How to properly water your garden without a hose porn

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From Bert Vaux:

I was just preparing a facebook post on the use of "luck out" when I came across your nice entry on the very same passage on the Language Log! ["Lucking out", 10/8/2011; "More lucking out", 10/11/2011]

Anyway, a propos of your (in my opinion correct) observation that Lee Child generally does American English quite well, I thought you might appreciate the following examples (also from The Affair) where I think he slips up:

"hosepipe" for "hose" (p. 230 in my edition)

"not by a long chalk" for "not by a long shot" (238)

"drinks well" with the infamous British regular-plural-inside-compound (245)

[I'm not sure what we call this in American English; I know that some parts of the country call cheap/generic drinks in a bar "well drinks", from which I'd infer that the thing in question is called a well, but I don't actually know.]

These come with the caveat that I haven't actually researched their American vs. British distribution; I'm just going by my personal exposure to the two varieties.

Here's more context for the first of the usages that Bert cites:

Janice May Chapman had not continued the herbicide applications. That was clear. No hosepipe in her garage. No watering can. Rural Mississippi. Agricultural land. Rain and sun. Those weeds had come boiling up like madmen. Some boyfriend had brought over a gasoline mower and hacked them back. Some nice guy with plenty of energy. The kind of guy who doesn’t like mess and disarray. A soldier, almost certainly. The kind of guy who does things for people, gets things neat, and then keeps them neat.

The Wiktionary gives the gloss

n. UK, South Africa, southern US A flexible pipe for carrying water or other liquids; a garden hose.

suggesting that in "rural Mississippi", a garden hose might well be a hosepipe. But all of the 71 current examples of hosepipe in Google News are from the U.K., Ireland, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sri Lanka, or other Commonwealth-ish places.

In the case of the second example, Reacher is shopping in "a men's outfitters three enterprises south of where I started", and has a conversation with "an old guy behind the counter" with "a tape measure draped around his neck".

I hauled my choice to the counter and asked, “Would this be OK for a job in an office?” The old guy said, “Yes, sir, it would.”
“Would it impress a person at dinner?”
“I think you’d want something finer, sir. Maybe a pinpoint.”
“So it’s not what you’d call formal?”
“No, sir. Not by a long chalk.”
“OK, I’ll take it.”

Michael Quinion discussed this expression back in 2004, and confirms its status as "mainly British":

Q From Kriss Buddle, UK: Where does the expression not by a long chalk come from?

A This mainly British expression means “not by any means”, “not at all” and often turns up in conventional expressions such as they weren’t beaten yet, not by a long chalk.

And again, all the 14 examples in the current Google News index are from the U.K. and Commonwealth countries.

Bert's third example:

But Brannan’s bar was open. Defiantly optimistic, or maybe just maintaining some longstanding tradition. I went in and found nobody there except two similar guys fussing with stuff in the drinks well. They looked like brothers.

I don't have anything to add to his analysis. A well drink is a drink made from ingredients "from the well near the bar (and thus handy to the bartender) holding bottles of liquor". And calling that space a "drinks well" does seem a bit U.K.-ish. But I'm not sure what an American would call it, and I'm not finding a lot of examples of "X well" with this meaning for any value of X from any region. [Note: Bert's intuition is about the use of plural "drinks" in this noun compound, not the use of "well" or the compound itself.]

Anyhow, on at least two out of Bert's three examples, it does seem that Mr. Child fell below his usual standard of trans-Atlantic linguistic plausibility.

June 13, 2013 @ 9:13 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Variation

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