As a Californian coming to live and study in Oxford some years ago, I had to learn a new language. Richard Gombrich pointed out that I was working at learning two cultures, Newar and English, at the same time. Living in Scotland these past two years has been something of a relief in that some words and objects are more familiar\u2014bagels and donuts are easier to get, for example. But the divide between Scots and Southern English is even greater than most people who speak on one or t\u2019other side of the Solway realize. One of the enheartening things about Scots is that it is playful in the way that I remember US English being (think Tom Waits or Arrested Development), filled with lively onomatop\u0153ia and invention. It\u2019s another learning curve, though, and I am constantly scanning the speech and print around me for clues on how Scots of various registers should be spoken. My mistakes come as often from resurfacing Californisms as they do from more recently learned Oxford English clanging onto the conversational pitch.<\/p>\n
Now, for those unacquainted with the brutal divide between two of these three languages, in England the word \u2018shop\u2019 is used where \u2018store\u2019 is the ordinary term in the US. A store, in England, is a warehouse or similar facility for, well, storing things – something I learned fairly quickly. There certainly are no liquor stores in England, nor for that matter here in Scotland (save up towards Speyside and on Islay). I was therefore startled to see Ottakars, which was until recently our major independent bookshop here in Aberdeen, calling itself a bookstore on its Union Street signage. Was there a Scottish tendency to use \u2018store\u2019?<\/p>\n
A certain amount of detective work later, I find that there is no such tendency, just a thoroughly confusing muddle. The US use of the word store is<\/em> seeping across, and there is also a separate cluster of usage first surfacing in the mid-19th century from the co-operative movement, whose retail outlets were called stores. (See the OED article on \u2018store\u2019.) Compound terms in \u2018store\u2019, to be found both in Southern English and in Scots, thus derive from both mid-Victorian British and modern US forms. Yet the present state of things is such that on the Ottakars website<\/a> the buttons to the left offer a \u2018shop finder\u2019 while the hotspot in the upper right says \u2018click to find your local store\u2019, or at least it does today.<\/p>\n One of the delights of British English is its specificity; at least in BBC English there is a stubborn insistence on using distinct terms for particular events or objects. So: \u2018tread on\u2019, not \u2018step on\u2019; and a \u2018jacket\u2019 and a \u2018coat\u2019 are very different things. Elvis Costello (a Liverpudlian) used the poetic particularities of British English to great advantage: he could no more have been from the US than Tom Waits could have been from England. But the collision of US \u2018store\u2019 with British \u2018shop\u2019 leaves us with a store detective working in a shop, and a tautological website for a fine bookseller.<\/p>\n Unless it\u2019s deliberate. Do folks in the US look to the right for reading matter, while people here look left?<\/p>\n Alas, Ottakars has been lost to the corporate agglomerations. James Thin in Edinburgh was my favourite bookshop ever<\/em>, but that was eaten by Blackwells in 2002 in the same way Ottakars has been eaten by Waterstones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a Californian coming to live and study in Oxford some years ago, I had to learn a new language. Richard Gombrich pointed out that I was working at learning… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[91,154],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bookshops","tag-language"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2DSYH-e7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}