British English and American English

 

(come on, work it out. You're a smart bunch. Two points for first correct answer)

This is particularly one for my ex lexicography friends (several of whom are still actual rather than ex-lexicographers). And it is all about what we close friends across the Atlantic think of the way that we each use and choose and pronounce our lovely language.

There are two general terms that are used about how you write a dictionary, or rather about the purpose of your dictionary: 'Prescriptivist' and 'Descriptivist'. The first one tells people what they should do. The second one tries to describe what people actually do. I fall firmly into the second camp (simply because I find it more interesting) although I know that for many dictionary users, the prime function of that book is to get things 'right' rather than get them 'wrong'. So if you are going there for the spelling of a word, you could equally say that the dictionary is telling you what people do do, but also what you should do.

Anyhoo, I wanted to probe a little about the differences between the two dialects or standards, and what users of each dialect think of the other. My impression is that AmE speakers find BritE quite cute and quaint, and are not offended by it in any way, but that a lot of BritE speakers have strong feelings that AmE is a bit wrong. I'd say the reasons for this are quite obvious: AmE has had much more influence on BritE in the last 50 years than the other way around. Film and media, and especially the Internet has left inescapable changes in what British people say. I have noticed this particularly while teaching young children. When I was a child you fell over and landed on your 'bum'. It is now a lot more likely to hear British children say 'butt'. They may even say 'Happy Holidays' at Christmas (small cringe here).

And it is not just children. When I was young, the large vehicle that carried goods was invariably called a lorry. Now it is far more likely to be called a truck, both by adults and children. And 'trucker' even, rather than 'lorry driver', which latter phrase now sounds quite quaint. So there are many borrowings and migrant words coming across the pond from West to East. I don't think it is fair to say any technology words are actually AmE. They are just new to us all, even if many of the things they describe have their origin in Silicon Valley. So non-modern imports are the ones that stand out most. 

I also think a lot about how good or poor a grasp we BrE speakers have of AmE, even if we think we know what the main differences are. I think most BrE speakers will have heard 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement', 'elevator' instead of 'lift', and 'apartment' instead of 'flat', but the new words haven't displaced the old in BrE, we are just aware from media that this is how they are rendered in AmE. Same with 'hood' for 'bonnet' and 'trunk' for 'boot'. Or am I, as a previous lexical techie, simply making the techie's overestimation of the knowledge of non-specialists. I think maybe every British person knows the ones above. Would you agree?

But just because we know the ones that we know doesn't mean that we know all the other ones that we don't know. There are all kinds of everyday words such as 'faucet' for 'tap' and 'furnace' for '(central heating) boiler' that only become clear if you go and spend time in the US. In fact the 'furnace' one is actually a bit tech-based, because whereas nearly all UK central heating systems are water-circulated, a lot of US ones are now forced air, so you couldn't call it a boiler anyway. 

This overlap of not just different vocabulary but also different things being described does remind me of a hugely informative training session we had about thirty years ago when I worked on a large international ELT dictionary. To explain, these dictionaries were aimed at high-school and university level learners of English around the world, and as you did not know which dialect of English was being taught, you always had to explain the BrE/AmE variants. It isn't just names of objects that varies across the dialects either. The differences between pissed, mad and homely across the two languages are also worth investigating. And don't get me started on fanny pack. 

Our training session was put together by our four in-house American lexicographers (one of whom I know dips in here occasionally. Hiya!). They presented a kind of 'cultural biography' of US society to try to show how not just the words but the way that people used them could be subtly (or unsubtly) different. We learned about homecoming queens, and proms (which were not a thing in the UK then!), and the importance of the coach, and ideas about freedom of speech, and loads of other things that helped us not make stupid mistakes in what we wrote. The example that stands out is that someone had given an example mentioning someone 'robbing a post-office' and they pointed out that in the US all you could steal would be stamps, as they don't have the quasi-bank function that UK post offices do. 

Quite apart from the lexical differences in AmE, there are lovely and distinctive structures and preferences that mark it apart from BrE (and vice versa I suppose, but only AmE speakers could say). There are many preferred structures that seem to come from German or Yiddish, such as saying 'If I would've known' rather than BrE 'If I'd known'. I also like the 'statement questions' such as 'You want me to come down there and tell you!' And you still do hear (as I can attest from sitting in a farmer's cafe in Virginia last year) phrases such as ' I'm fixin to mow the upper one come Friday...'

One last thing I should point out, for any would-be British language guardians, is that despite the US being the New World, they have often held onto forms that the Old World has discarded or replaced. So 'pitcher' is, I believe older than our more normal BrE 'jug', and even the word 'gotten' is an older form than our 'got'.

I stand to be corrected, which is the lot of the semantic engineer or harmless drudge, but I would of course love to hear other people's take on all the fragments I have shored above!