To our British friends: we call the rearmost compartment of a car a “trunk”, because in the early days of automobiles, it was a literal trunk (usually a small steamer trunk) that was strapped to a rack mounted on the back of the car. When designers began incorporating it into the body of the car, the name stuck.
@crash burn "...the boot was so named..." Still waiting to hear why 'boot' is the term for all that you described. The US uses 'trunk' because it used to be a trunk, so Brits say 'boot' because?????
@@LouieLouie505 on smaller [horse drawn] carriages - ie. the precursor to the private car - boots were kept in a locker under the rear facing seat (at the back of the carriage), so that passengers who had to disembark in muddy conditions didn't mess up their smarter dress shoes.
One of my favourite jokes: American: Let's take the elevator up to the top floor Englishman: You mean "lift" mate American: Actually no it's called an elevator Englishman: No in English it's called a lift. We're English. We invented the ENGLISH language. American: No. It's called an elevator. Because WE invented the elevator .
@@KindredBrujah Archimedes invented the motorized elevator?? Or was his just man-powered? Of course you know the "kind" of elevator that's being referred to here. Now run off with your semantic shenanigans.
@@slinky6481 It's not the motori *s* ed, it's the safety elevator. With a brake, where, if the car starts accelerating downward at a certain rate, it causes a weight to rise, since free falling is equivalent to weightlessness. The weight, now weight-less (cos it weighs less), rises up, undoes a catch, and powerful springs jam wooden beams under or over the car, into rails on the wall of the shaft. At least that was Otis's basic idea. Modern ones, I think, still use that principle. Since unlike computerised motion sensors etc, it can't go wrong as long as simple physics remains the same. I think instead of levers jamming in, brakes are applied that squeeze against a girder. Still, needs no power source, easily resettable, foolproof. Before Otis, people worried that the ropes could snap and they'd plummet down to their doom. This limited the height of buildings people could use. So Otis did his demonstration with a big wooden frame and his mockup lift car and safety brake. A man winched the car, with Otis, to the top (again, not so much a car just a few planks making a basic frame with a floor on it), waving and smiling. Then Otis ordered the man to cut the rope, with a big axe! The lift fell. About 6 inches, then the brakes kicked in. Perfect, lots of impressed public and also he didn't die.
BTW if you want a free freefall related factoid... astronauts in space, are not nearly far away enough to be free from the Earth's gravity. They still feel almost all of the Earth's gravitational pull. So they fall. Spaceships are constantly falling to Earth. But if they're moving fast enough, by the time they've fallen a little, they've also moved forward a little. And moving "forward", that is at a right angle to the ground, means the ground underneath is further away, since the Earth is round. Viewed from above it, the ground falls away in every direction, imagine being on a point just above the globe, any direction you move, the ground is going to get lower beneath you. They fall in an arc, like a shell from a mortar. But their arc goes far enough forward that it misses the ground completely and ends up falling round and round the Earth. So gravity pulls you down to Earth, but velocity pushes you forward, to where the ground is that bit lower. They cancel out. Your falling effectively cancelled by your moving forward. The result is, you're constantly falling to Earth, but constantly going forward. So you fall to Earth, but you miss! You keep missing the ground, so stay up there in a circle, or indeed an ellipse. Gravity is still pulling normally. You're falling, the spaceship is falling, the stuff inside the spaceship is falling. Like if you were in a free-falling lift, your feet would leave the floor, objects would float in the air, you'd be "weightless". Except not weightless at all, just in freefall. Gravity is effectively cancelled out, for you, relative to the spaceship and it's contents. But of course it's still pulling you down all the time. If it wasn't, if gravity lost it's grip, you'd zoom off into infinity. It's gravity that gives things a stable orbit, constantly falling, constantly missing the ground. It's how those "vomit comet" aeroplanes work. They're aeroplanes astronauts use to practice weightlessness, effectively the plane takes a free dive downward, and as you'd imagine, everything starts floating around, "zero G". It's _effectively_ zero G but in actuality completely 1G. So you could have zero gravity in a lift with a long enough shaft. For the height you'd need for more than a couple of seconds, it wouldn't be worth it. Unless scientists are allowed to practice in office blocks on weekends. The forward velocity that keeps a spaceship, or a satellite, up there, is what the rocket is for. All that energy isn't to lift the spaceship up high enough. It's to get it travelling forward, fast enough. Every rocket launch, you'll see starts off vertically, but soon the rocket turns to face horizontally. It needs to accelerate to a great speed, the faster you fly, the higher your orbit. Like swinging a weight on a string around your head, if it's further out from the centre, it needs to cover a greater distance, and you need to put more effort into it, or else it will fall. So a correct astronaut will refer to "freefall" but never "zero G" because there's nowhere in the Universe where there isn't a bit of gravity from something somewhere. Well, everything everywhere, technically.
As a brit, I’ve always thought the US got the naming of public and private schools right… private means you have to pay to get in, public means it’s provided for the public
@@mournblade1066 a public school in Britain is what Americans would call a private school but it's "public" in the sense that anyone with sufficient funds can go. What Americans would call a public school would be (I believe) called a state school.
One criticism I received from some Brits was for the word "sidewalk." They said it was almost infantile and that we should use the word "pavement" like adults. The thing is, though, we do use the word "pavement" to refer to anything that is paved. That includes roads, car lots, and also sidewalks. The word pavement is ambiguous in many cases. If I say, "Let's meet out on the pavement," you may think I'm talking about the parking lot outside the office, the sidewalk just off the property, or (less likely) the street.
@@lhaviland8602 same here in Ontario. Pavement nearly always means asphalt, not concrete. But then we say "tarmac" when it could be either asphalt or concrete. Sometimes you just have to have everything backwards :)
I'm sure it is different in various locales in the US. But for the most part in Missouri we consider pavement as a construct meaning anything paved. However paved isn't restricted to asphalt. Concrete is always pavement, but asphalt may be pavement but many times it is referred to as asphalt. We also use tarmac but not as much and it doesn't differentiate between concrete and asphalt.
Yeah, until I started listening to subbed VTuber clips, I thought it was an English only thing, or at least English related. Then I heard Japanese people saying “Okay” and I thought they were just using the English word for their version of “okay”. Nope, they actually use it. lol
@@rbbecker73 President Martin Van Buren was from Kinderhook, New York. His nickname was Old Kinderhook aka OK. Another possible contributor to the idiom was "oll korrect" which has a story of its own. Neither of these have anything to do with that abomination of a state, Oklahoma (yes, I'm a Texan😜).
@@VoidHxnter "Nope, they actually use it." The same way English speakers _"actually use"_ the word "tsunami." They're called "loanwords" and all languages have plenty. Just putting this out there because I see a lot of "fun facts" that say stuff like "did you know Japanese doesn't have a word for 'pepperoni?'" So some people get this weird impression Japanese just has no way of saying many things.
The United States has many different accents and words in different regions. Compare a Boston accent to an Alabama accent and you will hear the difference. English doesn't really have dialects.
@@johnsaia9739 England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, North Ireland all have many accents as do America and Australia and other English speaking nations. My point is within these countries there are multiple accents so one country should never say something is pronounced wrong when it is pronounced in different ways throughout their country.
The funniest part to me is they somehow assume England is magical and the only place with many accents and dialects. A lot of English people refuse to accept there's more than 2 or 3 accents in America. There is more than that in my state, plus more than one dialect. Idk why they revel in their ignorance on this one.
@@rapa2894 lol yep, I worked in London for a while and just on my floor of the office different people pronounced things in really different ways. I know I have kind of the generic newscaster Midwest American accent but I have family on both coasts and the way they talk is really different.
“The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears. There even are places where English completely disappears. Well in America it hasn’t been used fir years!” Same character, but modified for the musical “My Fair Lady”
@@bookmouse2719 The original play by Shaw was Pygmalion, which was adapted in the US by Lerner and Lowe in the 1950s into the Broadway musical, later made into a movie, “My Fair Lady.” Rex Harrison played Prof. Higgins, speak/singing the words I quoted as part of a song. I never saw or read the original Shaw version, so I don’t know the exact context of the quote in it, or even whether it was a song, so I quoted from the movie version, which I did see. I knew that Shaw wrote the original, but I never read it. Without the music I never would have remembered that much of it!
Honestly one of the most fascinating things to me, is how “OK/Okay” has permeated throughout such a huge portion of the world. Watching foreign shows in many countries, I often see/hear them say it. Such a useful yet simple word.
"As long as we understand each other, that's all that matters." For some reason that made me tear up. I think people forget that the purpose of language is to understand others. Being so caught up in semantics undermines the very reason we speak. A little bit of understanding goes a long way.
This is one of the things that stuck with me from the cultural anthropology course I took in college. What really matters in a language is mutual communicability and how well the language serves to enhance a people's ability to survive and thrive within their given environment.
Words are the way we try to understand each other. If you want to communicate something, it is *your* sole obligation to make yourself understood, in terms the listener will underatnd, *not* the listener's obligation to understand *you.*
I feel like you need to be made aware of a southern colloquial hyper-contraction if you aren't aware of it. I think it's linguistically amazing for English. That word is: Y'all'd've. In its complete form without contraction, it is: You all would have. I just find it amazing at how that word rolls off the tongue and is very nearly a complete sentence. Edit: I know it could be a full sentence, but it's never used alone. It's always at least "Y'all'd've, too"
I love these so-called hyper-contractions. I've been using "I'd've" for years now and it only occurred to me the first time when I went to write it that it isn't accepted syntax (yet). xD
Is it really a hyper-contraction or just natural tendency to shorten speech. Almost everyone learning a foreign language thinks that native speakers speak too fast or don't enunciate well.
I live in the South, and I never realized that this wasn’t as common as I thought. I thought everyone used that hyper contraction until I started paying attention to speech on the internet more. Us Southerners like to make everything to most efficient and to the point as we can be. From farming equipment to speech.
Mr. Brown, This reminds me of another "Lost Memo" for you: In my earlier years, I strived to speak better English, and worked to replace "fall" with "autumn" in my vocabulary, feeling that "fall" was just kind of like American slang or something. ... and then I discovered the truth of the matter. "Summer" and "winter" have ancient roots in proto-Germanic. The names for the other two seasons are newer. People in 16th Century England began to refer to the "spring of the leaf" and the "fall of the leaf", and that's how we got "spring" and "fall" for the other two seasons. And that's what the anglosphere was using at the time of the American Revolution, and for some time afterward. For whatever reason, in the 19th Century, British people in both the British Isles and elsewhere in their empire started using the Latin word "autumn" instead of "fall". And today I hear from a lot of non-American English speakers how it seems that Americans are just wrong for using "fall" for the season of the year we're now experiencing. Except, that the U.S. did not get the memo, and continued to use the original English word for the season and did not adopt a foreign term like everyone else did. With that in mind, and still endeavoring to speak better English, I defenestrated "autumn" from my vocabulary and embraced "fall" as the true English word. And thus, it's an example of Americans speaking better English than... the English.
as someone who speaks the 3 main Romance languages (Spa/Fre/Ita) I continue to use Autumn in more highfalutin conversations :P ALso, Astronomy user the term "Autumnal Equinox" so that reinforces also
It's not just the *names* of "fall" and "spring" that are recent, it's also the *concepts." Spring and fall/autumn didn't need names back when people didn't have much use for the concepts and tended to divide the year in half, the only seasons being winter and summer.
The idea of true English is impossible, it never can be pinpointed to an exact moment like you're saying it can be. If I started speaking Early English/Anglo-Saxon, by your logic I would be speaking better English than the English. It is with this that English will always be English for the English and anything else is different English.
You may notice a rather distinct difference between herb and honor/hour/honestly, though. The 'e' in herb? At least in my dialect, which I'll admit is neither British nor American, is very awkward to say as the initial sound of a syllable (and very few words are pronounced that way, none of which are spelled with an h), but follows from h very nicely (as it does in 'her' and 'heard'), where as the o in those others words is very easy to say as an initial sound but ends up awkwardly (in a way that causes physical discomfort) swallowed if I try to precede it with a pronounced h (a sound made mostly in the throat rather than the mouth). I should note that hour has two syllables (the h is silent, the o is more of a short 'ah' sound, and the ur somehow becomes more of a wh' (that ' is a schwa)), while our has only one (the whole word is just a single diphthong). The joys of dialects.
1. The other dialects that drop or de-emphasize the H aren't as annoying as the Americans or as self important. 2. The name Herby is still pronounced with a H.
The people that actually recognize the brand near my area pronounce it as "Crow-ger." Most Kroger stores in this area are franchised convenient stores (read: gas station; they all are mini-marts that have fuel pumps... most here have heard the term petro, but never use it unless imitating a Brit) juxtapose to the full grocery supermarkets.
Well, here in America, we felt the need to differentiate between 'herb', as in the dried, minced plant life one might sprinkle on food, and 'Herb', the shortened nickname of someone named 'Herbert'.
What is a constant irritant to me about British English is the lack of a collective singular. Thus you get "the family are". While I get the concept that a family is a group of people it is also a unit in and of itself. So one family is and two or more families are. The British way makes subject/ verb agreement break in my American ear. Ah, well. Two peoples separated by a common language and all that, I guess.
@@tonygumbrell22 Australians do the same thing, I think. I watch some Aussie beauty gurus and every time they say "This brand are..." my mind immediately goes 🚨🚨🚨
@@vera-vf4we That has the smell of hypercorrection on it. A company is clearly a group of people, but a brand is a brand. Most corporations, if they brand their product, have multiple brands that may overlap personnel in charge of them.
Yeah that used to bother me, then I listened to more british stuff and now I'm irreparably muddled, I can't stick to either standard. and I've noticed others around me not doing it consistently either.
@@Markle2k well that's why it's easier to just stick with the actual noun you're using, not what it represents. because one's quite objective and the other's subjective and vague.
My favorite difference is math and maths. There was an old Numberphile video on it (featuring CGP Grey) that explained that the difference is pretty much down to the fact that English generally doesn't have a set rule for abbreviation, and the abbreviation of mathematics came when universities created course catalogs in the late 1800's/ early 1900's. American universities preferred a four letter code for course subjects, so mathematics became just MATH, and English universities preferred 5 letter codes, so MATHS because there is a 's' at the end. As a person who works in math and has worked with many British people they will sometimes defend it by saying that math should be pluralized either because there are multiple steps in most math or because it refers to the multiple disciples and subjects under the banner or "mathematics". To that that numberphile video points that that most British people would say "maths is hard" rather than "maths are hard" and similarly treat it grammatically as a singular term.
@@comma_thingy Just as not all that glitters is gold, not all words ending in an s are plural. Mathematics isn't plural, nor is physics, linguistics, and politics.
@@comma_thingy Yeah, but you don't keep the 's' normally when shortening words, do you? Like, why cut out most of the middle bits, but keep the 's'? Is linguistics 'lings'? Is politics 'pols'?
Can anyone actually explain both or either of these to me? Zed I accept…it’s silly to me but whatever; add extra sounds that aren’t related in any possible way I guess. Also; would brits watch Dragon Ball Zee or Dragon Ball Zed? The narrator tells you the correct thing to say but how far do y’all go 😅 Haitch just reeks of wanting to be posh.
@@bitharne Haitch is the opposite of posh, it was working-class Irish Catholics who popularised the pronunciation. Look it up. In fact I believe Ireland is the only country where it is the accepted pronunciation, certainly isn't in Received Pronunciation.
We owe a great debt to the many Americans like Jerry Seinfeld over the years, who just invented words and phrases because they wanted to. Close talker Pinch weasel Master of my domain
Another for you, which is my favorite: *Scrumdiddlyumptious!* Though popularized by Roald Dahl in *The BFG,* this term started as an American slang improvement on the British *Scrumptious*
No, there are many situations today where different is dangerous. I cannot "agree to disagree" with people who sexualize children or want to refuse healthcare to the unvaccinated. Ideologies which endanger innocent people must be opposed and defeated.
@@howtubeable Agree, but for that healthcare workers themselves have a right not overly to endanger their own health by chronic close personal exposure to adult patients who (heedless of the health of their healthcare workers) refuse vaccination against COVID, for too many proven a lethal and/or lastingly disabling infectious disease.
Thank you for this. Linguistic superiority always irks me and I blame schoolteachers for the way they teach the scholarly register as though it were the only correct way. Non-standard does not mean incorrect. Dialects abound, each with their own storied history. None are the standard dialect with errors. And then there's this meme fodder: Brits: "American English sounds so childish!" Also Brits: "Brolly. Cuppa."
the reason why, I believe at least for all of this linguistic superiority is the american's massive amount of soft power, and since the younger english people (like me) grew up hearing the american pronunciations more than the english pronunciations, making us use some of them. This then leads to the older ones getting really defensive because they feel like their dialect, which came first, is being erased by these americans saying the words differently, the people who get corrected the most I think are actually the English kids
Brits are also out there saying fizzy drink for soda, cheese toastie for grilled cheese, telly for TV, wellies for rain boots, and washing up liquid for dish soap. It's almost like they're trying to sound adorable lol
@@JMPschool1 Well, "wellies" is short for "Wellington boots", after the Duke of Wellington who popularized them in the early 1800s. We all judge other dialects against our own. Of course the way "they" talk is strange, because we're not accustomed to it. The term "soda" comes from the sodium salts used to decrease the acidity. It's oddly specific and honestly a strange way to refer to a category of beverage. At least "fizzy drink" is more usefully descriptive. And yes, I was born and raised and I live in the USA.
@@R.F.9847 I really enjoy the kind of whimsical impression many British words and phrases provide my American ear. I never knew American English could be perceived as childish by some, so I found it funny. Putting an ie or y at the end of things is generally cute and diminutive to us, and British and Australian English has a lot of that. In a very similar way, Swiss German sounds cute to Germans because they often use a diminutive suffix with a long ee sound like li or i, so it would almost be like if someone said bread-ling instead of roll/bun lol.
I specifically have not done a linguistic degree because I want to preserve the joy I have for it. I admire your ability to do that and this channel, which so often involves linguistic differences.
I took courses in Linguistics and it's made accents fascinating. Not just how it arose, but when you hear people speak, you're like "ooh, they have a ____ accent" and you'll notice what makes it unique, not just in how they say words, but in their word choice, too.
My son double majored and linguistics was one of his majors. It's actually an interesting major. He was recruited by the FBI, he wasn't interested in joining that particular organization, but it's surprising how many different fields are interested in linguistics students. His text books looked like ancient Greek writing me.
As you Brits say "good on you." Aren't there as many differences within the UK as to pronounciation and use of words? I find it strange that the British would criticize America for it.
I honestly found this really fascinating. I'm American and my uncle (not blood related, but still family) is from London. He always told me not to worry about Brits making fun of how I talk because of the same stuff in this video. But they never offended me. Mainly because when I get told I don't speak "proper English" my mind instantly goes to Australia. My uncle's daughter was born and raised there and when I met her I could tell she was struggling not to use a lot of slang. I was a kid at the time and I probably wouldn't have understood 😅
"Herb" is a really funny one because, as an American, I associate dropped H's at the start of words VERY strongly with British accents. "Ello, 'Enry! 'Ad an 'orrible experience 'ere today, I 'ear!" _edit: Although reading back, the class thing makes a lot of sense, because that sentence sounds like something that only an orc or a chimney sweep would say._
Yeah, it's similar to accents, modern 'american' accents were the accent commoners spoke with, modern English accents being old upper class accents that spread to the rest of England, figures some of them would get self important.
Yeah "herb" has always been the weirdest one to me. It seems to be singular H word where Brits insist on pronouncing the H regardless of regional accent.
Yes! I love how much he loves and respects us. He defends us when we're right, has no problem poking fun of us when we're wrong. He's our biggest champion and is with us through the highs... and lows. He really is like the best friend who loves us unconditionally, isn't he?
I think the US invented "weekend", too. In France it's become something like L'weekend, which drives the purists crazy which is another reason to be proud of it. The only difference that puzzles me is the US saying "transmission" while the Brits say "gear box". Seems like it should be the opposite. A gear box is knowable whereas a transmission is something only elites can comprehend.
Americans know how to properly use a collective noun. ex the family IS on vacation not ARE on vacation. So it has to be THIS family . Brits would have to say THESE family.
I appreciate these distinctions because I moved from NYC to London at age 13 and had quite the time learning how to speak and listen all over again. Eventually I resorted to mimicry being careful not to over-do it. Some accents remained impenetrable even after years, like Scottish or Cockney. The way the recording on a busy-signal phone call said "The line is engaged" was so damn posh!
Grew up in the UK but am from the US. My favorite method where my mother did something similar was with the pronunciation of schedule, which we pronounce like skedjule instead of shedjule. One of the ladies in my mother's social group started making a big deal of this and belittling her for it asking her where she learned to pronounce the word so poorly, and without blinking, my mother looked at her and said (spelled phonetically) in shule (instead of skool) for school. Remembering this since it's one of the big inconsistencies I always remember with UK English, despite them saying we're inconsistent :)
I literally bust out laughing and could not stop for a minute or two (am American) at the fact that Americans added hangover to the English lexicon. Sounds appropriate.
Growing up, in the PNW of the US in a rural town, the "big" department store in town had an employee who was from England (I never thought to ask and she may no longer be with us) I always enjoyed listening to her speak. Many people even here in the US are mean and will say "You talk funny," or "You have a funny accent." Not me, to me that lady had a beautiful accent.
Interesting! Thank you! If you haven't already, read the history of our Noah Webster. He was bright & made significant reforms to our education system in the early days of our country. He went on to write dictionaries - the first collecting all unique American words & standardizing spelling. We have Noah to thank for dropping all those u's (honour, colour) and adding words unique to us like skunk and squash (the New World food). His influence on our language came just as our nation was developing and is really central to how we speak today - and he did it all for clarity & consistency, for education.
@@rd6203 Of course we don’t. That’s why It needs to become our mantra. Our world would be a much better place if people actually tried to understand each other instead of just yelling at each other.🐝🤗🤗
@@deborahdanhauer8525 ☺☺ Actual "conversation" i have had "Saying it louder isn't going to make him understand English any better" "Well, yes, but i don't know how to say it in Spanish "
@@rd6203 lol!! That about sums it up…. Btw, I got across Mexico once by using the three or four Spanish words I knew, and a lot of pointing and pantomime. I looked a fool, but it worked!🐝❤️🤗
@@deborahdanhauer8525 I have learned two things in my life... well, I have actually learned a great many things in my life, but two pertinent to the subject at hand: The *vast* majority of people will make a genuine effort to understand you if you make a genuine effort to be understood. My personal assumption is that this tidbit of human nature is responsible for the birth of language in the first place. And most people will help, if you ask. And if they can't, they'll usually try to direct or pass you to someone who can But also, some people won't 😟
this is the most fantastically positive channel. much needed in society here in USA. Satire is hilarious, delivery is good, animations are captivating enough i don't look away, and it keeps my attention. hard to find that lately.
Well that was a load of poppycock. I said that last week and my grandkids just loved it. Nana was reading a book to my 6 year old grandson last night and he said." Nana that sounds like poppycock." I couldn't stop laughing 🤣
In my youth, I lived in Australia, and we fought regularly about the correct pronunciation of Aluminum. It took us almost a year to figure out that the English and American versions of the word were spelled differently thus the different pronunciation. We all had to agree that we were both right… and that’s super cool.
Americans use the original spelling and pronunciation of aluminum, as established by Humphrey Davey. The royal science club decided that aluminium sounded more posh and Davy said, ok fine. We didn't feel like going along with the change. Eventually all of Europe agreed on the new, posh spelling. By that time we were all the way to not giving AF about everyone else liking the posh version and have been waiting for the UK to get over it ever since.
I mean do we really even say aluminum that much anyway? It’s definitely not an everyday word. When would you even use it? In US we call aluminum foil “tin foil” anyway. When else would you use it?
@@catgirl6803 In Davy's first paper to The Royal Society he called it alumium - and no one objected. In his 1812 book of discoveries he called it aluminum - that's where the world at large learned about it and that's what everyone called it. The Royal Society decided that henceforth new discoveries ought to have Latin or Greek sounding names because that would somehow make them sound more legit. I am not making that up. The Brits changed it to aluminium because to them, the big experts, it simply sounded more posh, more upper drawer, more expensive school. That's what they decided to foist off on the rest of the world and they went along with it. I don't know why we didn't. Maybe on the third name we decided to wait until the royal science club was done being fickle. Maybe we already had signs painted. I don't know. I only know that we never cared. There's a lot of crown worshiping in America today but it wasn't always that way. We used to be proud of being free of royalty, now we're the opposite, go figure. I was raised calling it tin foil. Haven't heard that term in decades, we call it aluminum foil. Everyone who cares about what things are made of, or who work in metal production, products, or maintenance very probably uses the word quite often. If I had to guess how often I've said it out loud or to myself I'd say it's probably better than a few hundred times per year.
@@MyName-nx1jj The throttlebottom was installed by machines, illegals, and DEAD people. His predecessor MAY have been cunning in his personal business dealings, but cares about the country, in a way no other has since Reagan or Truman.
This is all excellent, and I enjoyed it. But, I have a small confession to make: Years ago, I read politics at the University of Bristol. As an Arizonan, I found everyone's English to be varying degrees of foreign, but I didn't have any trouble understanding until... I had to do a group presentation on the early Soviet Union (1920's I think it was) with a classmate from some Northern hinterland or other, and... I quite truly couldn't understand a single word he said! :-O I looked around the room for signs that someone, ANYONE would understand my plight and find some polite way to help, but nobody else looked even remotely baffled. I briefly considered trying Spanish (which I did much classwork in back home) but quickly decided that was no good. I was so embarrassed, I couldn't bring myself to actually TELL him that, though, so I just "repeated back" what I assumed he had probably said, then "agreed" to it as to which parts we would each cover. To this day, I have no idea what his part of the presentation was about. I could read Spanish going back to medieval times with little trouble, but I had found mutual incomprehensibility with a native speaker of English from... somewhere in England.
To my ear a lot of British country (as opposed to urban) dialects sound mumbled, similar to what I hear from older inhabitants of Appalachia, where I live. I find it hard to understand either.
I sometimes give you some ribbing on your channel, because it's fun to compare things such as crisps/chips, chips/fries, "zeh-bra"/"zee-bra", etcetera. I know we have differences and quirks and I sometimes like to tell Brits and Aussies "Speak English!" just to get a rise out of them. But listening to your thoughts in this video is refreshing and I have a lot of respect for your perspicacity in this matter. You're such a nice mellow guy I sometimes worry somebody's going to ruin your nice little world full of rainbows and unicorns. Your a good human animal. Now if I could only get Kabir Considers to grow out of his innocent naiveté, and don't even get me started on Irish Girl in America Diane. By the way, have you ever watched "Your New Zealand Family" videos? Great family, they're also trying to figure out what America is really all about. I recommend them.
Are you calling her "Irish Girl in America" because of her content? If you are, that's not necessarily her obsession, it's her catering to her target audience. Shaun from Scotland has struggled with the same thing. Many American viewers are only interested in navel gazing: they only care about what others think of us, and not about learning about other cultures. (Plus there's the crowd of males following the pretty girl audience). But it's shrewd of her, and I sense she desires more. That being said, when she has opportunity for commentary, she does not begin to approach Laurence's level of perspicacity
@@LindaC616 No, that's what she calls her channel. Yes, her content is mostly about her experiencing American things, comparing Irish stuff to American stuff, and so on, so thematically it is consistent with the channel name. She's just hard to watch sometimes, she's got a shrill voice that yells at you when she starts sentences, and she's a little naive and slightly lost. I watch to get comparative reaction content, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
@@davidcruz8667 there's no channel calked "Irish girl in America". Just Diane Jennings'. She actually lives in Ireland (Spain, for the last year), and has only visited the US a few times. So everything I wrote above applies. Of course, if the voice gets to you, there's not much to be done about that
@@LindaC616 well, whatever the channel is called, I guess I got the wrong name, but that's indeed the person I'm talking about. And it doesn't matter to me where she lives, I'm talking about her content. Yes, her voice is definitely my problem, not saying otherwise. I'm still interested in what she has to say, because she can be quite entertaining and she does give me some insights. It was funny when she tried to make a PB&J sandwich with Jello. Not sure if she was doing it for the humor or if she really had no clue. As for following a "pretty girl", you're barking up the wrong tree. I honestly don't like the way she looks and couldn't care less, regardless of what she looks like.
Many years ago I saw a British standup comedy monologue where the comedian discussed American spelling, and how in many cases it really was easier. Words like plow instead of plough were some of his highlights.
The first time I realized that the word we spell in the US as maneuver was spelled in the UK as manoeuvre, I yelled "why the f would they put a 3rd consecutive vowel in there."
Your linguistic background really comes out in how you talk about all varieties of English as equally valid! No variety is inherently better than another, they're just different! Even within huge national varieties, smaller differences can also be fascinating, it's fun to notice a quirk of someone's speech or writing and think "ooh, that's a feature I don't have! I wonder where it came from?"
The earliest use of the word "erb" that I can think of off the top of my head is from the cookbook "The Forme of Cury", very late 14th century. My favorite Indian English word is "prepone", the rushing to do something instead of postponing it.
'erb is the best, like honor and honest. I don't get the brits: 'arry, grab 'ermione, and 'arriette, so we can go to the grocery and buy some hhhhhhhhherbs.
The practiced dropping of consonants. Posh = no R's. Common = no T's. Common faking Posh example (butter) bu'uh. Also the practiced UK of dropping the middle of a word. Example: Lancaster Shire becomes Lanka Sheer.(I know that you can see what is missing.) Apologetics claim that it's the accent. Bullocks!
I used to be the sort of person that would find Americanisms annoying, but I think at some point I realised that there's a lot of internalised classism going on in that irritation, and that isn't healthy. These days I'm super psyched when I hear the way people around the world use English words and grammar in really unusual ways - it feels like English is really going back to its mongrel "3 three languages in a trench-coat" days now that its become such a global standard. I want it to keep evolving until we reach an international English that's simplified enough for people of almost any culture to take up and enrich with whatever words and concepts they need!
Classism is definitely the right word. It seems much of the way British English evolved is when a group of people wanted to differentiate themselves from others, usually they upper-class from the working class, and it’s the source of a lot of differences between American and British English now. Shame how most British people don’t seem to understand that and instead claim Americans are somehow wrong… The attitude itself is inexcusable no matter what though.
To borrow from Orwell, simple English makes for simple thoughts. That isn't good. Personally, I miss the Received Pronunciation which used to be common in public discourse in the UK (aka England).
I've always said most people hate on American English simply because it's American. Other English-speaking countries have their own quirks when it comes to the language but most people just find them charming.
1:30 . . . Oh my gosh!!! He said ‘aluminum’ instead of ‘al-ooo-min-eee-um’ and he said it so naturally and freely!!! He’s been here long enough that now he’s one of us and must be protected from judgmental Brits when he goes back for visits!
@@shannonjones8877 The element was originally called "alumium" when discovered. From that, the two current versions sprang. So the "i" wasn't dropped; a second "i" just wasn't added when the "n" was added. In that sense, the American version is closer to the original in spelling, having only one extra letter. And most interesting to me, it was a Brit, chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who coined "alumium" and later changed it to "aluminum". He's also the one who coined "sodium" and "potassium" so it's a bit odd that he chose not to go with "-ium" for aluminum, but there it is. He discovered the stuff, so I'll stick to calling it what he did. (In truth, I'll call it aluminum because in my society, that's just what we call it. 😉)
I have bought one of your wonderful T-shirts, and every time I wear it, I get asked over and over and over all about you--Laurence--and your wonderful show! I am spreading the word!!! Thank you for all the information and fun. Hi Tarah!
Laurence, you're always very useful. :) There's another channel owned by a British man who just began a similar journey to yours when you moved to the US. He met his American wife online through a dating web site crossover. He's still getting used to American terminology and made a video today about just that very thing. He's only been in the US full time for just over a month, so it's all extremely new to him. His subscribers help him as much as we can with language explanations. I have you to thank for the help I can give him, really.
Really? I'd like to check it out, if you could tell me the name of his channel. Besides Lawrence, I also watch Kabir Considers, Your New Zealand Family, German Girl in America (excuse me, her channel is now called Feli from Germany), and when I can stand her Irish Girl in America. She's a little too ditzy for me sometimes.
@@davidcruz8667 "German Girl in America (excuse me, her channel is now called Feli from Germany)..." Ugh, I despise that entire situation. Copyright trolls deserve a special place in hell otherwise reserved for people who talk at the theater.
@@IceMetalPunk yeah, she explained what happened. In my opinion she did a far better job at being the German Girl in America than that other lady that complained, especially since the other girl was basically an American girl with German parents, I think. Either way, Feli gets my vote as being cooler and more informative, as well as more authentic.
I wish everyone were as enlightened as you and as accepting of the differences between their own flavor of English and that of others. It's depressing the number of times someone online, almost invariably from England, has told me that I don't speak "real English" or has retyped my comments with all of the spelling "corrected." There was one guy in South Africa who told me that what Americans speak is literally a different language than that spoken by the rest of the Anglosphere. He was very upset that he had to learn "another language" (American English) just to use the Duolingo Spanish course for English speakers. I guess I'm lucky to have always had access to British TV and radio programs and books here in Florida and to have worked with a number of British and Irish expats over the years. I've never found British English strange or unpleasant, and not because I consider it purer or more prestigious, but because I'm used to it. It's familiar. If you haven't done one already, I'd love to see a video that mentions the migration of the Angles to Great Britain from mainland Europe and the naming of the language and the country after them. Thanks! Love the channel. ❤
Yes. And the equivalent of that gent's problem is an immigrant to the US from Brazil studying for the Citizenship exam, using CDs....that ask the ?s in a Britiah accent....🤷♀️
It's not like the rest of the planet is unfamiliar with American English or something. We've sent our language around the world via Hollywood for a century. That gent honestly has little excuse. It's to the point where other English- speaking countries honestly think they know what America is like based solely on our film industry. Americans know it isn't an accurate representation, but the rest of the world doesn't.
I’m an Englishman from Shrewsbury and I love the differences I’m only 18 but I do think there’s some words which are weird. Like I prefer how you Americans spell centre as center theatre however is weird being spelt as theater
By that logic, there’s more than 1 American English just based on American geography. How many words or phrases are used in a certain region in America not used elsewhere? Examples include the plural of you (y’all or you guys & others) & what a soft drink is called. To me, they’re all cokes regardless of brand.
Brilliant! (In both British and American senses!) I wish I'd had access to your videos when I was still teaching Linguistics to teachers of English Language Learners. Great fun and insightful!
Lawrence, great video. I really enjoyed it. You should spend some time around old-timers in the American South. You might hear some great phrases such as " I not saying he lies, mind ya but what comes out of his mouth. Is worth the same as what comes out of the South end of a North bound mule."
@Jesse Mathis that one is out of my areas of the South. I love directly and a fur piece. I will get some I that cobbler, directly Well you go down the road, a fur piece, and you will see Pete's store on the right take the next left.
You just blew my mind by pointing out that "hello" is an American word! I would have thought it was much older than even the existence of the US, but no, I've looked it up and you're right: 1826 Connecticut was the first time it was used 🤯 Also, this video just reminds me of Eddie Izzard's bit on American vs British spellings, and how Brits are just trying to cheat at Scrabble 😂
There used to be many variations of the word: hullo, hallo, etc. (Many other Germanic languages say similar things). It's pretty cool that the variety that won out came from these United States.
@@weirdlanguageguy I have heard that hello came into common usage with the advent of the Telephone. When people were first exposed to the telephone in around the 1880's, they didn't know how to react to this strange talking machine. So they had to give lessons in how to use a phone, when you hear the bell ring, pick up the speaker and hold it to your ear and then speak into the microphone. Some people thought "Ahoy, Ahoy" was the greeting that should be uttered (sounds like a Maine fishermen came up with that). Others thought "Hello" was the logical response to a call, and soon after hello won out as the proper response. Now after nearly 140 years no one would believe that any other greeting was ever used.
Scofflaw is a US invention originating in the 1920s! You'd think as old as "scoff" is that the term would be quite old itself clearly referencing someone who holds the (or a) law in low regard not worth following but it was a contest winner for a new word to describe those not following prohibition!
I remember hearing somewhere that "cahoots" is actually just a mispronunciation of "cohorts" that caught on and became its own word, similar to how "varmint" came from "vermin."
Great stuff, Sir. I have a friend here in Florida who is an amusing Brit and have shared your site with him so we can chat about the language. I get a kick out of imitating his accent periodically....and to our amusement he responded by imitating my American accent. Ah now we're having fun, mate!
Brits: Americans don’t pronounce the H in herb, how daft. Also Brits: I’m from Chippenum, but now I live in Totnum. My mate from the University of Birmingum is originally from Cheltenum, but now he lives in Twickenum.
That "-ise"/"-ize" thing causes problems for musicians. In American, "vocalize" is a verb meaning to do something with your voice; "vocalise" (pronounced "-eez") is a noun meaning a performance using the human voice to do something other than make words (think Bobby McFerrin beatboxing, or scat singing). The distinction is lost in the UK where both meanings are spelled with an S. BTW, I'd love to get a clear overview on the US/UK differences on certain adjectives like "quite", "a bit", "rather". It's been my experience that the relative degree of such modifiers doesn't come in the same order on opposite sides of the pond ("quite hot" is more so than "rather hot" in one country but less so in the other).
In the US, "quite" means "rather" or "entirely". In the UK, "quite" means "a bit" or "sort of". This is apparently the result of it losing its way in too many layers of ironic understatement and overstatement. Both sides agree that "not quite" means falling short of a mark. This indicates that the US meaning is the original one (or at least the obvious argument that it means "not completely" is more believable to me than "slightly not").
I have never throughout my participation in choirs and vocal training never heard an American or anybody say "vocalise". In looking it up it seems primarily a noun, and as a verb almost entirely British. I think (as an American) it's not being used has more to do with us being unsure of what letters we are meant to be hearing at the end; if written we would rarely read with "eez" as the perceived pronunciation but literally as "ise" which would be difficult to communicate give "ize", and would certainly cause spelling confusion about ending the word in "ice". For what I have heard we just use the word scat or scatting instead to avoid confusion. Only in scholarly music circles would I expect to hear vocalise used at all.
My favorite word that British people get ruffled over but which actually makes far more sense in American is "math" vs "maths." The word that's being abbreviated, mathematics, isn't a plural, it's a Greek word that happens to end in S (much like "physics"). So when it's abbreviated, why on Earth would you include a random letter from the end of the word? We both call chemistry "chem" rather than "chemy" and nobody loses their mind. My usual response when someone complains about this online is to ask them which is their favorite mathematic.
You might be interested in researching an American named Melville Dewey and his ideas about spelling. He wanted to get rid of all unnecessary vowels and renamed himself Melvil Dewe. Yes, this is the guy who invented the Dewey Decimal System used by librarians.
I recall a (possibly apocryphal) story about how some of the... simplification? of American English spelling happened. Basically, when the first American dictionary was being created, there was supposedly a concerted effort to try and make the spelling more closely match the pronunciation. Which is why, according to the story, American English doesn't have a lot of the silent letters that British English has.
I do know that some of our Founding Fathers were in favor of spelling reform. Ben Franklin comes to mind - iirc he supported making the words look like they sounded (e.g. "soop" instead of "soup").
As an American, the word "herb" has always had two meanings in my own lexicon - one is a flavorful plant, the other is a shortened form of the name Herbert. I drop the H when talking about the plant, but not when talking to or about my neighbor Herbert.
Useful for fun. My favorite from processing failure and repair reports from American and British submarines is the Brit sailors use of "fitted" where US sailors would use "installed". It suggests the Brits needed a file and shims to install repair parts. That was definitely not true for the submarines although it had validity when I replaced some parts on my MGB.
I can "noodle" out what everyone is saying in the Anglosphere, They are ALL valid. They are all "English". Even IF my "trunk" is your "boot". I get it. English is a rich language. It has variations that are ALL valid. If I were English (meaning an actual London bred, Brit). FAR from being bothered by the differences, I'd be DAMNED PROUD that my language had such "legs". 👍😊👍
I finally figured out why the term trunk is used: it comes down fomr the old sailing/steamship/stagecoach says when you had a giant :trunk" you packed al lyour stuff in, and usually put it on the back of the stagecoach, and then that transferred to automobiles. Not sure why the term boot is used, as one cant normally put much in aboot (insert canadian joke here). Hood versus Bonnet is just a term for covering the head/brain of the car.
@@ZakhadWOW British people refer to them as bonnet and boot because that's what it was referred as in horse-drawn wagons or stagecoaches. Then the names stuck.
@@ZakhadWOW get better reading comprehension i said nothing about when it started, i said exactly why it was called that. Bonnet and boot referred to the front and rear of horse-drawn coaches, and those names were still used on automobiles.
Here's an interesting thing about r-dropping: in America it was incomplete in some areas. We keep most of our r's, BUT some of our oldest words (kept in parts of Appalachia esp.) they're preserved in an r-less state. The word "passel" is an example of that; iirc, it's the same word as "parcel," but with the r dropped. I don't know, but I imagine that it's related to whence the Brit (or Irishman?) came or when they came to the USA.
I am a retired teacher and have always loved the history of words. I read somewhere that 40% of the world's population speaks English as a first or second language. English is the language of science. So thank Britain.
Not even close. There are 983 million people in the world who speak English, or 13% of the world's population, according to Ethnologue. It is estimated 372 million speak English as their first language, while 611 million speak English as a second language. The British Council claims that 25 percent of the world's population has some understanding of English.
As Churchill said, two peoples separated by the same language. That said, US English is often the older version of English, the US didn’t mutate the English in the same way as the English.
Well that's extremely true even within the same country. As a Southern Appalachian speaker, we're stuck with an even older form of English. Mainly for over-articling, definite nouns vs. indefinite, and having more than a few anachronisms, despite being a dying dialect. It's hard to understand General American English speakers passed the mid-USA line when they're writing. Mainly the grammar is too simplified.
Lawrence, you sometime should do a show on the difference between the Scottish language and the UK English language. I have lived in several of the UK places. My favorite is Glasgow but, I must admit I am a little prejudice because that is my husband and myself home town. As we used to say "Glasgow is pure deed brilliant" Cheers
The Scots speak English or celtic in the north, it is an accent and the English language doesn't have a real dialect. The Scots do have their own vocabulary, but so do other English speaking regions.
He should team up with Scottish youtubers (Shaun, WeeScottishLass, & BeautyCreep) and do a Scottish-English diffeances. Also find a Welsh person & get them to start a channel.
@@johnsaia9739 Celtic isn't a language. Gaelic is a language. It is part of a group of languages that are Celtic though, much like there's a group of languages called the semitic languages but no language called semitic. There's also Irish, Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx within the group of Celtic languages. Scots is very much a dialect, to the point where academics debate whether it's in fact it's own language and also has subtypes like Doric (which is love you to listen to and claim it's similarity to say middle class London English, many even in Scotland don't know what the hell they're saying). I'm not sure what you think a dialect is if the fact that having its own vocabulary, by your own admission, and some of its own grammar rules, doesn't count. You've posted your completely unsubstantiated claim that English doesn't have it's down dialects in a few places and because it's so demonstrably wrong particularly in the British isles where you can pinpoint what part of a county someone is from by how they speak in many places, I'm inclined to think you're kind of just trolling.
The different pronunciations of “herb” have a similar history as the pronumnciation of “Missouri.”…Missouri is commonly pronounced as Missouree or Missourah. The common pronunciations went back and forth between the wealthy city dwellers and the rural in habitants of Missouri several times before the Missouree pronunciation became the commonly used one and Missourah seems to be used mostly by some who live in rural areas or people who have moved here from the South (like my parents.)
One difference I've found very odd is 'Own' For Americans and 'Owin' for a lot of brits. Usually alterations in pronunciations stem from shortening or slurring the word, or even taking out syllables, This one Adds a syllable. "Blowin up" instead of "Blown up", "Knowin" vs "known".
It's a good day when you learn something new. Never used the word pulchritudinous and had to look it up. Used all the others though. Thanks British Guy! You're a life-saver. On a related note, I can't say I've ever thought about the schism that occurred when we in the states went our separate way, but that divide makes sense.
Noah Webster had a a lot to do with many American spelling of words during the early part of the 1800s.Allegedly, he wanted to make American English, distinct from British. Since there wasn’t exactly a consensus from lexicographers, either in England or the USA, Webster proceeded to create his own dictionary, especially to cater to an American audience. His eponymous dictionary became the standard then, as it does today.
yay, another fellow linguistics major! like you, i also took a course on the varieties of the english language, and it also really opened my eyes. i kind of wish a class like that would become part of just learning english.
The fact that my English husband went into a convenance store here in the US and asked the guy for free packs of Marlboro lights, then the guy gave him a really weird look and said we don’t have free cigarettes here. 😂 Was seriously one of the funniest moments! FYI for any of you that don’t get it, he was actually saying three not free. Lmao!
Kinda like Marty asking for a Pepsi Free in back to the future. Of course I always doubted that Pepsi was really a thing in the 50s but never looked it up... Probably should.
we also had a wee bit of a debate over whether we had to do things the way the brits do, a couple hundred years ago. but in all seriousness, the very idea of rigid spelling rules is younger than the US. and we were a bit of an upstart to want to codify them and simplify them. fun trivia bit - occasionally two diplomats from English speaking countries have to hire an American to be an interpreter.
I actually noticed another quirk/difference at 5:49 when you write “every day words” instead of “everyday words.” I’ve always seen “everyday” (one word) used when it’s acting as an adjective, like it is in that caption; while “every day” (2 words) is when it’s used as an adverb. Is this another difference between British and American English or it it just a typo? So interesting to learn about the origin of things like this
I think that the internet has meant that us Brits are more aware of it, but the word as another name for the game is something I've been aware in a purely British context for all of my living memory (going back to the '70s).
Possibly. But around the same time we became more aware - through TV - that Americans had their own game they called football (which it patently wasn't!)
@@rogink And decidedly distinct from rugby as well. An odd hybrid of rugby and association football with some unique twists evolving from resultant inconsistencies and problems of the fusion.
I also applaud Laurence for learning to pronounce Appalachia right, and not use the long a! Yay! Wish we could get non-southern Americans to say it right, lol.
Another reason why spelling in English, both British and American, can be so weird is because we used to have 9 more letters in our alphabet that were used for multiple specific sounds that are now shared by a single letter or group of letters. For example the hard 'th' sound in the word 'there' and the soft 'th' in the word 'thought' used to each have their own letter.
Fun fact: You're referring to the letter "thorn" which was difficult to print properly, and was printed with a 'y' with an 'e' over it to signify it. That's how we ended up with "Ye olde ___." It was never supposed to be a 'y' it was a "thorn" which was 'th' in pronunciation. So the signs actually would be read "the olde" not "ye olde."
The one thing as an American, that sparked the most comments at a dinner where steak was served (by a wonderful Cornish family), was my not switching the cutlery in my hands! I coyly said: "But that is they way the silver was set out."
I was raised to switch hands and then abandoned it as a silly, wasted motion. I was taught that when one is eating at a formal dinner, it's good manners to use one's utensils that way. "Poppycock", I say. Good manners is about being polite, grateful and respectful; not which hand you use to wield a knife.
I have never even heard of a switching hands tradition. If anything, on rare occasions, I have been told it is rude to do so despite being left handed. Do you mean the knife is set on the left or that you are expected to use the knife in your left hand?
@@johnpublicprofile6261 Apparently, how one holds and uses cutlery is important to some people. At a table setting, the knives are on the right and the forks are on the left. You are "supposed" to eat with your fork in your right hand unless you're using your knife. Then the fork, in your left hand, holds the food and you cut with the knife in your right hand. After this, you put down your knife and move the fork to your right hand. You're also supposed to set down down your cutlery while chewing and never point a fork or a knife in the direction of another person at the table. Personally, I think these silly rules were designed to make some people feel superior to others. Some table manners make sense, like not talking with your mouth full and not farting with gusto during a moment of quiet; but the cutlery rules seem arbitrary and pointless.
@@grantrichards4950 I grew up in a traditional British restaurant but only ever knew fork in left hand as far as formal fork use. Though these days, unless for penguin suit and bow tie events, it is which ever hand you want.
As a young child I was taught the hand-switching method because children are slow to learn use of their non-dominant hand. Then Daddy taught me the American way to do it, and how uncouth he was thought to be in Continental Europe for it.
Beautifully researched and really enjoyable to hear. I enjoy your take on this country. It takes fresh ears to hear things we have always taken for granted. Thanks for the final comment. There’s always more overlap with other cultures than we realize and man, can we use more understanding. Love to Larah.
The thing with "Soccer" especially comes from a visceral reaction to USA 94. Prior to that the word "Soccer" was actually pretty common in England but a few people decided to make a big fuss over it and suddenly it became verboten. My younger brother who doesn't even like Football in the first place HATES the word but then again he constantly polices language and hates all things American. He turned 16 in 1997 whereas I turned 16 in 1992 and have no issue with the word "Soccer" whatsoever because when I grew up it was fully accepted in England! Sensible Soccer was made by a British Company! Sky Sports still has Soccer Saturday! Yet the word is seen as an Americanism because of a visceral reaction to USA 94 - I'm sure the fact that England didn't make it to that World Cup has nothing to do with this visceral reaction :)
@@rbbecker73 Most the world does call it football, but most of the English-speaking world calls it soccer, with Great Britain being the only notable exception. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland all use 'soccer'.
@@costakeith9048 I'm unsure about South Africa but all the other Commonwealth countries have their own national foot-the-ball games. US = gridiron, Canada = very similar to US but bigger ball and one less "down" (whatever a "down" is), Australia is a split between various states = either Aussie Rules or Rugby League, New Zealand = Rugby Union, Ireland = Gaelic Football. However in 2007 New Zealand renamed their national soccer team to New Zealand Football (All Whites) in line with other non-Commonwealth nations.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed more Brits spelling “judgment” the American way and most Americans barely even know we’re supposed to spell it “glamor.” The -ize to -ise was a Victorian choice, I’d read. More continental to look like French or German, which is why Canadian English still uses the original British spelling of -ize, whereas Aus/NZ and ZA use the more recent -ise. Around the same time as the posh pronunciation of tomahto and banahna came into use. But how in the hell did North America coin “Hello”?? I felt like that was universally Germanic. (And thank you, anyone, if you got this far in a rando youtube comment. Cheers.)
It seems like it was "hallo" way back when, and that morphed into "hello" in American English sometime in the mid-1800s. Interestingly, from what I found in my quick search, "hullo" is even newer than that!
Hello. I read somewhere, years ago, before the internet existed as we know it today, that "hello" started as a question called down the telephone line "hollow?" meaning "is anyone there?". It could well be an urban myth but it sounded logical to my mind, might be why it stuck there all those years. It mutated thru hallo to hello over time.
I am an American who teaches British English (Cambridge Exam preparation) at an international school. These videos are fantastic. I always encourage my students to learn both British and American style English as international users of the language.
love this. language is dynamic, evolving, and ever changing. there is NO right, but perhaps right now. dialects, even within close regions, have nuances. I almost unconsciously speak to my friend from Iran differently (my pronunciation changes) than a friend from Ireland than from a Central Midwestern US dialect of a white male that grew up on the poorer side of town.
And THAT is the beauty of english. As you note, it is constantly evolving and changing. There are so many countries in the world that have tried to invent words to keep their language(s) “pure” (free from english). English has survived, (even dominated) the linguistic divide because it is willing to embrace words from other cultures and languages. For example, if there is a foreign word that describes a certain phenomenon or item for which there isn’t an english equivalent , it (the english language) will just adopt it. Examples: tsunami, brioche, chow mien , bungalow, pasta, linguine, schadenfreude, baguette, Prost, curry, Samurai, goulash, sushi , kebab, schnapps, schnitzel… the list is endless.
@@artos1955 The assimilation of foreign words and associated spellings and pronunciations is both the strength and major problem of English, especially the Americanized version. There are no straight forward rules without multiple exceptions.
In America we use an "Elevator", in Britain it is "Lift"..... I guess we are just "raised" differently!
Out
You win.
I feel like you stole that…butt it’s still funny SuperVinlin
I'm absolutely floored by this.
@@burke615 Stealth pun for the win.
To our British friends: we call the rearmost compartment of a car a “trunk”, because in the early days of automobiles, it was a literal trunk (usually a small steamer trunk) that was strapped to a rack mounted on the back of the car. When designers began incorporating it into the body of the car, the name stuck.
Does that mean that the British would afix boots to their automobiles and fill them up with things?
@@thebuzzah How else would Father Christmas be able to give them gifts on the go? ;-)
@crash burn "...the boot was so named..." Still waiting to hear why 'boot' is the term for all that you described. The US uses 'trunk' because it used to be a trunk, so Brits say 'boot' because?????
@@LouieLouie505 on smaller [horse drawn] carriages - ie. the precursor to the private car - boots were kept in a locker under the rear facing seat (at the back of the carriage), so that passengers who had to disembark in muddy conditions didn't mess up their smarter dress shoes.
@@yodapig "... boots were kept in a locker..." Ah-- now I see.
One of my favourite jokes:
American: Let's take the elevator up to the top floor
Englishman: You mean "lift" mate
American: Actually no it's called an elevator
Englishman: No in English it's called a lift. We're English. We invented the ENGLISH language.
American: No. It's called an elevator. Because WE invented the elevator
.
Archimedes was American?!
@@KindredBrujah Archimedes invented the motorized elevator?? Or was his just man-powered?
Of course you know the "kind" of elevator that's being referred to here. Now run off with your semantic shenanigans.
@@slinky6481 It's not the motori *s* ed, it's the safety elevator. With a brake, where, if the car starts accelerating downward at a certain rate, it causes a weight to rise, since free falling is equivalent to weightlessness. The weight, now weight-less (cos it weighs less), rises up, undoes a catch, and powerful springs jam wooden beams under or over the car, into rails on the wall of the shaft.
At least that was Otis's basic idea. Modern ones, I think, still use that principle. Since unlike computerised motion sensors etc, it can't go wrong as long as simple physics remains the same. I think instead of levers jamming in, brakes are applied that squeeze against a girder. Still, needs no power source, easily resettable, foolproof.
Before Otis, people worried that the ropes could snap and they'd plummet down to their doom. This limited the height of buildings people could use. So Otis did his demonstration with a big wooden frame and his mockup lift car and safety brake. A man winched the car, with Otis, to the top (again, not so much a car just a few planks making a basic frame with a floor on it), waving and smiling.
Then Otis ordered the man to cut the rope, with a big axe! The lift fell. About 6 inches, then the brakes kicked in. Perfect, lots of impressed public and also he didn't die.
BTW if you want a free freefall related factoid... astronauts in space, are not nearly far away enough to be free from the Earth's gravity. They still feel almost all of the Earth's gravitational pull. So they fall. Spaceships are constantly falling to Earth. But if they're moving fast enough, by the time they've fallen a little, they've also moved forward a little. And moving "forward", that is at a right angle to the ground, means the ground underneath is further away, since the Earth is round. Viewed from above it, the ground falls away in every direction, imagine being on a point just above the globe, any direction you move, the ground is going to get lower beneath you.
They fall in an arc, like a shell from a mortar. But their arc goes far enough forward that it misses the ground completely and ends up falling round and round the Earth.
So gravity pulls you down to Earth, but velocity pushes you forward, to where the ground is that bit lower. They cancel out. Your falling effectively cancelled by your moving forward. The result is, you're constantly falling to Earth, but constantly going forward. So you fall to Earth, but you miss! You keep missing the ground, so stay up there in a circle, or indeed an ellipse.
Gravity is still pulling normally. You're falling, the spaceship is falling, the stuff inside the spaceship is falling. Like if you were in a free-falling lift, your feet would leave the floor, objects would float in the air, you'd be "weightless". Except not weightless at all, just in freefall. Gravity is effectively cancelled out, for you, relative to the spaceship and it's contents. But of course it's still pulling you down all the time. If it wasn't, if gravity lost it's grip, you'd zoom off into infinity. It's gravity that gives things a stable orbit, constantly falling, constantly missing the ground.
It's how those "vomit comet" aeroplanes work. They're aeroplanes astronauts use to practice weightlessness, effectively the plane takes a free dive downward, and as you'd imagine, everything starts floating around, "zero G". It's _effectively_ zero G but in actuality completely 1G. So you could have zero gravity in a lift with a long enough shaft. For the height you'd need for more than a couple of seconds, it wouldn't be worth it. Unless scientists are allowed to practice in office blocks on weekends.
The forward velocity that keeps a spaceship, or a satellite, up there, is what the rocket is for. All that energy isn't to lift the spaceship up high enough. It's to get it travelling forward, fast enough. Every rocket launch, you'll see starts off vertically, but soon the rocket turns to face horizontally. It needs to accelerate to a great speed, the faster you fly, the higher your orbit. Like swinging a weight on a string around your head, if it's further out from the centre, it needs to cover a greater distance, and you need to put more effort into it, or else it will fall.
So a correct astronaut will refer to "freefall" but never "zero G" because there's nowhere in the Universe where there isn't a bit of gravity from something somewhere. Well, everything everywhere, technically.
@@greenaum Motorized. Are you sad because you don't have control over you language? Are you sad because you can't make changes like Motorized?
As a brit, I’ve always thought the US got the naming of public and private schools right… private means you have to pay to get in, public means it’s provided for the public
Yeah, we got that right.
Yeah, that's so strange to me about British schools.
Well what is the difference between public and private in Britain?
@@mournblade1066 a public school in Britain is what Americans would call a private school but it's "public" in the sense that anyone with sufficient funds can go. What Americans would call a public school would be (I believe) called a state school.
Same in Canada!
One criticism I received from some Brits was for the word "sidewalk." They said it was almost infantile and that we should use the word "pavement" like adults. The thing is, though, we do use the word "pavement" to refer to anything that is paved. That includes roads, car lots, and also sidewalks. The word pavement is ambiguous in many cases. If I say, "Let's meet out on the pavement," you may think I'm talking about the parking lot outside the office, the sidewalk just off the property, or (less likely) the street.
They ridicule “side walk” but then without irony will say “car park” - I’d call this a draw
Interesting. I think of "pavement" as being almost synonymous with "asphalt" as in the substance. I'm from New England so maybe that's why.
@@lhaviland8602 same here in Ontario. Pavement nearly always means asphalt, not concrete. But then we say "tarmac" when it could be either asphalt or concrete. Sometimes you just have to have everything backwards :)
I'm sure it is different in various locales in the US. But for the most part in Missouri we consider pavement as a construct meaning anything paved. However paved isn't restricted to asphalt. Concrete is always pavement, but asphalt may be pavement but many times it is referred to as asphalt. We also use tarmac but not as much and it doesn't differentiate between concrete and asphalt.
Sidewalk reminds me of the British car park. They're both logical.
The word "okay" is now pretty much universally understood. It's such a fascinating yet simple word that meets a linguistic need across cultures.
Yeah, until I started listening to subbed VTuber clips, I thought it was an English only thing, or at least English related. Then I heard Japanese people saying “Okay” and I thought they were just using the English word for their version of “okay”. Nope, they actually use it. lol
@@VoidHxnter it’s oké in Dutch, same pronunciation
The most useful thing to ever come out of the state of Oklahoma.
@@rbbecker73 President Martin Van Buren was from Kinderhook, New York. His nickname was Old Kinderhook aka OK. Another possible contributor to the idiom was "oll korrect" which has a story of its own. Neither of these have anything to do with that abomination of a state, Oklahoma (yes, I'm a Texan😜).
@@VoidHxnter "Nope, they actually use it."
The same way English speakers _"actually use"_ the word "tsunami." They're called "loanwords" and all languages have plenty. Just putting this out there because I see a lot of "fun facts" that say stuff like "did you know Japanese doesn't have a word for 'pepperoni?'" So some people get this weird impression Japanese just has no way of saying many things.
British people: there are so many different local accents and dialects in England
Also British people: American's are pronouncing that word wrong
The United States has many different accents and words in different regions. Compare a Boston accent to an Alabama accent and you will hear the difference. English doesn't really have dialects.
@@johnsaia9739 "English doesn't really have dialects"? 😕 What makes you think that?
@@johnsaia9739 England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, North Ireland all have many accents as do America and Australia and other English speaking nations. My point is within these countries there are multiple accents so one country should never say something is pronounced wrong when it is pronounced in different ways throughout their country.
The funniest part to me is they somehow assume England is magical and the only place with many accents and dialects. A lot of English people refuse to accept there's more than 2 or 3 accents in America. There is more than that in my state, plus more than one dialect. Idk why they revel in their ignorance on this one.
@@rapa2894 lol yep, I worked in London for a while and just on my floor of the office different people pronounced things in really different ways. I know I have kind of the generic newscaster Midwest American accent but I have family on both coasts and the way they talk is really different.
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” -George Bernard Shaw
“The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears. There even are places where English completely disappears. Well in America it hasn’t been used fir years!”
Same character, but modified for the musical “My Fair Lady”
@@allanrichardson9081 Pygmalion😁
@@bookmouse2719 The original play by Shaw was Pygmalion, which was adapted in the US by Lerner and Lowe in the 1950s into the Broadway musical, later made into a movie, “My Fair Lady.” Rex Harrison played Prof. Higgins, speak/singing the words I quoted as part of a song.
I never saw or read the original Shaw version, so I don’t know the exact context of the quote in it, or even whether it was a song, so I quoted from the movie version, which I did see. I knew that Shaw wrote the original, but I never read it. Without the music I never would have remembered that much of it!
The satisfaction I receive from watching people discover "poppycock" not being bri'ish is enormous
Yeah, that one surprised me.
President Nixon made that word famous/infamous during Watergate saying "That's just plain poppycock"
@@rbbecker73 And it's not just solely a snack mix anymore.
Surprised me too.
It’s derived from Dutch, apparently! It comes from a word that means “soft dung”, or so it says in Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue.
Honestly one of the most fascinating things to me, is how “OK/Okay” has permeated throughout such a huge portion of the world. Watching foreign shows in many countries, I often see/hear them say it. Such a useful yet simple word.
“Hi!”
“ok”
@@codiefitz3876 And yet Google is offering to translate these words to English.
"As long as we understand each other, that's all that matters." For some reason that made me tear up. I think people forget that the purpose of language is to understand others. Being so caught up in semantics undermines the very reason we speak. A little bit of understanding goes a long way.
This is one of the things that stuck with me from the cultural anthropology course I took in college. What really matters in a language is mutual communicability and how well the language serves to enhance a people's ability to survive and thrive within their given environment.
the art of communication is to get the message across - not to get it correct.
What?
Words are the way we try to understand each other. If you want to communicate something, it is *your* sole obligation to make yourself understood, in terms the listener will underatnd, *not* the listener's obligation to understand *you.*
@@JimC yeah that kinda falls apart when they do actually understand you but are simply being obstinent.
I feel like you need to be made aware of a southern colloquial hyper-contraction if you aren't aware of it. I think it's linguistically amazing for English.
That word is: Y'all'd've. In its complete form without contraction, it is: You all would have. I just find it amazing at how that word rolls off the tongue and is very nearly a complete sentence.
Edit: I know it could be a full sentence, but it's never used alone. It's always at least "Y'all'd've, too"
Even better is the negative form, contracting you all would _not_ have: "Y'all'dn't've"
I love these so-called hyper-contractions. I've been using "I'd've" for years now and it only occurred to me the first time when I went to write it that it isn't accepted syntax (yet). xD
Is it really a hyper-contraction or just natural tendency to shorten speech. Almost everyone learning a foreign language thinks that native speakers speak too fast or don't enunciate well.
I even use y'all'd've in text messages.
I live in the South, and I never realized that this wasn’t as common as I thought. I thought everyone used that hyper contraction until I started paying attention to speech on the internet more. Us Southerners like to make everything to most efficient and to the point as we can be. From farming equipment to speech.
Mr. Brown,
This reminds me of another "Lost Memo" for you:
In my earlier years, I strived to speak better English, and worked to replace "fall" with "autumn" in my vocabulary, feeling that "fall" was just kind of like American slang or something. ... and then I discovered the truth of the matter.
"Summer" and "winter" have ancient roots in proto-Germanic. The names for the other two seasons are newer. People in 16th Century England began to refer to the "spring of the leaf" and the "fall of the leaf", and that's how we got "spring" and "fall" for the other two seasons. And that's what the anglosphere was using at the time of the American Revolution, and for some time afterward. For whatever reason, in the 19th Century, British people in both the British Isles and elsewhere in their empire started using the Latin word "autumn" instead of "fall". And today I hear from a lot of non-American English speakers how it seems that Americans are just wrong for using "fall" for the season of the year we're now experiencing.
Except, that the U.S. did not get the memo, and continued to use the original English word for the season and did not adopt a foreign term like everyone else did. With that in mind, and still endeavoring to speak better English, I defenestrated "autumn" from my vocabulary and embraced "fall" as the true English word. And thus, it's an example of Americans speaking better English than... the English.
as someone who speaks the 3 main Romance languages (Spa/Fre/Ita) I continue to use Autumn in more highfalutin conversations :P ALso, Astronomy user the term "Autumnal Equinox" so that reinforces also
English is not a romance language though, so his point stands. He is trying to speak better English, not Italian or French.
@@bibliophilelady6106 what the fuck are you on about? o.0 I was commenting on MYSELF< not him Jeezus get a clue
It's not just the *names* of "fall" and "spring" that are recent, it's also the *concepts." Spring and fall/autumn didn't need names back when people didn't have much use for the concepts and tended to divide the year in half, the only seasons being winter and summer.
The idea of true English is impossible, it never can be pinpointed to an exact moment like you're saying it can be. If I started speaking Early English/Anglo-Saxon, by your logic I would be speaking better English than the English. It is with this that English will always be English for the English and anything else is different English.
Any time someone gives me a hard time about "herb", I say to them "Honor the Hour Honestly", and I don't drop the "h" to make the point.
Some king or queen probably accidentally pronounced the H in herb and all the upper class started repeating it and looking down on those that didn’t.
You may notice a rather distinct difference between herb and honor/hour/honestly, though.
The 'e' in herb? At least in my dialect, which I'll admit is neither British nor American, is very awkward to say as the initial sound of a syllable (and very few words are pronounced that way, none of which are spelled with an h), but follows from h very nicely (as it does in 'her' and 'heard'), where as the o in those others words is very easy to say as an initial sound but ends up awkwardly (in a way that causes physical discomfort) swallowed if I try to precede it with a pronounced h (a sound made mostly in the throat rather than the mouth). I should note that hour has two syllables (the h is silent, the o is more of a short 'ah' sound, and the ur somehow becomes more of a wh' (that ' is a schwa)), while our has only one (the whole word is just a single diphthong).
The joys of dialects.
1. The other dialects that drop or de-emphasize the H aren't as annoying as the Americans or as self important.
2. The name Herby is still pronounced with a H.
@@ANTSEMUT1 Clearly you can't take a joke.
@@laurencefraser I wonder if that would make hurban development more difficult.
I love it when I run into this dude at Kroger. He nods then keeps on with his shopping. He’s learned how to be an American and I’m so proud.
It's pronounced K-Rodger
The people that actually recognize the brand near my area pronounce it as "Crow-ger." Most Kroger stores in this area are franchised convenient stores (read: gas station; they all are mini-marts that have fuel pumps... most here have heard the term petro, but never use it unless imitating a Brit) juxtapose to the full grocery supermarkets.
But does he do the city folk up-nod? xD
It is crow-ger...
@@coreyhaskins7768 How do you pronounce Kmart?
Well, here in America, we felt the need to differentiate between 'herb', as in the dried, minced plant life one might sprinkle on food, and 'Herb', the shortened nickname of someone named 'Herbert'.
I mean, it's not like we don't have other homonyms/homophones.
dropping the h in herb is more recent than you would believe.
There used to be an old commercial where a wife corrected her husband by saying, "It's ERBAL, Herb."
Yeah. Once we're out of Herberts (likely sometime in 2037) we'll totally go back to using "herb" with the "H" sound. :D
Herb’s herb garden.
What is a constant irritant to me about British English is the lack of a collective singular. Thus you get "the family are". While I get the concept that a family is a group of people it is also a unit in and of itself. So one family is and two or more families are. The British way makes subject/ verb agreement break in my American ear. Ah, well. Two peoples separated by a common language and all that, I guess.
I noticed the same thing a long time ago. Our way has logic on it's side but sounds wrong to the Brits.
@@tonygumbrell22 Australians do the same thing, I think. I watch some Aussie beauty gurus and every time they say "This brand are..." my mind immediately goes 🚨🚨🚨
@@vera-vf4we That has the smell of hypercorrection on it. A company is clearly a group of people, but a brand is a brand. Most corporations, if they brand their product, have multiple brands that may overlap personnel in charge of them.
Yeah that used to bother me, then I listened to more british stuff and now I'm irreparably muddled, I can't stick to either standard. and I've noticed others around me not doing it consistently either.
@@Markle2k well that's why it's easier to just stick with the actual noun you're using, not what it represents. because one's quite objective and the other's subjective and vague.
My favorite difference is math and maths. There was an old Numberphile video on it (featuring CGP Grey) that explained that the difference is pretty much down to the fact that English generally doesn't have a set rule for abbreviation, and the abbreviation of mathematics came when universities created course catalogs in the late 1800's/ early 1900's. American universities preferred a four letter code for course subjects, so mathematics became just MATH, and English universities preferred 5 letter codes, so MATHS because there is a 's' at the end. As a person who works in math and has worked with many British people they will sometimes defend it by saying that math should be pluralized either because there are multiple steps in most math or because it refers to the multiple disciples and subjects under the banner or "mathematics". To that that numberphile video points that that most British people would say "maths is hard" rather than "maths are hard" and similarly treat it grammatically as a singular term.
Most people I know would defend maths as being the way to say it since the word mathematics ends with an s. Mathematic sounds weird and archaic
@@comma_thingy Just as not all that glitters is gold, not all words ending in an s are plural. Mathematics isn't plural, nor is physics, linguistics, and politics.
@@comma_thingy Yeah, but you don't keep the 's' normally when shortening words, do you? Like, why cut out most of the middle bits, but keep the 's'? Is linguistics 'lings'? Is politics 'pols'?
@@JimMonsanto Yep mathematics is a single subject like physics.
There's also "hospital" vs. "the hospital". British might say, "He went to hospital". Where Americans would say "He went to the hospital".
Herb vs ‘erb has never bothered me, but “haich” makes my eye twitch (as does, to a lesser extent, “zed”)
TBH haich and zed still mostly get the "oh, look at the cute little British/Commonwealth person with their funny words" response from me.
not a fan of haich, but honestly I prefer zed over zee
@@candybluebird Well then we should just say “bed” “ced” “ded” too ;)
Can anyone actually explain both or either of these to me?
Zed I accept…it’s silly to me but whatever; add extra sounds that aren’t related in any possible way I guess. Also; would brits watch Dragon Ball Zee or Dragon Ball Zed? The narrator tells you the correct thing to say but how far do y’all go 😅
Haitch just reeks of wanting to be posh.
@@bitharne
Haitch is the opposite of posh, it was working-class Irish Catholics who popularised the pronunciation. Look it up.
In fact I believe Ireland is the only country where it is the accepted pronunciation, certainly isn't in Received Pronunciation.
I do rather adore that glorious list of fun American words at the end. This was well written, Lawrence. Well done indeed!
I totally agree.
We owe a great debt to the many Americans like Jerry Seinfeld over the years, who just invented words and phrases because they wanted to.
Close talker
Pinch weasel
Master of my domain
I'm American (Colorado) and I love the word 'conniption'. It's like, "Dude! Don't have a friggin' conniption."
Another for you, which is my favorite: *Scrumdiddlyumptious!*
Though popularized by Roald Dahl in *The BFG,* this term started as an American slang improvement on the British *Scrumptious*
Instead of doohickey, my dad says doomaflotchey. Where he got that one I have no clue.
The “fanciful words” bit made me laugh really hard. I say “doohickey” a lot, but it looks I’m gonna need to use the word “poppycock” more often.
A thingamajig is the same as a doohickey
Whatchamacallit might also be there, but I don't know 🙃😉
Different is not wrong, just different.
A lesson we should apply in more situations than just linguistics.
AMEN !
Preach! Well said!
No, there are many situations today where different is dangerous. I cannot "agree to disagree" with people who sexualize children or want to refuse healthcare to the unvaccinated. Ideologies which endanger innocent people must be opposed and defeated.
@@howtubeable Agree, but for that healthcare workers themselves have a right not overly to endanger their own health by chronic close personal exposure to adult patients who (heedless of the health of their healthcare workers) refuse vaccination against COVID, for too many proven a lethal and/or lastingly disabling infectious disease.
@@howtubeable Boy I was with you for the first part of that post.
I just want to see a cajun and a scott try to talk to each other.
I feel like the world needs this.
You could say that about a Cajun and almost anybody else... 🤣🤣🤣
Thank you for this. Linguistic superiority always irks me and I blame schoolteachers for the way they teach the scholarly register as though it were the only correct way. Non-standard does not mean incorrect. Dialects abound, each with their own storied history. None are the standard dialect with errors.
And then there's this meme fodder:
Brits: "American English sounds so childish!"
Also Brits: "Brolly. Cuppa."
the reason why, I believe at least for all of this linguistic superiority is the american's massive amount of soft power, and since the younger english people (like me) grew up hearing the american pronunciations more than the english pronunciations, making us use some of them. This then leads to the older ones getting really defensive because they feel like their dialect, which came first, is being erased by these americans saying the words differently, the people who get corrected the most I think are actually the English kids
I'm not so accepting, but I'll agree that English teachers generally piss me off.
Brits are also out there saying fizzy drink for soda, cheese toastie for grilled cheese, telly for TV, wellies for rain boots, and washing up liquid for dish soap. It's almost like they're trying to sound adorable lol
@@JMPschool1 Well, "wellies" is short for "Wellington boots", after the Duke of Wellington who popularized them in the early 1800s.
We all judge other dialects against our own. Of course the way "they" talk is strange, because we're not accustomed to it. The term "soda" comes from the sodium salts used to decrease the acidity. It's oddly specific and honestly a strange way to refer to a category of beverage. At least "fizzy drink" is more usefully descriptive.
And yes, I was born and raised and I live in the USA.
@@R.F.9847 I really enjoy the kind of whimsical impression many British words and phrases provide my American ear. I never knew American English could be perceived as childish by some, so I found it funny. Putting an ie or y at the end of things is generally cute and diminutive to us, and British and Australian English has a lot of that. In a very similar way, Swiss German sounds cute to Germans because they often use a diminutive suffix with a long ee sound like li or i, so it would almost be like if someone said bread-ling instead of roll/bun lol.
I specifically have not done a linguistic degree because I want to preserve the joy I have for it. I admire your ability to do that and this channel, which so often involves linguistic differences.
I took courses in Linguistics and it's made accents fascinating. Not just how it arose, but when you hear people speak, you're like "ooh, they have a ____ accent" and you'll notice what makes it unique, not just in how they say words, but in their word choice, too.
My son double majored and linguistics was one of his majors. It's actually an interesting major. He was recruited by the FBI, he wasn't interested in joining that particular organization, but it's surprising how many different fields are interested in linguistics students. His text books looked like ancient Greek writing me.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only British person who really doesn't care at all about differences between British and American English
So nice to find people like you!🐝🤗❤️
As you Brits say "good on you." Aren't there as many differences within the UK as to pronounciation and use of words? I find it strange that the British would criticize America for it.
English unites all we English speaking peoples no matter the differences.
jokes are fun though. like "manoeuvre" lol come on guys wtf is that
Your definitely not the only one Joseph 😉
I honestly found this really fascinating. I'm American and my uncle (not blood related, but still family) is from London. He always told me not to worry about Brits making fun of how I talk because of the same stuff in this video. But they never offended me. Mainly because when I get told I don't speak "proper English" my mind instantly goes to Australia. My uncle's daughter was born and raised there and when I met her I could tell she was struggling not to use a lot of slang. I was a kid at the time and I probably wouldn't have understood 😅
"Herb" is a really funny one because, as an American, I associate dropped H's at the start of words VERY strongly with British accents.
"Ello, 'Enry! 'Ad an 'orrible experience 'ere today, I 'ear!"
_edit: Although reading back, the class thing makes a lot of sense, because that sentence sounds like something that only an orc or a chimney sweep would say._
Yeah, it's similar to accents, modern 'american' accents were the accent commoners spoke with, modern English accents being old upper class accents that spread to the rest of England, figures some of them would get self important.
Very cockney.
My guys speaking ork
Or a bobby.
Yeah "herb" has always been the weirdest one to me. It seems to be singular H word where Brits insist on pronouncing the H regardless of regional accent.
Laurence is America’s biggest advocate, and this is why we love him ❤️
Yes! I love how much he loves and respects us. He defends us when we're right, has no problem poking fun of us when we're wrong. He's our biggest champion and is with us through the highs... and lows. He really is like the best friend who loves us unconditionally, isn't he?
He needs to be protected at all costs 🥺
I like the way he defends the US without prosecuting the UK!
I think the US invented "weekend", too. In France it's become something like L'weekend, which drives the purists crazy which is another reason to be proud of it. The only difference that puzzles me is the US saying "transmission" while the Brits say "gear box". Seems like it should be the opposite. A gear box is knowable whereas a transmission is something only elites can comprehend.
Americans know how to properly use a collective noun. ex the family IS on vacation not ARE on vacation. So it has to be THIS family . Brits would have to say THESE family.
I appreciate these distinctions because I moved from NYC to London at age 13 and had quite the time learning how to speak and listen all over again. Eventually I resorted to mimicry being careful not to over-do it. Some accents remained impenetrable even after years, like Scottish or Cockney. The way the recording on a busy-signal phone call said "The line is engaged" was so damn posh!
Grew up in the UK but am from the US. My favorite method where my mother did something similar was with the pronunciation of schedule, which we pronounce like skedjule instead of shedjule. One of the ladies in my mother's social group started making a big deal of this and belittling her for it asking her where she learned to pronounce the word so poorly, and without blinking, my mother looked at her and said (spelled phonetically) in shule (instead of skool) for school.
Remembering this since it's one of the big inconsistencies I always remember with UK English, despite them saying we're inconsistent :)
A Brit bringing vindication to the American English is priceless 😀👍🏾
Great content Laurence 🙌🏾
I literally bust out laughing and could not stop for a minute or two (am American) at the fact that Americans added hangover to the English lexicon.
Sounds appropriate.
Well, it sure wasn't going to be a Scot or Irishman that admitted liquor got the better of them!
@@benwhite8863 American the next day: I'm in pain because I have a hangover.
Irishman the next day: I'm in pain because I'm sober.
LOL proud to be an american
@Qualnias I thought the same thing
And yet people like to give us shit about prohibition…
Honestly, I really appreciate the multitude of English variations, as it gives depth and dimensions to the language as a whole
Growing up, in the PNW of the US in a rural town, the "big" department store in town had an employee who was from England (I never thought to ask and she may no longer be with us) I always enjoyed listening to her speak.
Many people even here in the US are mean and will say "You talk funny," or "You have a funny accent."
Not me, to me that lady had a beautiful accent.
I appreciate the variations in vocabulary, but not in spelling. That just drives you insane.
Language is always evolving. It still fascinates me how Latin morphed into Spanish or French or Italian. What happens when 2000 years transpires?
Anybody's guess.
I don't believe it will evolve as fast as it did in the past as we have standardized and written the English language so well.
@@JP-pq9xi Yes, there is truth to this. The change the world is undergowing is at a pace which is frightening. Anything is possible.
Interesting! Thank you! If you haven't already, read the history of our Noah Webster. He was bright & made significant reforms to our education system in the early days of our country. He went on to write dictionaries - the first collecting all unique American words & standardizing spelling. We have Noah to thank for dropping all those u's (honour, colour) and adding words unique to us like skunk and squash (the New World food). His influence on our language came just as our nation was developing and is really central to how we speak today - and he did it all for clarity & consistency, for education.
which still failed.
license/practice is my fav0rite example
Gen. Patton said If everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
It's only true if everyone is thinking in the exact same way. But he had the general idea down in that different people think in different ways.
That last part you said Laurence, (As long as we understand each other, that’s all that matters), needs to become our mantra.🐝🤗❤️
To be fair, tho... we don't always.
@@rd6203 Of course we don’t. That’s why It needs to become our mantra. Our world would be a much better place if people actually tried to understand each other instead of just yelling at each other.🐝🤗🤗
@@deborahdanhauer8525 ☺☺
Actual "conversation" i have had
"Saying it louder isn't going to make him understand English any better"
"Well, yes, but i don't know how to say it in Spanish "
@@rd6203 lol!! That about sums it up…. Btw, I got across Mexico once by using the three or four Spanish words I knew, and a lot of pointing and pantomime. I looked a fool, but it worked!🐝❤️🤗
@@deborahdanhauer8525 I have learned two things in my life... well, I have actually learned a great many things in my life, but two pertinent to the subject at hand:
The *vast* majority of people will make a genuine effort to understand you if you make a genuine effort to be understood. My personal assumption is that this tidbit of human nature is responsible for the birth of language in the first place.
And most people will help, if you ask. And if they can't, they'll usually try to direct or pass you to someone who can
But also, some people won't 😟
this is the most fantastically positive channel. much needed in society here in USA. Satire is hilarious, delivery is good, animations are captivating enough i don't look away, and it keeps my attention. hard to find that lately.
Well that was a load of poppycock. I said that last week and my grandkids just loved it. Nana was reading a book to my 6 year old grandson last night and he said." Nana that sounds like poppycock." I couldn't stop laughing 🤣
Oh bullfeathers....LOL!
Oh, horse fritters!
My first sight of "Poppycock," was an ad for an very pricy Crackerjack-like snack.
@Pete Engard
There isn't a right or perfect pronunciation/dialect, but there is sometimes the perfect word for a situation.
I always thought Poppycock derived from the Dutch Pappe Kak
In my youth, I lived in Australia, and we fought regularly about the correct pronunciation of Aluminum. It took us almost a year to figure out that the English and American versions of the word were spelled differently thus the different pronunciation. We all had to agree that we were both right… and that’s super cool.
Americans use the original spelling and pronunciation of aluminum, as established by Humphrey Davey. The royal science club decided that aluminium sounded more posh and Davy said, ok fine. We didn't feel like going along with the change. Eventually all of Europe agreed on the new, posh spelling. By that time we were all the way to not giving AF about everyone else liking the posh version and have been waiting for the UK to get over it ever since.
@ملقرت ملك صور So's Arabic, so what goes around....
I mean do we really even say aluminum that much anyway? It’s definitely not an everyday word. When would you even use it? In US we call aluminum foil “tin foil” anyway. When else would you use it?
@@Ni999 I totally don’t get the whole “posh” thing.
@@catgirl6803 In Davy's first paper to The Royal Society he called it alumium - and no one objected. In his 1812 book of discoveries he called it aluminum - that's where the world at large learned about it and that's what everyone called it. The Royal Society decided that henceforth new discoveries ought to have Latin or Greek sounding names because that would somehow make them sound more legit. I am not making that up. The Brits changed it to aluminium because to them, the big experts, it simply sounded more posh, more upper drawer, more expensive school. That's what they decided to foist off on the rest of the world and they went along with it. I don't know why we didn't. Maybe on the third name we decided to wait until the royal science club was done being fickle. Maybe we already had signs painted. I don't know. I only know that we never cared. There's a lot of crown worshiping in America today but it wasn't always that way. We used to be proud of being free of royalty, now we're the opposite, go figure.
I was raised calling it tin foil. Haven't heard that term in decades, we call it aluminum foil. Everyone who cares about what things are made of, or who work in metal production, products, or maintenance very probably uses the word quite often. If I had to guess how often I've said it out loud or to myself I'd say it's probably better than a few hundred times per year.
"Every now and then, I'll be on Twitter, which was my first mistake..."
Heh.
Thanks to you I just learned that a "snollygoster" is a shrewd, unprincipled person. Proud to be an American!
I, as well, and I shall use it daily! 😅
@@LindaC616 I second that.
I had to look it up and also found "throttlebottom, a bumbling inept character holding public office--That sounds a lot like....
@@elultimo102 ... we voted in a Throttlebottom to replace a Snollygoster!
@@MyName-nx1jj The throttlebottom was installed by machines, illegals, and DEAD people. His predecessor MAY have been cunning in his personal business dealings, but cares about the country, in a way no other has since Reagan or Truman.
This is all excellent, and I enjoyed it. But, I have a small confession to make: Years ago, I read politics at the University of Bristol. As an Arizonan, I found everyone's English to be varying degrees of foreign, but I didn't have any trouble understanding until... I had to do a group presentation on the early Soviet Union (1920's I think it was) with a classmate from some Northern hinterland or other, and... I quite truly couldn't understand a single word he said! :-O I looked around the room for signs that someone, ANYONE would understand my plight and find some polite way to help, but nobody else looked even remotely baffled. I briefly considered trying Spanish (which I did much classwork in back home) but quickly decided that was no good. I was so embarrassed, I couldn't bring myself to actually TELL him that, though, so I just "repeated back" what I assumed he had probably said, then "agreed" to it as to which parts we would each cover. To this day, I have no idea what his part of the presentation was about. I could read Spanish going back to medieval times with little trouble, but I had found mutual incomprehensibility with a native speaker of English from... somewhere in England.
I have heard from japanese english speakers they find British English difficult to understand
To my ear a lot of British country (as opposed to urban) dialects sound mumbled, similar to what I hear from older inhabitants of Appalachia, where I live. I find it hard to understand either.
This is hilarious (though I bet it wasn’t at the time).
This was useful to me. I had no idea there was method to the madness of ending a word in -ize or -ise. Thank you.
I sometimes give you some ribbing on your channel, because it's fun to compare things such as crisps/chips, chips/fries, "zeh-bra"/"zee-bra", etcetera. I know we have differences and quirks and I sometimes like to tell Brits and Aussies "Speak English!" just to get a rise out of them.
But listening to your thoughts in this video is refreshing and I have a lot of respect for your perspicacity in this matter. You're such a nice mellow guy I sometimes worry somebody's going to ruin your nice little world full of rainbows and unicorns. Your a good human animal.
Now if I could only get Kabir Considers to grow out of his innocent naiveté, and don't even get me started on Irish Girl in America Diane.
By the way, have you ever watched "Your New Zealand Family" videos? Great family, they're also trying to figure out what America is really all about. I recommend them.
Are you calling her "Irish Girl in America" because of her content?
If you are, that's not necessarily her obsession, it's her catering to her target audience. Shaun from Scotland has struggled with the same thing. Many American viewers are only interested in navel gazing: they only care about what others think of us, and not about learning about other cultures. (Plus there's the crowd of males following the pretty girl audience). But it's shrewd of her, and I sense she desires more.
That being said, when she has opportunity for commentary, she does not begin to approach Laurence's level of perspicacity
@@LindaC616 No, that's what she calls her channel. Yes, her content is mostly about her experiencing American things, comparing Irish stuff to American stuff, and so on, so thematically it is consistent with the channel name.
She's just hard to watch sometimes, she's got a shrill voice that yells at you when she starts sentences, and she's a little naive and slightly lost. I watch to get comparative reaction content, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
@@davidcruz8667 are we talking about the same Diane? Diane Jennings?(that's her channel name)
@@davidcruz8667 there's no channel calked "Irish girl in America". Just Diane Jennings'.
She actually lives in Ireland (Spain, for the last year), and has only visited the US a few times. So everything I wrote above applies. Of course, if the voice gets to you, there's not much to be done about that
@@LindaC616 well, whatever the channel is called, I guess I got the wrong name, but that's indeed the person I'm talking about. And it doesn't matter to me where she lives, I'm talking about her content.
Yes, her voice is definitely my problem, not saying otherwise. I'm still interested in what she has to say, because she can be quite entertaining and she does give me some insights.
It was funny when she tried to make a PB&J sandwich with Jello. Not sure if she was doing it for the humor or if she really had no clue.
As for following a "pretty girl", you're barking up the wrong tree. I honestly don't like the way she looks and couldn't care less, regardless of what she looks like.
Many years ago I saw a British standup comedy monologue where the comedian discussed American spelling, and how in many cases it really was easier. Words like plow instead of plough were some of his highlights.
I always thought the word "plow" is a verb and plough a noun as in, "You plow the field using a plough". English is difficult to understand sometimes
The first time I realized that the word we spell in the US as maneuver was spelled in the UK as manoeuvre, I yelled "why the f would they put a 3rd consecutive vowel in there."
@Garrett W. Pluff 😂😂 my American brain reads it that way too! Same as rough or tough
@@shoredude2 Because manoeuvre is a French word adopted into English.
@@shoredude2 "...why would they put a 3rd vowel..." The Plantagenets maintain their grip hundreds of years later
Your linguistic background really comes out in how you talk about all varieties of English as equally valid! No variety is inherently better than another, they're just different! Even within huge national varieties, smaller differences can also be fascinating, it's fun to notice a quirk of someone's speech or writing and think "ooh, that's a feature I don't have! I wonder where it came from?"
The earliest use of the word "erb" that I can think of off the top of my head is from the cookbook "The Forme of Cury", very late 14th century.
My favorite Indian English word is "prepone", the rushing to do something instead of postponing it.
15th century, unless the cookbook was hand made by scribes.
Preone should logically exisdt; but then we dont go around saying someone is a very couth person, as an example LOL
'erb is the best, like honor and honest.
I don't get the brits: 'arry, grab 'ermione, and 'arriette, so we can go to the grocery and buy some hhhhhhhhherbs.
Well they pronounce herb with so many h's they had to steal them from other words.
Thank you! 😂
The practiced dropping of consonants. Posh = no R's. Common = no T's. Common faking Posh example (butter) bu'uh.
Also the practiced UK of dropping the middle of a word. Example: Lancaster Shire becomes Lanka Sheer.(I know that you can see what is missing.)
Apologetics claim that it's the accent. Bullocks!
In ‘artford, ‘ereford, and ‘ampshire, ‘urricanes ‘ardly hhhever ‘appen.
You need to hear English accents other than cockney.
I used to be the sort of person that would find Americanisms annoying, but I think at some point I realised that there's a lot of internalised classism going on in that irritation, and that isn't healthy.
These days I'm super psyched when I hear the way people around the world use English words and grammar in really unusual ways - it feels like English is really going back to its mongrel "3 three languages in a trench-coat" days now that its become such a global standard.
I want it to keep evolving until we reach an international English that's simplified enough for people of almost any culture to take up and enrich with whatever words and concepts they need!
Classism is definitely the right word. It seems much of the way British English evolved is when a group of people wanted to differentiate themselves from others, usually they upper-class from the working class, and it’s the source of a lot of differences between American and British English now. Shame how most British people don’t seem to understand that and instead claim Americans are somehow wrong… The attitude itself is inexcusable no matter what though.
To borrow from Orwell, simple English makes for simple thoughts. That isn't good. Personally, I miss the Received Pronunciation which used to be common in public discourse in the UK (aka England).
I've always said most people hate on American English simply because it's American. Other English-speaking countries have their own quirks when it comes to the language but most people just find them charming.
This is one of my favorite subscriptions. Love his unique take on things. Brilliant sense of humor. Uhm.... humour. 👍😊
1:30 . . . Oh my gosh!!! He said ‘aluminum’ instead of ‘al-ooo-min-eee-um’ and he said it so naturally and freely!!! He’s been here long enough that now he’s one of us and must be protected from judgmental Brits when he goes back for visits!
I noticed that, too!
TBH, i find "aluminum" kinda bothersome. We have so many other metals that end in "ium", but then for some reason that particular "i" got dropped...
@@shannonjones8877 The element was originally called "alumium" when discovered. From that, the two current versions sprang. So the "i" wasn't dropped; a second "i" just wasn't added when the "n" was added. In that sense, the American version is closer to the original in spelling, having only one extra letter.
And most interesting to me, it was a Brit, chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who coined "alumium" and later changed it to "aluminum". He's also the one who coined "sodium" and "potassium" so it's a bit odd that he chose not to go with "-ium" for aluminum, but there it is. He discovered the stuff, so I'll stick to calling it what he did. (In truth, I'll call it aluminum because in my society, that's just what we call it. 😉)
I have bought one of your wonderful T-shirts, and every time I wear it, I get asked over and over and over all about you--Laurence--and your wonderful show! I am spreading the word!!! Thank you for all the information and fun. Hi Tarah!
Laurence, you're always very useful. :) There's another channel owned by a British man who just began a similar journey to yours when you moved to the US. He met his American wife online through a dating web site crossover. He's still getting used to American terminology and made a video today about just that very thing. He's only been in the US full time for just over a month, so it's all extremely new to him. His subscribers help him as much as we can with language explanations. I have you to thank for the help I can give him, really.
Really? I'd like to check it out, if you could tell me the name of his channel.
Besides Lawrence, I also watch Kabir Considers, Your New Zealand Family, German Girl in America (excuse me, her channel is now called Feli from Germany), and when I can stand her Irish Girl in America. She's a little too ditzy for me sometimes.
What is his channel/name?
What's the name of the channel?
@@davidcruz8667 "German Girl in America (excuse me, her channel is now called Feli from Germany)..." Ugh, I despise that entire situation. Copyright trolls deserve a special place in hell otherwise reserved for people who talk at the theater.
@@IceMetalPunk yeah, she explained what happened. In my opinion she did a far better job at being the German Girl in America than that other lady that complained, especially since the other girl was basically an American girl with German parents, I think.
Either way, Feli gets my vote as being cooler and more informative, as well as more authentic.
I wish everyone were as enlightened as you and as accepting of the differences between their own flavor of English and that of others. It's depressing the number of times someone online, almost invariably from England, has told me that I don't speak "real English" or has retyped my comments with all of the spelling "corrected." There was one guy in South Africa who told me that what Americans speak is literally a different language than that spoken by the rest of the Anglosphere. He was very upset that he had to learn "another language" (American English) just to use the Duolingo Spanish course for English speakers. I guess I'm lucky to have always had access to British TV and radio programs and books here in Florida and to have worked with a number of British and Irish expats over the years. I've never found British English strange or unpleasant, and not because I consider it purer or more prestigious, but because I'm used to it. It's familiar. If you haven't done one already, I'd love to see a video that mentions the migration of the Angles to Great Britain from mainland Europe and the naming of the language and the country after them. Thanks! Love the channel. ❤
Yes.
And the equivalent of that gent's problem is an immigrant to the US from Brazil studying for the Citizenship exam, using CDs....that ask the ?s in a Britiah accent....🤷♀️
It's not like the rest of the planet is unfamiliar with American English or something. We've sent our language around the world via Hollywood for a century. That gent honestly has little excuse. It's to the point where other English- speaking countries honestly think they know what America is like based solely on our film industry. Americans know it isn't an accurate representation, but the rest of the world doesn't.
I’m an Englishman from Shrewsbury and I love the differences I’m only 18 but I do think there’s some words which are weird. Like I prefer how you Americans spell centre as center theatre however is weird being spelt as theater
By that logic, there’s more than 1 American English just based on American geography. How many words or phrases are used in a certain region in America not used elsewhere? Examples include the plural of you (y’all or you guys & others) & what a soft drink is called. To me, they’re all cokes regardless of brand.
@@abbycross90210 actually, these days, it's based on the news....which is worse
Brilliant! (In both British and American senses!) I wish I'd had access to your videos when I was still teaching Linguistics to teachers of English Language Learners. Great fun and insightful!
Lawrence, great video. I really enjoyed it. You should spend some time around old-timers in the American South. You might hear some great phrases such as " I not saying he lies, mind ya but what comes out of his mouth. Is worth the same as what comes out of the South end of a North bound mule."
Don't forget, "It don't make no nevermind." When my wife first uttered that phrase, I said "What the hell was that?" Her family was from Missoura.
@@grantrichards4950 We say that in SW Virginia too
@Jesse Mathis that one is out of my areas of the South. I love directly and a fur piece.
I will get some I that cobbler, directly
Well you go down the road, a fur piece, and you will see Pete's store on the right take the next left.
You just blew my mind by pointing out that "hello" is an American word! I would have thought it was much older than even the existence of the US, but no, I've looked it up and you're right: 1826 Connecticut was the first time it was used 🤯
Also, this video just reminds me of Eddie Izzard's bit on American vs British spellings, and how Brits are just trying to cheat at Scrabble 😂
There used to be many variations of the word: hullo, hallo, etc. (Many other Germanic languages say similar things). It's pretty cool that the variety that won out came from these United States.
It pretty much became a thin, derived from the native American Hao of how ever its spelled same with waving
hi
@@weirdlanguageguy I have heard that hello came into common usage with the advent of the Telephone. When people were first exposed to the telephone in around the 1880's, they didn't know how to react to this strange talking machine. So they had to give lessons in how to use a phone, when you hear the bell ring, pick up the speaker and hold it to your ear and then speak into the microphone. Some people thought "Ahoy, Ahoy" was the greeting that should be uttered (sounds like a Maine fishermen came up with that). Others thought "Hello" was the logical response to a call, and soon after hello won out as the proper response. Now after nearly 140 years no one would believe that any other greeting was ever used.
@@davidmarquardt2445 I heard about that too
Scofflaw is a US invention originating in the 1920s! You'd think as old as "scoff" is that the term would be quite old itself clearly referencing someone who holds the (or a) law in low regard not worth following but it was a contest winner for a new word to describe those not following prohibition!
I remember hearing somewhere that "cahoots" is actually just a mispronunciation of "cohorts" that caught on and became its own word, similar to how "varmint" came from "vermin."
I think that's just folk etymology (cahoots, not varmint).
I enjoyed this nerdy linguistics oriented video. It's what originally interested me in this channel. Keep it up. 😁
I really enjoy your videos about the linguistics of the language and where their origins came from.
Great stuff, Sir. I have a friend here in Florida who is an amusing Brit and have shared your site with him so we can chat about the language. I get a kick out of imitating his accent periodically....and to our amusement he responded by imitating my American accent. Ah now we're having fun, mate!
Brits: Americans don’t pronounce the H in herb, how daft.
Also Brits: I’m from Chippenum, but now I live in Totnum. My mate from the University of Birmingum is originally from Cheltenum, but now he lives in Twickenum.
Also brits: "'ello 'enry, 'ow is it that you don't pronounce the 'aytch' in the word Herb!?"
@@Dhalin the funny thing is a lot of Brits (and Maritime Canadians) call the letter "haitch".
@@thebigmacd Must be regional dialects, I have heard it both ways before.
Ok if we give 'erb to the Americans they can pronounce the 'erb Basil not Baysil
@@paulreed1 Is that why half the streamers that I watch play OMORI pronounce it "Bass -il"? Always wondered about that.
That "-ise"/"-ize" thing causes problems for musicians. In American, "vocalize" is a verb meaning to do something with your voice; "vocalise" (pronounced "-eez") is a noun meaning a performance using the human voice to do something other than make words (think Bobby McFerrin beatboxing, or scat singing). The distinction is lost in the UK where both meanings are spelled with an S.
BTW, I'd love to get a clear overview on the US/UK differences on certain adjectives like "quite", "a bit", "rather". It's been my experience that the relative degree of such modifiers doesn't come in the same order on opposite sides of the pond ("quite hot" is more so than "rather hot" in one country but less so in the other).
actually the technique youre referring to is spelled "Vocalese" see the Manhattan Transfer album of the 80s
In the US, "quite" means "rather" or "entirely". In the UK, "quite" means "a bit" or "sort of". This is apparently the result of it losing its way in too many layers of ironic understatement and overstatement. Both sides agree that "not quite" means falling short of a mark. This indicates that the US meaning is the original one (or at least the obvious argument that it means "not completely" is more believable to me than "slightly not").
I have never throughout my participation in choirs and vocal training never heard an American or anybody say "vocalise". In looking it up it seems primarily a noun, and as a verb almost entirely British. I think (as an American) it's not being used has more to do with us being unsure of what letters we are meant to be hearing at the end; if written we would rarely read with "eez" as the perceived pronunciation but literally as "ise" which would be difficult to communicate give "ize", and would certainly cause spelling confusion about ending the word in "ice". For what I have heard we just use the word scat or scatting instead to avoid confusion. Only in scholarly music circles would I expect to hear vocalise used at all.
Never had that issue here in Canada. We seem to be used to using se and ze spellings interchangeably :)
@@juliaf_ I have never forgotten this sentence that I read in a book when I was a kid: "Canadians live with compromises like 'tire centre.'" 😊
My favorite word that British people get ruffled over but which actually makes far more sense in American is "math" vs "maths." The word that's being abbreviated, mathematics, isn't a plural, it's a Greek word that happens to end in S (much like "physics"). So when it's abbreviated, why on Earth would you include a random letter from the end of the word? We both call chemistry "chem" rather than "chemy" and nobody loses their mind. My usual response when someone complains about this online is to ask them which is their favorite mathematic.
You might be interested in researching an American named Melville Dewey and his ideas about spelling. He wanted to get rid of all unnecessary vowels and renamed himself Melvil Dewe. Yes, this is the guy who invented the Dewey Decimal System used by librarians.
That guy's rap is burned into my brain.
I recall a (possibly apocryphal) story about how some of the... simplification? of American English spelling happened. Basically, when the first American dictionary was being created, there was supposedly a concerted effort to try and make the spelling more closely match the pronunciation. Which is why, according to the story, American English doesn't have a lot of the silent letters that British English has.
As an American, whenever I read colour, honour, favourite, etc. I always pronounce them how they’re written. The American versions make more sense
I do know that some of our Founding Fathers were in favor of spelling reform. Ben Franklin comes to mind - iirc he supported making the words look like they sounded (e.g. "soop" instead of "soup").
As an American, the word "herb" has always had two meanings in my own lexicon - one is a flavorful plant, the other is a shortened form of the name Herbert. I drop the H when talking about the plant, but not when talking to or about my neighbor Herbert.
Cattywampus, is a word I love and still frequently used today. Correction I used it yesterday.
Many of the words you quoted are British - discombobulated, fuddy duddy etc
Useful for fun. My favorite from processing failure and repair reports from American and British submarines is the Brit sailors use of "fitted" where US sailors would use "installed". It suggests the Brits needed a file and shims to install repair parts. That was definitely not true for the submarines although it had validity when I replaced some parts on my MGB.
I'm sure someone else has already posted but another reason we dropped the U is telegraph used to charge by the letter. Color was cheaper than colour
Don't forget a great American word "Hootenanny"
Similar to a ho-down, but very distinct also
Seems like a whatchamacallit to me 😉
I can "noodle" out what everyone is saying in the Anglosphere, They are ALL valid. They are all "English". Even IF my "trunk" is your "boot". I get it. English is a rich language. It has variations that are ALL valid. If I were English (meaning an actual London bred, Brit). FAR from being bothered by the differences, I'd be DAMNED PROUD that my language had such "legs". 👍😊👍
I finally figured out why the term trunk is used: it comes down fomr the old sailing/steamship/stagecoach says when you had a giant :trunk" you packed al lyour stuff in, and usually put it on the back of the stagecoach, and then that transferred to automobiles. Not sure why the term boot is used, as one cant normally put much in aboot (insert canadian joke here). Hood versus Bonnet is just a term for covering the head/brain of the car.
@@ZakhadWOW British people refer to them as bonnet and boot because that's what it was referred as in horse-drawn wagons or stagecoaches.
Then the names stuck.
@@hard_drive.system you didnt answer the question AT ALL. WHY are the called that, not when did it start?
@@ZakhadWOW get better reading comprehension
i said nothing about when it started, i said exactly why it was called that. Bonnet and boot referred to the front and rear of horse-drawn coaches, and those names were still used on automobiles.
Here's an interesting thing about r-dropping: in America it was incomplete in some areas. We keep most of our r's, BUT some of our oldest words (kept in parts of Appalachia esp.) they're preserved in an r-less state. The word "passel" is an example of that; iirc, it's the same word as "parcel," but with the r dropped.
I don't know, but I imagine that it's related to whence the Brit (or Irishman?) came or when they came to the USA.
Typically the example that people give is the Italian New Yorker accent.
I'd say Boston is way more well known: Pahk ya' cah in the Hahvahd yahd and all that.
I am a retired teacher and have always loved the history of words. I read somewhere that 40% of the world's population speaks English as a first or second language. English is the language of science. So thank Britain.
Not even close. There are 983 million people in the world who speak English, or 13% of the world's population, according to Ethnologue. It is estimated 372 million speak English as their first language, while 611 million speak English as a second language. The British Council claims that 25 percent of the world's population has some understanding of English.
As Churchill said, two peoples separated by the same language. That said, US English is often the older version of English, the US didn’t mutate the English in the same way as the English.
Well that's extremely true even within the same country. As a Southern Appalachian speaker, we're stuck with an even older form of English. Mainly for over-articling, definite nouns vs. indefinite, and having more than a few anachronisms, despite being a dying dialect. It's hard to understand General American English speakers passed the mid-USA line when they're writing. Mainly the grammar is too simplified.
love your positivity about the differences and enthusiasm for the US and our version of english.
Lawrence, you sometime should do a show on the difference between the Scottish language and the UK English language. I have lived in several of the UK places. My favorite is Glasgow but, I must admit I am a little prejudice because that is my husband and myself home town. As we used to say "Glasgow is pure deed brilliant" Cheers
The Scots speak English or celtic in the north, it is an accent and the English language doesn't have a real dialect. The Scots do have their own vocabulary, but so do other English speaking regions.
He should team up with Scottish youtubers (Shaun, WeeScottishLass, & BeautyCreep) and do a Scottish-English diffeances. Also find a Welsh person & get them to start a channel.
@@johnsaia9739 Celtic isn't a language. Gaelic is a language. It is part of a group of languages that are Celtic though, much like there's a group of languages called the semitic languages but no language called semitic. There's also Irish, Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx within the group of Celtic languages.
Scots is very much a dialect, to the point where academics debate whether it's in fact it's own language and also has subtypes like Doric (which is love you to listen to and claim it's similarity to say middle class London English, many even in Scotland don't know what the hell they're saying). I'm not sure what you think a dialect is if the fact that having its own vocabulary, by your own admission, and some of its own grammar rules, doesn't count.
You've posted your completely unsubstantiated claim that English doesn't have it's down dialects in a few places and because it's so demonstrably wrong particularly in the British isles where you can pinpoint what part of a county someone is from by how they speak in many places, I'm inclined to think you're kind of just trolling.
The different pronunciations of “herb” have a similar history as the pronumnciation of “Missouri.”…Missouri is commonly pronounced as Missouree or Missourah. The common pronunciations went back and forth between the wealthy city dwellers and the rural in habitants of Missouri several times before the Missouree pronunciation became the commonly used one and Missourah seems to be used mostly by some who live in rural areas or people who have moved here from the South (like my parents.)
That's due to the French influence from what I remember.
One difference I've found very odd is 'Own' For Americans and 'Owin' for a lot of brits. Usually alterations in pronunciations stem from shortening or slurring the word, or even taking out syllables, This one Adds a syllable. "Blowin up" instead of "Blown up", "Knowin" vs "known".
It's a good day when you learn something new. Never used the word pulchritudinous and had to look it up. Used all the others though. Thanks British Guy! You're a life-saver.
On a related note, I can't say I've ever thought about the schism that occurred when we in the states went our separate way, but that divide makes sense.
Pulchritudinous to me always suggested beauty with a little extra amplitude. Like zaftig or callipygian.
Noah Webster had a a lot to do with many American spelling of words during the early part of the 1800s.Allegedly, he wanted to make American English, distinct from British. Since there wasn’t exactly a consensus from lexicographers, either in England or the USA, Webster proceeded to create his own dictionary, especially to cater to an American audience. His eponymous dictionary became the standard then, as it does today.
yay, another fellow linguistics major! like you, i also took a course on the varieties of the english language, and it also really opened my eyes. i kind of wish a class like that would become part of just learning english.
The fact that my English husband went into a convenance store here in the US and asked the guy for free packs of Marlboro lights, then the guy gave him a really weird look and said we don’t have free cigarettes here. 😂 Was seriously one of the funniest moments!
FYI for any of you that don’t get it, he was actually saying three not free. Lmao!
Born within earshot of the Bow Bells, was he?
Has he ever asked for four candles? ua-cam.com/video/gi_6SaqVQSw/v-deo.html
Kinda like Marty asking for a Pepsi Free in back to the future. Of course I always doubted that Pepsi was really a thing in the 50s but never looked it up... Probably should.
@@mkshffr4936 Actually Pepsi has been around since 1893.
@@KindredBrujah maybe, I’ll have to ask him. Is that close to Chelsea. That’s where he grew up. Lol!
I simply adore watching your videos Laurence. Thank you!
I think you're exactly right: "As long as we understand each other..."
we also had a wee bit of a debate over whether we had to do things the way the brits do, a couple hundred years ago.
but in all seriousness, the very idea of rigid spelling rules is younger than the US. and we were a bit of an upstart to want to codify them and simplify them.
fun trivia bit - occasionally two diplomats from English speaking countries have to hire an American to be an interpreter.
I can definitely understand if it’s the Ausies or New Zealanders…who can understand that gibberish 🤣👍
I actually noticed another quirk/difference at 5:49 when you write “every day words” instead of “everyday words.” I’ve always seen “everyday” (one word) used when it’s acting as an adjective, like it is in that caption; while “every day” (2 words) is when it’s used as an adverb. Is this another difference between British and American English or it it just a typo? So interesting to learn about the origin of things like this
I'm genuinely impressed with the amount of work that must have been put into making that soccer / football map.
The British only started to object to 'soccer' in the '80s because they didn't like the North American Soccer League.
Sounded too NASL
@@KalebMarshallDulcimerPlayer I see what you did there!
I think that the internet has meant that us Brits are more aware of it, but the word as another name for the game is something I've been aware in a purely British context for all of my living memory (going back to the '70s).
Possibly. But around the same time we became more aware - through TV - that Americans had their own game they called football (which it patently wasn't!)
@@rogink And decidedly distinct from rugby as well. An odd hybrid of rugby and association football with some unique twists evolving from resultant inconsistencies and problems of the fusion.
People who live in Appalachia use alot of 16th century English words and phrases. Up until 70 years ish ago they were very isolated
I also applaud Laurence for learning to pronounce Appalachia right, and not use the long a! Yay! Wish we could get non-southern Americans to say it right, lol.
I'm glad that you worked the word plethora into this video. It means a lot to me.
Another reason why spelling in English, both British and American, can be so weird is because we used to have 9 more letters in our alphabet that were used for multiple specific sounds that are now shared by a single letter or group of letters. For example the hard 'th' sound in the word 'there' and the soft 'th' in the word 'thought' used to each have their own letter.
Fun fact: You're referring to the letter "thorn" which was difficult to print properly, and was printed with a 'y' with an 'e' over it to signify it. That's how we ended up with "Ye olde ___." It was never supposed to be a 'y' it was a "thorn" which was 'th' in pronunciation. So the signs actually would be read "the olde" not "ye olde."
@@rayh966 *Thorn* thats right, I completely forgot what the letter was called. That's pretty cool.
The one thing as an American, that sparked the most comments at a dinner where steak was served (by a wonderful Cornish family), was my not switching the cutlery in my hands!
I coyly said: "But that is they way the silver was set out."
I was raised to switch hands and then abandoned it as a silly, wasted motion. I was taught that when one is eating at a formal dinner, it's good manners to use one's utensils that way. "Poppycock", I say. Good manners is about being polite, grateful and respectful; not which hand you use to wield a knife.
I have never even heard of a switching hands tradition. If anything, on rare occasions, I have been told it is rude to do so despite being left handed. Do you mean the knife is set on the left or that you are expected to use the knife in your left hand?
@@johnpublicprofile6261 Apparently, how one holds and uses cutlery is important to some people. At a table setting, the knives are on the right and the forks are on the left. You are "supposed" to eat with your fork in your right hand unless you're using your knife. Then the fork, in your left hand, holds the food and you cut with the knife in your right hand. After this, you put down your knife and move the fork to your right hand. You're also supposed to set down down your cutlery while chewing and never point a fork or a knife in the direction of another person at the table. Personally, I think these silly rules were designed to make some people feel superior to others. Some table manners make sense, like not talking with your mouth full and not farting with gusto during a moment of quiet; but the cutlery rules seem arbitrary and pointless.
@@grantrichards4950 I grew up in a traditional British restaurant but only ever knew fork in left hand as far as formal fork use. Though these days, unless for penguin suit and bow tie events, it is which ever hand you want.
As a young child I was taught the hand-switching method because children are slow to learn use of their non-dominant hand. Then Daddy taught me the American way to do it, and how uncouth he was thought to be in Continental Europe for it.
Beautifully researched and really enjoyable to hear. I enjoy your take on this country. It takes fresh ears to hear things we have always taken for granted. Thanks for the final comment. There’s always more overlap with other cultures than we realize and man, can we use more understanding. Love to Larah.
The thing with "Soccer" especially comes from a visceral reaction to USA 94.
Prior to that the word "Soccer" was actually pretty common in England but a few people decided to make a big fuss over it and suddenly it became verboten.
My younger brother who doesn't even like Football in the first place HATES the word but then again he constantly polices language and hates all things American.
He turned 16 in 1997 whereas I turned 16 in 1992 and have no issue with the word "Soccer" whatsoever because when I grew up it was fully accepted in England!
Sensible Soccer was made by a British Company!
Sky Sports still has Soccer Saturday!
Yet the word is seen as an Americanism because of a visceral reaction to USA 94 - I'm sure the fact that England didn't make it to that World Cup has nothing to do with this visceral reaction :)
That surprises me. As an American, I was taught that in school in the 80s that most of the world calls it football, and that only we call it soccer.
@@rbbecker73 Most the world does call it football, but most of the English-speaking world calls it soccer, with Great Britain being the only notable exception. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland all use 'soccer'.
@@costakeith9048 I'm unsure about South Africa but all the other Commonwealth countries have their own national foot-the-ball games. US = gridiron, Canada = very similar to US but bigger ball and one less "down" (whatever a "down" is), Australia is a split between various states = either Aussie Rules or Rugby League, New Zealand = Rugby Union, Ireland = Gaelic Football. However in 2007 New Zealand renamed their national soccer team to New Zealand Football (All Whites) in line with other non-Commonwealth nations.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed more Brits spelling “judgment” the American way and most Americans barely even know we’re supposed to spell it “glamor.” The -ize to -ise was a Victorian choice, I’d read. More continental to look like French or German, which is why Canadian English still uses the original British spelling of -ize, whereas Aus/NZ and ZA use the more recent -ise. Around the same time as the posh pronunciation of tomahto and banahna came into use. But how in the hell did North America coin “Hello”?? I felt like that was universally Germanic. (And thank you, anyone, if you got this far in a rando youtube comment. Cheers.)
It seems like it was "hallo" way back when, and that morphed into "hello" in American English sometime in the mid-1800s. Interestingly, from what I found in my quick search, "hullo" is even newer than that!
Hello was basically only accepted after the invention of the telephone, it was almost ahoy instead!
Hello. I read somewhere, years ago, before the internet existed as we know it today, that "hello" started as a question called down the telephone line "hollow?" meaning "is anyone there?". It could well be an urban myth but it sounded logical to my mind, might be why it stuck there all those years. It mutated thru hallo to hello over time.
I am an American who teaches British English (Cambridge Exam preparation) at an international school. These videos are fantastic. I always encourage my students to learn both British and American style English as international users of the language.
love this. language is dynamic, evolving, and ever changing. there is NO right, but perhaps right now. dialects, even within close regions, have nuances. I almost unconsciously speak to my friend from Iran differently (my pronunciation changes) than a friend from Ireland than from a Central Midwestern US dialect of a white male that grew up on the poorer side of town.
And THAT is the beauty of english. As you note, it is constantly evolving and changing. There are so many countries in the world that have tried to invent words to keep their language(s) “pure” (free from english).
English has survived, (even dominated) the linguistic divide because it is willing to embrace words from other cultures and languages. For example, if there is a foreign word that describes a certain phenomenon or item for which there isn’t an english equivalent , it (the english language) will just adopt it.
Examples: tsunami, brioche, chow mien , bungalow, pasta, linguine, schadenfreude, baguette, Prost, curry, Samurai, goulash, sushi , kebab, schnapps, schnitzel… the list is endless.
@@artos1955 evolving? Not. It is not changing from "language" to some other thing not-language.
@@artos1955 The assimilation of foreign words and associated spellings and pronunciations is both the strength and major problem of English, especially the Americanized version. There are no straight forward rules without multiple exceptions.