4 Ways American English is Pretty Weird | PART 2

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 spoken here in the United States if you're subscribed to this channel you may remember that last month I made a wildly popular video called fourways American English is pretty weird due to the conversation sparked by that video not to mention the revenue I now believe time is ripe for part two of course this only lends further weight to my previous assertion that the story of American English much like the story of language in general is highly compelling is highly compelling if you've not yet seen part one I will link to it at the end and if by some miracle you haven't subscribed to this channel do that now after all my subscribers get to know things about me such as oh look at Lawrence in his new specs I can't wait to find out where he got them from so that I too can harness the general Aura of a YouTube sensation the answer is glassesusa.com who I'd like to thank for sponsoring today's video and I know what you're thinking o lawence your ingenious logo incorporates red glasses won't blue frames clash with your branding well firstly I can have interchangeable logos and secondly you didn't think I'd stop at one new pair did you no I went and got three Revel drift blue Revel Sullivan red clear and revel Pit Stop red and I got myself a new pair very nice there's just one question how are we affording all of this I don't know maybe you should just let narrator Lawrence explain well it certainly helps that glassesusa.com glasses start at $39 up to 70% off retail prices if you didn't already know glassesusa.com is among the largest eyar retailers in the US offering Brands like Ray bang Gucci Oakley and many more they also do contact lenses I was going to say that yeah but when you buy contacts through glassesusa.com you'll get 25% off on all brands including Vista ACU view biofinity dailies and many more shopping online can be fun but it can also be extremely overwhelming especially with so many options that's why we loved shopping for my new glasses with glassesusa.com they offer some amazing tools to help you find your perfect pair one of these tools is the AR virtual Tryon we used it to find all of our frames and it was super helpful also shopping online at glassesusa.com is a risk-free shopping experience with free shipping and returns and 100% money back guarantee within 14 days glassesusa.com is offering exclusive discounts only available for 24 hours just click on the links in the top of my description box to get all the details once again thank you to glassesusa.com for sponsoring today's video on that note here are four more ways that American English is pretty weird in part one I told you this 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 find in the United States but in that sense there's perhaps one letter that Americans like to pair together even more the letter O ooh you see it all started pretty much as soon as Europeans reached present day North America as evidenced by a word featured heavily in my last video see the English word raccoon comes from the AL gonan word Arun and long before the intergenerational Rivalry between Boomers and zumas themselves a product of American English the US produced a deluge of other words with oo digraphs in linguistic terms a Digraph is when two letters pair up to produce a single sound in this case oo from 1865 the southern us gave us the word Doodlebug a type of beetle and a word that the British would later use to describe a form of flying bomb employed by the Nazis curious LLY the word predates the US coinage of doodle as in to sketch idly by some 60 years however both words came later than hang doodle which was a fanciful American coinage of the 18 50s meaning a creature whose appearance is left to one's imagination Wang dolls later became a favorite of British author R Dal who reference them in not just Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but several other works and to this day I still hear Americans use the word Boondocks or Boonies to describe a remote place as it happens this word was brought to the US by American soldiers who had been stationed in the Philippines where the tarog word bondock meant mountain in fact Boondocks is one of many BW in American English to use the oo diagraph additionally American English has given us boondoggle Boogie Woogie Betty Boop booger boom box and Honey Boo Boo and the O diagraph is still alive and well today with Jen Zed embracing I am Shook and let Lawrence cook as in to do his job supremely well not actually cook because you've seen my cornbread that's right in between setting the nation's agenda and waving from golf courses US presidents have had a surprising influence on American English I say surprising they obviously benefit from having having their every word documented for public consumption it's just that in an oddly High number of cases some of those words were being used for the very first time in addition to the word belittle Thomas Jefferson coined anglomania a word used to describe excessive enthusiasm for all things English which is something that I still happily benefit from so thank you many decades later as the word okay was emerging out of Northeastern slang it entered Nationwide and even Global usage after the two letters were attached to the 1840 reelection campaign of Martin vanen hoay supporters of Van buan whose head somehow looked like a cloud formed something known as the okay Club this was both in reference to the new word and the fact that the incumbent's nickname was old Kinderhook a nod to Van boran's hometown of Kinderhook New York from then on okay went mainstream across the land despite the fact that van buurin lost oh no and then came the story of why most Americans say normaly instead of normality like we do in writ Frances look no further than 29th president Warren G Harding who ran on the campaign slogan a return to normaly is that that he can't he didn't speak like that at the time Harding was accused of using a malapropism that is the mistaken use of a word in place of one that sounds similar after all at the time Americans overwhelmingly use normality however his alleged misuse of the word seemed to catch on from 1920 normaly just like Speak Easy skyrocketed in use across the land and then came the contributions of America's World War II president before the 1930s the word iffy meaning of doubtful quality and full of ifs ironically did not exist that is until it became a word favored by Franklin D Roosevelt who is believed to have originated it in particular he would brandish the word when dismissing hypothetical questions from the press as in the only thing we have to fear noce JFK is iffy questions like that one and his successor Harry Truman took things a step further not content with coining a single word he introduced or popularize two well-known sayings his desk in the Oval Office bore a sign saying the book stops here a phrase that was little known before his presidency but widely used after it and then there's a phrase that we still use today that first showed up in print in 1942 when Truman was still a senator in July of that year an Idaho newspaper reported a favorite rejoinder of Senator Truman when a member of his War contract investigating committee objects to his strenuous Pace if you don't like the E get out of the kitchen Truman wasn't from Yorkshire anyway this is the earliest known use of the phrase with Truman later replacing don't like with can't stand acronyms in modern times no country on Earth has come close to the United States when it comes to forming Snappy new words from the first letters of other words in fact as long ago as 1879 a fellow by the name of Walter P Phillips issued something called the Phillips code which defined a new set of abbreviations and sometimes acronyms for Words commonly used by journalists the the idea was that by sending abbreviated telegraphic messages like this instead of their longer Alternatives both time and money could be saved think of it as the text speak of its day in fact as a result of the Philips code Americans still use two acronyms that came from it POTUS and scotus and as the 20th century unfolded acronyms like this became ever more trendy in American English now for the purposes of clarity I'm defining an acronym as an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word in its own right like NASA as opposed to an initial ISM like litp which must be spelled out but in 1917 the US military gave us a word that historically belonged to both categories the word awal which stands for absent without leave was initially pronounced a wol l it wasn't until World War part two that its modern day pronunciation fell into use and it was at this time that countless other American acronyms were drafted into the English language Chief among them was radar while radar technology existed in Britain and the US before then the word itself is is attributed to the US Navy who coined it in 1940 as an acronym for radio detection and ranging in recent decades it has evolved into what's known as an anacronym meaning a word most people no longer recognize as an acronym because its uppercase lettering and original meaning have been lost at time other examples of this phenomenon include scuba and Laser themselves products of American English but for all the technical application of wartime acronyms some were more sarcastic such as one I still hear in America today snafu which means situation normal all up and you might be thinking snafu is the perfect word to describe this very video after all how dare I Jorge present day American English by 80-year-old Trends well because those Trends never really went away since then American derived acronyms have cropped up in all walks of life from the corporate sector to healthcare to information technology and in the last 10 years alone we've seen the popularization of several acronyms including one currently favored by gen Zed goat meaning greatest of all time now before Uncle Toby starts dunking on the Youth of today please remember two things number one the generation before you once did the same and number two the acronym goat predates gen Zed by several decades genz actually its earliest known use is attributed to one yolando Williams otherwise known as Lonnie Ali the wife of Muhammad Ali in 1992 she founded greatest of all time Inc stylized as goat Inc to consolidate Muhammad Ali's intellectual property Britain and and America are pretty well known for not pronouncing words the same way and when I first moved to the United States there was one pronunciation Trend that really stood out the tendency of some Americans to pronounce Str as Str in words like strong strong the utterance of a sound in a word that doesn't feature it seemed quite weird to me at first but then I remembered two things number one this English town is pronounced lster and number two Linguistics undoubtedly has a word for such a phenomenon well does it yes actually backing allow me to explain by taking you inside a human mouth which is not as filthy as it sounds unless they don't floss the human mouth is of course how humans verbalize their thoughts but different sounds require your tongue to interact with different parts of your mouth for instance as an English speaker I pronounce the initial consonant cluster in the word strength as Str when I do this my tongue Glides between what's known as The alveola Ridge where the s and t are articulated to the post alviola position where the r is articulated ated this is also not a euphemism but there's something you should know about the post alviola position that's also where the tongue goes when articulating sh anyway that's why it's called s backing because in the case of strong the S is articulated further back because of this some phoneticians believe s backing could be the result of ass similation assimilation is when a speech sound is influenced by a similar sound that's about to come an example of this in British English is when Brit pronounce handbag as hbag because the m and b are both by labal consonants that is they are articulated using both lips whatever the cause if you're the sort of person that doesn't like it when Americans do this there are two things that you should know number one one of the Lesser known characteristics of s backing appears to be that many speakers don't realize they're doing it until it's pointed out to them is that you let me know in the comments and number two it's not just Americans while it is said to be most prevalent in American English the phenomenon has been widely reported in other varieties of English including those of Australia Canada and Britain yes it turns out particularly in the years since I left that instances have been on the rise back in the motherland so perhaps at least on this score American English is not quite so weird after all if I've learned anything from this video it is that Americans like their O's and their acronyms and sometimes both at the same time oo I've learned that presidents being at the center of historic events are well primed to influence the words we use even Benjamin Frank Franklin who might as well have been a president coined the word harmonica and I've learned that when it comes to American English the truth is Stranger Than friction fiction if you were absolutely obsessed with this video here is part one you'll watch that next until the next time goodbye

Channel: Lost in the Pond

Views: 259,596

Keywords: Laurence Brown, America, Shtrength, Britain

Id: f9bLjkvxpBI

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024