How Americans preserved British English

Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.

It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.

That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated. One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”

So at least when it comes to their treatment of the 18th letter, Americans generally sound more like the Brits of several centuries ago. So do Canadians west of Quebec – thanks to loyalists to the Crown fleeing north during the American Revolution.

Another divergence between British and North American English has been a move toward broad As in words like ‘path’. The pronunciations of the early colonists (and their English counterparts), in contrast, have stuck around in the US: think ‘paath’ rather than ‘pahth’.

At first glance, these colonial legacies of pronunciation seem especially apparent in certain remote areas of the US – hence the argument that some places in the US have preserved Shakespearean English.

For instance, Tangier Island in Virginia has an unusual dialect which can be unintelligible even to other Americans. Some speech patterns, included rounded Os, seem like a dead ringer for the dialect of the West of England. This has led some observers to claim a strong lineage from early Cornish settlers to the current Tangier dialect.

But linguist David Shores has noted that these claims are exaggerated, and that the island’s isolation, rather than any freezing of Elizabethan speech patterns, is responsible for its linguistic quirks.

Another US area that’s been linked to 17th-Century British English is Appalachia, especially the mountainous regions of North Carolina. Linguist Michael Montgomery has written that the North Carolina tourism division used to issue a booklet called A Dictionary of the Queen’s English, which claimed that the English of Queen Elizabeth I could be found in pockets of the state. Montgomery traced the idea back to an educator-clergyman who, around the turn of the 19th Century, spread the idea that mountain language was a remnant of a much older tradition. This myth helped to counteract negative impressions of oft-maligned mountain people. Turning this around – and claiming kinship with a Shakespearean way of speaking – was a way of bringing status and apparent classiness to a marginalised part of the country.

“Mountain speech has more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it,” Montgomery writes. These include terms like ‘afeard’, which famously appears in The Tempest. Overall, however, “the Shakespeare myth reflects simplistic, popular views about the static nature of traditional folk cultures, especially those in out-of-the-way places.”

Common phrases

It’s a bit surprising that Shakespearean English has come to be associated with high status and education. That’s the other oft-forgotten complication of the concept: even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re speaking a ‘posher’ version of the language.

“We’ve always had this stigma in the UK that Shakespeare has to be posh… [but] in his time, it was everyday speech,” says David Barrett, who conducted workshops in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP) while preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of South Wales. He’s also transcribed Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander into OP. (There have been similar projects for the King James Bible and the Lord’s Prayer).

Even Queen Elizabeth I didn’t pronounce words in a particularly ‘posh’ way. Barrett has researched Elizabeth’s letters for clues to her pronunciation. Since spellings at the time were far from standardised, written texts are one tool linguists use to determine how words would have been pronounced historically. The queen’s habits likely included pronouncing ‘servant’ as ‘sarvant’, or ‘together’ as ‘togither’. These were pronunciation styles of ordinary people of the 17th Century – rather than the nobility. So like Shakespeare, the queen had a down-to-earth manner of speaking... in contrast to the upper-crust accents she is portrayed with in contemporary films and TV programmes. (It’s worth noting that today’s Queen Elizabeth II is speaking in a more ‘common’ way than she once did, too).

“The reason I find the Elizabethan period interesting is that the pronunciation contains many sounds which are far enough removed from modern English to create a challenge for the speaker, but there is also a considerable overlap with modern English,” says Barrett.

So when actors and audiences hear OP for the first time, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

“Every English speaker who hears Original Pronunciation for the first time hears something different in it,” Barrett says. Sometimes that sounds similar to Northern Irish or West Country accents, other times South African or American.

Star-spangled Shakespeare

American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.

It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.

So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.

As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.

Dialect coach Meier understands the appeal of the idea that 17th-Century speech patterns have been perfectly preserved an ocean away. “It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, he says.

But as sociolinguist Brook explains, “Every actively-spoken dialect is always changing – that’s as true of the rural ones as of the urban ones.” Echoes of older dialects can be heard here and there in different places, but unfortunately there’s no living museum of Shakespeare’s English.

_________________

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english?ocid=fbcul

Pidgin - West African lingua franca

What is Pidgin?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca.

Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate.

Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed.

It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

There are differences, because English is mixed with different languages in each country but they are usually mutually intelligible.

A form of Pidgin has developed into a mother tongue for the Krio community in Sierra Leone, which non-Krios can find difficult to understand.

What is so special about Pidgin?

"It's quite fluid, it keeps changing all the time and it's expressive as well," says Bilkisu Labran, head of the new BBC language services for Nigeria.

"Sometimes, if you don't have a word for something, you can just create an onomatopoeic sound and just express yourself. And it will be appreciated and understood.

"I can talk about the gun shots that went 'gbagbagba' and you get my gist. So it vividly captures it instead of describing or trying to find a word to say: 'The gun shots were very loud'."

Also, Pidgin hardly follows standard grammatical rules so "you can lose things like verbs", by saying: 'I dey go' to mean 'I'm going'.

Other examples are:

• I wan chop ( I want to eat)
• Wetin dey 'appen? (What is happening?)
• I no no (I do not know)
• Where you dey? (Where are you)

How many people speak it?

It is difficult to know the precise number of speakers across the region as it is not formally studied in schools and is spoken in varying degrees of proficiency.

But many millions of people undoubtedly speak it on a daily basis, especially young people.

Nigeria is estimated to have between three and five million people who primarily use Pidgin in their day-to-day interactions. But it is said to be a second language to a much higher number of up to 75 million people in Nigeria alone - about half the population.

Although it is commonly spoken, Pidgin is not an official language anywhere in West Africa.

In many schools, children are disciplined if they are caught speaking Pidgin, rather than English.

However, some local radio stations do broadcast in Pidgin.

How did it originate?

West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English, was a language of commerce spoken along the coast during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th Centuries.

This allowed British slave merchants and local African traders to conduct business.

It later spread to other parts of the West African colonies, becoming a useful trade language among local ethnic groups who spoke different languages.

_______________________

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38000387

The vanishing words we need to save

Robert Macfarlane collects words that describe nature and landscape – and which are dying out. He explains their power to shape our relationship with the earth itself.

Robert Macfarlane is a compiler of words: an explorer of hedgerows and roadsides, salt marshes and sea-caves. But he is also a magician, of sorts – one who weaves spells using lost phrases that recall a different connection with our landscape. In his latest book Landmarks, the British naturalist calls for “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen”.

We speak on the phone the day before he is due to talk at the Hay Festival. I am sitting in my car at a rest stop next to the river Wye in Wales, opposite public toilets, trying to stay still to keep my mobile from cutting out. Macfarlane is in the kitchen of his home in Cambridge, also clinging to a patch of reception. He laughs as I describe my location. This is a man who has found peregrine falcons at a power station and water voles at a municipal dump, claiming in his 2007 book The Wild Places that “the human and the wild cannot be partitioned”.

Similarly, he doesn’t believe that the words he has collected in Landmarks are just for shepherds or hill-walkers. “I’m talking to you from my edge-of-the-suburb house in Cambridge – most people are in cities now,” he says. “The book is about all of us finding ways to celebrate and enrich the language that we have for landscape and nature.”

In Landmarks, Macfarlane pulls together nine glossaries of terms taken from 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain and Ireland. They all describe aspects of weather, nature and terrain – and many of them are dying out, slipping out of conversation and off the tongues of those who once spoke them. They have been lost. Macfarlane wants them to be found.

He describes two of his favourites: “One is this lovely Cornish word ‘zawn’, which means a wave-smashed chasm in a sea cliff – it’s so evocative of that gaping mouth, and the power of those places,” he says. “Another is this soft, Gaelic phrase ‘rionnach maoim’, the shadows that clouds cast on moorland on a windy day. There’s something about the poetry of that, the precision and the need to compress that phenomenon down into that gorgeous soft phrase.”

In his book’s lists, he has included words coined by poets along with agricultural or geological terms. There is the ‘shepherd’s lamp’ imagined by the 19th-Century poet John Clare to describe the first star that rises after sunset, and a smattering of terms from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘heavengravel’ for hailstones, ‘endragoned’ describing a raging sea, and the ominous ‘doomfire’ – meaning, as Macfarlane puts it, “sunset light which has the appearance of apocalypse to it”.

Macfarlane delights in the language. “There’s just the sheer joy of exactitude; I see it as a form of beautiful elegance. These lovely poems that fold up inside these words and spring out of them like jack-in-the-boxes – they’re gorgeous forms of precision,” he says. 

The glossaries include ‘zwer’ (Exmoor dialect for “the noise made by a covey of partridges rising in flight”), ‘frazil’ (“loose, needle-like ice crystals that form into a churning slush in turbulent super-cooled water, for example in a river on a very cold night”) – and ‘blaze’, which along the North Sea coast means “to take salmon by striking them at night, by torchlight, with a three-pronged spear”.

As might be expected in Britain, there is an entire list devoted to words for rain, most of them Gaelic. From ‘virga’, meaning “observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground”, to a ‘beum-sléibhe’, or “sudden torrent caused by the bursting of a thundercloud”, every drop is accounted for. Some of the definitions are lyrical – like ‘smirr’, “extremely fine, misty rain, close to smoke in appearance when seen from a distance”, and the “torrent of brutal rage” that is ‘burraghlas’. Others are more prosaic, like ‘clagarnach’, Irish for “clatter of heavy rain on an iron roof”, and ‘letty’, “enough rain to make outdoor work difficult”.

But Landmarks is more than an ode to language. By enriching our vocabularies, Macfarlane believes, we can change the way we interact with our landscape. “We increasingly make do with an impoverished language for nature, a generic language: ‘field’, and ‘wood’, and ‘hill’, and ‘countryside’. It’s a very basic way of denoting, and that’s fine, and sometimes we need to speak generally,” he says. “We can’t always speak absolutely precisely. But I’m fascinated by details and by the specifics of nature, and its particularities – and language helps us to see those.”

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes flying over the Scottish Outer Hebrides in a twin-prop plane. He saw “the tawny expanse of Mointeach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis”. Across the aisle from him, two people looked out of the window. Macfarlane recounts: “One of them laughed. ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.

Seed fund

“If we just see a landscape as some kind of waste space and devoid of detail, it becomes more vulnerable to dismissal or disinterest or improper use,” Macfarlane tells me.

In Landmarks, he quotes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”

A chapter in the book is dedicated to the Scottish-American John Muir, whose writings inspired the US president Theodore Roosevelt to create the country’s first national parks. “Muir gives me hope,” Macfarlane said in his talk at Hay. “His writing changed the course of landscape history. It’s the idea of hope in the dark.” He described the seeds of the bristlecone pine, which lie dormant in the soil and are germinated by forest fire. “Individual actions in culture – art, writing – can be dropped, like the pine seeds. They seem dead but decades later they can flare into life.”

Subtitled a “field guide to the literature of nature”, Landmarks is a work of great scholarship – but also a call to action. It explores “how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perceptions”. And it fits within a wider resurgence of nature writing in Britain, including Costa award-winning H is for Hawk and The Shepherd’s Life, the memoir of a sheep farmer.

Macfarlane believes there is an “astonishing surging cultural energy that’s working across photography and art and in literature”. He credits it to an acute sense of loss. “It’s because we live in the shadow of destruction and damage, because we are a generation that’s grown up conscious of climate change, and that internalised anxiety at the world’s ongoing peril is a really powerful imaginative force that we don’t quite register in its full form but is deeply in us,” he says.

‘An A-Z of words lost’

Macfarlane was inspired to write the book both by discovering a “peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic” and after the culling of nature words such as buttercup and kingfisher from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which he described at Hay as “an A-Z of words lost”. He thinks we can learn from how children encounter nature.

“The last chapter is about a group of children in a country park which has the busiest A road in the east of England on one side, and a hospital on the other,” he says. “It’s about the limitless wonder with which children meet even a very unwild place, which is an inspiration to all of us who’ve forgotten how to speak ‘childish’.”

Just as important as the words that are vanishing are the words being created every day. Macfarlane explains in the book that his seven-year-old son, when told there was no word for “the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream”, quickly suggested ‘currentbum’. “Since the book was published, I’ve been sent many words – on postcards, and letters, from diaries and clippings, as well as emails and Twitter – and children and parents have begun to send me ones that they make up,” Macfarlane tells me.

The collecting of terms in Landmarks is not a form of hoarding, an attempt at control in the face of loss. At his Hay talk, Macfarlane expressed how he hoped the book might give new life to the place-languages within. “I want these words to be released and let their energies and their poetries run wild,” he said.

To that end, the last glossary, Childish, is left blank. It is a sign of hope. As Macfarlane says in Landmarks, “We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time.”

His glossaries, then, are much more than vocabulary-expanding lists. This is where Macfarlane the magician takes over.

“I wanted them to become spells, really; chants, incantations – you step into them like you might step into a flowing stream and let the words run over you. They do have their own magic, which is nothing to do with me. I just put them on the page,” he says. “But they become spells.”

_______________

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151126-robert-macfarlane-on-the-wild-words-were-losing?ocid=fbbrt

How India changed the English language

They are in there, often unnoticed. The words that have become part of everyday English. Loot, nirvana, pyjamas, shampoo and shawl; bungalow, jungle, pundit and thug.

What are the roots, and routes, of these Indian words? How and when did they travel and what do their journeys into British vernacular – and then the Oxford English Dictionary – tell us about the relationship between Britain and India?

Long before the British Raj – before the East India Company acquired its first territory in the Indian subcontinent in 1615 – South Asian words from languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Tamil had crept onto foreign tongues. One landmark book records the etymology of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases. Compiled by two India enthusiasts, Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India was published in 1886. The poet Daljit Nagra described it as “not so much an orderly dictionary as a passionate memoir of colonial India. Rather like an eccentric Englishman in glossary form.”

The editor of its contemporary edition – which has just been published in paperback – explains how many of the words pre-date British rule. “Ginger, pepper and indigo entered English via ancient routes: they reflect the early Greek and Roman trade with India and come through Greek and Latin into English,” says Kate Teltscher.

“Ginger comes from Malayalam in Kerala, travels through Greek and Latin into Old French and Old English, and then the word and plant become a global commodity. In the 15th Century, it’s introduced into the Caribbean and Africa and it grows, so the word, the plant and the spice spread across the world.”

As global trade expanded through European conquests of the East Indies, the flow of Indian words into English gathered momentum. Many came via Portuguese. “The Portuguese conquest of Goa dates back to the 16th Century, and mango, and curry, both come to us via Portuguese – mango began as ‘mangai’ in Malayalam and Tamil, entered Portuguese as ‘manga’ and then English with an ‘o’ ending,” she says.

But the movement of South Asian words into English did not always follow a simple East to West trajectory, as Teltscher highlights with ‘ayah’, a word I’ve always understood to be an Indian nanny, or domestic help – how my extended family in New Delhi use it today. “Ayah is originally a Portuguese word, which means governess or nurse, and it’s used in this way by the Portuguese in India and is absorbed into Indian languages, and then via India comes into English.”

The Hobson-Jobson glossary describes an unusual journey for the word ‘chilli’, recorded as “the popular Anglo-Indian name of the pod of red pepper”. According to Yule and Burnell: “There is little doubt that the name was taken from Chile in South America, whence the plant was carried to the Indian archipelago and thence to India.”

Scents and sensibilities

Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Portuguese and English words pinballed around the globe in the 16th and 17th Centuries, revealing how languages evolve over time as culture is made and remade, and people adapt to conditions around them. This is neatly illustrated by three words – shawl, cashmere and patchouli – that travel hand-in-hand from India into 18th-Century English.

“Cashmere is what we associate with wool and its origins are in Kashmir and the wool produced by Kashmir goats. It was closely associated with shawl, a word which originates in Persian, and travels into India via Urdu and Hindi and then enters English,” explains Teltscher.

“Shawl enters English in the 18th and 19th Century because it becomes a desirable luxury garment for women in high society – if you had a brother working for the East India Company, you would want him to send you a beautifully embroidered shawl. Patchouli is linked to shawls because the perfume was used to deter moths while shawls were being transported and as a result this heady, heavy perfume became popular in Britain,” she continues.

But patchouli soon lost its aspirational edge. “As the 19th Century moves on, patchouli becomes associated with racy, decadent French women and prostitutes. So patchouli goes from something royalty might wear into being beyond the pale, and then in the 1960s it becomes associated with the hippie movement,” says Teltscher.

The right climate

London-born, Bristol-based author Nikesh Shukla feels India’s significant contribution to everyday English reflects the symbiotic nature of Empire. “It was inevitable with colonialism that Britain would imbibe the local culture and it would have a lasting effect because colonialism flows two ways. Look at the things in British culture that have come from the Commonwealth that Britain calls its own like tea, and language is part of that too,” he says.

Shukla, whose recent novel Meatspace explores social media and smart-phones, believes that empire reshaped the English language in the same way as technology is now. “One way of looking at it is these Indian words disrupted the English language because they just didn’t exist in English – for example veranda. The climate’s cold here so you wouldn’t have a veranda, or pyjamas – loose fitting cotton trousers, which again are perfect for a hot climate,” he says.

“Today, words such as wifi, internet, Google, email and selfie have become universal, there aren’t other words for them, so they have infiltrated English and languages all over the world. Social media has also changed the way we talk, the meaning of a word such as ‘like’ has completely shifted, also ‘following’, or ‘lol’ – the new disrupter of the English language is technology, but I love how empire was a major disrupt to English through exposing Britain to so many cultures and languages,” he continues.

Shukla’s favourite Indian-English word – Blighty – shows how language is constantly evolving. “It’s usually used by expat Brits referring to Britain and the homeland as in ‘Good ol’ Blighty’ but it comes from the Urdu word for foreigner or European, ‘vilayati’. So it’s been subverted and used as a homage by the British and eventually has become part of the English language,” he says.

India’s influence on English points towards how language is perpetually in motion, and highlights the importance of former colonies in the making of the modern world. “It’s so fascinating to look at words,” says Teltscher. “It opens up these unexpected rhythms and paths of travel, and extraordinary, unlikely connections.”

____________________________

http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20150619-how-india-changed-english?ocid=fbcul

How Americans Have Reshaped Language

Much of the chapter on Philadelphia is about the city’s use of German in the 18th century. It’s interesting to learn that Benjamin Franklin was as irritated about the prevalence of German as many today are about that of Spanish, but the chapter is concerned less with language than straight history — and the history of a language that, after all, isn’t English. In the Chicago chapter, Bailey mentions the dialect literature of Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade but gives us barely a look at what was in it, despite the fact that these were invaluable glimpses of otherwise rarely recorded speech.

Especially unsatisfying is how little we learn about the development of Southern English and its synergistic relationship with black English. Bailey gives a hint of the lay of the land in an impolite but indicative remark about Southern child rearing, made by a British traveler in 1746: “They suffer them too much to prowl amongst the young Negroes, which insensibly causes them to imbibe their Manners and broken Speech.” In fact, Southern English and the old plantation economy overlap almost perfectly: white and black Southerners taught one another how to talk. There is now a literature on the subject, barely described in the book.

On black English, Bailey is also too uncritical of a 1962 survey that documented black Chicagoans as talking like their white neighbors except for scattered vowel differences (as in “pin” for “pen”). People speak differently for interviewers than they do among themselves, and modern linguists have techniques for eliciting people’s casual language that did not exist in 1962. Surely the rich and distinct — and by no means “broken” — English of today’s black people in Chicago did not arise only in the 1970s.

Elsewhere, Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text. (The book’s editors say they have elected to leave untouched some cases of “potential ambiguity.”) If, as Bailey notes, only a handful of New Orleans’s expressions reach beyond Arkansas, then exactly how was it that New Orleans was nationally influential as the place “where the great cleansing of American English took place”?

And was 17th-century America really “unlike almost any other community in the world” because it was “a cluster of various ways of speaking”? This judgment would seem to neglect the dozens of colonized regions worldwide at the time, when legions of new languages and dialects had already developed and were continuing to evolve. Of the many ways America has been unique, the sheer existence of roiling linguistic diversity has not been one of them.

The history of American English has been presented in more detailed and precise fashion elsewhere — by J. L. Dillard, and even, for the 19th century, by Bailey himself, in his under­read ­“Nineteenth-Century English.” Still, his handy tour is useful in imprinting a lesson sadly obscure to too many: as Bailey puts it, “Those who seek stability in English seldom find it; those who wish for uniformity become laughingstocks.”

______________

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/books/review/speaking-american-a-history-of-english-in-the-united-states-by-richard-w-bailey-book-review.html?_r=0

50 BRITISH PHRASES THAT AMERICANS JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND

1. “How’s your father,” “Rumpy pumpy,” “Good rogering”
Meaning: To have sex, sexual relations, get “your groove on.”

2. “Going to play some footy”
Meaning: Going to play soccer.

3. “I’ll give you a bunch of fives”
Meaning: You’re going to get a punch in the face.

4. “That was a right bodge job”
Meaning: That job went wrong.

5. “Oh bloomin ‘eck”
Meaning: A non-curse word exclamation.

6. “That’s pants”
Meaning: It’s not great, not very good.

7. “I’m knackered”
Meaning: I’m tired, exhausted.

8. “Don’t get shirty with me,” “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” “You’re getting on my goat,” “Wind your neck in”

Meaning: Someone’s getting angry or aggravated with you…or you’re getting annoyed or
irritated with them.

9. “ I was gobsmacked”
Meaning: I was shocked, lost for words.

10. “She was talking nineteen to the dozen”
Meaning: She was talking at a speedy rate.

11. “It’s all gone pear shaped”
Meaning: Something has gone wrong.

12. “She’s a picnic short of a sandwich,” “She’s a slice short of a loaf”
Meaning: She’s a little dopey, not very clever.

13. “She’s as bright as a button”
Meaning: She’s clever.

14. “He’s as mad as box of frogs,” “He’s crackers”
Meaning: He’s mad. He’s lost it.

15. “Spend a penny,” “Going for a slash”
Meaning: To visit the bathroom.

16. “Well that’s thrown a spanner in the works”
Meaning: Plans have gone awry, a curveball has been thrown.

17. “We’re having a right old knees up,” “Heading out on the tiles,”“Out on the lash”
Meaning: To go out for the night to have a good time. To party.

18. “I’m out on the pull tonight”
Meaning: To go out looking for a lady or man with whom to enjoy a romantic liason (see #1.). To get ‘laid’.

19. “I’m going to get off with him / her”
Meaning: I’m going to kiss / snog that person.

19. “I’m quids in” / I’m skint,” / “Have you got any dosh?”
Meaning: You’ve come into money / You have no money / You’re asking someone if they have any money.

20. “Sweet Fanny Adams”
Meaning: Nothing, such as when being asked what you did for the day or what you’re currently doing.

21. “It’s just Sod’s law”
Meaning: Same as ‘Murphy’s Law’ — what’s going to happen, will happen.

22. “It’s parky out” or “It’s brass monkeys out”
Meaning: It’s cold outside.

23. “She’s such a curtain twitcher” or “Stop being such a nose ointment”
Meaning: She’s a nosy neighbor, stop being so nosy.

24. “Did you see her? She’s such a chav”
Meaning: A British stereotype for a ‘low class’ person or someone wearing ‘cheap’ clothes.

25. “That’s smashing,” “Super,” “Ace,” “Pucker”
Meaning: That’s “awesome.”

26. “Did you just fluff?” “Did you just pop?”
Meaning: Did you just fart?

27. “He’s the dog’s danglies,” “It’s the mutt’s nuts”
Meaning: He’s the best, it’s the best. Top notch.

28. “Nice baps,” “Look at those bristols,” “Look at those rose buds”
Meaning: Nice breasts.

29. “Old Blighty”
Meaning: Britain.

30. “Oh, he’s a Bobby,” “They call him PC plod”
Meaning: He’s a policeman / cop.

31. “I’ll ring you,” “I’ll give you a bell,” “I’ll give you a tinkle”
Meaning: I’ll call you.

32. “He’s such a plonker,” “ponce,” “pillock,” “tosser,” “ twit,” “knob,” “bellend”
Meaning: He’s not very nice / He’s an idiot.

33. “Stop being such a big girl’s blouse”
Meaning: Stop being such a wimp.

34. “Toodle Pip!” “Ta ta!”
Meaning: Goodbye.

35. “I’m just having a fag”
Meaning: I’m just having a cigarette.

36. “I’m totally cack-handed”
Meaning: I’m not coordinated.

37. “He’s such an anorak”
Meaning: He’s such a geek.

38. “Don’t be such a wind-up merchant”
Meaning: Stop teasing.

39. “Having a good old chinwag”
Meaning: Having a gossip / chat.

40. “She’s got a face like a bag full of spanners” / “She has a face like a cat’s arse”
Meaning: She’s not very attractive / She is pulling a ‘sour’ face.

41. “Meat and two veg”
Meaning: A man’s ‘private parts’

42. “She’s so gobby”
Meaning: She’s very mouthy, rude.

43. “She / he / it’s minging”
Meaning: She / he / it’s not very nice, disgusting.

44. “That’s mint, that is”
Meaning: Mint condition, perfect.

45. “Careful, he’s on the chunder bus”
Meaning: He’s going to be sick, throw up.

46. “Oh stop whinging on”
Meaning: Stop moaning.

47. “You look smart”
Meaning: You are well dressed.

48. “That’s lush”
Meaning: That’s nice, or that tastes good.

49. “I’m feel really grotty”
Meaning: Feeling under the weather, not well.

50. “Ta!”
Meaning: Thanks!

____________________________________

http://matadornetwork.com/notebook/50-british-phrases-americans-just-dont-understand/

From marvellous to awesome: how spoken British English has changed

A study called the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 reveals how our use of language is evolving. Is British English succumbing to American influence?

Almost nothing is marvellous these days, but everything is awesome. According to a study by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, Britain has all but abandoned the former adjective in favour of the latter.

Early evidence from their project, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, shows that "awesome" now turns up in conversation 72 times per million words. "Marvellous", which 20 years ago appeared 155 times per million words, now appears just twice per million. "Fortnight" is also on the endangered list, as is "cheerio". (That's "cheerio" meaning goodbye, young people, as opposed to the singular form of the breakfast cereal, which you would only tend to use if you got one stuck up your nose.)

The study is the linguistic equivalent of that regularly updated shopping basket they use to determine the Retail Price Index: out goes whale meat and suspenders, in comes SIM cards and hummus. They aren't like-for-like substitutions, just signifiers of a fast-changing culture.

The project is now calling on people to send in MP3s of their conversations – they'll even pay a small amount – in order to gain a wider sense of how the language as it is spoken has changed over the years.

Looking over the current list, it's obvious why some of these words have fallen from grace. People don't utter the word "Walkman" much any more for the same reason they hardly ever say "locomotive". "Marmalade" is also falling out of fashion, which probably corresponds to a decline in sales. Or perhaps it's just not the conversation starter it used to be.

The rise of "awesome" has inevitably led some to the conclusion that British English is succumbing to American influence, and that "awesome" has chased "marvellous" from its habitat the way grey squirrels do red ones, confining it to odd phrases and old book titles such as George's Marvellous Medicine.

But awesome is no worse than marvellous. Both modifiers are cliched exaggerations: the first really means "dread-inspiring", the second implies a miracle has taken place. The fact that you can apply either to a flapjack recipe indicates we've long drained them of impact. Both have been around for a long time, but we use up cliches faster these days. We need new ones all the time.

There is hope for "marvellous" yet. My American mother used it exclusively as a sarcastic term, usually when a second bad thing happened while something else was still in the process of going wrong. "Oh, marvellous," she would say, with ice in her voice. You can't do that with awesome. Not yet.

_______________________________________________

http://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/aug/26/british-english-words-endangered-awesome-marvellous?CMP=fb_gu