'Separate in name and power': How America reinvented English | Hacker News Reader

'Separate in name and power': How America reinvented English

bbc.com

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I moved from the UK to Canada as a pre-teen* and what I found shocking was how bothered a lot of Brits are about the fact that some people or places use different words and pronunciations. "We gave you a perfectly good language and you buggered it up!" my mother oft-repeated. You see it in shows like Top Gear and Taskmaster and especially the football vs. soccer thing with the world cup right now. The UK has so many regional dialects that I can only assume it's a national pride thing, especially as the US has eclipsed the UK in population, economy, and media.

* side note - emigrant parents, please try to time your move so that your kid doesn't have to experience puberty AND immigration at the same time.

I think that's a commonality of most locales. Pop/soda/coke is particularly divisive in the US, for instance. You can encounter genuine friction using the 'wrong' word ordering at a bar or asking directions in a grocery. I get friction for having adopted "y'all" because I like the you/y'all/all y'all construction in northern states because it lets me communicate exactly which 'you' I'm talking about.

Lots of people have a "well at least we don't talk like those hicks/rednecks/bumpkins/yeehaws/yeeyees" as if the people from there aren't saying precisely the same about you.

There's a fun quiz (though I think it is US only, unforutunately) called How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk by the NYT that was eventually turned in to a book with the same idea that is sometimes surprisingly accurate in guessing your geographical situation based on the words and pronunciations you use. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...

There's another aspect to the discussion as well, which is code-switching. The idea being that you have one way of speaking to, for instance, your friends/family vs coworkers/boss. Some people have gone to great lengths to demonstrate their ire at not being understood in the dialect they were raised on, and many people are shamed by their communities for "being weak" or some such because they "speak white" at work but not on the corner, for instance.

Edit: fun example ->

What do you call something that is across both streets from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)?

kitty-corner

kitacorner

catercorner

catty-corner

kitty cross

kitty wampus

I would use only diagonal for this

I have no term for this

other

NY Times almost got it with Seattle! Although my weird hybrid accent was definitely something that isn't fully in line (and I also use y'all because its fun.) I loved my sociolinguistics courses in university, although definitely felt a bit self-conscious at times.

You may be onto something with the first point though: while (southeastern) Brits may chuckle at northerners calling lunch "dinner" or the southwest sounding like farmers and pirates ("ooh er! combine 'arvester!") Americans do enjoy mocking words like "fortnight" and the pronunciation of "chewsday, innit?" too. So maybe everyone just mocks everyone else and I'm reading too much into the trans-Atlantic angle. After all, the way you speak is like a constant shibboleth and that's why I default to "what's your background?" instead of "where are you from?" in very cosmopolitan places.

Edit: Kitty-corner was the giveaway for Seattle, Spokane, and SLC. Although the one I always think of was this Starbucks which used to have another Starbucks kitty-corner from it in downtown Vancouver: https://maps.app.goo.gl/LPSk9XRaJMnDUGa66

My favorite part of the quiz is that my result is very near to "you're from the US" with the exception that it is quite certain that I am not from "nahlens" (New Orleans). It's neat to see my choice to deliberately use certain words/pronunciations confusing assumptions.

Some that aren't in the NYT data are "innit" and "Origgin" instead of the local native "Oregawn". I also feel like Wednesday could be a strong candidate because around here people call it "wensday" in everyday speach and "wendsday" in formal/professional speech. I'm sure there must be somewhere they actually say "wednessday" or even ESL speakers that use the etymological "ohdinsday"

One that's particularly divisive is "the devil's beating his wife" which is what I choose to call rain coming from a clear sky, but that's a highly localised construction from nowhere near where I'm from. But the moment I heard it I knew it was far better than the "sunshowers" I grew up with because now when it happens I get to have an entire conversation instead of just nodding along with everyone else.

"Oregon" is one of my favourite west coast shibboleths. West-coasters generally say "Oh-ruh-gun" while everyone else says "Oh-reh-gone".

> and especially the football vs. soccer thing with the world cup right now

My favorite thing about this is that the term “soccer” originated in British English in the late 19th Century as an abbreviation for association football, yet we get blamed for what’s actually a useful term of distinction given the presence of a much more popular (domestically) football code.[1]

My second favorite thing is that apart from receiving the blame from the people we ought to be crediting for the term, is that even outside of America in other primarily English-speaking countries, “soccer” is the prevailing term for association football in Ireland, Australia[2], Canada & New Zealand[2]. Even in Puerto Rican Spanish and Canadian French. Despite this, America specifically gets blamed. This is easily one of the best century long psy-ops the world has ever seen. Even if we were actually alone in this though (and we’re not), as long as we keep calling it soccer, the prevailing English word is soccer, and the English language doesn’t owe any deference to another Indo-European language.

Sorry to the parent for the tangent. This is just an endless source of amusement to me how riled up soccer fans get about this difference in terminology.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soccer

[2] This is made complicated in Australia & New Zealand by the fact that the local governing bodies for soccer changed their official names and the way they refer to the sport to “football” around 20 years ago, but that didn’t overnight change the way people referred to soccer. Australia also has multiple sport codes that people colloquially call “football” and which “football” people mean is highly regional.

And rugby is actually "Rugby Football," as I learned from the local Medway Rugby Football Club.

There's association football (soccer), rugby football, gridiron football (American and Canadian), Aussie rules football, and probably others either in certain niches or in the past. I've been calling the NFL and CFL "gridiron" exclusively for a few years to avoid any confusion.

In Australia, Rugby League and Rugby Union can both be referred to as just “football”, though there are also other more distinctive terms for the sake of clarity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Australia#Terminol...

And they’re just two of the four major codes, two of the six if you include Gaelic football & gridiron which are both relatively minor.

The American and Australian dialects preserve a number of interesting archaisms.

Madison's tyranny.

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