English vs English

[deanb]

 

 

And yeah it wouldn't be gravy (either version). I'm aware America has sauces that may be coloured brown, but not Brown Sauce.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

any sauce on a bacon sandwich is heresy.

[fuchikoma]

We definitely have HP sauce in Canada - it's at any grocery store, but no one would know what you meant if you called it brown sauce. I don't use it a lot, but it seems to go well on blander things like roast beef or potatoes.

 

I checked bacon on Wikipedia to see if it's heavily salted and smoked in both places and I saw it's a different cut in North America - it's almost always belly cuts with streaks of fat along the strips. It's usually served fried until crispy, or at least firm and chewy. I know back bacon is sometimes called "Canadian bacon" but I pretty much only ever see it on pizza.

[TheMightyEthan]

And yeah it wouldn't be gravy (either version). I'm aware America has sauces that may be coloured brown, but not Brown Sauce.

 

Yeah we do, look at the link again, we just call it "steak sauce" instead of "brown sauce".

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Steak sauce= BBQ sauce?

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Brown sauce/steak sauce is a lot more vinegary and a lot less sweet than BBQ sauce and is more spicy.

[Luftwaffles]

Yeah, steak sauce here is A1 and the like, whereas BBQ sauce is, like gerbil said, much more sweet usually. I believe BBQ sauce has a ketchup/tomato base as well, and steak sauce has a vinegar base.

[deanb]

[TheFlyingGerbil]

An article about Briticisms in America. Interesting to read that Americans seem less bothered by it than the British do about Americanisms making their way over here.

[TheMightyEthan]

Several of the things mentioned wouldn't even have struck me as Britishisms, like "will do", "sell-by date" and "the long game".

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

An article about Briticisms in America. Interesting to read that Americans seem less bothered by it than the British do about Americanisms making their way over here.

 

This seems like quite the stretch.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

What does?

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Calling a lot of that Briticisms in the first place. Ethan seems to have thought the same thing.

[Hot Heart]

Ethan didn't think the same. He's surprised because some of them are well-established and familiar, being that they can date back as far as the 19th century

 

...but you probably know better than a professor studying the subject.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

So we both assume Ethan said different things. Whose to say either of us is right but Ethan?

 

I think it's a stretch because I think the only people who are going to care in the first place are linguists. They're not so much "Briticisms" as they are just colloqualisms that take time to travel. It hasn't been that long since British English and American English diverged and it's not like words can never travel. This stuff seems a lot less uniquely British than the usage of words that differ in meaning (torch vs torch.)

[TheMightyEthan]

I meant that a lot of the things mentioned didn't seem uniquely British as the article would imply. "Will do" for example. It just means "[Yes, I] will do [that]." It's a phrase that I've just heard people use, and those people weren't predominantly British any more than any other phrase I've heard. That's in contrast to some of the other examples, like "snog" or "chuffed to bits", which are distinctly British.

[Hot Heart]

It's not really about 'caring', it's just recognising a trend. And they're clearly not all colloquialisms. Of course they travel and will become common but I imagine, at that point, they lose their 'Britishism' status outside of anything but historical context.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

I meant that a lot of the things mentioned didn't seem uniquely British as the article would imply. "Will do" for example. It just means "[Yes, I] will do [that]." It's a phrase that I've just heard people use, and those people weren't predominantly British any more than any other phrase I've heard. That's in contrast to some of the other examples, like "snog" or "chuffed to bits", which are distinctly British.

 

See, I knew we were thinking the same thing. That's why I called it a stretch.

[TheMightyEthan]

It also seems weird to me that, give this aspect of English:

 

 

the fact that a word or phrase comes from American would suddenly make it bad in the eyes of Brits.

[fuchikoma]

I can't say without being... a linguistic anthropologist(??) but I'd accept that these may have come from Britain. I think not seeing them as Britishisms shows how they've been adopted.

 

...though it's sort of a strange distinction to make in the first place if you ask me, since we're all speaking English.

[deanb]

 

Basically it boils down to cultural issues. Imagine the world as an artists box of bits n bobs. You've got the European oil paints, the Japanese inks, the russian crayons and then you've got UK and US as acrylic paints. And due to the shared medium we can swap back n forth rather easily, but as anyone knows who uses paints, you mix colours up shittily and you end up with that turgid swamp brown muck. Britain/England would very much like to remain purple. There's a general feeling of losing national heritage and culture under the massive influx of american culture, words, companies etc taking root so there's a fair amount of push back against it. From a dislike of "Americanisms" to Kraft buying Cadburys to American remakes of UK shows and beyond. Not helped by the fact that generally most American things in those respects tend to be shit.

For example Kraft are known for:

 

Sure we have plenty of shit too, but it's british shit. (And I'm pretty sure we don't export much of it either.)

 

It's kinda hard to explain I guess, I'm pretty much petering out here and you can see why I don't finish off too many PXOD articles. Basically it's a bit of a "you had to be there" thing to understand.

[TheMightyEthan]

Back to the flipside ("Britishisms" in America), I guess part of my thought is that obviously 99% of words/phrases Americans use came from Britain, so how established does something have to be over here before it stops being a Britishism?

[deanb]

For most I'd say never (especially the phrases). Maybe if "Expiration date" was to change to "sell by date" on official packaging laws? But until then they'll be as British as "ball park figure" is American. Shared words, different usage and meaning. I'm surprised at ginger being a britishism, and I'd have thought metrosexual was American in origin(though it doesn't feel like an Americanism, more in that it's its own word with shared meaning across the pond)

 

btw if you guys didn't use "Ginger" for gingers until recently, what did you normally call them? Coppers?

Unlike in the UK, there is no anti-ginger prejudice in the US, she says

I learnt "Gingers have no souls" from US sites.

[Thursday Next]

I was wondering about the ginger prejudice too. I hear the phrase "red-hedded step child" from Americans, and the gingers have no souls thing was done by South Park. Maybe it's just a very recent development.

 

Video related:

[TheMightyEthan]

We call them redheads. And I'm pretty sure any anti-ginger sentiment in the US is just a joke popularized by South Park.

 

And just as a practical matter I actually prefer "expiration" or "best-by" dates over "sell-by" dates because if I get a gallon of milk that says "sell by October 15" or whatever I don't know how long past that date it's okay to use.

 

*Edit* - Thursday ninja'd me.