Words

[davidn]

Today, I suddenly received my very first impression of how unorthodox British spellings must look to Americans, when I learned that the word "font" used to be spelled as "fount", and that the current spelling of it was a surrender to Americanization at some point in the 1970s. The older spelling just looks completely wrong and unnatural to me, and for the first time, it came into my head how strange words like 'favourite', 'colour', 'favour' and 'doughnut' might conceivably appear if you've spent all your life with a language that robbed them of their Us. And in one case their Gs and Hs as well.

Of course, language has always been a problem of mine here, and it's largely because most of American seems to be this sort of code that was invented to personally wind me up. Not the word differences - it's not difficult to imagine that post-Webster concepts just had separate names applied to them, for example, a chopping board can equally legitimately be called a cutting board, and a pavement is logically referred to as a side-walk. But it wears on you a bit when you're continually finding more of them after four and a half years, such as it being considered an absurd image for a man to be wearing a 'dressing gown' in favour/favor of a 'bathrobe', and it can make communication difficult when some words have such disparate meanings.

It's not just words as a whole, but the sound of letters in general are slightly different - the (thankfully largely untrue) usual stereotype of Boston is that it dropped the letter R from the alphabet some time ago, but throughout America, the letter A has slightly more of an E flavour/flavor to it in places, and T is softened to something more D-like - I still remember when we were going around the shops for moving in just after getting married, and when any female assistant learned of this fact they would always enthusiastically offer their "congradul[high pitched squeak]tions". American is... shorter than British - street names in speech do not have the qualifying "- Street" or "- Avenue" appended to them, unless they're over three syllables, in which case a different abbreviation will be used, such as "Commonwealth Avenue" and "Massachusetts Turnpike" being shortened to "Com-Av" and "Mass-Pike" respectively.

The most noticeable differences are the simple things that you hear all the time in daily speech like that, the things that you just couldn't imagine could be different. By far the one that has got to me the most has been the word "herb" - which is pronounced the way we say it in Britain for this reason, and yet here the pronunciation is something closer to "'urb", with no H and a more nondescript E. I was subjected to a lot of mockery (by Whitney) when I happened to mention the novel 'Dune' and she found out that I said it with some sort of inflection I can't quite describe on the D, making it sound homophonous to 'June'. In American, whether talking about the heap of sand or the novel, it is invariably pronounced without that inflection, making it simply 'Doon' (presumably by Frank 'Urbert). I can't offer a reason for pronouncing "du" or "tu" with a J between the two letters, and can only offer that to my ears the plain version just sounds a bit stoopid.

By the way, if somebody could explain what the hell a 'raincheck' might be, I would be very grateful.

Comments

[goodbyebartleby.livejournal.com]

I've always found the differences between American English and British English absolutely fascinating. Though it's written by an American expatriate, you might enjoy this popular blog dedicated to the subject - http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/ - at least you can glimpse what the language barrier can be like from the opposite side. Researching the history behind the differences might assuage your irritation, too :)

[davidn]

That does seem like something interesting to follow! The differences are... more than you can imagine until you're suddenly surrounded by them...

Someone on FA put up a submission about the words one of his British friends used, like "Tesco" and "football"... I was actually quite pleased that it was apparently just as excruciating the other way round.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Was the raincheck question being sarcastic? (I mean... google's right there. :P)

Either way, it literally means "we're out of stock, but I'll give you this piece of paper that proves we've set one aside for you"; but more colloquially it just means "I'm all good for that in principle, but now's not a good time; could we do that same thing, but another time?" I guess I could just say "postponing" or "rescheduling", but those have connotations of avoidance, whereas one usually says "can I take a raincheck on that" when they really wish they could do it now but they're unable, and they at least want to make sure that the opportunity isn't going to dry up -- that it isn't going to become something that you simply don't get around to rescheduling. (Unless someone says it sarcastically, of course.. "Yyyyyyeaaah, I'm gonna have to take a rain check on that..")

Man, I could've sworn there were other words that lose their GH, but nothing is jumping to mind... this is gonna bug me. :P

One thing I could never get over about british english was how you "go to hospital", until my mom pointed out to me that we still "go to school", and church. But at least those are institutions somewhat, "I'm going to the school because I go to school", whereas a hospital isn't the sort of thing that people are often dealing with in a nebulous sense; you usually go to a hospital (or even the hospital) but it's just a unique event that doesn't recur often enough for someone to know what you mean if you were to try and say it in a more generic sense... but I might be picking that one apart too literally.

Now, hang on -- are you saying you find it odd that Boston has dropped its Rs? Because (even if, assuming from context, you don't hear it yourself) you must know that "not having the letter R" is something that a british accent is much more famous for... I guess you hear your own implied Rs, but not someone else's? (I'd love to hear a linguist's opinion of whether the Rs are actually more prominent in one accent than the other...)

Interestingly, my family has always said "dressing gown", but my brother says that when he moved to Toronto, his friends laughed at him for saying it (the idea being that a dressing gown is something that a woman wears). He said that they say "housecoat".

[davidn]

Yes, this is the trouble with writing on the Internet... it's invalid to feign exasperated lack of knowledge of something, because the answers are all right there. I, too, would have said that it meant 'postpone' from your description, until you mentioned the way that it didn't have any chance of implying avoidance, and now I can't think of a suitable alternative for it. It strikes me more as an odd word in itself because, as was explained to me shortly after I made this post, it comes from a word that I don't use in the context of a sport that nobody else cares about.

I can't answer why we would say "go to hospital" - though I knew that there was something unusual about the way Americans said that, without being able to identify what it was. The inclusion of "the" doesn't seem to be tied to how usual an event or concept it is - we would say "go to school", "go to church", and yet both countries still say "go to the supermarket" (except they don't, because it's "store" here. Do you see how difficult this is?) School and church, though, are things that you belong to, have some sort of membership in - you can say you "go to" both without literally meaning that you're heading there right at this moment, and somehow that spills over into describing the act of actually going there as well. I don't know.

Trying out words and accents in my head myself, I can see how "ar" and "or" are mutated into something approaching "ah" and "aw", but only in very upmarket English such as the Queen or, if you're after someone a bit posher, Brian Sewell. Or if you're Liquid Snake. Did you feel that I dropped Rs when you heard my voice, for example? I was more worried about the fact that I seemed not to pronounce the letter T, which sounded a bit common.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

But at the same time, people who are a bit posh, or come from southern England, sometimes sound as if they're adding Rs into words where they don't appear on paper. Like the way that people from the Home Counties pronounce "bath" (whereas for those of us in the great unwashed North, the word is more often used in the plural, occasionally prefixed with "public", to mean the place where you go swimming - unless you live in Edinburgh, where we have the Commie Pool, which must really unnerve visiting Americans).

We do have housecoats in Scotland, although I think it's more of a West Coast-ism, and it has a vague suggestion of being something your Granny wears.

[davidn]

That is also true - even my mum brings up the way that I say "bath". Baa-a[r]th. I know of the terms 'public baths' and 'housecoat', but both seem very archaic to me (I think I even might have only heard the latter in Blackadder).

[silvertarna.livejournal.com]

In Belfast, you 'go to the swimmers'. No, really.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I actually don't remember, now that you mention it... do you have a link to the video on hand?

[davidn]

Here you are (the original post so that you can see your previous thoughts as well) - and this too, while I'm at it.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Hm! Alright, well as near as I can tell, you have more Rs than Boston, but less than the rest of america... and more than most of the british accents I had in mind. It is REALLY hard to get a firm picture of in my mind, though!

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

A corollary of "go to hospital" that confused me at first was the British usage of ill/sick. That one can be ill in hospital with a broken leg is very strange to American ears.

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

Also, I would have said that dressing gown = bathrobe, and housecoat = dowdy smock older women wear while doing housework. My husband, however, wears a housecoat on occasion - his name for what I would call a fancy bathrobe. New England/Deep South differences are another interesting topic.

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

I grew up with totally absent 'h'es, but that's what living in Yorkshire does to you.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention about Dune as I was just mentioning that on the video post. I had never heard that about Font, but I could see how the spelling could have been that way. American English, is a bit like Roy Walker's Catchphrase in Catchprase, 'just say what you see'.

I don't know the origin of raincheck, but I assume the 'check' part will be similar to the 'check' in poker which is the gameplay to pass you by. It would not be the same as 'stick' in pontoon, as that has a finality of it, whereas the 'check' is like a pass. So a rainpass, I think, could also be used.

Not sure if I mentioned, but in Ireland they call cupboards and cabinets, 'presses'. The airing cupboard is a 'hot press'. They also can sometimes say, 'doing the 'ware' for 'doing the dishes'. So interesting that you don't need to go that far to see this.

[davidn]

Hot press! I think that's even more out of nowhere than anything I've heard even in American. Why 'press'? And I can see where "ware" might come from, but only because I've been here so long where things are "cookware", "bakeware" and so on - I wouldn't have been able to make that connection otherwise.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

"Press" in the context of a cupboard is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic prais, meaning, funnily enough, "cupboard".

[silvertarna.livejournal.com]

Is hot press a Thing only of my land? I had no idea, woah.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of a hot press before, but people in Scotland also call a cupboard a press sometimes. Usually it's prefixed with which room it's in.

[davidn]

I've never heard anything like that anywhere in Scotland. After all this talk about American I think you're just making it up to confuse me, now!

[silvertarna.livejournal.com]

No, it's a real thing, and I'd never even heard of an airing cupboard as a term until I went to uni...

[davidn]

I never used the phrase myself or really had any idea what it might be at the time, but "airing cupboard" will always remind me of Tony Hart, as his constantly recommended place to store your paintings while they were drying :)

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

Strangely, Edinburgh has some streets with single word names - and I don't mean that the second half of the name is dropped in colloquial usage, they literally just have one-word names. I used to live in Viewforth ("Viewforth what?", I was constantly asked whenever I had to give my address to someone who didn't live locally), which was connected to Montpelier.

The way it was explained to me, the derivation of "raincheck" is that it was originally a voucher that you got if you went to some kind of outdoor event or tourist attraction that had to close because of bad weather - usually so that you could claim a free ticket another time.

[davidn]

I remember there were some around my primary school as well - I was going to say I couldn't recall what one of them was called, but once again I had forgotten that I was on the Internet. Broadford, Windyedge, and - the one I remember the most - Baddifurrow, which was a mountainous incline that they always sadistically made us go up in our cycling proficiency tests.

Also, I can tell you from that same Google Maps search that my old school's roof really is in a dreadful state.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Wait -- am I correctly inferring that Viewforth was the name of the street? So you live IN a street rather than ON a street?

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

Yes, we live IN streets over here. Only homeless people live ON a street.

[davidn]

Discoveries like this are pretty much what my life has been like for the last four years.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I think that I might say that somebody lives on the High Street (hello, another difference) but in Thisisaname Street... unless that first one is just America confusing me.

[drake [begriffli.ch] (from livejournal.com)]

WRT the “Dune” difference, you may be talking about yod-dropping (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phonological history of English consonant clusters#Yod-dropping). The “r”-after-vowel bits you mention above are what distinguish rhotic from non-rhotic accents.

Americans do seem to turn all the vowels into crazy indistinguishable schwas more often than not. While I grew up with US English, I've specifically tweaked my accent somewhat over time, and I've had US and British friends both get very confused upon hearing me and trying to figure out where my pronunciation profile originated.

[davidn]

That sounds like exactly it - a facet of speech that I was sure must have some sort of name, but that was so indescribable to me that I couldn't have imagined what that name might be.

I am actually the same, although on a much more localized level - in most of Britain, people can't tell whether I'm English or Scottish - where I grew up, people identify me as English, but in America I am identified more correctly.

[davidn]

Oh, speaking of US-British accents and crazy vowels...!

[kjorteo]

I realize this would make it more Australian than British, but the degree of... emphasis there actually kind of gave me a Steve Irwin vibe.

[davidn]

I can certainly see why you would think that... the sheer unfamiliarity of any vowels he uses could put his voice anywhere. He's a... TV food critic, but is mostly famous for his astaeiounishing oaccent.

And I've just this minute found out that he used to sing in a punk band, which is an incredible thought for both the difference between that and his calm demeanour now, and trying to imagine the results of him singing anything.

[kjorteo]

Probably "Let's talk about fight!"

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

As an Australian on the internet (and who seen quite a bit of American media) I find this post to be quite interesting.
I'm very nearly distressed to discover that I too say it as "June" (sometimes "Dyune" if I'm trying to be eloquent) and I can't really explain why. I suppose it's not just other cultures that are guilty of pronouncing words in insane ways.

[davidn]

I've heard that as well - particularly with extremely BBC accents, the inflection (not yod-dropping, as I have learned thanks to other comments) becomes even more separated from the letter for words beginning with D and a vowel sound, like d-yune and di-warf.

[kjorteo]

I consider myself to be mostly neutral, accent wise, with a few eccentricities specific to certain words. I actually found my own habit of pronunciation with these words quite irritating and first and tried to force myself out of it, but it... didn't work, and now I just sort of accept it. Basically, I tend to slur the contraction "I'll" into something that sounds more like "all" than "aisle" or "isle," and "our" into something more like "are" than "hour." The weird thing is I am perfectly capable of pronouncing the correct versions when they're the actual words--if I were to say the sentence "In an hour, we'll take our things, and I'll go to the isle," the actual "hour" and "isle" would be pronounced with full emphasis and correctness and everything, but the "our" and "I'll"...wouldn't.

Someone once told me that was apparently a Utah thing, since I was born in there and didn't escape move to New Mexico until I was six (with a stint in Maryland in between those two.)

[davidn]

What I've had to learn, of course, is that even if you think you're neutral, nobody is. Though I've never had the benefit of sounding like anyone else no matter where I've lived. These things can apparently take hold at a very young age and are difficult to get rid of... it's the reason I don't talk with an accent anything like the rest of my family, just because there was a neighbour with a very Queen's English accent who used to speak to me a lot when I was under three years old.

In a strange twist of life, after my voice had been a handicap for so long I'm now worried about it changing or disappearing. What I'd most like to change is that I habitually don't seem to pronounce the letter T at the end of words, replacing it with some sort of throat-produced... stop... thing - something I only noticed when listening to myself in the video re-linked somewhere in the tangle above.

[drake [begriffli.ch] (from livejournal.com)]

I would find it more precise to say that the idea of a “neutral accent” is ill-defined most of the time, unless you externalize the definition into something like “the average of all speakers (or all native speakers, autc.) of language X”—by some suitable vector-esque average, of course, defining which would in itself be like nailing jelly (or jam) to the wall. In practice, people seem mostly to use the term unawares to refer to a not very useful, highly context-sensitive grouping of whatever they most commonly heard while they were young, as though implying the customs of their tribe to be laws of nature…

[davidn]

I had always thought that that analogy was meant to be about nailing a jelly to the wall (or to the ceiling, as I would say). Both would appear equally impossible, though.

I suppose, yes, if you did the impossible and took an average of every facet of every speaker on the planet, you would come up with someone in the middle, a true neutral representation of every accent on earth. Sadly I get the feeling that he would sound quite a lot like Loyd Grossman, above.

[drake [begriffli.ch] (from livejournal.com)]

FWVLIW, the Jargon File suggests a possible US etymology for the phrase like nailing jelly to a tree (http://catb.org/jargon/html/L/like-nailing-jelly-to-a-tree.html). (As far as I know, “jelly” in the other sense isn't used as a mass noun… ?)

[davidn]

I suppose I would use the term 'jelly', to mean the... gelatinous alien cuboid substance that you would drop in hot water to make "a jelly" out of. Or... pieces of the complete "a jelly" form just "jelly", like you can have "cake" by cutting it out of "a cake".

This is making my head hurt.