4 Ways American English is Pretty Weird | PART 1

hello I'm Lawrence and I'm on a quest to uncover all of the memos that Britain and America lost in the pond and one of those memos pertains to English specifically varieties of English that are spoken by American humans and children ever since my first poorly Lit video I've made several more in defense of American English and that's because as I said in this video the story of American English much like the story of language in general is highly compelling is highly compelling but it's also completely and utterly a little bit Bonkers how do I know because I've heard read and sometimes spoken it while living in the United States for the past 16 years whether we're talking about words that have the same meaning or Regional variations that are completely unknown in other parts of the country American English like British English is packed with quirks and if you like quirky things and haven't subscribed to this channel do that now in the meantime let's take a look at how American English is one bizarre variety of of English in case you've only just woken up that transition slide did not say cinnamon rolls we just couldn't think of a better pun for the word synonym what's a synonym Lawrence good question Lawrence a synonym is a word or phrase that has the same meaning as another word or phrase for example remember 3 weeks ago when I said this cougars pumers Mountain lines catamounts and Panthers I'm being told those are different words for the exact same animal well just like how the British have 348 words for the United States has a significant number of synonyms of its own many of which are dependent upon where in the country you are for instance in the north these curious crustations often go by the name of crayfish however in the Deep South where they are most commonly harvested they are known as crawfish but try telling that to people in the middle or in the west who might know them as craw dads Freud would have had a field day with those people he'd also have a field day with people who seek out my address ever since last year when I bought my first American house I've received all kinds of weird things in the mail and at no point did I make my address public so how did people get a hold of it don't worry about that well it turns out that data Brokers had collected personal data about me in my house and sold it to various property listing websites and when I say various I mean 124 as you can imagine nobody has time to ask that many websites to remove their personal data because it would literally take weeks so thank goodness for our partner today incog incog is a personal data removal tool that contacts those data Brokers on your behalf in fact just 10 minutes after launching my first batch of removal requests roughly onethird of data Brokers confirmed my data had been removed if your personal details are showing up on people search websites incog can help you remove them in fact they're giving my subscribers 60% off their annual plan head to incog docomo in the pond to get your discount and to thereafter protect your data the link is in my description Bel hello during that deeply beautiful brand integration Max just told me that his family knew crawfish as mod bugs which makes me think of woodlice what are wood Li it's what we Americans call Roly poliy actually they're called potato bugs I don't even have a name for that thing along the Ohio River my family called them pill bugs dude these are doodle Bugs Lawrence is lying in England we actually call them cheesy bugs that's Regional in Devon we call them chiggy pigs it's Parson okay clearly British English is the Bonkers one the point is as a country with an area of 3.8 million square miles you could say that the US might be even more prone to inter Regional synonyms than Britain then again I remember when I first moved from my English hometown of Grimsby no one at University knew what the word miy meant and Mary just means you're in a bad mood yes and what I need you to do right now is to pay close attention to the previous transition slide are you serious serious it almost looks like text speak except in that case my team would have written it like this instead only the word r is textify because it is the letter r that I want you to pay close attention to you see one of the defining linguistic traits shared by most though not all Americans is the post vocalic R in words like well Mii aside from the fact that it sounds like the name Marty in American English rotic speakers in the US would more or less pronounce this regionally English word as Mary however since moving to the United States I've detected one or two exceptions to this rule number one there are still small pockets of the US that remain non- rotic like most of England number two as I've mentioned before there are rare instances in which Americans will incorporate a postvocalic r in words that don't have one like kernel colel and C three and number three there are peculiar instances of words that do have them but for which the r is often unpronounced take for example the word forward While most Americans pronoun ounce it forward a phenomenon has emerged in recent decades in which some Americans dro the first R in linguistic circles this phenomenon is known as dissimilation that's when speakers drop a vowel or consonant if it appears later within the same word and it owes much to the principle of horror equi which proposes that language users psychologically avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures that's why some Americans might also dissimilate the first R in words like Governor berserk and particular moving forward the governor in particular will go completely [Music] berserk Larry yeah it's a free kick while consecutive instances of the letter Zed have inexplicably come to denote the sound of snoring they also show up with surprising frequency in words that were coined in the United States perhaps the most famous is Jazz a world-renowned form of music that emerged out of the African-American communities of New Orleans from the late 19th century it is widely believe that the word Jazz evolved out of jasm which meant Vitality or energy and not what you're thinking about you little in fact it went through several definitions before lending itself to an entire genre of music something that first occurred right here in Chicago in 1915 and the Jazz Age that followed spawn several Zed heavy words like snazzy Pizzaz Twizzlers and future astronaut BOS Aldren so it was perhaps Little Wonder that one of the nation's favorite meals became so popular at about that time Pizza in fact you kind of have to wonder if it would have had the staying power in the United States if the Italians had named it something without Zeds like bread pie that certainly wouldn't have led to America also giving us the word Pizzeria from 1928 and I know what you're thinking ooh lence Z heavy words were just one of many fads of the Jazz Age one era doesn't a data set make then know this more than 20 years before Jazz entered the Lexicon American English also gave us razzled Dazzle razmataz and almost certainly blizzard they have 10 Zeds between them and in the years since American English has rolled out bosot zzy top and most recently RZ a slang form of the word charismatic which today is appropriately popular with Gen Z so what does all of this tell us it could tell us that Americans are Guided by their senses many of the words that I listed are partly or fully onomic what do onomic mean Lawrence anomic words are words that sound like the thing they are describing whether it is the of a Razer or the sizzle of pepperoni either that or the American Scrabble Union just really wanted to raise the stakes that said there's at least one such word for which the United States can't take credit and that word is drizzle which emerged in England many centuries ago and hasn't stopped emerging since as evidenced by the word forward Americans can't always agree on how a word should be delivered and this is by no means unique to America in Britain we're still fighting Wars over how to say this it's a scar it's a scone but sometimes American English takes things a step further sometimes a word is delivered differently because subtly it is a different word there are members of my wife's family alone who describe their favorite vices as addictive and others who say addicting a word I'd not heard until moving to the United States similarly familiar lines are also drawn on whether one does something by accident or on accident here you go Sor sorry sorry sorry that was that was that that was on purpose actually Americans are often ridiculed for saying I could care less because I could care less implies that they care a lot in other words so goes the logic I couldn't care less would be more well logical but from what I've seen half of the people doing the ridiculing are Americans themselves you see the real divide in this country is not between right and left it is between those who could care less and those who couldn't a bit like me on this issue the truth is English is itself quirky whether whether we're talking about British English English of the United States or that of other countries that Britain invaded without this quirkiness the English language probably wouldn't be half as interesting and I'd be stuck making videos about just animals actually on that note I have to run now because a certain doggy of mine is being prep for a starring role in my next video bye Larry that was a little abrupt well I mean data shows that viewers click away during those Meandering goodbyes so I figured we'd get around it by not letting them okay but you didn't tell them to continue binging by watching the why American English is highly misunderstood video max if our audience is as smart as you think they are then they'll figure it out you better be right I'm always sometimes right

Channel: Lost in the Pond

Views: 650,490

Keywords: Laurence Brown, America, American English, Quirks

Id: kU_3hFDVmag

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024