D3X73R

Jane Setter recently asked me about noodles . Her take on them was that Americans can call spaghetti noodles and the British can't. My take, as ever, is: it's complicated . Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is indeed what my English (and American, she would tell you) 7-year-old means when she says that her favo(u)rite food is noodles (various types and dishes but especially pad see ew and yaki soba . I've come to reali{z/s}e that on some days I eat nothing that I ate as a child). Noodle is used for Asian types of noodles and noodle dishes in the US too. But I would suspect that the default understood ethnicity of noodle will vary by the speaker's age, location and ethnicity in the US. Let's start with me, because that's easy (for me). If someone in my family asked me to go to Wegman's and buy some noodles, I would pick up a bag of these: And once I got them ...

I've been to two conferences in the past two weeks, presenting studies on British and American use of the word please . It was a blog post here that inspired this new research direction: three years ago I posted about whether one says please when ordering in restaurants (click that link for lots of discussion!). If you read the comments at that post, you'll see Americans saying things like  Please winds up feeling impolite with people that you don't have the right to order around, ie anyone other than your children . and British commenters saying things like  not saying please makes it sound like a lord giving an order to his butler --that is, Americans saying please sounds bossy and Brits saying 'you have to say please , or else you'll sound bossy'. The conference papers will turn into one or two journal articles (eventually!). In the meantime, the two studies brought up so many little factoids about please that I could do at least a half a dozen blog po...