My pleasure. I award you a BritCred rating of A+ 
Then your experience is poor. I join Robdog in supporting choie.
Yeah, I only spent a couple months living in England, and then around British folks in Budapest, and “down the pub” was a perfectly normal and common expression.
Ah! Cheers all for the backup. Yeah, I knew I hadn’t invented the frequency with which I’ve heard these phrases. Funnily enough I was just watching The Good Life and was reminded that “up” is also sometimes used without a preposition. (Tom is trying to buy a loom at a second-hand shop, but the assistant doesn’t dare negotiate when his boss is “up the other shop.”) Probably less common but still, it’s a thing.
OK, if you say so, but, if so, hotflungwok was simply off topic with this example. On the other hand,if you interpret the examples as I did, they were on topic (although incorrect about British usage). The thread began as, and until that point remained, one about differences between British and American English in the use of articles. (I maintain that the difference is much more restricted than the OP implies, and indeed, confined to perhaps just a single word being treated irregularly in American.) No-one denies that there are lots of other differences Between British and American English. A thread just throwing out examples of that is a very different one from what this one started out to be.
I’ve noticed for quite some time that on my local NPR affiliate they’ll say that such-and-such performer will be present in studio. What happened to “in the studio”? It sounds like a lame effort to sound foreign and sophisticated, possibly inspired by the “in hospital” thing. As such jars the hell out this American, but I’m happy to corrected if this is the normal way of saying it in radio work.
Not normal.
Charlie Rose says “In the studio with us tonight,” as have many others before him.
choie writes:
> You’re the one whose posts imply superior knowledge–I’m just giving my
> BritCred (FWIW) and explaining that I’ve got widespread enough knowledge to
> have heard it in a variety of places.
No, you were the one who first claimed superior knowledge.
RobDog writes:
> It is however slightly less likely to be used higher up the social scale where “to”
> would be preferable to “down”.
This strikes me as a reasonable distinction. It’s probably true that I’ve listened more often to more educated Brits than to less educated ones.
:dubious: well this north-eastern boy with his humble first-class honours degree would certainly use “Down the XXXX” in most situations. A quick off-the-cuff poll of my colleagues with their multiple MBA’s, Phd’s and masters suggest that it is a well understood and oft-used phrase.
I’d humbly suggest that you really don’t mean “more educated” and “less educated” do you? you mean “posh” and "not posh"but the distinction is rather important.
If this is indeed a thing, I wonder if they are subconsciously referencing stock Latin phrases such as in camera,* in vitro*, in utero, in extremis, in situ, in toto, ummmm* in excelsis deo* (OK, stretching now) etc?
ETA, and didn’t the US forces in Vietnam used to refer to being “in country”?
In architecture school (in the midwest US), “in studio” was a common phrase for time spent working in the studio at the Architecture Building (vs. working at home):
*I was working in studio all night last night.
Are you going to be in studio all day?*
It’s just one of those things we picked up because the professors and older students used it commonly.
What about going to market, to market, to buy a fat pig? Of course, I only do that in 18th century nursery rhymes.
Oh I hate when Americans say “I’m on holiday” too. Um, no you’re not. You are on vacation.
Did you also take the “lift”? Stop for “petrol” on the way home from work?
**Grrrrrr!!!**Just noticed “on air”, too.
It’s always been “going to Homecoming”, and I’m in my mid-fifties. The only time you see an article before “Homecoming” is if a word like “dance” or “parade” follows the noun: a homecoming party or the homecoming parade and so on.
I never really used “petrol” or “on holiday” much, if at all, but it took me awhile to get used to “elevator” again.
Rarely, I’ve been guilty of this myself if, in the context, out of concern that “college” might be taken as a secondary institution, as many UK secondary schools do denominate themselves “colleges”. I’ve done it here only once or twice in nearly fourteen years; more typically I’ll just let it go or find an unambiguous way to say something.
Going the other way I think I have the opposite reaction to LWIBR when native English speakers outside of North America “translate” words to American English; I’m slightly miffed as I feel I’m being talked down to in a way. It’s as if there’s an assumption that we’re too provincial and limited to understand words like “petrol” or “football” (when the writer clearly means what we call “soccer”). But it’s only a minor annoyance rather than something I get hot under the collar about. For me the greater emotion by far is just one of bemusement.
I have an example that will sound stranger to Americans than any of the foregoing, and it may be obsolete by now in the UK. It’s from a P.G. Wodehouse novel, Uncle Fred In The Springtime, published in 1939. A character in the story leans out over a windowsill, overbalances, and falls to the earth outside. On being asked about it later he says he was “jumping out of window”. To which Lady Constance seems mildly shocked and says, "Jumping out of window, as if wondering why he didn’t choose a more normal place to jump out of.
Is this expression still current anywhere?
BTW we need to be sure not to include in this discussion phrases in what they used to call telegraphic English, and still widely seen in newspaper headlines. The omission of articles in such contexts is completely typical in America, e.g. “Blackhawks win Cup”, “Area Man Falls Out Of Window”, and so on.
Aren’t there some American dialects where they do something similar? I read something about Baltimore English (“Bawlmerese”); one of the examples was Pitcher bane suit ohn! we’re gane danny ayshun.
i.e.
“Put your bathing suit on! We’re going down [to] the ocean.”
They do this in the summer, when they head to the Chest Peake.
I can’t find that expression anywhere in my Kindle edition, are you sure it’s in Uncle F in the S?
Anyway, it seems like a very unusual construct for Wodehouse. Might it have been “jumping out the window” with “of” omitted?
“Jumping out u’ window” is possible in a northern dialect, with of being replaced by half an “of” with a glottal stop.