I once was talking wit some british people whilst in california and said "oh you can throw that garbage in the trash". They laughed and said it sounded really coarse, what did you do with it after? "It goes into a truck which takes it to the dump. Why, what do you say?" "We say you put your rubbish in the bin and the lorry takes it to the tip" which did sound more pleasant.
That reminds me of a phrase I've seen on signs in both the UK and in Aus/NZ (IIRC): "No fly tipping".
I'm not sure if this is actually correct usage in those countries, or slang, but it certainly feels much more like slang, and felt virtually impenetrable, even to someone who's been exposed to a fair but of UK-isms in his life.
I wouldn't call it slang, it is the common way to refer to the act in media, and the government uses it, e.g: https://www.gov.uk/report-flytipping (they do define it, however, as you say, it would be unclear if you aren't familiar).
I remember going on a walk in London with my dad when I was little and we ended up in Hyde Park (this is late 1970s). There was a sign that said 'no dumping" which he chuckled at and explained to me the slang term 'dump', as in 'to defecate'.
I'm fairly certain "dump" is the more commonly used word in the UK. There's the classic children's novel "Stig of the Dump" published in 1963.
There's definitely cases where UK English has adopted a new word but American English hasn't. I was surprised to see the word "coupon" used in old UK literature. "Voucher" is the more common word nowadays. People would accuse you of being Americanised if you said coupon.
Tip is definitely more common everywhere I've lived in the UK.
Stig of the Dump is set in an informal place people dump rubbish, if I remember correctly, which is where people are more likely to use the term (e.g: "what a dump"), but if you are talking about a managed place it is taken to be disposed of properly, tip is by far the more common term I hear used.
I love Stig of the Dump. I read it at school and whilst I have very memories of my childhood I do remember reading it. I can quite imagine living in a dump/tip with old jam jars as my window!
Dump and tip have different connotations. The tip is where one deposits refuse/rubbish. Whilst a dump and is a pile/collection of unwanted things, not necessarily rubbish.
It’s a small but often important distinction.
As a less confrontational reply: from my point of view “unwanted fly tipping” is talking about rubbish. The concept of depositing unwanted, yet usable, not rubbish, things somewhere is not something that would happen (outside of the rather recent disposable culture context).
As to your sentence (which is perfectly fine), the use of words avoids possibly confusing repetition. Atypical use would be preferred to “no fly tipping, take it to the tip”.
> It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find
Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. “Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
See also: "ejaculation" used to be synonymous with "exclamation" and it's used heavily all across the Sherlock stories eg
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
> "The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
Makes the "romance" books my grandmother would read sound like they were lifted from the Sherlock stories
> "In the future" refers to a general or specific time that has yet to occur, and "in future" is used to mean "from now on". (The recent business jargon, on both sides of the Atlantic, is "going forward".)
Funnily enough, I think 'going forward'/'going forwards' is a transatlantic difference?
It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.
TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.
Officially we do, but lots of people make it sound more like 'aluminyum", still distinctly British rather than American, but not said in a way that someone unfamiliar with the spelling could guess it was 'ium' at the end.
I've got a fairly plain accent, fairly close to Received Pronunciation or BBC/Oxford English, Americans never have a hard time understanding my pronunciation, and even I sound closer to 'aluminyum' or maybe 'aluminiyum' more than a clean 'aluminium', though it still sounds much closer to correctly pronounced British word than to the American version.
Fascinating story behind the origins of the naming of that element. Davey, the British scientist who first isolated it, originally suggested it be called alumium. Somewhat ironically, he referred to it as aluminum in his papers, while it was a Swede writing in a French journal that spelled it aluminium.
How curious! (I feel that I've observed the Britishization of the word "curious" in my lifetime. As a child, it meant only interested, intrigued. Now it also means strange or bizarre.)
This might be my fault. I was in Charlottesville for a few months about 16 years ago doing some work for a startup, hanging out in my off hours with a group of sorority girls who had worked for me in London when I’d been an impresario.
I say (or rather, said, as this episode made me very conscious of it) “hmm, curious” almost reflexively when working on something. They aped me. They partied, they spread the meme. Within a week I was suddenly overhearing people in cafes and gas stations going “hmm, curious” and by the time I left town I felt like I was living in a poorly written Monty Python sketch (or perhaps a Lovecraft bit), as an epidemic of “mmm, curious” had taken over the townspeople and the UVA student body. The latter all then went home at the end of the year, towards the end of my stay there, and spread it to every corner of the U.S.
When I went back a year later, they were all still at it.
I guess this ties in with the whole “teenage girls introduce new language” piece a few weeks back.
As an Aussie I get a kick out of seeing Australianisms get picked up in the global vernacular. No worries seems to be increasing common outside of Australia, and cooked (to describe something that's fucked up) also seems to be prolific on social media these days.
As an American, I always find it kind of ironic that Aussie colloquialisms and colloquialisms my Texan grandparents used overlap, likely because of being drawn from a similar pool of British & Irish expats some 100-150 years ago. "I reckon" is one that comes to mind first.
Somehow the fact you chose word "vernacular" comes across as amazingly Australian to me. It's like Australians instinctively know that you need to sprinkle your sentences with some interesting vocabulary every so often. I'm probably making no sense to anyone but myself but I find the Australian manner of speaking to be sharp swings between the most basic brutish, often vulgar, english to the complete opposite. Like, you'll hear someone blurt out "Slow down you cunt, These pills they've got me taking take are praying bloody murder on my fucking knees" and then effortlessly it just flows into something like "That said it's not worth grieving or shedding too many a tear over. They've done a marvelous job at alleviating my various ailments. My wife's taking them to and it's all but cured her rheumatism".
It's not occurred to me in ages that "no worries" could be Aussie in origin, thought it was just a degradation of "don't worry about it" here in Canada, or picked up from the Lion King, but we do have a ton of aussies here, at least on the West Coast, so it seems plausible enough. I guess we just don't add "mate" as commonly.
"and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island - staff who don't just say "No worries" when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say "No worries at all". They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don't even despise you. Really. No worries at all."
Juice Media's "honest government ads" are a goldmine for Aussie-speak,
"colossal shitfuckery" so perfectly nails the dank machinations of
Australian tech and politics.
"No worries" is the main phrase I brought back from visiting Australia in 2013. "no worries m8" is a common response from me on $CORPORATE_CHAT when a coworker thanks me. The other one I use occasionally is "yonks".
According to the O.E.D. it's been used in the US in a stock market context since 1935.
As an example of how seriously the British take their language, here's a shortened entry for the phrase "run-up".
1.The act of running up to a certain point; esp.
1.a Coursing. The race between two greyhounds up to the first turn or wrench of the hare.
1834 Thacker Courser's Comp. I. 134 One dog is sometimes behind the other in the first run up to the hare
1.b The act of taking or sending a ball up to the goal or into a position for final play. Also attrib. Chiefly in Golf.
1897 Outing XXX. 484/1 Foster‥, after a clean run from 'way down the field, puts the ball through the uprights.‥ The excitement of the run-up has been intense.
1.c A run made in preparation for jumping, throwing, etc., in Athletics; in Cricket, the bowler's approach to the bowling crease before delivery.
1897 Encycl. Sport I. 52/2 Pace in the run-up supplies the impetus; spring enables the jumper to lift himself into the air.
1.d = run-in | RAF lingo.
1942 R.A.F. Jrnl. 27 June 8 Another Stirling and a Wellington adopted almost identically the same run-up as ourselves.
1.e A period of time or series of occurrences leading up to some important (freq. political) event; an action which prepares the way for one on a larger scale.
1966 Sunday Times 20 Nov. 48/2 The Petit Palais show offers, also, invaluable evidence in its drawing section of the ways in which Picasso manoeuvred during the crucial run-up to the ‘Demoiselles d'Avignon’.
1968 Listener 5 Dec. 761/1 The run-up to the election of Oxford's new Poetry Professor has aroused a good deal of mirthful interest
2 Bookbinding. (See quot. 1875.) Also attrib.
1875 Knight Dict. Mech. 2004/2 Run-up, a fillet-mark which runs from head to tail on the back, without mitering with the horizontal cross fillets on the panels.
1880 J. W. Zaehnsdorf Bookbinding 131 With a ‘run-up’ back, the edge of the leather round the end papers is to‥have a roll run round it in gold.
3 On the U.S. Stock Market, a rapid increase in the price or value of a commodity. Now also in gen. use.
1935 Sun (Baltimore) 13 Apr. 17/8 Corn advanced to 1 to 13/4 cents a bushel, but cotton was reactionary after Thursday's run-up.
1942 Ibid. 1 Oct. 21 Laclede gas preferred had a runup of 6½ points.
There's two I like in particular as an American, but mostly because their counterparts are ruined.
'Good on you' is the biggest one. 'Good for you', especially in text, to me comes across as bitter or sarcastic because of how often it's used that way, whereas the other doesn't.
'Mate', while I don't use it, is a solid word. We have buddy, pal, guy, etc, but again, they can each have their own negative connotation. Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
The word mate can be used both positively and negatively, but is predominately used positively. One of Australia's core values is 'mateship'.
You will be surprised to find that Champ is the word Aussies will use when unimpressed. For instance, "You alright there Champ?" means " You absolute idiot, what in the hell are you thinking?"
Brit living in the US here. Despite being here 7 years now i'll every so often have an American point out how odd something I say is. Recently it was me saying "I'll need to head home and get my swimming costume before heading to the pool". To which the response was "wow wow wow, "swimming costume"? Really? A costume. Not a uniform but a costume; something you wear for halloween? OMG that's adorable" Turns out Americans say "swim suite" :).
On holiday in Whistler back in 2019, I had a brief conversation with an Englishman in the hotel elevator.
A few days later, he recognizes me outside the hotel but I am noticeably slow to recognize back and he mentions "we chatted on the lift". I fake remembering while desperately searching my memory for the event of riding the chairlift with this English guy.
An hour later I remember that in the UK, "lift" == "elevator". Me, being North American and having spent plenty of time in ski towns, always associates "lift" with "chairlift".
I'm not sure about other Americans, but I'll sometimes say "swim[ming] trunks" if I'm specifically referring to male swimming attire. Otherwise, yeah, it's often "swim[ming] suit" or "bathing suit" here.
Since male swimming attire comes in different shapes (ahem designs), I hear people use «swimmers» more and more.
Save for one singular design which, it would seem, distinguishes itself with such remarkable uniqueness as to warrant the bestowal of its very own appellation: «budgie smugglers» (AusE).
Budgie smugglers does indeed only apply to the brief style, but those who like banter and wordplay will try to work it into any conversation involving male swimwear. E.g. "Fetch your budgie smugglers fellas, we're going to the beach", or "sorry ladies, my budgie smuggling days are over. It's boardies for me."
Having grown up in the US with what I would consider a higher than average exposure to the early 2000s internet, at least compared to other peers my age, much of my ability to read and write actually came directly from social media, instant messengers and online games rather than books. This meant I often found myself struggling with spelling errors in English class which sadly resulted in deducted points from my essays.
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
> Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
I can see the teacher's perspective here. I don't think it's unreasonable for teachers to mark this down, though I don't think your request to get back the points was unreasonable either.
Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you. Using language constructs that are unnatural for your audience can distract them and disrupt their flow. You don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point. This friction gets in the way of your point, thus ultimately hurting your own cause in addition to wasting their time. So when you keep doing that on your assignments and exams, you're effectively showing that you haven't mastered this skill -- and so it's not unreasonable for your grade to reflect that.
If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
As a computer science student in England we were told we should use ‘program’ rather than ‘programme’ since that was the convention in our subject.
If I remember correctly BBC Basic accepted COLOUR as well as COLOR keywords to be more approachable to primary school children who were native English speakers.
My teachers only commented/deducted if I mixed spellings in a single essay. If a teacher can't teach someone who uses either variant they probably have a stark educational deficit themselves.
when i was an exchange student i was told that some students would have problems coming back because their english teachers would not accept the american english they would learn during the exchange year and that might reflect on their grades. fortunately i had an understanding teacher who didn't do that, but who was happy to see my english dramatically improved.
> In Europe, British English is used as a reference point
Anecdotal counterpoint, but… I’m a British English speaker, but many of my colleagues are Continental Europeans, for whom English is their second language. Part of my job involves copy editing and, almost without exception, their output is written in American English.
No, it's due to the ovewhelming exposure to media from the U.S., mere spellcheckers oughtn't interfere with 'underground' vs 'subway', 'film' vs 'movie', 'flat' vs 'apartment', and so on and so forth.
> Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you
Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
> don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point
Fair point. At the very least, one should be aware of the different usages.
> Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
Not sure what you mean by "distinguish". But just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way.
OK, at this point I really need to explain what on earth is going on here:
"what does "pants" refer to?" - pants refers to trousers and pants refers to underpants and of course pants refers to pants as a noun. Pants also refers to heavy breathing as a verb.
I have absolutely no idea how we ended up with this situation, where pant(s) is a noun and a verb and really odd. I'm going to blame Britain, US and Italy (via Latin) and not necessarily in that order.
"A dog pants when they are hot but they only pant when they are hot."
Note how I end up slapping an extra s in for no apparent reason - actually, it is when I don't put a verb in front of that word. So: "a dog will pant" ... "a dog pants". The extra s on the word seems to make it a verballish thing.
On the bright side this is why phishing emails always look a bit wank.
> how we ended up with this situation, where pant(s) is a noun and a verb and really odd. I'm going to blame Britain, US and Italy (via Latin) and not necessarily in that order.
Because (in English) adding -s(/-es) makes plurals of (most regular) nouns, and also makes 3rd person singular declension of (most regular) verbs.
All of these are common in NZ ("twaddle" is a bit old-fashioned). I had no idea "nonsense" was supposedly regional, and four dictionaries I just checked make no mention of that (and include American sources of quotes).
For what it’s worth, although this is often considered an Americanism, a lot of regions of the UK (particularly in the North) have consistently used “pants” to mean trousers.
Colour and realise I suspect most American readers would be able to understand just fine. But you start writing tyre, kerb, and gaol, and there will be real reading comprehension issues that start arising. We have standardized spellings for a reason and that's what schools are there to teach.
And this is just spelling, not even going into words that have different meanings in the US vs UK like pants and lemonade.
Interestingly, recently there is a push in the US to normalize African-American (for the lack of a better name) grammar and spelling, e.g. using "do" in place of "does". Wonder if this includes normalizing the usage of British spelling as well.
Thanks, I haven't heard of Ebonics before. Looks like at this point in time its usage is becoming discouraged (the term, not the phenomenon it describes).
Like so many things that become objects of policy argument in the United States, the term describing it became overloaded to the point where it was rendered less useful. You don't hear the term so much now.
The term reached peak use around the time (I'm going from memory here as far as timeline) some educators began exploring the concept of teaching kids who spoke Ebonics at home with some of the same techniques they would use to teach English as a second language students. America reacted with the focus, intelligence, and empathy it always does when issues of education and race are brought up.
Yeah I am starting to notice that (not from the US originally) re: how America reacts to this topic. Also, it looks like even the term "ebony" itself in the context of African-American culture is considered archaic.
I love this example. I felt ick at realise but yeah, still understood it. Tyre I thought no way, that can't be tire. Kerb, wait, like curb?? And then gaol I think my tongue tied itself in knots and gave up trying to imagine what it might actually mean lol.
Yes, but like a lot of minor regional spelling or pronunciation differences, some people say it with a hard g. It may be the improper pronunciation when compared to the origin, but that’s how words work, grating as it may be to our enlightened sensibilities.
I personally don't care much for small misspellings and they add zero friction to my reading, I'm more interested in the message and how it is delivered to some extent. What adds friction are some styles of writing which diverge too much away from the essential.
In Germany, I wouldn't get marked down for using the wrong spelling, because it just didn't matter. Behavior? Behaviour? Who gives a fuck, it's all the same. It's ridiculous that these regional variations are somehow significant that it warrants points being taken away.
I think native speakers of a language have a more visceral reaction to things being spelled wrong or the wrong word order. So in Germany, people may not care so much. I grew up in the US but near Canada so I have maybe more exposure to written British English than most in the US (center vs centre). And I lived in Tanzania where I myself became very confused on how to spell words (grey vs gray?).
But there are probably still some words that will make me think the person is not American, like organisation with an s. I read it and it viscerally feels off.
As a Brit, I resent the "authorized_keys" in my .ssh directory.
Due to the large number of U.S. internet residents, I don't tend to really notice many "Americanisms", though one thing that bugs me is when the U.S. doesn't seem to recognise that "America" is a a large continent and only one area is the U.S. However, even Canadians will refuse to admit that they are American, as in living within the american continent.
I'm not sure if you did it intentionally but I saw "recognise" and felt a slight electric shock :-)
Perhaps the solution is to just unite all of the states of America, because I at least think the original idea was that the USA was a supranational government uniting little nation-states (precursor to the EU?), but maybe these more established nation-states won't want to join the union and become a "state" (even though I think political science would already refer to them as states).
At least you use the "ize" suffix, so all else should have been forgiven!
I prefer the "u" in colour/behaviour as I find it more aesthetically pleasing. But I absolutely despise the "ise" spelling of realize (realise) and am not entirely sure why. Though, I vaguely remember spelling all words with "ise" and getting some wrong some right and not understanding why (I'd learn later I'm dyslexic so I chalked it up to that and called it a day)
Somewhat oddly, "grey" has ended up pretty normalized in the US so either works. There are a few other examples; theatre comes to mind. In a way that lots of other British spellings really have not.
Don't blame Webster. For a lot of the well-known differences, he actually preserved the original.
In particular, the British added the "u" when French was in fashion, and likewise for "-ise" (in fact, "-ize" dates all the way back to Ancient Greek!)
One thing that Americans do get wrong is misspelling "-lyse" which comes from a different Greek root, so should not follow the same pattern as "-ize". But even then, Webster didn't invent the error.
To me it's about consistency. I don't really care what is or isn't "correct", I care that the spelling can sometimes be different depending on the region. It would be one thing if there was some unified body for English, like the French have, but we don't, so it's just another competing standard.
Ultimately I think changes like this should be more grassroots than top down whims of private dictionary publishers. Not to mention that all this focus on the phonetics fundamentally misunderstands that the phonetics of English spelling are closer to a mnemonic than a rule. I suspect this will become gradually more obvious as languages world wide evolve to be more keyboard friendly in the coming century.
I find it fascinating that anyone in the US has this issue, as a Brit this was an issue for anyone with early internet exposure, but I hadn't considered the volume of British/Canadian/Aussie English to have an impact the other way round!
I remember in the 1980s entering a computer program into my BBC Micro after watching The Computer Programme[1] and finding out that it had dual spellings of key words like COLOUR/COLOR in its BASIC.
So even before the internet was widely used people in the UK we’re aware of the problem.
> as a Brit this was an issue for anyone with early internet exposure
Same here as a Swedish person who grew up with American media + eventually getting into Internet communities. English exams felt great when I took them, I knew all the answers after all.
But then getting the results back was always disappointing, as Swedish schools teach "British English", not "American English", so you better use the British spelling and pronunciation, otherwise it's completely wrong obviously and you deserve punishment.
Companies, for example, have very detailed style guides about usage to enforce consistency. Obviously we don't "punish" people for doing things differently but we do correct them and, by implication, ask them to do it differently next time.
(Note that my HN name is the same as my real name, without the space).
On my first (and only) visit to Australia I got stopped at passport control. The security bloke took my passport and looked at it. Then kept looking at it, in silence. His face was straight and sour, but his shoulders were ... twitching. This went on for more than a couple of minutes until, finally, he looked up from the passport, stared into my eyes and asked: "Is that your real name?" Confused, I nodded. He handed me back my passport and waved me through - to his credit, the man never smiled or laughed at me, but I could see it had taken him a lot of effort to maintain his control.
A day later I learned about the Wombat Joke. I grew to hate the Wombat Joke. I'd love to visit Australia again, but I'll probably use a false passport next time.
When I lived with an Australian in London, he'd say you can beat an egg, but you can't beat a root (pronounced like beetroot) – I think it was a type of joke.
Yeah I don’t think UK lingo has conquered anything here in the US. I find most UK lingo rather dorky and quaint. To me it’s like talking to cousins you like from a quaint town that’s woefully behind the times. It’s not their fault though and it’s kind of endearing.
However, Americans who use British lingo are the absolute worst; they remind me of a Will Farrell character except they are not funny.
At some point after the 1950s, en-gb speakers had to resign themselves to the dominance (if not prestige) of en-us; might the same process happen with en-us and en-in?
Dang has been resurfacing threads that got limited engagement, but that either have a second posting that's doing better or that he simply manually resets the timer on. The process by which he does this also resets the time on comments, too, for some reason; I don't really know except that I've noticed it happen to threads I had open or threads I had commented on.
The article didn't mention what is by far my favorite British lingo: "faffing about". It's just so damn useful! I know that there are other phrases which work, but for whatever reason none of them really hit for me like "faffing about" does.
A good example of 'faff' is when you join a queue, get to the teller and they tell you a) you needed to take a number and/or b) you're in the wrong line.
I feel like my role in the comments here is to add a Scottish flavour - what we'd say where I grew up (South Aberdeenshire) rather than "faffing about" is "footering about"
Healthcare providers getting fat paychecks from all the treatment from accidents, or in later age prolonged lung cancer treatment? Funeral services?
Or maybe just bike sellers being happy to sell junky overpriced fashionate ebikes that will drop embedded non-replaceable battery's capacity significantly within few years (or replace them for exorbitant costs).
With the right mind the world is there to screw over, just look at the politicians and other high functioning sociopaths.
While non-rhotic accents are common in parts of America, the dominant theory among linguists is that this was a result of Americans copying a trend in England, not the other way around, as you seem to be asserting:
> By the 1770s, postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation was becoming common around London even in formal educated speech. The English actor and linguist John Walker used the spelling ar to indicate the long vowel of aunt in his 1775 rhyming dictionary.[4] In his influential Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), Walker reported, with a strong tone of disapproval, that "the r in lard, bard,... is pronounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the middle or Italian a, lengthened into baa, baad...."[8] Americans returning to England after the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, reported surprise at the significant changes in the fashionable pronunciation that had taken place.[16]
...
> The loss of postvocalic /r/ in the British prestige standard in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries influenced the American port cities with close connections to Britain, which caused upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic in many Eastern and Southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah.[9] Like regional dialects in England, however, the accents of other areas in the United States remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag", which preserved the original pronunciation of /r/.[9]
For many people of my rough age and hobbies (cars/motorsport), Top Gear and other British motoring shows and podcasts have had a massive impact. We had virtually nothing good in the way of TV shows about cars in the 90s/2000s, which meant that anyone watching World Rally Championship and F1 were downloading clips or torrents of them. That, in turn, led straight into finalgear.com in the mid 2000s, before the BBC finally had the sense to bring Top Gear to BBC America, which led to another huge uptick in popularity.
Likewise. I didn't even know that several phrases I picked up from Top Gear were distinctively British, until my wife pointed one out recently. There are a few figures of speech I never adopted from the show, though. Ex: Is "oh cock" a British-ism, or just a James May-ism? I don't think I've ever heard that anywhere else.
There's also the simple nature of being online at 6 AM. What other English-speaking country is awake at that time of day?
I think it's a May-ism. I was going to say it could be a "posh public schoolboy"-ism, but it turns out he went to comprehensive school ("public high school" for the Yanks out there).
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 536 ms ] threadI'm not sure if this is actually correct usage in those countries, or slang, but it certainly feels much more like slang, and felt virtually impenetrable, even to someone who's been exposed to a fair but of UK-isms in his life.
There's definitely cases where UK English has adopted a new word but American English hasn't. I was surprised to see the word "coupon" used in old UK literature. "Voucher" is the more common word nowadays. People would accuse you of being Americanised if you said coupon.
I also call my discount-loving fellow Brit friend ‘coupon boy’ rather than ‘voucher boy’!
It was always the dump when I was growing up (mid 70s, northwest.)
Stig of the Dump is set in an informal place people dump rubbish, if I remember correctly, which is where people are more likely to use the term (e.g: "what a dump"), but if you are talking about a managed place it is taken to be disposed of properly, tip is by far the more common term I hear used.
I suspect might be one of those regional things like scone/scone[1].
1. It’s pronounced “scone” and I will fight anyone that says otherwise!
That was a very weird morning…
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
For a list see https://thetaleofsirbob.blogspot.com/2013/07/watson-and-othe...
If you mentally insert some commas some of them are really funny.
Makes the "romance" books my grandmother would read sound like they were lifted from the Sherlock stories
"Stop!" he ejaculated
I can't help adding a mental full stop to make 2 sentences. Childish I know :D Makes for some strange additions to the story
Funnily enough, I think 'going forward'/'going forwards' is a transatlantic difference?
It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4
TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.
The video helps it makes sense.
I've got a fairly plain accent, fairly close to Received Pronunciation or BBC/Oxford English, Americans never have a hard time understanding my pronunciation, and even I sound closer to 'aluminyum' or maybe 'aluminiyum' more than a clean 'aluminium', though it still sounds much closer to correctly pronounced British word than to the American version.
I say (or rather, said, as this episode made me very conscious of it) “hmm, curious” almost reflexively when working on something. They aped me. They partied, they spread the meme. Within a week I was suddenly overhearing people in cafes and gas stations going “hmm, curious” and by the time I left town I felt like I was living in a poorly written Monty Python sketch (or perhaps a Lovecraft bit), as an epidemic of “mmm, curious” had taken over the townspeople and the UVA student body. The latter all then went home at the end of the year, towards the end of my stay there, and spread it to every corner of the U.S.
When I went back a year later, they were all still at it.
I guess this ties in with the whole “teenage girls introduce new language” piece a few weeks back.
'I'm heaps keen to chuck that saying into the old tucker bag'...
https://douglasadams.com/dna/980707-08-a.html
"and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island - staff who don't just say "No worries" when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say "No worries at all". They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don't even despise you. Really. No worries at all."
(Bluey. The single greatest contribution to exporting Australian culture.)
As an example of how seriously the British take their language, here's a shortened entry for the phrase "run-up".
I think equivalent for US would be "Wind-up" (at least I think pitchers in Baseball performs a wind-up before releasing the ball)
'Good on you' is the biggest one. 'Good for you', especially in text, to me comes across as bitter or sarcastic because of how often it's used that way, whereas the other doesn't.
'Mate', while I don't use it, is a solid word. We have buddy, pal, guy, etc, but again, they can each have their own negative connotation. Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
It can be negative, definitely, if said with the right intonation.
You will be surprised to find that Champ is the word Aussies will use when unimpressed. For instance, "You alright there Champ?" means " You absolute idiot, what in the hell are you thinking?"
Personally I hate swimming wearing clothes, feels so unnatural, and then you're dripping wet when you get out
A few days later, he recognizes me outside the hotel but I am noticeably slow to recognize back and he mentions "we chatted on the lift". I fake remembering while desperately searching my memory for the event of riding the chairlift with this English guy.
An hour later I remember that in the UK, "lift" == "elevator". Me, being North American and having spent plenty of time in ski towns, always associates "lift" with "chairlift".
(or is there a region in the US where this is common? Everyone I know would say “on vacation,” but the US is very regional.)
Save for one singular design which, it would seem, distinguishes itself with such remarkable uniqueness as to warrant the bestowal of its very own appellation: «budgie smugglers» (AusE).
As a kid I found the Irish usage of “press” for cupboard and “runners” for trainers/sneakers confusing as hell.
when i was a lad, my mother always said "swimming togs"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/togs
Maybe "swim suit"? "Suite" is something else, no?
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
I can see the teacher's perspective here. I don't think it's unreasonable for teachers to mark this down, though I don't think your request to get back the points was unreasonable either.
Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you. Using language constructs that are unnatural for your audience can distract them and disrupt their flow. You don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point. This friction gets in the way of your point, thus ultimately hurting your own cause in addition to wasting their time. So when you keep doing that on your assignments and exams, you're effectively showing that you haven't mastered this skill -- and so it's not unreasonable for your grade to reflect that.
but for the rest of us, the point of language is to convey a shared concept, and if the sender and receiver are doing that then mission accomplished
But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
If I remember correctly BBC Basic accepted COLOUR as well as COLOR keywords to be more approachable to primary school children who were native English speakers.
It was a bad show that they allowed COLOR as well.
As each keyword was saved as a code - did COLOR and COLOUR really map to two different codes?
Unless you are writing International Standards. ISO requires British English spellings in documents.
Anecdotal counterpoint, but… I’m a British English speaker, but many of my colleagues are Continental Europeans, for whom English is their second language. Part of my job involves copy editing and, almost without exception, their output is written in American English.
Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
> don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point
Fair point. At the very least, one should be aware of the different usages.
Not sure what you mean by "distinguish". But just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way.
Sure. I'm just sceptical that errant signal isn't lost in the background of the American dialect's regional heterogeneity.
If I ask someone in San Francisco "what colour pop" they want, the friction won't come from the "u."
OK, at this point I really need to explain what on earth is going on here:
"what does "pants" refer to?" - pants refers to trousers and pants refers to underpants and of course pants refers to pants as a noun. Pants also refers to heavy breathing as a verb.
I have absolutely no idea how we ended up with this situation, where pant(s) is a noun and a verb and really odd. I'm going to blame Britain, US and Italy (via Latin) and not necessarily in that order.
"A dog pants when they are hot but they only pant when they are hot."
Note how I end up slapping an extra s in for no apparent reason - actually, it is when I don't put a verb in front of that word. So: "a dog will pant" ... "a dog pants". The extra s on the word seems to make it a verballish thing.
On the bright side this is why phishing emails always look a bit wank.
Because (in English) adding -s(/-es) makes plurals of (most regular) nouns, and also makes 3rd person singular declension of (most regular) verbs.
Other examples of noun+verb collocations: books, shows, scents, raises, views, votes, comments, dates, dogs, aims, bugs, ends, grades, hunts, launches, lifts, marks, moves, posts, rains, rates, records, rows, sets, signals, tracks... Examples with -es: searches, watches, punches
(This is going to be much more common in English than Italian/Spanish/Latin because English uses -s/-es for both nouns and verbs.)
https://g.co/kgs/UzZtYRr
I find myself using it nowadays rather sparingly and mostly in just one phrase (and its semantic derivatives): «all that twaddle […]».
https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/clothing/
And this is just spelling, not even going into words that have different meanings in the US vs UK like pants and lemonade.
The name is “Ebonics.” It’s had its own name since the seventies, although the push to “normalize” it peaked in the nineties.
> Wonder if this includes normalizing the usage of British spelling as well.
No.
The term reached peak use around the time (I'm going from memory here as far as timeline) some educators began exploring the concept of teaching kids who spoke Ebonics at home with some of the same techniques they would use to teach English as a second language students. America reacted with the focus, intelligence, and empathy it always does when issues of education and race are brought up.
(American here, but that's one I've come across before.)
Also, if gaol can have a soft g, then so can gif? :-)
But there are probably still some words that will make me think the person is not American, like organisation with an s. I read it and it viscerally feels off.
Due to the large number of U.S. internet residents, I don't tend to really notice many "Americanisms", though one thing that bugs me is when the U.S. doesn't seem to recognise that "America" is a a large continent and only one area is the U.S. However, even Canadians will refuse to admit that they are American, as in living within the american continent.
Perhaps the solution is to just unite all of the states of America, because I at least think the original idea was that the USA was a supranational government uniting little nation-states (precursor to the EU?), but maybe these more established nation-states won't want to join the union and become a "state" (even though I think political science would already refer to them as states).
At least you use the "ize" suffix, so all else should have been forgiven!
I prefer the "u" in colour/behaviour as I find it more aesthetically pleasing. But I absolutely despise the "ise" spelling of realize (realise) and am not entirely sure why. Though, I vaguely remember spelling all words with "ise" and getting some wrong some right and not understanding why (I'd learn later I'm dyslexic so I chalked it up to that and called it a day)
Grey is UK English, so think "e" for England. Gray is American English, so think "a" for America.
Become a web/CSS developer and it won't matter anymore.
In particular, the British added the "u" when French was in fashion, and likewise for "-ise" (in fact, "-ize" dates all the way back to Ancient Greek!)
One thing that Americans do get wrong is misspelling "-lyse" which comes from a different Greek root, so should not follow the same pattern as "-ize". But even then, Webster didn't invent the error.
Ultimately I think changes like this should be more grassroots than top down whims of private dictionary publishers. Not to mention that all this focus on the phonetics fundamentally misunderstands that the phonetics of English spelling are closer to a mnemonic than a rule. I suspect this will become gradually more obvious as languages world wide evolve to be more keyboard friendly in the coming century.
But this all just my take on the situation.
So even before the internet was widely used people in the UK we’re aware of the problem.
1. See how I slipped that one in there?
Same here as a Swedish person who grew up with American media + eventually getting into Internet communities. English exams felt great when I took them, I knew all the answers after all.
But then getting the results back was always disappointing, as Swedish schools teach "British English", not "American English", so you better use the British spelling and pronunciation, otherwise it's completely wrong obviously and you deserve punishment.
On my first (and only) visit to Australia I got stopped at passport control. The security bloke took my passport and looked at it. Then kept looking at it, in silence. His face was straight and sour, but his shoulders were ... twitching. This went on for more than a couple of minutes until, finally, he looked up from the passport, stared into my eyes and asked: "Is that your real name?" Confused, I nodded. He handed me back my passport and waved me through - to his credit, the man never smiled or laughed at me, but I could see it had taken him a lot of effort to maintain his control.
A day later I learned about the Wombat Joke. I grew to hate the Wombat Joke. I'd love to visit Australia again, but I'll probably use a false passport next time.
I'm embarrassed to admit I'm not aware of the Wombat Joke. I'm assuming you were warned about the danger of Drop Bears though :-)
The search engines tell me that there are lots of wombat jokes, but don't seem to know any that stand out enough to deserve a "the" in front.
... Yeah. I don't get Aussie humour either.
However, Americans who use British lingo are the absolute worst; they remind me of a Will Farrell character except they are not funny.
(and then there's en-gb vs en-eu...)
In fact algolia search shows this was first posted 3 days ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Probably. When that happens the comments don't get moved, their timestamps get adjusted to match the repost timestamp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683174
https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
Invited: Overlooked links, invited to repost
Anyway, I’m on the drag getting to the shops. I need to fix a picture thas on the huh. ;)
[0] https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/scheme.php
Or maybe just bike sellers being happy to sell junky overpriced fashionate ebikes that will drop embedded non-replaceable battery's capacity significantly within few years (or replace them for exorbitant costs).
With the right mind the world is there to screw over, just look at the politicians and other high functioning sociopaths.
It's interesting the way that words sometimes seem to have nuance that doesn't seem to be strictly within the definition.
For no reason I can remotely explain, I'd divide these into clever/bright and smart/gifted.
I've met several autists that I would readily describe as smart or even gifted, but I wouldn't describe as clever or bright.
(Although the distinction might just be that I'm an arsehole.)
(I often consider it shorthand for "I'm not an American".)
> By the 1770s, postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation was becoming common around London even in formal educated speech. The English actor and linguist John Walker used the spelling ar to indicate the long vowel of aunt in his 1775 rhyming dictionary.[4] In his influential Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), Walker reported, with a strong tone of disapproval, that "the r in lard, bard,... is pronounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the middle or Italian a, lengthened into baa, baad...."[8] Americans returning to England after the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, reported surprise at the significant changes in the fashionable pronunciation that had taken place.[16]
...
> The loss of postvocalic /r/ in the British prestige standard in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries influenced the American port cities with close connections to Britain, which caused upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic in many Eastern and Southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah.[9] Like regional dialects in England, however, the accents of other areas in the United States remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag", which preserved the original pronunciation of /r/.[9]
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#History
UK slang, like their humor, is just objectively better.
There's also the simple nature of being online at 6 AM. What other English-speaking country is awake at that time of day?