So I’ve come across a certain construction of sentences by British English writers that jumped out at me as an American reader, phrases like “he just got out of hospital” and “she’s going to university.”
I realize (just now) that the latter is simply because of the difference in the use of the word “university,” but the former struck me as odd. Is it possible to explain why British English doesn’t need “the” or “a” before “hospital”? It’s just one of those things that my American English mind thinks is “wrong,” but it’s apparently not overseas.
Sometimes, we choose to drop the article to indicate that the method by which the subject is interacting with the noun is the platonic ideal, as it were. I go to school when I am a student and I am there to be educated, but I go to the school if I’m chaperoning a dance or attending a PTA meeting as while they’re aspects of schooling, they’re not the immediate concept people have of school.
Someone going to the hospital could be visiting or making a drop-off or something. Someone going to hospital is going as a patient to be healed in some manner. American english has not yet decided to demarcate this and it may never.
Curiously, American’s do make this exact distinction between “jail” and “the jail”. A person in jail is serving time, a person in the jail is visiting him (hopefully, bringing a cake with a file baked into it).
Yeah, and the “school” example is a good one (although I don’t think we Americans think of it as a “platonic ideal” like the Brits do; IMHO, we think the word in “going to school” as more of an institution than a physical location, if that makes sense). Same with “jail/prison”.
Another example is that Americans have no problem saying somebody is going to college.
A WAG but maybe the fact that Britons use “going to hospital” as a platonic ideal for “seeking medical care” while Americans do not reflects the difference in their public health care systems. In Britain, all hospitals are represented by a single service while in America they’re separate entities.
There is no deep reason for such things, and it’s a waste of time to try to figure one out. Both Americans and Brits say “in prison”, “in jail”, “in school”, and “in college”. Brits also drop the article for the phrases “in university” and “in hospital”. This dropping of articles in both countries only applies to the cases where you’re talking about someone being in those institutions for the long term, not the cases where they’re just passing through. I suppose you could consider “at home” an example of this, but if there’s phrase without the dropping, it would be “at my home” (or “at their home” or whatever). It’s also used in both countries.
American legalese provides counter examples. A judgment may say something like “Plaintiff seeks relief from Defendant’s behaviour bla bla…”. Commonwealth lawyers would put “the” before plaintiff and defendant. The lack of articles looks odd to our eyes.
To be fair, some parts of the US say things like “get washed” and “come with”, which sound absolutely dreadful to those of us who have no problem with “in hospital”. Also see “two thousand seven hundred thirteen” vs “two thousand seven hundred and thirteen”.
The UK isn’t alone in dropping words from phrases, leaving them to sound oddly truncated to others.
So far as I can see the only linguistic irregularity here is in the way that American English treats the word “hospital”.* The rules of English article usage are subtle and difficult to articulate (at least, I do not know how to do so in any clear and succinct way), but whether or not an article is used does mark a subtle distinction in meaning, and, for the most part the rules for this are exactly the same in British and American English. As has already been pointed out, Americans do say “in college”, “in school”**, “in jail”, etc., and understand and make use of the difference in meaning between these expressions and “in the college”, “in the school”*, “in the jail”, etc., just as British people do. The oddity is that, apparently, Americans never drop the definite article before “hospital” and thus, in this particular case, leave themselves incapable of expressing the relevant distinction, although they do recognize and express it as appropriate in other cases.
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*And, according to the OP, “university” too, although that is news to me, despite having spent over 20 years of my life involved in the American university system.
** Actually, in British English the normal idiomatic expression would be “at school” (and “at university” in most contexts), and “in school”, the way Americans use it, to mean something like “regularly attending school”, sounds slightly odd to British ears. This, however, is a separate issue, though of a similar type. In this case, perhaps, it is British English that is slightly irregular in its use of prepositions with “school”.
What’s wrong with “get washed?” Is there another way of using it other than in a sentence like “the car gets washed once a week”? Or are you saying it should be “washed up”? Or are you thinking of the construction “needs washed,” which sounds a bit odd, as in “the car needs washed.”
Re: washing, the American usage which sounds strange to my ears is saying “wash up” in a context other than washing plates & utensils, i.e. when referring to washing one’s hands or face.
It’s because American English generally uses “college” in many contexts where British English would use “university”. We go to college , we’re college-educated, we’re away at college etc - even if the institution in question has “University” in its name.
Americans say ‘out back’, where it would always be ‘out the back’ in the UK.
Of course, there are some English dialects where the word ‘the’ is reduced to a glottal stop, (generally represented by a ‘t’ when written, but if you say the ‘t’ locals will think you’re weird), so some of us certainly do appear to randomly cut out the word.
Well, ok, but I think it has already been established in the thread that an American will say “My daughter is in college,” without the “the”, just like a British person would. Is it in fact the case that, in otherwise similar circumstances, when they happen to choose to use the word “university” instead of “college” an American will never say “My daughter is in university,” but always “My daughter is in the university,” or is this irregularity of usage only associated with the word “hospital”?
Incidentally, the guys on “big Bang Theory” refer to “the university” all the time. This grates on me, not because they use the “the” (in the relevant contexts, a British person would too) but because when I was at Caltech (admittedly many years ago now) I do not recall anyone there referring to it as “the university” in this way. Although, technically, it is a university, it is a very atypical one (not just because of its elite status), and it does not have “university” in its name. As I recall, people would mostly say “the institute” or just “Caltech”. It has crossed my mind that Caltech might have raised some objection to their name being mentioned too often on the show (although it no secret that the show is meant to be set there).
