Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms discusses a phrase I was familiar with but didn’t realize was making inroads over here:
I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…’”
I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness.
The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were both written by Thomas Hardy, the first in an 1888 short story called “Waiting Supper”: “Side by side as they had lived in his day here were they now. They had moved house in mass.” (Incidentally, the OED defines the word “wait,” as Hardy used it in the story’s title, as “To postpone (a meal) in expectation of the arrival of someone. colloquial.” It has four citations, all English, from 1788 to 1861. From an 1836 Charles Dickens letter: “I hope and trust you did not wait dinner for me.” The only time I’ve ever encountered it, till now, is from my wife, born in Massachusetts, where a lot of Britishisms, like “rubbish,” linger.)
But “move house” had been in circulation for at least three decades before Hardy’s story–probably well over three decades.
Click through for the antedates (which are always fun); I normally have no objection to Yanks picking up shiny bits of Britspeak, but this one is (in my opinion) dumb: “moving” is short and punchy, “moving house” is long and dull.
How about flitting?
“moving” is short and punchy, “moving house” is long and dull
“Moving” and “moving house” are not synonyms, even in this context, in Brit.
When I was an a little tiny ophthalmology registrar, I moved to Edinburgh. At that time, I had no house to move. Subsequently, I bought my first house. Some years later, we moved to West Africa. We didn’t move house, but rented out our Edinburgh house. Some time after we moved back to Edinburgh, we moved house to darkest England. (Don’t worry, it all came right in the end. Eventually, we moved house to Wales, and the cosmic balance was restored.)
@David Eddyshaw: I have definitely heard people from England talk about “moving house” from one rented flat to another.
cosmic balance was restored
Isn’t the outcome of your story that Scotland lost a house and Wales gained one? Although perhaps that is what you mean by restoring cosmic balance.
“moving house” is long and dull.
Then appropriate: moving house is long and dull. Weeks of packing stuff into boxes [**]; of agonising as to whether you’re ever going to use that thing you bought specifically for this house, and you should really get rid of; weeks afterwards of trying to remember which box you eventually packed it into.
[**] I don’t know how it goes in other countries, but house sales in Brit-land are in a ‘chain’ of people moving house all on the same day. Because nobody can afford to own two houses at the same time, even for a couple of weeks for a more orderly transfer.
Isn’t the outcome of your story that Scotland lost a house and Wales gained one? Although perhaps that is what you mean by restoring cosmic balance
Conservation of Celticity.
I have definitely heard people from England talk about “moving house” from one rented flat to another
Ah. They were evidently showing off. It’s all to do with our famous class system, you understand. You egalitarian Yanks wouldn’t understand.
My memory should not be trusted, but reading the above made me recall a very small printing job for the NH affiliate of The Stinehour Press in Lununberg, VT, c 1967. I was just the printer’s devil and had no hand in the creative sude of things. It was a relocation announcement that included the words, “We’re moving sticks”. It had hand drawn images of figures carrying furniture on their backs, and old and new addresses. Might have been a one-off. Might have been a visual pun. Just putting it out there for inspection.
How about flitting?
Doesn’t that happen at midnight?
The British word for this that I always thought was strange was “remove”. Do people still say that?
(A look at Google suggests that it used to be American, too, but I think it survived longer in Britain.)
Doesn’t that happen at midnight?
Not in Scotland.
I’ve never come across “remove” in that sense. Though the people who transport your stuff for you are “removal men.” Or removal persons. And they do drive removal vans.
(The only Weird British sense of “remove” that I can think of is as a noun, referring to an intermediate class at a public* school.)
* i.e. private. A “private school” is a prep** school. It’s all very simple.
** I think Americans mean something different by this. I seem to recall Ali MacGraw banging on about how Ryan O’Neal went to one in that movie where she takes ages to get on and die already.
Back to my dicey memory and sticks:
source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/27/messages/812.html
That last explanation sounds like classic tour-guide folk-etymology.
I’ve never come across “remove” in that sense.
You haven’t memorized the genealogical tables in The Lord of the Rings? At the very end of THE LONGFATHER TREE OF MASTER SAMWISE, Elanor the Fair is shown as marrying Fastred of Greenholm, with the note “They removed to the Westmarch, a country then newly settled…”
Our “private school” is your “fee-paying school” (though the school doesn’t pay the fees), right? Just to add to the confusion, in American sports journalism “prep” can refer to high school in general, mostly when modifying the name of a sport, as “prep football”, I think.
The OED says “remove” meaning “to change one’s place of residence or work…” is “Now somewhat archaic).” Its 20th-century citations are
One trouble with “move” to mean “move house” is that that is not the meaning a listener would think of, unless context had already primed them. But in the right context, yes, we do sometimes say just “move”.
And “move house” is quite in order even when the places involved are flats. “House” is part of the idiom.
People in Hawai’i usually say ‘move house’ (rather than just ‘move’) when they describe changes of residence, whether or not they own their residences.
One consequence of having spent most of my 20s in darkest England is periodically discovering certain things are Britishisms. I definitely sometimes say “moving house” as a minority variant of “move”, I think mainly when I’m emphasizing the process and the idea of moving all the stuff rather than just the change of location.
I also remember my mom being very confused when I told her I thought the milk in her fridge had “gone off”. She said, “it’s gone off to where?”. I’ve mostly kept my Upper Midwest English,* but I guess you always pick up things around you whether you mean to or not.
*Or so I think. One time when I was visiting my home town, the person behind the counter at the gas station asked me where I was from. Disconcerting thing to get asked in the place I grew up! I’m pretty sure it can’t have been anything lexical in that case, so either my prosody or pronunciation had changed more than I thought, or there had been enough change back home that I now sounded out of place. Or both, I guess.
A person or company that moves your stuff between houses (or offices, etc) is often called a ‘removalist’ here in Australia. I only found out recently that this sense of ‘removalist’ appears to be Australian in origin.
Is that an infinitive ending in 1928?
Unless you’re autistic enough to notice everything, I guess. After we moved to Vienna when I had just turned 11, I did pick up a few Viennese turns of phrase – consciously and deliberately. I’ve resisted all the monophthongization and stuff.
(This is not to say I notice everything in other domains. I’ve met someone who counts his steps, automatically counting along as he walks. I don’t, and indeed couldn’t because I get distracted far too easily. I don’t have a photographic memory either.)
I also remember my mom being very confused when I told her I thought the milk in her fridge had “gone off”. She said, “it’s gone off to where?”.
And just to muddy the waters, I learned that “gone off” usage from my very Philadelphian born and bred mother.
called a ‘removalist’ here in Australia. I only found out recently that this sense of ‘removalist’ appears to be Australian in origin.
Yes, very specific. I don’t think I’ve heard it in NZ. We use ‘Removals’/’Removal Company’/’Movers’.
I am from New Hampshire and find “the milk’s gone off” completely normal. But I have spent a lot of time overseas interacting with Brits and other foreign types, and worse, my wife is from Philadelphia, so I can’t really trust my instincts.
I could say either “move” or “move house”. The latter avoids ambiguity, though I suspect this is less often a problem than rosie seems to think. Nonetheless I wonder whether Americans have a standard disambiguation formula when “move” is in fact ambiguous, or merely resort to whatever handrolled adhoc phrasing springs to mind.
Nonetheless I wonder whether Americans have a standard disambiguation formula when “move” is in fact ambiguous, or merely resort to whatever handrolled adhoc phrasing springs to mind.
The latter, as far as I know. But it’s rarely ambiguous; when people say “We’re moving next week” or “Are the Johnsons really moving?” the context makes it clear. You can say, e.g., “moving away” if that’s the situation, but that’s usually emphasis rather than disambiguation.
I have thought about the ambiguity in the use of move before, and I think that the “relocate”* meaning is simply the default one in American English when move is used without a direct object or adverbial modifier. Combined with contextual cues, this makes the situations in which, “She moved,” is ambiguous pretty uncommon in practice.**
* Of course, relocate actually has almost the same ambiguity, except that intransitive uses are virtually always in the “move to a new location, esp. in order to work; to resettle” (per the OED) sense. In fact, the OED has only one intransitive attestation outside that sense, and that is for an archaic meaning specific to Scottish law.
** A story I recall about Elizabeth Sladen (famous for playing Sarah Jane Smith, the best companion the Doctor ever had) is that she met her husband when she was playing a small role as a corpse. He kept telling her jokes, which meant she had a hard time keeping still when the camera was rolling. That’s the kind of situation in which, “She moved”—coming from, say, the first assistant director—would, even without further elaboration, default to a different sense of move.***
*** However, it wouldn’t have been an issue in that specific instance anyway, as the shoot in question took place in Britain.
Does the “in mass” in Hardy’s “moved house in mass” mean something other than “moved house en masse” or was it just an anglicized spelling of that fixed phrase that ultimately didn’t catch on as the phrase became fully domesticated with its foreign spelling?
OED s.v. mass:
she met her husband when she was playing a small role as a corpse. He kept telling her jokes, which meant she had a hard time keeping still when the camera was rolling.
I guess you don’t want the corpse to corpse.
I too was having trouble thinking of a situation where “move” would be ambiguous, even when it doesn’t come with a locative phrase.
God moves in a mysterious way, without a relocator
@Jerry Friedman: I had thought that scenario (playing a corpse) was probably the origin of the verb senses of corpse. However, it turns out that it apparently arose as a metaphor for killing a scene or a particular actor’s performance:
The relevant sense of dry is “suddenly… forget or fail to speak one’s words in a play or other performance.”
I thought I’d read that it was because an actor whose performance was spoiled was as useless as a corpse.
In English, I would never say move house, but in Mandarin it’s almost always move-home 搬家 ban1jia1.
@Jerry Friedman: That’s essentially the same metaphor—”kill”* for the transitive sense, “be dead” for the intransitive.
* I noticed that in the captioning for a comedian I occasionally watch on YouTube, Gianmarco Soresi,** whenever he says “kill” it is always transcribed as “unalive.” I assume this has something to do with his particular focus on mental health issues.
** Most comedians seem to post their videos with captions, but it’s especially important for comics like Soresi whose bread and butter is crowd work, going back and forth with un-micced audience members.
I hadn’t realized “gone off” had currency anywhere in the US, but my parents definitely didn’t even recognize it. But they’ve never lived anywhere in the vicinity of Philadelphia or New Hampshire. I wonder what the full distribution of the expression actually is.
Regarding the original blog, I don’t think any version of the phrase other than simply “moving house” is a Britishism. “Moving offices”, for example, sounds completely natural to my American ears, as does “moving warehouses”. Even “moving apartments”, which does seem possibly British-inspired, I think means something different than just “moving” in American English. I think it’s used in that sub-head specifically because it’s about rent increases. “Moving apartments”, to me, implies the abstract idea of moving, but not the actual act, so in some sense it’s narrower than “moving”, which can mean both. If you say “Oh I can’t go out on Friday, I’m moving apartments” that sounds odd to me though.
they do drive removal vans
removalistprep
in u.s. school names, “prep” is at root (i.e. until the late 20thC) an indication that it prepares students to go on to get a college degree, in contrast to schools that where a secondary school diploma is seen as a terminal degree. that tracks with class, for “public” (i.e. state-controlled, tuition-free) high schools – though in my part of the world, those are more likely to use “latin” (e.g. Boston Latin School, Cambridge Rindge [Technical/Vocational] and Latin School) – and religious schools (around here, mainly “parochial”, i.e. catholic-church-controlled, usually tuition-charging) as well as the “private” (i.e. independent, tuition-charging) schools that it’s most associated with (e.g. brooklyn’s Poly Prep*). but the main association remains with the private boarding schools that functioned as pre-college finishing schools for the WASP upper crust – from whence “preppie”/”prep” as a stylistic and social category emerged.
.
* originally Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, then Polytechnic Preparatory Institute, now officially Poly Prep Country** Day School.
** i still do not understand the full semantics of “Country” in the names of private u.s. urban day schools, despite having a close friend who taught at Manhattan Country School (z”l) for many years.
The “Country” in “Manhattan Country” presumably referred to the farm up in the Catskills where (until the school’s recent financial collapse) the students were shipped from Manhattan to get back to the land and set their souls free. I don’t know whether it was or wasn’t really a metaphorical dues-paying member of the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Day_School_movement or not, but I find it useful to think of “country day” in that context as an idiomatic phrase with non-compositional meaning. That said, when Poly Prep moved to its current Dyker Heights location more than a century ago, that part of Brooklyn was as aggressively non-urban as compared to distant Brooklyn Heights as the setting of Riverdale Country School was as compared to midtown/downtown Manhattan.
Note that the verb underlying “prep[pie]” can still be found in a fixed phrase most commonly seen in my own lifetime in obituaries, which will say that the decedent e.g. “prepared for Dartmouth at the Choate School” or “prepared for Bowdoin at Portsmouth Priory.” Above and beyond the honorary-WASPdom of that last-mentioned Priory (a Benedictine foundation*), those who use the formulation are sometimes egalitarian enough to extend it to generic non-preppie public high schools in the case of a relevant graduate. Thus we read of the endocrinologist Norbert Freinkel (1926-1989) that “Norbie prepared for Princeton at Weequahic High School in Newark,” that being the not-very-posh public institution whose most famous graduate may be the novelist Philip Roth, who was six or seven years behind Dr. Freinkel. (It was in those years known for producing many academically-high-achieving graduates, but they were non-posh strivers generally from Ashkenazic-immigrant families.)
*Now known as the Portsmouth Abbey School, a name change that had already occurred by the time I was college age myself and first encountering alumni of such places. I don’t know what motivated the change of Benedictine terminology.
“Norbie prepared for Princeton at Weequahic High School in Newark,” that being the not-very-posh public institution whose most famous graduate may be the novelist Philip Roth, who was six or seven years behind Dr. Freinkel. (It was in those years known for producing many academically-high-achieving graduates, but they were non-posh strivers generally from Ashkenazic-immigrant families.)
Around here I probably don’t even have to mention my favorite part of Portnoy’s Complaint:
Just as an added fillip (a word with an amusing history) to J.W.’s thorough answer, “country day” is less country and western and more country club. I know rozele knows that.
Now I want to reread Portnoy’s Complaint.
In college, I had a couple of sport coats—one powder blue, one aquamarine—that I occasionally wore for dressier events. After I came back to my room one evening wearing the blue one, some of the people in my dorm started calling me “preppy boy”*—even though the jacket looked nothing like a prep school blazer. I, as a kid with Jewish, Catholic, and Adventist antecedents who had always gone to public schools, did not appreciate the nickname—especially when my girlfriend, who was an actual preppie, used it.
* My fingers defaulted to typing the more common “pretty boy” here, and I had to go back and correct it. Ironically, the same people who tended to call me “pretty boy” for a while called another guy who lived on our floor “pretty boy.”
Ironically, the same people who tended to call me “pretty boy” for a while called another guy who lived on our floor “pretty boy.”
Should the first “pretty boy” read “preppy boy”?
Selling a potentially unsophisticated young person a questionably-tinctured sports coat w/o a detailed warning label disclosing likely side effects sounds like it might justify a lawsuit for consumer fraud.
The Country Day movement may have been based partly on the idea that city life makes boys untrustworthy, treacherous, unhelpful, hostile, rude, cruel, disobedient, gloomy, wasteful, cowardly, dirty, and irreverent. I think I see that idea not much later in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Woodcraft Indians, then Dan Beard’s Sons of Daniel Boone, then Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, which assimilated both of them. (Wikipedia says Seton eventually withdrew his organization from the BSA and it survives in a much smaller way as Woodcraft.)
The first country day schools according to Wikipedia, in addition to Brooklyn as mentioned above, are near Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and Cincinnati. I don’t know why the “10 Most Spoken Languages” thread hasn’t mentioned Detroit yet.
Not to make everything about Cincinnati, but the fanciest non-Catholic private schools in the city tend to be Something Country Day. I think at least one of The National guys went to Cincinnati Country Day or Summit Country Day.
I always parsed the name as two separate modifiers for School: Country as opposed to City and Day as opposed to Boarding.
JH is burying the lede, rockandrollwise, because wiki says that the National dudes are alumni of the same country day school as the rather more elderly David Freiberg of the Jefferson Starship (and before that of Quicksilver Messenger Service).
@languagehat: Yes, ironically I mistyped it again and didn’t notice it the second time—even though I was commenting on mistyping it! (You may fix it if you wish, or leave it as a caution for the careless.)
@JH: I was surprised by how many Catholic high schools there were in Cincinnati. Growing up in Oregon, private schools were not a big thing. The Catholic schools generally only went through sixth (or sometimes eighth grade), but they were pretty stable. Independent private schools came and went; I recall at least three different iterations of Salem Academy. (However, the private school my college lab partner’s parents started does still exist, after more than a quarter of a century.) In Cincinnati, various religious orders ran multiple schools, including many high schools, and there seemed to be a sort of hierarchy among the Catholic schools. My preppie girlfriend (mentioned in the other thread earlier today*) went to what she said (and other people I knew from Cincy agreed) was the most elite Catholic girls’ school, Saint Ursula Academy.
* All threads are one. The thread is the monad.
You may fix it if you wish
I wouldn’t dream of it. It is the Ideal Typo.
One of my daughters previously shared an apartment with an alumna of St. Ursula Academy, in a further demonstration of the rootless and peripatetic nature of these elite-school young people, severed from any connection to ancestral farmland. But I know nothing of that young lady’s favored technique for preparing bratwurst if indeed she has one.
The Catholic high schools where I grew up all had somewhat distinct personae/stereotypes associated with them, although I don’t know if they sorted into any sort of coherent hierarchy.
I hate to say it Mr. Brewer, but I believe we may just be displaying a generation gap here. The National is much more impressive to me than Jefferson Airplane/Starship.
@Brett: Continuing the monothread, Cincinnati is shockingly Catholic and there seems to be a distinct hierarchy among the Catholics. It’s a parochial city, in every sense of the word. St. Xavier is the academic one (also good at sports), Elder for the west-side athletes, Moeller for baseball, LaSalle if you can’t get in anywhere else, etc. I grew up a distressingly low-church Protestant, so most of it is a mystery to me. I assume there’s a secret level of city life you unlock if you’re a Jesuit from Avondale who went to St. X for HS and Xavier University for undergrad.
Confusingly, of the 3 (?) major Catholic girls schools, one is called St. Ursula Academy and one is called Ursuline Academy. I believe one is far more prestigious than the other. It was never clear to me which was which.
St. Ursula was the older and more prestigious one. Both were operated* by the Ursuline nuns, but the convent was located at St. Ursula. The single-sex schools had cooperative arrangements for activities that required both girls and boys (like theater productions), and St. Xavier and St. Ursula were paired off this way.
* I’m not sure what it meant, in practice, for the order to operate the schools. By the 1990s, there were very few nuns left of working age to teach at and run the acadamies. Even the principal at St. Ursula was a lay alumna, not a nun.
The National is much more impressive to me than Jefferson Airplane/Starship.
Displaying an even wider generation gap, I have never even heard of the National. (Is there a band called the Notional? If not, there should be.)
Come on, hat, The National is the band we old people always get mixed up with The Decembrists, and vice versa. Not to be confused with Cake, whom we mix up with Spoon. But it’s all been downhill since the Circle Jerks’ 3d album failed to replicate the quality of the first two, if you ask me. (Although obviously many still insist the drop-off from 3d to 4th was more significant.)
Speaking as someone I think slightly younger than the members of the National, so without a relevant generation gap, I’d rank the above bands as follows:
1. Quicksilver Messenger Service
3. Jefferson Airplane/Circle Jerks (tie)
5. Jefferson Starship/the National (tie)
Though the drop-off in quality between the 2nd and 3rd Quicksilver records is at least as steep as that between the Circle Jerks’ 2nd and 3rd.
So I’d say you’re not missing anything, but clearly JH would disagree
ETA: I realize I accidentally ignored Cake, Spoon, and the Decembrists, but that’s just as well, really – I suppose I could revise the last line to 8. Jefferson Starship/the National/Cake/Spoon/the Decembrists (tie)
I’m apparently also slightly younger than the guys in the The National, and I, like languagehat, had never heard of them.
personally (and perhaps indicating something (micro?)generational), i mostly confuse Cake with Moxy Früvous, who i mostly confuse with BETTY (despite barely listening to them compared to the other two).
Come on, hat, The National is the band we old people always get mixed up with The Decembrists, and vice versa. Not to be confused with Cake, whom we mix up with Spoon.
Ah, lad, none of yer “we old people.” Ah’m old, ye’re just bedraggled. Ah’ve never heered of a one of them folks. (I thought at first “Sure, I know the Decembrists,” but then I realized I was thinking of these guys.)
thanks for the Country Day School movement reference, JWB! i hadn’t known of it as a more organized thing, though now i find myself to have been a beneficiary of it.
my tiny boston high school, Commonwealth (which styles itself “independent”, rather than “private”), had twice-yearly trips to the new hampshire farm owned by its founder, charles merrill (of the lynch merrills; half-brother of the poet james). i feel quite confident that he had the movement in mind when he began that tradition. those trips were hardly compensation for a lack of access to open air – the school’s original intended constituency was the children of the professoriate; by my time it served a wider mix of fairly-well-off greater-bostonians – but were a defining piece of the school’s identity, partly because of the camaraderie built on shared labor (“corvée” in the school’s parlance) and partly because it offered a lot of freedom to wander around unsupervised.
—
i think the “prepared at [secondary school] for [college/university]” locution is interestingly based on the “legacy” system by which any (or almost any) son would be assured of acceptance at the college or university where his father went. so the function of the secondary school was not to ensure students were academically prepared for college/university-level study in general, but to vouch for the scion’s readiness for his automatic admission to a specific institution. you don’t go to (say) Choate to prepare for college – you could do that at Boston Latin, or even Brookline High; you go to Choate to prepare for Harvard (or Dartmouth, or Amherst, or wherever your father went) specifically.
(…and people still keep saying this country doesn’t have an aristocracy…)
I could never confuse Moxy Früvous with another band. They played twice at MIT while I was there, and another student I knew (who had gone to St. Xavier in Cincinnati) was a huge fan of the band. I was also a regular listener of Q, hosted by Jian Ghomeshi,* the Moxy Früvous drummer, until it turned out he was a sexual predator. The other members of the band released a statement saying that although Ghomeshi was their friend, they had been unaware of his abusive behavior towards women and would not have tolerated it.
* His sister is a linguistics professor, who has been mentioned here once.
Checking the file on my own Ivy League entering class of many years ago for Cincinnati private schools, I see one St. Xavier’s guy and two young ladies from the perhaps-ominously-titled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Hills_School. Plus a guy with a Cincinnati home address who had gone off to one of the conventionally schmancy New England boarding schools.
Also graduates of pretty much each and every Boston-area school rozele mentioned, but you would expect that, wouldn’t you?
In English, I would never say move house, but in Mandarin it’s almost always move-home 搬家 ban1jia1.—This prompts a reflection unrelated to Chinese:
I think AmE sometimes says “home” where I and probably BrE would say “house”. (This seems true even setting aside situations where the residence is not a house, although perhaps there is some correlation. Polly Adler/Hal David “A House is not a Home” is probably irrelevant.) Perhaps also compare the distribution of “roommate” vs “flatmate”/”housemate”
I would have said “move house” was very different from “move home”; the latter means “move back home”, such as to your parents’ house or your home town. But this UK article disagrees with me: “She had changed her name and moved home after an acrimonious split from her husband”.
I think AmE sometimes says “home” where I and probably BrE would say “house”.
This is a new development and I don’t like it, just as I dislike the now-universal “folks” for “people.”
Bloomfield specifically tags “home” for “house” as being advertising-speak in Language. (“The word home for ‘house’ has doubtless been favored by speculative builders.” 22.7.)
Here in the UK we have bijou maisonettes instead.
Bloomfield specifically tags “home” for “house” as being advertising-speak
Yes, I remember that from my days as a Bloomfieldian. But now it’s migrated from advertising-speak to ordinary usage. I mean, it hasn’t taken over entirely, but it’s encroaching. Stop the encroachment!
–Old Man Yells at Cloud
House/home is an interesting semantic distinction when you start thinking about it.
For “home”, Kusaal uses the morphologically irregular locative yin of yir “house”; it has a motion verb kul which is specifically “go/come home.” But apparently some Chadic languages have an actual dedicated verb derivative for “doing something in a homeward direction”:
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/552
(Section 2.7.) Several Oti-Volta languages have “hither” and “hence” verb-deriving suffixes, but this is the only place I’ve come across “homeward” and “away from home” derivational suffixes. On the other hand, I imagine that even when they do occur, they have often been mistaken for the much commoner hither/hence type.
Viennese /ˈhãmdrãn/ “murder”.
(*heimdrehen, literally “turn towards home”.)
The reaction of those who deplore the encroachment of the word HOME on the semantic territory of HOUSE in American English is “You buy a house and make it into your home.” A few weeks ago I saw the encroachment has now reached British English but not knowing the subject would come up here, I did not note details.
Hungarian has haza- ‘(toward) home’ as a verbal prefix like any other directional verbal prefix; likewise in German. Doesn’t seem like it would be that unusual to me, but maybe there’s something different that I don’t understand with the Chadic languages.
It’s part of the system of systematically deriving verbs by affixes in those Chadic languages, rather than root-compounding; more like Hebrew binyanim. But the Hungarian thing does sound semantically akin.
Obviously, all languages can express meanings like these one way or another; the interesting bit is just how it fits into a particular language’s general modus operandi.
Kusaal does it with its wrongly-so-called “serial verb construction” and its “go/come home” verb kul:
O daa zɔɔ kul.
she PAST run.LINKER go.home
“She ran home.”
Ba da tɔɔm suori kul.
they FAR.PAST change road.LINKER go.home
“They went home a different way.”
Ba tɔɔmnɛ suori kun.
“They’re going home a different way.”
(both verbs changed to the imperfective aspect)
On actual verbs of motion: heimgehen, heimfahren, heimkommen, heimfliegen… heimschwimmen if need be.
(Regional like everything else. Elsewhere, like apparently here in Berlin, the only option is nach Hause gehen…)
I looked to see if Hungarian could do hazanéz, literally ‘home-look’; apparently it exists but it actually means ‘stop by home, make a short visit home’.
Jen in Edinburgh: “How about flitting?”
The OED (1897) says that’s “Chiefly northern or Scottish” in the relevant sense, “6. To remove from one habitation to another, change one’s residence, ‘move’. (In proverbial expressions often opposed to sit.)” That’s probably still true; at least, I mainly know it from Kipling’s Dymchurch Flit.
(ETA: I just noticed that the story annotations say “A ‘flit’ was traditionally a surreptitious removal of oneself, one’s family and belongings from one’s lodgings – usually because the rent is due and one cannot pay.” But the definitions in the OED and DSL don’t sound like they’re surreptitious, they could be just any removal. Maybe that implication is only in southern English (Kipling’s story is set in Kent/East Sussex)?)
The current OED also has headword entries for moonlight flit and moonlight flitting.
Hungarian has a specific verb költözik ‘move house’, often with directional suffixes ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘away’, etc. That’s probably not unusual.
Language Hat in 2003: MOVING “Or, as the Brits say, moving house. That’s what I’m doing this weekend”. Comments (2003 and 2019) on “But the ambiguity!”, then “flit” and its Scandinavian cognates and the whole cognate family of fleet, float, fly, etc., plus “moonlight flit”.
Yeah, “flit” does not (in itself) imply anything surreptitious in Scotland.
Thanks. And MOVING/REMOVAL (2005) got a couple more comments on “flit” and its Icelandic cognate.
umziehen ~ übersiedeln. The former has an opaque non-compositional meaning from what would ordinarily probably refer to pulling something around, and indeed sich umziehen has a completely different non-compositional meaning: “change clothes”. The latter is more transparent: settling, so to say, from one settlement (or apartment) over to another. It makes it easy for me to remember переселяться/-и-, although the cognate of село “village” is, alas, not Siedl(ung)/settle(ment), it’s Saal “ceremonial/festive hall”…
I wouldn’t use übersiedeln for simply moving between apartments or houses; for me it implies changing countries or at least moving to a faraway region, and it has epic overtones of uprooting one’s existence in one place to start new in the new place.
You can also use it if you are moving to another part of the same town (especially if they have a different social background).
I don’t use it at all. It simply sounds pretentious to my ears.
On the other hand, if you specify where you are moving you can use simple intransitive ziehen: Ich bin nach Düsseldorf gezogen.
Geography strikes again – I don’t use umziehen or simple ziehen at all… well, I might write them.