Separated by a Common Language

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those of you (particularly the American yous) who like signage discussions will probably enjoy it.

But there was a comment in the post that got me a bit down. Orac shows a photo of a sign for a "Baby Nappy Changer Unit" in a public toilet/restroom (which funnily uses the more Canadian washroom in the sign--it's at the Tower of London, so perhaps they're going for the most transparent term, given the tourists). About this sign, Orac says:

It sounds so much more civilized that [sic] "diaper."

And my question is why? Nappy, the modern BrE equivalent to (AmE) diaper, is a baby-talk version of napkin--though no one these days calls the things that you put on babies napkins.* So, nappy, etymologically speaking, is on a par with other baby-talk words like doggy, horsie, and choo-choo. The OED's (draft 2003 definition) first citation for it in print comes from 1927, and it's hardly complimentary of the word:

1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 7 Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).

Diaper, on the other hand comes from a Latin, later French, with a root meaning 'white'. The first citation for it is from the 14th century, where it refers to a type of cloth, and it has its place in Shakespeare (probably not referring to a baby's napkin in that case, but to a napkin or towel). So, why does a babyfied word sound more 'civilized' to an educated AmE speaker than a good, old latinate word? Methinks that this is a symptom of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

AVIC strikes Americans from all walks of life. It's why my mother thinks that it's "pretty" when an Englishperson rhymes garage with carriage. It's why Americans think people with English accents are more intelligent than they are. It's why I get e-mails from Americans who despair of their fellow citizens' diction and thank me for championing the 'correct ways'. (I e-mail back and explain that I'm doing no such thing and that their reasoning on the matter is flawed. I wonder why they never send a reply...) Of course, there's a similar syndrome affecting some BrE speakers: British Verbal Superiority Complex; however, I've not found this to be quite as evenly distributed through the population as AVIC is in the US.

Now, there are times to think that some (uses of) language is(/are) better than others. One thing that Orac and commentators on his blog praise is the directness and honesty of certain signs. I don't always agree with their examples, but directness and honesty are admirable qualities in signs. (One that is pictured on the blog, but that I've never understood, is the BrE convention of putting polite notice at the top of a sign that orders people around. What's wrong with please?) Other things that make some (uses of) language arguably better than others are consistency within the system (e.g. in spelling) and avoidance of ambiguity. But these are issues about the use of the language, and both BrE and AmE can be (and often are) used in clear, consistent, direct, honest ways.

So, back to my old mantras:

• 'Different' doesn't mean 'better' or 'worse'.
• 'British' doesn't necessarily mean 'older' or 'original'.
• 'Older' doesn't mean 'better' either!
• Let's enjoy each other's dialects AND our own!

(One can be obnoxiously preachy in either dialect too.)

Happy Labor Day to the Americans out there. (I won't re-spell it Labour, since it's a name.) And I will admit my prejudice that American Monday-holidays generally have better names!


* I can't resist a few side-notes on nappy and napkin.

• AmE uses sanitary napkin for a feminine hygiene product, while BrE uses sanitary towel.
• Then there's the AmE meaning of nappy, which derives from the more general sense of 'having a nap'--as fabric can (BrE: can have). In AmE this also refers to the type of tightly curled hair that is (pheno)typical of people of sub-Saharan African ancestry--particularly when said hair is not very well cared for. This was the meaning in play when (orig. AmE) shock-jock Don Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". When the news story was reported in the UK, there was some confusion (see, for example the comments here), with some people thinking that Imus was claiming that the women wore diapers or napkins on their heads (à la Aunt Jemima).
• Then there's the old napkin versus serviette drama in BrE and related Es. In some (e.g. South African and some BrE speakers), the former is reserved for cloth table napkins, and the latter for paper. Elsewhere, serviette just marks you out as being 'non-U'--i.e. not upper class. Serviette is virtually unknown in AmE.

Postscript (8th September): Found a lovely example of AVIC (and its cure, in this case) in last week's Saturday Guardian Review section, in an article by AM Homes about American writer Grace Paley:

Grace often retold the story of how, at 19, desperate to be a poet, she took a course taught by WH Auden. When she used the word "trousers" in a poem, Auden asked why she was writing in British English - why didn't she just say "pants"? Paley explained that she thought that was just what writers did, and then never did it again.

They're doing some fixing-up on campus, and this week I was faced with the following in my path:



(In case you can't read the writing on your screen, the left(-)hand sign says "Please go around" and the right(-)hand one says "Please go round".) I liked this bit of linguistic indecision.

Adverbial and prepositional round is far more common in BrE than in AmE. (And just typing it gets the Dead or Alive song going through my head. Which Dead or Alive song, you ask? You mean they had more than one? I thought they just released the same one over and over and over and over again.) According to John Algeo's British or American English?, round is 40 times more common in BrE than AmE (in the Cambridge International Corpus). Though it might just be differences in lexicographical practice, Algeo also notes that (US) Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003) lists 2 senses for prepositional round but 7 for around, whereas the (UK) New Oxford Dictionary of English lists 5 for around and 8 for round.

I searched for round the on the Guardian website and asked myself whether the examples I found would be round or around in my native dialect. Here are the results from the first two pages that didn't involve other Briticisms (otherwise I'd be typing explanations all day and night), repetition, compounding (e.g. a round-the-world ticket), or other disqualifiers:

1. Party round the world in 2007
2. Reading round the Christmas tree.
3. He's an expert guide, fluent in Italian, takes you round the museum
4. Pubs are to be allowed to stay open round the clock under plans for a radical overhaul of licensing laws
5. 'Listen: tinkering round the edges will change nothing'
6. On the way round the labyrinth, there are slits in the walls,
7. He has recently completed the last section of a walk round the M25 [a motorway/highway]

I'm fairly confident (though I must confess that I use a BrE-flavo(u)red round fairly often these days, and so may have lost my intuitions), that a typical AmE speaker would say around in all of these cases. The last seems to me the most natural with round, but perhaps some of you with more intact AmE intuitions will be better judges.

Using Fowler's as a guide, The Grammar Logs of the Capital Community College Foundation (Hartford, Connecticut) answers a query about round and around with:

In almost all situations, the words are interchangeable and you'll have to rely on your ear to come up with the word that sounds better. [I]n British English, there are several idiomatic expressions in which "round" is obligatory, but where "around" would work just fine in the U.S.A.: "winter comes round," "show me round," "he came round to see me." In the U.S., "around" is obligatory when you're using it to convey approximation: "He arrived around 4 p.m.," "Around two-thirds of the faculty will retire next year."

There are other idioms that must have one or the other in them--for instance to get around, meaning to go to/be in a lot of places (as in the Beach Boys song), needs around. But in the meaning 'to evade' (as in We got (a)round the security guard), BrE prefers round and AmE prefers around. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments!

An interesting example in the Guardian results was The speech heard 'round the world. Here the apostrophe seems to indicate the writer's feeling that round has been contracted from around--and probably the writer's feeling that round is a bit more informal. That was the only apostrophe'd one in the 20 I looked at. But is it round really a contraction of around? Maybe not. Around is a fairly recent addition to the language. The OED lists around as 'rare before 1600', and notes that it doesn't occur in the works of Shakespeare. Round goes back further, and Shakespeare used it in places where I would have said around (but he didn't ask me, did he?):

1602 SHAKES. Ham. III. ii. 165 Full thirtie times hath Phoebus Cart gon round Neptunes salt Wash.

So where did the a- come from? It could be on analogy with other a- prepositions like across and among. At any rate, the OED marks its fourth sense for around as an Americanism now, but perhaps not in the past or the future:

4. In U.S.: = ROUND. Perhaps orig. U.K. (cf. quot. 1816). Now coming back into British use under U.S. influence.

1816 JANE AUSTEN Emma I. x. 187 Emma..was beginning to think how she might draw back a little more, when they both looked around, and she was obliged to join them.

All this seems to indicate that apostrophes are unnecessary for 'round (at least in BrE), and that the perceived need to put them there may be analogous to 'til, which was till before it was until.

Howard at the UK/US forum e-mailed to request discussion of BrE arse and AmE ass. It seems Howard has come across at least one American wondering why the British "put an /r/ in ass", when, of course, the real question is why Americans have taken the /r/ OUT of arse. There are many useful discussions of arse/ass available, so I'll lazily quote Wikipedia:

Until the late eighteenth century, "ass" presumably had no profane meaning and simply referred to the animal now mostly called donkey. Because of the increasingly non-rhotic nature of standard British English, "arse" was often rendered "ass". However indirect evidence of the change from arse to ass traces back to 1785 (in euphemistic avoidance of ass "donkey" by polite speakers) and perhaps to Shakespeare, if Nick Bottom transformed into a donkey in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1594) is such a word-play. This usage was also adopted in America, which is why the word "arse" is not usually used in the United States. The age of Victorian propriety resulted in the rechristening of the horse-like animal, changing the name to "donkey" (not recorded in English before 1785, slang, perhaps from dun "dull grey-brown," the form perhaps influenced by monkey, or possibly from a familiar form of Duncan, cf. dobbin) to avoid any improper inferences. Some people in Britain have adopted the American version in writing. Although before World War I they were similar, the British pronunciations of "ass" /æs/ and "arse" /ɑːs/ are now quite different. While arse is commonly used in Atlantic Canada, west of the Ottawa river, ass is more idiomatic.

So, the /r/ in arse used to be pronounced, but now it's not pronounced as an /r/ in many (particularly southern English) British dialects, including Received Pronunciation. Nevertheless, it's spel{led/t} with an r no matter which British dialect one speaks. So why do some Americans think that the /r/ has been added in, rather than taken out?

My hypothesis is that it's because most Americans are familiar with dialects that add /r/s after certain vowels, even though the r is not present in the spelling. They're used to seeing the written form without an /r/, and so figure/reckon that any other form is a corruption, just as they consider it a corruption when people pronounce idea as idear and washing as warshing. Some British dialects have an intrusive r, so it's not unreasonable to guess that the word that is familiar as ass is the victim of /r/-adding.

Adding or dropping /r/s is a definite marker of geography and social class. In the US, people often consider added /r/s to be a mark of a hick or "white trash". (It's done in many parts of the country, including rural Pennsylvania and the Ozarks.) Thus in one on-line discussion one participant said "English people are cute. They say 'arse' instead of 'ass'", to which another American hotly replied:

"Arse" is not cute. "Arse" just makes me think of welfare moms living in low-rental housing and wearing sweatpants, running babysitting operations out of their ghetto apartments and threatening the kids into behaving themselves by shrieking "I'll tan yer arse!" with a Virginia Slim hanging out the side of their mouth.

Arse. So not cute.

So, here we have an American judging BrE arse in much the same way that many Britons judge the American pronunciation of herb. Even though it's the older pronunciation and the one that is natural to the dialect, it's judged on the basis of class-based assumptions that don't translate over international borders.

In BrE, arse can also a verb. Can't be arsed to means 'can't be bothered to'. I see that another blogger (Troubled Diva) is promoting an acronym to be used when you want to admit you're too lazy to back up the claims you're making on your blog: CBATG, or 'Can't Be Arsed To Google'. Another verbal use of arse, to arse about is vaguely equivalent to AmE goof off. The OED includes some examples of ass being used as a verb in ass about, but this just isn't a common usage in the US. I actually could be arsed to Google that, but the results were contaminated with lots of examples of give a rat's ass about, and I couldn't be arsed to sort those out.

And while we're on our rear-ends, a few other sources of international confusion over the gluteus maximus:

Perhaps I just had a poor vocabulary in my pre-passport days, but it was only after leaving the States that I learn{ed/t} that pratfall literally means 'falling onto the rear-end'. In BrE, prat is known to mean 'buttocks', but is mostly used as an epithet for a dolt or a (orig. AmE) jerk--much as ass is used in AmE.

Americans should be warned strongly against referring to one's fanny while in proximity to British persons. In the UK (and other parts of the English-speaking world), fanny means a woman's genitals. Either hilarity or deep embarassment (depending on the company) ensues when American tourists refer to their fanny packs. In the UK, these items are known as bum bags. Bum is, of course, another BrE word for the buttocks, which is a bit less crude than AmE butt. Thank goodness that Americans gave up on naming babies Fanny in the 1940s, but the Swedish still love it (though they pronounce the 'y' as a fronted 'u'; see Think Baby Names).

Bottom only means 'buttocks' in AmE, and while it can be used in the same way in BrE, a distinction can be made between the front bottom (i.e. the [female] genitals) and the back bottom.

Since I've just hit bottom, I'll make this the end (ha-ha) of this instal(l)ment.