UK: speciality
US: specialty

According to the American Heritage Dictionary the British use the first to mean what the second one means in the US. When you read the two definitions they're quite similar: speciality is a distinguishing feature or mark; specialty is a pursuit, occupation, aptitude or skill.

Finding the difference is like trying to pick the fly poop out of the pepper, eh?

quote:

UK: speciality
US: specialty

This is a revelation to me! I have spent my whole life thinking Americans were mispronouncing (leaving out the 'i') our word!

Me too

And the same here! Whenever I heard a person from UK say "speciality," I thought it was "specialty" being mispronounced. You know, like "aluminium" (which, according to my Scribner/Bantam Dictionary is a perfectly legitimate English word in UK)instead of "aluminum," the US version.

That's how language evolves, I guess - or maybe devolves...or, or,

Just to confuse the issue, "specialty" is used in UK English, but only (as far as I know) to indicate a medical specialism or specialisation.

In US, we almost never here "speciality." We use "specialty" to cover it all.

I heard a Premier League announcer use "speciality" just yesterday referring to a Liverpool played who caught the keeper way off his line and took a shot from midfield (missed BTW). The announcer said it had become this player's "speciality" having tried it 3 or 4 times this year. We'd say "specialty" for that one, too.

Speciality/specialty made me think of "forte" (strength or special talent). The Americans, by about 80% to 20% mispronounce this word as "fortay," rather than "fort." It's French, it has no "ez" at the end - how did this happen? In fact "fortay" has become a secondary pronunciation in dictionaries because it has become the most common pronunciation. As the son of an English teacher, this frosts me, but so it goes with language, I guess. (lowest common denominator? Whatever gets used the most automatically becomes the standard, so it won't be long before "fortay" takes over first place. How so in the UK?

...and another misuse occurring in the US is the word "moot." I hear people commonly use it to mean "not subject to debate" (e.g. The point is moot - meaning it's not debatable, so stop arguing about it!). Of course the word means the opposite. (If the point is moot, it IS debatable) - hence the term Moot Court, where lawyers debate their case before a judge.

UK?

Jeff, I'm so surprised to discover that "forte" like in "writing is not my forte" comes from French rather than from Italian... (the other "musical" forte does come from Italian...).
If you translate the expression literally into Italian it makes perfect sense, infact it's widely used as an expression: "scrivere non è mai stato il mio forte"...
Wow the things you learn on ST!!!!

Tou're correct on the derivation of the adverb (forte being "loud" or "loudly" in music) - the noun however (forte as someone's strong point) is derived from French. So unless we're talking loud music or music played loudly, we're taking "fort." ...I think...

My position is eroding quickly. Look what I just found from Merriam Webster:

"Usage: in forte we have a word derived from French that in its "strong point" sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation. Usage writers have denigrated \for'-tA\ and \for-tE'\ because they reflect the influence of the Italian-derived second definition of forte. Their recommended pronunciation \fort\, however, does not exactly reflect French either: the French would write the word le fort and would rhyme it with English for.

So you can take your choice, knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose. All are standard, however. In British English \fo'-tA\ and \'fot\ predominate; \for'-tA\ and \for-tA'\ are probably the most frequent pronunciations in American English.

My Australian Macquarie dictionary shows the pronunciation \fort\ is used only when the word is used for "the stronger part of a sword blade between the hilt and the middle" (in contrast to the foible which is the weaker part of the blade between the middle and the tip) and comes from the Latin fortis via the French fort.

I'm pretty sure that both the French and Italian words come from the Latin, and we don't know how that was pronounced.

I think I'd just avoid the issue. And avoiding issues is my strong point....

Touche!...or is that Touchie...

quote:

...and another misuse occurring in the US is the word "moot." I hear people commonly use it to mean "not subject to debate" (e.g. The point is moot - meaning it's not debatable, so stop arguing about it!). Of course the word means the opposite. (If the point is moot, it IS debatable) - hence the term Moot Court, where lawyers debate their case before a judge.

While it's probably true that people aren't aware of the primary meaning of "moot", aren't they more or less using the secondary meaning of the adjective when they say, "It's a moot point"? i.e., the point is too abstract or academic and has no practical significance?

In other words, "It's not worth discussing" rather than "It's not debatable." (Or as Joey from "Friends" says, "The point is moo -- it's like a cow's opinion.")

Wow

The suggestion that people might use moot to mean a subject is too debatable to debate (I paraphrase wildly here) really does put a perpective onto a culture.

Having said what I di about Moot let me try and suggest what we brits might say when the intent is 'this is too airy fairy to be bothered discussing'

- 'its academic' (meant in a semi-pejorative sense)
- 'You are splitting hairs' i.e. seeking fine nuances of difference where broadly we agree


I am sure there are more, but my mind has gone blank.

What about geezer and geezer? Bugger and bugger?

Geezer means an old dorky gentleman in American English, but doesn't it mean something much milder in British English, like a regular bloke?

Bugger, too, seems to be said very often in British English and seems to be rather mild.

Am I going to be expelled from ST now?

Once I wrote an article comparing cuss words in English, French and Chinese, and how their different "targeting" reflects their respective culture.
I can just see the moderator's finger poised above the censor key right now, so I'll stop here...

Naomi, Good catch!

"...aren't they more or less using the secondary meaning of the adjective when they say, 'It's a moot point?' i.e., the point is too abstract or academic and has no practical significance?"

For those that use it that way (the ones who know what it actually means), I believe you're absolutely right...my wife pointed this out to me, as well...I hate when that happens.

I stand by my contention, though, that many people use it to mean not debatable: although, if you think about it, these users probably picked up the wrong "signal" from the correct use by someone else, since both are trying to stop debate, but for two differing reasons.

Owens88 - another expression that aims at conveying the futility of debate for whatever reason (unmoot, moot or otherwise) "...picking the fly poop out of the pepper." This sums it up for me.

Or "...like trying to teach a pig to sing." (i.e. frustrating, fruitless, plus you're gonna anger the pig!)

I'd be interested in getting some feedback on the regional uses of "kitty-corner," "catty-corner," and "catercorner".

Being mainly based in Ontario and Quebec, I hear almost exclusively "kitty-corner." A guy I know who lives in NY state recently wrote "catty-corner" in an e-mail to me, but I'm not sure where he's originally from. I did come across a Chicago-ite message board where local users seemed to feel that "catty-corner" was weird and "kitty-corner" was the norm.

I don't think I've ever heard a North American use "catercorner."

What's the UK story on that?

We don't use any of those, and it's not something that comes up in conversation often enough for many of us to have heard the North American usages. I think I've heard "kitty-corner", and who knows, it may have existed once upon a time in very old English. But I think we would normally say "diagonally across" (how boring, I hear you say).

And as for swear words, well, I wouldn't say "bugger" in front of the Queen, but for some reason it does have a vaguely humorous overtone for a lot of people: when I lived in Stoke on Trent a few decades ago, it seemed to be commonplace slang for one's children, and there was a TV sketch show where this was a regular character (and punchline):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUvg1KhOEqQ

In Australia "bugger" is not used in polite circles but it's well enough accepted to be used in general conversation. There is a famous TV ad where it is used several times to raise a laugh.

"Geezer" brings Steptoe and Son to mind. In the 60s (and if I return to England now) I only use it because it is unusual.

Patrick, OED definitely agrees that the kitties in all their permutations are a North American thing (thought the origins seem to be Old French->Middle English). Somehow I just thought we were bastardizing an English thing.

And this morning I found a very thorough answer to my own question about regional differences by e-mailing Bert Vaux, one of the main linguists behind the Harvard Survey of North American Dialects. Hereis the link to the kitty corner regionalism results.

Anyone who's interested in the full regional dialect survey results or who wants to contribute to the new, international survey (!) can check out the various links on Vaux's site.

I don't know if he has any insights into buggers and geezers though.

nb