It’s tanning season again, and time for a talk about tan.

“’You’re so tan. Are you out of L.A.?’” asked the former Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, of a New York Daily News reporter recently. “Palin then confessed that her golden glow came from a salon. ‘Mine’s fake,’ she quietly confided. ‘I mean, I’m Alaskan.'”

You’d be unlikely to hear those three words — “you’re so tan” — coming from the mouth of an Englishwoman. And that’s not because the sun doesn’t shine in the UK. Tan she wouldn’t say, but “tanned” she might  — as in the word formed from the past participle of the intransitive verb “to tan”: I tan, you tan, we all tan under the rays of summer or the sunbed. So tanned, according to the OED, is an adjective meaning “that has been made brown, esp. by exposure to the sun.” But not so for Americans: when they’ve been baking under the UVs, they tell each other they’re “tan” — and not just when they’re Sarah Palin.

Is that because Americans are prone to chopping the ends off British words, and they’re shortening the verb-inspired adjective from “tanned” to “tan”?

Apparently not: it’s simply that Americans use the color name “tan” in their everyday language, and Brits don’t. It’s perfectly legit on either side of the Atlantic: the OED defines tan the adjective as “a brown skin colour resulting from exposure to the sun or other source of ultraviolet light”. But Brits just don’t buy it as a color; instead they tend to hear it only as a verb (either transitively or intransitively, “to turn or make something brown”) or as a noun (as in the thing you strut when you’ve baked yourself into a bronzed god). The color tan itself — used as an adjective or noun — doesn’t fly where the Union Jack does, curiously enough.

On the flip side, there is one sun-baked word the Brits say that you probably won’t hear coming out of an American’s mouth, and that’s brown. As in, “Where have you been? You’re so brown!” Could it be that referring to anyone’s skin color as brown in this day and age — whether it’s as a result of DNA or ultra-violet rays — is an American no-no of the first order and simply politically incorrect? Or is it because they’ve got their more appropriate color tan and don’t need the less specific brown? There are probably more brown Brits of the non-sun-baked kind than those who are tan — sorry, tanned — during the one sunny week of Wimbledon. But they seem to be as happy calling each other brown as they are trying to become it, if only temporarily or at great risk to their health and comfort.

And here’s a thought to finish with. I bet when I wrote the word “bronzed” above, this isn’t what immediately came to mind …

No, I thought not. Bronzed he is, but he isn’t — and you’ll have to look that one up in the dictionary to find out why…

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