Differences between American and British English can be seen on almost every linguistic level, with the two varieties differing in their phonology, their grammar and phrasing, their spelling and punctuation, and their vocabulary. Listed in this chapter are the stories behind ten words familiar to speakers of British English that have, for one reason or another, failed to gain little recognition in North America.
This is not to say that British English has embraced much in the way of American vocabulary in return, as besides shunning the vast majority of spelling reforms popularized by the nineteenth-century American lexicographer Noah Webster (like color, encyclopedia and catalog), British English steadfastly prefers skirting-board to baseboard, pharmacy to drugstore, pushchair to stroller, and turnip, spring onion, rocket and courgette to the America rutabaga, scallion, arugula and zucchini. Even some American terms like gasoline (1860s), pacifier (1901) and elevator (1780s) have never been fully adopted into British English despite predating their British equivalents petrol (1890s), dummy (1907) and lift (1850s), whilst even some words that British speakers would consider obvious Americanisms were in fact originally used in Britain but have simply fallen out of use. The word faucet, for instance, dates back as far as the fifteenth century when it was originally applied to a tap or plug used to drain alcohol from a barrel, and similarly diaper (1600s), candy (1650s), sidewalk (1660s), railroad (1750s) and tailpipe (1880s) were all originally British terms that have simply vanished from the language.
Almost entirely exclusive to British English, the word boffin is today used as a humorous name for a scientist or intellectual, but on its first appearance in the language in the early 1940s was originally used in the Armed Forces, and in particular the RAF, as a slang term for an older and more experienced officer. The origin of the word is unclear, but given the prevalence of earlier English literary characters named Boffin – such as those found in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and the character of Noddy Boffin in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend – it is likely that the name was at some point pilfered from one of these.
Dating from the fifteenth century and taking its name from an old hook-shaped implement which it apparently resembles, in British musical notation a crotchet is a single note equal to one full beat; its American counterpart is the quarter note, so called as it is equal to one-quarter of a whole note or British semibreve. Indeed, most musical notes are known by different names in British and American English: the minim, equal to two beats, is known as a half note in America; the quaver and semiquaver, one-half and one-quarter of a beat respectively, are otherwise known as eighth and sixteenth notes; and, beyond these, the demi-semiquaver (half the value of a semiquaver) and hemidemisemiquaver (half the value again) are, in the American system, known as thirty-second and sixty-fourth notes. That is not to say that either of these systems is the ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ one, however, as the differences between the two simply reflect their distinct origins – the British names are descended from the original Italian terms, whilst the arithmetical arrangement favoured by American English is a translation of the system used in German.
Derived from the Old English feowertyne niht, literally meaning ‘fourteen nights’, as surprising as it may seem to British English speakers to whom the word is so familiar, American English has never truly embraced the word fortnight. Quite why the word remains something of an oddity in American English is unclear, although it seems all the more unusual given its prevalence not only in British English but also in the vocabularies of many other English-speaking nations including Australia and New Zealand, and parts of Canada, India and Pakistan. The obsolete term sennight, meanwhile, describing a period of seven nights, has all but vanished from all varieties of English.
Meaning ‘slow-witted’, the adjective gormless is thought to have existed as a British dialect term long before its first recorded written use in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. Rarely encountered in American English, the term remains an almost uniquely British word, thought to be derived from some long-obsolete Middle English term, gome or gawm, which would have presumably meant ‘notice’ or ‘attentiveness’. As this Middle English form has no equivalent in Modern English, gormless is also an example of a so-called ‘unpaired’ word, namely one which despite appearances does not have an opposite counterpart, like disgruntled, disambiguate, uncouth and ruthless.
The colloquialism jiggery-pokery, meaning ‘manipulation’ or ‘deceit’, is one of several nonsense-sounding British words which are rarely, if ever, encountered in American English. It was probably adopted into English from Scottish – the seventeenth-century equivalents joukerypawkery and jewkrypawkry are likely built around the Scots word jouk, meaning to ‘dodge’ or ‘swerve’. Similar examples of nonsense-sounding words include the nineteenth-century term argy-bargy or argle-bargle, meaning ‘an argument’; skew-whiff, dating from the eighteenth century and meaning ‘off centre’ or ‘awry’; and shillyshally, an eighteenth-century expression meaning to ‘waste time’ or ‘procrastinate’, thought to be a playful variation of the phrase ‘shall I?’
Known simply as ‘pruning shears’ in American English, the word secateurs is based on a French loanword, sécateur, which was adopted into British English in the late 1800s. Ultimately descended from the Latin verb secare, meaning ‘to cut’ (from which words like dissect, intersect and sector are all also derived), the word was originally singular but is now always used as a plural in English, its etymologically unnecessary final ‘s’ having been added through association with similar words like scissors and shears in the early twentieth century.
Meaning ‘very small’, the word titchy is a relatively recent British coinage derived from the nickname of the nineteenth- to twentieth-century London-born entertainer Harry Relph, who performed under the stage name of Little Tich. The popularity of Tich (who stood just four-foot-six tall) in the early 1900s eventually led to his character’s name being more widely applied to any similarly diminutive person or child, and ultimately to the invention of the adjective titchy as recently as the 1950s. Due to the somewhat specific association with British music hall culture, titchy simply never caught on in American English.
As an adjective meaning ‘quaint’ or ‘dainty’, the chiefly British word twee dates from the early twentieth century, and is believed to be formed from an intentionally childish pronunciation of the word ‘sweet’. First used genuinely with real affection or intention, the word has developed a more depreciative meaning over time and today tends only to be applied to things that are mawkish or over-affectedly sweet.
Meaning ‘whine’ or ‘moan’, the verb whinge is a surprisingly old British word dating from the twelfth century and thought to originate in the dialects of Scotland and northern England. The word maunder, also of dialect origin and similarly meaning ‘grumble’ or ‘dawdle’, is likewise exclusively used in British English, whilst the Americanisms bellyache and kvetch, both meaning ‘complain’ or else a ‘person who habitually finds faults’, are found much less frequently in British English.
In modern British English, the last letter of the alphabet is known as zed while in American English it tends to be called zee. Historically, however, both zed and zee were used interchangeably in both British and American English, alongside a whole host of other more outlandish names for Z including izzard, shard, ezod and uzzard, all of which have long since fallen out of use. Of the two, zed is the earlier, derived at length from the name of the equivalent Greek letter zeta and first attested in written English in the fifteenth century. Zee, meanwhile, was first recorded in the seventeenth century in a British English spelling book and is thought to have originated as a dialect variation of zed probably influenced by the regular bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the rest of the alphabet. Quite how or why zee became the dominant form in American English is unclear, but it has been suggested that because zed tended to be favoured by British speakers, during the Revolution and America’s fight for independence in the late eighteenth century American English speakers would have wanted to distance themselves from anything even vaguely suggestive of Great Britain and hence adopted zee in preference.