I agree completely. Sometimes the adoptions are of words with connotations no single American word has.

There are some Englishisms that I wish hadn't crossed the pond, like "row" for "argument". Our local NPR station uses it, and I find it annoying.

Also, I wonder if "waiting on" (as in "waiting on line", rather than "waiting in line") is from British English - or has been in America for some time. When I was growing up, the only thing that was waited on was tables...

Thanks for the venue - I've needed to get this off my chest for some time.

Yay! I'm not pretentious! Patrick says so.

(Side query: Should we still standardise our spelling and whatnot when we submit manuscripts to publishers? I have received the advice that I should standardise my spellings to American English, and cut out the colloquialisms. No "faery", no "grey", none of that. Please advise.)

As an expat who grew up in a crown commonwealth, I have a "get of of being accused of being pretentious free" card. Britishisms *are* something I can claim as part of my heritage.

But yeah. Anyone claiming an American using "whinge" is pretentious needs to get over themselves.

"Grey" is a colloquialism?

Until I read yesterday's posting, I always thought "whinge" was FANNISH not BRITISH. I didn't think I was being pretentious...it's not like I say "colour" or anything like that...

#2: "Faery" isn't the British spelling of "fairy." "Faery" and "fairy" are both legitimate spellings, save than in the last few decades, the former has tended to be used as an adjective denoting things that have a fairy-ish quality. (And of course "Faerie" is a place.)

In response to #1, "waiting on line" (as opposed to "in line") has long been a feature of English in the New York metropolitan area. I didn't know that most of the rest of the country waited IN line until I started grad school in Texas and my classmates (in a Linguistics program, no less) commented on my usage. They, of course, had read that people in New York waited ON line, but didn't believe it until they actually heard someone use the collocation.

I've only ever heard "waiting on line" from Americans; I don't think it's a Britishism at all.

And I've picked up all sorts of Americanisms from fandom and US friends; it's only fair that you lot should pick up our slang too! *g*

Smashed @ #1

As a Brit with a few decades of residence in the UK, I can say that I've never heard "waiting on line" used in the UK. In fact, your posting was my first exposure to the phrase...

In fact, waiting 'on line' instead of 'in line' is so ingrained in New York usage that I once saw a sign advertising 'on line skates'.

Thanks for the clarification. My boss is originally from NY, which is probably why I've been noticing it lately. Glad to know that I don't have to blame the Brits.

#s 1, 7 - 10:

I think the Britishism might be "waiting in queue"?

Wait. "Row", as to (v) engage in petty conflict, or (n) a petty conflict, is a Briticism? I've heard it all my life, from the lips of some old and not-at-all-British people.

I think that's pretty much a generalized, standard, usage.

Patrick,

If you really want to insist that this makes those people “pretentious,” you’re a pinhead.

Didn't you mean 'you're a wanker'?

No, I believe that the British simply queue. New Yorkers wait on line. Everyone one else in the US waits in line.

At least in my experience. Canadians also queue.

As a part-time Caledonian, I find myself using crossover phrases all the time without realizing it.
Not putting it on, just bleed-through, I suppose.

And I have yet to find an American equivalent of gobsmacked.

Jane

FWIW, Brits would usually say 'queueing'.

Or should that be 'queuing'? Either looks very weird to me today.

(16): And I have yet to find an American equivalent of gobsmacked.

Flabbergasted? Dumbfounded?

#16 Jane: Gobsmacked isn't American? I've heard it all my life. "Shut yer gob" and "gobstoppers" always seemed really American, too. (As is "shut yer piehole" which is quite fun.)

National identity tied to spelling and grammar? Ick.

A strong tendency among grammarians is to value the rule of grammar over the spirit of language. I tend to favor the spirit of the laws of grammar. namely, I prefer to focus on clarity, not correctness. In a perfect world the two are one and the same. but in this world, often we must choose to favor clarity or the structures of grammar in tiny ways that irk me now and then.

I'm still up in arms about the insistence that "alright" isn't a word just because strunk and white didn't like the slang spelling of something that wasn't quite a word yet in 1911.

in common usage - dialog especially - "alright" ought to be an acceptable word.

I am sick and tired of seeing the jarringly incorrect meaning of "all right" used everywhere in dialog instead of the correct word that people are actually saying: "alright".

in 1911, "alright" was a misspelling of "all right" meaning "all correct". In 2007 the word "alright" means something similar to "okay". "Alright" often sounds smoother without the harsh "k" sound in softer dialog. But, because of the prejudices of the professors of 1911, writers are often still disallowed using this young word.

If this brief mini-rant is any indication, I'm all for allowing the continents to bleed all of our languages together into one gorgeous, delirious cousin of Esperanto. I'd call it Esperanza, except that at the wonderful juncture of tongues, I don't think anyone will need a name for the way people speak anymore. They certainly wouldn't need a language name imposed externally by the likes of me.

::sharpens head::

hmm.

maybe i should qualify this.

i have a problem with affected language use of all sorts -- i.e., someone who consciously lards his or her speech with mannerisms in an attempt to be something he or she is not.

how's that? can i blunt my head again?

jane @ 14

And I have yet to find an American equivalent of gobsmacked.

AFAIK there isn't one, which is why I've taken it up. It expresses something that in American requires a circumlocution like "so astonished as to strike one's forehead and drop one's jaw" to express it.

Oh, and re-reading, it sounds like i'm needlessly attacking the original post. That would be silly, since I'm actually agreeing with it, heartily.

So, if I could edit posts, I'd put this line at the beginning:

"I agree with the author of this post about how foolish it is to fight the bleeding of languages across continents."

Then, commence with "National Identity tied to..."

Sorry, folks. With practice, I may improve.

I actually got in a linguistic tussle with a UK English-speaking friend yesterday; apparently, according to her and a recipe on the BBC website, the Southwestern US dish of meat, optional beans, and spicy peppers is "chilli," not "chili." I am a US English-speaker and have never seen the double-L spelling in my life until now.

Sharon 17/18, I believe it's queueing. But I could be wrong.

Mary Aileen @ 19

I think of 'gobsmacked' as a combination of 'flabbergasted' and 'dumfounded' with a twist of 'awestruck by the implications'. I get the sense that it's not simple astonishment about a single event or proposition, but also amazement at what that implies about related events, or the worldview of the proposer.

For instance, it's not just the crazyness of the things that the current US administration does that gobsmack me, but what those things say about the things they believe about the way the world works.

Is the golden age of proper English the same as the golden age of science fiction--fourteen?

If someone is speaking today, using language that is used today should not come as a surprise. I only quibble with dialogue in historical fiction, and even there, if the point is to translate the time for the reader, I suppose an atrocity like "impact" used as a verb should be accepted.

Yes, I'm a traditionalist, though I fight it. If a new choice is clearer and shorter, either in spelling or pronunciation, I'll embrace it. That's practical. Pretentious people prefer the longer choice.

And the longer choice isn't the whole test of pretention. Sometimes we're just the people who are typing too quickly.

I'm pretty certain that "stuff it" doesn't mean remotely the same thing as "get stuffed", but what do I know?

Personally, I'd be more likely to say "soddit" than the former anyway.

I'm not sure if it's an Englishism, but, although I've never come across "waiting on line" before this thread, I've certainly used "I'm waiting on a phone call/Joe Bloggs" to mean I'm waiting for the event/person. If I'm waiting until the pubs open, then I'm waiting while they open. But I'm from Yorkshire and we're contrary buggers in that county.

i have been hauled into the headsharpener privately.

so i guess i will rephrase again:

my own personal past experience has gifted me with a truckload of pompous, affected, and/or condescending people who were and are prone to all sorts of linguistic adoption and abuse.

so this is a hot button for me. please still like me!

I think of the Atlantic as having four shores, not the two we normally think of when we look at the different Englishes. There's the American shore, fer shore, the Canadian shore,eh, the British shore, surely, and the Caribbean shore, where old pirates, yes, they rob I. In all these places there are different standard Englishes operating by subtly (or not so subtly) different rules of orthography, grammar and usage. And all of them interact (in ways that might leave trustafarian wankers well and truly gobsmacked).

I am amazed by the posters who are saying that "waiting on line" is a "New York-ism" rather than a Britishism. I use it all the time along with a long list of other (what I've always assumed were) Britishisms (grey, whinge, etc.). I've always assumed that I picked these all up from the same sources: Adams, Pratchett, Monty Python, BtVS, that many of the other Americans on this list are quoting.

I do enjoy the occasional Woody Allen movie -- can we blame him for this particular New York-ism spreading from its homeland?

BTW: Rewatching the series premier of Buffy as I type. Willow: "Do you have Mr. Chomsky for history?" The geek-culture references come a mile a minute if you are paying attention, don't they?

Sharyn! I like you fine!

Really, I'm a pinhead several times a day. I mean, come on, perspective.

sdn, 29: I will forgive you nearly anything just because of the "Firebirds" anthologies. Where were they when I was a teenager?* And from my point of view, your comment at 22 made perfect sense.

*and when is the next one coming out?

..."blame" for certain non-judgemental values of the term.

I think that Malcolm Reynolds uses "whinge" several times in Firefly.

For 'gobsmacked' I think of 'whop yo' jaw'. I think regard that as Hawaiian Creole but Deep South friends found it recognizable as being part of the 'slap ya mama' family, although 'wyj' and 'sym' tend to refer to food being especially tasty and I don't know that one could be gobsmacked by a dead good pudding, even a Nigella Lawson receipt.

My brother has spent a fair amount of time surfing in places like Australia, Tahiti, Indonesia, France, and So. Cal, and we grew up in Hawai'i (Linkmeister, 96792 - and sometimes *I* can't understand what he's saying). His language use can get really interesting depending on who he is speaking to. I wonder if any linguists have done work on the global subcultural lexicon of surfing...

>And I have yet to find an American equivalent of gobsmacked.

AFAIK there isn't one, which is why I've taken it up.

Molly used to say whomperjawed. I'm more likely to use gobsmacked if I use anything, but whomperjawed is a great word.

pnh: Sharyn! I like you fine!

Really, I'm a pinhead several times a day. I mean, come on, perspective.

I LIKE YOU
YOU ARE NICE

texanne: thank you! summer 2008. in the meantime you can buy the special novellas commissioned for the fifth anniversary. there will be three. the first one is out right now. it is by diana wynne jones, who can use all of the britishisms she wants as far as i am concerned.

::cracks up laughing::

sharon #18: The reason both look wrong is that they are; the correct spelling is "queueueueueueueing."

jmmcdermott @21: I confess to being one of those comp. teachers who marks "alright" as a spelling error--once upon a time, I'd have been quite willing to accept it in informal writing or dialogue, moving towards accepting it formally one day, but over the years it has become one of those embarrassing ticks that I just can't tolerate. One of my personal fingernails-on-the-blackboard grammatical error-constructions (we all have them; we all need to relax and not obsess so much over them; but they still drive us all nuts . . . and we've all got different ones, on top of that). How did this happen to me, personally? I think it came about because of the lack of distinction my students were making between "all right" and "alright" . . . and because of the existence of the "allright" spelling. In a world where language development were logical, "all right" and "alright" ought to have clearly distinct meanings already, much like, well, "all ready" and "already," and I wouldn't need to worry about "allright."

I do think that "alright" is getting here, though, and even such ancient pedants as I am will accept it One Of These Days. Then I can go back to screaming hysterically about "its," "it's," and (heaven help me) "its' " . . .

I thought about it a little more, and now think that one could be gobsmacked by a food, not because it tasted good, but because there was something else astonishing and surprising about it. Therefore, 'whop yo' jaw' and 'slap ya mama', while committing a similar act of violence upon a mandible, are not in the same spirit of 'gobsmacked'. Ah, English.

Ethan @ 38 the correct number of eu's depends on the length of the line, of course. Unless the line is about four feet long and made of maple. Then it is spelled a different way altogether.

And here I thought "gobsmacked" was geek...

will shetterly @ 27

"If a new choice is clearer and shorter, either in spelling or pronunciation, I'll embrace it. That's practical. Pretentious people prefer the longer choice."

Or prefer/use the longer choice because it's what they grew up with and it's the standard/correct spelling/pronunciation where they come from.

obSF:

English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results. - H. Beam Piper

While I know people who contest that there are distinct meanings between alright and all right, it is a distinction which doesn't exist in any of the dialects I speak, and one which confuses me when people try to explain the distinction. Which indicates to me that it is a dialectical marker on a structural and not vocabulary level.

I accrete vocabulary: whinge and gobsmacked are recent, tsuris dates back to the seventies and The Joys of Yiddish when dicovering its existance freed me of many circomlocutory or obscene descriptors (the closest my native dialect got was "rain of shit"). Words which fail to stick, like "unie" instead of college or school, I perceive as affected or, like sdn, pretentious but what I mean by that, I think, is that there is not a gap between vocabulary and experience where the word fills a need.

Sharon @#10: here you go.

I may not fully understand "gobsmacked", but it seems to me quite equivalent to "croggled" (to the extent that any two words are ever equivalent).

My father's side of the family is English, he was born in England, so I've had more exposure than most Americans to that influence, and no doubt there are strange bits floating around my speech. But my usage of "grey" is a personal affectation, not based on any knowledge of regional usages; it's just that I prefer colder-toned versions of light black, and the "e" spelling somehow conveys that to me.

#43 dcb

will shetterly @ 27

"If a new choice is clearer and shorter, either in spelling or pronunciation, I'll embrace it. That's practical. Pretentious people prefer the longer choice."

Or prefer/use the longer choice because it's what they grew up with and it's the standard/correct spelling/pronunciation where they come from.

Or because the form, intent, or mood of the writing makes the shades of difference (inevitable among synonyms) important. Or because the writer is making a conscious choice to demote simple clarity in her objectives for that writing. Or because the notion that a specific shorter word is clearer than a longer synonym is one with which the writer does not agree.

Blockquote tags failed to operate as anticipated. Apologies.

Mr. Shetterly, no. 27:

...I suppose an atrocity like "impact" used as a verb should be accepted.

Never! That use of "impact" is something I'll go to the dam' ramparts over. —Some things must be ruthlessly stomped out, or else in the future we'll still be ramparting over them.

Also, in general: "gray" is a distinctly different color than "grey." (Though I'm not sure which is the color of all cats after midnight.)

Isn't "flabbergasted" a reasonable equivalent to "gobsmacked?"

(And I would suspect that "gobsmacked" is a bowdlerization -- not sure that's the right term in this context, but close enough for commentwork -- of "God smacked", i.e, given a headringing, eye-crossing smack in the head by God. Same mechanism that turned "God's hooks!" -- semi-revelant aside; read the Waldrop story by the same title* -- into "Gadzooks!")

Last minute add: I checked to see if the Waldrop story was anywhere online, and found I could still link to the SCI FICTION archive, despite the recent announcement that it was supposed to go bye-bye several days ago. "God's Hooks" was one of the "Classic" stories Ellen Datlow reprinted there. Find the story here.

The dam ramparts will eventually be breached, especially when impacted by hurricanes.

sdn #22

The most affected person I have ever met was a wedding photographer who interrupted himself in mid-spiel to test several pronunciations of the word "judge", settled on the most pretentious* and out-of-area, and proceeded with his pitch.

We took our business elsewhere.

*He settled on pronouncing the u as in "good". Pompous git.

David Dryer Bennet @ 47: I too prefer "grey" as well as any number of non-American spellings, but that dates back to fifth grade and Mrs. MacGreggor, who wore tartan suits, spoke with a tiny remnant of Perth (the northern hemisphere one) in her voice and was a great, gifted, giving teacher but with no patience for American spelling.

Kip, 50: That would be "gris."

TexAnne #55: Wouldn't that mean that two cats at midnight would possess some magical fetish or gris-gris?

mk @ #35, "whop yo' jaw" doesn't ring true as Hawai'ian Creole (which out here is called pidgin) to me, but I didn't grow up here. I've heard "whopperjawed" off and on since I was in junior high in Virginia. I think it has to do with big fish, myself.

Working in a vet's office, as I have for the past two months, I've noticed that, on new patient forms, people with gray cats will inevitably write "grey" for the color of their pet. It's made me wonder whether "gray" might be on its way out, or if it's a particularly cat-related thing (you don't get too many gray dogs, so there's less of a sample to compare to), or what. Anyway, I find it interesting. Alright?

"Voodoo Cats at Midnight" sounds like the title of a *b-grade horror flick from the 50s.

(*if that good)

...either that or the plot of a Buffy episode.

"Impact" as verb annoys the fire out of me, but the other one that appeared at roughly the same time (Gulf War 1, I think) was that awful contraction of "attrition" into the verb "attrit." I heard that by a few generals doing briefings on CNN and wanted to throw things at the screen.

DoonboggleFrog #59: To me it sounds more like a low-rent jazz group.

The one that makes me nuts (probably because I hear it from personnel people who I prefer not to antagonize by protesting their grammar) is referring to what you do at an orientation as "orientating"

Fragano Ledgister @ 30

*applause*

A point your post brings out that we haven't talked about is rhythm and tone. It's obviously different between British English and Caribbean English, but there are subtler distinctions between Canadian and standard US: Canadians tend to uptalk in a manner similar to (but thankfully less intense than) ValleySpeak. It's most obvious on the terminal "eh?" but present in other cases too.

My brother's cat, Malcolm, is definitely grey.

Grey(ish) dogs are usually called "blue", as in: blue heelors/Australian Cattle Dogs/Queensland Heelers.

Perhaps the gris-cats are using voodoo to attrit the low-rent jazz bands?

What do cats have against jazz?

Writers who do not know the difference between anxious and eager drive me up the proverbial.

Back in the '90s my husband and I agonized over
"operationalize."

And I am on the side of grey in the grey vs gray scale. It's just a different color (or perhaps colour). The Scottish stone houses are definitely grey. So is Goshen stone--from Western Mass.

Jane

Linkmeister #61:

They were impact verb-ing in the very early 80s, to my certain knowledge. You couldn't have a software project meeting without someone who'd use it.

(Not to mention that long-time dental favorite, the impacted wisdom tooth.)

Jane #69: Is the Proverbial a tributary of the Avon? Because that would explain a lot about a certain Stratfordian.

JESR @ 45

""unie" instead of college or school"

Ah, another British/American thing. On this side of the pond, I went to "school" when you went to "high school". After that I went to University (not "college" or "school") to get my degree. "Uni" (pronounced "yew-nie") is a sensible contaction over here, because neither "school" nor "college*" means the same as "university".

It's one of the few Americanisms I always find sounds wrong to me, saying "school" for "university". The other one is "math" rather than "maths". Dunno why.

*Although some colleges are what you go to after you are through with what you would call high school.
- And others are "Sixth Form Colleges" which are for the equivalent of the last two years of high school.
- And some universities, like my own Alma Mater, Cambridge, are Collegiate universities containing a number of colleges. But if you've been to Cambridge (UK, original) you say you went to Uni, not to college...

There's some quite difficult-to-express difference between cheerfully using a Britishism as part of the ancient, unavoidable, and in fact desirable exchange of dialects, and someone who uses them constantly in an apparent attempt to seem clever. That the former happens and is lovely and wonderful and just like kittens and apple pie doesn't stop the latter from also being an accurate description of certain people who, lacking compensating wit or charms, are quite irritating.

I can't quite tell how being a British person in the US affects this, lacking a basis for comparison. I suspect my own cringe reaction is enhanced by my learned aversion to using certain hot-button Britishisms. I don't say "wanker", or "whinge", or "mum", or "arse", because any time I do use one of them I risk a five-minute diversion onto the subject of how interesting it is how British people talk, how your interlocutor once went to London, where are good places to stay in London (I have no idea because I'm not from London), isn't fish and chips lovely (no), what exactly some completely other British word means (I usually have no idea), how much funnier and wittier British television is than American television (it isn't), and on and on. Which is a fascinating & charming conversation for about the first five hundred times you have it.

The other problem is that, just like the US, there are dozens of regional or class-based differences in usage, and when someone who uses a lot of Britishisms throws together words from different regions or social strata the effect is something like a British person attempting an American accent by combining odds and ends from the deep South, New York, and California, that is to say, horrific. In fact when I look at a list of Britishisms I'd probably only use about 1/3 of them myself.

There are some irreplaceable words from both sides. I wouldn't use it myself, but gobsmacked is one; I also like "jobsworth" for which I haven't found an American alternative. And of course from here, the invaluable "dude" which reduces all of English vocabulary to one word (really, answering "dude" to every question should get you a passing grade on an English-language immigration test in California), and "y'all" which I can usually only bring myself to say as "you all", but still very useful.

I still recall proofreading my dissertation book (the subject is an international field, with a long temporal tail) and finding that my bibliography was full of traditional British punctuation.

E.g. 'single quotation marks' instead of "double quotes" and 'final periods after quotation mark'.

I had transcribed the titles of British articles verbatim, and the New York publisher preferred American punctuation. However, I'd also picked up British punctuation habits randomly in the text. Clearing it out was much harder than spell-checking for "colour" vs. "color." The publishers had required author-date notation in the notes, which weren't affected.

Never heard "whop yo jaw," but I did know "broke da mouth" (mouth rhyming with "out"), which seems to be of similar spirit. (Big Island, 1990s)

I love the grey/gray distinction. About 80% of people I have asked agree that they are different colors, with most people agreeing with my perception (selection bias?) that gray is more mechanical (computers, dystopian futures) and grey more organic (mice, cloth). This is rarely reversed. About 1/3 feel it is a difference of color temperature, mostly with gray being warmer.

mk @ 35:

I think you're confusing "Whop yo' jaw" with "Brok' da mout'" which is the pidgin for "unbelievably good food". "Whop yo' jaw" doesn't seem local to me. "Whop yo' face" maybe, but I'm not sure on that.

I find that such cross cultural exchanges give people new words to explain complex ideas that we used to use a sentence for. Schadenfreude, besides being a fun word to sound out in your head has a very nuanced meaning that "guilty pleasure" just doesn't cover.

Same with hedge, verge or your more precise British garden nouns. "He dived over the hedge and rolled about the verge trying to rid himself of the marauding bees," is a lot more interesting than just "He jumped on the lawn and rolled in the grass to escape the bees."

Also, I prefer mobile phone rather than cell phone. A cell phone sounds like something a monk would have used in the fifteenth century to relieve himself of sinful urges.

See item 93 on this list. (The rest is fun, too)

http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html

Keith @ #75, "A cell phone sounds like something a monk would have used in the fifteenth century to relieve himself of sinful urges."

Like calling out for pizza?

Clifton and tom, yeah, I'd forgotten "broke da mout."

Nathan #76: those maps would be a lot more useful if they were somehow weighted by population density. Many of them less seem to show the distribution of a dialect than the distribution of the US population.

I consider myself to be pretty good about separating American and British English (I live in the UK now, 5.5 years and counting, and I usually remember to call my mom on her cell but phone my boyfriend on his mobile), but I was amazed when I spell-checked thesis chapters and found just how many American spellings crept in when I wasn't consciously thinking about them. I don't know what the the uni's [nods to dcb @70] official position was, but I figured that as I was getting a degree at a British university, I ought to be spelling it in British. (And I made sure to use 'outwith' at least once - a brilliant Scottish word that I can't believe hasn't been taken up elsewhere, as it fits a small language gap so nicely.)

DoonboggleFrog,

That's exactly what it is...distribution of dialects in America.

It's results of a study that Burt Vaux did when he was teaching at Harvard. I just thought some of the info was fairly cool.

My use of British slang and idioms is directly proportional to the amount of British television I watch.

I understand that it is the distribution of dialects. But (at least on the 10 or so I randomly looked at) all it really shows is the relative common-ness of each option across the continent. The extreme variations in population density are washing out the useful info in the study.

For the majority of examples, no matter what answer is picked, the highest concentration is the Northeast corridor.

Obviously we all know that there are genuine regional dialects in this country, so I assume that the maps would show them better if they were weighted to compensate for the difference between New York and Mississippi in population density.

This could be done with a regression analysis, but I am not enough of a statistician to know how one would go about mapping the data that came out of the regression. (Only 1 graduate-level course in stats, and that one was for non-math majors)

Keith @75:

It's normally 'cellphone' round these parts though 'mobile' is also common. On business cards, it's normally, 'Mob: xxx-xxx-xxxx'. Was caught out in Malaysia where the normal term is 'handphone', which on business cards is 'HP: xxx-xxx-xxxx', thus leading it all neatly back to J.K. Rowling.

#30, Fragano Ledgister: In all these places there are different standard Englishes operating by subtly (or not so subtly) different rules of orthography, grammar and usage. And all of them interact (in ways that might leave trustafarian wankers well and truly gobsmacked).

Yup. It's been said that American and Brits are separated by a common language, but we all are.

#43, dcb: "If a new choice is clearer and shorter, either in spelling or pronunciation, I'll embrace it. That's practical. Pretentious people prefer the longer choice."

Or prefer/use the longer choice because it's what they grew up with and it's the standard/correct spelling/pronunciation where they come from.

Agreed! There's nothing pretentious in a Brit's use of "colour."

#48, Chris Clarke: Or because the form, intent, or mood of the writing makes the shades of difference (inevitable among synonyms) important. Or because the writer is making a conscious choice to demote simple clarity in her objectives for that writing. Or because the notion that a specific shorter word is clearer than a longer synonym is one with which the writer does not agree.

Apologies for not making it explicit: when longer is clearer, longer is better. But when longer wins because it's longer, the speaker's a git.

#50, Kip Manley: Never! That use of "impact" is something I'll go to the dam' ramparts over. —Some things must be ruthlessly stomped out, or else in the future we'll still be ramparting over them.

I do hate that one: it's neither shorter nor clearer. But it does save the writer from having to remember the difference between "affect" and "effect."

Also, in general: "gray" is a distinctly different color than "grey." (Though I'm not sure which is the color of all cats after midnight.)

I'm always surprised by people who think that. "Grey" is simply the older spelling. Have you ever heard someone describe something as "gray and grey"?

I think that, in this community of persnickety language users especially, that we'll go searching for ways to differentiate words that most folks would use as exact synonyms. We don't need more words that mean the same thing after all, we need more ways to express small shades of meaning. So we get to differentiate whinge from whine and be quite happy about it.
I'm curious if the folks above who differentiate gray from grey as being different shades agree on how they are different -- it was hard for me to tell from where I sit since some folks were in essence pointing to objects that I can't see from here.

sara @ #72

For some reason this reminds me of when my mother proofread my Phd thesis for me:

The title of one paper included "the red kangaroo, Megalia rufa". The title of the next paper talked about "red kangaroo, Macropus rufus". She wanted to know WHICH? I had to explain that both were correct - the genus name changed and the ending of the specific name was changed to fit...

And yes, you have to be careful when spellchecking because you don't want to change the spellings of the paper titles or the quotes...!

Never mind all this. I want people to stop saying things like, "He requested me to bring it."

And I want the British to learn that not all pants are underpants.

tom @ 73

grey vs gray: It feels to me like they're different, and 'gray' is warmer, even when they're the same color.

Keith @ 75

Well, you could go over (or through) the fence into the bar ditch. In some places, anyway. (It's West Texas usage, I know.)

Historically, American English has absorbed words from the countries that we have, er, mugged, to use Mr. Nicoll's apt analogy. It will be interesting to see how much Arabic the troops bring home and the extent that it is incorporated into our vocabulary.

beth meacham @ 15 - Canadians may queue, but they've also been known to exclaim, "What a line-up!" if the line is particularly long.

Bruce @ 64 - Thank you. I've been wondering if I was imagining Canadians uptalking. It's really noticeable in one of my colleagues who's originally from Nova Scotia and I wasn't sure if she had adopted it to sound less Canadian.

Patrick: Yes, but.

The fact that language migrates naturally, that it's a negotiation, etc etc is all true enough. Self evident, even.

But my experience some (honestly, most) people who adopt British usage are nonetheless doing so both consciously and pretentiously.

Both can be true without being connected. As Leonard Shlain says in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, "The disappearance of the stars at dawn does not cause the sun to rise."

dcb @ 70:

because neither "school" nor "college*" means the same as "university".

Which is why, for clarity's sake, I tend to use "university" when talking to people from outside NorAm. If it's all native English speakers, I might forget and say "college" anyway, but given the prevalence of variations on "university" in other European languages, I figure it's a pretty simple way for me to make things easier for non-native speakers. Particularly since I tend to speak very quickly (I've got relatives who're constantly asking me to slow down)--though I do also try to speak more slowly when there might be a language barrier issue, altering my vocabulary is far easier to remember, somehow.

But the sun rising does cause the stars to disappear.

I picked up a weird one - I'll spell color as an American, but watercolour with the u. I think it's because I spent a decade or two using Winsor Newton watercolours & watercolour brushes. I'm not invariably consistent about it - it's a tendency more than anything else.

It is, of course, possible that I'm just a pretentious git, too.

Pretentious gits of the fluorosphere amalgamate!

Beth @ 15: I use "queue" every day- the set of files waiting in the folder is collectively the "upload queue". It's not a line and I can't think of another good word for it.

JESR @ 46: "Uni" is an aquisition from German for me, in both long and short form. "I've been at university" is my default response to what I've been doing for the past few years v. the american "I've been at college", and it's a distinction I learned from German classes.

I grew up learning about things such as y'all and all y'all from the pulpit*, even though St. Louis only qualifies as southern because of the food and the music. Now that I live much further north, I have to explain the difference regularly, and people think I must be joking.

*"y'all" is singular or small plural, as many as a "few". "All y'all" is generally used when speaking to four or more people. Really. From the pulpit.

But what, exactly, does 'gobsmacked' mean? To me, its that sort of sudden surprise that means you clap your hands to your cheeks - gob (mouth)and smacked. I get the impression that's not what it means to you guys.

Wait on line British? Never. As for the Canadian line up, over here it means an identity parade (think the poster for Usual Suspects) or the manager's selection for your team or the grid arrangement for a Grand Prix (that's Lewis Hamilton at the front these days...) or arranging your purchases on the counter or...

What we really want are national equivalents of L'Academie Francaise to decide what words we can and cannot use. Then again, anarchy has worked for several centuries now and we all know nobody's going to stop it.

Definition of pretentious. Janet Street Porter being down wi' da' kids.

My parents grew up in Southern California, and they both insist that y'all is the only second-person plural in the English language, and therefore, not even slang, but a perfectly acceptable word even in formal usage.
(I suppose in a very formal format, i.e., academic paper, one might write "you all" to avoid the apparent informallity of a contraction.)

I also suspect that New Jersey-ans would argue that "youse" also fills this role, but my parents would be appalled if they ever heard me say something like, "youse guys" non-ironically.

Forgot the footnote:

"The River" is the Thames river, London, UK.

Londoners pretty much always just call it "the river" not "the Thames". I knew I'd been living here too long when I said "south of the river" one day.

I'm not a Londoner, I'm a Mancunian*! I just live in London...

Um. Footnote for the footnotes, as it were: "Mancunian" = comes from/lives in Manchester (UK).

Forgot the footnote:

"The River" is the Thames river, London, UK.

Londoners pretty much always just call it "the river" not "the Thames". I knew I'd been living here too long when I said "south of the river" one day.

I'm not a Londoner, I'm a Mancunian*! I just live in London...

Um. Footnote for the footnotes, as it were: "Mancunian" = comes from/lives in Manchester (UK).

I swear I only hit "Post" once.

Posting the footnote to the wrong thread, however... - Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Should be in "Yes, a little fermented curd would do the trick"

About "waiting on line"--the first time I ever heard it was in one of the Godfather movies, when the sister complains about having to wait on line with everyone else.

And being from Texas, I still catch myself saying "I'm fixin' to" do something, instead of "I'm about to."

On using "impact" (or, indeed, "author") as a verb:

Do not verb nouns. It wierds the language.

OBDoggerel:
I know that this dam will eventually break
for all that is mortal shall fail.
But if it should hold for the rest of my days
then I've no cause to whinge or to wail.

Don't author your software, transition your plans
or leverage your synergies fine
Don't talk of how policy imapacts a man
or your eardrums I'll bust with my whine.

Howard Weaver, #92: "But my experience some (honestly, most) people who adopt British usage are nonetheless doing so both consciously and pretentiously."

I really want to get to the bottom of what people mean by "pretentious." If I use a useful British idiom like "gobsmacked" or "twee", what is it that you think I'm "pretending"? That I'm British? Why on earth would I do that?

This is silly. Both American and British English are full of robustly useful phrases and idioms. And increasing numbers of people in both countries spend lots of time exposing themselves to vigorous speech and text from the other. What's "pretentious" or "affected" about vigorous language leaping the Atlantic Ocean?

Yes, there are silly people in the world who put on airs. I don't avoid using multisyllabic words just because there are MENSA twits who use them. And neither should anyone else.

Doonbogglefrog (#89): American English has absorbed words from the countries that we have, er, mugged, to use Mr. Nicoll's apt analogy.

And not just American English - there are any number of words in British English and English generally that date from the occupation of India ('pukka' comes immediately to mind).

Bruce (#64), Larry Brennan (#91): I feel compelled to point out that Canada is a pretty big place and not all Canadians talk the same way, just like all Americans don't talk the same way. Your colleague from Nova Scotia probably sounds pretty different from me (from Toronto; I've heard the accent described as an 'educated Midwestern drawl,' but I can't hear it, of course). And I was watching Knocked Up and about ten minutes in, I thought, 'Wow, this guy,' - the lead actor, Seth Rogen - 'sounds exactly like my friend Ian.' Well, it turns out that Rogen is also from Vancouver, and I discovered that there is apparently a Vancouver accent (or at least a peri-Vancouver accent).

And Josh Jasper (#3) - as an expat Commonwealther living in the States, I love the idea of having a 'get out of pretension free' card. Of course, that doesn't help me when I go home and say things like 'when I was in college' (I wasn't; I went to university) and 'soda.'

The edition of Partridge I have handy (7th) lists 'gob' as meaning mouth (C16-20), spittle, and portion (-1887), and 'gob' v. meaning to gulp down or to spit copiously, but alas, doesn't list 'gobsmacked'.
My impression has been that it means something so astounding that one feels slapped in the mouth, and is stunned and mute.
Boxing cant for 'bleeding at the mouth' by the way, is 'gob-full of claret' (ca. 1820-90).
-Barbara

@Barbara - this came up on the TV last night: "When he brought out the food, I was gobsmacked. I was totally smacked across the gob." It's exactly the 'stunned' thing you suggest, like someone's slapped you across the face with a wet fish. The Cassell Dictionary of Slang dates it from the '80s, which is later than I'd have thought.

debcha #106: Yes, I almost acknowledged that both languages have done that, in fact, most of the examples that I could think of when I was writing it were British Imperial-era neologisms that have since crossed the pond.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if the British troops will bring more Arabic back to Britain than the US troops will here, just because Britain is more open to Islamic culture in general, and the troops have tended to have closer relations with the "average Iraqi on the street" than American forces have.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #64: Thanks. Of course, as soon as I wrote that I realized that I had left out Southern Hemisphere English (or Englishes, the South Africans can be very distinct from the Australians and the New Zealanders). I grew up in environments in which British and Caribbean norms were standard, and the differences between the two of them are very clear to me.

Will Shetterly #84 wrote: 'There's nothing pretentious in a Brit's use of "colour."'

Nor in a Bajan's, or a Belizean's, or a Kiwi's.

In London, I queue for theater tickets.

In Connecticut, I get in line.

In New York City, I ignore all the tourists forming lines outside Broadway shows and simply crowd up to the doors like we used to do back before Broadway became such a theme park.

David Crystal's The Stories of English (which I recently read) is an engaging, rather detailed account of how English has evolved and changed, with a bit about where it may be headed. Most users of English in the world are not native speakers. The mishmash that is English may well become even more delightfully different.

Crystal relates how he noticed that he switches without thinking between pronouncing schedule with an initial sk/sh depending on context. His children have adopted the sh pronunciation.

Patrick: You go, boy.

Mr. Shetterly (again!), No. 84:

Have you ever heard someone describe something as "gray and grey"?

Nor have I ever heard someone describe something as "crimson and incarnadine."

Grey and gray have been differentiated as organic and artificial in this thread; I, perhaps, would be less charitable, and describe them respectively as romantic and drab. —Grey has more color in it? More depth? Is where gray becomes glas, which my handy Cornish dictionary defines as "blue, green, grey, glaucous, pale, wan, (of fruit) unripe"? —Pencils write in gray, but if you shade a block thickly with a soft pencil, the gray lines shift and shine and combine as grey.

dcb@ 70, I needed to be more specific about when I feel "unie" is a pretentious usage; I accept it as a part of British English, but when it's used by my daughter's fellow college freshmen, it strikes me as affected and very much one of those generational gloves thrown down to the oldsters. As far as I can tell with the whippersnappers I am in 3D contact with, they all picked it up in the Harry Potter fandom, starting about the time they were seventh graders.

Er, me at #113, correction: His children have adopted the sk pronunciation (of schedule).

—An aside, prompted by Janet Kegg, nos. 113/117: was Jean-Luc Picard, Frenchman, unbearably pretentious for adopting the British "shedule"? Or was he terribly déclassé?

I picked up all my Britishisms from Eddie Izzard's "Dressed to Kill." I watched all his specials just after college. I ended up accidentally slipping into spontaneous British accents at times, which bugged the hell out of most of the people I worked with.

But then, there's a theory of linguistics both physical and verbal that we unconsciously adopt those of people to whom we speak or in whom we are interested. When on a date with a person in whom we are interested, i.e., most of us will not only subconsciously (all right: sometimes very consciously) angle our bodies toward theirs, emphasize punchlines with brushing fingertips, etc. I know I tend to do it; though I didn't all together drop my Jersey-based accent when I first moved to California, I did accidentally (and much to my chagrin) begin to end sentences with "so."

I very often say "No worries." I have never been to Australia, and can count off the top of my head the number of Aussies I know at one.

My favorite book on the subject of cross cultural language is Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way, by Bill Bryson, and, circularly, my favorite documentary on it was Mongrel Nation, hosted by Eddie Izzard and linked to, not so long ago (I remember, because I subsequently YouTubed the whole thing in my blog), by Teresa.

PS- Up until I heard Izzard pronounce it, I had always thought "queue" was pronounced "qway-way." My only previous exposure to the word was via Corel Word Perfect, when it told me I had several jobs waiting in the printing qway-way.

PS- Up until I heard Izzard pronounce it, I had always thought "queue" was pronounced "qway-way." My only previous exposure to the word was via Corel Word Perfect, when it told me I had several jobs waiting in the printing qway-way.

I'm relatively certain it guaranteed I never sounded pretentious.

dcb at #70 writes:

> It's one of the few Americanisms I always find sounds wrong to me, saying "school" for "university". The other one is "math" rather than "maths". Dunno why.

Big yes to both - for me going to college is a lower level thing than going to uni - a less prestigious and more trade oriented alternative.

'Math' has the same effect on me as on you.

And a message to all of America: The plural of 'Lego' is 'Lego'. Every time you say 'Legos' I twitch with pain. And you wouldn't want that, would you?

"Uni" never felt right to me when I was there, and "university" seemed too long for everyday use, so I used to say "college". If called on it, I would point out that I was at an Oxford college.

My sister's at medical school and she calls it "school", which sounds very odd to me. Technically her school is a college of the University of London, just to make life more interesting.

will shetterly at #84 writes:

> But when longer wins because it's longer, the speaker's a git.

indubitably!

will, don't forget the Greek God "Zee-Us".

I know for a fact I'm not the only guy who was reading the mythology before he was talking about it and sounded like a twit for a while until someone explained why everyone was snickering.

Seriously, though, the pretension exists only of one is pretending. Thus, if someone is embiggening their language with words they barely comprehend (like, for instance, me with "embiggening"), then that is pretension.

It isn't pretension if one came about the language naturally.

Unfortunately, delineating between the two is not always an easy task. The natural cynicism inherent to life on earth among hairless apes has caused the initial reaction around such verbage to include raised eyebrows and cringing. Twinging, even.

However, I suspect connoisseur of culture will always sound like twaddle to people who are outside of the groupspeak.

I know I can squeeze one more silver dollar word into this post if I try. I must exacerbate my instinct towards the ironic to do so. Yes, "exacerbate" does it.

Hm. I seem to be nearly out of silver dollar words. My language skills are tatterdamalion indeed...

(the people that make me curl my nose at pretensiousness are the ones that pretend to be bi-lingual when they clearly only know a few phrases. Remember when George W answered a question with a Spanish expression during an early Republican primary debate back in '98 and Alan Keyes commenced to rattle off some serious Spanish language, and George got that horrified look on his face like someone had just slapped him? Yeah. I didn't think Alan Keyes was pretensious, just George.)

Steve Taylor @122: If one insists on being pedantic, Lego is a company, and there is only one of it. The singular of the little plastic bits is "Lego brick", and the plural of them is thus "Lego bricks".

If one is not being pedantic ... well there were quite a lot of Legos at the club meeting I went to earlier this afternoon. (Including a three-foot-diameter Roman colosseum built entirely out of Lego.)

PNH @ 105 - I wholeheartedly support the adoption of useful words and phrases, but when an American starts talking about lorries or waiting for the lift to other Americans, or insists on spellings such as "colour", "labour" and "centre" when writing for other Americans, it does feel silly and pretentious. At least it does to me.

I started using 'Uni' and 'University' (as in "I'm in my penultimate year at Uni(versity)") while I was studying in N. Ireland, because I didn't want people mistaking me for the 11-18 year-old students I was working with.

I'm generally in the 'if it's easier to say or spell, I'm using it' crowd. Except arguably with 'petrol,' which for some reason is just impossible to shake now that I've picked it up.