10/10. I am so glad I don’t work in an office any more: all those awkward conversations with clients where you are trying to find an inoffensive way to tell them that what they’re demanding is totally unreasonable; fumbling to find a way to tell a colleague that their prose style is dreadful without making them cry, or that you need them to stay late and work on something to meet a deadline because otherwise you will have to stay twice as late as you were already planning to, without sounding like an actual monster… btw can I ask you if, in your opinion, the distinction between lie (intransitive) and lay (transitive) [I know you know exactly what the difference is because you’re Spanish and have therefore been educated in grammatical terms!] has effectively disappeared in British English for people of your generation and younger? (I know from watching tv that it has largely disappeared from spoken American English and entirely from the vocabulary of people who do subtitles for k-dramas)
I'm rereading the sentence where I've used lay here and now I understand what you mean by the transitive/intransitive use! I looked that one up when I was writing this as lie/lay sound very similar to a non-native speaker and I often get them wrong. I got indeed a reference that explained in American English "lay" is commonly use to mean "lie," and I believe I stuck with it, which now I see sounds weird in British English. Will I ever learn this language???
We have the same transitive vs intransitive contrast and causative alternation denoted by a vowel sound in rise/raise and (with different vowel pairs) sit/set and fall/fell. There used to be more examples but they disappeared over the centuries. I believe they are proto-germanic in origin. It would be sad if they all disappeared.
Your English is absolutely excellent or I wouldn’t be having this discussion with you!! But there’s always more to learn about any language, even when it’s one’s mother tongue.
That's good to hear, Claire. I swear there are days I feel I'm unlearning a little bit every language I speak.
Rise/raise are another pair that always causes me confusion.
Similarly to lay/lie I believe it has to do with Spanish having only 5 vowel sounds but also with the fact that in English the sound for E is the Spanish I, and the sound for A sounds more like E in Spanish.
But Spanish has the diphthongs ai and ei, too, which are used to distinguish between the indicative and subjunctive moods of some verb forms, so hmmm, can you really argue that these sounds are inherently more difficult to deal with because your mother tongue is Spanish?
Depending on who you work with trying to say something that could save them work and time feels like walking on egg shells, right? Glad to hear you've escaped that minefield.
Very interesting question about lie/lay. I haven't been paying attention to this specific case in English but will now that you've mention it as I find it very interesting to spot such changes. However, I have noticed more young people in Spanish use incorrectly transitive/intransitive verbs, so I wouldn't be surprised a similar thing is happening in English too.
All languages tend to evolve and change over time, especially with the use speakers make of them on their day to day, and I find since the arrival of social media some of these changes have happened a lot faster as people are exposed to new ways of using language and copying them is a way of feeling included.
thanks so much for this piece, i can totally relate as another person of many languages. this may be my age speaking but now i’ve come to see some of this as acknowledging/recognising the other person’s effort/time when they’ve done something and we don’t like it - saying that, i get into a real state when i don’t like something someone else did/made and have quite an arsenal of how-to-avoid-saying-what-i-really-think-about-it :) the one thing that baffles me is the really dated forms of address eg politicians calling each other ‘my honourable friend’
I’m not sure if this is the correct place for unusual polyglot coinages, and it’s not mine, shame to say, but the insincere English offer of tangible assistance has been referred to as “dry giving”within earshot. Great essay. Thank you.
And here I was thinking Brits were so charmingly bantery and easy to understand haha!
In my experience living in the US, Americans are an amped up exaggeration of the Brits depicted here, with everything being maniacally AWESOME, nothing sincere ever said and everything being taken literally all the time.
The part about being hot in a room was hilariously recognizable – countless meetings at schools, events etc where you can almost feel people’s teeth chatter as they clutch themselves with bluing fingers but no one says anything until you the foreigner ask if they can turn down the AC. I continue to be surprised by a certain prevalent conformism in the Anglosphere.
I developed a certain low-key hatred for the word AWESOME after living in the US. It was too much for the mostly indifferent European in me. But in contrast with the British, my experience with North Americans was that they were also very straight forward when the occasion demanded it, which I really appreciated. If they were hot, they simply said “Can you please turn on the AC to the polar setting, please? It doesn’t feel icy enough in here”
Yes, second the attitude to AWESOME. For me, something has to be truly "awesome" for me to call it that, otherwise it's just rendering words meaningless. Like that "objective distribution" meme https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzZ6s6QWUAAOBTt?format=jpg&name=large (I'm Eastern European)
The "polar setting" made me laugh out loud! The special relationship with extreme air conditioner settings and ice in drinks.
I think as an expat/immigrant there’s always the “exotic foreigner” card, like I will say and do weird stuff because I’m just the outlier weirdo.
There is so much more to language than just the words and the meaning isn’t it. Language is formed in and by culture so without understanding culture it’s so difficult to really “get” what people mean. It also took me a while to adapt to British working culture, especially them writing 7 paragraphs just to ask or convey the simplest thing! Though in the end I came to appreciate and enjoy the passive aggressiveness of writing things like “Not sure if you’ve had the chance to read my email following your request for information “. Anyway from the title I thought you were going to write about similar words with different meanings in languages. I was looking forward to the embarrassed/ embarazada joke 😂
"Language is formed in and by culture so without understanding culture it’s so difficult to really “get” what people mean." This has reminded me of the first time I heard the expression "not my cup of tea" and I was so puzzled because there was no tea whatsoever involved and I just didn't know what was going on 😂 But when you think about it, only in the UK could such an expression be used to say "it's not for me." I thought about the title a lot, but then False Friends seemed to convey that idea of it looks one thing, but it's actually another that I was going after. Glad it worked 😂
Due to tea being the go-to drink to gather around in England, the metaphor has been created; culture. Surprised to hear that you were in Scotland but missed the ultimate sarcasm in "Aye, right!", Where two positive words are used to state the most negative position!
Exactly, once I understood that connection it totally made sense why this was an expression in the UK but wouldn't fly in Spain (where we're not big tea drinkers).
As for Scotland, I bet people were saying all kind of things but whether I understood them correctly is another question 🤣 But now I'll keep and eye and ear out for "aye, right!" and will know better!
If it's any comfort to you, I suffer the same in Español. My wife and kids are Peruvian and I don't understand most of the phrases and colloquial (sometimes part Quechua) expressions used when I'm in Lima...it makes me crazy but every day's a school day for this Gringo escocés! 😅
Rather than learning a language twice, I dare say we learned two languages. Or, the meaning of what a language is expands to include the performance of language. Very cool and funny examples, I especially liked the isn't it hot in here one. 🤭
Also you made me remember my pragmatics classes!! I loved them back then, so useful in real life too, it turns out.
Also! And that's without even discussing the differences between the way people speak a language and how they write it. That'll be a third language in itself. Ah, the language learning journey can be the most exciting and the most frustrating 🙃
Glad I brought you back to pragmatics - for some reason I started thinking about it and how many examples we come across in every day life.
"The thing is he thought he could get rid of me in 15 minutes and I’d be fine with it. Wrong, mate, that’s not going to happen,” this brought me so much joy. Use their odd ways in your favour!! hahahah
By the way, I’ve just remembered there’s a great French comedy film called Quai d’Orsay that is a parody of the inner workings of diplomacy and the main character (based on French Foreign Affairs Secretary Dominique de Villepin) is obsessed with language.
For what it's worth, Boris did a fine job here by telling people to "stay at home" when he meant "go to work". That was an interesting period of our lives 😅
10/10. I am so glad I don’t work in an office any more: all those awkward conversations with clients where you are trying to find an inoffensive way to tell them that what they’re demanding is totally unreasonable; fumbling to find a way to tell a colleague that their prose style is dreadful without making them cry, or that you need them to stay late and work on something to meet a deadline because otherwise you will have to stay twice as late as you were already planning to, without sounding like an actual monster… btw can I ask you if, in your opinion, the distinction between lie (intransitive) and lay (transitive) [I know you know exactly what the difference is because you’re Spanish and have therefore been educated in grammatical terms!] has effectively disappeared in British English for people of your generation and younger? (I know from watching tv that it has largely disappeared from spoken American English and entirely from the vocabulary of people who do subtitles for k-dramas)
I'm rereading the sentence where I've used lay here and now I understand what you mean by the transitive/intransitive use! I looked that one up when I was writing this as lie/lay sound very similar to a non-native speaker and I often get them wrong. I got indeed a reference that explained in American English "lay" is commonly use to mean "lie," and I believe I stuck with it, which now I see sounds weird in British English. Will I ever learn this language???
We have the same transitive vs intransitive contrast and causative alternation denoted by a vowel sound in rise/raise and (with different vowel pairs) sit/set and fall/fell. There used to be more examples but they disappeared over the centuries. I believe they are proto-germanic in origin. It would be sad if they all disappeared.
Your English is absolutely excellent or I wouldn’t be having this discussion with you!! But there’s always more to learn about any language, even when it’s one’s mother tongue.
That's good to hear, Claire. I swear there are days I feel I'm unlearning a little bit every language I speak.
Rise/raise are another pair that always causes me confusion.
Similarly to lay/lie I believe it has to do with Spanish having only 5 vowel sounds but also with the fact that in English the sound for E is the Spanish I, and the sound for A sounds more like E in Spanish.
But Spanish has the diphthongs ai and ei, too, which are used to distinguish between the indicative and subjunctive moods of some verb forms, so hmmm, can you really argue that these sounds are inherently more difficult to deal with because your mother tongue is Spanish?
Depending on who you work with trying to say something that could save them work and time feels like walking on egg shells, right? Glad to hear you've escaped that minefield.
Very interesting question about lie/lay. I haven't been paying attention to this specific case in English but will now that you've mention it as I find it very interesting to spot such changes. However, I have noticed more young people in Spanish use incorrectly transitive/intransitive verbs, so I wouldn't be surprised a similar thing is happening in English too.
All languages tend to evolve and change over time, especially with the use speakers make of them on their day to day, and I find since the arrival of social media some of these changes have happened a lot faster as people are exposed to new ways of using language and copying them is a way of feeling included.
thanks so much for this piece, i can totally relate as another person of many languages. this may be my age speaking but now i’ve come to see some of this as acknowledging/recognising the other person’s effort/time when they’ve done something and we don’t like it - saying that, i get into a real state when i don’t like something someone else did/made and have quite an arsenal of how-to-avoid-saying-what-i-really-think-about-it :) the one thing that baffles me is the really dated forms of address eg politicians calling each other ‘my honourable friend’
Ahaha, you sound like someone well-equipped to defuse conflict in any language, my honourable friend 😆
(I kind of like the sound of that!)
I’m not sure if this is the correct place for unusual polyglot coinages, and it’s not mine, shame to say, but the insincere English offer of tangible assistance has been referred to as “dry giving”within earshot. Great essay. Thank you.
Dry giving is genius 😂 I will steal that with your permission because it's too good to be limited to the confinement of this post.
Thanks for reading!
No worries :)
I guess wet sand is at least useful to make sandcastles by the shore. 😅
Exactly 😂😂😂
And here I was thinking Brits were so charmingly bantery and easy to understand haha!
In my experience living in the US, Americans are an amped up exaggeration of the Brits depicted here, with everything being maniacally AWESOME, nothing sincere ever said and everything being taken literally all the time.
The part about being hot in a room was hilariously recognizable – countless meetings at schools, events etc where you can almost feel people’s teeth chatter as they clutch themselves with bluing fingers but no one says anything until you the foreigner ask if they can turn down the AC. I continue to be surprised by a certain prevalent conformism in the Anglosphere.
I developed a certain low-key hatred for the word AWESOME after living in the US. It was too much for the mostly indifferent European in me. But in contrast with the British, my experience with North Americans was that they were also very straight forward when the occasion demanded it, which I really appreciated. If they were hot, they simply said “Can you please turn on the AC to the polar setting, please? It doesn’t feel icy enough in here”
Yes, second the attitude to AWESOME. For me, something has to be truly "awesome" for me to call it that, otherwise it's just rendering words meaningless. Like that "objective distribution" meme https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzZ6s6QWUAAOBTt?format=jpg&name=large (I'm Eastern European)
The "polar setting" made me laugh out loud! The special relationship with extreme air conditioner settings and ice in drinks.
I think as an expat/immigrant there’s always the “exotic foreigner” card, like I will say and do weird stuff because I’m just the outlier weirdo.
That graphic meme about the use of awesome seems rather accurate : ) The Australians and the French seem to have similar standards.
Agree, and the "objective distribution" control part must be continental Europe
There is so much more to language than just the words and the meaning isn’t it. Language is formed in and by culture so without understanding culture it’s so difficult to really “get” what people mean. It also took me a while to adapt to British working culture, especially them writing 7 paragraphs just to ask or convey the simplest thing! Though in the end I came to appreciate and enjoy the passive aggressiveness of writing things like “Not sure if you’ve had the chance to read my email following your request for information “. Anyway from the title I thought you were going to write about similar words with different meanings in languages. I was looking forward to the embarrassed/ embarazada joke 😂
"Language is formed in and by culture so without understanding culture it’s so difficult to really “get” what people mean." This has reminded me of the first time I heard the expression "not my cup of tea" and I was so puzzled because there was no tea whatsoever involved and I just didn't know what was going on 😂 But when you think about it, only in the UK could such an expression be used to say "it's not for me." I thought about the title a lot, but then False Friends seemed to convey that idea of it looks one thing, but it's actually another that I was going after. Glad it worked 😂
Due to tea being the go-to drink to gather around in England, the metaphor has been created; culture. Surprised to hear that you were in Scotland but missed the ultimate sarcasm in "Aye, right!", Where two positive words are used to state the most negative position!
Exactly, once I understood that connection it totally made sense why this was an expression in the UK but wouldn't fly in Spain (where we're not big tea drinkers).
As for Scotland, I bet people were saying all kind of things but whether I understood them correctly is another question 🤣 But now I'll keep and eye and ear out for "aye, right!" and will know better!
If it's any comfort to you, I suffer the same in Español. My wife and kids are Peruvian and I don't understand most of the phrases and colloquial (sometimes part Quechua) expressions used when I'm in Lima...it makes me crazy but every day's a school day for this Gringo escocés! 😅
Love that! I bet your family dinners must be quite fun : )
Rather than learning a language twice, I dare say we learned two languages. Or, the meaning of what a language is expands to include the performance of language. Very cool and funny examples, I especially liked the isn't it hot in here one. 🤭
Also you made me remember my pragmatics classes!! I loved them back then, so useful in real life too, it turns out.
Also! And that's without even discussing the differences between the way people speak a language and how they write it. That'll be a third language in itself. Ah, the language learning journey can be the most exciting and the most frustrating 🙃
Glad I brought you back to pragmatics - for some reason I started thinking about it and how many examples we come across in every day life.
Pragmatics is fascinating, although I'm not a pragmatic type of person. ☁️ 😊
"The thing is he thought he could get rid of me in 15 minutes and I’d be fine with it. Wrong, mate, that’s not going to happen,” this brought me so much joy. Use their odd ways in your favour!! hahahah
This friend of mine is afraid of nothing! I'm getting a flashback now of when she told me this story and how much we laughed 😂
Hilarious. The meeting and post-meeting Jekyll and Hyde thing is so spot on - cannot tell you the number of times...
You do question if you have imagined everything! But no, it's just English working its magic
Can you imagine how this plays out in the arena of world politics?!
By the way, I’ve just remembered there’s a great French comedy film called Quai d’Orsay that is a parody of the inner workings of diplomacy and the main character (based on French Foreign Affairs Secretary Dominique de Villepin) is obsessed with language.
oh sounds intriguing! Will look it up!
For what it's worth, Boris did a fine job here by telling people to "stay at home" when he meant "go to work". That was an interesting period of our lives 😅
This is a dream to read and I hope that’s clear x
I'm very glad to hear because our conversation about you know who has partially inspired it 😅