1138. This week, in honor of National Cookie Day, we look at the vocabulary split between British and American English, including the differences between a cookie and a biscuit, and the two meanings of "pudding." Then, we look at anthimeria, the advertising trend of turning one part of speech into another, as in the slogan "Together makes progress."
This week, in honor of National Cookie Day, we look at the vocabulary split between British and American English, including the differences between a cookie and a biscuit, and the two meanings of "pudding." Then, we look at anthimeria, the advertising trend of turning one part of speech into another, as in the slogan "Together makes progress."
The anthimeria 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 They’re Living."
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon 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.
by Mignon Fogarty
December 4 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 1980 in the book "The Sesame Street Dictionary."
So it's a fun day to celebrate everything from chocolate chips to snickerdoodles, but it also 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 small, savory baked goods 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 "koekje" 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 Lynne Murphy of the Separated by a Common Language blog said the word was making inroads in the U.K. — but it's used more for bigger, softer cookies, like 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 U.S., jelly is a smooth fruit spread with no chunks that you most often put on bread, like in a PB&J sandwich — peanut butter and jelly. (And we use jam for spreads with fruit pieces.) In Britain, jelly is a wobbly gelatin dessert … what I'd call Jell-O.
And Jell-O leads me to another difference: pudding. Again, Lynne Murphy says there's no such thing as Jell-O pudding in the U.K. And I'm still cranky about an expensive pudding dessert I ordered in a fancy restaurant in New York 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 just me 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 savoury) 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. People in Britain usually call those trousers, and "pants" most often refers 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 lead 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.
In British English, those are usually called braces. If you ask British people about suspenders, they'll likely think you're asking about what Americans call garter belts! Another item you probably shouldn't shop for with a co-worker.
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 suspender's 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. 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 OED is hilarious. He wrote, "The King hath yesterday in council, declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes... It will be a vest, I know not well how. But it is to teach the nobility thrift."
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: Lynne 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.
by Ben Yagoda
For me, peak advertising anthimeria 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 anthimeria, also known as functional shifting, which means the use of a word as 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. Anthimeria 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 anthimeria; indeed, it aerates and kick-starts 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. Perelman's play "The Beauty Part"), adjective to noun (as in the Wicked Witch's "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 gonna have to science the shit out of this.”)
The device is especially productive in slang. Impressively, “chill” went from noun (“winter chill”) to transitive verb (“chill the wine”) to intransitive verb (“Netflix and chill”) to adjective, as in, “That party was chill.” (And Coors Lite re-nouns 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 non-standard grammar is one of the ways it has traditionally done this. I’ve always loved this early-twentieth-century endorsement by a star ballplayer. It reads, "Nap LaJoie chews Red Devil. Ask Him If He Don't!"
Later, there were grammatically questionable slogans such as “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”; “Us Tarreyton smokers would rather fight than switch”; “Think different” (from Apple); “Leggo my Eggo”; and “Make summer funner” (from Target).
The earliest anthimeria ad I’m aware of was Quaker Oatmeal’s ad in 1986 that transformed the adjective “warm” into a noun. It read, "5 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 "Tonight We Tanqueray”; two years after that, in 2015, when I saw a sign in a store commanding “bring the merry home,” 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 sixty examples.
The most common category is adjective-to-noun, as in
Only slightly less popular is noun-to-verb:
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’ “Guest how you guest, extra how you extra,” and “The more you Bosch, the more you feel like a Bosch.” 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 Fernbank Museum, BB Riverboats, and the AREA15 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 anthimeria.
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 TicketSmarter, 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 anthimeria the noun “vacation” but forgot it has already been established as a verb.
I hope my hunch was right. Anthimeria advertising has had a good run (verb to noun). But at this point, the gimmick is cliché and very bore. 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 They’re Living."
Finally, I have a familect story from Kevin:
Hi, Mignon, 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 a hamster wheel, and I was hoping maybe you could share some insight on that. Thank you. Enjoy your show.
Thank you so much, Kevin! You're right that "hamster wheel" has been used more lately, and I'll have more about that for you in next week's show. Thanks so much for the call!
If you want to share the story of your familect, a special word or phrase you use with your family, or a friendilect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL 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 Hoopes and Rebekah Sebastian in marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; Morgan Christianson 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.