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 
One that I always notice is “ROBin Hood” (US) and Robin HOOD (UK)
When the UK speakers put the emphasis on the first syllable, were they using “halftime” as a standalone noun, or part of a compound?
“HALF-time” by itself sounds very marked to my UK ears. But compounding can shift the stress, so in the same way that we say “piccaDILLy”, but “PICCadilly CIRCus” (Geoff Lindsey’s example), it sounds fine to say “HALF-time BREAK”.
Good question but I am not prepared to go back to Youglish to check. (Be my guest if you’d like to.) I was surprised to hear that many with stress on the first syllable, but will say the stress was pretty faint compare to the way American say the word.
can’t stand it. Some believe it’s “athentic.” Is lorry? Loo? Nah. We have words too.
Why be so sensitive to adopting British English terms? As Britain expanded its empire, English adopted numerous new words into the language from those of the indigenous peoples of its colonies. British English continues to do so today from its former colonies, including American and Australian English, adding to an already vast vocabulary and offering users ever more varied ways of expressing themselves.
I think what’s going on is that American English is more “German” than British English.
in German, compound nouns are written as single words, whereas in English we form noun phrases, much the way German does, but usually write them as separate words. at the phonetic level, if they’re really separate words, they retain their stress accents. in American English, noun phrases are more apt to act like single words at the phonetic level, so one or more of the individual words loses its stress accent and the whole noun phrase gains a single primary stressed syllable.
there’s an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, where one of the characters refers to “Chinese food”, but he clearly says it as CHI-nese FOOD” — “food”, in that phrase in the early 70s, was still phonetically a distinct word with its stressed syllable intact. most Americans now say “CHI-nese-food”, effectively as one word with a single primary stressed syllable.
I don’t know why American English is more apt to treat noun phrases as “Germanisms” than British English, but that seems to be what’s going on
Very interesting–thanks. But I would tend to disagree on the Chinese food example, which I still hear with the accent on FOOD. (Not that I hear it so often.) However, when people sometimes shorten it, they will say, “Let’s have Chi-NESE tonoght.”
The high number of German surnames in the U.S. populace is indicative of German immigration shaping American English.
British speakers will say ‘apple SAUCE’. If you Germanise the phrase and make it a single word, the stress will fall on the first syllable: ‘APPlesauce’; this effect is widespread in AmE. There is even a tendency to place stress on the first syllable in single words which, in BrE, are not first-syllable-stressed: reSEARCH – REsearch; reSOURCE – REsource; as well as the many fine examples of phrases which Ben gave such as BOYscout and NEWyear.
German syntax is also seen in:
Skipping ‘and’ in ‘one hundred and fifty’; ‘sailing boat’ becoming ‘sailboat’; ‘write to me’ becoming ‘write me’, etc.
Replacing adverbs with adjectives (you walk too slow).
Use of ‘already’ (schón) as emphasis in ‘stop it already’.
I had thought that this use of “already” was influenced more by Yiddish than by German. That’s Leo Rosten’s theory, anyway (“The Joys of Yinglish”).
All right already, it’s true, so nu, so sue me.
Yes, Nancy. Wrong of me to conflate German and Yiddish. Thank you.
I read somewhere that at one point in American history, one in seven schoolkids were taught in a Germanic language other than English (mainly German, of course). I wonder what the current proportion is for Spanish.
This is an interesting topic. My main observation on this overall issue– as I believe I have mentioned in these pages– is how British unfailingly put the accent on the first syllable of a two syllable French word (ballet, cafe, garage, etc), and Americans unfailingly put the accent on the second syllable. (Neither are correct, of course.) There is a consistent difference in three syllable words, too, like renaissance. But I don’t see how that’s related to the subject of this Noob.
A good treatment of this issue as it transpired 500 years ago in English is episode 189 of the History of English Podcast. It’s called Stressed Out and describes the evolution in English syllabic stresses in the 1630s– many of which were different in North America.
My first thought was of John McWhorter’s podcast episode about the subject. The example that sticks in my mind is from around the 1940s, when Chinese food was first becoming more widely known in the US. People in movies would talk about eating Chinese FOOD, rather than CHINESE food.
As I said responding to another comment, I still say (and feel I hear others said), Chinese FOOD.
Incidentally, it seems to me that in the UK we would drop “food” entirely and just saying having Chinese.
Definitely a common usage in U.S. too.
Huh. I lived through the 50s and 60s and have absolutely no recollection of the accents on the later syllables. I’ve always just assumed (since I’m a retired language arts teacher but not a language researcher) that we put the emphasis on the first syllable to differentiate from other words–BOY scout, not GIRL scout, LITTLE league, not MAJOR league. (Although, come to think of it, I do have some recollection of hearing “little LEAGUE” when I was a kid living across the street from a kids’ baseball park and thinking it sounded weird.)
As for GUITar vs guiTAR, INsurance vs inSURance, DEtroit vs DeTROIT, I’ve just thought of that as a South vs North thang/thing. (I was a South, but my mother fussed at me continually for not talking right because I said guiTAR and inSURance, which I sort of assumed I picked up from watching tv during my formative years.)
Definitely southern on on INsurance and UMbrella and possible RED light and SHORT story. DEE-troit and GUIT-ar I think of as African-American origin, but maybe they’re more broadly southern.
Yes, I’m a South, and it was definitely RED light and GUItar and DEEtroit. It’s possible that DEEtroit, however, was similar to EYEran, in that it was just ignorance. I want to say I remember other place names, like SAINT Louis and NEW York, but that could have been only a few people, rather than a rule. It’s funny to think about, because I’m still very much an INsurance and UMbrella person, even though I’m surrounded by people who aren’t.
I think some of these can go either way, depending on context. We’d say ‘At halfTIME’ but ‘in the HALFtime interval’. There are other similar things like ‘I ate a ChiNESE from a CHInese restaurant’ where this is also true. There’s also ‘the FOREcast is rain’ but ‘It said it was going to rain on the weather foreCAST’. I always say ARMchair and YESterday but there are other strange fellow Britons who say armCHAIR and yesterDAY (I may be wrong but I think yesterDAY’ is a Norhern variant.
Americans adopting British football terms? Next thing you know, we’ll all be drinking tea at halftime and calling our sneakers “boots.” The real World Cup victory is the English language changing teams without a transfer fee.
The trickle of British words being used in the US is nothing compared with the flood of Americanisms in the UK.