As of now, two friends have forwarded me the New Yorker‘s recent article about American adoption of British soccer/football terminology–especially treating teams as plural, such as “England have advanced to the semifinals”–with messages along the lines of “In case you missed it!” To which I snarkily replied, “More like in case they’ve missed the fact that I’ve been writing about this for thirteen years!”
As it happens, with the World Cup in full swing, I’ve been thinking about another Britishism that seems to have been adopted by the American announcers on Fox, John Strong and Stu Holden. It involves not grammar or terminology (like calling the the field “the pitch” or a uniform “kit”) but pronunciation, and specifically the way stress is placed in compound terms such as “halftime,” “red card,” “goal kick,” and “set piece.” My sense is that in American English the stress is on the first word or syllable, while in Britain–and for Strong and Holden–it’s on the second. HalfTIME, red CARD, etc.
This topic (as a general phenomenon, not just in soccer) is rather surprisingly complicated. I’ve actually been thinking about it for a month or so, since reading a New York Times column in which John McWhorter observed (referring strictly to the U.S.) that
“names with two parts often start out with the accent on the second one, and over time, as the name becomes culturally well-established, the accent shifts to the first one. In a 1955 episode of the sitcom “Make Room for Daddy,” the characters pronounce “Little League” — founded 16 years earlier — as “little LEAGUE.” It’s more commonly spoken now as LITTLE league. In a 1964 episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a woman says “crossword PUZZLE” — because that was the way it would have been pronounced when crosswords were popularized in the 1920s, and the actress was born in 1896.”
It rang true, as I thought of 1930s gangster movies with lines like “So you’re a wise GUY, eh?” or “What do you make me for, a boy SCOUT.” Now in the U.S., we say “WISE guy” and “BOY scout.”
However, over in Britain, they (still) say “boy SCOUT.” I learned that in a 2012 article called “Informativeness is a Determinant of Compound Stress in English,” by Melanie J. Bell and Ingo Plag, which gets into some of the complexity of this issue. And the Brits also say “New YEAR,” “ice CREAM,” and “weekEND,” while we stress the first syllable. (Adding to the complexity: I’ve noticed significant variation among Americans in such terms as “red LIGHT”/”RED light” and “short STORY”/”SHORT story.”)
Back to the soccer/football compounds, I can attest to Strong and Holden’s pronunciation, and while my strong sense is that this is the British way, it’s hard to confirm, without listening to dozens of hours of football commentary, which I’m not prepared to do. I did go over to the valuable Youglish site and listened to about twenty-five YouTube clips of U.K. people saying “halftime.” The results were about equally divided, between those who did it the American way, with emphasis on the first syllable, and what I take to to be the British, with stress on the second syllable or equal.
If I get my energy up, I might listen to “red card,” “set piece,” and the like. But in the meantime, why don’t you lot just tell me what you think,
notoneoffbritishisms.com 