Separated by a Common Language

Out for lunch Saturday with Better Half's Mum and her Better Half, when BHM'sBH declares "I hate it when English people take on American corporate jargon." I expected he was talking about thinking outside the box and investing in excellence. The latter is one of my pet peeves, as well as the current call-to-arms/pens by my university's management. ( I also hate that my university has a management team now instead of an administration.)

But no, BHM'sBH instead went on to talk about how he can tell who works for an American company when they open their mouths at Starbucks and say "Can I get a..." instead of "Can/May I have a...". If you ask to get a coffee, by his reasoning, you're asking to come (a)round to the other side of the counter and fix yourself a coffee. BH agrees with BHM'sBH that in the context of ordering a coffee can I get a means 'can I get myself a'.

Checking out can I get a on Google UK, some of the examples are:

can I get a qualification?
Can I get a regular health check at my GP surgery?
can i get a gmail invite?
Can I get a refund of unused portion of a season ticket...?
Can I get a refund on my parking permit?
Can I get a business grant to start up a new business in the Harrogate district?

Most of these are from FAQs, and are sincerely about ability ('Am I able to get a refund? How do I do it?'), rather than requests for things to be given. That's not surprising, as writing Can I get a decaf latte? on my website is unlikely to result in a hot beverage showing up beside me. (That's what yelling to BH in the kitchen was invented for.) The gmail invite example is the only one that stands out as a UK-located (but not necessarily UK) person requesting something using can i get a.

BrE speakers have no problem with saying I got a coffee on my way to work, meaning 'I took a coffee away from someplace where I ordered it'.

In can I get a, get is the converse of give:
Can I get a coffee (from you)? = Can you give me a coffee?

But it's not that the get/give opposition is American-only: on UK Google, one gets twice as many hits for get presents as for receive presents. Since one typically doesn't go and get one's presents from the giver ( one tends to passively receive them), it's clear here that British folk have the lexical/logical wherewithal to understand can I get a as a request.

I think is the real problem is that one learns early the 'polite' ways to ask for things, and this way is not in the British canon of polite requests. While get can mean a passive action of receiving, it also has other senses that are closer to take--which probably colo(u)rs people's perceptions of get's connotations. So, if you're brought up on saying can I have a, then can I get a might sound a little more greedy/impolite.

But why doesn't it sound less polite to American ears? (Especially if it's a relatively new locution there too?) Three possibilities, which don't rule one another out:

1 - Perhaps it does sound less polite to Americans too. To me can I get a sounds a little more brusque and self-cent(e)red than can I have a. (But maybe I've been influenced by my surroundings.)

2 - Perhaps it is slightly less polite in both dialects, but it's less important to sound "polite" in America. (The word polite is a bit loaded here. I'm using it to mean something like 'indirect/genteel'.) The US is known for its solidarity politeness system and for its individualistic culture. In a solidarity culture, one wants to act as if everyone's on the same social level. The UK is historically a deference culture, in which people's societal roles are more distinguished and great pains are taken not to inflict oneself on others unnecessarily. The UK has been shifting toward solidarity styles since at least the second world war, but is still not as far along that path as the US. The importation of (and unease with) can I get a may be a symptom of that shift.

3 - Or perhaps it's just that anything that sounds American grates on British ears and sounds less polite, just by association with Americans and stereotypes of Americans.

I think it's probably a combination of all of these.

Tonight Better Half asked me to lay the table. I went to get plates, then noticed that he'd already filled plates for us. Which led to a conversation about which things the 'layer of the table' was responsible for, which could almost be seen as a dialectal conversation.

My reasoning: I grew up with the job of setting the table, BH grew up laying the table. I was responsible for putting down plates, silverware (AmE), glasses, placemats and napkins. BH says that he just put down cutlery (BrE). I don't actually believe him, having been involved in table-laying exercises at his mother's house where the plates have gone down with the cutlery on the placemats, but he did say "We never had napkins. Sometimes we had kitchen towel" (AmE paper towel).

It's not unusual for napkins not to be supplied at meals served in people's homes here. In the US, it may just be paper towels, but you are generally given something to wipe your mouth with. This may be a generational thing--it's my impression that "war babies" are less likely to have something on the table for mouth-wiping.

But stranger still for an American dining in English homes is being served a meal without a drink. I eat a lot of meals in a lot of different people's homes because of the Scrabble team I'm on. While one's always offered tea after the meal, it's not uncommon to be offered nothing liquid during it. (This always happens at my team's host's house. He has in the past pronounced it strange that I drink as much as I do. I've pronounced it strange that he hasn't had kidney failure yet.) Again, this is something that I associate more with the post-war generation, so may have its roots in necessary frugality.

We all know that Americans consume more than other cultures, right down to paper napkins and milk (the staple in my house) with dinner. But as the post-war generation is replaced by people who haven't known the same privations, the rates of consumption rise in the UK as well. One can only hope that the more voluntary 'green' ethos takes hold as strongly as the effects of involuntary rationing did.

But to get back to the language...why do we set or lay a table? Despite the different words in the two dialects, they are grammatically odd in the same way, with the direct object table not corresponding to the thing that is being moved. Usually if you set or lay a thing, it involves putting it down. In the case of the table, it's already in position, and that which is being moved is left unmentioned. We often leave out mentioning semantic arguments (i.e. things involved in the action) if they're clearly recoverable from the context. For example, we don't bother to say "Did you eat food yet?", we say "Did you eat yet?"

So, do we not mention the 'what' that needs to go on the table because it is predictable in the context? On the contrary, if you're preparing to eat a meal, the table is surely more contextually stable (and thus not needing mention) than what goes on it. For instance, if you're eating soup, you need to lay/set the table differently than if you're eating sushi, and if you're eating breakfast you might put down different things than if you were having lunch. So, why don't we leave out the table and instead say "Would you set/lay the dishes?"

Perhaps it's because there is no good term to cover that which goes on the table (it's not just dishes, it's also linen and cutlery), and also because we do have a sense of doing something to the table when we prepare it for a meal. But still--why then do we use verbs that have to do with moving something (usually represented by the direct object--but not here)? Why don't we say "would you ready the table?" or "would you prepare the table?"

Wonder about things like this too long and one works up an appetite...

Standing outside a bookshop today, Better Half pointed out the Where's Wally books, and wondered why the man called Waldo in America is Wally in the UK. No one seems to know.

The Wally/Waldo books are the invention of an Englishman, so I am assuming (just because there's precious little info on this on the internet) that Wally was the original name. In BrE, a wally is someone who's a bit of an idiot. It doesn't have this meaning in AmE, and neither does Waldo, so why they felt the need to change it in the US, I'm not sure. My only guess is that they chose Waldo because it's a funny-sounding name, and that might make up for the fact that the 'dunce' connotations of the name were lost on Americans. It's also a name that's pretty much died out in the US since the 1950s. The Where's Waldo books have not, it seems, sparked a baby-naming trend. (See: Name Voyager, a fun way to waste some time.)

The family of (US) candy bars / (UK) chocolate bars made by M&M/Mars (aka Masterfoods) provide another case of onomastic mismatch between the US and UK, as the following table shows. (Hey, look at me! I figured out how to make an html table!)

inside the bar	US	UK
nougat	3 Musketeers	Milky Way
nougat, caramel	Milky Way	Mars
nougat, caramel, peanuts	Snickers	until 1990: Marathon; since 1990: Snickers
nougat, caramel, almonds	until 2000: Mars now: Snickers Almond	n/a
caramel (in a pretzel shape--vague equivalents; not made by the same company)	Marathon (R.I.P.)	Cadbury Curly Wurly

Just to be confusing, there's now an energy bar called Snickers Marathon. I have read one theory that Snickers was originally called Marathon in the UK because Snickers sounded too much like knickers (i.e. underpants).

For a visual comparison of US/UK Mars, see The Visible Mars Bar Project In general, Americans are more likely than Europeans to put Almonds in their chocolate, and Europeans are more likely to put hazelnuts in their chocolate, though you see more and more of both on both sides of the Atlantic these days. Both are delightful in their own ways.

On Saturdays like today I volunteer for four hours at an Oxfam shop. It's a fun job--most of my fellow volunteers are foreigners as well--mostly students who want to practice their English or to get some shop experience in hopes of getting a paying job at some point. Anyhow, working there today got me thinking about the differences between UK charity shops and US thrift stores. While you could say that the two terms are cross-dialectal translations of one another (as wikipedia does), the different focuses of the names reveal differences in the establishments themselves and the cultural attitudes to them.

shop vs. store
Generally, BrE uses the noun shop where Americans would use store, but for me as an American, a shop sounds smaller than a store, and indeed size is a major difference between the average transatlantic thrifting (US informal) experiences. Most UK charity shops are smallish shops in the high street (UK; = US 'on the main shopping street, downtown'), while US thrift stores often have warehouse or supermarket proportions. Because of the smaller amount of floor space, some UK shops can afford to be very choosy about what they put out for display. Oxfam recently had a campaign to discourage donations of "not so good" goods.


thrift vs. charity
More differences in the social attitudes toward these shops are revealed in the descriptors thrift and charity. In the past few years, attitudes toward buying second-hand goods have changed in the US (hence the popularity of eBay), but when I was a kid, thrift stores were understood to be 'for' poor people to shop at. Hence they were in poorer (or in my town's case, industrial) areas. Nowadays you can find many thrift shops in strip malls, mixed in with retail shops appealing to all kinds of tastes. The prices are still pretty cheap, though I expect that the influx of middle class thrifters and the need to pay rent in more expensive parts of town may raise those prices in places.

Charity shops like Oxfam are clear that their main purpose is to raise money--not to provide cheap goods to the community (that's a nice side effect). Our shop is particularly expensive (as customers like to tell me), but we generally charge what we think we can get for an item. This means that anything that has possible value as a collectible is priced only a bit cheaper than it would be in an antique or other specialist shop. Secondhand books are £2 or £3 for most paperback novels (new ones in bookshops are £6 or £7), but there are also art books and antique books priced at around £20. (£1 = ~$1.90)

A broader cross-section of the UK (than the US) population seems to frequent charity shops--not everyone would buy their clothes there, but most readers enjoy checking out the books. Although there are real charity aficionados here, there is not, to my knowledge, any equivalent of the US verb to thrift.

A few days ago, I read Better Half a bit of something I'd been writing about cooking terms, and my mention of a roiling boil completely flummoxed him. Not sure whether I'd stumbled on a dialectal difference or whether BH just had a poor vocabulary when it came to cooking, I asked my boss, a historical linguist who also professed ignorance of the word roil. So, dialectal difference then--BH's vocabulary is vindicated!

To roil is to move water so that whatever is in it (sediment, etc.) gets stirred up. By metaphorical extension, it can mean to perturb or upset. A roiling boil, then, is the type where your eggs knock against your pan.

OED's first citation of roil is from 1590, but most citations past 1700 are American. The origin is obscure, possibly from a rare French verb. Development of the adjective roiling seems particularly American, with the first citation in 1967.

It's a common enough word in American recipes, with an estimated 9300+ Google hits for roiling boil:

To purify questionable water, bring it to a roiling boil and keep it there for 10 minutes at least.

Bring to a roiling boil, reduce to simmer and cook until the meat is tender...


The sea and emotions frequently roil as well.

The British equivalent for roiling boil is fast boil [updated link].

The lack of roiling boil in BrE reminds me of another American -oil word, broil.

Playing Scrabble recently, my opponent The Postman was unsure of broiled, but played it figuring that it must be related to embroiled. This reminded me of one of the first times I watched "Who wants to be a millionaire?" in the UK. The million pound question was (approximately, from memory):

The American word broil means:
(a) bake (b) boil (c) grill (d) braise


I could've won a million pounds, except that I probably would've wiped out on a cricket question long before getting to the mil.

When I first moved to the UK, more than six years ago, I started a list of ways in which British English (henceforth BrE) and American English (AmE) differed. I thought I might try to write a grammar/spell-checking program that would translate texts from one dialect to the other. That idea never got off the ground, largely because I can't program, and because I doubted that the amount of work it would require would be in reasonable proportion to the number of people who would actually want to pay for such a thing.

Dictionaries of British/American English mostly cover well-known variants like truck/lorry and elevator/lift But these are just the tip of the iceberg. What I intend to cover here are words/phrases/pronunciations/grammatical constructions that get me into trouble on a daily basis.

If you'd like to suggest any words for discussion, please use the 'e-mail Lynneguist' feature.