I have recently married a Brit (me being American) and we are expecting our first child. As is custom in the U.S. we throw Baby Showers. I was not aware that Baby Showers are not common in the U.K. and was baffled by the in-laws' apparent offense [BrE offence--ed.] at being invited. Even though they currently reside in the U.K. and we in the U.S., I had sent invitations to all of the new in-laws regardless. In America if the family were not invited this would be considered extremely rude as it would send the message that they were cut out of a major part of our lives. In my mind, it would be akin to having a large wedding and not inviting the family. I would like to mend this obvious misunderstanding. Can you provide any suggestions as to how I can explain this American phenomenon to my new in-laws? Most importantly, that the Baby Shower’s function is not an intentional display of over-the-top American greed only designed to ring in gifts.

Newlywed should be a mother by now, what fun! And as a new mother, I hope she'll appreciate my low-on-time recycling of her note and my response as a quick way to write a long blog entry! In April, I replied:

We had the baby shower problem here as well. The thing about them is--they are designed to ring in gifts, that is their purpose--and inviting people to something whose purpose is to get gifts is just seen as crass to most (especially older) British folk. By inviting people who obviously could not attend, it really looks like an attempt to get gifts. The British would not see such a party as 'a major part of [your] lives' (they'd see that as a great exaggeration). So, I think the best you can do is to say 'Sorry if that invitation seemed like an attempt to be greedy. It really was an attempt to let you know what's going on in the run-up to the birth. Of course, we don't expect you to send a gift to a shower you are not able to attend, but we really look forward to the time when you'll meet your new grandchild.' Or something like that.

Usually baby showers are organized by the friends/families of the expectant mother, not the mother herself. If that's the case, you can also just shift the blame--i.e. 'Cousin Fifi wanted to include you in the invitation. Sorry about that.'

The need to explain yourself/your intentions to them [in addition to apologi{s/z}ing] is in itself kind of an American thing. So, you might want to ask yourself whether you're doing it for them or for you. Your husband might be able to help decide whether his parents would be made to feel even more uncomfortable by prolonged discussion of the topic.

Wow, I feel like Miss Manners.

In our case, a wonderful American friend wanted to organi{s/z}e a 'cybershower' for me, and wanted a list of my friends' e-mail addresses from the US and the UK. I was happy to give the US addresses, but hemmed and hawed about the UK ones. She really wanted them--she felt it would be a way to 'bring together' all the people who care about Better Half, then-future-Grover, and me. So, my compromise was to give her friends' addresses, but not in-laws'. And some of the UK friends participated, and some didn't. (All gave baby gifts, though. We've only just had to start buying Grover clothes, since we were catered very well for in the first three sizes.)

So, there are two linguistic issues to cover here: the lexical item shower and the sociolinguistics/pragmatics of the invitation. But, you know what? I've only got time for the word. So, your assignment (should you choose to accept it): think back on some of the anthropological observations on Americans that have been discussed here (e.g. the compliments post and the social class post), then try to untangle what's going on with Americans inviting people to a little party that they know the invitees cannot attend. (Or, disagree vehemently with my claim that this is American--and not English--behavio(u)r. Your choice.) Let the party begin in the comments section.

As for (AmE) shower, the term is becoming more familiar here, but baby and bridal showers are still considered to be very American (and often thought to be very crass) activities. To give the OED definition, a shower is: 'An abundance of gifts of a similar kind presented by guests at a party to celebrate esp. a wedding or birth; a party given for this purpose.' In other words a 'shower' of gifts. The parties usually involve games and sentimental traditions. A baby shower I once went to had a great game, in which they'd taken the labels off (of) about 20 jars of baby food and you had to work out (guess, really) which orange thing was the carrots, which the squash, which the sweet potato, which the peaches, etc. (OK, it's a great game if you like silly games.) A bridal shower tradition I've seen involves taking all of the ribbons and bows from the gifts, assembling them on a paper plate and then giving it to the bride to use as her 'bouquet' at the wedding rehearsal. (Wedding rehearsals and their traditions are [AmE colloquial/jocular] a whole nother ball of Americanness.) The OED's citations for this sense of shower go back to 1904, but the term must be a bit older (since the source, a newspaper, didn't see the need to define the term).

While bridal showers are relatively rare over here, hen nights are bigger in the UK than in the US. (Click on the link if you want to discuss hen nights!)

Another sense of shower--which I assume is BrE, since I've never seen it before and American Heritage doesn't have it--is given by the OED as:

A group or crowd (of people). Usu. derog., a pitiful collection or rabble. slang.

I imagine that if you know that sense of the word shower, the party meaning could be somewhat humorous. And if you know the 'pathetic crowd' sense, but not the party sense, it would not seem like a compliment to be invited to a shower.

Jan Freeman, in her The Word Blog, reacted to the zebra post by writing:

What with my near-daily dose of BBC News on the radio, I thought I was pretty current on British-American pronunciation differences: furore with three syllables (and an extra letter), vitamin with a short I (VITT-a-min), con-TROV-er-sy with a different stress, and so on.

...which made me remark to myself with surprise that I've never got(ten) (a)round to blogging about controversy, since (and this is the crucial thing about my blogging, isn't it?) I have an anecdote. (I think I didn't do it earlier because I was going to write a lot more about stress patterns in Latinate words, but in my new working-mother-on-the-go incarnation, I'll do this word now, and a hundred other words a hundred other times.)

And now, the anecdote you've managed to live without so far (but how?):

When I lived in South Africa, I had the altogether ego-enriching experience of being a relatively big [linguistic] fish in a relatively little [language-fascinated] pond, and so I had the pleasure of being a panel(l)ist on the SAfm (sort of the equivalent of BBC Radio 4 or NPR) program(me) Word of Mouth (which is like Radio 4's Word of Mouth or a bit less like KPBS/NPR's A Way with Words). Listeners write to the show with their language-related questions, and a couple of language experts join the host, John Orr, to answer them. Not once but THREE TIMES during my experience with WoM, some member of the South African native English-speaking population wrote in to complain that South African English was going to the dogs because people had started pronouncing controversy as conTROVersy (there's a short 'o' in the stressed syllable), rather than CONtroversy, and THREE TIMES they blamed this on the influence of American English.

Now, I only answered that one on-air once, but when I did, I did so with great glee as I pointed out (as I seem always to be pointing out) that just because something is annoying and new, it doesn't mean it's American. No, this "perversion" of the English language has its home in SAfE speakers' linguistic motherland. To quote Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition, 1996):

controversy. The mood of the moment is to challenge orthodoxy by placing the main stress on the second syllable. This stressing is often used by newsreaders and also, in my [editor R.W. Burchfield's] experience, by many scholars and lexicographers, not to go any further. My verdict is that the traditional pronunciation with initial stressing is at risk, but is still, just, dominant among RP speakers in the UK. In AmE the stress is always placed on the first syllable in this word.

I believe I read this on the radio--but since I no longer own a working cassette recorder, I doubt I'll ever hear those old program(me)s again.

Can you tell that my maternity leave has finished? Little, tiny posts nearly a week apart--how sad! But the real sadness is that I now know the point of maternity leave, and that point is CAKE. You go to get-togethers with other new mothers and everyone orders cake. You meet for coffee with friends and colleagues who want to meet the baby, but, what the hell, why not order some cake too? People come to visit, they bring you cake. The baby has a 'birthday' every month, so let's bake a cake. Yes, I have seen the cake. I have eaten of the cake. And now I must desert the cake.

So, here's your little cakeless observation of the week, brought on by Grover's newest toy--the one in the cent{re/er} of this photo (from Bright Starts). It took some work, but I finally convinced Better Half that this is a blue zebra. (Grover agreed with me from the start.) But I'm starting to wish that I'd called it a stripey donkey, because I am mocked (not by Grover, who is too bidialectal to notice and would be too polite to mention it even if she weren't) every time I say zebra in the way that I learned to say it, with the first syllable pronounced like zee (the American name for the letter that's called zed in BrE). In British English, the first syllable is pronounced as it would be in the French zèbre, i.e. zeb.

This is one of those pronunciation differences that is not the result of a general pronunciation rule that differs between AmE and BrE--instead, it's just a lexical oddity, like vitamin (first i as in bit in BrE, but like in bite in AmE) or tomato (you know the song). BrE is probably influenced by a tendency toward(s) shorter vowels and greater awareness of French, while AmE isn't. In spite of the fact that the only non-dual-citizen in the household (ha! who's the minority now?) will only accept the zeb pronunciation, the OED lists the zee pronunciation first. (People from other regions of the UK will have to let us know if they use the zee-bra pronunciation there. Zeb seems to be standard in the Southeast.)

On my listening to it (as you can see from my description of the sound in the last paragraph), it sounds like the BrE version puts the syllable break here zeb•ra, rather than here ze•bra, but as far as I know, that's against English syllabification rules, which favo(u)r complex onsets (i.e. a consonant cluster at the beginning of a syllable) of increasing sonority (i.e. the explosive /b/ before the more vowel-like /r/) over plosives in the coda (i.e. putting the /b/ at the end of the previous syllable). So, I'm assuming that I'm wrong about that syllabification (i.e., that it's just my perception of the less-familiar-to-me pronunciation and not the reality of it) and that both versions put the syllable break before the /b/--but I'd be happy for real-life phoneticians (rather than a dabbling lexicologist) to weigh in on the matter.

I pronounce it (to the extent that my American articulatory organs allow) in the British way when I say (BrE) zebra crossing (a pedestrian [AmE] crosswalk marked by stripes on the road--as seen on the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road). But when talking to my baby about toy animals, I revert to my mother tongue--now my mothering tongue.


P.S. Apologies for all the (annoying, I know) parenthetical comments, which make my sentences (oh, won't someone stop me?) so difficult to parse.

P.P.S. Two mentions in Language Log this week. Wow, I'm somebody now! Thanks Ben and Arnold!

A True Story (would I lie to you?)

Once upon a time, a young American academic moved to South Africa. When it came to be exam season, her boss asked her to (BrE--and other Es) invigilate an exam.

"Invigilate? That sounds painful!" she cried.
"What do you call it then?" asked the bossman.
"(AmE) Proctoring!" she replied---reali{s/z}ing just a little too late how that sounded...

(Hat tip to Maverick for the request.)

In addition to celebrating her half-birthday, Grover started (BrE) crèche/(AmE) daycare last week. It's the campus crèche, and it's really great, for many reasons. For one, it has a very gentle acclimation process--after three sessions, Grover is only up to 40-minute stays. For another, each baby is assigned a primary carer. We were assigned to E, and since the parent doesn't leave at all for the first session, E and I spent a lot of time discussing Grover's habits and her likes and dislikes.

When I got home that night, I told Better Half all about our day, and he was particularly amused by one part of the story: E and I had been talking for about an hour before she and I reali{s/z}ed that we were both American. BH is constantly bemused by my accent-deafness and will quiz me after any brief conversations with strangers who have an accent of the British Isles that's not the local accent. I've usually been paying no attention to the accent and have to take a wild guess. Now he's started saying "What was {his/her} accent?" after we pass people in the street who are American. (Even if I haven't been listening, I guess 'American' because that's all he's asking me about now. He never expects anything more specific than 'American', happily.)

My excuse for missing E's accent is that she's from New York State too, and when I am talking to someone with the same accent as me, I tend not to cotton on to the fact that they have an accent. It's that old "I don't have an accent, everyone else does" syndrome, that's so faulty, but so easily slipped into. (The only problem with this theory is that she's not from the same part of the state as me, and so once I knew where she was from, I started to notice some differences in our vowels. I suppose I could use the excuse "I was too worried about the fate of my firstborn to pay attention to accents.")

I do notice American accents that aren't as similar to mine--particularly midwestern and southern ones spoken by tourists. Or loud exchange students from any part of the country--and most of them are loud (and plenty of tourists are too). They haven't learn{ed/t} to lower their volume when outside the States, and they seem to think of their conversations on trains and in restaurants as performances that anyone should be able to have a seat for. I think this has a lot to do with different senses of 'privacy' in the different countries--loud-talking Americans may be hoping that you'll join them in the conversation. But you know what? That's fodder for a separate blog post.

So, I often miss accents. I rarely pay any attention to the sounds of others' speech--I skip straight to the words and meaning. Is it any surprise that I became a lexical semanticist rather than a phonetician?

Of course, it's possible that it's not just me--maybe accent deafness is an American condition. We're fairly sensitive to some differences within America--e.g. north v(s). south--but the British are very sensitive to ways of speaking due in part to the connection between accent and social class. Some evidence in favo(u)r of American Accent Deafness: sometimes American tourists don't seem to reali{s/z}e that I'm American--for instance when they stop me on the street for directions or start up a conversation in a (chiefly BrE) queue. And I've also had the experience of Americans in the US thinking I'm British just because I have an address in England. While my accent has changed a bit since moving here, it's still very definitely American. (Maybe they just don't know a lot about British accents--but I don't have that excuse.)

I should be clear here, the 'deafness' is more like inattention. I can hear the difference between accent A and accent B--I just have to think fairly consciously about them to do so.

So, are there more tales out there like that of E and me? And is it an American thing?

The special vocabulary that adults use in talking to babies has the potential to be very family-specific. After all, you're talking to a baby, who can't talk back (yet) and who's getting little other language input outside the family, so why not just make things up? We've got a number of 'inside jokes' that we use with Grover. For example, despite her lady-like appearances, Grover is a very farty baby. We started out saying poot poot when we heard the reports from down south. Then we'd say Are you pootin'? And this has turned into Is that you, Vladimir? So now, Vladimir = farty baby. And then there's the fact that we say knickerschnitz whenever Grover sneezes, which goes back to my brothers convincing (well, almost) my sister-in-law that this is what the English say instead of Gesundheit (which is, in fact, more popular in the US than in the UK).

But at the same time, babytalk is remarkably widespread within a culture--though the ocean often gets in the way of a generic, international babytalk. When talking to babies, we call cats kitties and wounds (orig. AmE) boo-boos. There's (BrE) bicky for (BrE) biscuit and (chiefly AmE) choo-choo for a train. And so on and so forth.

So, when I hear Better Half or his family using new-to-me babytalk, I'm never sure if it's something that's part of their 'family-lect' or more generally part of BrE. Since there may be a natural tendency to view one's in-laws as strange ('they're a family, but they don't do thing the way my family does!'), I tend to assume that their babytalk is 'theirs' until I hear someone else use it. Such was the case with (BrE) windy-pops, which came up in the comments back here. Now, I've found another case.

When I play the game Peek-a-boo with a baby, I hide my face, then show it suddenly and say Peek-a-boo! in a sing-song voice. Sometimes I vary it and say "Here I am!" or "There you are!", which follow the same three-syllable tune. And that's the only way that I've known the game.

But when BH's mother plays it, she says Beebo! I make a mental note to say peek-a-boo twice as much later, to reassert my influence (Jealous? Moi?), and put it down to her own creativity. Then I heard BH's sister say it, and I figured that she learned it from her mother. But then...we had a picnic in hono(u)r of Grover's half-birthday with other parents and babies, and I heard another mother say Peebo! So, yet another occasion on which I learn with disappointment (but, alas, not surprise) that I'm the strange one, not my in-laws.

The Wikipedia entry on peek(-)a(-)boo mentions nothing about alternative exclamations, but the OED mentions peep-bo and bo-peep. I've also found this line from a London blogger, indicating that the variation in interjections is well known in these parts:

We've been playing beebo, peepo, peekaboo, whatever you want to call it for months.

So, am I right in thinking that most Americans stick to peek-a-boo? Are there other alternatives?

And is Better Half the only person who calls hands pandies or is that general BrE babytalk? (AmE snowclone): Enquiring babies want to know! I know this derives from the nursery rhyme Handy Pandy, but I'm wondering about pandy on its own.

Regular reader JHM sent me a link to this article from a Washington Monthly blog, in which an American complains about British (and European, more generally) road signs:

And as long as I'm venting a bit here, what is it with Europeans and compass points? Their road signs tend to be gloriously well designed and easy to decipher, but they never include the words north, south, east, or west. So when you get to a crossroad, all the sign tells you is that one direction takes you to, say, Chard, and the other direction takes you to Axminster. Unless you've memorized the map, or happen to be a local who doesn't really need the sign in the first place, you don't know which direction to go. (If you're lucky, one of the cities on the sign is the one you want to go to, which makes things easy. Usually it's not.) But although I might not know every town and village in the area, I always know from a quick look at a map which general direction I want to go. So why not add the words north and south here? Some sort of EU-wide directive to banish directional notation, or what?

JHM writes to ask:

Does the linked article ring true to you? If it is true that road signs tend not to indicate compass direction, I find this very odd indeed (even though (in New England at least) six or seven times out of ten the posted compass direction has a very low correlation to an actual compass point).

JHM often writes to ask if things that he's read about Britain ring true for me, and I think I always say "yes, it's ringing". I suppose that illustrates the extent to which we get so accustomed to things being one way that we never imagine them being another way. In this case, I have to say "yes, it rings true, but..."

When I lived in South Africa (and had a car), I don't remember ever seeing a sign on a (BrE) motorway/(AmE) highway* with a direction on it. This got me lost in the (AmE) boondocks when I needed to get from a rural hotel in the Northern Province to Swaziland. None of the signs said which way was north or east, and none indicated how to get to the major towns in the province (or to the border). Instead, at each (chiefly AmE) intersection there were signs pointing toward(s) the next town on the road. One thus needed to know every single town along one's route in order to make sense of the signs. I imagine GPS is very useful there these days.

While I don't drive in the UK, on occasions I'm a passenger for a longish car journey (Americans would usually say trip, but that tends to be reserved for shorter journeys in BrE). Initially, I was only travel(l)ing for southeastern Scrabble league matches, and thus only experienced the A-roads (trunk roads), which are so-called because they are designated by A + a number, e.g. the A27. (There are also B-roads, which are more local.) A-roads are roughly comparable to state routes, like New York State Route 31, which goes through my hometown.** But unlike the US roads, the British roads are not called by different names depending on the direction you're driving in. So, if I give you directions out of my town, I'll talk about 31 East or 31 West . A friend of our family lives on a different route, just outside the village, and her address is "[house number] Route 88 South, Newark, NY", meaning she lives on the stretch of Route 88 that lies south of Newark. (Before you think "hey, I've been to Lynneguist's hometown, note that it's not the Newark that has the big airport you've been to. That one, despite its pretensions, is not in the state of New York. My hometown doesn't have a travel agency, let alone an airport. It has apple orchards. And cows.)

In Britain, people don't talk about "the A27 West" (though Google the phrase, and you'll think me a liar; but really, no one says it! At least not with the same name-like intonation that one says "Route 31 West"). When you join the A27, the sign will tell you about upcoming towns, not whether you're going east or west. If you're on that road driving east from Portsmouth, you have to get past Chichester before you start seeing signs for Brighton, if I remember correctly. So, if you want to get from Portsmouth to Brighton, you'd better know that Chichester is on the way. You need to constantly make decisions about which town to head toward on roads like the A27, since for the most part, they are not limited-access roads with on-ramps and off-ramps. They have roundabouts (often called traffic circles in the US, but rarely seen there--though I believe New Hampshire has quite a few). Lots of them. The signs on the roundabout exits will indicate the number of the routes and some number of upcoming towns/landmarks, as in the picture below.

So far, so much like my South African experience. But then I graduated from southeastern Scrabble events to national ones, and got to be a passenger on the M-roads, the national motorways--which are more comparable to American Interstate highways. M-roads are dual-carriageways with limited access--ramps rather than roundabouts--and they tend to be used for longer journeys. When one approaches an M-road, one may see compass point names on it--except that they're not really describing the direction of the route, they're describing the destination. That is, instead of saying, for instance "M3 North", they say "The NORTH", along with whatever cities you might get to along the way. (So, in the sign here, it's not saying that Nottingham is in 'The North' so much as it's saying that this road goes to The North, and it goes to Nottingham too.) What's interesting in this picture are the (N) and (S) in parentheses/brackets after M42. You see this in places where you need to take different routes to different entrances to a motorway. Once you're on the M42 going south, there will be no signs along the way that say M42(S), whereas in the US, signs telling you what route you're on and what direction you're going in are planted regularly along the right side of the road. The reason why (M6) in this photo is in parentheses/brackets after M42(S) is to indicate that this roundabout is not taking you to the M6 but to the M42 which takes you to the M6 , which will get you to 'The S. WEST'.

Incidentally, in England people talk about the East (meaning the east of England, not 'the Orient') a lot less than the other directions. There are two reasons for this, I think. (1) There's a lot more West than East here--in that the island juts out, particularly in the Southwest. (2) London is treated (rightly or wrongly, depending on where you live) as the hub of the universe (sorry, Boston), and it's fairly eastward. So, striking out from London, there's very little to the East. Well, there's Essex (Americans: that's where Jamie Oliver is from. English folk: make it a new joke if you're going to make it). So, while you hear/see the North, the South and the West, and the Northeast/west and Southeast/west, you rarely hear about the East.

Back to the American side... as JHM notes, the directions on particular routes may bear little resemblance to the compass direction when you're on the road. Routes are not perfectly straight lines, and non-Interstate routes can involve a number of different roads that add up to a route in the right direction. For instance, if you look at the map for US Route 20, you'll see that, in spite of its status as an east-west coast-to-coast route, there's a bit in Idaho that runs north-south. Still, we'd instruct people in Idaho to take Route 20 West if they want to get to Oregon, because 20 West is, in essence, its name.

Rather than designating the different types of route by letter, American route types are distinguished by the shapes of the shields on their signs (images/links courtesy of Wikipedia):

	Interstate Highways
	U.S. Routes
	State Routes

And within states there may be other kinds of route. There are systems to the numbering of the routes in both the US and Great Britain, but I won't go into those here, since they're not very language-y. So, if you're interested, see here for the US Routes and Interstate system and here for Great Britain.


Side notes:
* Highway is probably the most dialect-neutral term in the US, and can apply to various types of routes--the key is that there's no stopping and starting on a highway. On the west coast, one tends to hear freeway. For limited-access roads in/around cities, I'd say expressway. Major toll roads, run by individual states, have their own names. In New York, it's the Thruway. Several other states have turnpikes, which is sometimes shortened to pike, as in the Mass Pike--that is, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

** Two things to know about AmE regionalisms when it comes to routes:

1. Some Americans say route like root, others say it like rout. I grew up with the former, but the latter sometimes creeps into my speech because of other places I've lived. These dialect survey maps indicate that the 'rout' pronunciation is more common in the South and Midwest. In a forum on Canadian English, someone named Kirk says:
   
   

   About "route," I use both pronunciations of the word depending on context. For instance, I've never heard anyone say "rowt 66"...it's always "root 66" for "route 66." So, if I see an official route as in a state route I definitely pronounce it "root." When I was younger I had a paper route and I almost always pronounced it "rowt" in that context. In other, general usages of the word, I use "root" and "rowt" pretty interchangeably.

   My pattern and Kirk's pattern are the same. I grew up saying 'paper root', but now tend to say 'paper rout'.
   
   
2. Southern Californians (and perhaps others) prefix route numbers with the, but Northeasterners like me don't. So, I'd say Take (Route) 5 but an Angeleno would say Take the 5.