of nous.  And I thought to myself: "Is that British? I just think of it as extremely intellectual." The problem, it seems, is that I don't read the sports pages.

The first definition in the OED is the one that I knew:

1. Ancient Greek Philos. Mind, intellect; intelligence; intuitive apprehension.

As in:

1884    Encycl. Brit. XVII. 336/1   What Plotinus understands by the nous is the highest sphere accessible to the human mind‥, and, along with that, pure thought itself.

But the meaning that Ben was referring to was:

2. colloq. (chiefly Brit.). Common sense, practical intelligence, ‘gumption’.

And he pointed out:

It's surprisingly common in UK sports reporting (search Google News for "have|has|had the nous").

Reading the sports pages would require a level of dedication to this blog that I demonstrably don't have. But I am aware that I miss linguistic riches by not paying attention to them (in any country). Searching have/has/had the nous, I got six hits (half British, the others from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand), four of which were from the sports pages. Here are a couple (bold added):

[About a senior police figure who's resigned in the phone-hacking scandal] “I don’t think any of us would question his integrity. It’s his judgement that has been called into question. But he’s had the nous to realise that if he stays the speculation goes on.” 

and 

[About a cricket player(BrE) cricketer/(AmE) cricket player--T20 is an abbreviated name for an abbreviated form of the game] In many ways du Toit exemplifies the way T20 has gone – he’s hardly a household name in his own household and has played more T20 matches than first class or List A, but he has the nous to get the job done.

The 'common-sense' history of nous is hardly recent. I liked the first OED example for it [though I don't know what Demo-brain'd means here. The only OED entry for Demo is a colloquial name for the US Democratic Party]:

1706    E. Baynard Cold Baths II. 306   A Demo-brain'd Doctor of more Note than Nous.

According to OED, the usual pronunciation of nous in BrE rhymes with mouse, but the AmE pronunciation sounds like noose.


There's another AmE/BrE difference to be found in the OED entry for nous: its definition as 'gumption'. To my AmE mind, gumption (orig. Scots) is an odd synonym for 'common sense'.  We can see the reason for this reflected in US/UK dictionary treatments of the word. The American Heritage Dictionary has:

1. Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
2. Guts; spunk.*
3. Common sense.

Whereas Collins English Dictionary has:

1. Brit common sense or resourcefulness

2. initiative or courage

As the AHD entry reflects, the 'common sense' sense is not the primary sense in American English. A better AmE synonym for gumption is (orig. AmE) get-up-and-go.


What do we have in AmE for 'common sense'?  Well there's horse sense ('strong common sense'), which is originally AmE, but now found in BrE. A more specific kind of common sense is (orig. AmE) street smarts 'the ability to live by one's wits in an urban environment' (OED). But when I think of Americans talking about common sense, I think of the construction X has[n't] [got] the sense God gave Y (or:  X doesn't have the sense God gave Y).  Looking for "the sense God gave" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I found:

He's got the sense God gave a fruitfly.
The sense God gave a goose, you might say-except He didn't give it to all the geese
That man ain't got the sense God gave a goat.  
you ain't got the sense God gave a mule.
You don't have the sense God gave crawfish.
Anybody who'd choose to live in Texas hasn't got the sense God gave a squirrel
they'd missed the sign and hadn't had the sense God gave a turnip to stop and look at a map
you don't have the sense God gave you.
You city noodles haven't the sense God gave hedgehogs
If I'd had the sense God gave a horny toad I'd have turned and run

As you can probably tell from the examples, this construction (partially filled-in idiom) has a definite 'rural' feel to it--it's colloquial and very (orig. AmE) folksy and stereotypically very Southern.

But if I've missed some good nouns for 'common sense', I'm sure you'll fill us in in the comments!




* I've no doubt that some readers will find this definition humorous, as spunk is BrE slang for 'semen'. But the primary meaning in AmE (also found in BrE, and originating from a Scots/northern England dialect for 'spark') is 'Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' (OED).

As promised, here's my reaction to the second half of the BBC's list of 'Your most noted Americanisms'. Since part 1, many others have weighed in on that BBC piece, including Stan Carey, Not From Round Here, and on the BBC website (huzzah!!) Grant Barrett. The commenters at the BBC site, you may discern, are not completely taken with Grant's message.

So, back to the list.  And can I ask again:  if you'd like to discuss further any of the items that I've discussed in other blog posts (linked here), please comment at the original post. This is more helpful for people who come this way looking for answers, and it keeps the repetition down. Thanks!

26. As an expat living in New Orleans, it is a very long list but "burglarize" is currently the word that I most dislike. Simon, New Orleans

In the last instal(l)ment, I pointed out that bristling against -ize in AmE was a bit rich coming from a culture in which one can be (BrE) pressuri{s/z}ed to do something (where AmE would pressure them). Another such example is the BrE preference for acclimati{s/z}e in contexts where AmE is likely to use acclimate. In the comments of that blog post, the discussion turned to burgle/burglari{s/z}e, and I responded:

[D]on't be tempted to think that Americans have added syllables to burgle, as both words are derived (burgle by back-formation and burglarize by adding a suffix) from burglar. The two forms seem to have come about simultaneously in the 1870s. Oxford notes that burgle was at first a humorous and colloquial form.

Both burgle and burglarize are heard in the US, though burglarize is more common.

28. Eaterie. To use a prevalent phrase, oh my gaad! Alastair, Maidstone (now in Athens, Ohio)

I'm not sure whether Alastair is reacting to the word (also eatery) or the alternative spelling with -ie.  Eatery is informal originally AmE, emphasis on the 'originally'. P.G. Wodehouse used it in Inimitable Jeeves (1923) and the OED has other examples of the UK press using it decades ago.

But the -ie spelling? That's looking more and more BrE to me. Trying to find the source of Alastair's ire, I looked for things called eaterie around Athens, OH--but I could only find things called eatery.  Looking at Wordnik's page for it, I noticed that many of the quotations were from UK-based writers/publications. So, I compared COCA and the British National Corpus. Eatery outnumbers eaterie 464:2 in the US corpus. Compare this to the UK corpus, where there are 7 cases of eaterie versus 4 of eatery.  Conclusion? Eaterie is the preferred (oddly Frenchified) British spelling and almost unknown in AmE. 

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

Fortnightly would not suffice in the US, since most Americans wouldn't know what you mean. It is generally not found in AmE, so to complain about Americans not using this British word is kind of like complaining about the British saying football when they could be saying soccer.  The adverb fortnightly has only been used in British English since the 19th century--so it's exactly the kind of thing that Americans shouldn't have been expected to preserve.  The noun fortnight is much older. But America hasn't bothered with it. It's a contraction of fourteen nights (or the Old English version of that), but two weeks is more transparent.

30. I hate "alternate" for "alternative". I don't like this as they are two distinct words, both have distinct meanings and it's useful to have both. Using alternate for alternative deprives us of a word. Catherine, London

This is something that people complain about on both sides of the Atlantic, and something my British students do all the time (and that their American (BrE use) tutor corrects).  Here's Grammar Girl's post on it, speaking to an American audience. While the OED marks it as 'chiefly North American', their first quotation containing the form is from a British legal text in 1776. Catherine should note, however, that alternative is in no danger of slipping from the language. The noun meanings of alternate and alternative continue to be separate, and the adjective alternative outnumbers adjectival alternate by about 7:1 in AmE (according to COCA).

31. "Hike" a price. Does that mean people who do that are hikers? No, hikers are ramblers! M Holloway, Accrington

Rambler here is a very BrE word--one that Americans in the UK tend to find amusing, since we only use the verb to ramble with the older meaning (from OED, bold added):

With reference to physical pursuits: to wander or travel in a free, unrestrained manner, without a definite aim or direction.

But the later BrE meaning is somewhat opposite to this, involving:

Now also (chiefly Brit.): to walk for pleasure through the countryside, freq. in company and on a specified route. 

But back to hike.  Most senses of hike are originally AmE; the word itself is of obscure origin--but probably from a colloquial and dialectal BrE word.

32. Going forward? If I do I shall collide with my keyboard. Ric Allen, Matlock

The OED's first citations of 'go forward' to mean 'make progress' come from Sir Thomas More, the Coverdale Bible and an elliptic use (now forward with your tale) from Shakespeare.  Probably overused in business jargon now, and everybody hates that.

33. I hate the word "deliverable". Used by management consultants for something that they will "deliver" instead of a report. Joseph Wall, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire

Another bit of jargon. None of the dictionaries I've checked mark it as an Americanism, and some of the American dictionaries I've checked (AHD, M-W.com) don't have it at all. It's just jargon. People don't like jargon, no matter which country they live in. Especially jargon that's used to demand things of people, like this one is.

34. The most annoying Americanism is "a million and a half" when it is clearly one and a half million! A million and a half is 1,000,000.5 where one and a half million is 1,500,000. Gordon Brown, Coventry

If I go somewhere for an hour and a half, I am going for an hour and a half an hour. If a horse wins by a length and a half, it wins by a length and a half a length. On the same analogy, a million and a half is a million and a half a million, rather than a millon and a half of one. If one, for some odd reason, needs to refer to 1,000,000.5, one could say one-million-point-five. [Attempted jokes at the expense of the former Prime Minister deleted.]

35. "Reach out to" when the correct word is "ask". For example: "I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient". Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can't we just ask him? Nerina, London

Really, someone's said this to you in this context? I agree. Obviously the evil doing of the Bell Telephone company. (American cultural education link.)

36. Surely the most irritating is: "You do the Math." Math? It's MATHS. Michael Zealey, London

Not this one again.  Here is the true, muddled story of maths. Short story: it was only maths after it was math. And no, it's not plural.

37. I hate the fact I now have to order a "regular Americano". What ever happened to a medium sized coffee? Marcus Edwards, Hurst Green

Another one that everyone hates because it's just put there by marketing people to fool you. I have seen regular refer to small, medium and large--and that's just in Brighton (England, that is).  And why order an Americano when you could have a strong (BrE) filter coffee? (Yes, I know they're not quite the same, but in the name of patriotism...)

38. My worst horror is expiration, as in "expiration date". Whatever happened to expiry? Christina Vakomies, London

Expiration in the 'ending of something that was meant to last a certain time' sense goes back to the 1500s. First recorded use of expiry is in 1752. So, shouldn't it be Whatever happened to expiration?

39. My favourite one was where Americans claimed their family were "Scotch-Irish". This of course it totally inaccurate, as even if it were possible, it would be "Scots" not "Scotch", which as I pointed out is a drink. James, Somerset

It is completely possible. Scotch-Irish is an American term to refer to a particular immigrant group. It describes a historical group that (AmE) was/(BrE) were in their time referred to (and referring to themselves) by that name. Wikipedia reproduces a number of sources on the early (18th century) use of that name, so I won't do so again here.

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase "that'll learn you" - when the English (and more correct) version was always "that'll teach you". What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

This brings us back to the not-recogni{s/z}ing-linguistic-humo(u)r-in-the-other-dialect problem. If you express a 'that'll teach you' message, you're putting yourself above the person you were talking to. If you want to soften that grab for social/moral superiority, you make it a non-standard way of expressing it, in order to humorously put yourself down a (more BrE) peg/(more AmE) notch. To do this in an emphatic way, people who wouldn't usually do so sometimes spell/pronounce this as that'll larn ya.

41. I really hate the phrase: "Where's it at?" This is not more efficient or informative than "where is it?" It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

See the comments thread at this old post: Where I'm at. 

42. Period instead of full stop. Stuart Oliver, Sunderland

Another case of Americans using a British cast-off. (Now-AmE) period for this .  punctuation mark dates to the 16th century. The first record of (BrE) full stop is from just a few decades later, in 1600. It looks like both terms were introduced around the same time, and a different one won the battle for supremacy in different places.

43. My pet hate is "winningest", used in the context "Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time". I can feel the rage rising even using it here. Gayle, Nottingham

Oh, I could have sworn I'd written about this one before, but it seems I haven't. I haven't much to say about it, except that it fills a gap and demonstrates a willingness to play with the language.

44. My brother now uses the term "season" for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

But I have done this one. The upshot: AmE uses the term season and series for different television-related meanings, but BrE doesn't make that distinction at the lexical (word) level.

45. Having an "issue" instead of a "problem". John, Leicester 

This has been much-maligned in AmE too, but I think it's thrived because it's less negative and confrontational to talk of having an issue with something rather than a problem with it.

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as "zee". Not happy about it! Ross, London

Fair enough, but why has zed come to us from zeta, but beta hasn't turned up in English as bed? (Because it's come from French and they did it that way. But still!) I have two zee-related suspicions: (1) Some BrE speakers prefer zee in the alphabet song because it rhymes better (tee-U-vee/double-u-eks-why-and-zee/now I know my ABCs/next time won't you play with me). (2) Fear of 'zee' is a major reason that Sesame Street is no longer broadcast in most of the UK. Both of those issues (not problems!) are discussed in this old post.

47. To "medal" instead of to win a medal. Sets my teeth on edge with a vengeance. Helen, Martock, Somerset

"Americans have an awful habit of turning nouns into verbs" I'm often told. But in this case, the noun already was a verb. Here are the first two and the most recent OED quotations for to medal in the sense 'to decorate or hono(u)r with a medal':

1822    Byron Let. 4 May (1979) IX. 154   He was medalled.

1860    Thackeray Nil nisi Bonum in Roundabout Papers (1899) 174   Irving went home medalled by the King.  

1985    New Yorker 18 Mar. 125/1   He was eulogized‥and was renowned and medalled for his war record.

But the AmE sense that annoys Helen is different, in that the one who gets the medal is the 'agent', rather than the 'patient' in the sentence. For the sense that Lord Byron used, medal must be in the passive in order for the medal-recipient to be the subject of the sentence (as they are in all of the examples, because one wants to put the most relevant person first). In these cases, the agent of the medal(l)ing is the giver of the medal, and if they're in the sentence at all, they go in a 'by' phrase (the King in the 1860 quote). The sports sense 'to win a medal' makes the athlete the agent--the active getter of a medal, rather than the passive recipient of one, and therefore the verb is in the active voice (She medal(l)ed, rather than She was medal(l)ed). It would be inappropriate to say that a soldier 'medalled', as they did not set out to get a medal, a medal was conferred upon them. (Yes, I'm using singular they. You got a problem with that?) The athlete, on the other hand, was (to use an apparently orig. AusE phrase) in it to win it.

While it may seem confusing to have two senses of the verb with different roles attached to the subject in each case, it's not terrifically uncommon. For example, I hurt. Someone hurt me. I was hurt (by someone).  The ice melted. I melted the ice. The ice was melted by me. And so on and so forth.

48. "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you? Mark Jones, Plymouth

On this logic, Mark, are we to assume that you say I got it expensive?  Maybe you do. I cannot.

But anyhow, this use of for before an adjective is found in AmE in other contexts as well--notably for real; but the range of contexts in which it's found seems to be narrowing. Some of the early OED examples--from just 1887 and 1900--sound very old-fashioned, if not completely odd: a for-true doctor and goin' to railroad him for fair. So, it looks like for free and for real are fossils of an earlier more general use of for+adjective.

49. "Turn that off already". Oh dear. Darren, Munich

If I were to make a list of BrE peeves, I think the list would have to be topped by The Oh dear of Condescension.

Utterance-final already comes to AmE via Yiddish. It's used to mark exasperation, and it does so very well. William Safire, in this old On Language column, quotes Lillian Feinsilver's book Taste of Yiddish (1970), which suggests now as an alternative. But Turn that off, now is a bit ambiguous and certainly doesn't give me the flavo(u)r of that sentence-final already. I'd be more likely to translate it with some  rather impolite words (e.g. Turn that off for ****'s sake. or Turn that off, you ****ing ****). Isn't it beautiful that we don't have to resort to such language?

50. "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they're trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

Unless they're trying their hand at irony, of course. But Americans couldn't do that, could they? At any rate: old post on could care less and old guest post on irony.



I know I should probably go back and edit this, but it's late, I'm tired and I've accidentally partially published this twice already today. So, I'll post it already.  Let us know what you think...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnson's covered this one, and says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not to mention bumming a fag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

I'm at the conference of the International Pragmatics Association in Manchester (UK) this week, and I was interested to see that there's a poster in the poster session (which is already posted, though the session's not till tomorrow) on directive speech acts in AmE and BrE. 'Directive speech act' means an utterance that is intended to get someone to do something. Being an impatient sort, I've looked up the author of the paper, Ilka Flöck of Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, and found an earlier paper by her on another aspect of the issue. The PDF is here, if you'd like to read it yourself.

The British (and English people, more specifically) are often stereotyped as being very indirect in their style--that is, implying their meanings rather than saying exactly what they mean. (The stereotypical British use of irony is a classic example of this--saying the opposite of what one means in order to implicate one's true meaning.) Americans, on the other hand, are often stereotyped as being very direct--brash or bossy, even.

So, what happens when people from these cultures make suggestions? For her study, Flöck defines suggestions as follows:

A speech act is understood as a suggestion when the following conditions apply:
- The speaker (S) wants the hearer (H) to consider the action proposed.
- S and H know that H is not obliged to carry out the action proposed by S.
- S believes that the suggestion is in the interest of H.
- S may or may not include herself in the proposed action  (Flöck 2011: 69)

Flöck looked for suggestions in two corpora of spoken English: the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and the British component of the International Corpus of English. Skipping to the end, she found that:

Apart from modest preferences for one or the other head act or modification strategy, no major differences between the two varieties could be observed. Unlike other speech acts, suggestions might therefore not have a strong potential for intercultural misunderstanding.  (Flöck 2011: 79; emphasis added)

That is, on the whole, the British and Americans do not differ in whether they prefer direct or indirect strategies for suggestions. What Flöck did find were some differences in how the indirect strategies are phrased, with the British modifying their requests more (using 'upgraders' and 'downtoners') and Americans relying more on the 'head' of the suggestion--the unadorned sentence and its verb phrase in particular.

Now, I do not want to claim that I am not bossy. I'm a first-born. I'm a teacher. Of course I'm bossy. But at the same time, I do not perceive myself as being anywhere near as bossy as a certain Englishman thinks I am. And I suspect that this might be because of some of the different preferences for phrasing Flöck noticed.  One difference was in the modal verbs used in suggestions. British speakers used more modals of obligation (should, shall), while Americans tended toward(s) can, but Americans also used more Why don't you...?  (Note: the fact that you say either is not counterevidence to this! Both cultures use all these strategies--but at different rates in the corpora.)

The British-preferred modals of obligation are considered by Flöck to be more direct.  That is, they're communicating the directive meaning: 'I think you should do this'. Can on the other hand, is (arguably--depending on how you like your modal verb analysis) ambiguous between a weak obligatory meaning and a capability meaning: i.e. 'you are able to do this and therefore you have the option to do it'. My question is: might should-preferers perceive can as too ambiguous for use in this context, or find its option-giving meaning to be insincere? Or am I basing too much of my hypothesi{z/s}ing on the fact that my husband thinks I'm bossy?

I can also see that Why don't you... might be perceived as bossy. It has no modal at all. It sounds like it's implying that the other person should have already thought of doing the suggested thing.

And I think (but these kinds of self-reportings are notoriously [BrE] dodgy) that I use can (e.g. Can you do it this way? You can try this.*) a bit and that I use Why don't you a lot more than BH would. And when he either automatically does the suggested thing or takes issue with me being bossy, I sometimes say: Wait a minute! It was just a question/suggestion! 

The British indirectness tends to come from the use of modifiers, such as with understaters like a bit, to begin with, for the moment and downgraders like just, perhaps, at least, maybe, probably. With these markers missing, no wonder British people (for it's probably more than just BH) find me bossy.

Because I'm away from my books and because it's hard to google research on US/UK interactions,** I haven't anything more hard-evidency to offer you about mutual stereotypes of bossiness or about suggestion styles. My suspicion is that Americans are more likely to expect negotiation to follow suggestions, whereas the British are more likely to expect compliance (possibly with a bit of griping about it afterwards--this fits with the British complaint culture: see this or this, for example). 

Flöck's paper here at IPrA compares her corpus results to what people do in the classic pragmatics research tool: the Discourse Completion Task (essentially, a written role-play).  And I'll just say, it looks like the DCT doesn't do very well.  Go Corpus Linguistics!

Before I leave, to the long-suffering Better Half: Happy Anniversary!


* Could is not in Flöck's modal comparison chart. I'm assuming that when she says can, she means can and not can/could, but I might be wrong about that. For me, could is much more natural in suggestions than can, and it's a bit more indirect).
** Because one gets everything on American-Chinese interactions that happen to cite something from the British Journal of Psychology and so on and so forth.

References
Flöck, Ilka (2011) "Suggestions in British and American English. A corpus-linguistic study." Paper presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society 2011 [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS], Göttingen, February 2011. 

Flöck, Ilka (2011) "‘Don't tell a great man what to do’: Directive speech acts in American and British English conversations." Poster presented at the 12th International Pragmatics Conference, Manchester, July 2011.