We're not all the same

It's a rather dull and damp bank holiday here in the North West of England. It's a good job we hadn't planned a picnic or an outdoor activity.

It may be a bank holiday and the post office may be closed but Amazon still deliver. There was a tap tap at our door - very few delivery men seem to understand that a doorbell is a device that is usually more likely to be heard throughout the house - and there was the Amazon man with a parcel, which Phil insisted I should open. So, not yet another chess book then!

No, this was a dictionary of English Usage, the perfect book for a pair of grammar nerds. Ammunition for arguments about the correct part of speech to use in all situations. Hours of fun for all the geeks in the family. It will probably also give us further insight into differences between English usage and American usage. Although most of the things which we believe they say "wrongly" are just an older form of the language. If Shakespeare said it that way, it should be good enough for all of us!

Which brings me on to an oddity I came across while skimming the stuff that friends post on social media. Back in Shakespeare's time it was quite usual for a girl to marry young. Juliet was, after all, only 13 when she got involved in all that mess with Romeo. I mention this because I read somewhere that as recently as March of this year, the state of Pennsylvania introduced a bill to end child marriage in their state, raising the age of legal marriage to 18. It turns out that in most states of the USA it is still possible for girls to be married off at age 14, provided they have their parents permission of course. If it was good enough for Shakespeare ....

Here is an excerpt from something I read:-

"In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”

Unchained at Last was not able to get data for the other states. But it extrapolated that in the entire country, there were almost 250,000 child marriages between 2000 and 2010. Some backing for that estimate comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which says that at least 57,800 Americans age 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014. Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky.

The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state in America still allows underage girls to marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not even set a minimum age by statute, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.

A great majority of the child marriages involve girls and adult men. Such a sexual relationship would often violate statutory rape laws, but marriage sometimes makes it legal."

Unchained at Last is an organisation fighting to change the legislation and prevent forced marriage, which is a thing we associate with third world countries or at the very least places which are radically different from ours. Somehow you don't expect suchbthjngs to be going on in the USA.

And then you remember that even the language we share with the United States can often be spoken very differently in our two countries!