feeding the five thousand » separated by a common language

Looking for something easy to blog about, I was reading through old email requests from back in the days when I was in (the) hospital, waiting for Grover to be born.  Grover's going to be three in December, so there's a little insight into just how untidy that email inbox is and how many unblogged-about topics might be lurking there.

At any rate, then-reader (are you still out there?) Catnap in the US wrote to me about some British recipes she'd been reading, including one for brownies.  She correctly surmised that brownies are not the institution in the UK that they are in the US--but they've become much better known/loved in the decade that I've lived here.  (I've never known a British non-professional-baker person to actually make brownies.  One tends to get 'gourmet' brownies here--and they can be incredible.  Like the raspberry ones made by Prosperity Brownies. Ooh, I'm getting palpitations just thinking about them.)  It's all part of this craze for importing and "fancifying" American baked goods. 

At any rate, the BrE word that Catnap noted in the recipe was squidgey, which the OED and I spell squidgy.  The older sense of this word in OED, from the 19th century, is 'Short and plump; podgy' And here we pause to note that BrE prefers podgy, but AmE uses pudgy almost exclusively.

The second sense of squidgy is the brownie sense:

Moist and pliant; squashy, soggy. Esp. of food.

The definition doesn't sound very appeti{s/z}ing, but squidgy can definitely be a positive trait in a brownie. 

This sense of squidgy is only noted since the 1970s, but squdgy, a word that looks like a typo, has been around and meaning 'soft and moist or yielding' starting with Kipling:

1892 KIPLING Barrack-Room Ballads 51 Elephints apilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek.  1919 W. DEEPING Second Youth xvii. 145 He made haste to shake Joseph Bluett's squdgy hand and escape. 1959 M. STEEN Woman in Back Seat I. v. 97 ‘Don't you like babies?’ Lavinia shook her head... ‘They're so squdgy, and they haven't got any shape!’

Looking for other -dgy adjectives that might differ, I find splodgy. OED defines it as 'Full of splodges; showing coarse splotches of colour.'  In AmE, this would be splotchy (and 'full of splotches').  The OED doesn't mark splotchy as 'chiefly American', but there are no instances in the British National Corpus, as opposed to three instances of splodgy. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, it's 78 instances of splotchy and zero splodgy.

The only other differing -dgy adjective I can think of is dodgy, which the OED has as:  

Brit. colloq. Of poor quality, unreliable; questionable, dubious.

One hears it in contexts like I have a dodgy knee or He's selling some dodgy goods on the internet.

The Lesson of the Post is thus: BrE likes adjectives ending in -dgy more than AmE does!

Grover (now two-and-a-half) continues on merrily acquiring British English. Her first language, but not her mother('s) tongue.  I was caught off guard the other day when she sounded so exactly like her father, saying That's a pity, when told that it was too late to go to the park.  I'm also keenly aware of her Britishness whenever she urges me to follow her, for she never says C'mon without following it with then.

Sticking a then onto the end of a sentence is very much a spoken British English thing to do.  It is not the use of then about distant time (I had it then, but I haven't got it now) nor the use that's about logical consequences (If 1+3=4, then 3+1 must equal 4 too), which are universal uses of then--though BrE uses the latter twice as much as AmE does (see below). These might also occur at the end of a sentence, but they're not what I'm talking about.   Instead, let's look at some examples from the British National Corpus (BNC).

If you write to them and drop it in that's fine then .
Let's let's get straight what we are talking about then .
So that is it then .

It means something like 'in that case'.  But to use it in that way in AmE (to me at least) communicates an impatience or accusation. 

Come on then and Go on then are things one hears all the time in England, clearly talking about 'the now', rather than 'the then'.  Go on then is used for all sorts of things.  In this one, it means something like 'give it a try, I dare you':

- Yeah. I could scare you, Auntie June.
- Could ya.
- Yeah.
- Go on then

 But in this one it accepts an offer: 

- This tastes lovely! Want a taste?
- Go on then .

 In that case it means something like 'Oh, I know I shouldn't accept your offer, but yes, please'. 

In the spoken part of the BNC, question-final then occurs nearly as much as statement/request-final then (since I'm just searching by punctuation, I can't tell the difference between declarative and imperative sentences).  For example (from BNC):

What pub is that then ?
So What about this then ?

Now, I know some Americans will be reading this and saying "but I say things like that", and I don't doubt it.  It's not that Americans never put then at the end of a sentence--it's that they don't use it in all the same ways that BrE speakers do, and therefore they can misinterpret BrE intentions.  As I said above, when I hear a non-temporal then at the end of a question (or statement), it implies to my American ears an impatience or accusation--or mistrust.  But that's not what (in most cases like the above), a BrE speaker would hear.  And Americans wouldn't tend to use then in completely sympathetic sentences like the following (from the Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky):

- How was your weekend?
- Crap.
- Oh, no, why's that, then?

As for numbers, we can start with Algeo's British or American English (I've deleted his source citations for examples, since they're abbreviated to opacity).

In all positions, then as a linking adverb is nearly twice as frequent in British conversation as in American; on the other hand, so in the same use is half again as frequent in American conversation as in British. A distinctive British use of then is in terminal position: Who's a clever boy then? • Well, there you are then.

For sentence-final (or "terminal") position, I've got the following figures of occurrences per 100 million words by searching BNC and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

	BrE	AmE
then .	5824	3173
then ?	4741	1196
go on then .	142	2
come on then .	105	3

As you can see, it's not that AmE doesn't put then at the end of a sentence or question, it's that it's done a lot more in BrE.  The commonest ground between BrE and AmE is the temporal use like She was happier then, See you then, and What did you do then ('next')?  When we search in a context where the temporal meaning is much less likely (in the last two rows), we see the BrE uses of then outnumbering the AmE ones by very large margins indeed.

What do you think then?


p.s.  I know some of you haven't got(ten) into Twitter, but that's where I'm hanging out between blog posts.  I've added a Twitter feed gadget to the left, where you can see my most recent tweets, which may include the Difference of the Day.

We start this post with an email from former (non-linguist) colleague Andy:

I discovered my Railroad Tycoon 3 DVDs today. [...]
This is an American game, so it's not surprising that it uses AmE usage. Even on European maps. In particular, it's really odd seeing "Thames River" or "Severn River" or for that matter (on the France map) "Seine River".

BrE usage is always "River x". Same in French, Italian, I can't for the moment think of the usage in German - though I bet it's a compound.

AmE is "x River". Why the change? The only countercase I can think of is the Gospel songs referring to "That Jordan River" which I suspect are actually AmE originally in any case.

In any case all of these uses sound really wrong to my BrE ear. About the only exception I can think of is "East River", but then the river's not actually called "East", is it?

An AmE countercase is of course the classic Standells track, "Dirty Water", which refers to the "River Charles". But then, it's Boston, so I guess that doesn't count as proper AmE.

Let's start at the beginning, or near enough to it.  Before the late 17th century (according to the OED), the normal way to refer to rivers was the River of X.  Here are some of the OED's examples from around that time:

1548 Hall's Vnion: Henry V f. xxxiii, Borne at Monmouth on the Riuer of Wye.
1565 in R. G. Marsden Sel. Pleas Admiralty (Selden Soc.) II. 55 Honnefleur and Rouen and other ports in the revere of Seine. a1616 SHAKESPEARE Antony & Cleopatra (1623) II. ii. 194 She purst vp his heart vpon the Riuer of Sidnis. 1652 M. NEDHAM tr. J. Selden Of Dominion of Sea 218 Those words concerning the River of Rhine. 1710 J. CHAMBERLAYNE Present State Great Brit. II. I. 323 It's watered with the pleasant River of Clyde.

From the late 17th century, the of started to be dropped, so then we get the River X, as in the River Thames, the River Clyde, the River Cam, etc.  But what else was going on in the 17th century?  Oh yeah, the English coloni{s/z}ation of North America.  So this is about the time when we'd expect to see transatlantic differences starting to develop.  If linguistic changes are happening in England, then they'll mostly stay in England, while the English speakers in America are off on their own linguistic path.

One possible scenario then, would be that BrE would come to have River Thames while AmE would still have the of: the River of Mississippi, say.  But the loss of of had already started by the time most of the colonists would have come over, so perhaps it's not surprising that it got lost in the soon-to-be US too.

It might seem odd that the loss of of would cause the nouns to swap/(BrE alternative spelling)swop places, resulting in X River, but I can think of some reasons why it isn't too odd:

• First, consider the possessive use of of, as in a friend of my mother('s). Get rid of the of and we have to move my mother before the friend (and add a case marker, 's): my mother's friend.  So, there is an existing relation between grammatical constructions of the forms X Y and Y of X.   
• Second, English generally puts grammatically simple modifiers before the nouns they modify.  So, unlike French, for instance, we say red chair, not chair red.  Since river is the 'head noun' in the river-name construction, it would seem most natural to put river after its descriptor.
• A clear exception to the last generali{s/z}ation is what often happens with names of lakes and mount(ain)s: Lake Superior, Lake Titicaca, Lake Geneva; Mount Everest, Mount Rushmore.  But still, there are plenty of geographical features that put the name first: roads, streets, and lanes; seas and oceans; islands, deserts and so forth.
• Some of what would become the original 13 colonies were first coloni{s/z}ed by Sweden and the Netherlands.  Swedish puts 'river' (älv) after the name.  Dutch (modern Dutch, at least) seems to not have a word for 'river' (rivier) as part of the name at all: it's just de Rhône, de Maas, etc.  I don't know how much linguistic influence these colonial powers might have had (not much, in the case of the Swedes, though they certainly named some things), but they're at least worth mentioning as a counterbalance to Andy's observation that the Romance languages put the 'river' first.

 The Wikipedia article on AmE/BrE differences lists some exceptions to each dialect's rules:

Exceptions in BrE include the Fleet River, which is rarely called the River Fleet by Londoners outside of official documentation, and also where the river name is an adjective (the Yellow River). Exceptions in the US are the River Rouge and the River Raisin, both in Michigan and named by the French. This convention is mixed, however, in some Commonwealth nations, where both arrangements are often seen.

Incidentally, the River Charles that Andy refers to is much more usually called the Charles River.

Another thing that might be considered an exception in BrE is what happens when the name of the river is used as a modifier for another noun.  One sees quite a few Thames Rivers in things like Thames River Authority, Thames River Police, Thames River Valley, and Thames River Cruises. Now, of course, we have the option here (especially in the last two cases) of parsing this so that Thames River is not a constituent phrase.  That is, is it:

[Thames River] Authority        or        Thames [River Authority] ?

I would suspect that most BrE speakers would vote for the latter, though that's not how I'd parse the American equivalents.

One also sees Thames River in BrE when it's plurali{s/z}ed, as in Thames Rivers Restoration Trust, which works to improve the Thames and its tributaries.  In this case, Rivers Thames would not be appropriate, since the tributaries are generally not named Thames, so in this case Thames is descriptive (like East or Yellow), describing the locations of the rivers, rather than just naming them.  Usually when referring to more than one river by name in BrE, the river+name order is maintained with river marked as plural, as in "The Environment Agency runs the rivers Thames, Nene, Great Ouse, Medway, Welland, Glen and Ancholme" (waterways.com).

BrE speakers generally use the American word order when referring to American rivers. One doesn't hear the River Mississippi much (though Julian Barnes uses it in Flaubert's Parrot), and this seems to extend to the rest of the new world--BrE prefers Amazon River (7 British National Corpus hits) over the River Amazon (2 hits), but really prefers just the Amazon (over 300 hits).   For European and African rivers, it's River X all the way.  So Germany has the river Main in BrE, but the Main river in AmE--and it's the latter that the local tourist board goes for.  Whether that's because the Germans have more affinity for AmE/American tourists or whether it's because that ordering is more natural to German I'm not sure--the German version of the website refers to it only as Der Main.  German speakers?

I've had a quick look for rivers in the US and UK that have the same name, but haven't succeeded in finding any--but we can see what happened when the English River Avon went to Canada and Australia. According to Wikipedia, the New World versions are Avon Rivers.

Feeling a bit guilty that I haven't blogged in more than a week, but then I'm also feeling guilty that I haven't finished all the things that I need to finish.  So, here's a quick one, largely in other people's words, starting with an email from an American colleague in another department at Sussex.  The difference is in insurance terminology.  Let's say you were (BrE/AmE) burgled/(AmE) burglarized and the insurance company agreed to cover your losses.  Of course, they never cover the full amount that you claim for; there will be, say $100 or £50 (or some such number) that is not paid, as per the insurance contract.  In BrE that's the excess, whereas in AmE it's the deductible.  My colleague writes:

It kind of comes down to how you think about it. In American English, you start with the total, e.g., £200. Then, you deduct the deductible (e.g., £50). So, you are left with the amount you can claim (£150). In contrast, in British English, you start with nothing* then, there is the excess (£50) and anything in excess of that amount you can claim (£150) towards the total (£200).

Her footnoted comment is that the differences in perspective are not terribly surprising, given the stereotype of Americans as positive-thinking and the British as, well, not.  I'd explain excess slightly differently: you start with a claim for £200. The insurance company gives you £150, so your claim exceeds (is in excess of) the settlement by £50.  I'm not sure that this is any less 'positive' in its perspective than deductible is.

On another insurance note, in BrE, you're more likely to see some insurance products or companies with assurance in their names, rather than insurance.  One particularly sees it in the context life assurance (vs AmE life insurance)--but this is rarer and rarer.  On the  differentiation of assurance and insurance, the OED says:

Assurance is the earlier term, used alike of marine and life insurance before the end of 16th c. Its general application is retained in the titles and policies of some long-established companies (e.g. the London Assurance Corporation). Insurance (in 17th c. also ENSURANCE) occurs first in reference to fire (1635 in INSURE v. 4), but soon became coextensive with assurance, the two terms being synonymous in Magens 1755 (see ASSURANCE 5). Assurance would probably have dropped out of use (as it has almost done in U.S), but that Babbage in 1826 (see quot.) proposed to restrict insurance to risks to property, and assurance to life insurance. This has been followed so far that assurance is now rarely used of marine, fire, or accident insurance, and is retained in Great Britain in the nomenclature and use of the majority of life insurance companies. But in general popular use, insurance is the prevalent term. Mr. T. B. Sprague, followed by others, considers assurance, assure, assurer, etc., the proper words for the action of the company or persons undertaking the risk, insurance, insure, insurer, etc., for that of the person paying the premium. This would be in some respects a useful distinction, if it could be carried out; but it would leave the members of mutual societies at once assurers and insurers.

That, happily, is about the extent of my experience with insurance-related terminology. If you know of any more, feel free to relate your examples in the comments.

Editor Mark recently wrote (to) me to suggest the different meanings of pound sign (or pound symbol) as a Twitter Difference of the Day.  In the US, pound sign/symbol is usually understood to refer to this thing: #.  It is also called the number sign in AmE, where it is used to signify the word number, as in #1, which is read as 'number one'.  The use of # to mean 'number' is increasingly understood in the UK, but not often used in that way.


But, of course, if one were to say pound sign/symbol in the UK, it would be understood to refer to this: £.  Now, if Americans needed to refer to £, they would probably say the pound sign or the pound symbol or That little squiggly thing that looks like a capital L in cursive* with a line through the middle.  But since they rarely have to refer to £, they're not too bothered by the ambiguity.


The usual UK term for # is hash sign (or hash symbol), but it doesn't seem to have a long history. The OED says: 

hash sign [cf. hash-mark: prob. ult. f. HATCH v.², altered by popular etymology], the symbol #, esp. used before a numeral (as in N. Amer.) to indicate a following number; the ‘number sign’

1984 Which Micro? Dec. 12/2 Neither user-defined characters, nor the ‘*hash’ sign could be reproduced. 1986 Guardian 20 Feb. 15 Would I please therefore oblige her by using the musical notation provided (I gather that it is called a hash sign).

The (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas and uncertainty about the term in the quotations suggests that hash sign was only becoming established in English (British or otherwise?) in the 1980s. The hatch mentioned in the etymology is the verb sense of 'To cut, engrave, or draw a series of lines', but although one also sees hatch mark in the wild, there's no indication in the OED that this term has ever been popular.  Of course, hash sign/symbol is not restricted to the UK, and its use in the Twitterverse term hashtag will probably give hash an advantage over pound and number in some quarters.  Another term that some seem to use is the descriptive crosshatch symbol--though the OED doesn't yet include it.


I can only guess that the apparent absence long-standing name for # in BrE is due to a lack of need for it.  BrE speakers weren't using # to mean 'number' or 'pound', so it was only when (AmE, orig. proprietary name) touch-tone/(BrE) push-button telephones became widely available that they had much need for a word for that symbol. (And maybe even later--it was years after we had such phones that we got automated interactions with instructions like "press the pound/hash key twice".) 


Because American keyboards typically do not have the £ symbol, people sometimes use # to signify amounts in sterling.  My understanding of this has been that it's called the pound sign/symbol because it is used to mean the same as lb. --i.e. pounds as an imperial measurement of weight--then because it was already called the pound sign, it fell into use for the other kind of pound when need(s) be.  But Mark Liberman on Language Log has been doubting this, and so my reason for choosing tonight to blog about this is just that it's a good excuse to link to his post.

Oh, and if you don't like any of these, you can always call it an (orig. AmE) octothorp(e), which seems to have been invented in the early 1970s specifically for the phone button.

* While cursive is not marked as AmE in the OED (it certainly wasn't coined in America), it's rarely heard in the UK, where people instead tend to say (BrE) joined-up writing.

Last week I had two emails from fans of the recent British-made television versions of Miss Marple mysteries, which are apparently playing in North America at the moment.  As is often the case with British costume dramas and mysteries (those things that a certain class of American anglophiles like[s]), it is co-produced by British (ITV) and American (WGBH Boston) television companies.  (In a reversal of the stereotype of the original-series-producing television channels in the two countries, the British ITV is a commercial channel, while WGBH is part of the US's Public Broadcasting System.)  WGBH has a long history of Anglophilia; it is the home of Masterpiece Theatre (now just 'Masterpiece') and Mystery! (rebranded as 'Masterpiece Mystery!').  The former was originally introduced by 'Letter from America' broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and the latter by Vincent Price, and they are iconic program(me)s in the States to the extent that Sesame Street created a long-running parody, Monsterpiece Theatre (hosted by Alistair Cookie) and a parody mystery program(me) hosted by Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.  Of course, the only reason I mention this is to have the excuse to post one:



But that has nothing to do with Miss Marple, does it?  Both of my Miss Marple correspondents (American Judy and @mikcooke) have lived in the UK, but watched Miss Marple in North America and were surprised by apparent Americanisms and anachronisms in the script.  Apparently these recent re-tellings of the Miss Marple stories are known for playing fast and loose with the original Agatha Christie texts.  From Wikipedia:

The show has sparked controversy with some viewers for its adaptations of the novels. The first episode, The Body in the Library, changed the identity of one of the killers and introduced lesbianism into the plot; the second episode explored Miss Marple's earlier life; the third episode contained a motive change and the fourth episode cut several characters and added affairs into the story and emphasized a lesbian subplot that was quite discreet in the original novel. The second series also saw some changes. By the Pricking of My Thumbs was originally a Tommy and Tuppence story, while The Sittaford Mystery was also not originally a Miss Marple book and the identity of the killer was changed. The third series has two adaptations that were not originally Miss Marple books: Towards Zero and Ordeal by Innocence. The fourth series continues the trend with Murder is Easy and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?. The fifth series does the same, with The Secret of Chimneys and The Pale Horse.

@mikcooke points out the following:

• Jane Marple phoned the local police station and asked for "Detective X" (AmE) and would have asked for "Inspector X" [This inspired a 'Difference of the Day' tweet last week--ed.]
• She spoke about a man who took the bus from the "train station" (AmE) instead of "station" (BrE)
• The village vicar was in traditional black attire but wore a grey trilby (inappropriate)
• Various characters used current casual parlance (if not outright Americanisms, sorry, AmE) "not to worry", "waste of space"
• A man lent another "half a million pounds (c. 1950)" which would be about a billion pounds c. 2010 (a foolish updating, which is never done in the Poirot series)

And Judy queried the pronunciation of migraine, which was pronounced "in the American way" by one of the English characters.  This is how the OED represents--and comments upon--it:

Brit. /'mi:greIn/, /'m^IgreIn/, U.S. /'maIgreIn/   

In other symbols, the BrE pronunciations are 'me grain' or 'my grain', whereas the AmE pronunciation is always 'my grain'.  The symbols are a bit different for the 'my grain' pronuniciations because the OED represents the diphthong represented by the 'y' in 'my' differently for the two dialects--claiming a slight difference in where in the mouth the diphthong starts.

But not everyone agrees that there's a distinction between the two pronunciations of my. For instance,  this dialect coach represents the 'price' vowel (for that's what phoneticians tend to call it) as being the same in the two dialects.  It's represented the same in this chart in Wikipedia, too.  The OED uses a scheme developed by Clive Upton that makes this and a few other distinctions that aren't universally made.  John Wells, writing about the advantages and disadvantages of Upton's system, says:

Price. The standard notation might seem to imply that the starting point of the price diphthong is the same as that of the mouth diphthong. In practice, speakers vary widely in how the two qualities compare. In mouth people in the southeast of England typically have a rather bat-like starting point, while in price their starting point is more like cart. In traditional RP the starting points are much the same. Upton's notation implicitly identifies the first element of price with the vowel quality of cut -- an identification that accords with the habits neither of RP nor of southeastern speech (Estuary English), and strikes me as bizarre.

I'm going to go with Wells on this one.  This means that American 'my grain' pronunciation is a known variant in BrE.  And in fact I've heard 'my grain' so much in England that I was beginning to wonder whether 'mee-grain' was just a South Africanism (since that was where I was first introduced to the pronunciation).

The OED also has a historical note on the pronunciation that first discusses whether the second vowel is pronounced as it would be in French (from which the word came to us--about 500 years ago) or whether it's "naturalized" to the English pronunciation of the spelling 'ai', as in grain.  It also says that two American dictionaries from around the turn of the 20th century listed the pronunciation as if the first syllable had the vowel in mitt and the stress on the second syllable--but that it later turned to the 'my' pronunciation that we know today.  It's unclear here whether the 'my' pronunciation started in the US and spread to the UK, or whether it might have been invented in both places.  To me, it doesn't look like the most natural way to pronounce that spelling--if I saw the word for the first time, I'd probably go for the abandoned /mI'greIn/ (mih-GRAIN)--so, how it turned to 'my grain' I don't know...


At any rate, the English character in Miss Marple could have naturally come upon that pronunciation, but I'm betting that it's anachronistic, like many of the things that @mikcooke noted.  So, has Miss Marple been updated or Americanized?  Probably a little of both.


Now, I've been feeling a bit down about all of the anti-Americanism-ism that's been going on in the UK press these days--everything from The Economist to our local property-listings magazine seems to have a feature or a series that urges its readers to defend the Mother Tongue against (in the words of the latter example) "ghastly, overblown, crass, managerial Americanisms".  It's not infrequent that the alleged Americanisms are (a) long-standing non-standard (or formerly standard) Briticisms, (b) management jargon that didn't necessarily start in the US and that is reviled in the US as much as in the UK, or (c) Australianisms.  

Why does all this make me uncomfortable?  It's not that I think Americanisms should or shouldn't be imported, it's just the vehemence and bile with which the (often unresearched) claims are made--the apparent assumption that if it's American, then it's crass and unnecessary.  (The Economist doesn't like gubernatorial because it "is an ugly word."  Is that the best you can do, Economist?)  One could point out many Americanisms that have found very comfy homes in BrE, and which no one complains about.  


But the implicit anti-Americanism in the anti-Americanismism becomes more understandable when one thinks about the American resistance --at an institutional level-- to importing British voices and words.  In addition to producing globali{z/s}ed versions of Miss Marple, British (pop-)cultural products tend to be remade (many would say [orig. AmE] "dumbed down") in some way or another for the American market--whereas the British take their American media mostly (AmE) straight-up.  So, a generation of British youth spout the slang of Friends, while Americans watched re-planted American versions of Coupling and The Office (and lots more).  In the case of The Office, the re-potting has been so successful that the American version is shown in the UK.  In the case of Coupling, oh I feel embarrassed for my homeland.  (See this wonderful compare-and-contrast video to see just how broad and--how can I say this? oh yeah!--terrible American comic acting can be.)  But it's not just changing the situations of situation comedies.  When I heard my American family talking about "Oprah Winfrey's Life on the Discovery Channel", I told them they should watch the David Attenborough series by the same name.  Then I realized it was the David Attenborough series, re-voiced by Oprah.  (You can read this discussion on which is better.  Apparently Sigourney Weaver has re-voiced previous Attenborough series.)  The American television programming that keeps British voices is on the channels that 'intellectuals' are supposed to watch: PBS, BBC America and some co-productions on premium cable channels (HBO, Showtime).  And while there have recently been lots of British actors speaking in American accents on American television (American-columnist-for-UK-newspaper Tim Dowling rates them here), for British characters it's not uncommon to have a North American speaking with a non-authentic accent--see most of the "English" characters (save Giles) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example.


Of course, ask Americans, and they'll usually say that they love the English (the rest of the UK doesn't really get a look-in) and would love to see more of them.  But that's not what they're getting--and for the most part, they don't seem to mind.  And this is why there usually are ten times as many candidates for AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year as BrE-to-AmE candidates. And why many of its speakers feel that British English is 'under attack' from an imperialistic America.  (But a country that prides itself on its sense of irony should eat that up, eh?)

Happy 4th of July, which, apparently, is a good enough name for a holiday, since EditorMark, over on Twitter, informed us today that:

“Independence Day” is more descriptive, but “Fourth of July” is the name given in the 1938 act that extended pay for the federal holiday.

Here at SbaCL Headquarters, we're more about co-dependence than independence, but in hono(u)r of the holiday, my Twittered Difference of the Day^TM was:

BrE 'the American War of Independence' vs. AmE 'Revolutionary War'.

In more formal contexts, I should add, you're likely to find American Revolution in AmE. 

But then I read this New York Times article (pointed out by Not From Around Here) in which the English historian author writes of the War of American Independence.  Oh no, I thought, I got it wrong.  Or did I?  Google gave me nearly ten times as many War of American Independences (1.3 million) as American War of Independences (144k).  Searching just .uk sites, the difference is still there: 69k American independences and 16k American wars. But it still didn't ring true for me, or, it turns out, at least one of my Twitter followers, so I re-checked it in the British National Corpus, which gives us (among its 100 million words) 23 American War of Independences and 3 War of American Independences.  Now, the BNC texts are from the 1980s and early 1990s, and of course most web text is later than that.  And the web is not a reliable corpus, since it isn't balanced between different types of texts and it includes a great amount of repetition.  But still, one has to wonder whether the adjective-placement tide has changed.

Incidentally, the (Anglo-American) War of 1812 is sometimes known as the Second War of American Independence.  It's one of those things that every American schoolchild will have to learn about, but  you'll be hard-pressed to find an English person who's heard of it.  Why? Well, the Americans won it, so they have the bragging rights, but more importantly, for the English, it was just an annoying thing that was going on in the colonies during (and as a consequence of) the Napoleonic Wars.  It'll be those conflicts that English schoolchildren will encounter (in year 8, according to the National Curriculum).

As an aside, revolutionary is typically pronounced differently in US and UK. In AmE it has six syllables: REvoLUtioNAry.  In BrE, it may drop the 'a' (revolution'ry) as part of a general pattern of reduction of  vowel+ry at the ends of words--thus it has one main stress (-LU-) and one secondary stress (RE-), unlike the two secondaries in AmE.  Also, in BrE 'u' may be pronounced with an on-glide (see this old post for explanation).  Both of those "BrE" pronunciation features are not found throughout BrE.  I'd consider them to be features of RP ('Received Pronunciation'), but I'm sure others (you, perhaps?) can comment better on geographical distribution.

I hope that wherever you are and whatever you're celebrating, you're having a lovely fourth of July.  I usually try to (orig. AmE) cook out to mark the day, but I discovered yesterday that our* (AmE) grill/(BrE) barbecue** has been murdered by scaffolders.  My beloved Weber! And this is how I came to celebrate American independence by eating a Sunday roast dinner complete with Yorkshire pudding and parsnips at a pub (with lime cordial and soda).  As I said, co-dependent, not independent.

*Oh, who am I kidding? It's mine. Vegetarian Better Half could not care less.
** I mark this as BrE because in AmE a barbecue is generally the event (this sense also found in BrE) or the food (as in I miss good barbecue--it is a mass noun, and particularly used in the South). When I say it refers to 'the food' I emphatically do not mean overcooked burgers and sausages, the scourge of British summer entertaining.  What constitutes barbecue varies regionally in the US--in some places it's specifically pork, in others beef.  And it will involve smoking and special sauces.  And it will be tender and tasty.  Where you are when you order some barbecue will in large part determine where on the sweet-to-spicy continuum the barbecue will fall.

Still active on the Twitter feed, but having a hard time re-introducing myself to the world of blogging.  I am starting to think that the internet, with its 140-character limits, 60-second games, and instant 'friend'ship, has robbed me of my attention span. But since I keep writing books (have I mentioned that this is the year [August to August] of three book deadlines?), I must have some attention span left.  It just gets used up on the day job.  (And why do I call it my "day job" when it doesn't seem to let me get any work done till night?)

At any rate, my attention span held out for several tweets on a single topic tonight, and that's just cheating.  That's trying to make Twitter do what the blog does, and doing it a lot worse.  So, in true blogger spirit, I hereby embark on a long exposition on something I know almost nothing about.  I'm back!!


I'm disqualified from writing this one on at least three levels:  

1. I have never seen the (AmE) TV show/(BrE) programme Glee.
2. I have never voluntarily belonged to a choir.  ('Chorus' class in school was my living purgatory.)
3. I have consistently found excuses to leave early when required to attend choir concerts.
4. I hated that Journey song the first time (a)round, and I hate it even more now that it's re-released in a form that is mind-bendingly more over-earnest than the original.  

Oops, that was four.  I got a little carried away there.  I might very well like Glee —several people whose taste I respect are addicted to it— but I'm not a choral music person and I just can't afford a new television addiction at the moment (see paragraph one, parenthetical comment one).  But I assure you: I could never like it enough to get over my horror at the Journey cover.  Never ever.

At any rate, my interest was piqued by this Guardian article about Glee, which includes the line (emphasis added): 

The comedy-musical show charts the story of a group of teenagers in a US high school show choir, or glee club.

Not knowing a lot about the subtypes of choirs, I had to look these things up.  Wikipedia (best that I could do) said this about show choir:

A show choir (originally called 'swing choir') is a group of people who combine choral singing with dance movements, sometimes within the context of a specific idea or story.
Show choir traces its origins as an activity in the United States during the mid-1960s, though cultural historians have been unable to determine the date and location of the first "true" show choir group [...]. Two groups of touring performers, Up with People and The Young Americans, traveled extensively throughout the country in the 1960s, performing what could be called the show choir concept. When students and directors of the day saw these organizations, they would, in turn, start similar groups at their high schools.

So, show choir is original to AmE, but used in BrE now too.  But the definition of show choir didn't particularly sound like the glee clubs that I remember from my school and (AmE) college/(BrE) university days.  In particular, I don't remember them dancing.  So I looked up glee club.  The OED says:

[]glee-club, a society formed for the practice and performance of glees and part-songs

Wikipedia expands on this a bit:

A glee club is a musical group, historically of male voices but also of female or mixed voices, which traditionally specializes in the singing of short songs—glees—by trios or quartets.

And that's what I remember. The Wikipedia article goes on to say:

Although the term "glee club" is still used in some places, including the American TV series Glee, glee clubs have largely been replaced by the show choir in schools throughout the United States. Show choirs tend to be larger and more complex than the traditional glee club.

What I'm less clear on —and I'm sure you Gleeks out there can help me— is (a) whether it's ever called a show choir on Glee and (b) whether the meaning of glee club shifted pre-Glee to mean something more like a show choir.  (I suspect not--Glee is a really good title for television, so I would think it might be an opportunistic appropriation of the term.)  

The meaning of glee club has certainly shifted now in the UK at least, since schools (see the Guardian article) are leaping on the Glee bandwagon and re-naming their choirs glee clubs (or is that Glee clubs?). What's interesting (to word-nerdy dual citizen me, at least) is that although the Guardian felt the need to explain the term glee club to its UK readership, it is an originally BrE term. Here's Wikipedia again:

The first named Glee Club was founded in Harrow School, in London, England, in 1787.^[1] Glee clubs were very popular in the UK from then until the mid 1850s but by then they were gradually being superseded by choral societies. By the mid-20th century, proper glee clubs were no longer common. However, the term remained (and remains) in use, primarily for choirs found in Japanese and North American colleges and universities, despite the fact that most American glee clubs are choruses in the standard sense and no longer perform glees.

The term didn't entirely die out in the UK, but the only recent pre-Glee uses of it that I can find are figurative uses or plays on the term (referring to the emotion glee, rather than the song type).  For example, the headline of a 2001 Simon Hoggart column, "Two-party disharmony with the Tory glee club", describes this group of Conservative Members of Parliament:

John Redwood rocked gently with happiness. Eric Forth's tie, a modest effort of only six or seven colours, seemed to wink at us as he too rolled about in pleasure. And Ann Widdecombe does a wonderful fake laughter turn. She throws back her head, waves her arms in the air, and opens her mouth as wide as you do at the dentist, in order to imply that she might otherwise implode with the sheer effort of keeping all that hilarity inside.

Now it's back in UK consciousness, but with a different meaning again.

As a cultural side note, I was thinking about the fact that I've known several adults in England and South Africa who belong to non-church choirs.  In the US, I  was never aware of non-church, non-school choirs, with the exception of gay choirs (and I never lived in a city big enough to sport one of those).  I've also been known to opine that clubs are more popular in  England than the US.  (In a small city in Texas, I had to travel 90 miles to get to a Scrabble club. In England, I moved to a not-large city that had two.) And I'm not alone in that--commentators on Englishness like Jeremy Paxman and Kate Fox have noted this tendency, since there seems to be a clash between Englishpeople's "obsession with privacy and [their] 'clubbability" (Fox, Watching the English). Kate Fox has this to say about English club-joining:

If you do not have a dog, you will need to find another kind of passport to social contact. Which brings me neatly to the second type of English approach to leisure [...] — sports, games, pubs, clubs and so on. All of these relate directly to our second main method of dealing with our social dis-ease: the 'ingenious use of props and facilitators' method. (Watching the English)

So, I was wondering whether there seem to be more choirs here because choral music is more popular here (it definitely is in South Africa and Wales) or because there's a greater tendency to join organi{s/z}ed groups. And then it hit me.  It's that non-church bit.  It's not that Americans don't join things.  They do. They join churches (and other religious groups, but mainly churches), and with that comes all sorts of activities, clubs, and committees.  UKers are less likely to  organi{s/z}e their hobbies and social needs around a church, because they're less likely to go to church, and it's generally more socially acceptable not to go to church in the UK.  (This site has church attendance at 44% in US and 27% in UK. According to this site, 53% of Americans consider religion to be very important in their lives, versus 16% of Britons.)  It may be that gay men's choirs became so strong in the US because of a need for joinable singing groups among people who were less likely to turn to the community church to fulfil(l) that need.  The rest of the US population might dip into church to satisfy their need to sing, but in the UK there are plenty of other outlets.  (In fact, my old reflexologist belonged to a non-religious Gospel choir--they just like the style of singing, not the religious message.)

Come to think of it, I do know Americans who belong to non-religious community singing groups, but these are (orig. AmE) barbershop quartets.*  Am I wrong about community choir-joining?  Should barbershop quartets count as choirs, when the things I'm thinking of in the UK have far more singers?  Let me have it in the comments...

*OED notes that barber(-)shop as a name for a haircutting establishment is not originally AmE, but is "chiefly North American" nowadays.  I'm not quite sure whether there's a replacement in the UK--Better Half just talks about going to the barber's and we both marvel all the time that yet another hair-cutting place is taking over yet another place that used to be a nice shop.  Do other people in Brighton get their hair cut every two weeks? Do people travel for miles for a Brighton haircut?  How can the population possibly support this many hair stylists?

Thanks for your patience while I was not-really-blogging for the past month.  During that time, I've been working in five UK cities/towns and two other EU countries (Germany, Malta)--not to mention preparing for all those meetings and (BrE) marking/(AmE-also) grading my brains out end-of-year essays/term papers and exams.  Now I just have lots more student work to read and the page proofs of this book to correct and the collaborative book to finish...and...and...and...and should  I really be blogging now?  (Best not to think too hard about that.)

But how to get back into the blogging groove?  Doing 'Differences of the Day' on Twitter has kept me and the groove on a nodding acquaintance, but which of the multitude of un-blogged-about topics should I start with?  It's inbox roulette time again.  This post's winner is Astro Brat, who wrote to ask:

Is the British version of "token" different than the American one?
I ask because in the last few days I've run across the term used by Brits that sounds more like where my mid-western US dialect would say voucher or perhaps coupon?

One was in a television show and I just assumed it meant the same -
"I hope you like this gift, because honestly it's either this or tokens"

But when I read this later in the week:
"it’s not a book that would have been top of my reading list, but I was in a bookshop and I had some book tokens so you know how it is!"

Where I come from token is a kind of coin used for amusement parks or kid's restaurant sort or things.  It can also be a little small gift, a token present.  Does Britain give out specific-use coins for bookstores?

AB has correctly surmised that in BrE a token is a kind of (AmE) gift certificate/(BrE) gift voucher.  These days, one most often hears token in this meaning for one of two things: National Book Tokens or Theatre Tokens.  These are sold at bookshops/box offices, but usable at almost any (BrE/AmE) bookshop/(AmE) bookstore or (BrE/sometimes AmE) theatre/(AmE) theater, not just the one at which it was purchased.  For shop/store-specific gifts, I more often hear voucher, rather than token in BrE, but the OED has examples (latest from the 1980s) of shop-specific tokens, so there's not (historically, at least) a hard-and-fast meaning difference. 


AB's little error is in transferring the coin property of (AmE) subway/amusement park tokens to the British context. Tokens are like American gift certificates, so traditionally paper, nowadays likely to be in the form of a gift card.  There's a gallery of these at the National Book Token website, and while I could photograph the two in my (AmE) wallet/(BrE) purse for you, I am far too lazy, so here's one from the 1930s, courtesy of the NBT site (the relevant details would have been on the back) and the modern plastic type.
My two are really Grover's.  They're paper ones with a value of £1 each, given to children in schools and (BrE) nurseries on National Book Day.  I can't tell you how many books I've bought while holding the wallet/purse that holds those book tokens.  I generally think of them about 10 minutes after the purchase, even if I've stepped into the bookshop with the specific goal of spending the tokens.  So, Grover gets books and I contribute £2 more than I'd intended to the recovery of the retail sector.

(I also want to mention Bookstart, a lovely UK institution, which gives children free books (through their local libraries or at health check-ups) at three points in their preschool years.  I've only just missed mentioning them on National Bookstart Day (11 June this year). Bookstart is a charity, funded by the government and book publishers.  Given the slash-and-burn approach of the new (BrE) government/(AmE) administration, I am crossing my fingers for it.  Not to mention for all jobs in higher education. *sigh*)

The notion of a token as a coin is not foreign to BrE.  The OED has this sense-definition (though it includes subway tokens under the same sense as gift token):

 11. a. A stamped piece of metal, often having the general appearance of a coin, issued as a medium of exchange by a private person or company, who engage to take it back at its nominal value, giving goods or legal currency for it.
  From the reign of Queen Elizabeth to 1813, issued by tradesmen, large employers of labour, etc., to remedy the scarcity of small coin, and sometimes in connexion with the truck-shop system. bank-tokens, silver tokens for 5s., 3s., 1s. 6d., were issued by the Bank of England in 1811

You might need metal tokens in the UK for use in amusement parks or cloak-room lockers or such things--I don't know of any public transport systems using them here at present, but I'm happy to be informed otherwise.

Most other uses of token seem to be the same in the two dialects, though a draft addition to the OED marks this sense as US:

[3.] c. A nominal or ‘token’ representative of an under-represented group.

Does this mean that the joke of the South Park character Token's name has gone over some British heads?  (Say it ain't so!)

And on that note, welcome back to my blog.  I've missed you!

I love this blog. I love writing this blog. I wish I were doing it now.  I feel even more guilty about my deadline-imposed neglect of the blog considering this:



and this:





Thank you, my dear readers, for all your support. I am not worthy!


(BrE) Have/(AmE) Take a look at the other blogs on those lists if you'd to find some new languagey diversions.