Here’s a conversation that happens to me more than you might imagine:
Me: …you may know this as an English muffin, but in England, we just call them ‘muffins’
An American: So… what do you call the cupcake-type muffins that we call ‘muffins’
M: Oh, we call those ‘muffins’
AA: That must be confusing
M: Not really
AA: But… how do you know which kind someone is talking about?
M: Context I suppose. It really isn’t a problem.
AA: Well, I think that’s weird, having two different things with the same name! Your language is stupid! How can you even function like that?
(OK, it’s not always exactly like that, but sometimes it is)
I think this is just one of those things where people mistake their own familiarity with their own dialect of English, with perfect consistency and utility, and misperceive a difference in someone else’s dialect of English as being a horrible flaw; basically, blindness to the inconsistencies and weirdness of their own dialect, because they use it every day.
I’ve seen the same thing with other words, and also with pronunciations where someone else’s version also seems less consistent than our own.
What I would actually like, is some examples of pairs-by-name-but-not-by-type of objects, in any dialect of English, but especially in American English, because I feel like that would be a better way to illustrate the complete triviality of these pairs.
I’m sure there must be some, so what are they?
The closest example I can think of, in American English, is “cracker”. A saltine isn’t too far removed from, say, a Ritz, or any of Pepperidge Farm’s offerings… but all of those are very different from a Graham cracker (which is similar to what Brits call a “digestive biscuit”). And yes, we can specify “Graham cracker” if we need to disambiguate, but often it’s just “cracker”.
Not in my experience. If you just said “cracker” it would never occur to me that you were talking about a Graham cracker.
To the OP: right now the best example I can think of is “cocoa,” which could refer to the chocolate powder used ffor baking or to the drink a.k.a. hot chocolate.
This is a common prescriptivist objection, not just when encountering different dialects but when unfamiliar changes occur within one’s own dialect, when the kids are running amok on the lawn. A prominent example that comes to mind is the use of “literally” as an intensifier, as in:
“That’s literally the meanest thing anyone has ever said”
A common objection is that we now have no way to distinguish the literal from the figurative. In reality, we get by just fine using context.
Another example in a recent thread, somebody insisting (contrary to all evidence of literally* centuries of usage) that the semantic scope of the word “guest” should exclude anyone who is paying, as in a hotel guest. Because, if it doesn’t resolve the potential ambiguity between those who are paying and those who are not, what use is the word at all?
Interesting - I guess it is quite similar to prescriptivism - i.e. your dialect should conform to mine
The other related phenomenon I see a lot is “Why do [people of this English dialect] pronounce [this word] inconsistently with [this cherry picked list of words I think are similar]”. Poppet, all English dialects (and even accents, since it’s about sounds) are inconsistent in their pronunciation. Fortunately counterexamples for that complaint are easy to find by just leafing through a dictionary.
In my experience, we American and always specify “Graham cracker” when we mean Graham cracker. A generic reference to crackers doesn’t generally include Graham crackers.
And of course a lot of what we Americans call crackers and cookies are all “biscuits” to you Brits, right? That seems as confusing to me as your “muffin” issue.
Here’s one from my part of the country (southern Ohio). In real traditional local pizza joints, you might see “mangoes” as a topping option. That’s just bell peppers/green peppers/sweet peppers (capsicum). We don’t put mangoes on pizza. We also never get confused about which mangoes are under discussion.
Dialect is mere happenstance, the time and place where you are born, but many people show little awareness of this; or of the fact that judgmental dialect preference is often tied to social identity, sometimes in unpleasant ways. Most aspects of grammar and semantics are entirely arbitrary, and not significantly better or worse for communication than any other usage within the range of human language. Much of language prescriptivism consists of trying to construct rationalizations about why a preferred usage is objectively better than others. Claims of ambiguity resulting from the disfavored usage are one common rationalization.
There’s a thing that I call a spatula, which has a flexible blade meant for uses such as scraping bowls clean.
And there’s a thing that I call a pancake turner, which is used in hot pans for turning pancakes, or eggs, or anything else in a hot pan which needs to be turned or to be scraped off the pan.
To me, these are two distinct tools, though both of them exist in a batch of variations. I’ve run into people who call them both spatulas. I found that confusing, but the people who call them by the same name don’t seem to be confused by it.
This is exactly right, and this parochial lack of self awareness and ignorance of language is not always benign. If someone encounters the example you gave of a difference in British dialect, they may note the ambiguity and call it stupid, but they will not generally think less of British people, they will just put it down to our well known quirkiness. If someone encounters a similar situation with a difference in AAVE, they may much more quickly jump to “ignorance”, “poor education”.
That’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for (albeit that it sounds a little bit localised) - and I know it’s the sort of thing I was looking for, because my first involuntary thought on reading it was something like “That’s just stupid for no reason - they should just stop doing that”
It helps that we don’t have the other kind of biscuits here at all (except when we knowingly make them as an imported idea). We do have cookies, and I think that word has been embedded in British English probably since WWII, but we regard ‘cookies’ as a fully contained subset of the category ‘biscuits’
Give me a biscuit—maybe from a Pillsbury tube and baked or maybe a baking powder.
Give the dog a biscuit—another usage, like Milk Bone.
Etymology: I only recently learned that bis is like bi (like bicycle, bisexual, etc. for two).
literally “twice-baked,” from Latin (panis) bis coctus “(bread) twice-baked;” see bis- + cook (v.). Originally a kind of hard, dry bread baked in thin cakes; U.S. sense of “small, round soft bun” is recorded from 1818.
I’m like the people you run into; Mrs. L is like you.
My wife baked biscotti last week and they are indeed baked twice. I assume that Triscuits ® and thrice baked.
In my native Philadelphia dialect, we used “pavement” for what most Americans call the sidewalk, while they call the (paved) street the pavement. When I use the word, my wife is not certain what I am referring to. Although I’ve largely given up on the first meaning.
That’s normal in the UK too - because the pedestrian footpath was paved (that is, laid with close fitting flat pieces of dressed stone) whereas the road would be cobbled, or later, tarmacadam
In the UK, I believe there is a clear distinction made between “buses” (which serve a single metropolitan area, and have provisions for standing passengers) and “coaches” (which travel between metropolitan areas, have no standing areas, and have large cargo space for luggage). In my experience, and I believe this is true through most of the US, they are both called “buses”. For example, Greyhound calls their vehicles “buses”.