Wordstalks 1: Different Englishes

Since I love to eat my words, I want to have a whole bunch of posts that I call 'wordstalks.' Puns and multiple possible segmentations intended!

Reading a novel by a Canadian author (Margaret Atwood) just now provided me with one of those delightful 'prods' reminding me of the ways in which different varieties of English have such different grammar, idiom and contextualized expressions, and how fluid these are, to the point that one is by no means stuck with the settings with which one grew up.

After 10 years in the US, most people (but not all) can still hear that I have an accent and some of them can correctly identify its provenance. Back in the UK, everyone asks about my accent! The funny part to me is that recently I commented on someone else's blog and another commenter identified me as a 'Brit' from my writing alone!

When I first arrived in the US, hearing people say 'different than' (as opposed to 'different from') was so ungrammatical to my ear, I almost had to hold my head. Now, I say 'different than' all the time (except when I'm talking to Brits)! The same with the expression 'it's not that big of a deal/big of a difference:' that 'of' there had no business being there. Apparently it's a grammatical shift that's subject to regional variation: we talked about it in Syntax class and plenty of US English speakers were just as uncomfortable with it as I was. Nowadays, if I don't say 'big of a deal' I hear the gap where the 'of' might go. I say the 'of' out loud more than half the time. And then, slang had to be painstakingly interpreted for me. This is partly my fault for not keeping up with the media/watching TV enough (shame on me!) - but last time I was in England I couldn't understand some of the slang there! It changes so fast.

Another regionalism that I've grown accustomed to since spending most of the past two years in rural Oregon and rural Alaska is the use of 'anymore' as a positive-polarity conjunction meaning approximately 'nowadays.' It doesn't even have to be contrastive. The first few times I heard 'anymore' as the first word in a sentence I was fascinated and startled: now I try not to say it all the time myself (I think it would sound affected, like when I was hanging around with a Southerner and started saying 'might could:' I couldn't help picking it up, but got teased mercilessly). Interestingly, I had thought that this was a purely American outlandishism but my Mum reminded me that our Irish neighbor says it too.

Reading Atwood's Canadian English reminded me of expressions where a word takes more than its 'neutral' value by virtue of being in a specific context. (E.g. when someone says 'wow, that's some speed!' the context makes clear that this means fast speed as opposed to just neutral speed. Or, when someone says 'she's sure got a mouth on her,' they're not just stating the banal and obvious but remarking upon the foul language coming out of her mouth.) Some of these expressions exist in one variety of English but not another. So, at one point in Atwood's novel a character is come across who has a serious wound. The person checking him over notes that 'he had no temperature.' Of course, what was meant was 'he had no fever,' but I've been away from people who use 'temperature' in the context of illness to mean a high temperature for so long that it's not at the front of my mind. I understood pretty much immediately, but was fascinated to observe a split-second where, misplacing the idiom, I thought 'ha, that's like saying he didn't have a pulse!'

I didn't know that this was the kind of idiom one could lose track of for lack of use. I guess there are some that I have 'acquired' since being over here too.