agentive suffixes: -er and -or, and a little on grey/gray

Oct 13, 2007
A member of our Psychology Department wrote the other day to ask about distractor and distracter. In her experience, the former is AmE, but BrE can have either (as she found in the OED). But this isn't quite true. Look up distractor in the American Heritage Dictionary and you'll find "Variant of distracter". Both variants are available in both dialects, but is there more to it than that?

I was intrigued by this query because of other niggling (for me, at least) -er/-or distinctions. Here, I'm talking just about the use of these letter combinations as agentive suffixes--i.e. endings that turn verbs into nouns meaning 'someone who VERBS'. Of course, there are other -er and -or endings that differ in AmE and BrE (centre/center, color/colour), and those are what you find if you try to look up AmE versus BrE differences in spelling -er and -or words. But that's an unrelated issue that we'll just ignore for now.

So, both -er and -or are agentive suffixes. The -or suffix is only primarily found in words derived from Latin, whereas -er can be put on the end of just about any verb that involves an agent (a 'doer' of the 'action'). But Latin-derived words differ in how strongly they are associated with the -or suffix. Latin-derived verbs that end in -ate, for example, almost always take the -or suffix. So we have dictator, but not a variant *dictater, alternator but not *alternater.

Things are less clear-cut with other Latin-derived verbs. For example, in my job, I advise students and convene courses, and when I spell out those roles, I'm an advisor and a convenor, but when my UK university spells them, I'm often an adviser (which just looks wrong to me) and a convener. (Incidentally, Blogger's allegedly AmE spellchecker likes the -er forms.)

So, is this a dialectal difference, or just personal perceptions? (It's not a pronunciation difference, except in those cases in which one exaggerates the pronunciation in order to give a clue to the spelling.) I've searched for advisor and adviser on a range of university websites from the UK and the US, and here's what I found:

US Universities
adviser advisor
U of Massachusetts (Amherst)10%90%
U of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)27%73%
Baylor University31%69%



UK Universities

U of Sussex38%62%
U of Manchester36%64%
U of Edinburgh49%51%

So, it's probably not my imagination that the -or form is stronger in the US than the UK, though there's considerable variation within each country. The fact that I started out at the university with the strongest preference for -or might account for my strong preference for it. There's also the question here of whether this distinction can be attributed to regional differences within the countries. We see the strongest -or preference in the US in a northeastern university. Did I get that strong preference because of my university experiences, or had it already been inculcated in me by growing up and learning to spell in the northeast? In the UK, we see the weakest -or preference in a Scottish university. Does that extend to other Scottish universities? I'm not going to spend my Saturday finding out! But you're welcome to!

Before we leave this topic, let's raise the question of whether these spelling differences are meaningful. There's a general principle at work in language (sometimes called the Principle of Contrast) that if there are two different forms, they must have some different significance. This is why it is difficult to find exact synonyms in a language--once you introduce a new word for something, people start to assume that it must give some different information from that given by the old word for that thing (otherwise, why bother to coin or borrow the new word?). The Principle of Contrast (and avoidance of synonymy) is so strong that it can be extended to spelling variations. So, for example, I was once party to an American discussion of grey versus gray (the latter being the more common AmE spelling, but the former being acceptable as well), with people discussing whether grey or gray was a darker colo(u)r. (The discussion began here; search the American Dialect Society archives for 'grey and gray' to get the whole string). Because there are different forms, and because people like to look for differences in meaning and maybe because they have been exposed to one form more in one type of context than another (e.g. grey in clothing catalog(ue)s, but gray in a box of crayons), people often believe that the words have different definitions. This discussion has happened (for about 100 years!) at the OED, too, where there's a note at the 1989 grey/gray entry that reads:
With regard to the question of usage, an inquiry by Dr. Murray in Nov. 1893 elicited a large number of replies, from which it appeared that in Great Britain the form grey is the more frequent in use, notwithstanding the authority of Johnson and later Eng. lexicographers, who have all given the preference to gray. In answer to questions as to their practice, the printers of The Times stated that they always used the form gray; Messrs. Spottiswoode and Messrs. Clowes always used grey; other eminent printing firms had no fixed rule. Many correspondents said that they used the two forms with a difference of meaning or application: the distinction most generally recognized being that grey denotes a more delicate or a lighter tint than gray. Others considered the difference to be that gray is a ‘warmer’ colour, or that it has a mixture of red or brown (cf. also the quot. under 1c below). In the twentieth century, grey has become the established spelling in the U.K., whilst gray is standard in the United States.
So, do advisor and adviser mean different things to you? Or does one just seem misspelt?
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to table

Oct 9, 2007
Ooh, I'm cruising through the backlog of requests now. We're in June now, with Simon writing to request treatment of the verb table, an example of a Janus word in BrE and AmE meeting lingo.

In the US, meetings are often held according to Robert's Rules of Order, a popular guide to 'parliamentary procedure'. (We may not have a parliament, but we have the procedures! The Congress has its own set of rules.) In the parlance of Robert's and AmE generally, if a motion has been made and is up for discussion, it is on the floor, as in the following quotation from the Princeton Union Eagle:
After a few minutes, Weisenburger said to Girard, "There's a motion on the floor, it's been seconded. Do something."
If you want to remove the motion from the floor--that is, to postpone discussion of it until a later time, you can put it on the table, or table the motion. (You'd then say that the motion is or has been tabled.) So, a tabled motion is not on the floor--it cannot be debated. Here are some examples from the minutes of the 2002 Annual General Meeting of the International Thunderbird Class Association (which may be international, but they seem to be based in Washington state, and they use table in an AmE way):

There was considerable discussion on the issue of the mast weight. Most had to do with the question of whether the matter could be taken off the table and voted upon at the current AGM. It was concluded that it could not, due to the failure of proper notification of the membership about such an action.

If a member wishes to have this motion taken from the table it would require a majority vote of those at the AGM, assuming proper advance notification - distribution to the fleet captains as part of the agenda two months prior to the meeting date. [...]

Currently, the motion is on the table, sine dei. There is no specific date upon which it is to be brought back before the AGM.


In BrE (where parliamentary procedure--or Standing Orders--seems to differ depending on the type of bill being debated and in which House), a motion that is being discussed is on the table. So, you table a motion when you want to bring it up for debate. You can also table questions (bring them up for discussion), according to the House of Commons Standing Orders for Public Business:
Notices of questions shall be given by Members in writing to the Table Office in a form determined by the Speaker. [...] a Member may not table more than five such questions on any one day
Both systems speak of the floor, but it seems to me that there are some differences in its use. This guide to the business of the House of Lords makes the distinction between work done on the floor--i.e. in a House of Lords session, with all members able to examine and discuss the matter at hand, and off the floor--i.e. in committee. In my experience of American government, on the floor would be used in a similar way, but I wouldn't say that work in committee is off the floor, really...I'd limit my use of that phrase to describing more informal behind-the-scenes deal-making (or whatever). Perhaps insiders into either government can give us more insight.

Click on the tag below for more Janus words...including the somewhat related moot.
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fingertip search

Oct 7, 2007
I've had a couple of requests (from Dennis in May and Marc in June) for coverage of the BrE phrase fingertip search, and more specifically for the AmE equivalent of the term. It's a term that comes up a lot in the news and in one of the UK's great cultural exports, the murder mystery novel, and thus there are some other available discussions of it on the Internet, for example on Language Log and in this discussion forum for translators.

Let's start with the meaning. Fingertip search (or, more rarely, finger-tip search) is a search carried out by people (rather than technology, like a scanning device) for something that probably needs careful attention in order to be noticed. It is most often used to describe, the goings-on at a crime scene, especially a place where a corpse has been found. This leads to the question, is it a search for fingertips, or a search with the fingertips? The common assumption (in our household, at least!) is that it's the latter. This photo from a 2002 BBC story illustrates the point. It's captioned: 'A fingertip search took place in atrocious weather conditions'.

While/Whilst one mostly finds fingertip search in discussions of crime scene investigations, it's not exclusively used in such contexts. For instance, the Language Log post linked above has an example of a fingertip search for newts and other amphibians, as part of a conservation effort. It does, however, connote an official search. For example, you don't typically hear people saying that they conducted a fingertip search of the bedroom carpet for a lost contact lens, and if you do, it's probably meant to be a little humorous.

Finger(-)tip search is not to be found in the OED at this point, but we shouldn't conclude too quickly that it's a new term. It's rarely explained in the BrE news contexts in which it is printed, which seems to indicate that the writers feel that they can assume BrE speakers' familiarity with the term. Using Google Book Search, I've found an example in Blackwell's Magazine from 1945.
I remember an age-long fingertip search of a vast sweep of recreation- ground ;
I remember finding a mine balanced weirdly and precariously on its nose
That's as much as I'm allowed to see via Google, but note that even back then, the term is used without explanation--so it must have been a somewhat familiar term by then. It also may not be a crime scene, but the scene of a bombing. (We could consider that a crime scene, I guess.)

As for the question of what the AmE equivalent is, I don't think there is a noun phrase that sums up this meaning in the same way. And there doesn't need to be, since the activity is very describable (e.g. the police searched the scene with a fine-tooth[ed] comb) without a specific noun phrase equivalent. While it's convenient, if you need to talk about something a lot, to have a specific lexicali{s/z}ed expression for a particular concept, there are always other possible ways to describe it too.
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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:
  1. I need to _____ a copy of that.
  2. I need to _____ a holiday.
  3. You should ____ a look at that document.
  4. You need to ____ a shower!
  5. I want to _____ a nap.
  6. 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!
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special(i)ty, newspaper editing jargon and dogpile

Oct 4, 2007
As the title reveals, this post is a (AmE) hodgepodge/(BrE) hotchpotch of unrelated topics, which will serve the purpose of (a) finishing up the queries from April, and (b) writing a quick entry in a really busy week. (It's both Lynneukah [the joyous festival of Lynne] and week 1 of the university term. One of those is more entertaining than the other.)

Terry wrote back in April, pointing out that I'd failed (as I'm sure I often do) to mark a BrE/AmE difference that I'd used in passing: (AmE) specialty versus (BrE) speciality. There's not much more to say about that, except that in BrE specialty is used in the field of medicine, at least according to the Oxford Dictionary of English.

But in the ensuing correspondence, Terry called my attention to quite a bit of newspaper editing jargon that differs between the US and the UK. Terry is a (BrE) sub-editor/(AmE) copy editor, and the differences do not stop at the job title. Here are the ones he listed--and as far as I can tell, the American versions come first in this list:
... there's a surprising amount of difference in terminology between US papers and Brtitish ones: "slot" and "rim" (from where people sit at the horseshoe-shaped copy desk) versus "chief sub" and "down-table sub" for example, indicating American and British newspapers used differently shaped tables; "hed" versus "headline" and "lede" versus "intro" (ie opening sentence - a "lead" (pronounced [in the same way as] "lede") in BrE journalism, would mean the whole main story on a page, not just its intro); "cutline" for "caption", "graf" instead of "par" for paragraph, "refer" for "cross-ref", the line at the foot of a story that cross-refers to another story elsewhere in the paper, "slug" for "catchline", the short name given to a story for tracking purposes; "soft strip" for "strapline", a long subsidiary headline.
Terry's the expert (compared to me, at least!), so I'll leave it at that. I should add that of course headline is an AmE word too--it's what most people would call a headline. His inclusion of hed here should be taken only as jargon use, not as general AmE. Similarly, as a layperson speaking AmE, I'd refer to captions, not cutlines, so again this is about the jargon that copy/sub-editors use, not what newspaper readers use. Are there other copy/sub-editors reading who'd like to add anything else?

Finally, Terry made the following request:
If you ever do a(nother) piece on words common in the US that not one in a thousand Britons would understand, can I nominate dogpile? I never heard the word until coming across the search engine of the same name, and it was another five or six years before I learnt what a dogpile was - BrE scrum - and realised why the search engine designers had given it that name, because it piles results from other search engines up together ...
As you can see, I'm relying on Terry to write the bit on dogpile. The thing is...I don't know how many AmE speakers know the word either. I certainly had never heard it before I came across the search engine. Perhaps it's something that all (American) football fans know (I exclude myself from that category), but I've never heard it used in my Buffalo Bills-loving family. The OED added an entry on it earlier this year:

1. A disordered mass or heap of people, formed around an individual on whom others jump. Also fig. Cf. PIG PILE n.

1921 Nebraska State Jrnl. 19 Nov. 3/1 Purdy tucked the pigskin under his elbow and cantered over a dog-pile for a tally. 1948 Los Angeles Times 21 Nov. I. 20/2 The bottom man of a ‘dog pile’ in a fraternity house scuffle is in a hospital with a neck dislocation. 1993 Toronto Star (Nexis) 25 July E1 The AL West is a dog-pile similar to the AL East. Several teams can win. 2003 A. SWOFFORD Jarhead 20 The half-speed fight degenerates into a laughter-filled dog-pile... This is fun, plain mindless fun.
It's not clear to me that scrum is used in the same extended ways as dog-pile. The OED's second sense for scrum is: 'A confused, noisy throng (at a social function or the like)', which could involve a lot of standing people:
1976 Eastern Daily Press (Norwich) 19 Nov. 1/4 Cindy, as the new Miss World likes to be called, was surrounded by the traditional scrum of over 100 press photographers.

Thus I believe (though I'm not a rugby person either) that scrums are more 'vertical' than dog-piles. Here's a picture of a scrum from the MIT women's rugby site:


And here's a picture of a dog-pile (full of baseball players, not football players!) from the Santa Barbara Independent:


Scrums seem to have people on their feet more often than dog-piles do.

According to About Football Glossary, another (presumably less slangy) term for dog-pile is piling on, and it's a punishable offen{c/s}e in the game.

Finally, one has to question the wisdom of naming a search engine Dogpile, since the second (AmE) meaning for dog-pile is given in the OED as: 'A piece of dog excrement.' So, you can go with the metaphor of the search engine piling on results from other search engines, or you can substitute the metaphor that the Internet is full of this stuff.

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salt beef, corned beef

Sep 30, 2007
So, was there a crossword today that required a military slang word for bread? About a fifth of this blog's hits today came from people looking for such a word. I don't think they found what they were looking for here...but I hope they found something else of interest.

I'd said that I was going to try to get through April's backlog of queries before term starts. Well, term starts tomorrow, and I have more than one April query left, so it's looking unlikely. But here's one. Philip, the man responsible for my shot at Saturday night television fame, wrote back in the spring to ask:
If you want to order a salt beef sandwich in the US, what do you ask for?
My reply was that you order a corned beef sandwich. Both countries have a beef called corned beef, but they tend to be a bit different, with American corned beef being more spiced than the British kind and not usually prised from a (BrE) tin/(AmE) can. As Wikipedia said (back in April when I first checked it on this subject): "In Britain, corned beef is almost always found in trapezoid cans and imported from South America."

In the US, corned beef is associated mainly with two ethnic subcultures, starting with the Jews. Corned beef, like pastrami, is a major element of Jewish delicatessen fare in the US. (See this menu, for example.) It is the meat of one of the most archetypal deli sandwiches, the Reuben: rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese (more commonly referred to in BrE as Emmental--which is what 'Swiss cheese' usually is; it's just not usually called that in American), sauerkraut and Russian dressing -- an American condiment that has little to do with Russia. This is in contrast to the Reuben at a Brighton delicatessen, which is a bagel with pastrami, Swiss cheese, (AmE) dill pickles/(BrE) dill cucumbers (though they do use the more AmE name on the menu), tomatoes and mild (i.e. American-style yellow) mustard. I am always tempted to accuse that deli of misusing the name Reuben, but since (not being a sauerkraut fan) I like that kind of Reuben better than the AmE kind, I figure I should put up and shut up (playing on the primarily AmE phrase, put up or shut up).

The other American ethnic group associated with corned beef is the Irish-Americans, who eat it boiled with cabbage and potatoes as a St Patrick's Day tradition (and at other times too). On this Wikipedia comments:
According to the History Channel, while cabbage has become a traditional food item for Irish-Americans, corned beef was originally a substitute for Irish bacon in the late 1800s. Irish immigrants living in New York City's Lower East Side sought an equivalent in taste and texture to their traditional Irish bacon, and learned about this cheaper alternative to bacon from their Jewish neighbors. A similar dish is the New England boiled dinner, consisting of corned beef, cabbage, and root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, and potatoes, which is popular in New England and parts of Atlantic Canada.

The Saint Patrick Day tradition caused controversy among American Catholic dioceses in 2000 and 2006, when the holiday fell on a Friday during Lent. Lenten custom dictates that no meat be consumed on Fridays during Lent, but some bishops granted dispensations to their dioceses for eating corned beef on St Patrick's Day.
And that's what I remember eating every St Patrick's Day during my childhood (although some of those must have fallen on Fridays, and my parents weren't the kind of Catholics who would put Irish-American tradition ahead of Lenten custom, so we might've had it on St Patrick's Eve sometimes...).

The OED doesn't give salt beef its own entry, so I don't have a lot of information about the term's history, though since beef has been salted for centuries, it goes back some way. But what's interesting for Americans is to go into delis in the UK that claim to be 'Authentic New York Delicatessen' and find that the sandwiches are filled with a meat with some mysterious (to us) name. I would assume that British "New York-style" delis stick with salt beef because corned beef has such negative associations with unsavo(u)ry (BrE) tinned/(AmE) canned meat, also known in the UK as Bully beef. I don't care what it's called, so long as I can get a good corned/salt beef sandwich in the event of a hangover. I don't know that it has any curative properties, but it's only when I'm in a rough state that I can justify the calories to myself.
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bloviate and brunch

Sep 28, 2007
My posts are so long these days. Can I do a short one? I'll try writing about a single word and see what happens.

My friend Maverick (an Englishwoman) was talking to an American friend via Skype, and the following happened:
There was some banter as I had accused of him of pontificating (as opposed to going out and doing research!) He said no, he was 'bloviating'. I had not come across this word before and when I looked it up on google during our conversation I saw that it is used in USA. Is it ever used on this side of the pond?
It's not the most common word in America, either, but it is AmE. To quote the OED (draft 2004) definition, it means "To talk at length, esp. using inflated or empty rhetoric; to speechify or ‘sound off’." Searching for it on .uk sites, one commonly finds comments about it being American, or in 'expand your vocabulary' sites, or in (BrE) inverted commas/(AmE) quotation marks, indicating its newness or foreignness. Some examples:
The verb "to bloviate" is one I learnt in America, and it sums up what Clinton excels at: an effortlessly congenial form of self-promotion. (Times Online, 2004)

The Concise also says croeso (welcome) to some Welsh words with bore da (good morning) and iechyd da (good health) joining thousands of words from all around the English-speaking world: dicky (car boot) and batchmate (classmate) from India, spinny (mad, crazy) from Canada, and bloviate (talk at length in an inflated or empty way) from America. (about the Concise Oxford English Dictionary on Amazon.co.uk)
It's not all that new, however. The OED has found it as far back as 1845, in an Ohio newspaper. In linguistic terms, it seems to be a blend, also known as a portmanteau word--that is, a word that smashes (new technical term) together the form and meaning two words. The OED suspects that it came from blow + -viate as in deviate.

Another blend that I like is brunch--or maybe I'm confusing liking the meal for liking the word. Now, I had assumed that this was an AmE word, since the concept of brunch (particularly the institution of Sunday brunch--see, for example, the site of San Diego's Sunday Brunch Master) is fairly undeveloped in the UK (because everyone's saving their appetites for Sunday lunch). Whenever I suggest to Better Half that we should host a Sunday brunch, his reaction is something like Huh? But it's my favo(u)rite meal of the week, especially when (AmE) coffee cake is involved. That's another one that puzzles BH. He thinks (as do all the cafés (a)round here) that coffee cake means 'cake flavo(u)red with coffee', whereas in AmE it's a type of cake that goes well with a cup of coffee--particularly "in the U.S., a breakfast bread of yeast dough enriched with eggs, butter, and sugar, baked in a sheet topped with streusel [etc.]..and glazed with melted sugar" (OED). (See previous posts on baked goods and weird things people do with them, if you're interested.) So, I had a hard time believing that brunch could have originally been blended anywhere but America.

But how wrong I was! The OED lists it as 'orig. University slang' and its first published example of the word comes from Punch in 1896. Imagine that...

But before you imagine that, observe how pathetically I failed at writing about just the one word I meant to write about!
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pro-predicate do and verb phrase ellipsis

Sep 27, 2007
Have you read past the scary title of this post? Glad you're still with us! The phenomenon in question is how AmE and BrE speakers differ in their preferences for avoiding repetition of complex verb phrases in main clauses. (Still here?) So which of the following would you say?
(1) I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn't have done.
(2) I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn't have.
If you answered "(1)", then I'd be willing to bet that you're not American. Kevin of Berkeley, California wrote to me about this back in April, saying:
I particularly wonder if the American formulation is as jarring to British ears as theirs is to mine.
(I'll leave it to people with British ears to answer the 'jarring' point.) Since this type of construction was one of those things that I had in mind when starting this blog, I'm fairly surprised that I haven't given it proper coverage yet. I guess I've put it off because I feel the need to go over some basic grammatical concepts first. And then I got slowed down by an obsession with using sentence trees to do so. But while walking home from yoga class tonight (with my mind all open to startling truths), I reali{s/z}ed that one rarely makes new friends by presenting sentence trees to them. So, let's see how well I do without.

First, a little sentence anatomy. Both sentences (1) and (2) above are made up of two sentences (clauses) joined by a conjunction (but). The two clauses are: I ate all the chocolate and I shouldn't have (done). The second clause in both cases means 'I shouldn't have eaten all the chocolate', and in both cases the speaker is avoiding the awkward repetition of a form of the verb eat plus its complement (which in this case is a direct object) all the chocolate. So, eat all the chocolate is old information that doesn't bear repeating, but we have new information to impart, the feeling that the chocolate-eating was in some way a bad thing to do. So, we want to say the clause while leaving out the old information shown in brackets here:
(3) I shouldn't have [eaten all the chocolate].
The usual AmE solution to this problem is just not to say the bit in the brackets. (Bit is such a BrE noun to use, but not so exclusively BrE that I feel comfortable marking it as BrE.) This leaves a sentence without a full verb phrase (or predicate in traditional grammar terms). We have the modal verb (should), the negative marker (n't) and an auxilliary verb (have), which gives tense and aspect (the when and how-it-relates-to-time) information, but no main verb (the heart of any complete sentence) or complements (elements that the verb requires in order to make a complete verb phrase). The continuation of the verb phrase is just understood from context. This leaving-understandable-but-grammatically-important-things-out business is called ellipsis, and we are left with an elliptical construction.

In BrE, however, there is a preference for having a complete clause in these situations, with a main verb included. So, how do you do that without repeating a lot of already-heard, understandable-from-context words? You use a pro-verb (not the same as a proverb! Sometimes hyphens are important!) or a pro-predicate.

You might not have heard of a pro-verb or pro-predicate before, but you've probably heard of their cousin, the pronoun. All of these are pro-forms, that is to say, words that stand for a word/phrase whose meaning is recoverable from context. (English also has pro-adverbs.) If we wanted to use a pronoun to solve our problems with the 'eating all the chocolate' sentence, we could say (4)...
(4) I ate all the chocolate, but I shouldn't have eaten it.
...with it standing for the phrase all the chocolate. But that's still pretty repetitive.

What BrE speakers typically do here is to use do as a pro-predicate that stands for the main verb and its complements (at least). So done in (1) above stands for eat(en) all the chocolate.

Why does this grate on the ears of some AmE speakers, like Kevin? Because we just don't like using a pro-predicate with auxiliary or modal verbs in main clauses (see below for when we do use it). We (and BrE speakers too) are able to use do as a pro-verb, as in (5) where it stands for the main verb eat and nothing else, or as a pro-predicate that stands for an entire verb phrase (without modal or auxiliary verbs--we refer to these collectively as support verbs) as in (6).
(5) I ate all the chocolate, but I shouldn't have done it. [do= 'eat']

(6) I ate some chocolate, and Better Half did too. [do = 'eat some chocolate']
But most AmE speakers cannot use pro-predicate do in a clause with support-verbs in it, as in (1) above. (Note that do has other non-"pro" uses too, and so may be used with modals and auxiliaries in those cases.) There are some AmE dialects that are more tolerant of mixing support-verbs. See this article from American Speech by Mariana di Paolo for an example.

BrE uses support verbs with pro-predicate do very freely. So any of the following could be your answer to the question Have you sent Lynne any chocolate yet?
I have done.
I haven't done.
I will do.
I might have done.
I could do.
I could have done.
I should do.
I should have done.
(etc.)
(Note that the correct answer to that question should be the first one. Otherwise, go for the third one.)

On a(n) historical note, the aforementioned di Paolo article says:
Butters (1983 ["Syntactic change in British English propredicates" Journal of English Linguistics 16:1-6]) adds that pro-do was possible as long ago as Middle English although it was not common in England until about the 1920s in the written sources which have been examined. Butters also presents historical evidence suggesting that pro-do spread from subordinate clauses to main clauses in the early part of this century. Most dialects of present-day English, including American English, probably preserve the conservative forms in dependent clauses, as in the following example:
[...] I usually kinda take a back seat, which I know I shouldn't DO but...
So, we AmE speakers, like BrE speakers, can use pro-predicate do with support verbs in some clauses that are, like the above example, not complete sentences on their own (in this case the dependent clause is: which I know I shouldn't do). I'd have no problem (grammatically speaking) in saying the 'back seat' sentence, with pro-predicate do. But it's not quite as straightforward as 'propredicate do is good in AmE dependent clauses' because examples (1) and (2) above involve the subordinating conjunction even though, putting the shouldn't have (done) in a dependent clause. And I can't (in my native dialect) say that one, or include the do in this one:
(7) I usually take a back seat, even though I know I shouldn't do.
There might be a cline of 'subordinateness' operating here, with even though clauses 'feeling' more independent than which clauses, and therefore less likely to allow a pro-predicate do in AmE. (Or else the 'dependent clause' explanation of the exception is just too general/simplistic.)

Pro-predicate do is one of those Briticisms that I find myself using every once in a while, but I retain a certain self-consciousness about it. As well I should (do).
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if need(s) be

Sep 23, 2007
Still putting off writing the post that requires a lot of sentence-tree work--in favo(u)r of something that, like yesterday's topic, (a) concerns archaic forms that survive in modern English as set phrases, (b) involves adding/deleting apparent suffixes, and (c) came up in reading this weekend's Guardian (which, I must say, is living up to its reputation for typos and editing errors this week, including a sub-headline that starts "If you weigh more then when you started your course..." in the 'Graduate' section--directed at (BrE) university/(AmE) college students. I'm losing hope for language knowledge and spelling standards in the age of spell-checking. I'm also setting records for long, pointless parenthetical comments.)

So, as I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself, I was reading the Guardian--this time the 'Work' section--and in an article about lottery millionaires who continue to hold jobs, I read:
Elaine: "If needs be, you'll find me doing the dishes or mopping the floors..."
I've seen/heard if needs be before, and Better Half confirms it's what he'd say, but I'd say if need be. Back to Algeo's British or American English?, which says:
CIC [Cambridge International Corpus] indicates that if need be is the usual form in both British and American, with 7.6 and 7.1 [instances per ten million words], respectively. However, if needs be has 1.8 British and no American tokens [per ten million].
I did, however, find this claim on adamcadre.ac:
If you're in Wyoming and you're not sure which direction you're going, wait until you start picking up radio stations again and listen to the ads. If they're all about corn, you're entering Nebraska. If they're all about parenting, Utah. Also, for whatever reason, people on Utah radio keep saying "if needs be" instead of "if need be." Not sure what's up with that.
Nor am I/Me neither.

Now, this is just some idle wondering, but I have two hypotheses as to why needs has been growing this -s, particularly in BrE. They're not mutually exclusive--both reasons could be conspiring against if need be:
  1. If need be is a set phrase involving a subjunctive verb form (be), and the subjunctive has survived much better in AmE than in BrE. (Another of those topics that I will write a separate post about!) Since the phrase therefore makes a bit less grammatical sense in a dialect without the subjunctive, maybe some speakers are more comfortable using it with a plural verb. Note that the past tense of the phrase is if need were (OED, 2003 draft)--i.e. the subjunctive [singular or plural] past tense form looks like the indicative (non-subjunctive) plural past tense. So, that could make people feel like the subjunctive should go with a plural subject.

  2. There is another set phrase with a similar meaning, needs must, which has plural marking on the need and an odd verb, so they might influence each other. For example:
    a1902 F. NORRIS Pit (1903) ii. 51 Then needs must that Laura go with the cook to see if the range was finally and properly adjusted.
    1991 B. WHITEHEAD Dean it was that Died (BNC) 132 She sighed again. Today she would have to go back home, making out that she'd been in London staying with a friend... Well, needs must. [OED, draft entry 2003]

    World-Wide Words discusses needs must and related phrases here, and although it's not noted as AmE or BrE, I have the impression that I only started hearing/reading needs must after I moved to the UK, so perhaps it is more common/influential here.
Worth noting here is that [all of the evidence that I can find for if needs be post-dates any evidence for if need be]. So this seems to [could] be a case where BrE has deviated from an older phrasing--i.e. BrE has [might have] an innovation that AmE (except maybe in Utah!) doesn't have. Of course, that's only worth noting because so may people assume that BrE forms are older than AmE...and that's just not how language works.

[Bracketed parts of the last paragraph are later edits--see comments for, um, commentary.]
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unbeknown(st)

Sep 22, 2007
I started to write a long post this morning, but have been undone by my inability to produce a sentence tree that I can post on Blogger. I was hoping to make one in MS-Word, then find a way to export it as a .gif or other picture file. (Saving the Word file as html didn't preserve all the drawing features.) If one of you more tech-savvy folk can (and has the time to) give some advice on that problem, please drop me an e-mail. (I'm on a Mac, if it matters.) [Update: I've received many suggestions now, and will try one or some of them. Thanks!!]

So, in place of the big, long grammatical post, here's a little quickie, inspired by reading the following line in the Weekend magazine in today's Guardian:
She believes, tragically, that she's done this unbeknown to him. (from 'What Women Don't Understand about Men' by Anonymous, a column whose raison d'être has never been evident to me)
This was the second time in the past month or so that I've read unbeknown to [someone]. The first time, I thought it was an error, because as an AmE native, I'm used to the phrase being unbeknownst to [someone]. (The ever-mysterious, mostly AmE spell-checker on Blogger likes only unbeknown. But it also doesn't recogni{s/z}e blog--which takes it beyond mysterious to pathetic.)

John Algeo discusses this phrase in his book British or American English? Searching the Cambridge International Corpus, he found 3.0 instances of unbeknown but only 0.9 instances of unbeknownst per ten million words in BrE texts. On the other hand, he found 4.1 per ten million of unbeknownst and only 1.0/10,000,000 of unbeknown in AmE texts.

Unbeknownst has shadowy beginnings. It was originally 'colloquial and dialectal' (OED), but has increased in commonality (versus unbeknown) since the 19th century. While unbeknown is the negated form of the archaic term beknown (= modern-day known), the OED has no entry for the non-negated form beknownst. These days, it seems to be used as a back-formation from unbeknownst:
Only beknownst to me, however, was the fact that my threats were idle. [Center for Conflict Resolution, Abilene Christian University]

Little beknownst to the modern day assembler of packaged components is that somewhere buried deep in the recesses of these objects are the well chosen instructions to order and index data. [from a post on TutorialAdvisor.com]
(Using such usually-negated words without their negative prefixes is a fertile area for word-play, as in this little essay.) Interestingly (well, if you're me, it's interesting, at least), both of these non-negated examples have not-exactly-positive modifiers: only and little. One might say that modern-day beknown(st) carries with it some negative semantic prosody--i.e. 'the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can come to carry positive or negative associations through frequently occurring with particular collocations' (Wikipedia).
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bogy, bogey, boogie, booger

Sep 19, 2007
I had a house-guest this week, and since I'm a bit behind in things, I was thinking I'd answer a really simple query. So, heading back to the April correspondence, I found Doug of Colorado writing about boogers in my inbox. I thought, 'oh, I'll do bogy and booger, that'll be quick!' But even as I began to write the title for this post, I reali{s/z}ed that this is going to get out-of-hand very quickly.

So, we start with snot. (Which just reminds me of Chiffon margarine ads from my American childhood: When you think it's butter, but it's not, it's Chiffon! That jingle writer did not have a good ear for potential mondegreens. We eight-year-olds thought it was hilarious.) Bits of fairly dry nasal mucus (you know what I mean) are colloquially called bogies (or bogeys) in BrE and boogers in AmE. The first vowel in the AmE version is generally pronounced like the oo in book. This is also the vowel that is found in the usual AmE pronunciation of the originally-AmE word boogie ('to [disco] dance'), though many BrE speakers pronounce it with a long /u/ sound, so that the first syllable is like the sound that a cartoon ghost would make (Boo!). In fact, the OED has only the boo! pronunciation, while the American Heritage has both, with the book-vowel one listed first. The long /u/ is also used for both oos in the usual BrE pronunciation of (orig. AmE) boogie-woogie, while AmE uses the book vowel for both.

It was only when I looked up bog(e)y in the OED that I discovered that one of the golf senses for bogey, 'a score of one stroke above par for a hole' (OED), is (or possibly was) AmE. The first (BrE) definition in the OED, 'The number of strokes a good player may be reckoned to need for the course or for a hole', seems to me to mean 'par'. I don't know a lot about golf (and I count myself lucky for that), but I only knew the AmE meaning. (American golfers, do you know the more 'par-like' meaning?) For the verb bogey ('to complete (a hole) in one stroke over par'), the OED lists this as 'orig. U.S.' It's a bit hard to believe that the verb has come over here, but not the noun. UK golfers, what's your experience?

(Apparently bogey is also Australian slang for a bath, and bogie is a Northern English--particularly Newcastle--dialectal word for 'A kind of cart with low wheels and long shafts'. But now I'm just getting distracted by the OED.)

And then there's the bogeyman. American Heritage lists four alternative spellings for this: bogeyman, boogeyman, boogyman, boogieman. OED has only bogyman (listed under bog(e)y) plus an example with the e: Bogey man. The capital B in some examples reflects bog(e)y's origin as a 'quasi-proper name' (OED) for the Devil. The AmE variations in spelling reflect the fact that it has many pronunciations in the US (probably regional in nature). In the order the AHD presents them, they are:
  1. with the book vowel: bʊg'ē-măn'
  2. with the long /o/, as in the golfing term bogey
  3. with the long /u/, as in boo! or BrE boogie
Myself, I grew up (in western New York state) with the first pronunciation, and would naturally use the last AmE spelling, but somewhere along the line I became conscious of bogeyman as the 'correct' spelling. That didn't affect my pronunciation of it.

I have a tangentially related (because there's an oo involved) anecdote from this week. Our house-guest was an American linguist who lives in Japan. Predictably, there were BrE/AmE conversations, particularly about water. But the best part (for me, at least) was when she noted that the café called Moorish Brighton wasn't particularly 'Moorish'. I'd claimed before we went there that it was Moroccan, but we found that it had all sorts of Mediterranean foods. It was only when she pronounced the café's name that I reali{s/z}ed it was a pun. I'd been pronouncing the oo with a /u/-ish vowel (which is typical in BrE or AmE) and just not getting the joke. She pronounced it with an /o/-like vowel (which the OED lists as a BrE alternative, oh well). Eureka! Moorish Brighton is (BrE) moreish!
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diarrh(o)ea

Sep 15, 2007
Well, I was correct in my prediction that the Ant & Dec appearance would be a blink-and-you-miss-me affair. Although we spent more than an hour giving them spelling and Scrabble tips, my contribution was edited down to "Hi, I'm Lynne" and "Yes, that's a word" (or something like that). I don't have a good history with ITV.

But the show had a wealth of jokes that wouldn't work in AmE, so I amused myself with noticing them--for instance, Dec's double-entendre at the start about about having it off--where "it" could have been his leg, or (BrE) he could have been claiming to have had sex with the "nurses" who accompanied him on stage. Then there was the skit/game called Court in the Act, which works much better as a pun in BrE than it would in AmE.

But the richest bit (from my perspective) was Dec almost losing the spelling bee (forcing the competition into 'sudden death') because he used the AmE spelling of diarrhea. Susie Dent, the dictionary expert (of Countdown fame), merely told him that the 'correct' spelling was diarrhoea, without mentioning the AmE connection. A lost opportunity, I thought. But still, at least it's topical as far as this blog is concerned. Also did you (who watched it) notice that Ant and Dec are both haitch-sayers? Is this a Geordie (Newcastle-dialect) thing, do you think, or Catholic upbringing? (Only Dec went to Catholic school, though, according to this source.)
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posted, post and mail

On to April's queries--with the goal of getting through them before the term starts.

On a visit to Colorado, Chris was puzzled:
Lining the roads were expanses of trees, and every so often I'd see a sign nailed to a tree that said "Posted."

Nothing else.
We have signs like this in my native New York state, too, and many, if not most, other states--though whether they can get away with just saying Posted might vary. The longer form of the sign would say Posted: No Trespassing, and we could refer to the area of land with these signs at its borders as posted land. In other words, the sign is saying that the land is privately owned (or at least not open to the public) and that you are not allowed to be on the land without the owner's permission, and that because signs have been 'posted' you have been warned of this fact. These kinds of signs, in my experience, are particularly used in wooded areas of countryside. This is the landowner's way of keeping away hunters, anglers, dog-walkers, (AmE) hikers/(BrE) ramblers, (orig. N. Amer. E) snowmobilers, others' livestock, etc. This also gives rise to the transitive verb: to post land--that is, to declare it off-limits by posting signs at specific intervals, as specified by state law. When I was a child, I was told that landowners were allowed to shoot trespassers if they'd posted their land. This, of course, was not true (though it could well have been true a longer time ago). These days, the penalties are fines or short jail stints and/or loss of hunting/fishing licen{c/s}es, depending on the state and whether the trespasser has hunted or has previous convictions. Click for miscellaneous examples from Kansas, Florida and North Dakota.

The trend in (at least northern) Europe is toward public access to private land. The UK recently implemented the Countryside and Right of Way Act (2000), informally known as the right to roam, which allows anyone the right to (BrE) ramble/(AmE) hike on uncultivated land (but not to ride horses, camp, etc.). (Hunting privileges are another matter, about which I have no clue.) For other European countries, see this Wikipedia article.

The Posted signs are pretty opaque in their meaning in the first place, but probably even more foreign to BrE speakers, since the related adjectival meaning of posted is used less in the UK:
2. Set up or fixed in a prominent place; displayed so as to provide information; advertised, made public. Now chiefly N. Amer. [OED: Mar 2007 draft revision]
As in:
1975 N.Y. Times 29 Oct. 28/1 There was ample time to peruse the posted menu of the day's cuisine minceur.
In BrE, one might be more likely to interpret posted menu as a menu that had been sent through the (BrE-preferred) post /(AmE-preferred) mail. (Mailed menu sounds a little odd to me in AmE--I'd probably say menu that had been sent in the mail.) When I worked in South Africa, in the days before widespread e-mail availability, I lived for the post/mail, even though it largely consisted of recitations by my mother of who-ate-what when they went out to dinner last. All of my letters were sent to my work address, so every afternoon, I could be heard to be wondering whether the mail was here yet. One of my colleagues could always be counted on to offer himself as "the male". That trained me into saying post fairly quickly.

Of course, the organi{s/z}ation that delivers the (BrE) post in the UK is the Royal Mail, demonstrating that mail isn't an AmE word, but that the senses and usage of the word varies across the two places. In BrE, it's more likely to be the mail when it is in transit in large bunches, and more likely to be the post when it is on its way from the post office to your door. Hence this entry in the OED (2004 draft revision):
2. a. A bag or packet of letters or dispatches for conveyance by post (more fully [Obs.] mail of letters). In later use chiefly: the postal matter (or a quantity of letters, packages, etc.) conveyed in this manner; all that is conveyed by post on one occasion. With definite article or without article. Also (chiefly in N. Amer.) in pl., and (chiefly S. Asian) with indefinite article.
The plural use mentioned here for AmE, the mails isn't used all that much, and sounds fairly outdated to me. (Something that the Pony Express might deal in, but not the modern-day USPS.) But the 'In later use chiefly' bit in the above definition is more true of BrE than AmE, since the following use is equally dominant in AmE:
c. orig. U.S. The letters, packages, etc., delivered to or intended for one address or individual.
The OED goes on to note that mail in AmE and AusE is also used to refer to the 'system of delivery and conveyance of letters, etc., by post', and notes:
The term mail (as distinguished from post) is currently dominant in North America and Australia, both for the system itself and the material carried. New Zealand retains post for the postal system, but mail otherwise. Britain favours post in both contexts. However, this pattern is not necessarily maintained in historically fixed collocations, such as Royal Mail, Post Office, Canada Post, Australia Post, parcel post, junk mail, etc. In the United Kingdom the word was formerly limited in ordinary use to the dispatch of letters abroad, as the Indian mail, etc., or as short for mail-train.
And thus AmE speakers tend to talk about mailmen--or the less gendered letter carriers--while BrE speakers tend to talk about postmen--but I note that the Royal Mail jobs website uses postperson where space is at a premium, and postman/postwoman elsewhere. Postal worker is used more generically to include people who work in the post office or sorting office, as well as deliverers, and of course some high-profile cases of postal workers (orig. BrE, I think) going mental and shooting people resulted in the AmE colloquialism to go postal.

Of course, postman is also known and used in AmE, as evidenced by The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Postman. This sounds a little old-fashioned to me in AmE, and I think Costner used postman in his title because it sounds a little more exotic than mailman. J. Robert Lennon's book title Mailman, on the other hand, carries with it a more quotidian feel. (Is it perverse to use such an exotic word to mean 'everyday'?)

I suppose we can't leave this subject without touching on e(lectronic)-mail. Much of the history of e(-)mail is situated in US Department of Defense (= BrE Defence) projects, which is probably why we call it e(-)mail, rather than e-post. This, of course, led to the AmE coinage of snail mail, but in BrE, of course, one can distinguish between the two types of communication by referring to e(-)mail versus post.

And with that, I'll post this blog post!
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on/in the playground

Sep 14, 2007
(December 2010 updates in red)

Once upon a time, Grant Barrett forwarded to me the following item from issue 343 (29 March 2007) of Popbitch:
Confessions of an 80s pop fan
ishouldhaveknownbetter writes:
"I met Simon Le Bon at a house party. Everyone was playing it really cool so when he came to say goodbye I just exchanged air kisses, but then as he turned away for some reason I blurted out, 'Simon, I just want you to know that when I was younger I had a whole wall covered in posters of you at jaunty angles'. He went quiet. So I continued, 'And once I had a dream that you and Roger Taylor came to call for me on horses and then we all went out and played on the climbing frames.'
He left the party immediately."
Grant thought a girl [*ahem*] of my generation would appreciate the Duran Duran reference (I never actually bought any of their albums, but did bother to have an opinion on which was the [orig. AmE] dreamiest). He also pointed out the non-Americanness of climbing frame, which he ably figured out is equivalent to (orig. AmE) monkey bars and/or (orig. AmE) jungle gym. Monkey bars is used in the UK now too, and in both dialects it can refer specifically to a contraption like the one below, from US company ChildLife, with a ladder-like structure several feet above the ground.


But in both dialects monkey bars is also used more loosely sometimes to refer to any kind of structure built for children to climb on--i.e. a climbing frame/jungle gym.

Most of the other amusements on a playground have the same names in both dialects, although swing set, to refer to the apparatus involving swings and the frame that they're suspended from, seems to be more popular AmE. Better Half says he'd just call the whole apparatus swings [although the OED does not mark swing set as AmE--see comments]. See-saws are see-saws, but teeter-totter is a dialectal AmE word for the same thing. (I grew up with both terms.)

And those round things that one kid pushes (a)round and (a)round while the kids on it get sick--well, as a child in New York State we called these things merry-go-rounds or roundabouts, but the American Heritage tells me that roundabout in this meaning is 'chiefly' BrE. As a child, I preferred roundabout, because I liked to reserve merry-go-round for the kind of powered thing with horses, also known as a carousel. (Let's ignore the traffic-related meaning of roundabout. That deserves its own post.) Oxford dictionaries like to claim that carousel is spelt carrousel in AmE ('frequently' in OED2, but simply presented as the AmE spelling in my [admittedly out-of-date] Concise). I don't recall seeing it spelt that way anywhere but in an Oxford Dictionary--and, now that I've looked, in the American Heritage, which lists it as an alternative spelling, but not the predominant spelling. The OED also says that attributive use (i.e. placed in front of another noun, to modify it) of carousel, as in carousel music, is chiefly AmE. Nevertheless, their most recent (2007) addition to the carousel entry in the OED On-line is BrE carousel fraud (a kind of scam to reclaim [BrE] VAT/[AmE] sales tax)--indicating that BrE speakers use it attributively too.

Going through my mental playground inventory, the only other dialectal difference that I can think of is AmE sandbox versus BrE sand-pit. But I suppose that this is as good a place as any to mention BrE bouncy castle versus (in my day) AmE moonwalk (or today) bounce house, even though they're generally not found on playgrounds everyday. The naming difference reflects the different ways in which these things are decorated and marketed. The bouncy castle is a big inflated thing that is usually shaped like a castle. Moonwalks tend to have space themes. I've found inflatable castle as an AmE term for the castle shaped ones as well. Apparently, there's some controversy about whether these things were invented first in the UK or the US.

Other business:
  • This is it! I've finally got to the end of the answerable queries from March! Now I'm only five months behind!
  • As for tomorrow's appearance on Ant & Dec, it might be a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of affair. We spent at least an hour together taping yesterday (charming young men!), but I have no idea what they'll edit it down to. But here's the evidence that we have breathed the same air:

Ant, Lynne, fellow Scrabbler Kat, and Dec
(thanks to Stewart for the photo!)


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AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)