good morning

Mar 11, 2016
Being a parent has opened my eyes to differences I probably wouldn't have otherwise noticed. Not so much because of interactions with my English child, but because of the situations in which I see English parents. I have already noted the well done/good job divide, which was very apparent at preschool level. Nowadays, I have to interact with other parents while taking Grover to school (in BrE, I'm doing the school run).

In the 500 meters/metres between our house and the school, we face a constant stream of parents (known and slightly known) heading in the other direction. (Yes, we're always among the last to arrive. Neither G nor I are morning people.) And, minus conversation between Grover and me about who has the smallest hands in her class, here's approximately how the school run went:
Hello_Kitty

Evie's dad*:  Good morning.
Me:  Hello!
Rosie's dad: Morning!
Me: HELLo!
Somebody's (BrE) mum: G'morning!
Me: helloooooo
Me: Hello!
Teacher at the gate: Morning!
*These people may have actual names. I may even know some of them. But your own name shrivels in relevance when you are a parent.

I said the only hellos and everyone else said a variation on good morning. I've two things to say about that:

  1. Hello originated in the US in the early 19th century, and though the British use it plenty (--as adverb, mostly AmE) these days, I wonder if in Britain it may retain a tinge (just a [AmE] smidgen! a tiny, tiny, tiny bit!) more of its etymological link with surprise. Oh, hello! Hallo, halloa, hullo were British, but came a bit later than hello in AmE--first OED cite is by Charles Dickens--a year before he started travel(l)ing in the US. Hello only really got going as a greeting after the invention of the telephone, and that spread its use to the UK and elsewhere. For more on its forms and etymology, see the Online Etymology Dictionary.

  2. I feel like, where I'm from (western NY state), one only really says good morning right after someone gets out of bed. It's something you say to people who are still in their pajamas/pyjamas, before they've had their coffee. When it's directed at me by members of my family (for it's only usually your family who sees you in your (AmE) pj's/(BrE) jim-jams), one hears a good dose of sarcasm, as in "Isn't it nice of you to join the waking world three hours after the rest of us got up?".  I might be able to imagine a telemarketer saying good morning to me on the phone, and I see people using it to start the day on social media, but I doubt I'd hear it much from colleagues or people I pass on the street.

    I tweeted about this this morning, and I've had some Americans agree that good morning is something you say only to people with noticeable (orig. AmE) bedhead (from Arizona, New Mexico, [?] Sussex), and others not (all in the midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Missouri). I was willing to bet there would be regional variation in this--but Midwest wasn't a region I was betting on. (I lived in central Illinois for five years, and I don't recall feeling affronted or surprised by many people's good mornings, but I was a (AmE) grad student, so maybe I only got up in the afternoons.)  Many aspects of manners are more 'British-like' in the US South, and in areas where there's a lot of Spanish, there might be (what linguists call) interference from buenos dias. But since the people agreeing with me come from very Spanish-influenced areas, perhaps not. The New Mexico tweeter summed up how I'd react:

I started this post when it was still morning, but now it's not, so I've moved on to thinking about good day. If I hear it in my head, it's in a sort of brusque RP accent. Good day, old chaps!  But when I look for it with punctuation on either side in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find it occurs at a 4-times-greater rate than in the British National Corpus. (The Corpus of Historical American English tells us it's been dying out since the 19th century. Perhaps hello is to blame--though good day is used for both 'hello' and 'goodbye'.) This is a lesson for those who insist that such-and-such a word is "used by Americans/Britons because I can hear the accent in my head". Your head is unreliable.  (This was the subject of an online debate I had recently--which I'll probably blog about soon.) Our preconceptions about our language can be a lot stronger than our factual knowledge about it.

I'll leave you with this, which is now stuck in my head, and which my mother used to sing in some perverse effort to make me less grumpy in the morning. You can imagine how well that worked on teenage me.






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lengthy, hefty

Feb 16, 2016
Did you know that lengthy is not only an Americanism, but a much-protested one? Early on in its life, lots of American patriots used the word; John Adams seems to have coined it, and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and (though English) Thomas Paine all used it. But here's what they thought of it in the Philadelphia magazine The Port folio (1801):
 [Lengthy] is a vicious, fugitive, scoundrel and True American word. It should be hooted by every elegant English scholar, and proscribed from every page.
Port folio, though published in the US, was "remarkable chiefly for close adhesion to established English ideas" [Henry Adams]. The authors complained that if lengthy makes sense, then so must breadthy, but since no one's saying breadthy, that shows how ridiculous lengthy is.

They didn't like it in England either (from the OED):
1793   Brit. Critic Nov. 286   We shall, at all times, with pleasure, receive from our transatlantic brethren real improvements of our common mother-tongue: but we shall hardly be induced to admit such phrases as that at p. 93—‘more lengthy’, for longer, or more diffuse.
At some point in the 19th century, the British (and everyone else) seem to have stopped minding it. While some still note it as an Americanism, some authors use it without comment:

From the OED
Nowadays, it seems to be used by the British even more than by Americans (from GloWBE):




None of the style guides on my shelf even mention it, except for Fowler's (3rd edn, by Robert Burchfield, 1996), which says "not a person in a thousand would regard it as anything other than an ordinary English word." To quote their definition of it, it is not simply a synonym for long but 'often with reproachful implication, prolix, tedious'. It was a useful word, so people used it.

I was thinking about the 'we don't have breadthy' anti-lenghthy argument. We don't. But we do have weighty, which goes back to the 1500s. It doesn't just mean heavy (for "languages abhor absolute synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum"--Cruse 1986:270) , it has additional implications, usually of importance or seriousness. One suspects that the authors of the Port folio complaint noticed weighty but decided to (orig. AmE) keep it under their hats.

And then there's hefty, which the OED considers to be 'originally dialectal and US'. I like the word hefty and the noun heft to mean 'weight', which the OED marks as 'dial. & U.S.'. They seem slightly onomatopoetic to me. I can imagine exhaling 'hft' as I lift something with heft.

Again, according to the web-English corpus GloWBE, the 'American' adjective hefty gets more hits in Britain (1,954) than in America (1,366) in corpora of about 387 million words each. The noun heft is a bit more common in the US (224 v 200). What's remarkable about all that is that the word hefty is first cited in 1867, more than 100 years after the first use of lengthy. By the turn of the 20th century, English writers are using hefty, and no one's commenting on it as being an Americanism as they did for lengthy. Did acceptance of lengthy make hefty non-controversial? I don't know, but I found it interesting.

Still, there's no heighty and no breadthy. Go on. Start using them. I dare you. 
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double contractions

Feb 11, 2016
In the last post, I looked at of instead of have after modal verbs--as in should of gone and might of known--in contrast to the more standard spelling of the contraction 've: should've gone, might've known.  As we saw there, the of spelling was more prevalent in British online writing than American.

I promised then to look at what happens after negation. Here are the options (sticking with contracted have):
could not 've could not of
couldn't 've couldn't of
Again, I'm looking for these in the GloWBE corpus of English from the web. When I search for the of variants, I have to specifically search for a verb after the of in order to block out things like of course or of necessity, where the of isn't standing for have.

The full not versions in the first row of the table offer no surprises. Just as with the modals, there are more of spellings in the British than in the American (126 v 86).
The double-contracted versions in the bottom row get a bit more attention because I've been wanting to investigate the prevalence of double contractions, like n't've and 'd've. I use them quite a bit in writing and often get comments on them, so I've wondered if they're a more American thing. It's important here to remember that we're talking about writing, not speech. I'm not wondering if people say couldn't've--they do. I'm wondering whether they're (orig. AmE) ok with writing it.
First, the expected news: the of variants are more common in BrE, just as they were in the non-negated data. 85 American occurrences v 170 BrE.  Here's the top of the results table:


As you can see, some verbs show greater numbers with AmE, but this is to be expected because the numbers are small and because some of the verbs are used more in AmE than BrE--like figured, which is cut off the table. What's most important is the fact that the British total is twice as high as the American.

Is that just because BrE uses the present perfect (the reason for the have/'ve/of in these verb strings) more than AmE does? If that were so, we'd expect for the 've form to be more typical of British too, but that's not the case:



The tables in the previous post make this case more strongly, since here have the complication of whether people avoid writing double contractions. To test this a bit further, I've looked for another double contraction: 'd've, as in If I knew you were coming, I'd've baked a cake.

This table is a bit confusing because I searched for *'d 've. The 'd  is supposed to be separated from the word before in the corpus, but obviously that didn't happen all the time. So, the first line includes all the I'd'ves and and other things and the lower lines are other items that hadn't been input in the corpus in the right way and aren't included in the first line. It looks like the British part of the corpus suffers a bit more from bad coding of double-contractions. So, looking at the 'total' line at the bottom, there are more AmE double contractions, but not that many more: 67 versus 60.

Looking again at whether of is used instead of 've, it's still more British (59 total) than American (26 total) after 'd. Here's the top of the list:


So, it's not looking like British writers avoid double contractions all that much more than American writers--unless writing of instead of 've is part of an avoidance strategy. 

I found it interesting in the sheet music pictured above (and more than one version of it), it has been printed with a space before the 've. That's another solution--and perhaps that was more common in earlier days? The corpus would not distinguish between the space-ful version and space-less.

And on that note:


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Abbr.

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