D3X73R

From Cllr James Baker's website Want to bring out the pedant in me? Invite me to help fight the stigma attached to mental health . Then watch me shout: "There is no stigma attached to mental health! There is a stigma attached to mental illness !" I have these little shoutings fairly regularly these days--because I live in England, the home of mental health stigma. From the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE): It doesn't matter which preposition you use, if it's a stigma and there's mental health nearby, it's probably British: Yes, yes, some of those mental health s will have nouns after them like problems or professionals , but in BrE, most of them don't. For instance, for the 12 British stigma around mental health examples, only two follow up with problems or issues . For the others, it is just mental health that carries the stigma: Now, when people ask me to give money for cancer or child abuse, I object that I don't want cancer or c...

The appointment of a new Prime Minister in the UK has led to both national and international crises in pronunciation. How do you say Theresa ? The national crisis , within the UK, is the problem of whether the second syllable is pronounced 'ree' or 'ray' ('ree' it turns out, for this particular Theresa) and whether the first syllable is truncated (no), as this passage from a Buzzfeed article (helpfully jpegged by author @jamesrbuk ) explains: Language Log looked at that vowel yesterday . The international crisis is: what's going on with that 's'?  In American English, the 's' means /s/ , but note that the Buzzfeed article didn't even mention the possibility of (mis)pronouncing it with an /s/. In British English, it's a /z/. Theresa is not alone. There are other s- ful names that British English routinely pronounces with /z/, and American English usually pronounces with /s/. These include: Denise Leslie / Lesley (which British fol...

David Cameron and his house in 'leafy' Holland Park Daily Express Brits sometimes tell me that the problem with American politics is that the system of checks and balances , with the separate executive and legislative branches, means that changes are hard to make. My experience of politics in the UK since 2010 leaves me feeling that changes are too easy to make. Have an election and the next thing you know, things that have been built up over years can be thrown away. Get a new cabinet and within the year school curricula may change, departments of the civil service are closed, public properties are sold off. Because it's so much easier to destroy than to build, the recent Conservative (and coalition) governments (approx. AmE administrations ) have wreaked change that undoes generations' worth of work and that will affect many generations beyond the current decade. But perhaps the most surprising thing for Americans watching the news is how quickly David Cameron had t...

So last time, I wrote about disease versus infection following the phrase sexually transmitted , and I started thinking (again) about how we talk about medical things--technical or non-technical? In the book I'm writing (for you! ), I've touched on it a little with respect to bodily functions: Sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, I’m amused and a bit astonished to find posters about what to do if there is blood in your pee or poo .* The equivalent American public-service advertisements say urine and stool . In the medical context, America avoids being crude by sounding more scientific, and Britain uses baby-talk. * Make an appointment with your doctor immediately! The discussion hits on things like BrE waterworks ('urinary tract') and back passage ('rectum') and  classes given to foreign nurses in the NHS on British slang-- aka British euphemism. (It's a bit of the book that looks at the stereotype of Americans as euphemists, so yes, there's a lo...

Is a Manchester sexual health clinic trying to tell me something? I just feel that I should say this up front: there is nothing autobiographical about this post. There. Got that out of the way. The topic only came up because I was in a conversation that involved an allusion to leaflets in doctors' (AmE) offices /(BrE) surgeries .  Those leaflets are sometimes about (AmE, old-fashioned) social diseases . In either country it's possible to find references to  Sexually Transmitted Diseases or STDs or  Sexually Transmitted Infections or STIs . Is there a difference? Not really. To quote one (US) site on the matter: STI stands for sexually transmitted infection, and many people, mostly the medical community, have begun transitioning from “STD” to “STI” in an effort to clarify that not all sexually transmitted infections turn into a disease. For instance, the vast majority of women who contract HPV (human papilloma virus) will not develop the resulting disease cervical ...

When I (or a guest blogger ) have talked about dates here, it's mostly been about how dates are written . (One exception was about how we say the year. ) One thing we've not really talked about is how we read dates out loud. I've been struck by the mismatch a couple of times when British people have tried to "go American" and put the day after the month. In one case, it was The Telegraph on complained-about Americanisms on the BBC . One of these was July 5 . And I thought: but Americans hardly ever say July 5 . We write it, but in the context of a sentence we'd pronounce that date as July 5th . Not It's on July 5 , but It's on July 5th. The same happens in BrE. People write 5 July , but they pronounce the 5 as the ordinal version: fifth . People don't go about saying "My birthday is five July". So, I've never understood: when people complained about July 5 on the radio, had they heard someone say July five , or is that their way of...