What the British really talk about

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If the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, the way to a culture’s is through its language. Mind you, I invented that theory on the fly, but let’s believe it for long enough to play with a couple of recent studies. 

Two linguists recently analyzed every word in the British National Corpus 2014.

The British National what? British National Corpus 2014 is a hundred million words of contemporary language, which are a sample of all the words that get spewed out in fiction, newspapers, magazines, informal speech (how they catch that I have no idea; my informal speech disappears as soon as I informally speak it), academic writing, and online writing, all of them written or (I guess) spoken between 2010 and 2020. 

Given those dates, I have no idea how 2014 snuck into the discussion. Not my fault, Your Honor. I’m only telling you what I read.

The researchers went through all those words and counted up how many times various topics appeared per million words. By hand, of course.

Irrelevant photo: crocuses

In order of frequency, they are:

Time and punctuality: Year and time were the two most frequently used nouns. Being on time, in time, and punctual are enough of an obsession to rate all three ways of saying roughly the same thing. 

Semi-relevantly, the word morning is used twice as often as evening and three times as often as afternoon. December is the most mentioned month. Summer gets talked about more than winter and Saturday and Sunday more often than whatever those other days are.

Weather and climate: The word sun gets more of a workout than rain, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey (HS&US) reports that we have a lot more rain than sun in Britain. (Do not trust the HS&US. It takes being unscientific entirely too seriously.) Still, the word weather only appears as often as the words pub and restaurant. Climate change and its related words appear frequently, and considerably more often than in previous years.

Food and drink: Dinner gets mentioned more often than lunch and lunch more often than breakfast. Cake gets mentioned more often than salad. That will surprise no one. Although breakfast doesn’t top the list, eggs do. Go figure. Chocolate ranks pretty high. So do boring things. Look it up yourself if you’re interested. I have a short attention span.

Drinks? Tea, wine, coffee, beer, milk, juice, and champagne all made the list. How much does champagne matter? Tea gets mentioned six times more often. I’m not sure how much more often beer gets mentioned, but in a race between champagne and beer, my money’s on beer. Tea and beer? I’m not sure I want to bet on that one.

Emotions: Finding emotions on the list of top mentions sounds like it breaks the stereotype of the British as a tamped-down culture, but happy is at the top of the sublist, often in phrases like, “I’m quite happy to stay at home.” That’s not what you’d call an emotional outpouring, more like a stoic acceptance of the inevitable. Sorry is right up there too. HS&US reports that the British give sorry one hell of a workout. 

Bodies: Or at least our metaphorical bodies, because whatever we can learn from the calculation here gets thrown off by phrases like “on the other hand.” Researchers from HS&US are going to either eliminate this category or insist that people discuss their livers, earlobes, and unmentionables. 

 

Is there some other way to measure what people care about?

Why, of course. Let’s throw most of that out the window and talk about alcohol. Or more accurately, let’s talk about how people talk about alcohol. If the number of words a culture has for something carries information about how important it is, the British are a nation of serious drinkers. Or of serious alcoholics. According to a study from Germany, the British have 546 words for getting drunk.

Or for being drunk. After a couple of drinks, the line between the two has a way of blurring.

Need a few examples? Pissed. Sloshed. Stewed. Wrecked. Hammered. Bladdered. Plastered. Mullered. Pickled. Bevvied. Rubbered. Tanked. Cock-eyed. Zombied. Blootered. Trolleyed. Rat-arsed. Wankered. Shit-faced. Arseholed.

Blootered? Yeah, that was new to me too. Blooter is Scots and means to kick something–usually a football–”fiercely and often wildly.” 

What about mullered? A muller is “a stone or piece of wood, metal, or glass used as a pestle for pounding or grinding.”  

The things you learn here. 

Hell, the things I learn here.

You can also get cabbaged, gazeboed, and carparked. Unless– Okay, I got this information second hand, from assorted newspapers, so it’s not impossible that someone’s messing with us there. But basically, you can take just about any noun, add -ed to it, and say you’ve been that way. 

Does it work? I was so earthwormed I couldn’t see straight. Why not? Earringed? It might not be as convincing as cabbaged, but it works. Carburatored? Absolutely. 

Isn’t English a lovely mess of a language? 

Have fun.

The full list is here. Or a gesture in the direction of the full list. I haven’t counted. And a few that may or may not be extra are here. 

*

Several of the articles I saw mention that the Sami language has 300 words for snow. The Sami are the native people of northern Scandinavia and Russia, so yeah, snow matters to them. The point is supposed to be that we have many words for the things that are important to us, but the comparison to the British and being drunk breaks down when you realize that

the Sami words, at least as I’ve seen them explained, are for different kinds of snow: untouched snow; snow that’s hardened so much that reindeer can’t dig through it; snow your neighbors shoveled off their driveway and dumped on yours because you didn’t buy the cardboardy pizzas their kids were selling to raise money for their school. Or maybe that last kind of snow only falls in the US and the Sami don’t need a name for it.

The difference is that all those words for drunkenness describe a single state of near-oblivion, not variations on it. They have no purpose except to keep people amused, either until they sober up or until they can get drunk again.

Welcome to Britain.

30 thoughts on “What the British really talk about”

  2. I chuckled at blootered being a new word to you because that is my go to word to describe someone who is drunk and I have never really thought about how understandable it is to others. I assume the context always gives it away which is why people haven’t asked me to translate.

    I am curious as to the purpose of counting and categorising all of those words. Is the next step to analyse why some words are used with greater frequency than others? And to then determine what that tells us about British culture?

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    • It’s a good question and one I can’t even begin to answer. I’m convinced–and was when I first read about the list–that they would inevitably have missed one. Or several thousand. And at what point do you decide something’s a word in local circulation as opposed to one family’s oddity? Still, it all amused the hell out of me, and I’m happy to hear confirmation that at least one of the words is real.

      I’m sure you’re right: context would explain the meaning as surely as if you said someone was so cabbaged they couldn’t stand up.

      A linguist I follow on Twitter was asking recently for non-disparaging British slang words from, I think, the 1950s through ’70s for lesbians. Someone came up with “women in comfortable shoes.” I love it.

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  4. No. I can’t say something about Sami people, but the all too common “truth” that Eskimo people (or whatever their politically correct name nowadays is) have “hundreds” of (different) “words” for snow is wrong. Just read the wiki article (Ger., Eng.). It’s one of several idiocies that originate from Boas. Who nevertheless was an important scholar.

    I have never heared about that “British National Corpus 2014”. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Must be an impressive collection, I have to look it up.
    I may be wrong, but I’d guess that the most uttered words in English worldwide have four letters and start with “f” and “c”. There may be regional specifics.

    BTW Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow is now fifty years old, ach …

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    • The word you’re looking for is Inuit, although it gets more complicated than that. You can read about it here: https://www.uaf.edu/anlc/research-and-resources/resources/archives/inuit_or_eskimo.php I wouldn’t encourage you to write the change off as “political correctness.” It’s a phrase generally used to dismiss changes that annoy the user, and it keeps them from considering why the change has come about.

      I can’t speak to the number of Inuit words for snow–it’s nothing I’ve ever looked up–but I’ve heard it repeated so many times, starting a thousand years ago when I was a kid, that I instinctively doubt it. And since the word Inuit (and before it, Eskimo) covers more than one language group, I’m not sure who we’re actually talking about anyway.

      According to Wikipedia (usually accurate but prone to brief fits of madness), a list of the most common words in English starts with the, be, to, of, and then progresses (much later) to things like say, know, and people. If fuck gets a mention (c’mon, let’s not be coy), I didn’t last long enough to find it. Cunt is used much more in Britain than in the US, where it’s not likely to make even the list of well-worn insults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English

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  6. The Normans blamed the English army’s boozing for losing the Battle of Hasting (as well as William the Bastard’s brilliant generalship) back in 1066 so the English fondness for drink is not a new thing.

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    • They have had that reputation for a long time, but the fact that Harold’s army had just marched the length of the country, having fought off another invader, could, just possibly, have had something to do with it. Ah, well, trust a colonizing force to blame the bad character of the conquered.

      Having said all that, I hadn’t run into that claim, and it is interesting. Thanks.

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    • Now that you mention it, I’m surprised it isn’t at the top of the British list. If you’re inclined to blame anyone for saying “sorry” so often, blame Britain, because that’s where you inherited it from.

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