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Is the phrase "have overweight" from England/Australia/a largely English-speaking country?

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  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,979 Member
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    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    glassyo wrote: »
    paperpudding wrote: »
    glassyo wrote: »
    Just went through the thread. Nothing to really add other than I'm still trying to wrap my head around the brits "in hospital" as opposed to "in THE hospital", the Beverly Hillbillies theme song is now stuck in my head, and marry *kitten* kill Jess, Dean, Logan?


    We say that in Australia too - someone is in hospital not in the hospital

    LOL sorry. Didn't mean to leave the aussies (and others out). But whyyyyyy? That missing "the" just gets to me. :)

    I don't know about your region, but in my part of the US, we'd say "in the hospital" but "in hospice" (if residential hospice). Similar scenario, different wording. Go figure.

    IMO, there's not a "missing the" in the other usage. It's just different, like trunk/boot, windshield/windscreen, "knock up" and "thong" meaning very different things US vs. UK & Australia, lift/elevator, yard/garden minor differences, and a zillion other things. (I hope I've gotten those terms right.)

    I'm wondering if the lack of the definite article for hospice is because hospice isn't necessarily a place but a kind of care. You can be at home and be in hospice (which in my part of the U.S. -- East Coast compared to, I believe, your upper Midwest -- is also what we'd say.

    I remember the first time I ever heard -- or at least the first time I ever noticed -- the construction "in hospital." It was a British drama on PBS, based on the K.M. Peyton Flambards YA series, set in England just prior to and during WWI. A character who had been "invalided out" out of the Army said it was thanks to the Germans. "If I hadn't been shot, I'd never been sent to hospital. If I hadn't been sent to hospital, they'd never have out I had TB." Having tuberculosis, of course, meant he wasn't healthy enough to be used as cannon fodder. (How's that for finding the silver lining?)
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,979 Member
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    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    Lietchi wrote: »
    I'm definitely in the American camp for garage 😁 for my own pronunciation at least. But watching BBC regularly, the UK version doesn't disturb me in the slightest.
    Just thought of another US versus UK difference: CaRIBbean versus CaribBEan. There are probably more.
    Languages are cool 😎

    I think that's regional (or maybe just randomly varied) in the US - I've heard both forms of Caribbean fairly commonly, and no one seems to blink.

    As an aside to a later subdiscussion here, extract a tooth, vanilla extract - same pronunciation/syllabic emphasis, for me - 2nd syllable accented. (I've heard the other, though.)

    If I heard the first syllable of extract accented, my first hypothesis would be a Southern U.S. accent -- similar to THANKSgiving and INsurance where I would normally say ThanksGIVing and inSURance.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 13,247 Member
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    paperpudding wrote: »
    Well, pronunciation is one of the hardest things to master (some people still have accents after living in a country for decades)

    as a rough rule of thumb (now there is a weird figure of speech !) people tend to retain some accent if they moved to the new area after puberty.

    so people who migrated to Australia for example, at age 14, will still have some accent for the rest of their life.

    As there were a lot of people who came with their families at around that age from Italy, Greece etc soon after WW2 - you often meet people in their 80's now who have been here for half a century and still have a slight accent.

    I must be an odd duck. I grew up in the southeast USA. I used to be able to distinguish among accents of people from, for example, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, or even Oklahoma and Texas. All subtly different, especially some words like coffee. I've been away so long I'm not sure I still can, but I remember going to a conference a decade ago (locally) and one of the presenters said he was from Virginia. After his presentation, I went to chat because I had a couple questions. I also said, "You sound more like you're from North Carolina than Virginia." He nodded his head, smiled, and said, "Rocky Mount!"

    As an undergraduate, I went on a student exchange program to another state. I lived in an apartment style dorm. Three bedrooms, six people, one kitchen, one bathroom. My roommates included two men from Taiwan, one man from the mainland of China, one man from Bangladesh, and one from Jamaica. They all spoke English, but all had heavy accents. I was able to "translate" from English to English.... When I moved out of that living situation I had a Chinese accent. No fooling.

    When traveling back to the southeast, if I call friends back home, they have told me that my accent has changed especially words like Coffee or Water. It's odd how I do that. I don't even notice.

    I have weird.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,995 Member
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    It would be very unusual to then retain that accent from your situation, whereas retaining some accent for life after moving to a place from puberty onward is very common.

  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,995 Member
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    I'm wondering if the lack of the definite article for hospice is because hospice isn't necessarily a place but a kind of care. 

    Hospice is a place in Australia. One could receive palliative care at home, in an aged care facility, in hospital etc - or in a hospice.

    However we still say In hospital but In a or the hospice.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,902 Member
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    Countandsubtract wrote: »
    ...

    Sorry, I didn't know this before: After you guys responded, I found these. Not all of livestrong's pages have dates so it's hard to tell if this changed over time, but the titles and the address titles don't match, so I think they made some alterations later on...

    https://www.livestrong.com/article/333266-im-overweight-can-i-build-muscle/

    I Have Overweight: Can I Build Muscle? | livestrong

    https://www.livestrong.com/article/526121-does-being-overweight-make-you-tired/

    Does Having Overweight Make You Tired? | livestrong

    Interesting...

    The first article is written by a doctor and, after an admittedly very quick read, the only weird instance I see is the title, so I wonder if an editor got cute with the title in the "I can haz cheeseburger" style.

    However, the second article also seems to be written by a native English speaker, but has many odd instances of the phrase: "Having Overweight," "With overweight," "Have Overweight."

    My time in SEO makes me think they are trying to capitalize on "having overweight" and related search terms. And so I googled it, but that page is not in the top 10 search results.

    The # 1 search result was for the CDC, who uses "have overweight" in the first sentence.

    https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html

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