American English in the UK?

[She went straight to the desk and asked where the machine was, to which the shop assistant pointed over her shoulder and said "It's over there. What are you, a f***ing retard?!" ]

This both shocks and appalls me; at my establishment, it would be grounds for immediate dismissal. Then again, in the heartland, New Yorkers are known for their rudeness.

URIEL: your Alaskan anecdote was amusing. It does illustrate the laid-backness of the Fairbanks people, which can almost be a negative in its intensity. My relative told me that the people are so laid-back that, to get anything done on your house, sometimes several appointments are missed before they finally get around to addressing the issue at hand. (Winterization issues, however, are promptly dealt with; the Alaskan winter is no joking matter.) On the other hand, this same laid-backness is a major positive for those who want to get out of the rat-race.

As an aside: It's curious to note that Fairbanksans and Anchorage-ites often dislike each other. Fairbanks is called "Squarebanks" by Anchorage denizens; Anchorage is called "Los Anchorage", derisively--Anchorage even has a gang problem.

Your Dad's observations are absolutely accurate. Plug-in heaters are an absolute necessity for Fairbanksans, as is yearly winterizing for automobiles. (Many Fairbanksans don't drive their autos in wintertime; bundled up like a cocoon, they walk.) Temperatures of -50F (-45C) occur nearly every year, and once, in rural Fairbanks, it got down to -70F
(-56C). On the other hand, Fairbanks is said to have the absolute most-pleasant summers in the world.

I have gotten a little bit off the topic. GEORGE, I will address the Fairbanks immigration issue shortly...

Various issues have been raised here.

I'll start off with the very last one in Hilda's post. YES! We British are Europeans...our mere geography dictates that, and now so does political union......the days of "British Insularity vis a vis The Continent" are now as dead as the New Zealand dodo.

Even so we will jealously guard our individuality as a separate entity within a whole - a United Kingdom within a United Europe. In the course of time we WILL be earning and spending and, hopefully, saving the Euro ...... the Pound Sterling will go the way of the Deutschmark, the Franc, the Guilder, the Peseta, the Escudo, the Lire, the Drachma, the Schilling, the Punt and whatever it was they used to have in Finland...from memory was it the Markka?

But we will continue to drive on the left - nothing will change that and that is made much easier for everyone because we just don't have a land border with any other EU State....oh the sheer joys of being an island nation!....... so all those signs along all the roads leading away from the Channel and North Sea Ferry Terminals and the Chunnel itself will still tell people to "Tenez a Gauche" and "Links Fahren" as they venture forth onto the UK road system. That's just one of our many national characteristics, just as all our other member States jealously guard their own, and it's imperative that they do. It's wonderful that each nationality within Europe has a distinct, identifiable character, not only relating to the people themselves but also their individual countries. Very few Swedes conduct themselves quite the same was as do the Italians, or the Irish the Greeks and the Portuguese the Danes, and so on.

It's also imperative that nobody ever calls the entire population of these islands English! That is an absolutely unforgiveable sin. Much as I love all my English mates I have no desire whatsoever to be called English myself. I am Scottish, and my close friend down in Anglesey is Welsh, with no desire to be called English either. And I'm sure my English mates would never wish to be called either Scottish or Welsh. yet we are all bound up in the same Union, just as we are on a wider European sphere.

As for Americans being seen as rude - either at home or abroad - well, generalising is just an idiotic thing to do. It's crazy to even think that is so. It's just like saying that every single British person who ventures abroad is an obnoxious binge drinking yob causing mayhem to everyone else around them. It's always the case of a small minority getting all the limelight and tarnishing their national reputation.

The tipping thing - we've discussed this before. It's more of a big issue in the USA than it is here in the UK or in Europe generally, where waiters, etc are not so dependent on tips for making up their pay to an acceptable level due to statutory minimum wage requirements. Many restaurants here present you with the bill showing the actual total payment due, and then underneath that a note stating that a gratuity is entirely optional and then a £ sign with a blank space for you to enter an amount you wish to pay including a tip you are willing to include in a total payment. That was the case when we had lunch over the weekend at this really great pub called The Malsters' Arms in a lovely village in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. It was up to us to have the tip added to the bill for insertion into the credit card machine when she brought it to our table. I was down there with a friend of mine who had invited me to accompany him and a small group of other Scottish guys to this weekend of Morris dancing involving 14 other Morris dancing groups from across the Midlands. My friend is hoping to get his own MD group going up here - great, as long as he doesn't expect me to join it. It's very much an English thing anyway, something which has never caught on in Scotland in any big way, whereas England has many hundreds of Morris Dancing groups, made up entirely of men (women are totally banned but are free to organise their own groups with their own brand of dancing, quite unlike the men and far less aggeressive and boisterous and much less inclined to dance as close as possible to a pub, they don't bash sticks and staff together and don't have tankards hanging down from their belts and don't have a Fool or an accordianist but do have a tambourinist....)

Some restaurants, pubs etc include two actual amounts on the bill - one including a tip they have worked out for themselves on a 10% or 12.5% basis, and it's up to you to tell the waiter which one to log into the machine. Then it's up to you to check that amount before you tap in your PIN.

It's then up to the establishments themselves to sort out the distribution of tips to the staff concerned, and if they are respectable and ethical they will do it fairly, and not apportion some or all of it to the proprietors and their overall profits! There is no actual legislation in the UK that I am aware of that governs the distribution of tips to the staff on an equitable basis, but I may be wrong without checking it out, and I don't feel so inclined right now! My guess is that it is all left to the discretion of the businesses concerned and their standards of morality and ethics. A huge number of waiting staff in the UK are non UK citizens anyway who may not be totally au fait with regulations - not to start with anyway, as most of them soon become totally savvy streetwise if they hang around long enough and stand up for themselves if they feel aggrieved and short changed. It's more difficult to get fired in the UK and Europe than it is in the United States, by all accounts.

<<so all those signs along all the roads leading away from the Channel and North Sea Ferry Terminals and the Chunnel itself will still tell people to "Tenez a Gauche">>

Do they really say that ?

That's broken French.

<<Then again, in the heartland, New Yorkers are known for their rudeness.>>

So you really agree with me that you can't generalise about nations? Different areas, different cultural groups have different manners?

By the way Damien, I agree with you on both points - about Europe and the English/British thing. I'm English living in Scotland, and it makes me cringe when I hear people saying "English" when they mean British. I always feel compelled to apologise..

It should have read "Tenez la Gauche". That's what all those signs say at the UK entry points.

Here is an extract from a diary kept by cyclists who had just arrived in England from the Continent:

"Lympne* is about 245 miles from Exeter. We cycled out of the airport gates and came upon a road sign: LINKS FAHREN TENEZ LA GAUCHE

We wondered whether we had landed in the wrong country, but on translating discovered that it meant "Keep to the Left". So we crossed over to the left! It did seem strange after 5 weeks of cycling on the right. I made an error when turning a corner near Lewes, and found myself on the wrong side of a traffic island, to the surprise of the driver of a Daimler. However we soon re-established ourselves on the correct side of the road. We went about 8 miles down a narrow, typically English country lane which wound itself around every obstruction, and reached the village of Newchurch, near Romney. We went into the village shop and bought all sorts of provisions and a new torch battery. The shop keeper and his wife, after hearing a little of our story, gave us tea and some lovely cakes. It was so nice to find that our own countrymen could be as kind as the people abroad had been...."


*Lympne is pronounced simply as Lim, apparently. Many place names in Kent, particularly, are not pronounced anything like the way they are spelled. For instance, the lovely village of Trottiscliffe is called Trossley and not far away from there the village of Horsmonden is simply Hormsdun, or so I'm told by a bloke who comes from Sevenoaks, also in Kent - now that IS pronounced just as it says - or so he tells me. How can you possibly mess around with Sevenoaks anyway?

No need to apologise on behalf of others, Hilda......we're used to it anyway, like being called Scotch! That's even worse - we don't come out of a bottle! Welcome to Scotland btw.

<<Maybe it's worth recounting an anecdote my American flatmate told me, here. She's from West Virginia. The first time she went to New York she was just 17 and really excited. She needed some cash, and so went into a shop that had an ATM sign outside. She went straight to the desk and asked where the machine was, to which the shop assistant pointed over her shoulder and said "It's over there. What are you, a f***ing retard?!"

Funny as it is, what conclusions can you draw from this? That all Americans are rude?>>

No, but New Yorkers, on the other hand, take great pride in their rudeness! ;) The joke is that the sign outside the city says WELCOME TO NEW YORK. NOW GO AWAY.

<<My relative told me that the people are so laid-back that, to get anything done on your house, sometimes several appointments are missed before they finally get around to addressing the issue at hand.>>

Hmmm. Ya'll may have a bunch of transplanted New Mexicans up there. We're not called the Land of Manana for nothing! Anything worth doing is worth doing tomorrow. (Sorry, can't type the tilde -- and yes, it's weird to write it without -- makes me want to rhyme it with "banana"!)

"I want...Can I get...?"

I hate this little toddler-screaming-I-want style of American English.

"I want a Big Mac." is what Americans say in the stores in London. E.r... did your mother never scold you as a child when you said that? Have you no culture?

"Can I get a Big Mac?" You do mean, "May I?", don't you, you moron? And, no, you may not get it. The staff serve the customers in this store; customers cannot get the things themselves. You may HAVE what you have want. You may not GET it.

American English is so-o-o uneducated.

I'm British and I sometimes say "can I get" when I ask for something - with a friendly smile of course. No one's ever taken offence. When I'm speaking informally I also sometimes say "you want to" instead of "you should" i.e. "You want to speak to him about it" meaning "you should speak to him about it". It's not incorrect, it's just informal, influenced by regional forms (north-eastern English in this case).

I presume you're not a linguistician, Matt. Ask a real authority on linguistics - and by that I mean academics who study the structures and development of languages, not pretentious elitists who remember being told once by someone that they shouldn't split infinitives - and they'll tell you that grammar, in the true sense of the word, is descriptive, not prescriptive.

They'll also tell you that languages are not homogenous, and invariably have numerous lexical and grammatical variations.

Sounds to me like you're the one who's so-o-o-uneducated.

Incidentally, the word 'get' has several meanings, including 'to receive', as in "I got an e-mail". So there's nothing illogical about asking "Can I get a can of coke?"

In Britain you also hear "grab" used in informal contexts to mean 'get'. "I'm just going to grab a sandwich", or, to a shopkeeper, "Can I grab a can of coke, please?"

Are you going to suggest that's wrong too, Matt?

"Can I have a tuna and sweetcorn roll with some coleslaw, please!" is exactly what I said to the girl in the nearby deli a little earlier. "May I have" may be more "correct" but nobody I know uses it as it sounds a wee bit stuffy. I've never used "grab" in such a situation, but I may well have used it when telling someone I was taking a short break - as in "I'm going to grab a quick coffee and a bite - back soon!"

Hilda Ogden, what an absurd post! A linguistician!!! Do you mean a linguist, my dear? An "expert" in language will inform me that true grammar is descriptive and not prescriptive. That is such a stupid statement. Get an IQ test, luv. A linguist who told me that would be conveying his PERSONAL OPINION on the subject; it would not be an insight garnered from years of research.

"Grab" cannot be be used correctly to ask a shopkeeper to get something for you. Your English is appalling, my dear.

Polite people in America usually say,"I would like an eggroll, please", not " I want". Personally, when I hear a customer say,"I want", I mentally repeat "Polly want a cracker?" because I'm not crazy about the phrase "I want."

"Can I get..." is an Americanism; what else can you say?

["Can I get..." is an Americanism; what else can you say?]

That was improperly worded; I'll redo it.

"Can I get" is an Americanism; it is what it is...

Hello Matt.

A linguistician is someone who studies linguistics, as opposed to a linguist, who studies languages. That's what the Oxford English Dictionary says anyway, although maybe you know better. Look it up, if you can be bothered.

As regards opinion and fact - well, socio-linguistics is a social science, so it is largely based around opinion and interpretation, unlike more empirical subjects. With that in mind, if you can find me a recent linguistician whose opinion matches anything like your banal, tired-out preconceptions of what constitutes 'good' English, please give us the references. My guess, however, is that you've never studied linguistics.

If you're seriously interested you could try reading some of David Crystal's books. Giuliano and Laura Lepschy would also be useful authors to read, and you'll find in their texts a good bibliography of relevant texts where you can survey current ideas on the prescriptive/descriptive debate - they do use some big words for big boys and girls, but do your best to muddle through anyway.

In the meantime, have you got any other gems to share with us? Any more outlandish and subjective value judgements on other people's speech? Go on, give us a laugh, luv.