An American Idiom in London II

Welcome back, Scooby Gang, and welcome in, if this is your first visit. Following yesterday’s look at the first half of the BBC’s reader-solicited list of Americanisms, let’s continue our item-by-item analysis of British psyche and American lingo... (apologies if the list is all bunched-up without spaces between the items (like in Part One); I do space them out but Blogger seems to eat the spaces).

26. This is an old one too, and the OED calls it a “North American term for burgle”. Burgle being the standard British English.

27. Yes, I have to say, of all the things on this list, this is probably the one I dislike most. If wanting to drive a silver knife through the heart of the person that first popularised it can be attributed to ‘dislike’.

28. Eh, it’s a fun one. I think (don’t quote me on this though), that it’s an Anglicisation of a European – maybe French? – word. Like ‘croissandwhich’ or something. Any thoughts on this, people?

29. I think the problem here, Ami, is that fortnightly is, or at least was, an exclusively British word. I remember when I lived in Florida in the nineties that people there would always remark on it when we talked about the differences between the two languages.

30. To clarify: alternate = occur in turn repeatedly; change repeatedly between two contrasting conditions (e.g. ‘alternate work with rest’). Alternative = available as another possibility or choice. But note that the OED says, “The adjective alternate is sometimes used in palce of alternate, especially in American English.” In fact, there’s a whole side bar under alternative on the etymology and usage of these two, so perhaps it’s more complicated than just an American/British dust-up.

31. Yes, very American. Also very old, so I wonder why some of these terms are apparently ‘only just’ making it into popular British English?

32. Also annoying. A lot of these stupid things like this, 33 and 35 are typical Neutral Speak, which really only serve to obfuscate and confuse. I find a lot of English translation agencies are using this kind of bullshit because it appeals to the intrinsically English passive-aggressive nature. I.e., their passivity about paying my invoices makes me aggressive...

33.Verb-into-noun nonsense. See Part One for details.

34. Perhaps a little pedantic, but it’s a fair point and shows how mistakes can happen in understanding between people speaking a common language, or thereabouts.

35. See 32. Hulk get mad, Hulk reach out and crush your tiny head!

36. Sounds odd to me, but it ever was ‘math’ for them and ‘Maths’ for us. There’s a similar thing with ‘Lego’, which for most Brits and probably quite a few Europeans, is an uncountable noun, whereas for Americans it’s always ‘Legos’. The math I can understand, the Legos make me cry.

37. Well, usually in Britain you wouldn’t specify it at all, or if you had to you’d say ‘normal’ instead of ‘regular’. But I guess this has come across with the plague of chain take-away coffee shops.

38. Meh, I grew up with expiry, but expiration is fine too.

39. An old joke, the Americanos saying ‘Scotch’ and the Limeys saying ‘That’s a drink.’ Ho ho, yawn. Makes me wonder how the popular English idiom ‘Scotch mist’ (meaning ‘nothing at all’) came about. Could it be that the English are as mis-informed as the Americans? :O

40. I suspect that it’s a peculiarly Southern phrasing, but how it made through passport control at Atlanta International to land in Luton undetected is beyond me.

41. A specific type of phrasing used by inner city, urban gangster types perhaps? Sounds sort of ‘yo yo’ doesn’t it?

42. Silly thing to be saying in British English, where it’s either a measurement of time or a biological interlude.

43. Now that sounds like ‘net speak to me. I think I probably would die a thousand deaths if I heard someone say it in a serious context on the TV or radio though.

44. Well.... It always used to be (in British English anyway), that ‘ series’ referred both to the programme as a whole, from the first to the last episode ever, and also to just the current year’s production of it. The Americanism here is ‘season’ in reference to the individual years’ productions of it, most likely from the fact that you’d get a spring ‘season’ of episodes as well as an autumn season of episodes. This has become dominant in the last ten years as DVDs have become cheaper and cheaper, leading to boxsets of entire ‘runs’ of programmes (or ‘shows’). Marketing and technology combined to fill our inboxes with adverts for Season One of the hit show! etc etc.

45. Well, John from Leicester, issue has always had this meaning in British English too, it’s just that it’s not the dominant form. I suspect this was one of the early ‘PC’ words that came out of all that American New Left stuff in the 1970s. They do like their polite euphemisms over there. 

46. No that’s just crazy.

47. noun-to-verb. Aaaarrrggghhhhh!!!!!!

48. Jonesy makes the point better than I could, and what a good point it is too.

49. No no, see, this is a Yiddishism more than an Americanism, and there’s nothing wrong with that, my life already.

50. Another point well made, and an illustration of how, in the hurry to truncate and clarify, we end up changing our meaning completely.

Well, that’s the whole list. As a final thought, I’d like to point out that although everyone of course has the right to be annoyed any and everything (especially on the Internet), I’m not sure that it’s worth getting upset about most of these 50 things. In fact, I had some brilliant, philosophical point to make about this, which I though-up in the car on the way home from collecting the kids from school today. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), I’ve since forgotten it.

Oh well, it is what it is and it ain’t what it ain’t. That’s all folks!

An American Idiom in London

Our eagle-eyed man in the field, Inspector Q, sent in this hot tip. It’s a list of 50 American words and phrases that have apparently crept into everyday British English use, as nominated by readers of one of the BBC’s magazines/websites/things.

It’s an interesting list, not just for the actual words and phrases themselves, but also for all the cultural insight it gives us into what irritates people about foreign words creeping into their native vocabularies. The British have always had the slightly hypocritical attitude of ‘We can’t stand the way you mangle The Language! (But give us the new season of The Sopranos or we’ll go mad)’. So it surprises me whenever they complain about “Americanisms”, since they’re the ones throwing open the door and rolling out the red carpet for them. 

Anyway, here’s the list again, over on the BBC website, and what follows is my own commentary on each one. We’ll do it in two parts, 1 to 25 today, 26 to 50 jutorrow. As always, any comments and opinions are welcome, stick ‘em in the box down below or head over to our Facebook page and slap ‘em on the wall there. And again, many thanks to Inspector Q up around WaWa somewhere for the link!

1. It does seem like a very ‘Friends’ thing to say, although probably it’s just part of a New York dialect.

2. Agreed.

3. This is pure News-Speak, a strange off-shoot of its parent language that was invented by news readers and announcers to make their ramblings less rambly, in much the same way the truncated Headline Grammar works.

4.  I think 24/7 is alright. What about you? Back in the nineties, in college, we used to say ‘Are you studying?’, to which the reply was ‘24/7/365, bro.’

5. This is one of those horrible American verb-noun transmutations, where you give a noun a verb form it never previously had. There are others here on this list.

6. The incorrect use is nicely explained on the site, but to clarify the waiter thing, one says of waiters/waitresses that they ‘wait tables’, ‘wait on customers’ etc. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I wait tables at a restaurant in rynek,’ etc.

7. Another one I like. Sometimes, like with languages, there are things which can not be explained; they have no rules or theory attached to them, they just are. At which point, I like to tell the pedantic, overly-inquisitive and cloistered that ‘It is what is is, relax!’

8. An old one this, coming from the American term ‘fanny’ for ‘bottom’. It’s an inoffensive way of referring to the bum that dates from the 1920s, possibly from John Cleland’s 18th century fictional heroine Fanny Hill (thanks, Dictionary of American Slang, ISBN 0-06—96160-). Note that in British slang, fanny is a similarly inoffensive term for vagina).

9. A baseball expression I suppose. When you stop to think about it, a lot of slang and idiom comes from sports, at least in English. How about in your language?

10. Well Chris, the latest OED does list it as a noun derivative of physical. The 1991 Random House Webster’s also lists it with a plural form and dates both to 1585. Proof that not everyone processes language the same way.

11. Transport is more flexible because it can be a noun and a verb, so let’s go with that wherever possible.

12. Apart from this being one of those horrible ‘new’ words invented by marketing and business people, it’s interesting that (apparently) non-American speakers are using the American pronunciation (leather-age instead of lever-age). You get it a lot when people are discussing how to make more money from existing stuff. ‘How can we add leverage to Product X to make it more profitable?’ they say. Then die horribly when Pinhead from the Hellraiser films comes to get them. (OED says it’s a US form of the British financial term ‘gearing’, btw).

13. Can’t comment on that since I don’t regularly listen or watch English news.

14. As interesting as some of the stuff here is, what’s really interesting is the insight into British mentality on display. Some of it is very ‘Little Englander’ as we say; ‘Small Island, Big Ego’ and all that jazz. No offence to Mr. Nicholson btw, but it is rather amusing.

15. Agreed. It’s a spoken shortcut that *really* doesn’t work in print. We need to abolish this one right away.

16. Eh, I don’t mind this one. Most of these so-called Americanisms are dialectical flavour which in their own context are fine, but in the mouths and minds of our friends over on the Blighted Isle taste horrible.

17. Not sure why this is here; ‘bangs’ has always been a word used to describe a type of fringe, usually in women’s hair. Dates back at least as far as the 1960s in British and American English.

18. That’s a straight copy from the US to the UK. I wouldn’t say it myself because I’m too old and so have been saying ‘take away’ for too long to change now. But this highlights how the influence of foreign words and phrases on other countries and cultures is a generational thing. I suspect the majority of people in Britain who are actually using these more ordinary Americanisms are younger people who watch a lot of American TV, either on the Internet or actually (gasp!) on TV. The older people who use them are probably really only using the business, finance and marketing stuff etc, as it tends to migrate with the bosses of international companies and so on.

19. I suspect he’s right. Some people tend to think of the US as one big country, with one culture united on the foundations of Hollywood, hamburgers, ‘mom’ and apple pie. Whereas anyone who’s actually been there knows that each state is really more like an entirely individual nation. Culture, cuisine, mentality, humour; all these things differ greatly from state to state, with of course some degree of homogeneity between northern and southern states, the Midwest, the east coast and west coast etc.

20. Another detestable tendency of making abstract concepts into countable nouns. ‘A half hour’, ‘one half hour’ etc. There are others on the list here too.

21. Like here... See also 5, making things into nouns that weren’t really nouns to begin with.

22. No idea what he means. Can anyone explain this one?

23. No problems here, other than the quoted American ‘z’ spelling – remember, US: ize, UK: ise.

24. It *is* quite a lazy phrasing, but that’s the tendency of language, to shorten and be reduced into something that can be spoken more quickly or clearly. It’s a cultural cliché to think of it as an American tendency as it happens in nearly every language.

25. It is indeed an American variant of normality.

More tomorrow!

Idiom! with Guest Columnist, Dotty

Idios, idiosyncratic, idiomatic, idiom... All begin with the Greek root idio, meaning ‘private’ and indicating something like ‘of the self’. It’s perhaps ironic then that common idiom, which begins as language private or internal to a person or group, spreads out and becomes commonplace. It’s also frustrating for translators, because literal translations of idiom rarely work well enough to make them worth the effort.

Today we have a special treat as we’re joined for this, our inaugural look at idioms, by a very good friend of the Article. She’s an experienced translator who found a job juggling English-Polish translations in visual media, and believe me, when she speaks, I listen. I asked her for a quote on the subject and she came back a couple of minutes later with this, so let’s turn it over to her now and see what she has to say. Please give a very warm welcome to Dotty. Take it away Dots!

***

One might think that translating idioms is a piece of cake. All you have to do is just find the TL equivalent, right? Well, right and wrong. Obviously, it all depends on the type of translation we’re considering, but in most cases the TL equivalent is the most straightforward and efficient strategy.

But what if we are dealing with an ST that is not an independent piece of written text, but that exists within a more complex picture-text relationship? Take a movie trailer, for example, or a promotional video for a TV programme, which is what I had to deal with quite recently and which turned out to be the most annoying idiom issue I have so far encountered (undoubtedly, another one is just around the corner). The promo was for a British cooking programme that was to be broadcast in Poland. The whole programme was a very competitive cooking contest and the video spot was for the final episode, so it was quite fast-paced and lively, and with the whole thing obviously taking place in a kitchen, the viewer could almost feel the extreme heat of the competition.

This was emphasised by repeated shots of the fires on the stove, and it begged the expression of the contestants getting “out of the frying pan into the fire”, which is exactly what the English producer had used. Now, if you think what the Polish equivalent for this idiom is, you will understand my annoyance back then. How on earth could you relate rain or a gutter to the heat of a fierce cooking competition? Literal translation was not going to work and the discrepancy in the spoken idioms’ imagery did not help.

In these cases, I need to think of a nice way to verbally fill in the idiomatic gap and link the visuals with the text by means of a witty description.

***

So, a little inventive wit was the answer to that problem, but since levity isn’t always appropriate, what else can we do? Of course, there are books full of appropriate strategies, but we want to hear from you. What clever – or brutal – solutions have you found to the problem of translating idiom? Email or comment and share your ideas! And don't forget, if there are any strange idioms you'd like to know more about, write and ask!

in case of - in the case of

Idioms are fun, and powerful too. They’re the herbs and spices in the translator’s kitchen, and as anyone who likes to cook knows, judicious and appropriate use of a little seasoning in your food can elevate it from sublime to ridiculous. Errr, elevate it from good to great. That’s it.

 Today we have on our chopping boards two tasty, valid expressions that are being confused with each other. in case of is being used instead of in the case of. This is quite a common mistake and easy to make when you’re on a (cheese) roll. This is a classic example: Colonel Grzyborowska reported that the base was running short of ammunition, which would only last 4 days in case of the infantry, and 2 days in case of the artillery.

 So, definitions:
 in case of = in the event of something happening,
 in the case of = in the particular situation of,

 See how the article changes the meaning? 

 In case (of)
1a      In case of emergency, break glass with hammer and press alarm button.
2a      In case I’m late home tonight, dinner is in the oven. Just heat it up.
3a      Take your umbrella, just in case it rains.
4a      In case of a problem with the seating, there are 50 fold-up chairs in the room next door.

In the case of

1b      In the case of Collins Vs. Gabriel 1973, no distinct verdict was reached.
2b      Marek’s okay, he’s just quiet. In the case of Darek, however, I’d lock up the pills.
3b      In the case of financial discrimination against translators and proofreaders, a zero tolerance approach is called for.

Alternative phrasing for in the case of is to say in X’s case, e.g. In Darek’s case, I’d lock up the pills. Note too the useful in the event of, which is the nearly-twin brother of in case of, but which we can deploy when the scale of the situation becomes more epic. For example, In the event of a war, we expect our missiles to land first, or In the event of a zombie apocalypse, all our Shaun of the Dead fantasies will come true.

In any event (or at any rate), try to remember the distinction here – it seems like a subtle thing, but it makes a whole case-load of difference.