Learning to speak 'merican

There’s a question I’ve been wondering about for a long time and the video below reminded me of it. I think there may be a subtle difference between how acceptable it is to refer to somebody present in the third person in British and ‘merican. Has anyone else encountered this?

So for example, let’s imagine Mary, John and Bob are sitting in a room together and having a conversation. Mary says something about Bob to John, but instead of referring to Bob as ‘Bob’ she calls him ‘he’. Is that more acceptable in ‘merican English than it is in British?

I want to thank Steve Oakes for drawing my attention to this one. Cheers Steve!

And now here’s the video. It’s been doing the rounds recently and I’ve seen it cited as an example of a talk show guest demonstrating better manners and skills that his talk show hosts. The bit I’m interested in is the use of ‘he’ (which comes at about 5.20). Russell Brand calls his hosts out for addressing him as ‘he’ when he is present. I don’t think his hosts behaved very civilly at the start of the interview, but at the same time, I think Russell might have been unbraiding them a little unfairly on the ‘he’ issue. I’m not sure whether British and ‘merican politeness conventions are quite the same on this.

All thoughts welcome. Thanks!

Thoroughly enjoyed this BBC radio program on politeness. All the lunch guests were interesting and I particularly liked the historical perspective provided by Jason Hughes. I’d never thought about not blowing my nose on the table cloth as being good manners before.

Many thanks to Andreas Grundtvig for directing me to it.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that British apologies can be very routine speech acts that mean, well, nothing apologetic really. By way of contrast, we see lots of the features we’d expect of a sincere British (and American?) apology here I think – the appearance (credible or not) of sincerity, an acknowledgement of wrong doing, a promise to learn from the mistake and hence the implication that you won’t err again, an explanation of how things went wrong (well, almost).

It contrasts well with the British BP chief’s apology, and of course Mitt Romney’s stance on the recent leaked video – how to stand your ground and not make an apology.

How far we’re willing to forgive and forget is always going to be determined by our political convictions, of course, but when we want to see how people handle the delicate task of saying sorry, politicians provide some lovely examples.

Here are couple of other past posts on apologies:

Japanese apologies

A Thai apology