Tag Archives: language

Measuring time in Ethiopia

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J. sends this from the information book in an Ethiopian hotel.

“Ethiopia uses the Ethiopian calendar. One Ethiopian year consists of 13 months; 12 months of 30 days and a thirteenth month of 5 days (6 in a leap year). The Ethiopian new year falls on the 10th or 11th September according to the Gregorian calendar, depending if the year is a leap year. The Ethiopian calendar is 7-8 years behind the Gregorian calendar. The 12-hour clock cycle in Ethiopia is offset by 6 hours. For example, Ethiopia refers to 6 a.m. as 12:00 hours and 12 noon as 6:00 hours. Please bear this in mind when making local appointments.”

So the calendar’s different (lots of that going around) and the names of the hours are different (lots of that going around too, apparently), but the minutes are still the same length.

Measuring time in the US and UK

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When I was fielding comments about the insanities involved in figuring out what I weigh in the U.K., I caught myself just before I wrote that at least we all measure time the same way.

Are you sure? I asked my more-than-usually bewildered self. I imagined someone jumping out the magic surge of the internet to tell me that yes, the hour has sixty minutes everywhere but the minutes are longer in the U.S. Why there? Because everything’s bigger in the U.S. Or that’s what people in Britain tell me. Houses, rooms, scones, the spaces in our parking lots. People. So wouldn’t it be just like us to want a longer minute?

It might, but as far as I know the minute really is the same everywhere. And no, Americans don’t all live in mansions any more than the British all live in castles, although the scones and the parking spaces really are bigger. And some of the rooms and houses. I’m not sure about the people.

Irrelevant photo: freezing fog on Davidstow Moor.

Irrelevant photo: freezing fog on Davidstow Moor.

What were we talking about?

My point about time is that we may measure it the same way, but someone always finds a way to complicate things. Usually me. A few years ago, I was working out a time to pick up M. for—I think—a movie.

“A quarter of,” I suggested.

“What does that even mean?” he said.

“A quarter of six.”

Then I realized he wasn’t asking about the hour, he was asking about the quarter of part. I tried translations.

“Five forty-five? A quarter to? Fifteen minutes to six?”

He shook his head.

“But what, grammatically, does it even mean?”

Well, it means a quarter of, obviously, and I had to say the phrase one more time to realize that it doesn’t, but any sort of logic, mean a thing. A quarter of what? Of nothing. It’s just what we say. We know what it means, so what’s your problem?

On the other hand, the British say “half six.” That’s three, right? No, that’s six-thirty. What, grammatically, does that even mean? About as much as a quarter of. But if you’ve grown up with it, it makes all kinds of sense.

Mercifully, no one’s come along to divide the traditional clock into a more rational system—ten hours, 100 minutes. You know, something easier to calculate with. Because some of us would convert to the new system and some of us wouldn’t and we’d all fight about it, and we’re having enough trouble as it is.

British and American accents: Talking trash to an I-Pad

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M. and Wild Thing and I were trying to figure out what time it was in Singapore. You know how sometimes you just need to know that kind of thing? So Wild Thing grabbed the I-Pad she bought last week and said, “Hey, Siri.”

“What?” M. asked.

“She has an imaginary friend,” I said.

“I’m talking to Siri,” Wild Thing said.

My point exactly.

In extended and increasingly colorful ways, M. and I said, “Sure you are.”

Irrelevant photo: Our dog, who's real, even if she looks like a windup toy

Irrelevant photo: Our dog, who’s real, even if she looks like a windup toy

“Siri?” Wild Thing repeated to her I-Pad.

She might as well have been talking to the teapot. So while M. and I discussed the nature and uses of imaginary friends (in increasingly colorful and bizarre ways), Wild Thing—in the bits of air time she managed to snatch from us—explained that she’d set Siri up to have a woman’s voice and an American accent but that she’d reverted to being a British male—and a posh one at that.

Trust Wild Thing to have an imaginary friend with a sex change and an ambiguous national identity.

Because of the new accent, Wild Thing said, Siri couldn’t understand her, and that was why she wasn’t answering.

Unless he wasn’t answering. I don’t want to be insensitive, but this sex change business gets confusing when you’re dealing with invisible friends and virtual beings.

But forget about gender—it’s simple compared to accent. To what extent is an invisible British friend able to understand an American accent? I mean, just how parochial is she or he? And if the American accent’s a problem, is he or she (or, well, whatever) able to understand a working class British accent? Or a Welsh one? Or—well, you get the point: How narrow a range of tolerance are we talking about here? What happens if you have, let’s say, an Iranian accent in your English? Do you have to, and for that matter can you, set up your invisible friend to have her (or his, or whatever’s) very own Iranian accent in English?

I haven’t been impressed with the breadth of understanding demonstrated by virtual voices. We were in New Zealand once, and Wild Thing was on the phone with a computerized system.

“Yes,” she said in response to it doesn’t matter what question.

“I’m sorry,” the computer said, “but I didn’t understand that. Did you say ‘address’?”

“No, I said ‘yes.’”

“Did you say ‘guess’?”

And so forth until Wild Thing pinched her nose and, in her best imitation of a kiwi accent, said, “Yiss.”

“Thank you,” the computer said. (And sent a dress to the wrong address. Not that the address mattered. The last time Wild Thing wore a dress, splinters hadn’t been invented yet. And no, we’re not going to discuss how long it’s been since I wore one. It’s enough to say that I may still remember which end faces the feed.)

But back to that New Zealand virtual voice: What happens if you have a lisp and your yiss sounds like yith? You can’t order 80 kilos of chocolate covered Turkish delight by phone, that’s what, because you can’t confirm your order. You can’t call for a cab. You can’t let the bank know that your credit card just wandered off without you. Because the voice is set to the local accent—one local accent, and if it doesn’t happen to be the one you have, you’re skunked.

Or that’s my, admittedly limited, experience.

Apply this to invisible friends and you have to wonder, How much do they have to be mirror images of ourselves in order to understand us, or in order for us to accept them? If the posh, imaginary British man can’t understand (or be accepted by) the un-posh but entirely real American woman who’s talking into her teapot, what chance do the flesh and blood inhabitants of this planet to have to work out our differences?

M. and Wild Thing and I didn’t have time to explore that question, although no doubt the world would be a better place by now if we had. M. was heading home and we were out of time, not to mention cookies.

Wild Thing had addressed her I-Pad multiple times by then and swore Siri had answered her. Me, though? I didn’t hear a thing. And I’m prepared to speak for M. as well: She didn’t either.

Protecting children from English geography

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Breaking news: Programs intended to protect children from online pornography and in-head dirty thoughts are filtering out sites whose names include the words Essex and Sussex. Wessex wasn’t mentioned, and I’m not even going to try to explain that.

So there you go. You heard it here first. Or possibly second, since the BBC broke the story. I’d give you a link but it doesn’t seem to be online.

What, you say, an earth-shattering story like that?

Indeed. And I’m sure there’s a conspiracy out there to suppress it.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: What we do on a winter evening

Screamingly irrelevant photo: What we do on a winter evening

Manners, American and British

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The British have manners. They have such good manners that from time to time they’ll throw them out the window to scold strangers for their lack of them.

Wild Thing and I were in the outdoor section of a café once—a cramped, eat-your-lunch-and-get-out kind of place—and as a couple who’d been sitting nearby wove past our table to leave, one of them said, “In this country, we say please and thank you.”

Sadly, by the time we’d processed the words, they were too far away for a snappy comeback, but “In our country, we’re polite to strangers,” did come to mind. It may not be true, but I still wish I’d been quick enough to say it.

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Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey, in Yorkshire

I have no idea what we’d done, or more likely not done, to piss them off. I’ve been a waitress. Wild Thing and I have both been cab drivers. We’re not the kind of people who think that if they have the money for a meal, or a cab ride, or a tube of toothpaste, it gives them the right to be obnoxious. But we are, I admit, incapable of saying thank you as often as the British do. Buy something at a small store and when you hand in your item to be rung up, the clerk will thank you. When you hand over your money, you’ll get thanked again. (A variation: The clerk may look at the twenty you handed over for something costing less than a pound and say, “Lovely,” or “Brilliant,” as if you’d handed them a slice of chocolate cake, or exact change just when they were about to run out and the banks had all closed and the vandal hordes were all lining up to do their shopping and none of them had brought the exact change.) Then when you go to leave, unless some other customer’s diverted the clerk’s attention, you get thanked a third time, often with the phrase, “Thank you very much, thank you.” Or, “Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you.”

At least it’s like that way out in the country, where we live.

I can’t do that. Can not. Am constitutionally incapable of. I also can’t manage to say you’re welcome three times for a single transaction, especially when I haven’t done anything. I mean, you’re welcome? For what? I bought something. I wanted it enough to hand over money. That’s not a gracious act that I should say “you’re welcome” for. Sometimes I find myself saying “thanks” instead, which is also absurd but doesn’t feel quite as bizarre as “you’re welcome.”

I asked S. once how often she said you’re welcome in response to the multiple thank-yous. She looked startled and said she didn’t think it was “called for” unless you’d done something particularly—well, kind may not have been the word she used but it was the impression she left me with. Unless you’d gone out of your way, somehow. But I doubt she’d never noticed how many times she got thanked per transaction. It’s that old thing about the fish and the water. She swims through an ocean of thank-yous and wouldn’t notice them unless they stopped.

Or that’s what I thought, anyway, until A. and H. told me that you’re welcome is an Americanism, although H. added that there’s an equivalent phrase in Welsh. R. swore that it’s a class thing: If you’re working class, you learn to say “you’re welcome.”

At this point, I understood two things: 1, It’s complicated, and 2, I’ll never completely get it.

“What do you say?” I asked.

“That’s okay” would do, apparently. So would “cheers.” But “cheers” can also be used to mean goodbye, or as a kind of toast—when you lift your glass to someone. According to my British English A to Zed, it also means here’s how! What does here’s how! mean? I looked it up and it’s either too obvious or too unused to include, so I don’t know.

I asked M. and Wild thing what here’s how! meant and they were as blank as I was.

So in this country we say “please” and “thank you,” but we don’t say “you’re welcome.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that was rude.

Classes, Couches, and Rest Rooms: Word Choice in Britain and the U.S.

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N. read last week’s post on toilets and emailed to say that “toilet has a very lower class cachet in current English. Loo or lavatory are the posh versions, just like sofa vs. settee, sitting room vs. lounge, tea vs. dinner, dinner vs. lunch.”

I’ve heard some of those pairings before but have trouble keeping track of which word is high on the class scale and which is low—an incompetence that I kind of enjoy. Let’s face it, it’s all arbitrary and snobbish.

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Cornish Engines. The abandoned mine shafts they mark went out under the sea.

The distinctions are equally arbitrary in the U.S., but the silliness we grow up with has a way of looking like perfect sense. When I was a kid, lunch was the down-to-earth meal. Dinner stuck its nose in the air and demanded white tablecloths (not to mention cloth napkins), and it was the evening meal anyway, which we called supper. I not only thought all that made sense, I thought it was fixed for all time and all places and all people. Where Wild Thing grew up, though, dinner was a big midday meal, something you’d have on Sunday, after church, and I’m sure that seemed just as inevitable and fixed.

Then we moved to the U.K., where the things people take for granted are completely different. Settee? To me that sounds fancy, as if I dropped into a Victorian novel. Sofa sounds more ordinary, although I call the thing a couch and it sits in my living room, since I don’t have either a sitting room or a lounge in my vocabulary.

And tea as a meal? When someone talks about eating tea, I get a mental picture of someone struggling with a knife, a fork, and a cup of liquid. I know that’s not what they mean, but no matter how often I hear it, that’s still what I see.

I like it when my vocabulary sets me outside some of the entrenched divisions. True, it sets me deep in the trench of another division, American vs. British, but I’d be there anyway.

I can’t prove this, but I have a hunch that, compared to their U.S. counterparts, the British upper (and, I guess, middle) classes spend an awful lot of time, and find more ways, to establish their separateness (and I’m sure they’d say superiority) through their use of language. It’s an interesting bit of sociology.

Both cultures, though, do their best to avoid saying what they mean when it comes to human waste. Toilet comes from the French word meaning a cover for clothes (toilette). From there, toilet became first the act of dressing, then a dressing room, and eventually that room with plumbing that polite people don’t mention. So basically, it started as a polite word meaning that room where we do those unmentionable things. Eventually, the unmentionable things contaminated the polite word and we had to find an even more polite word so we could back away from our meaning again. I mean rest room? What on earth does that communicate?

For what it’s worth, not every culture does this. The Middle English word for the equivalent of toilet paper was arse-wisp, according to the Online Etymology Dictonary. The Middle English did, apparently, say exactly what they meant, at least about this.

And unless someone brings up a fascinating new aspect of this discussion, I’ll stop writing about toilets for a while. Really. It’s not the thing I most love to think about in the world.

Great British Telemarketing

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Recent and highly unscientific research reveals that you have to do more than move across an ocean to get away from telemarketers.

Okay, Wild Thing and I knew that already. Since we moved here, we’ve been called by people telling us our computer has been affected by such a dangerous virus that the only way to fix it is to read a credit card number into the phone and take a sledge hammer to the hard drive. We get calls from a recorded voice with an urgent message. So urgent that it doesn’t merit a live call. And so on.

On Wednesday, Wild Thing fielded a call that—well, we never did find out what he wanted. Wild Thing picked up the phone and the caller said, “Can I talk to the lady of the house?”

Some of these calls set off reactions we could never have predicted.

“Believe me,” Wild Thing said, in a doom-laden voice, “you don’t want to talk to her.”

She has no idea where that came from—or which of us was the lady he so didn’t want to talk to.

People here commonly use the word lady where we’d say woman. I notice it and I kind of roll my eyes , but in a detached, mildly amused way. And, I should add, an invisible one—the mental eye roll; the virtual one. Sometimes think I should object, but it doesn’t set off any deep reaction in me. You want to call me a lady? I’ve been called worse things, although I’m not sure any of them were more unlikely.

The lady of the house, or one of them, after a reading in Minneapolis, 2008. Photo by Terri Hudoba

The lady of the house, or one of them, after a reading in Minneapolis, 2008. Photo by Terri Hudoba

In the U.S., the telemarketing calls did set me off. The phone was in my name, so I spent a good bit of time fielding calls for Mrs. Hawley, and very few things push my buttons quite like being called Mrs. Hawley. I can’t entirely explain that, but we can begin by saying that I’m not married and I don’t want to be married, but if I did happen to be married I probably wouldn’t be married to myself. Then I can add that I passionately hate the whole business of women being publicly sorted and addressed by marital status. Top it all off with a hefty dose of I-know-my-reaction-isn’t-helping and throw in a telephone, and even though I told myself over and over not to do it, I’d end up saying, “There is no such person. What can I do for you?”

It was unfair, I know. The callers were following a script. Lots of people we know have worked for call centers, and it’s wrong to make a tough, underpaid job any harder than it already is, but there I was being horrible to the people who read the script, not the ones who wrote it. I knew that. I pledged to reform. And then the phone would ring and off I’d go.

Oddly enough, now that I’m living in the U.K., I’m less rabid about being called Mrs., even though it happens more often here. This isn’t my native culture. It can’t touch me as deeply. That makes no sense, but it’s the only explanation I can offer. It still pisses me off, but I’m more distant about it, and less vocal.

Plus the phone isn’t in my name. That helps.

The lady of the house,  though? Sorry, she’s in the back, and the maid’s helping her with her lace gloves. Can you call back when the butler’s available to take a message?

British and American English: The Accent

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Two words spoken in an American accent reliably crack up the British: water and butter. It has to do with the difference between English R and the American R, which as far as I can figure out is this: Americans have one and the English have a sort noticeable absence—something you might write as an H, or an apostrophe. WAWtah, as opposed to WAWterrrr.

WAWterrr. Photo by AdriannaNicole

WAWterrr. Photo by AdriannaNicole

I’ve spelled that first syllable the same way but no way does it sound the same. No matter how much I mess around with the spelling, though, I can’t come up with the difference. Put it this way: The English first syllable is well behaved and sits in its chair with a perfectly straight back. The American one slouches and puts its feet on the coffee table.

That may not help. I do understand that.

Okay, I’m writing about English pronunciation as if the English had one single accent. They don’t, but let’s not get into that here. I’m oversimplifying, the same way I’m oversimplifying the American accent, because if I don’t I’ll never write this. I’ll lose myself in complications and sub-points and convolutions so badly that I’ll shut down the computer, go back to bed, and pull the covers over my head. Pretty soon I’ll be joined by two cats and we’ll spend the day there.

They’ll think it’s a day well spent.

Any number of British friends will, in the middle of a conversation involving food or drink, lose all restraint and repeat after us, “BUTTerrrr,” or “WAWterrrr.” They can’t help themselves. It just breaks loose. Even if it was going to fly around the room and break the dishes, they couldn’t keep it in. Sometimes they don’t even wait for us to say it first. I’d love to criticize, but if Wild Thing and I are in the car when the weather comes on and the winds are moderate, we’ll repeat “MAWderit” and laugh as if it was the first time we’d done it. Some jokes just don’t get old.

We’re lucky, though. We have the accent that people think is cool because they’ve grown up watching Hollywood movies. Well, we sort of have it. We have versions of it, with regional flavorings that, from this distance, most people don’t hear. So we don’t get the disapproval that goes with having accents people look down on, or are afraid of. A wave of let’s-all-worry-about-immigrantion is breaking over the country just now, and our accents mark us all. Wild Thing’s and mine get us sorted in the Immigrants We Accept pile. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, but not as uncomfortable as being in the Immigrants We Don’t Accept pile. Still, it’s odd when people react to your accent, even favorably. It’s a bit like having people react to your nose. You’ve been walking around with the thing all your life. You’ve forgotten it’s there and are thinking about something else, but people want to talk to you about it. Over and over.

I’m in the supermarket and the woman at the checkout says, “I love your accent.”

What am I supposed to say? It’s my accent. I’m not responsible for it. When I was a kid, if I’d known I could choose I would have chosen a different variation on the New York accent. Now it’s too late. The glue that holds it in place set long ago.

So I say thanks, just as if she’d said she liked my sweater. Which she’d have called a jumper.

A Recommendation

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I just read a post on speaking with an accent on Not Another Tall Blog, by Angie K., and I want to recommend it to you.

Yeah, it’s true that we all have an accent of one sort or another, but when you’re the possessor of one that stands out, suddenly you don’t just have an accent, you have An Accent, and that changes things. Her post makes me want to write about the issue, but it’ll take me a while to catch up with that. In the meantime, do take a look at what she’s written.