Category Archives: Yanks vs. Brits

Joss sticks

joss

Remember when we used to call them joss sticks? What happened to those British hippy sticks of ’60s/’70s yore? They’re just incense now.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word joss means “Chinese figure of a deity”, taken in 1711 from Chinese Pidgin English, from the Javanese dejos, taken in the 16th century from the Portuguese deus, “god”, from the Latin deus. Colloquially, it came to mean “luck”. Joss stick, meaning “Chinese incense”, was first recorded in 1883.

“The Joss doesn’t get so many sticks burnt under his nose as he used to; that’s a sign of ill-luck, as sure as Death.” — from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

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Meta is so meta

meta

“A Film Critic Gets Meta (As Does Ours) In ‘The Film Critic (El Crítico),” ran the headline for a recent piece by NPR’s film critic Bob Mondello.

And he’s not talking about movie reviewers drinking Ethiopian beer on the job; this is all about an X about X … (i.e. a film critic writing about a film critic). As Mondello goes on to say: “A film critic doesn’t often have to review movies about film critics — probably a good thing — but sometimes, as with Hernán Guerschuny’s postmodern rom-com The Film Critic (El crítico), there’s nothing to be done.” Continue reading →

Pardon? Say what?

Proof that Don Draper was a social climber…

“What?” … “Huh?” … “Excuse me?” … “Can you [please] repeat that?”

Those are some of the ways an American might ask you to repeat something when they didn’t hear you. And apart from their varying degrees of politeness, there’s not much to distinguish between them.

But it’s a different story on the other side of the Atlantic. Brits are inclined to judge you by how you say “huh?” — as much as by the clothes you wear, where you went to school or what accent comes out of your mouth.

“Pardon?” Continue reading →

Thanks a bunch, and what’s up?

bunch    what'sup

Here are two common colloquialisms that divide Americans from their English-speaking cousins across the pond.

Last week, after news of her older brother’s stroke made headlines , Reba McEntire took to her social media channels to thank her fans and friends for their support: “We really appreciate all your thoughts and prayers. We will keep you all posted. Keep sending your prayers! Thanks a bunch!” Those last three words of gratitude from the American country singer were straightforward in their meaning. Reba was saying “thank you” with the most heartfelt sincerity.

But those words might have landed strangely on British ears, especially in that context. Continue reading →

Why do Brits pronounce lieutenant “leftenant”?

Lieutenant

Back in 2013, on The Guardian‘s Notes and Queries page, a man called Jeff Rushton from London asked this very good question:

Why exactly do the British say lieutenant as ‘leftenant’? 

Armchair linguists on both sides of the Atlantic offered up various answers and suggestions: here’s a selection for your interest and entertainment … Continue reading →

I say Derby, you say Darby …

iroquoisIroquois was the first American-bred thoroughbred racehorse to win the Epsom Derby

It’s Derby Day in the U.S. and all the hats were out in Kentucky. The Brits will dust off their own fascinators for their big day in June when the country’s fastest colts and fillies run the one-mile four-furlong ten-yard race on the Epsom Downs in the world’s original and most famous Derby. But what’s the biggest difference between the Derby Stakes and the Kentucky Derby — apart from the names of the speedy nags running for the roses on either side of the Atlantic? That will be in the way the names of the famous races themselves are pronounced: as in DERBY here in the States and DARBY over in Blighty. Why do the Brits do that? Continue reading →

Demanning our language

dictionary

The National Association for Equality in the Workplace (NAEW) has announced an ambitious and somewhat controversial initiative — in cooperation with the US English Teachers Coalition — to remove “hot button” gender phonemes from standard American English over the next five years, ensuring that our vocabulary no longer contains gender-suggestive syllables or spellings. The NAEW launched the campaign today, explaining its 62-month goal to “de-gender” our lexicon by July 2020 — allocating five months per letter of the alphabet to phase out gender-suggestive words, with an extra couple of months built in to address the large percentage of male-dominant “m” words. Continue reading →

In the news … (Feb 27)

shrimpsandwich

TGIF. Language and usage in the news this month: confessions of a comma queen; the possible death of “uh”; a town torn apart by an apostrophe; the mid-Atlantic language mash-up; some non-translatable idioms; what your pronunciation says about you; and a critique of Wikipedia’s grammar vigilante. Continue reading →

Well actually…

image

Actually has a bad rap. “Actually, the Worst Word on the Planet is Actually,” claimed The Atlantic a couple of years ago. Just saying the word seems to mean that you’re being snarky or passive-aggressive, that you’ve got a superiority complex, or that you might be telling a big fat lie. But can some of us be forgiven for using it habitually, even if it can mean any one of these things? Continue reading →