===

From an email I wrote to a friend who lives in another

country and let me know something was worded differently

(I always love hearing that stuff -- it's the micro-poetry

of life).

===

I was hoping your verbiage was different. I'm trying to

get away from my habit of musing every time whether the

difference is specific to your country or shared across the

Commonwealth as it's not fair to you; you are not your

commonwealth's keeper. But as I say farewell to the

musing, I want to share a thought or two on what words tend

to be different between the States and the Commonwealth.

My methodology, of course, is watching a television show

with my wife. In this case it was the U.K. program

(programme?) The Repair Shop. (I did a search to see if the

U.K. itself is technically in the Commonwealth. I believe

it is, though my source is Smithsonian Magazine, which is

American . . . ) To run my experiment, I said to my wife

"let's see how many words there are on the show that are

different than the ones we would use". And the grand total

was: zero. How can this be? I thought the U.K. and America

were two nations divided by a common language, and all

that.

But if you think about a show like The Repair Shop, they

are using words that were in use before modernity --

chisels, glue, wood, and the like. If you think of many of

the words that are different between American and

Commonwealth English, they tend to come out of modernity,

with a few interesting exceptions, such as "biscuit" based

on which language was to be drawn from (here Italian versus

Dutch). But how does that make sense in light of the fact

the world was more interconnected when the modern things

were made (and thus named) than the older times? Well,

obviously, it is that the relationship between the former

colony and the motherland changed. But what becomes

interesting to me is that this implies the word differences

were *selected* for psycho-social reasons rather than

because the words were developed in parallel. Mind, one of

the books I have on my list to read is the collected

correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle. I know for a

fact, and will know more deeply, how connected people

stayed as the words of modernity were coined.

So, what was the process of differentiation? One large case

is when a piece of slang crossed over into the most widely

used term. For example, whether you call something a flat

or an apartment, it is still a room. Without digressing to

research, I'd say at some point the phrase was so widely

used that the people who were the organs of British culture

-- newspapers, radio, later television -- started using the

term. So far, so good, but they probably had heard the

American usage of apartment and refused it, as had

Americans refused the term flat when they heard it. But my

point is that they heard each other's terms, and felt

disinclined to use them. And I am arguing it was a feeling

that motivated them.

On the other hand, fast forward long enough and many U.S.

internet terms are just accepted. This makes me conjecture

that there was a cultureal-historical sweet spot for when

most of these alternate coinages came about, and that it

was during the time that British Empire was in decline and

the U.S. was on the rise. One side was playing offence,

the other defense, but both sides had an incentive to make

the common language one that divided them and the only way

to do that was with new things and new styles. A very

small set of words was emphasized to show how different

they supposedly were.

===

I'd love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus

"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.