Separated by a Common Language: Search results for better half

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à la carte

Oct 18, 2009

In my last, menu-related post, I cheated and let someone else do all the work. As my penance, I'll do the work on this menu-related one. Moe wrote (a half a year ago) to ask:

I'm from the US and my boyfriend is from Liverpool. Last night at a restaurant (US) he ordered a sandwich a la carte. I asked him if he wasn't hungry enough to get the fries\chips that came with the sandwich. This launched into the discussion of him stating, rightly so, that a la carte means "according to the menu". By his definition, this means just ordering from the menu directly instead of special ordering.

From my understanding and from what I've asked other Americans, a la carte means in resturant terms "by itself". Meaning if you order a steak a la carte, you would not be receiving mashed potatoes or other items along with it.

Is his understanding correct in Britain and if so, what would they ask for in a restaurant if they wanted an item "by itself"?

This is as much a difference in our expectations of how restaurants work as a difference in language, I'd say.

À la carte comes from French, bien sûr, and is used in opposition to table d'hôte--more commonly called (these days) prix fixe. In the prix-fixe situation, the restaurant offers a meal of several courses with few or no choices as to what you get in which course. You get what the chef has decided to put together. In the US, I think I've only ever seen this in the most expensive restaurant I've ever been to, though I suppose it's the same thing as a meal deal at a fast food restaurant. (But I've yet to come across a burger (BrE) pedlar/(AmE) peddler who asks you if you want your Big Mac à la carte. I believe the appropriate idiom is the sandwich or the meal?) In the UK, prix fixe is a more familiar concept--both because more British people will have experience of eating in France, where prix fixe menus are common, and because they're not entirely uncommon in the UK. That is to say, I've had prix fixe in the UK at restaurants where the (AmE) check/(BrE) bill was more in line with the cost of a ticket to the theat{er/re}, rather than the cost of a ticket to Hawaii.

Ordering à la carte, then, is ordering from the (individual courses) menu rather than ordering (AmE) the whole shebang/(BrE) the full monty. So, Moe's boyfriend saw himself as ordering a sandwich as it comes according to the menu (which may be with chips/fries or what have you).

But while we don't in the US think of ourselves as having prix fixe menus, it is the case that restaurants often distinguish between 'dinners' (sometimes called entrees in this case) and simpler courses. For example, a menu might be divided into 'pasta', 'sandwiches', 'pizza' and 'dinners'. Where I come from, a popular dinner is prime rib.¹ If you order prime rib, they might ask you if you want the dinner or to have it à la carte. If you have the dinner, then it will come with salad (or sometimes the option of soup) and one or two side dishes. This always flummoxes Better Half when we go to a certain restaurant in my hometown. He orders his portobello mushroom thingamajig and is then somehow offended when asked what kind of dressing he wants on his salad.² (Even worse, they expect him to eat his salad before his dinner! The injustice of it all!) My mother, on the other hand, is regularly shocked and dismayed when she orders a main course in England and gets only what it says on the menu--a piece of meat. And you should have heard her when she ordered veal parmesan in Ireland and wasn't served a side of spaghetti with it.³ If the menu says 'rib-eye steak' or 'veal parmesan', then you're probably going to have to look at the side-dishes menu if you want any vegetables. The exception to this, of course, is if it's a roast dinner at Sunday lunch. If it's Sunday lunch, you will be served so many vegetables that you could conceivably fulfil(l) your five-a-day requirements until Wednesday.

So, it looks like Americans have sort of reinvented the prix-fixe menu as 'dinner', but don't really think of it as a menu--just as the main course. When they want a simpler and less expensive meal, they order à la carte, which almost means 'off the menu' in this case. The equivalent in the UK would just be to say 'I'd like my steak without the potatoes, please', and I'd be very surprised if that made it any cheaper for you.

And just in case all this reminds you of (AmE) à la mode, let the link take you there.

¹ I've never seen prime rib in the UK, though the term itself is not an Americanism. Instead of having rib roasts and prime rib, one tends to see thinner-cut rib-eye steaks on UK menus. Someday, when I have a lot of energy, I will have to do a post on different cuts of meat in the two countries. In the meantime, please consult the maps of cows on Wikipedia.

² I've never been asked what kind of dressing I want on my salad in the UK. You get what you get, and it usually tastes of mustard. My commenting on this will probably send some people to the comments section to exclaim that American salad dressings (particularly French and Russian) have disingenuous names--since the comments section serves as a magnet for salad dressing-related complaints.

³ I've started to think of BH and my mother as two sides of a coin, which raises the question of what/whom he's the better half of. Maybe it means it's a good thing I'm turning into my mother. Now I'm just confusing myself.

Labels: food/cooking , French , idioms | 46 comments

anti-Americanismism, part 2

Jul 27, 2011

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.

27. "Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I've not noticed it over here yet. John, London

You haven't noticed in England because the people who used to say it died out. Or emigrated, perhaps. This is one of those things that's an archaism in BrE (OED has it going back to the 14th century), but not so much in AmE. Still, you're almost 140 times more likely to hear often in AmE than oftentimes (according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English--henceforth COCA).

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...

Labels: Americanization , more complicated than you might think , prescriptivism | 81 comments

jumpers, sweaters and the like

Aug 29, 2007

Sorry for my week of silence (if you noticed). It was just too hard to entertain out-of-towners in my hometown while also being on-line. Somehow they thought hikes and malls and museums and restaurants were more interesting than watching me type. But among those visitors to my little American hometown were ten British English speakers. Predictably, there were lots of linguistic discussions. Unpredictably, the weather took an unwelcome turn and the most discussed words (in August!) were jumper, sweater and terms for related items of clothing.

Most BrE-AmE dictionaries will tell you that BrE jumper = AmE sweater, but this is a little misleading and far from the whole story. When referring to knit(ted) garments, AmE sweater has much broader application than BrE jumper, which refers only to (generally long-sleeved) pullovers--that is, they are donned by pulling them over the head. In BrE, jumper stands in contrast to cardigan, a word that is used in AmE, but sweater is used frequently in AmE to refer to cardigans as well. So, AmE sweater is a superordinate term or hyper(o)nym, which includes cardigans and pullover sweaters. In BrE, jumper is not the hyperonym of cardigan, but kind of its 'opposite'.

Jumper in AmE is a kind of dress, called a pinafore (dress) in BrE. (Both dialects have the 'apron' sense of pinafore.) In other words, it's a sleeveless dress that's made to be worn over a blouse or other top. Thus my mother, who finds cross-dressing unexpected and hilarious, always has something to say when Better Half says he's going to put on his jumper.

Another sweater that is not a jumper is the (AmE) sweater vest (illustration from this catalog(ue) site). Now, there are two reasons why this isn't called sweater vest in BrE: (1) sweater is AmE (as already established!), and (2) in BrE vest is generally used to refer to (more typically AmE) undershirts (with or without sleeves) or sleeveless undershirt-like things worn by sports players. In AmE, on the other hand, a vest is a sleeveless garment for the upper body that's typically worn over a shirt. This includes the kind that one finds in three-piece suits, which have buttons up the front, and which BrE speakers call a waistcoat. Vest was once used in BrE for what are now called waistcoats--originally the term for a more complicated garment:

The earliest waistcoats, intended to show through the slashings and other openings of the doublet, were often extremely elaborate and costly. They were sometimes provided with sleeves, and appear to have reached to or below the hips. (OED)

So, Americans kept an old (but certainly not the original) meaning of vest, while the British adjusted the meaning of another term. A related term that I've only heard in the UK is gillet (also gilet), for a type of furry waistcoat/vest that became fashionable a couple of years ago. (Here's a photo.) I was questioning whether I've only heard it in BrE because it's only been fashionable since I moved here, but most of Google results for gillet + fur are from the UK, so I'm suspecting that it's a far more common term in BrE these days. On an American catalog(ue) site, I find similar items described as fur vests.

But I've got(ten) away from the question: what is the BrE for (AmE) sweater vest? It

is, in my confused experience, tank top. Here's a so-label(l)ed photo from a UK retailer. The experience [of hearing of a dean coming to work in a tank top!] was confusing for me because of the AmE meaning of tank top: a sleeveless undershirt (nowadays often worn as an only-shirt). I was wearing one of those today, so had the opportunity to ask Better Half what he'd call such a thing, and his (sorry, honey) rather unsatisfying answer was 't-shirt', later adapted to 'sleeveless t-shirt'. A more precise BrE term is singlet (as one can see here), but it's not a term one hears a lot these days. Such undershirty things are likely to be called vests, as one can see when searching 'vest' on the Next [UK clothing retailer] website.

This brings to mind another (colo[u]rful but unfortunate) Americanism: wife-beater, which is a slang term for the type of tank top/vest that Marlon Brando wore in Streetcar Named Desire. Slangcity.com claims (I've never heard it) that wife-beater is also BrE slang for Stella Artois beer--which brings one back to Brando and Streetcar (Steeelllllaaaaa!).

Getting back to sweater and jumper, there are more ways in which the former is more general than the latter. For example, I have fine-gauge, short-sleeved knit(ted) tops (like this one on Knit Sisters) that I'd only wear on their own--not over another shirt/blouse--and that I'd call sweaters. I'd not feel comfy calling such things jumpers in BrE, though. Searching summer-sweater on Google Images brings up images of both short-sleeved and sleeveless tops and lightweight, long-sleeved sweaters/jumpers, but searching summer-jumper just results in lightweight, long-sleeved jumpers/sweaters and AmE jumpers (the one short-sleeved one is a red herring: it's on the same page as a long-sleeved one that has the 'summer jumper' label). What would one call a 'summer' sweater in BrE? My best guess is that it's just a top. (BrE-speaking 'summer sweater' wearers, what do you think?)

And speaking of top (once I get going, I just can't shut up, can I?), I find that it's used much more often in BrE than in AmE. And in AmE, one is more likely than in BrE to call a woman's blouse or top a shirt. I'm not saying that these terms aren't used in both dialects, but just that their frequency/commonality seems to be different--at least in the forms of BrE and AmE I've been exposed to. But on that intuitional note, I've got to go bed...

Labels: fashion/clothing , intoxicants , more complicated than you might think | 76 comments

roast

Jan 1, 2007

As mentioned previously, my dad has an important birthday today, for which we had a big party on the 30th. We needed a theme for this party that would suit my dad and that his friends and family would enjoy, so I suggested that we roast him. Better Half protested that he couldn't possibly take part, due to his vegetarianism, which is how I reali{s/z}ed that the roast tradition is an American thing. Since I'm beginning this entry on the morning after the night before, I'll let Wikipedia do the explanation for me:

A roast, in North American English, is an event in which an individual is subject to publicly bearing insults, praise, outlandish true and untrue stories, and heartwarming tributes. It is seen as a great honor to be roasted, as the individual is surrounded by friends, fans, and well-wishers, who can receive some of the same treatment as well during the course of the evening. The party and presentation itself are both referred to as a roast. The host of the event is called the roastmaster. [...] In short, it is both the opposite and the same as a "toast".

The Friars Club, a (AmE) fraternal organization for comedians, is known for its roasts, but people of my generation are likely to know about them because of Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts on television in the 1970s. Because I remembered my dad enjoying those when I was a child, a roast for Dad seemed like a great idea--and it was. I must say, my family and their friends are some pretty hilarious folk. But the break-out star roaster was our own Better Half, who discovered that my dad shares his birthday with great Americans Paul Revere and Betsy Ross. So BH riffed (orig. AmE) on the theme of "what if it had been our birthday boy who had been called on to warn that the British were coming or to sew the first American flag?" It was abso-effing-lutely riotous.

The roastee sits on the stage while he is being roasted, and we had a huge throne for Dad to sit in (right). At the end of the roasting, there is some toasting of the roastee, after which the roastee has the opportunity for a rebuttal--which is done with the same type of humo(u)r as the roasting. You might be able to see in the photo that dad has paper and pen at the ready to make notes of jokes he'll want to make at the roasters' expense.

Also in this picture you get a view of BH's shoulder. I've got too much of a headache for any serious cropping action today.

So, Happy New Year to you, and

Happy 70th Birthday, Dad!

Labels: rituals | 6 comments

blinders and other metaphors personified

Dec 11, 2006

Last time, I mentioned a (BrE) fancy dress/(AmE) costume party at which everyone was to come as a metaphor they'd been accused of being. I learned that among my friends are three dark horses, one social butterfly, a piranha with manners and an 40-year-old trapped in the body of an 8-year-old (that would be our dear Better Half). About 40 people came, five of them American, at least as many from other parts of the world, and the remainder British. The party-goers made a game of trying to guess what what everyone else was, but a few of the British ones stumped the Americans, and vice versa. (Incidentally, stump is originally AmE, but now used in BrE.)

The number one stumper was my dear friend to the right here. She was head-to-toe in glittering things and battery-powered lights. The BrE speakers had a hard time guessing, but when they were told, they said "Ah!" The AmE speakers, on the other hand, said "Huh?" She was (if you haven't guessed from the title) a blinder--that is, "Something ‘dazzlingly’ good or difficult" (OED), or in this case a "looker" (orig. AmE). Unsure that people would believe that she'd been called a blinder, she carried with her the sweetest love letter from long, long ago. (It would be impolite of me to tell you how long ago.) The universal reaction to the love letter was "My god, why didn't you marry him?" (Not that we have anything against Blinder's better half--but he didn't come to the party to defend his own hono(u)r, so we got all moony over [the idea of] Love Letter Boy.) Incidentally, Blinder won one of the evening's prizes--the Elbow Grease prize for the most effort devoted to the reali{s/z}ation of the metaphor. We got literal about our metaphorical prizes--the Elbow Grease was Body Shop Body Butter.

My dad, pictured right, was another transatlantic stumper. He and my mother came as what they (claim to) call each other (never in front of the children, though!). Mom came as "the cat's (AmE) pajamas/(BrE) pyjamas", wearing p{y/a}jamas with cats on them. Dad's was a less visuali{s/z}able metaphor, though the BrE speakers consistently guessed that he was the cat's whiskers (='the acme of excellence'--OED). While that was originally an AmE expression, it's now mainly used in BrE. In AmE, the expression is more usually (at least where we're from) the cat's meow. (All of these are a bit dated, like my dad, who celebrates a big birthday next month. Despite having enjoyed my metaphorty party, he's declined having a metaseventy party.)

Another American friend came as a mixed metaphor--so it's no surprise that people had a hard time guessing what he was. He had a target, with an antlered deer superimposed on it, taped to his back. By his estimation, he was "a moving stag", mixing the metaphors of a moving target and going stag to a party (i.e., 'without a date'). The latter of these (as the telltale bold font indicates) is AmE, and relates back to the notion of a stag party (orig. AmE), which was raised when we discussed local fauna terms.

Please steal the metaphorty party idea (leave off the -ty if you're not forty, but have the party all the same)! It's a helluva lotta fun, and if you invite both AmE and BrE speakers, you can report back to us any further metaphors that don't translate. My own metaphor required translation as well, but only because it was in Swedish. Jag var en djävil på Scrabble. (I was a demon at Scrabble--the first metaphor that I was called [to my face] på svenska.)

Or, join the virtual party in the comments area. What would your metaphor be? (Try to keep it clean, please!)

Labels: animals , epithets , idioms , metaphor , Scrabble | 12 comments

some light verbs

Oct 5, 2007

On to the May queries! Only 5 months behind!

Marian wrote back then to ask:

Can you tell me why some people make decisions and others take them?

The reason, of course, is that some people speak some dialects and other people speak other dialects. AmE speakers generally make decisions and BrE speakers can also take decisions.

Make and take in these contexts are light verbs. Light verb is defined by the Lexicon of Linguistics as "thematically incomplete verb which only in combination with a predicative complement qualifies as a predicate". In other languages, this usually means a fairly semantically-empty verb that occurs with another verb in a sort of compound-verb (Japanese and Korean have lots of these). In English, the term usually refers to verbs that add very little to the sentence but occur with nouns (usually) that have been derived from verbs. So, in this example's case, one could decide with a regular old verb, or make/take a decision with a light verb plus a nominali{s/z}ation of the verb decide: decision.

Since the light verb doesn't actually add much to the sentence (other than giving it a verb, which every English sentence needs), it doesn't matter much to the meaning of the sentence that we use different verbs, and light verb patterns often vary among dialects. Here are some other variations (from my own experience and John Algeo's book), but note the numbers next to them, to be explained below...

AmE - not-so-AmE

make a copy (38) take a (carbon) copy (31)

take a vacation (/holiday 219) have a holiday (123)

take a look (1841) have a look at (1607)

take a shower/bath (106/86) have a shower/bath (102/114)

take a nap (41) have a nap (36)

get exercise (15) take exercise (71)

The way to think of these is probably not that the left column is (exclusively) AmE and that the right column is BrE, but that the right column includes items that are more at home in BrE than in AmE, and the left column has items that may be found in BrE as well as AmE. The OED shows us, for example, that Caxton (1490) had make with decision and Dickens (1837) used take with bath.

The numbers in the table indicate the number of hits that I got when I searched the (UK) Guardian website for each of these phrases, and as you can see there are many, if not more, of the left-column phrasings on that UK site. Of course, some of those may be by AmE speakers (in quotations) or writers. Some may be from American wire stories, etc. But it's at least good evidence that the AmE versions are not as unfamiliar or 'foreign' sounding in BrE as the right-column versions are likely to be in AmE (from my own and Marian's judg(e)ment, at least).

In fact, I just gave London-born-and-bred Better Half the following fill-in-the-verb quiz:

I need to _____ a copy of that.

I need to _____ a holiday.

You should ____ a look at that document.

You need to ____ a shower!

I want to _____ a nap.

I really should _____ some exercise.

He answered out of the AmE column above for everything but number 6. A fault of the experiment is that he may have been primed to say take for 3-5 after saying take for 2. But mix up the sentences and try them on your better half, friend, child or passers-by and see what they say!

Labels: grammar , light verbs , verbs | 16 comments

some clothing fasteners

Jan 27, 2008

Back at the baby post, commenter dadge wrote:

Another word for your list is "popper".

...which is another word that's come to the fore of my experience since Grover's birth. BrE popper is the equivalent of AmE snap, which is to say it's the name for a type o

f fastener, as illustrated to the right (image from madeinchina.com). Searching for this photo on the web, I found that a lot of dealers in such fasteners call them snap buttons, but to me they're just snaps. The OED, in its definitions for snap and popper, calls them press studs. This counts as a baby-related word since one is constantly doing and undoing snaps/poppers at the crotches of (BrE) babygros/(AmE) onesies in order to get at (BrE) nappies/(AmE) diapers. I don't know why, but I feel silly saying popper, so I've been glad that I seem to be able to get away with snap. (Better Half won't let me get away with diaper, however.)

When one fastens/unfastens snaps, one snaps [and unsnaps--see comments] them, so I just asked Better Half what one does to poppers. He says you pop them. To my AmE ears, though, it would sound funny to pop something closed--things pop open, but don't pop shut. But perhaps BrE ears don't have that bias. [Added 29 Jan: The difference seems to be that snapping involves making a closure, and popping usually involves undoing the fastening. I'm pretty sure that no one says unpop to mean 'to fasten a popper'. So what seems to have (AmE colloquial) weirded me out here is that the verb doesn't seem to describe fastening--the purpose of the device--but describes unfastening. Both dialects' words are onomatopoetic.] (Your thoughts?)

(For other BrE/AmE differences in the use of the word snap, see here.)

Another clothing fastener that differs transatlantically is (BrE) zip versus (AmE) zipper. (The verb in both varieties is zip.) One is tempted to form the theory that there is a strict economy of syllables: dialects are allowed a fixed number, and since press studs have two syllables in BrE and one in AmE, some other clothing fastener had to inexplicably differ in its number of syllables. It would be a silly theory, of course, but it appeals to my taste for symmetry.

When zips/zippers are at the front of a pair of (BrE) trousers/(AmE) pants, they mysteriously differ in their number: in BrE you must take care to do up your flies, while in AmE, you do up your fly. But that matter is discussed in the comments for this old post, so please see there for more details.

I can't think of any more clothing fasteners with dialectal differences...but I'm sure someone will point them out if they exist...

Labels: fashion/clothing | 32 comments

accent attitudes

Jun 11, 2011

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking. Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether AVIC is on its way out, perhaps mostly found in older generations. Here's what I found:

In 1985 (see references below), Stewart et al. published a study for which American subjects had been asked to rate the social status of people with standard American or standard British accents. They found that:

speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents’ own (American) accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. For American listeners, this finding contrasts with their reactions to other ethnic accents (p. 103)

But that was more than 25 years ago. And just 10 years ago, Bayard et al. (2001) found that American accents were more positively evaluated in New Zealand and Australia, and America. Here's their graph showing the reactions to accents in their sample of Cleveland University students:

You might not be able to read the graph, but that dotted line at the top represents the North American accent, as spoken by a woman. Below that is North American male. Leaving third place to....Australian men! Yes, the English accent (as spoken by a man) is way down in 4th place now.

But my favo(u)rite graph of the ones I've come across is this one, from the undergraduate research journal at Brigham Young University. It shows the results of asking Brigham Young students to rate the intelligence of people with different accents.

The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one. My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.

Better Half often complains that while he was treated like a god (the god of what, I don't know) when he first went to live and work in the US in the early 1990s, nowadays he's "nothing special" when we go to the States. He attributed this to New York City being overrun by the British, particularly when the pound was much, much stronger than the dollar. But I think he also finds it to be true when we're away from the big city where British people tend to travel. So, perhaps this is a symptom of a general trend for (standard-AmE-speaking) Americans to have more dialectal self-esteem than they used to. You're welcome to speculate on the reasons for this in the comments--provided that you aren't too rude.

Any other business

Thanks and more thanks to all of you who voted for SbaCL and my @lynneguist Twitter feed in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top Language Lovers for 2011. I'm grateful/flabbergasted/proud to see Separated by a Common Language ranked 5th among Language Professional Blogs (and 37th overall) and @lynneguist ranked 2nd in the Twitter category and 4th overall. Big, big thank-yous to all who had a hand in that!
Thanks again for your help in locating instances of Dialect Fail and Dialect Success in transatlantic novel-writing. The Brighton Book Festival talk ('Whose Language is it Anyway?') was a success, in no small part because of your helpful suggestions.
Before you ask, that talk is not available on video--but I'm very happy to give it in other venues. Please email me if you're interested! Talks (with audio publisher/video producer Better Half) are underway to recreate parts of my Lynneguist talks in snazzy podcast form. No release dates have been imagined yet, but you know I'll tell you when they're available.
I had some interesting comments from English teachers (both school teachers and language-school ESL teachers) after the talk--they'd learn{ed/t} that some of their closely held beliefs about English were fictions, and thought that their colleagues would have benefited from the talk as well. So, that got me thinking that it might be good to do some workshops with teachers on American/British differences, standards and prejudices. (It might also be useful to do them with publishers/editors, perhaps.) If there are any schools out there who might like to be guinea pigs for such a thing, please get in touch!

References:

Anderson, S. et al. (2007) How accents affect perception of intelligence. Intuition 3:5–11.

Bayard, D., A. Weatherall, C. Gallois, and J. Pittam (2001) Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia, and America. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:22–49.

Stewart, MA, EB Ryan, and H Giles (1985) Accent and social class effects on status and solidarity evaluations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 11:98–105.

Labels: AusE , AVIC , dialect , education , more complicated than you might think , prescriptivism , pronunciation , stereotypes | 62 comments

bowls

May 8, 2008

I'm embarrassed by how much television I've been watching lately. On further reflection, perhaps that's not true--maybe I'm just embarrassed by how much television I've found myself admitting to watching. But it does raise lots of bloggable issues, so here I go again with the admitting.

Better Half came home tonight to find me watching The Big Bang Theory with a sleeping baby on my lap. (My excuse: I was stuck--I couldn't very well disturb the baby, who hates to nap and so must be tricked into doing it on my lap. So, nothing to do but power up the remote control.) In this episode, the boys are preparing for the "Physics Bowl". When they started practi{c/s}ing for the Bowl with physics quiz questions, BH said, "Oh, that's what they're doing! I couldn't figure out why physicists would get so excited about bowling!"

The AmE bowl in Physics Bowl is the same as the more general College Bowl--a contest between (usually) students in which they answer (usually) academic questions. The UK equivalent to the College Bowl is University Challenge, a television program(me) in which students from different universities (or colleges within the Oxbridge/London universities) compete on television. (Perhaps some Americans will have seen this in the book/film Starter for Ten--if it was released over there...) University Challenge was based on the College Bowl, but it has overtaken its ancestor in terms of popularity. The College Bowl was televised in the US from the 1950s until 1970, but University Challenge is a television institution that's still very popular today. My own bowl experience was to be in the History Bowl when I was in the 8th grade. In that case, it was a county-wide competition for which I had to learn much more than I ever wanted to know about the Erie Canal. (I stayed home on the day of the final, insisting that I was [AmE-preferred] sick/[BrE-preferred] ill, but I think my mother was right in insisting that it was just butterflies. Oh, the regret.)

I'm fairly certain that the name of these kinds of contests (which hasn't made it into the OED or American Heritage) is derived from the use of bowl to refer to certain post-season football (=BrE American football) games, such as the Rose Bowl, which are played between (AmE) college (= BrE university) teams. (Plus the Super Bowl, which is played between professional teams.) They are so-called because of the bowl shape of the stadiums (or stadia, if you prefer--the spellchecker doesn't) in which they were first played.

The kind of bowl(ing) that Better Half was imagining is generally called bowling in AmE, but ten-pin bowling in BrE. (In AmE bowling can also refer to variants like candlepin bowling. You can look these things up if you'd like to know the difference! The social class implications of bowling in America are noted in the comments of a recent post.) This distinguishes it from the game more traditionally played in England, (lawn) bowls, which is closely related to the continental games boules/pétanque and bocce (which is the more familiar game in America, thanks to Italian immigrants). Another kind of bowling found in the UK (more than the US), particularly in the Southwest, is skittles, the game from which modern indoor bowling is derived. This provides me with an excuse to post one of my photos of the Children's Parade in the Brighton Festival. This year the theme was favo(u)rite games, and one school chose skittles. (It's not the best photo I took, but I've suddenly had qualms about posting a photo of other people's children.) In the US, I imagine most people would associate skittles with a (AmE) candy/(BrE) sweet.

(...which compels an anecdote. I was at a party in Waco, Texas once and met a man who told me he was in Research and Development at M&M/Mars, one of the bigger employers in town. I asked what he'd developed. His wife proudly put her arm in his and beamed, "He invented Skittles!" As you can see, one meets Very Important People in Waco. And I should join Anecdoters Anonymous.)

The verb to bowl is used to describe what one does with the projectile in all of these games, but is also used to describe how the ball is delivered (or not) to the bat in cricket--and hence the person who does that delivering is the bowler. The closest thing in popular American sports is the pitcher, who pitches a baseball.

Going further afield, another bowl that differs is found in the (AmE) bathroom/(BrE informal) loo. While AmE speakers clean the toilet bowl, BrE speakers stick their brushes into the toilet's pan. I'm not absolutely sure that BrE speakers don't also use bowl in this sense (do you?), but it jars whenever I hear people speak about the toilet pan, as it makes me imagine something very shallow.

Those are the bowl differences I've noticed myself, although the OED also gives a special Scottish English sense: a marble. Their only example is from 1826, so you Scots will have to tell us whether it's current!

Labels: bodily functions , furniture , games , hardware , ScottishE , sport , television | 27 comments

suckers for an accent

Mar 21, 2007

Paul pointed out this article and discussion on BBCNews about the tendency for Americans to assume that the British are brighter (and their lack of recognition of non-RP accents as British). Better Half says that he's not sure whether Americans think he's smarter because of his accent, but he does think Americans (in America) find him more interesting and give him more attention because of it. American women often also find the accent sexy... Better Half says for the record that he didn't say that last sentence--though the fact that he's had more American girlfriends than British may provide some corroboration.

Labels: dialect , pronunciation , stereotypes | 32 comments

cures for what ails you

Mar 14, 2007

Better Half has been unwell (which sounds fairly BrE--I'd usually say sick in AmE) for more than a week now. The doctor says he has a chest infection, but an American doctor might've preferred to say bronchitis. It's not that bronchitis is an AmE word--just that people talk about being diagnosed with bronchitis in the US, and people in the UK tend to talk about chest infections. And it's not that BrE speakers prefer to avoid Latin/Greek-derived medicalese, either. Whereas Americans talk about getting urinary tract infections (people who get them a lot tend to call them UTIs), the British are more apt to say cystitis--a term I hadn't come across until I moved here. I heard urine infection (from a sufferer) here the other day, which I thought was a bit odd, as it's not the urine that's infected...but that's another matter.

This was supposed to be a short post, but I'm already going on off on my tangents. The real purpose was to tell you a joke that Better Half told me when I brought him some analgesic tablets. (Actually, BrE uses the word tablet much more often where AmE would tend to use pill--but that's another tangent. Oh dear.) Here we go:

Why are there no headaches in the jungle?

Because the parrots ate 'em all!

Americans cannot be expected to get that joke. And no one can be expected to find it particularly funny--but it is particularly punny. It relies on knowledge of (a) the word paracetamol, (b) how it's pronounced, and (c) that ate in BrE is often pronounced to rhyme with bet. That is, the answer is a pun on Because the paracetamol.

And why is that a relevant answer? Because paracetamol is what Americans generically call acetaminophen --though it's more commonly known in AmE by the brand name Tylenol. Both names, paracetamol and acetaminophen, are based on the description of the chemical components in the drug--they both make mention of the acet part. (I'm not qualified to comment any further on the chemical structure, so I'll stop before I make a mockery of pharmaceutical chemistry.)

Some BrE speakers will have come across acetaminophen in the White Stripes' song, 'Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine', which I particularly like for the rhyme:

Acetaminophen
You see the medicine

While I secretly enjoy them, I try to play it cool and roll my eyes when I hear puns like paracetamol = parrots ate 'em all. But I can't stop myself from expressing overt and enthusiastic admiration for tortured rhymes like that. Hurrah!

Labels: Greek , humo(u)r , Latin , medicine/disease , trade names | 32 comments

don't ask me for £5

Jun 7, 2008

Now, you could say that the following doesn't fit here because it's not about language, but I'd say it could be covered under the realm of pragmatics or interactional sociolinguistics...and anyway, it's just too interesting to pass up.

Via Boing Boing, quoting this source:

A price comparison website, www.moneysupermarket.com ran a experiment on the streets of London and Manchester:

[Representatives] wandered the streets this morning wearing sandwich boards offering a free £5 note to anyone who asked. Despite encountering over 1800 people, only 28 passers by bothered to take advantage of the offer.

Americans, please imagine someone wearing this sign in your town, except it says $10 bill instead of £5 note. Don't you think that more than 1.5% of the passers-by would stop to claim some free money? (If any one of you is rich enough to carry out this experiment in/on the streets of New York or your nearest city, please do so and report back to us!)

From the source press release, we get the British reasoning for not asking for the money:

Why do Brits believe they would fail to take up the offer?
• Six in ten people say they their cynicism would prevent them from asking for free cash as they would suspect a catch or trick.
• Twenty per cent of people would simply not believe the offer was real – a trend which increased with age. Almost a third of over 60s claimed they wouldn’t believe the sandwich board wearer.
• Just over one in ten people said they would feel too embarrassed and three per cent of people said that £5 wasn’t worth the effort.

Now, I can sympathi{s/z}e with the cynicism and embarrassment, but I still can't believe so few people stopped, and can't believe that the cynicism and embarrassment would be so widely felt in the US. In fact, I think the natural optimism of the American character might lead some people to ask for the money even if they thought there was a catch, as they might feel confident in the belief that they wouldn't be caught by the catch.

Comparing a couple of anthropological works about the English and Americans offers some support for my suspicions. (I must admit, I'm making a point of citing sources because it's always dangerous to make generali{s/z}ations like this on a blog with an open commenting facility, so I need to do the "it's not just me who thinks this!" thing. I will check my e-mail tomorrow morning with some trepidation!)

Among the traits that Kate Fox (Watching the English) describes as being at the 'core' of Englishness are social dis-ease (making it difficult to approach a stranger), Eeyorishness (chronic pessimism--'it is in the nature of things to go wrong and be disappointing') and a sense of fair play (including a feeling that there is only so much to go around, so if you have more, someone else has less). I think that the reasons respondents gave for not taking the money could be brought together as "Even if it were a good idea for me to take money from you (and I can't imagine that it is), it's not worth £5 for me to veer out of my comfort zone to ask for it." (I just showed Better Half the photo of the man with the sandwich board and he said: "Don't take the money--he'll want to talk to you about Jesus!")

Stewart and Bennett (in their American Cultural Patterns) note that Americans are very action-orient(at)ed (approaching new situations with an eye to what needs to be done about them) and a belief that "the achievements of the individual are not gained at the expense of others"--which makes it easier to have an "I deserve it" attitude when faced with good fortune. And Americans (although I'm the exception that may prove the rule) are notoriously good at approaching strangers. (Better Half quips: "An American would go up, ask for the £5, then say, 'And let me tell you about Jesus!'")

So, who's got a few hundred dollars to spare and the wherewithal to make a sandwich board?

Labels: money , politeness | 28 comments

lefties and righties

Aug 30, 2007

Joe e-mailed to ask:

I understand that in Great Britain the terms lefty and righty refer to people's political leanings and not their handedness as in the U.S. Is this true, and if so how do the British refer to a left-handed or right-handed person, especially in the context of sports (which is where the issue most often arises here)?

That's mostly true, Joe. Better Half, an avid cricket fan, reports that left-handed batsmen (NB: batter, as in baseball, is AmE, though it's gaining frequency in the UK to refer to cricket players--much to many fans' horror) are referred to as left-handed batsmen. One can also in BrE and AmE call such a person a left-hander. (There are much more derogatory/slang terms--see below.) Most AmE speakers wouldn't think of the diminutive lefty as derogative; in fact, they may consider it to be affectionate. While lefty/righty as handedness labels are found in BrE as well as AmE, they are not used so freely in that way.

Originally from AmE in reference to baseball, we get the slang term southpaw, which has been populari{s/z}ed world-wide through boxing. (Northpaw for right-handers is markedly less common.) It's sometimes considered to be a bit derogatory, particularly since it refers to a human by the name of an animal body part. But as derogatory epithets go, it's got nothing on some of those listed for BrE here. (I'm sure there must be a similar list for AmE, but I'm not finding it--might any of you lefties know?)

As BrE political terms, lefty (also leftie) and the less-common righty (or rightie) are not particularly derogatory either--though, like any epithet, they could be used with belittling intent. Better Half asked me how an American would refer to a socialist, if not by lefty. An awful lot of Americans would probably answer pinko, which is rarely used without derogatory intent and is frequently used in phrases like pinko-commie bastard. The fact of the matter is, while it would be unsurprising and not insulting in the UK to refer to some (certainly not all!) members of the current party in power (Labour) as 'good old socialists', there are few localities in America (Vermont comes to mind) where one could publicly use the word good to modify socialist and not start a fight. Most AmE nicknames for political positions are derogatory or extreme. The most neutral terms are probably left-winger and right-winger, but of course these days almost everyone likes to claim to be 'moderate' or 'middle-of-the-road', etc. Twenty years ago, liberal became a word that was considered a label of shame or an accusation for even the "non-conservative" candidates in the US. (That was back in my student-politico days. The Young Republicans --one of whom recently went to prison in the Abramoff scandal [so there!]-- used to do the L-for-Loser sign on their foreheads while chanting "Liberal" at my colleagues and me.) Conservative has not suffered the same fate in the States. Nor should it--it's a useful word, which makes the 'loss' of liberal as a usable political description all the more sad.

Labels: body parts , epithets , politics/history , sport | 26 comments

some onomatopoeia

Nov 1, 2008

The requests for treatment of various topics are still coming in much faster than I can deal with them. So here's one that goes back almost a year. Roxana wrote to say:

I teach English in Italy, and the books we use come from the UK. The other day I was a bit surprised to read a sentence in "English Files" that went like this: "Do you hoot if the driver in front of you is slow?" (not "toot") I would have said "honk".
Have you come across this?

Yes, cars in the UK hoot (among other sounds) and in the US they honk (among other sounds), and those are but a couple of examples of the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia (words whose sounds imitate what they refer to). "The arbitrariness of onomatopoeia?" I hear some of you thinking. "Surely not!" But I reply "Surely, surely."

Onomatopoeia is always raised by some student when I teach the notion of 'the arbitrariness of the sign'--i.e. the notion that there is no causal connection between the form of a sign (e.g. a word) and its meaning. For example, it's just a social convention that the word for that thing in the middle of your face is nose. You had to learn to associate that combination of sounds with that body part because there's no other way to know that those sounds symboli{s/z}e that thing. And people who speak Zulu had to learn to match a different set of sounds to that thing because there's nothing in nature forcing us to use those sounds for that thing.

But surely, my student reasons, onomatopoeia does involve a natural relation between meaning and form (sound). We call the sound of a gun bang because guns go bang and so forth. Except, of course, that they don't. That's the way that the sound is represented in English, but in French it's pan (with the 'n' pronounced as nasali{s/z}ation on the vowel). And in Icelandic, apparently, it's búmm. While onomatopoeia is iconic, it still relies on the particular sounds that belong to one's language and it relies on some conventionali{s/z}ation. In English, our guns go bang and our bombs go boom because that's what we've learned from other English speakers, not just because that's what guns and bombs sound like. So there's some room for variation among languages, and even within languages, on onomatopoetic matters.

So it is with car horns. In both BrE and AmE, one might imitate the sound as beep, but (especially as verbs for making the sound) BrE likes hoot, which Americans reserve for owls, and toot too, and AmE likes honk (which can also be used for goose noises--OED marks this as 'orig. N. Amer.').

Here I must mention an absolutely charming website, bzzzpeek, on which children from around the world say the sounds of animals and vehicles. If you don't believe me on UK/US differences in onomatopoeia, check with the children. (The UK is the first country on each page, the US is the last--so it takes some clicking to get to.)

Here is a selection of onomatopoeia that I've come across in day-to-day existence. It's mostly come to the fore as Better Half and I clash in our sound effects for the song "Grover Murphy had a farm" (also "Grover Murphy had a bath", "Grover Murphy had some lunch" and anything else I can think to do sound effects for--but of course we use her real first and second name, which, as luck--or possibly careful onomastic planning--would have it, is metrically identical to "Grover Murphy" and "Old MacDonald").

donkeys: in AmE they say hee-haw, but in BrE eeyore--which is basically pronounced like hee-haw without the aitches (the penny drops for many Pooh fans--see the comments here)

frogs: the verb is to croak in both dialects, but in AmE (originally and chiefly, says OED) they say ribbit. This may have made it across the ocean now--Better Half was surprised to learn it's originally AmE, but the British bzzzpeek child has frogs saying croak croak.

emergency vehicles: in BrE children (or adults talking to children) sometimes call these nee-naws after the sound they make, which (traditionally) in Britain is a two-tone sound that's different from the sirens of the US (which are sometimes represented as woo-woo--but I've never heard that used as a noun to represent the vehicles, like nee-naw is). This one is not a case of the dialects representing the same sounds differently, but of having different sounds to represent. One might make the argument that hoot and honk are the same sort of thing--the British drive little cars that go hoot and Americans drive big ones that go honk. Except that the OED has BrE hoots and AmE honks back in the early 20th century, when the size of the cars would have been about the same in the two countries.

trains: we've already discussed the AmE origin of choo-choo and the BrE alternative puff-puff, which seems to be a bit old-fashioned now. BH doesn't use puff-puff, but does use (BrE) puffer train as an equivalent to (AmE) choo-choo train. Grover and I take the train to work/crèche, and as we wait for it, I find myself saying "Here comes the choo-choo train" then feeling ridiculous for doing so, since the train makes a kind of electric hum rather than anything 'puffy' or 'choo-choo-y'.

The thing that's struck me in thinking and talking to BrE speakers about these onomatopoetic items is that the American ones are mostly well-known here, but few people seem to reali{s/z}e that they were originally AmE. Considering how much disdain is felt for some AmE words in BrE, it's interesting that this section of the vocabulary seems somewhat resistant to that kind of prejudice. Or have I just missed it? And have I missed more onomatopoetic differences?

Labels: animals , onomatopoeia , pronunciation , transport(ation) | 82 comments

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Separated by a Common Language

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