Any other business

I'm posting my first blog post in more than a month tonight. I thank you for coming back to see it! In the meantime, I've been seeing a couple of research projects out the door and starting the new teaching term.  I continue to be very active on Twitter, but I know that not all of you hang out there, so here are a few of the things that I mentioned there that I haven't mentioned here.  One thing that's changed here is that Google AdSense has banned me because its algorithms detected illicit activity. I have no idea what this refers to, but they turned down my appeal and took whatever money they owed me. The good news for you: back to being an ad-free blog. I hope. I still see big blank places where the ads used to be at the ends of posts. I hope they're not advertising to you without my involvement. Here, for your edification, is the story of another soul's interaction with Google NonSense.

On a happier-for-me note, I've taken the SbaCL show out on the road, giving a talk called
The degradation of the English language: who's whose fault is it?
to the Catalyst Club in Brighton. The talk had a secret punchline title (now saved for posterity in the Catalyst Club archive), which I hope blog-readers will appreciate. It was me trying to do linguistics as stand-up comedy, and I think it can be branded a success (anyone who was there is welcome to leave their opinion in the comments). My favo(u)rite post-talk comment was: "I wish I could unlearn everything you've just taught me." I now have an appetite for more, and a multimedia powerpoint that I'd love to subject others to.  So, if you'd like to book such a talk for your club, wedding or bar mitzvah, please use the 'contact Lynneguist' link on the right.  I'm scheduled to give a new talk at Catalyst in September--and you can bet I'll do something linguisticky or cross-cultural, so if you're near Brighton, come along!

In other news, the Translation Advisor website interviewed me in December on American versus British English, and you can read that here, if you like.

And in my day job, I now have this to show off:


So, not always blogging, but busybusy.

Last but not least, I received this tweet earlier this month:


I immediately, which is to say rashly, promised that I would post three blog posts this week (after my last pressing deadline) to make up for my absence. Depending on how I fare during the week, I might count this as one of them, but I'll try to post three real posts instead.

So, hello! How have you been?
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Words of the Year 2010

Thank you to everyone who nominated words for this year's SbaCL Words of the Year.  I needed them more than ever this year, as I had few ideas or preferences of my own on this matter.  But thanks to my kind readers, we have some winners.


Let's start with the more competitive AmE-to-BrE category.  Here we've had some nice suggestions, and the hono(u)r nearly went to primary in the sense of 'preliminary election'. Reader-in-Ireland mollymooly had suggested this at the end of 2009, noting that the Conservative party had an open primary to choose a candidate for the House of Commons seat for Totnes. Perhaps it should have beaten staycation last year--but it came to my attention a little too late.  But it was ousted as frontrunner in the last day of nominations, when SP nominated a gerund that has both been discussed in the news this year and made its way into UK news.  And that gerund, The 2010 American-to-British Word of the Year is:

shellacking

The word came into the news, of course, when President Obama said that the Democrats had taken a shellacking in the midterm elections. It made enough of an impression in its native US that it came 7th in Merriam-Webster's top 10 words of 2010.  But it required even more looking-up in the UK.  The OED lists it as 'originally and chiefly U.S.', and it also lists the plain verb, shellac (note the lack of k!), as originally and chiefly AmE (while the noun, for the varnish-type substance, is not dialectally marked).  The BBC Magazine ran an article on 'What is a Shellacking?', David Crystal discussed it on Radio 4, Michael Quinion covered it on World Wide Words, and Jenny McCartney in the Telegraph thanked Obama for 'an extremely useful addition to the lexicon'--just to name a few UK commentators on the subject. One does seem to find shellacking in the UK sports press (especially regarding [BrE] football/[AmE] soccer) before Obama brought the word to public attention, but since Obama's statement, it seems as if the frequency of that usage has increased.  For example, in the Guardian, there are seven uses in November and December, but only two in Sept/Oct.  (However, there are five during the World Cup in South Africa and other clumps of them during the year.)  A search for the word in UK political contexts shows up in colloquial contexts such as:

Like, for instance, his [Cameron's] current 'shellacking' (love that word) over a supposed lack of vision and confidence in the recent Guildhall speech. [Skol303 comment on Nick Robinson's blog]

Vince Cable being torn a new one by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight...she got him so rattled he developed a Herbert Lom-like twitch (left eye) halfway though the shellacking by Wark (I kid you not). [samandmai comment on digital spy]

So thank you, SP, for a fantastic nomination!

And on to the BrE-to-AmE winner.  This is always a tougher category--in part, because I live in the UK, but mostly because of the lesser impact that UK news and popular culture makes in the US. The winner is not a particularly 2010 word--instead, it's one that's been making steady progress in AmE over the past decade.  But in hono(u)r of the near-culmination of the Harry Potter film adaptations, the British-to-American Word of the Year is:

ginger


...in particular, the adjectival use to describe hair colo(u)r and, to some extent, the noun use to mean 'a red-haired person'. Twice this year I've heard from US parents (including Mark Allen) who have said that their children use ginger in this more British way because of the influence of the Harry Potter stories, which features the red-headed Weasley family, including Harry's sidekick Ron. (Here's my old post on the topic.)  The much-discussed new Google n-gram tool shows 'ginger hair' steadily increasing in American English books since 1995, though Harry Potter was not released in the States till September 1998.  In British English books, however, there's an increase in the Harry Potter days (after some years of decline), but what looks to be a decrease as we come toward(s) the present. It's hard to say if that's meaningful--and unfortunately I don't have access to any British corpus that takes us up to date.  In the more reliable Corpus of Historical American English, there are 8 uses between 1940 and 1979, none in the 1980s, five in the 1990s and 8 in the 2000s, which seems to show the Harry Potter effect.  It's harder for me to find incursions of the noun ginger in the meaning 'red-head' in AmE, since one must search for word strings, not meanings.  All I can think to do is to note that the Urban Dictionary entry for the noun ginger include some contributions that spell color without a u.  Further evidence is welcome in the comments.


Also welcome in the comments are your thoughts on whether I've done an effective or abominable job in choosing this year's Words of the Year.  But if you don't like them and didn't nominate any, I reserve the right to roll my eyes at you.  Through the computer.  Ouch.
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pantomime

How I've managed to blog through nearly five Christmas seasons without doing this one, I don't know. But here I am, finally tackling (BrE) panto, as suggested by Strawberry Yoghurt (in 2008!) and @MarianDougan via Twitter last week. 

So, you know, there's this thing called pantomime, right? Marcel Marceau did it. Man trapped in an invisible box and all that. Yes, that meaning of pantomime is found across dialects of English, though it's not what usually comes to mind in the UK. 

But it's probably not what a British person means if they say pantomime this time of year.  Instead, they are referring to (and I'm quoting the Oxford English Dictionary here):

Chiefly Brit. Originally: a traditional theatrical performance, developing out of commedia dell'arte, and comprising a dumbshow, which later developed into a comic dramatization with stock characters of Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Columbine; = harlequinade n. a (now chiefly hist.). Now usually: a theatrical entertainment, mainly for children, which involves music, topical jokes, and slapstick comedy, and is based on a fairy tale or nursery story, usually staged around Christmas; this style of performance as a genre. (Now the usual sense.)

The now-traditional English pantomime developed in the 19th cent. and was originally limited to a short opening scene to the earlier harlequinade in which Harlequin was handed his wand. Its popularity led to its extension into a full dramatized story with the harlequinade first relegated to a short scene at the end and then disappearing altogether. This process was accompanied by the development of a new set of conventional characters, typically including a man in the chief comic female role (see pantomime dame n. at Compounds 2), a woman in the main male role (see principal boy n. at principal adj., n., and adv. Special uses, and an animal played by actors in comic costume (see pantomime horse n. at Compounds 2).Recorded earliest in pantomime entertainment at Compounds 1.


This use of pantomime derives from the original sense of the word (again the OED):

Originally: (Classical Hist.) a theatrical performer popular in the Roman Empire who represented mythological stories through gestures and actions; = pantomimus n. Hence, more generally: an actor, esp. in comedy or burlesque, who expresses meaning by gesture or mime; a player in a dumbshow.

The 'man trapped in invisible box' and the 'fairytale play with cross-dressing' senses of the word are distinguished in BrE by the way they are clipped.  The former, as in AmE, is also called mime, while the latter is a pantoPantos are a Christmas tradition. Across the UK, most siz(e)able towns' theat{re/er}s at this time of year are taken up with traditional pantos, such as Cinderella, Aladdin, and Dick Whittington and His Cat.  The panto stories have their own characters above and beyond the traditional tales, for example Buttons in Cinderella and the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. These days, pantos are generally meant for children, but there is a parallel, newer tradition of 'adult panto' full of proper drag queens--this year  Brighton (the 'gay capital of Britain') has Dick Whittington and his Pussy.

Here are a couple of televised examples for the uninitiated.  I've only used television ones because the recording quality is miles ahead of the phone-videos from proper stage shows.
This one is from CBeebies, the television channel for preschoolers, and has a little explanation about pantos at the start.  I think it's a pretty decent example of the genre.
This one is from Paul O'Grady's (orig AmE) talk show/(BrE) chat show, and is a bit more in the 'adult' vein (as much as one can be on daytime television--before the watershed). O'Grady is the performer formerly known as Lily Savage.  It's peopled with a cast of household names in the UK who will be completely unknown in the US (including my university's chancellor) and it's studded with cultural references that will pass unnoticed by a non-UK audience.
The OED entry above gives some of the vocabulary that one needs regarding the traditional roles in a pantomime (particularly the cross-dressing roles of the dame and the principal boy). There is also an unwritten law that any conversation about pantomimes must go something like this, in imitation of some of the traditional audience-participation parts of the panto:

A:  I'm going to a panto.
B: Oh no, you're not!

A: Oh yes, I am!

B: It's behind you!!

Now, it is to my shame that I have never attended a traditional panto, even though there's more than one available to be seen in my area each Christmas time.  (The fact that I spend alternate Christmasses in the US bears some of the blame for this sad situation.)  I have, however, been in two original pantos, staged by my always-up-for-fun colleagues in my former school, COGS (Cognitive and Computing Science).  This was before university reorgani{z/s}ation put Linguistics into the School of English, where their idea of holiday fun is a staff performance of The Waste Land (I kid you not. This was our Christmas party this year. You know, "April is the cruellest month". Just the thing to send you to the bottom of a bottle for the holidays.)  Back in COGS, we did two pantos before we were cruelly torn asunder, with the Blinder as the main creative force, but, being geeks, we had our own ideas about what constituted a "traditional tale".  The first was based on the film A.I. (itself based on the Brian Aldiss story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long").  In that one, I played the love interest, ELIZA, an early chatbot. In the second, Harry Potter and the COGS Phoenix*, I played Gnome Chomsky. I could have had proper career development as a linguistic parodist, had I not been sent to the humanities. I'm only slightly bitter. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Returning to that other clipping, mime, its use differs somewhat in BrE and AmE as well.  I've been very aware of this lately, as Grover (soon-to-be three years old) is (thanks to her dad) completely obsessed with Singin' in the Rain. For those who don't know the story (which is to say, SPOILER ALERT), it takes place just as the first talking pictures are being introduced, and the (AmE-preferred) movie/(BrE-preferred) film studios are faced with the problem that some of their stars have horrible voices. So, in order to save an already-filmed picture, its soundtrack is recast with Debbie Reynolds' character singing and speaking Jean Hagen's character's parts. At the end of the première, the audience calls for a sung encore, so Reynolds stands behind a curtain and sings 'Singin' in the Rain' while Hagen ______.

How do you fill in that blank?  Better Half (and now Grover) always says mimes, while I would say lip-syncs.  And I see that the OED has the definition:

c. trans. To pretend to sing or play an instrument as a recording is being played; esp. to mouth the words of (a song) in time with an accompanying soundtrack. Also intr., with to, along with, etc.

...while none of the US dictionaries I've consulted have that specific sense.  BrE has lip-sync--in fact my sister-in-law belongs to a choir whose name plays on this term, but in everyday use, the verb mime seems to be preferred. The British National Corpus has 11 definite cases of mime='to mouth words' in its first fifty hits for the verb, and two cases of lip-sync* (*=any characters after), whereas the Corpus of Contemporary American English (which, we must note is 4.1 times bigger) has 179 lip-sync*s and only two mime='mouth words' in the first fifty hits.

Before I go... It's your last chance to nominate words for BrE-to-AmE import of the year or AmE-to-BrE import of the year on the SbaCL Words of the Year page.  I'll be announcing my picks in the next day or two.

* Inside joke: COGS Phoenix was the serious attempt by stalwarts of the school to keep the mission of the school going once it had been wiped out.
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stuffing and dressing

Here's a recipe
Between (US) Thanksgiving and Christmas seems like a good time for addressing the AmE use of the word dressing versus general-English stuffing.  I seem to have three requests for coverage of this. One from a Twitterer who will have to remain anonymous, as I can't find the original tweet (despite spending the entirety of QI XL trying), former-student-now-successful-speech-therapist Jodie, and mostlyharmless in Canada.

Let's start with stuffing because it's simple -- it means pretty much the same thing in BrE and AmE--a mixture of something bready and some flavo(u)rful things, stuffed into and cooked in another food, especially poultry.

Now, dressing is also general English in that it means generally what 'dresses' a food. Here's what the OED has to say:

The seasoning substance used in cooking; stuffing; the sauce, etc., used in preparing a dish, a salad, etc.

So, from this sense we get salad dressing (a general term used in both countries...but the specifics probably deserve their own post. In the meantime, some of it is covered in this old post and especially its comments). But in AmE (and according to mostlyharmless, CanE), dressing can be used specifically to mean 'stuffing'. Many of us have both stuffing and dressing in our vocabularies, which belies the claim that some dialects say one and some the other.  The Corpus of Contemporary American English has nine instances of turkey stuffing and three of turkey dressing, all from national publications.

Some people make a distinction between stuffing and dressing, with stuffing being what is stuffed into the bird (or whatever) and dressing being the same material, but cooked separately.  I've been known to make that distinction myself, but I note that the most famous US for a non-stuffed version of this foodstuff is called Stove Top Stuffing.  And there are plenty of (North American) people who stuff dressing into turkeys--I suspect that the stuffed-stuffing/non-stuffed-dressing distinction has come about because people found themselves with two words for the same thing and had the natural desire to find a distinction. As Alan Cruse once wrote, "natural languages abhor absolute synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum".
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Word of the Year 2010: nominations, please!

(A lightly edited version of last year's announcement for this year.)

Word of the Year season has begun. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2010, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.
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childish pronouns

Monica emailed me recently with this query:
Often when I'm reading something from a British person, I'll run into a statement like this: "it made a cute face."  OK, so I'm thinking someone's talking about a cute little puppy or kitten.

WRONG!

Said statement is referring to an infant or child!

This one gets my blood boiling every time, because it seems so dehumanizing.  Is that actually correct English in ANY form, and if it is, in your experience, is there indeed a difference in usage, and, am I the only American to have this reaction?  What about people from the UK?  Do they feel the same way?

Now, I was so confident that I'd already written about this phenomenon that I've spent a very long time searching past posts for it.  But apparently I haven't.

The quick answer is this: referring to a young child as it is far more common in British English than American. But. But but but.  But the practice is dying out.

And Monica, you're not the only American to have this reaction. After Grover was born, an English friend (who's in his early 60s) came to pay his regards.  He knew her sex, but he repeatedly referred to her as it. And each time, I corrected him with a her ('my child is not a thing!') I told this story to other English friends, and they found it a bit surprising that he would use it when he knew the sex of the child (it would have been more excusable to them if he hadn't known), but not very surprising--after all, they figured/reckoned, he's probably not that interested in babies and he's old enough to be old-fashioned. She's nearly three years old now, and I'm still recounting the story, so we can safely conclude that it bothers at least one American.

But it's also starting to bother some British people, as evidenced by this blog entry, where a father recounts doing the it-she correction.  What interested me, though, was one of the commenters who seemed to think it was a (BrE) storm in a teacup/(AmE) tempest in a teapot:
You know, people get SO offended when you refer to a child as "It". Even if it's your own child! I can't tell you how often my boss has yelled at me for saying something as simple as, "Yes, it's fine." Or "No, it didn't go to it's father's this weekend."

Sigh. She...it. Whatever.
 And that commenter appears to be American.  So there's no accounting for tastes.

For a more objective measure, I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus for instances of "{child/baby/infant} has {its/his/her/their}".  The numbers of hits were small enough that I could make sure that in each case the pronoun referred to the aforementioned child or baby. (The search strings containing infant got no hits in either corpus.) Of 22 hits in the American corpus, only one had its.  (Three had the gender-neutral their, and the rest had a gendered pronoun.) In the British corpus (which is a quarter the size of the American one), there were 7 hits, three with its (and zero with their).  So, 18% of the AmE cases used a gender-neutral pronoun, but only one of those (4.5% of the total) was it.  In BrE 43% of the hits were gender-neutral and all of those used it.

You could look at that and say "Well, maybe the American corpus had more instances where the writer/speaker knew the sex of the baby", but I don't think that's true. Instead, some of those gendered pronouns in AmE refer to babies/children whose sex isn't known, or to babies generally.  It's too rude in AmE to call a baby it, frowned-upon to use singular they, so parenting magazines, for instance, just pick he or she. Three of the American four baby has her examples, for instance, were general advice for parents (e.g. Your baby has her own inborn temperament). There were no BNC hits for baby has her or baby has his

Here's a more targetted search. I looked for "give the baby its/his/her/their own" on babycenter.com and babycentre.co.uk.On the UK site, I got only one hit, and that was for its. But, interestingly, on the AmE site I got as many its as their (three each). Now, on the internet, it could be that these people using the American site aren't actually American. But in all the contexts in which the its occurred, the baby wasn't born yet; parents-to-be were discussing what they would do about names or sleeping arrangements once their babies were born. And you know what? None of those examples bothered me. This one even began with an it in the question:

Will you be sleeping with the baby when it's born? - October 2010 .

23 Oct 2010... safety for the baby, but also so id doesnt get dependent on sleeping next to you, i think its a good idea to give the baby its own bed.
If you'd like to read more about what others say about all this, searching for the phrases "refer to a baby as it" brings up a number of discussions.  Searching "refer to the baby as it" is very depressing, as many of the hits are about how (not) to talk to bereaved parents.

And on that note, I think I'll go give Grover a kiss on her sleeping head.
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belly and tummy

I picked up a free copy of the Financial Times's FT Magazine in the airport, and was interested to read this bit in an article about body-part names and communication between doctors and patients.

Technically speaking, the anatomical structure the consultant was looking at was the abdomen, which is schematically divided by doctors into a three-by-three grid. From top right to bottom left the squares are named: right upper quadrant, epigastric, left upper quadrant, right flank, umbilicus, left flank, right iliac fossa, hypogastric, left iliac fossa. The organs are clustered in each square – the liver and the gallbladder reside in RUQ, for example. When a patient has RIF pain, you know to think of appendicitis.

But what doctors in England haven’t quite solved yet is how I should ask you to show me this space. The medical word, “abdomen”, is not used by many people. But “stomach” is factually wrong. (Your stomach – LUQ – is the springy bag in which your food first lands to be churned before it continues on through your intestine; most “stomach ache” is felt nowhere near the real stomach – what most people point to is their umbilicus, underneath which lies the small bowel.) “Belly” is American. “Tummy” is a nursery term, but English doctors use it in parallel with the anatomical terms. You learn to say “poo” for faeces, too. But if questions such as “Have you had your bowels open?” and “Have you passed any stool?” are met with blankness, there is not much alternative.

Belly is American?  That didn't sit right with me, as if a doctor asked me to show her my belly, I'd find it very strange--though I might suspect that the doctor spoke a different dialect from mine. I use tummy (or the anatomically-incorrect stomach).  To me, belly particularly signals a round tummy--hence (orig. AmE) beer bellyBabies have bellies, Buddha statues have bellies, I have a belly--but let's not go there. One also hears people saying, typically while pinching more than an inch, I'm getting a belly.  In all these uses, it's not the same as tummy or non-technical stomach.  It describes a paunch (which, incidentally, used to just mean 'abdomen', without the negative connotations), but with rounder connotations.

The doctor writing in the magazine is not alone in this assumption that belly is American.  In fact, this amateur (and very defensive about it, while not trying very hard*) BrE/AmE word-lister assumes that tummy is exclusively BrE.

But, while I had my doubts about the BrE/AmE tummy/belly divide, I've often heard tummy-button in the UK (though mostly from antipodean yoga/Pilates instructors), and never in the US. So, I decided to check it out.

First, the history. Belly goes all the way back to Old English, where it originally meant a bag, but from at least as early as the 13th century, it's used to mean a human or animal stomach and from at least the 14th century, it's used for the abdomen.  So, it certainly did not originate in AmE.  Tummy (a baby-talk simplification of stomach), in contrast, is only seen in print from the 19th century.


Next, the usage.  I looked up stomach, belly, and tummy in British and American corpora of writing and speech, and calculated the percentage of the total number of instances of any of those words that was represented by any one of those words. Here are my results:

corpusstomachbellytummy
BNC BrE 70%20%10%
COCA AmE      63%33%4%

From this we can tell (a) belly is used quite a bit in BrE as well as AmE, and tummy is more frequent in BrE than AmE.  I don't think this can just be due to differences in formality across the corpora, since if the AmE corpus had more formal writing in it, we'd expect the stomach percentage to be higher.

Now, within belly in either corpus, many instances do not refer literally to human abdomens.  There are lots of instances of idioms like in the belly of the beast or a fire in one's belly.  There are also lots of belly-dancing.  To see whether the AmE bellies might be more specifically fat tummies, I looked at paunch, to see if AmE didn't need it as much--but that's not the case. In both corpora, paunch occurs between 5 and 6 times per million words.

As for the hypothesis that belly is more 'round', I note that I and my UK friends do say I'm getting/I've got a bit of a tummy, but looking in the corpora, there are a couple of instances of get/getting/got a belly in each corpus but tummy only occurs in that context in the AmE corpus.  So, in BrE, belly is used for the 'rounded abdomen' meaning, just as in AmE, and AmE uses tummy in that context too.

What about bellybutton and tummy-button? OED has the former dated to the 19th century, but the latter only in the mid-20th century.  COCA has zero instances of tummy-button, tummybutton, or tummy button.  BNC has just one.  Belly(-)button seems to be the default colloquialism for 'navel' in either dialect. In a strange turn of orthography, the joined-up bellybutton is by far the most common spelling in the BNC, but two-word belly button is very strongly the favo(u)red spelling in COCA.  This is in contrast to another observation that I've made here, that AmE joins up compound words in writing more readily than BrE does.  In that post, I noted that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary recommends pot belly, while the American Heritage Dictionary likes potbelly.

I'm writing this in the Helsinki airport, so am limited to dialect resources that are on-line--and I'm not finding them to be helpful at the moment. While the evidence does show American English using belly much more than modern British English, I still have the feeling that there is some  regional variation at work here, since it's not a word that I would use for a human abdomen outside the 'paunchy' and 'baby' experiences.  But that's my western New York State perspective.  How would you feel if your doctor asked to look at your belly? (Don't forget to tell us where you're from!)

 

*In discouraging corrections to his list, he says 'life is too short to worry'--about accuracy, presumably.  Life is also too short to spend on writing word lists without caring to do it right, I'd say.
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yuck and yuk

Reader Martyn wrote to me back in January with the following:
Ricky Gervais's presentation at the Golden Globes caused some discussion at the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/jan/18/ricky-gervais-golden-globes - around the meaning of "yuk", which seemed to be taken by Americans as meaning "laughter" and by Britons as meaning disgust. Wordorigins discussed it here http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/1669/ , again revealing an apparent US/UK split. It would perhaps be interesting to see what your commentators thought …
Indeed, I'm interested to see what you think as well.  But first, I'll subject you to what I think--which is backed up by some dictionaries, so I think they're thoughts worth reporting.  However, we're talking about (a) an interjection and (b) onomatopoeia/slang, and neither of those is really within the realm of truly standardi{s/z}ed language, so we should expect a lot of variation.  (Remember the problem of whoa/woah!)

So, to my American eye, there are two things here that are pronounced the same, but should be spel(led/t) differently.  The interjection of disgust is, to me, yuck, as in: Yuck! Who put Brussels sprouts in the stir fry?!  The slang, onomatopoetic term for laughter is yuk, as in: We had some yuks at the Prime Minister's expense.  (It can also be a verb, but I wouldn't tend to use it that way.) The American Heritage Dictionary allows that the spellings could be reversed, but agrees with me that the default is for the laughter one to be c-less and the interjection to be c-ful.


BrE has the disgust interjection--but often spells it yuk, as illustrated by these two British-authored children's books.  The OED lists the laughter meaning, marking it as chiefly N. Amer., but spells it yuck.  Better Half tells me he knows the meaning from The Beano (British comic book institution*)--I think he's talking about the character Baby Face Finlayson.  Wikipedia says that this character  rode around in a motorised pram [baby carriage], stealing everything that wasn't tied down, whilst shouting 'Yuk Yuk!'"  It's not actually clear to me that that's laughter--can a Beano boy elucidate?

So, even if both uses of yu(c)k are known in both countries, there's still potential for miscommunication because of reverses in spelling.

American has a couple of other yuck/disgust synonyms: ick and ew (often ewwwwww!Ick also gives us the adjective icky (just as yuck gives yucky).  Ick(y) and yuck(y) are often interchangeable, but have slightly different connotations.  I'd prefer ick(y) for something that was disgusting in some sweet or sticky way. Or something that gave me the (orig. AmE) heebie-jeebies, whereas yuck(y) is more likely for something that's just plain disgusting, such as poo(p)Ew is listed by OED as 'originally' AmE, but it's still American enough for a blogging student of mine to remark upon it during a stay in Chicago this summer.  Click on the link to his BrE equivalents...but I must admit not knowing his English leeeeer. Is it something like bleugh?  BrE has ugh, which is usually pronounced just as a vowel but can be pronounced with a back-of-the-mouth fricative.  This won't be unfamiliar to AmE readers, but I think most AmE speakers would think of it as being pronounced 'ugg' and being an expression of exasperation more than disgust.


*Incidentally, The Beano is the home of the British comic book character Dennis the Menace--not to be confused with the much gentler American comic book character Dennis the Menace.  BH & I were just wondering the other day which came first, and it turns out (thanks, Wikipedia) it was the American--by five days!  I think we can put that down to coincidence, then.
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bags, dibs, shotgun

So, you're 10 years old, playing with your best friend.  Simultaneously you both spot a single gorilla mask abandoned on a park bench. Running toward(s) it, you shout the recogni(s/z)ed word for signal(l)ing a claim on desired objects. What is that word?

Chances are that there are dozens and dozens of ways to answer that question. The thing about childhood rituals is that they are passed among children, who tend to operate very locally--with their siblings, their schoolmates, their neighbo(u)rs.  Words are invented, misheard, re-invented, borrowed and those changes don't travel far, but may be passed down to the children who are just a little younger, who later pass it down to the ones who are just a little younger, and so on.


Which is all to say, in the American idiom: Your mileage may vary when it comes to the playground terminology I'm discussing today.

But with that feat of (AmE) ass-covering out of the way, here's how you might have answered the question.  In AmE, you'd probably shout dibs.  In BrE, at least down here in the South, bagsy would do, though it might just be bags.  (To get a feel for possible dialectal boundaries of this, see this thread at Wordwizard.) To put this in the verbal form, you can bags or bagsy something, but, as you can see from the OED examples, the spelling is hard to pin down:
[1946 B. MARSHALL George Brown's Schooldays xxi. 89 ‘What about you doing the gassing instead of me?’ ‘But I bagsed-I I didn't’, Abinger protested. 1950 B. SUTTON-SMITH Our Street i. 25 [They] would all sit..‘bagzing’. I bagz we go to the zoo.] 1979 I. OPIE Jrnl. 28 Mar. in People in Playground (1993) 129 I'm second, I just baggsied it! 1995 New Musical Express 28 Oct. 28 (caption) Mark Sutherland baggsys a window seat. 1998 C. AHERNE et al. Royle Family Scripts: Ser. 1 (1999) Episode 2. 52 Mam. I think I'll do chicken. Antony. Bagsey me breast.
A verbal form of dibs is also widely reported (I dibsed it!), but I'd be much more likely to say I've got dibs on it or I called dibs on that


But when I posted dibs/bagsy as the 'Difference of the Day' on Twitter, some BrE speakers questioned my translation, as they had understood (AmE) shotgun to mean the same as bags(y). But just as happens when words are borrowed from another language, the non-native users of the word have changed the meaning when they've adopted the word.  And they have adopted the word, to some extent.  Here's an example from a Twitter feed I follow:
timeshighered We hereby shotgun the rights to the phrase "I survived Twitocalypse 2010" - this time next year, we'll be millionaires!
In fact, if I had read this tweet without already having had the discussion with BrE speakers about dibs and bagsy, I doubt I would have been able to make sense of it.  What's happened? The BrE speakers have heard Americans say shotgun in a place in a situation in which they would have said bags(y), and didn't reali{z/s}e that there's more meaning to shotgun than just 'I stake a claim on something'.   Shotgun very specifically means: 'I claim the right to sit in the front passenger seat of a vehicle.'

You can see this in another tweet:
 I bet Zombies don't call shotgun on road trips.
An AmE speaker immediately knows which valuable commodity the Zombies are not interested in.  In fact, because the claimed thing is understood, it would be redundant (not to mention ambiguous) to say call shotgun on the front seat. Note also that it's not a verb.  To me, to shotgun something would be like to machine-gun something.  One calls shotgun. And once one gets the seat, one rides shotgun, which originally meant (and still can mean) 'To travel as a (usually armed) guard next to the driver of a vehicle; (in extended use) to act as a protector' (OED).

Calling shotgun could be extended and used metaphorically, as in this Canadian tweet:
Can I call shotgun on the yoga cd pls?
...but this usually is done as a sly reference to the childhood car-seat experience.

Or, at least, that's how it is for an AmE speaker of my generation.  We have a special word for that sweet seat, with its status and its anti-emetic properties, because it was a central part of our lives in childhood.  With the exception of a few urban cent{er/re}s, you'd expect any family to have a car--and more than one child to fight over the best seat in that car.  Americans can also get a (AmE) driver's license/(BrE) driving licence by age 16 in most states (as compared to 18 17 at the earliest [see comments] in the UK). So, gangs of teenagers also need ways to establish pecking orders.  But I have to wonder whether shotgun will go the way of the library card catalog(ue), since riding in a car is a completely different experience for children today than it was for children in my day.  No more cramming ten kids into the back of a (AmE) station wagon/(BrE) estate car; everyone's in car seats now, and the law determines which of those are allowed in the front seat.  While I think that's a good thing safety-wise, I'm getting rather nostalgic thinking about, for example, climbing in and out of the back seat of a moving car or cramming myself down in the foot-well when I felt like it.  So maybe the kids in America have lost or are losing the true meaning of shotgun.  *sob* You in the States can let me know whether this is the case.

By the way, I've left the Twitter window with the 'shotgun' search going. In the last hour, 50 people have used the word shotgun, often prefaced by I wish I had a.  I'll sleep less well tonight.
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the present perfect

This post title has been hanging around in my drafts since August 2006, when the friend who's been known on this blog as Foundational Friend mentioned some AmE bugbears as potential fodder for the blog.  The offending AmE sentence was:
Didn't you do that yet?
 And she said that in BrE it would have to be
Haven't you done that yet?

There was an echo of this when a native German speaker read a draft copy of a chapter of my new textbook, where my example (illustrating how we understand eat in some contexts to mean 'eat a meal') was:
Did you eat yet?
Now this sentence was basic to my linguistic education, as it was often used by one of my (AmE) professors/(BrE) tutors to illustrate palatali{s/z}ation (d+y becomes 'j' sound) and the extent to which a phrase can be phonetically reduced and still understood:  Jeet yet?  

But my German correspondent informed me quite insistently that my question was ungrammatical in English and should be Have you eaten yet?  I said something along the lines of "Who's the native speaker here?". But, dear reader, I changed the example, lest it put anyone else off.

A blog post on this subject by Jan Freeman spurred me to promise in public (well, on Twitter) that the present perfect would be the subject of my next post--which may help explain why I've been so long between posts.  This one (had) put me off for four years already, after all. It seemed like a lot of work.  Uh-oh, I feel a semantics/grammar lesson coming on...

So, the present perfect.  Present.  Perfect.  We use it to talk about things that (have) happened in the past, but it is itself in the present tense.  It's a past tense you say?  Look again!
I have eaten.
It's the first verb in a string of verbs that carries the tense, and this one, have, is present.  It's not had, it's have.  Of course, we can put had there, and then it would indeed be a past tense.  A past perfect, to be precise: I had eaten.

The perfect is considered to be a combination of tense and aspect.  Tense is grammatical marking of when something happened, aspect is grammatical marking of how that happening relates to time.  The perfect tells us that something is finished, but it does so from the viewpoint of a later time.  One way to visuali{s/z}e this is with a timeline.  Let's start with the past perfect (because it's the easiest one to draw a timeline for):
I had eaten by the time Don arrived:    2:00 Eating  ☚   3:00 Arriving  ☚  4:00 Speaking
In this example, 'I' am speaking at 4:00 about the state I was in at 3:00.  That state relates to an event that happened at 2:00.  In other words, I'm looking back to a time (Don's arrival at 3:00) at which eating was already in my past.

So, the perfect looks back on its event (eating, in this case) from a later vantage point (Don's arrival).  When we use the present tense, the speaking time is the same as the time that we're referring to.  So, in this case, we relate a past event to a present moment.
I have already eaten:    2:00 Eating   ☚  3:00 'already=now' Speaking
Of course, we can also do this with the future, in which case we are looking forward to a time when we'll be looking back at a time when we (from the 'now' perspective) will do something.  (And those are little fingers pointing, in case you can't tell.)
 I will have already eaten when Don arrives:
    2:00 Speaking  ☛☛☛☛☛☛ ☛4:00 Arriving  
                              3:00 Eating  ☚  4:00 Arriving
And you can put it into the progressive (I have been eating) and the passive (I have been fed) and most of the other ways in which you can play around with the form of a verb and the verb string.

So here's the story:  The adverbs already, just, and yet are taken as signals of that 'looking back from now' aspect, and in BrE they have to 'agree', so to speak, with the present perfect.  AmE has stopped caring so much about this 'agreement', which is, after all, a sort of redundant grammatical marking.  So, in AmE, you can by all means say I have eaten lunch already or I have already eaten lunch and it might sound a bit more formal, but you can also say I already ate lunch or I ate lunch already.  (If you'd like to think/comment about adverb placement, come back here.)  In general, though perhaps more in BrE than in AmE, the present perfect is used to signal recency, because it signals relevance to 'now'.  So, in either dialect, on the 10th of September 1976, one could have said Chairman Mao has died, but on 10 September 2010, we need to say Chairman Mao died (on the 9th of September in 1976).

The "death" of the present perfect in AmE has been exaggerated.  The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) reports that the BrE:AmE ratio of present perfect was 4:3 in their corpus study.  In British or American English? John Algeo reports that the perfect forms of have (have had, has had, had had) occur 1.7 times more often in BrE than in AmE.  These re not huge differences, but there's definitely a difference.  And it's been around for a while.  The Jeet yet? example mentioned above was perfectly unremarkable in my 1980s linguistics education.

Virginia Gathercole (1986) looked at Scottish and American adults' use of present perfect in speaking with young children and the acquisition of the present perfect by the children. She concluded that "Scottish adults use the present perfect construction in their speech to children much more frequently than American adults do" and "Scottish children use the present perfect construction in their speech long before their American counterparts."  Parents, of course, inevitably simplify their speech for their children.  In AmE, there's the option to simplify the past tense form to the preterit(e)* (simple past tense: ate, walked, threw) rather than complicating the syntax with the perfect (has eaten, has walked, has thrown), and parents take it.  In BrE (in this case Scottish English), that simplification option doesn't exist, and so the children are faced with the form earlier and rise to its challenge.

The conclusion I'd like to leave you with is this:  There is nothing unAmerican about the present perfect.  We can and do use it in the ways that the British do.  We just aren't restricted to it.  There is something unBritish about using the preterit(e)  with certain temporal adverbs in particular and perhaps also more generally to refer to recent-and-still-relevant events.  The difference between Did you eat yet? and Have you eaten already? is, in AmE, mostly a difference of formality, possibly also of emphasis.  However, if the two forms continue to co-exist, they might very well develop into semantically contrastive forms that signal somewhat different things.

*Preferred spelling in both dialects includes the 'e' on the end, but AmE also allows dropping of the 'e', in line with the pronunciation.  See comments (this is a postscript).
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Abbr.

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