Category Archives: Yanks vs. Brits

American -ates and -ations

The Americans usually shorten their words and phrases, given any opportunity. Take “three hundred fifty dollars” (cf. “three hundred and fifty pounds”), “it starts June 2” (cf. “it starts on June 2nd”), or “let’s go find him” (cf. “let’s go and find him”). They even take letters and syllables out of words – eg. “color” cf. “colour”, “aluminum” vs. “aluminium”. So isn’t it interesting that there are a few words that have longer alternative versions — and it’s the longer rather than the shorter words that have been adopted into standard American English? An Englishman orients himself in a new city; his American spouse probably orientates herself with a map. The tourist from London would inquire (well, she would actually enquire) about what transport she can take to Boston; the American would ask about transportation. The sleazy limey is planning to burgle the house on the corner; the Yank was caught burglarizing his neighbor. Administrate is an uncommon version of the verb administer, and although it’s more widely heard in the U.S. (and it is acknowledged by dictionary consensus to be a real word), it’s generally considered disagreeable and best avoided.

There is one further pair of related words that some might argue have a subtle difference in meaning; however, I believe they are synonymous. Whereas the English feel obliged to say sorry at any given opportunity, even to inanimate objects, the Americans generally feel obligated to give up their seats to the elderly. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, oblige means “to make (someone) legally or morally bound to do something”, and obligate means “to require or compel (someone) to undertake a legal or moral duty”. As far as I’m concerned (and I’m British-born), they’re the same, and oblige suffices without the added ‘-ate’.

There are words for which the addition of an ‘-ate’ or ‘-ation’ does in fact change the sense of the root word. To comment is to make a single remark, whereas to commentate is to provide a steady flow of comments and observations, usually about a sports event. A protest is an expression of disapproval or objection to something said or done, but a protestation is an emphatic declaration that something either is or isn’t the case.

Can you think of other words with longer alternative incarnations that are favored by the Americans?

Meet the raisins

We had Chelsea buns for tea yesterday. While discussing its ingredients (and its curious name), my American-raised daughter asked slightly suspiciously, “What’s a sultana?” Good question. Even though I know what it looks and tastes like, I realized I had no idea what it actually is, or what makes it different from a raisin. (And if you’re wondering what a Chelsea bun is, keep reading …)

The sultana is a “white” (pale green) variety of seedless grape, also called a sultanina, a Thompson Seedless (in the U.S.), a Lady de Coverly (in England), and a Kishmish (in Turkey and Palestine). The sultana grape is nicknamed the “three-way grape” since it’s used for table grapes, raisins and wine. Because of its multi-functionality, it’s the most planted grape in California. It’s thought to have originated from either Constantinople or from the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, from where the sultana raisin was originally and traditionally exported to the English-speaking world, some time in the 17th and 18th centuries. In some countries, namely Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, sultana is also the name of that particular type of raisin; in fact, in the UK, sultana usually refers to the dried fruit — which is basically a golden, plumper, rounder, more juicy version of the raisin (it’s treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its color) — rather than to the variety of grape from which it’s made. However, in the U.S., raisin is a catch-all word for all dried grapes, making the word sultana unfamiliar to speakers of American English.

Another variety of raisin is the currant, made from the small, dried Black Corinth seedless grape, which is produced mainly in California and the Levant.* Currants — not to be confused with the berries called redcurrants or blackcurrants — are miniature raisins that are firm, dark in color and have a tart, tangy flavor; they are more often found in cooking and baking than their sweeter raisin cousins, which enjoy strutting their stuff as healthy snacks these days. The currant gets its name from Corinth, the port in Greece from which it originated.

For a comprehensive history of the raisin — and other dried fruits — check out the second chapter of Sun-maid’s rather delightful 100th anniversary book.

And back to the Chelsea bun: This classy-sounding treat is a type of currant bun — made of a rich yeast dough sweetened with brown sugar, cinnamon and spice mixtures, spread with butter, and rolled up with currants, lemon peel and dried fruits before being baked. (Americans: think cinnamon roll or cinnamon swirl, with less sugar and lots of raisins.) It was so named after the Bun House in Chelsea, a fashionable area of London, where the bun was first created in the 18th century. Favored and frequented by the British royalty of the time, the Bun House was demolished in 1839.

Are you now craving a Chelsea bun? Well, don’t fret: Fitzbillies, Cambridge’s oldest craft bakery and a veritable institution, is famous for its Chelsea buns and traditional cakes. And it ships all over the world. As it boasts on its website: “Our extra sticky Chelsea buns travel well – Sir Edmund Hillary took a box with him to Base Camp when he conquered Everest. They are packed in an airtight cellophane envelope and then into a stout corrugated mailing box. They should reach you in perfect condition for the final assault on the summit… or indeed your tea.”

Go scoff a Chelsea bun today.

* The Levant is “the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa”.

Boys will be guys

About half of my 20-year-old daughter’s many friends are of the male persuasion. Does she refer to them as men or boys when talking about them in the third person (ie. behind their backs)? The trouble is, they’re no longer boys, and to refer to them as such would be as demeaning as it would be inaccurate. But these youngsters with their lanky gaits and fresh-faced grins can’t really be called men either: they’re not yet blessed with the gravitas or the sheer male experience that would earn them that moniker. So where does that leave these young chaps, in terms of what we should call them? Curiously, it isn’t quite the same for girls teetering on the edge of womanhood: girl is generally acceptable — and can even be regarded as quite flattering — for a maiden long past her official passage into adulthood.

Boy officially means “a male child or youth”, according to the Oxford Dictionaries. In plural form it can refer informally to men who mix socially or who belong to a particular group, team, or profession: eg. “he wants to go out with the boys”. “Boy bands” are often just that: ensembles of pre-pubescents with more than just wet dreams who rarely make music together as men. And in days now fairly long gone, boy was sometimes used as an affectionate address for or to a man: “Let me advise you, my dear boy”, or “The old boy has seen better days”. But essentially, the word is reserved for those of pronounced youth or immaturity, before dropped voices and facial hair turn them into their official adult incarnations, ie. men.

In the US, we’ve found a solution for this ambiguous linguistic interregnum between boy and man: we call these youngsters guys. In fact, guy serves as a suitably vague catch-all to describe not just a male of indeterminate maturity or unspecified age, but also — especially in its plural form — a group of mixed genders and even ages; it’s not unusual to have girls or young women included in a group of guys (think the equivalent of the French pronoun for they — ils, which covers either men or men and women), although it is predominantly a male thing. A guy thing. Dude is also gaining ground — and not just in comic screenplays by Judd Apatow or in jocular boy-bonding-speak; that dude with the green hair can apply appropriately if informally to any guy of any age or persuasion.

Brits have an equivalent term, bloke, that’s often used to describe those gangly man-boys — and indeed any male past puberty, young or old. But unlike guy, bloke is male-specific: girls aren’t ever included in a gathering of blokes, however many pints they can knock back. Other British-English words — now for the most part outdated — for a man of any age are fellow and chap. Lad was a word that covered both boys and youthful males, but unless used poetically (or by a Scotsman), it’s more or less gone from our vernacular today.

Juvenile suggests criminality, and youth now carries derogatory if not downright criminal overtones. So those fellows pictured above are probably happy that guys, blokes and dudes are firmly entrenched in our vocabulary, removing the need for us to choose between the men and the boys.

Dedicated to Jake, Flo’s favorite guy.

Oneword or two? Everyday and forever …

“May you stay forever young,” sang Bob Dylan in 1974. “I’m forever blowing bubbles,” chant the Liverpool football fans in their improbable anthem. These two forevers, in their wildly different musical contexts, also happen to have different meanings — and were Dylan an Englishman, his poignant song might well have had three words in its title instead of just two.

One word or two for certain word pairs is one of those sticky subjects that divides not just writers, language commentators and editors but also those common linguistic national adversaries, the Brits and the Yanks. Yes, it’s something else we can’t quite agree on, especially because there are often no hard and fast rules about these word pairs even within our own tribes. Because these often subtle discrepancies happen only on the page (two words spoken aloud sound the same whether together or apart), and therefore the argument can’t be settled by what ‘sounds right’, there’s more scope for argument and debate on theoretical grounds.

Here are some of the word pairs that can work both ways, starting with the ones that don’t generally start arguments (ie. we all get the difference between one word and two), followed by those for which the decision to combine or separate the words comes down to questions of both meaning and usage.

There are many words — like onset (meaning either “beginning” or “attack”) — for which the necessity to keep the component words (in this case on and set) together is not in question, especially if those smaller words don’t work on their own in the given context. Other examples are foreshadow, toothless, deadpan. But if the word makes sense when divided in two, it gets more interesting. Let’s take already and maybe. Each clearly started life as two words that came together over time in marriages of convenience and economy, and now their modern meanings differ substantially from that of their respective two-word equivalents. “We’ve eaten already” and “The kids are all ready to go home”: That’s a pretty straightforward distinction, isn’t it? As is “You may be excused from the table” and “Maybe she’s just not that into you.” But then it starts to get trickier.

Take altogether vs. all together. Here the difference in meaning becomes slightly more blurred, but is still distinct. Altogether is an adverb meaning “completely, to the full extent, all told, “: “She stopped being able to drive altogether.” When referring to a group acting collectively, the two words come into play. “He asked the musicians to play all together.” There is still sufficient room between these definitions to make a spelling distinction unambiguous. Anyway and any way fall into this category too: the first is an adverb meaning “regardless”, or “in any event”, whereas the separate words pair an adjective and a noun to denote multiple manners of approaching a task or direction. “Although we had missed the connection, she urged us to get to the station anyway, in any way we could manage.” The two forms aren’t interchangeable.

With onto and on to it gets even more blurry and a little complicated. The single word is a preposition meaning “moving to a place on”: “She climbed up onto his lap.” (There is also an informal meaning of onto when combined with the verb “to be,”meaning either you know something about someone who has done wrong — “I’m onto you”, or you’ve got an idea or concept that might lead to something else — “We’re onto something here.”) This preposition can also be spelled as two words, just to make things difficult. However, as the Oxford American Dictionary points out, “it is important to maintain a distinction between the preposition onto or on to and the use of the adverb on followed by the preposition to: she climbed onto (sometimes on to) the roof, but let’s go on to (never onto) the next chapter.” Think about what you do at the end of a meal: do you go on to dessert, or onto dessert? It would be a messy challenge to do the second. In to and into have the same issues.

I say two words, you say one

Now we enter dangerous territory where the Americans and the Brits start to bicker — with writers of American English invariably opting for the one-word option if there’s room for debate, and Brits still (sometimes) preferring the conservative separation into two words when appropriate.

Anymore and any more illustrate this simple trans-Atlantic usage rift. It is listed as two words in the OED as an adverb meaning “to any further extent, any longer” (with a q.v. reference to anymore “especially N. America” directing the reader to the two-word entry); the Oxford American Dictionary, contrary to its English cousin, gives its main entry to the single word. Each to his own…

Now we move to examples of words that distinguish between adjectival and adverbial forms, using one word for the former and two for the latter — or at least that was how it used to be done. This is changing rapidly, on both sides of the Atlantic (but more quickly in North America). Onstage/on stage is a good illustration. In British English, a single word is reserved solely for the adjective: “The onstage narrator was very effective.” The OED hyphenates the two words and lists only the adjectival definition. Adverbially, Brits tend to stick to two words: “The narrator walked briskly on stage.” However, American English recognizes the single word as both adjective and adverb: “He sang the whole song onstage.” Everyday/every day, online/on line, and underway/under way are all variations on this theme, with Brits tending to separate the words for adverbial use (“Every day she set out in her everyday clothes”), and Americans opting for the single word in any context (“she sang the same song everyday“). But the Brits are quickly following suit, perhaps realizing that Americans have the luxury of not needing to understand and identify sometimes complex grammatical forms in order to determine the correct usage.

For ever and forever are a different kettle of fish. The Brits still distinguish between the adverbial two words and the single-word adjective — and they read quite different meanings into each. The OED defines the single word as an adjective meaning “continually” or “persistently”: hence our Liverpudlians forever blowing their bubbles (or Jonny forever blowing his nose). But the adverb — meaning “for all future time” (or more colloquially “for a long time”) — is often spelled as two words. Britain’s National Trust, which owns and maintains many of the country’s historic properties, has a motto running through its literature for visitors and potential funders: “For Ever, For Everyone“. Not so in the U.S.: there the single word is used invariably, whatever the context. Bob Dylan was clearly not beseeching the subject of his song to continually stay young, but rather to stay young for all future time. Fowler, in his treatise on the subject, cited Calverley’s 19th-century poem Forever*, which foretold in jocular but ominous tone the merging of the two words. Fowler dismissed the poet’s fears, optimistically stating that “[his] fears have proved groundless. ‘Two words’ says the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary firmly, a hundred years later.” Little did Fowler know that Calverley’s prophecy was correct, and that forever indeed looks set to oust the two-word adverb — on both sides of the Atlantic.

Finally, our favorite ‘word-that-shouldn’t-be-a-single-word-but increasingly-is’: alright. Having the same effect on many of us as the sound of fingernails on a blackboard does, that ugly misspelling is fast gaining ground, everywhere. According to the OED, “the merging of all and right to form the one-word spelling alright is first recorded toward the end of the 19th century (unlike other similar merged spellings such as altogether and already, which date from much earlier). There is no logical reason for insisting that all right be two words when other single-word forms such as altogether have long been accepted. Nevertheless, although found widely, alright remains non-standard.” That’s what the OED says now; let’s see if its crystal ball is as off-base as Fowler’s was about forever …

Forever
by Charles Stuart Calverley

 "Forever": 'tis a single word!
   Our rude forefathers deemed it two:
 Can you imagine so absurd
       A view?

 "Forever"! What abysms of woe
   The word reveals, what frenzy, what
 Despair! "For ever" (printed so)
       Did not.

 It looks, ah me! how trite and tame!
   It fails to sadden or appal
 Or solace--it is not the same
       At all.

 O thou to whom it first occurred
   To solder the disjoined, and dower
 The native language with a word
       Of power:

 We bless thee! Whether far or near
   Thy dwelling, whether dark or fair
 Thy kingly brow, is neither here
       Nor there.

 But in men's hearts shall be thy throne,
   While the great pulse of England beats.
 Thou coiner of a word unknown
       To Keats!

 And nevermore must printer do
   As men did long ago; but run
 "For" into "ever," bidding two
       Be one.

 "Forever"! passion-fraught, it throws
   O'er the dim page a gloom, a glamour:
 It's sweet, it's strange; and I suppose
       It's grammar.

 "Forever"! 'Tis a single word!
   And yet our fathers deemed it two:
 Nor am I confident they erred;
       Are you?

You say forward, I say forwards; you say toward, I say towards …

Which of these sentences sounds easier on the ear to you? 1) “I’m inching forwards, aiming farther, and heading towards the finishing line.” or 2) “I’m inching forward, aiming further, and heading toward the finishing line.”

If you’re British you probably leaned towards the first (although you might have preferred further to farther); if North American, you almost certainly chose the second.

The differences in usage between further and farther, forward and forwards, and toward and towards often come down to preference, largely determined by which side of the Atlantic you live on. But there are also some subtle differences in meaning that can affect which word you choose.

1) Further/farther:

Take these five recent instances of further/farther in the media:

“Gen. Martin Dempsey said the U.S. has been preparing for further provocations or action from North Korea.” (USA Today). “The Red Sox were waiting to get the results of John Lackey’s MRI further interpreted.” (Boston Globe) “In Britain, the word semolina conjures up images of grim school dinners, but farther east it’s one of the staple ingredients of sweet and savoury cooking alike.” (The Guardian) “In the eyes of the federal government, urban Minnesota has just pushed a little farther into the countryside.” (Minnesota Public Radio). Clare Mann, describing her tour of an Italian volcano in the Telegraph, wrote that “Some visitors climbed farther down into the crater.”

In the first two sentences, further is the adjective or adverb of choice, meaning “to a greater extent, more”, or “to or at a more advanced point in space or time”. However, in the last three examples, in which there’s a sense of geographical distance or movement, the word farther doesn’t seem out of place, as it would in the first couple of sentences.

The words further and farther are virtually interchangeable, although the latter is often used when literal rather than figurative distance is implied. The OED states that “the form farthest is used especially with reference to physical distance, although furthest is preferred by many people even in this sense.” Fowler in his Modern English Usage, explains what he understood to be the surprising etymology of the two words: “The history of the two words appears to be that further is a comparative of fore and should, if it were to be held to its etymology, mean more advanced, and that farther is a newer variant of further, no more connected with far than further is, but affected in its form by the fact that further, having come to be used instead of the obsolete comparative of far (farrer), seemed to need a respelling that should assimilate it to far.”

2) Forward/forwards:

During a Commons debate on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, British MP Caroline Lucas was recently quoted in The Guardian as saying: “As well as looking backwards, it is also about learning the lessons looking forwards.” In this case, forwards is clearly being used to signal the direction of the looking, especially in contrast to the opposite direction mentioned earlier in the sentence. Lucas might also have wanted to distinguish “looking forwards” in a directional sense from the sense of anticipating something positively, ie. “looking forward” to something.

Like further and farther, the distinction between forward and forwards is subtle or in some cases non-existent. According to the OED: “The present distinction in usage between forward and forwards is that the latter expresses a definite direction viewed in contrast with other directions. In some contexts either form may be used without perceptible difference of meaning; the following are examples in which only one of them can now be used: ‘The ratchet-wheel can move only forwards’; ‘the right side of the paper has the maker’s name reading forwards’; ‘if you move at all it must be forwards’; ‘my companion has gone forward’; ‘to bring a matter forward’; ‘from this time forward’. The usage of earlier periods, and of modern dialects, varies greatly from that of mod. standard English. In U.S. forward is now generally used, to the exclusion of forwards, which was stigmatized by Webster (1832) as ‘a corruption’.”

The British forwards might well be in decline, often dropping its final ‘s’ in favor of its American counterpart. A Google search on forwards returns references mostly to a particular type of sportsman — “an attacking player positioned near the front of a team in football, hockey, etc” (OED) — in its plural form.

3) Toward/towards

“Cyprus is edging towards euro exit,” read a recent headline on the Reuters UK blog. “Andy Murray turns focus towards clay court season” was the first part of a Telegraph headline last week. Across the Atlantic, Suzy Menkes in the New York Times talked about “[Mrs. Thatcher’s] attitude toward the Falklands war against Argentina.”

As borne out by these examples, the difference between toward and towards is one simply of usage and preference, determined by whether you speak British or American English (with the latter favoring the ‘s’-less word, in keeping with its preference for the ‘s’-less forward). About toward and towards, Fowler wrote slightly abstrusely: “The -s form is the prevailing one, and the other tends to become literary on the one hand and provincial on the other.” Whether that means logically that American English is both more literary and more provincial than British English is probably best left for a separate discussion …

Mrs. Thatcher or Lady Thatcher?

Whatever opinions we might hold about the former British Prime Minister who died this morning (and she probably was one of the most divisive prime ministers in living memory), it seems only fair that she should be referred to appropriately, according to the title that was conferred on her. In 1992, Margaret Thatcher was granted a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire.

This morning, the two most influential U.S. newspapers, reporting on Thatcher’s death, are calling her simply “Mrs. Thatcher”. The Wall Street Journal writes: “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother, Baroness Thatcher, died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher‘s spokesman, Timothy Bell. She was 87.” It seems extraordinary that the newspaper’s house style apparently prescribes the removal of honorary or conferred titles, even in the very same sentence that the title itself is quoted by her official spokesman. The New York Times clearly has a similar editorial policy: “Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, ‘in most respects, is uncontested by the Blair government,’ Mr. Young, her biographer, said in a 1999 interview.” This must be a new policy on the part of the New York Times, since its 2010 review of composer Andrew Lloyd Weber’s new musical in London referred to him appropriately, acknowledging the knighthood that was bestowed on him in the same year that Thatcher was granted her peerage: “Lord Lloyd-Webber’s last international smash was, in fact, the first “Phantom”.”

The English newspapers, when not referring to the Iron Lady just by her last name, respectfully use her correct title, which is either ‘Lady’ or ‘Baroness’:

“The first woman elected to lead a major western state, Lady Thatcher, as she became after the longest premiership since 1827, served 11 unbroken years at No 10.,” The Guardian reports. The BBC also recognizes her life peerage in its coverage: “Lady Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the first woman to hold the role.”

We can trust Debrett’s, “the modern authority on all matters etiquette, taste and achievement”, to confirm and clarify how a baroness should be referred to and addressed. Indeed, its entry on baronesses ends with the example of Lady Thatcher herself:

“At present all peeresses in their own right are either countesses or baronesses. In the peerage of Scotland, the term Lady (ie Lady of Parliament) is the legal term of the fifth grade of peerage because the term “Baroness” is used in Scotland in a feudal sense relating to land tenure.

“A countess in her own right is addressed in the same way as an earl’s wife, but a baroness, whether hereditary or life, has the option of two alternatives, ‘Baroness’ or ‘Lady’.

“Since the Peerage Act 1963, and the growing numbers of female life peers, the use of the continental style of ‘Baroness’, both verbally and in writing, has become widespread. Most Baronesses in their own right, however, prefer to be styled ‘Lady’, and the same is true of a minority of Life Baronesses (for example Lady Thatcher).”

We’ll give The Queen the last word on this, as I’m sure she knows how to talk about a baroness. As a Buckingham Palace spokesman said this morning: “The Queen was sad to hear the news of the death of Baroness Thatcher.”

The ubiquity of buzzwords and business speak

Update, Oct 2018: You can now check your own writing for jargon, using the “Jargon Grader” app. Sic. It really does exist. …

We’re all playing Bullshit Bingo most of the time — in our heads, if not in the board room. When loud cell-phone guy on the morning commute is maximizing symbiotic deliverables, or your colleague’s powerpoint presentation is all about e-enabling mission-critical synergies, the urge to punch a fist in the air and shout “BS Bingo” can be overwhelming. But we all hear and read it and even sometimes speak or write it on a regular basis. Corporate and marketing jargon is here to stay in our daily vocabularies — at least when it comes to the media and the workplace, where formal relationships are negotiated, proposals are pitched, deals are done, speeches are delivered, products and services are advertised, and opinions or beliefs are expressed — often publicly, persuasively, delicately. But why don’t we go home and innovate cross-platform systems or expedite transparent convergences when we snuggle with our sweeties on the sofa? This relentlessly unattractive terminology seems to be born of and lend itself well to several different possible motives, which often can’t be easily discerned; they include sheer pretentiousness, vain attempts at linguistic or intellectual prowess, deliberate and strategic ambiguity, projections of authority or objectiveness, or simply being fashionable and speaking the lingo of the corporate West. Continue reading →

Live safe, think different, eat fresh, drive slow. Are we doing good?

Ah – the flat adverb. There’s nothing quite like it to get temperatures raised and grammarians talking. Is an adverb with its tail shorn off ever really legitimate?

A quick primer: an adjective describes a noun or pronoun (black as in “the black dog”, happy as in “she was happy”), and an adverb — which often ends in “ly” — describes a verb (erratically as in “he drove erratically”, happily as in “they danced happily”) or an adjective (“he was wonderfully peaceful”). There are some words, known as ‘flat adverbs’, that work legitimately in either role: hard can be both an adjective (“the ground was hard”) and an adverb (“he worked hard”); fast is another example (“her typing speed is fast”; “he drives too fast”). But there are certain adjectives — especially those that can be transformed into adverbs with the addition of “ly” (slow/slowly; fresh/freshly; healthy/healthily, safe/safely) — whose viability as adverbs when stripped of their two-letter suffix is debatable. Is it really OK to tell someone to “drive safe” or to “eat healthy”?

It might come as a surprise to learn that the flat adverb was much more common in middle English than it is now — especially when it came before an adjective. There are numerous historical literary and Biblical examples of the flat adverb: ‘the weather being excessive hot’; ‘extreme hot’; ‘the sea went dreadful high’ from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and “they were sore afraid” from Luke 2:9 are just a few. It was only when grammarians of the 18th century insisted on adding “ly” to the ends of adjectives to distinguish them as adverbs that the suffix gave the verb- and adjective-descriptors their own formal structural identity.

In an earlier Glossophilia post, “I’ll take that with a side of small words”, I pointed out what I see as an American English tendency to abbreviate or shorten words or phrases whenever a good opportunity presents itself, and I think the flat adverb is a good example of this. I really can’t imagine any of the so-called adverbs in the signs or ad slogans above being used or displayed in an English setting, even in the hip abbreviated lingo of today. And that’s not to suggest any kind of linguistic superiority or loftiness on the part of the Brits (they’re just as guilty of grocers’ apostrophes and other common clangers as everyone else in the English-speaking world). I just think they’re not programmed by their linguistic DNA to strip adverbs down flat the way Yanks do, even if this was the practice of their forebears. Go figure.

Songs my childhood taught me 1: Rhymes from the schoolyard

Glossophilia is taking a trip down memory lane with a series of posts on childhood songs and rhymes: when we skipped in the school playground, bounced on our parents’ knees, twisted our tongues around gob-stopping riffs, learned our lessons with nifty mnemonics, and recited — delighted — silly nonsense.

Remember the days of the old schoolyard? If you’re a grown-up boy, you probably just remember the footie and the fisticuffs more than anything else. But we girls will never forget our hours and hours of hand-clapping and skipping-rope sessions, the longer the better, with no-one ever tripping the rope or missing a beat, breathlessly counting, and chanting the rhymes and songs — often pretty rude — that gave it all reason, shape and momentum … Continue reading →

Mew or mews?

When we hear British folk talk about a mews (and yes, it is a singular noun, even though it sounds very plural), we think of a quaint cobble-stoned street lined with stable-like town houses, usually forming a quiet cul-de-sac off — and hidden away from — a larger residential street.

A recent article on Narrative.ly described an American mews that few have heard of, let alone seen, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “The Walk, as locals call it,” Narrative.ly exlains, “is a small English-style mew modeled after the streets of London and named for a romantic comedy by British playwright Louis N. Parker, set on a similar mew” [my italics]. Mew? According to all my dictionaries, singular mew means a gull, the cry of a cat, or a house for hawks. But considering it’s hard to find a real mews outside Great Britain, Americans can easily be forgiven for getting confused about the word and its usage …

OED defines mews as a British noun meaning “1. a set of stabling round an open yard or along a lane. 2) such a set of buildings converted into dwellings; a row of houses in the style of a mews [pl. (now used as sing.) of mew(2), originally referring to the royal stables on the site of hawks’ mews at Charing Cross, London].”

The OED’s second definition of mew, as referred to above and from which the modern word mews derives, is “a cage for hawks, esp. while moulting”; this dwelling for birds used for falconry was often the size of a small building — especially when it housed the king’s hawks as it did in 14th-century London. When the hawks’ mews became the royal stables in the 1530s, the name remained; today the Queen’s stables, which were moved in the early 19th century to their current site in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, are still called the “Royal Mews”.

At the end of the Industrial Revolution, before the motorcar replaced the horse-drawn carriage on England’s streets, prosperous Victorians needed dwellings for their horses and grooms that were near enough to their own homes for convenience, but sequestered enough to hide the sounds, sights and smells of the 19th-century stable from the master and his family. So wealthy urban dwellers lived in large terraced houses (or “row houses”, in American English) with stables at the rear that opened onto a small service street — or mews — on which the horses and stable-hands lived and worked.

With the advent of the motorcar, the mews lost its raison d’etre and fell into disuse; those carriage houses that weren’t demolished became commercial properties or were converted into private dwellings, which are now some of today’s most fashionable and sought-after residences on London’s property market. The previously unnamed stable-lanes took on the names of the main streets they had served, with the tag “Mews” added to distinguish between them. Look at a map of Central London today, and in the small, picturesque section of Westminster between Marylebone High Street and Portland Street you can count no fewer than ten mews named after neighboring streets: Marylebone Mews, Wimpole Mews, Beaumont Mews, Browning Mews, Mansfield Mews, Weymouth Mews, Devonshire Mews, Bentinck Mews, Queen Anne Mews, and Dean’s Mews. See if you can spot any more …

There are very few mews outside London (a Washington Mews can be found in New York’s West Village). Some fancy apartment buildings, gated housing developments and cul-de-sacs in Canada, Australia and the U.S. include “Mews” in their names to lend an air of elegance and exclusivity, but few if any of their residents can claim horses and hay-bales as their predecessors.