Girl here.
I'm Inyan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to look at some fun differences between British English and American English, and then we'll look at a big trend in advertising language.
December 4th is National Cookie Day in the United States.
And from the National Day calendar website, it sounds like the whole thing got started by Sesame Street in 1976, with Cookie Monster making an especially big deal about it.
In a 1980 book, The Sesame Street Dictionary.
So it's a fun day to celebrate everything from chocolate chip cookies to snickerdoodles.
But it got me thinking about the difference between British English and American English, because we have a cookie conundrum.
In Britain, those same baked treats would usually be called biscuits.
And biscuits in America are completely different.
Soft, flaky breads that I like served with gravy.
Biscuit is the older word going back to the 1300s, coming from an old French word that meant twice baked.
Biscuits were originally hard rations baked once to cook and then again to dry out, and they were perfect for sailors and soldiers.
But by the mid-1500s, people were using the term for small, sweet cakes I would call a cookie.
And in case you're wondering yes, if you go back far enough, the word biscotti, a twice-baked cookie, is related to biscuit.
But the word biscuit went a different way in the United States in the 1800s, becoming the name for a small savory baked good made with baking soda or baking powder.
So the bread was soft and fluffy.
Meanwhile, Dutch settlers in what would eventually become New York had brought the word kokje, meaning little cake, which turned into cookie and became the word we use for British biscuits.
Now, the word cookie does exist in Britain.
Back in 2006, linguist Lynn Murphy of the Separated by a Common Language blog said the word was making inroads in the UK, but it's used more for bigger, softer cookies, like the big gooey chocolate chip cookies.
And moving on, that cookie-biscuit mismatch is just one of many ways British and American English don't quite align.
Another food word that can cause problems is jelly.
In the US.
Jelly is a smooth fruit spread with no chunks that you most often put on bread like in a PBJ sandwich.
Peanut butter and jelly.
And we use jam for spreads with fruit pieces.
Well, in Britain, jelly is a wobbly gelatin dessert, what I'd call jello.
And jello leads me to another difference, pudding.
Again, Lynn Murphy says there's no such thing as jello pudding in the UK.
And I am still cranky about an expensive pudding dessert I ordered in a fancy restaurant in New York about 10 years ago that used the British definition of pudding and was some kind of steamed cake.
I'm allergic to wheat, so my annoyance was more than me just being picky.
I was expecting to get American pudding since I was in America, a soft, spoonable dessert.
But British pudding can be multiple things.
It can be a specific family of dishes, sweet or savory, that are boiled or steamed, like sticky toffee pudding or steak and kidney pudding.
Or the word pudding can be another name for dessert. just the general course of a meal.
For example, you might hear British hosts ask what shall we have for pudding, when they're talking about dessert.
So if you're visiting either country from the other, be especially careful when you see the word pudding on a menu and ask for clarification if it matters.
Now we'll move from the table to the wardrobe.
In American English, pants are the everyday word for a type of garment that covers your legs.
Jeans, khakis, dress pants, and so on.
Well, people in Britain usually call those trousers and pants.
Most often refer to what I'd call panties or underpants.
So that can lead to some funny mix-ups, like if you've just moved to London, don't ask a British co-worker to help you buy some new pants on your lunch hour.
And if British friends say that's pants, they're using slang.
That means something is nonsense or rubbish.
Pants leads us to suspenders, which also differ between the two countries.
American suspenders are straps that go over your shoulders and attach to your pants to help keep them up.
While in British English, those are usually called braces.
If you ask British people about suspenders...
They're likely to think you're asking about what Americans call garter belts, another item you probably shouldn't shop for with a coworker.
Not all garters are fancy lingerie, though.
Some men also use them to hold up their socks.
And one of the oldest orders of chivalry is the Order of the Garter, established in 1348.
And one likely explanation for the name of the Order of the Garter is that knights used garters to attach parts of their armor.
And here's a fun suspenders aside.
Mark Twain hated suspenders for holding up pants so much that he invented an alternative type of strap and filed a patent on it.
Now, from what I can gather, it was an elastic strap that is kind of like the part of a modern bra that fastens in the back.
Another clothing item that differs between the two countries is the vest.
King Charles II introduced the vest as a new court fashion in 1666.
And the citation about it from Samuel Pepys in the Oxford English Dictionary is hilarious, at least to me.
He wrote, quote, Unquote.
Unquote.
I get the sense that Pepys wasn't a fan, but the king was quite successful because vests are now common.
But while the vest stayed in fashion in Britain, the word vest did not.
It gets limited use to describe an undershirt in Britain, but what I'd call a vest is now called a waistcoat.
And my understanding is that waistcoat covers a more narrow range of clothing, mostly just the formal piece of clothing men sometimes wear with suits.
In the United States, we have all kinds of vests.
Suit vests, utility vests, puffy vests to wear outdoors, and sweater vests.
And this is wild to me.
Lynn Murphy says that sweater vests in Britain are called tank tops.
So if you're celebrating National Cookie Day in the States, take a moment to remember the wonderful differences between our versions of English on different sides of the pond.
And imagine your British counterparts eating biscuits, possibly while wearing a cozy tank top.
Next, I have a segment about advertising language by Ben Yagoda.
For me, peak advertising antimeria arrived during this year's U.S.
Open tennis tournament.
A commercial for Lexus with the slogan Experience Amazing.
Was immediately followed by one for Deloitte with its tagline Together Makes Progress.
Later, there was an Edward Jones ad cajoling us, let's find your rich.
When the actual tennis came on, you could see a sign on the side of the court promoting the tournament.
Spectacular awaits.
What the slogans had in common was the rhetorical device of antimeria, also known as functional shifting, which means the use of a word is a different-from-usual part of speech.
Thus Deloitte took the adverb together and the others the adjectives amazing, rich and spectacular and turned them into nouns.
The combination was striking, but hardly surprising.
Antimeria is, in my observation, the biggest trend in advertising copy in recent years.
At this point, it's almost more surprising to see an ad without it than with it.
In itself, there's nothing wrong with Antimeria.
Indeed, it aerates and kickstarts the language.
As I described in my book, when you catch an adjective, kill it the parts of speech, for better and or for worse.
In Middle English the nouns duke and lord started to be used as verbs and the verbs cut and rule shifted to nouns.
Shakespeare's characters, coined verbs for example saying season your admiration and dog them at the heels, and coined nouns such as design, scuffle and shudder.
In modern times, we can find noun to adjective, as in S.J.
Perlman's play The Beauty Part.
Adjective to noun, as in the wicked witches, I'll get you, my pretty.
Adverb to verb, as in to down a drink.
And noun to verb.
In the movie The Martian, Matt Damon memorably says I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.
The device is especially productive in slang.
Impressively, chill went from noun to transitive verb to intransitive verb to adjective, as in, that party was chill.
And Coors Light renowns the word, I think, in its slogan, Choose Chill.
The process has appeared to speed up of late.
Cringe, genius and cliché have lately become adjectives and heart a verb and feels fail and cope nouns, as the New York Times explained recently.
Advertising, if nothing else, needs to make you pay attention.
And bad or nonstandard grammar is one of the ways it has traditionally done this.
I've always loved this early 20th century endorsement by a star ballplayer.
It reads, Nap LaJoy choose red devil.
Ask him if he don't.
Later there were grammatically questionable slogans such as Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette.
Should US
Territon Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch.
Think Different from Apple, Lego My Ego And make summer funner from Target.
The earliest Antimeria ad I'm aware of was Quaker Oatmeal's ad in 1986 that transformed the adjective warm into a noun.
It read...
Five reasons why warm is better.
Tummies like warm better.
Warm is easy to make.
And so on.
In 2011, blogger Nancy Friedman spotted Ben & Jerry's Committed to Great and Full of Wow. an interjection to a noun from Crystal, a California dairy.
Two years later came the line.
Two years after that, in 2015, when I saw a sign in a store commanding, I had a sense that the trend had taken off to the extent that I should document it.
I took a picture and threw it into my notes app and since then have accumulated well over 60 examples.
The most common category is adjective to noun. as in create exuberant, live vivid from Jaguar.
Good leads the way from United Airlines.
Committed to better from Lisa.
Where there's happy, there has to be Heinz.
Spread the happy from Nutella.
Ace, where helpful has a home.
Healthier starts here from New Jersey Health Insurance.
Your every day can pay for your holiday from British Air.
Boring has its rewards from PNC Bank.
Only slightly less popular is noun to verb.
Let dogs dog from good and fun.
No matter how hard you football, it's easy to Sunday from Bud Light.
That's how you Heisman from Nissan.
Let's Movie from TCM.
It's easy to Geico.
Google The New Way to Cloud.
And The Colonel Lived So We Could Chicken from KFC.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the insurance company Geico did it again with It Feels Good to Geico.
But with the exception of prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, I've clocked examples of all the parts of speech shape-shifting, including one rare adjective to verb, amicable your divorce. and some I'm not sure I can categorize, such as Pfizer's Outdo Yesterday, IHG Hotels, Guessed How You Guessed, Extra How You Extra,
And the more you bosh, the more you feel like a bosh.
Maybe inevitably.
There's been double dipping, like extraordinary happens here, used by both Cooper Health and the College of Charleston, and make more happen from both Safeco and Staples.
Give the Gift of Wow has been a slogan for a window box company, the Fern Bank Museum, BB Riverboats and the Area 15 Entertainment District in Las Vegas.
And speaking of wow Hotel Chocolat's gift, the wow, with its use of gift as a verb, is double.
Aunt Maria.
In the last couple of years, I've noticed the gimmick moving beyond advertising.
The Guardian recently ran an article called How I Beat Overwhelm.
A StubHub competitor calls itself Ticket Smarter.
And there have been books titled How to Money and How to Winter.
A chain of airport spas is called Be Relax.
The first indication I've seen that this trend may have finally played itself out was a recent ad for Universal Orlando.
The tagline was, A New Way to Vacation.
It's such a bland line, an utter no-no in advertising, that I imagined that the copywriter was trying to antimeria the noun vacation, but forgot.
It has already been established as a verb.
I hope my hunch was right.
Antimeria advertising has had a good run verb to noun, but at this point the gimmick is cliche and very boar.
Please make it over.
That segment was by Ben Yagoda, whose books include Gobsmacked, The British Invasion of American English, and the novel Alias O Henry.
His podcast is The Lives There Living.
Finally, I have a familect story from Kevin.
Hi, Ming Yang.
This is Kevin calling from the Big Island of Hawaii.
I have a familect I'd like to share.
Since the mid-'80s, my dad used the word hamster alert for any time one of us would do something silly or stupid, as in, the hamster rides the wheel all day long, going nowhere.
Anyway, in the last couple of years I've noticed that there's been a lot more references in popular culture to riding the hamster wheel and I was hoping maybe you could share some insight on that.
Thank you.
Enjoy your show.
Thank you so much Kevin, and you are right that hamster wheel has been used more lately, and I'll have more about that for you in next week's show.
Thank you so much for the call.
If you want to share the story of your family, a special word or phrase you use with your family or a friend elect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or record a message on SpeakPipe.
And you may have noticed that's a switch.
I really think WhatsApp is broken for me.
So I'm sorry if you sent something in there the last couple of months and I didn't get it.
If you did, please try again.
We've switched to a service called SpeakPipe, which I think is better anyway, because you can review your recording before you send it, and you'll find the link to that in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Nat Hoops and Rebecca Sebastian in marketing, Dan Feyerabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who baked the best pumpkin cookies of her life last week and ate too many.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of The Grammar Daily.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
