Phraseology and Culture in English

Distribution of ten "neutral" collocations on the Web
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
.uk
.edu
.au
.ca
.us
.nz
.ie
.za
top
mean
bottom

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Varieties of English around the world
445
Table 2. Distribution of established collocational markers of Britishness on the Web 
(figures = rounded percentages)
 .uk
.au
.nz
.ie
.za
.edu
.us 
.ca 
bog standard 
91
3
1
1
*
1
* 
* 
TAKE the mickey 
80
13
4
1
2
1
* 1 
KNOCK them for six 
76
12
-
12
-
-
- - 
KNOCK us for six 
75
15
-
10
-
-
- - 
knocked for six 
83
7
8
1
*
*
* 
- 
I should like to 
64
7
*
9
*
14
1 5 
(I would like to) 
25
10
2
2
2
41
6 13 
(foot the bill) 
39
14
2
4
3
17
9 12 
NB: CAPITALISED forms include figures for morphological variants; TAKE thus 
includes take, takes, took, taken and taking. Percentages sometimes do not add up 
to precisely 100 due to rounding. * stands for attestations amounting to percent-
ages < 1. 
Unsurprisingly, the percentage figures for the two last-named neutral collo-
cations fall squarely into the span indicated in Table 1. The British collo-
quialisms bog standard (‘ordinary’), take the mickey,
5
the cricket idiom knock
someone for six, and the grammatical Briticism I should like to, on the other 
hand, are all conspicuously overrepresented in Britain at rates which are ro-
bust enough to compensate for the distorting effects of the notorious web 
imponderables mentioned above. 
But couldn’t we have arrived at these findings through smaller and tidier 
traditional corpora? Frequencies in the BNC of 5 (for the combined knock-
for-six expressions covered in Table 2) and 49 for TAKE the mickey suggest 
not. Even these perfectly ordinary idioms require far more material for a sys-
tematic regional comparison than even a one-hundred-million-word corpus 
provides.
However, if the method works tolerably well for identifying British us-
age, this does not mean that success is guaranteed elsewhere. Present-day 
Standard English is a pluricentric language, but this does not mean that the 
various centres are hierarchically on a level. And nowhere is this more ob-
vious than in an analysis of English usage on the web, where the influence 
of American English is all-pervasive. Thus, the distribution of the Ameri-
can equivalents of the British cricket idioms, baseball idioms such as get to 
first base, just barely falls outside the “neutral” band presented in Table 1. 
Nor does real good, a well-known and well-documented grammatical Ameri-
canism, show up as such in the web data, as becomes evident both in Table 
3 and in Figure 2. 

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446
Christian Mair 
Table 3. Distribution of American idioms and lexico-grammar on the Web (fig-
ures = rounded percentages)