I’m (usually) not one to turn down a challenge, so a post the other day by Lynne Murphy, the OG of British-American language differences, caught my attention.

On her blog Separated by a Common Language, Lynne (a native American who has long taught linguistics at the University of Sussex), brought up a particular preposition, remarking: “A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: ‘Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?’  I hadn’t noticed it at that point, but once he’d mentioned it, I felt surrounded by alongside.”

She included an Ngram Viewer graph showing not only a recent increase in use of “alongside” but also that it’s a NOOB: it has been more common in Britain for more than a century, but American use has ticked up since the 1990s.

The OED notes “alongside” was “originally nautical” and gives this definition: “In a position parallel to; side by side with; close to the side of; next to, beside.” The first citation is from 1704; the following century, it started to be used in non-nautical contexts.

Lynne wondered why Americans have taken to this long word, when there are such briefer alternatives as “next to,” “beside,” “next to,” and “with.” And here is where the challenge comes in. She recalled that in 2013, I wrote an article for Slate about Americans’ (especially young Americans’) recent fondness for saying or writing “amongst” instead of the completely synonymous and one-letter-shorter “among.” And she produced data from the News on the Web corpus showing that American use of “amongst” actually peaked the following year.

“Perhaps,” she mused, “once people were talking about the ‘British invasion’ of amongst, Americans became more self-conscious about it. If Ben published an article about alongside, could that change its fortunes?”

Well, challenge accepted.

I actually have a very specific association with the word” alongside.” In the late ’90s there was an Aaron Sorkin sitcom called Sports Night, which centered on a double-anchored, smart sports news show very much on the model of ESPN’s Sports Center. Anyway, when one of the anchors intro’d the show, he always said “alongside”—i.e., “This is Dan Rydell alongside Casey McCall.” The intro was so much a feature of the show that it’s repeated in this AV club piece: 

As Dan said it, it had a slightly ironic, Lettermanesque feel.

As to the word’s popularity, I place it alongside other lengthened or lengthy words, not only preposition like “amongst,” “towards,” “amidst” or (the admittedly still rare in U.S.) “whilst,” but also “oftentimes” (with “t” pronounced), communications or admissions departments (used to be communication and admission) and something I’ve started to see a lot lately, an “advanced” (i.e., pre-publication, or “advance”) copy of a book. Contrary to what you might expect, people seem to want to talk longer, not shorter.

Will this post have any affect on the popularity of “alongside”? I am highly dubious, but crazier things have happened.

I’ve just finished a book called The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements, by Sam Kean. It’s highly recommended, as Kean makes this ostensibly abstruse subject come alive, even for a complete non-scientist like me. But I bring it up here for another reason, the way Kean (an American) spells one of the elements: “aluminium.”

The metal’s history is fascinating. It was discovered in the early 1800s and for decades was more precious than silver or gold, because of the difficulty of extracting it. At first there was no consensus on what it should be called . Then, in 1811, following the model of potassium, magnesium, sodium, and many other elements, a scientist proposed “aluminium,” and it stuck. But not for long, or, rather, not for long in the United States. First, Noah Webster, in his 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, endorsed “aluminum.”

But the “-num” spelling really took off in the U.S. in the 1890s, as this Google Ngram Viewer graph of American usage shows. (The blip in the 1830s is presumable due to Webster.)

The rise and subsequent dominance is probably due to the influence of Charles Hall. In 1886, as a young freelance scientist, Hall discovered a cheap and easy way to extract the element. He went on to found the Aluminum Company of America, aka Alcoa, and become fabulously rich. Sam Kean reports that when Hall applied for patents on the process he’d discovered, he used the “aluminium” spelling.

“However, when advertising his shiny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There’s debate about whether cutting the i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw ‘aluminum,’ he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with classy platinum. His new metal caught on so quickly and grew so economically important that ‘aluminum’ became indelibly stamped on the American psyche. As always in the United States, money talks.”

Meanwhile “aluminium” held fast in the rest of the world, and in the scientific community. (In Britain, interestingly, “aluminum” has shown some growth in the past several decades.)

Admittedly, other than its use by Kean, “aluminium” is a marginal Not One-off Britishism. A search for that spelling in the New York Times archives yields 2901 hits, but the majority are from before 1910 or so, which seems to be roughly when the newspaper’s own style changed. Recent uses tend to be from articles about British football on the Athletic website or quotes from non-Americans, such as the British anti-vaxer Christopher Exley:

“In an email to the New York Times last week, Dr. Exley wrote, ‘Secretary Kennedy asks my advice on aluminium in adjuvants as I am the leading authority on human exposure to aluminium.'”

The British spelling did slip in in April 2025, in a graphic accompanying an article on tariffs.

But given that the graphic’s heading and the note on the bottom use “-num,” I’m pretty sure that was a one-off.

The OG of British-American language comparison is Lynne Murphy, a U.S. native, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, author of the book The Prodigal Tongue and the blog Separated by a Common Language. On the blog she annually chooses two Words of the Year: a U.S.-to-U.K. export (this year it’s pronouncing the last letter of the alphabet “zee” instead of “zed”) and, what’s interesting for my purposes, a word or phrase that’s traveled from the U.K. to the U.S. The winner for 2025 is, drum roll please, the adjective “fiddly.”

The OED defines it as “Requiring time or dexterity; pernickety” and has citations going back to 1926. Early uses were strictly British but it traveled to America by the 2000s and, as Lynne notes, I wrote about it on this blog in 2016., when a common phrase was “fiddly bits.” She observes that the News on the Web (NOW) corpus gives the impression that U.S. use had a bump in 2014, dropped off for a couple of years, and has been steadily increasing since then.

She looked at the ten most recent uses in the corpus and found that “Many things and activities … are fiddly: some kind of electronic device, rolling and stuffing a baked good, cleaning ear buds, a fictional mystery story, installing something on a bike, actions in video games, frostings and icings on Christmas cookies, using an infant car seat, paperwork.”

One commenter on Lynne’s post suggest a possible entry point for U.S. use of the word: board-game aficionados. He gives a link to a 2010 thread on the BGG (Board Game Geek) kicked off by someone commenting:

“I’ve seen people talk about how a game is ‘fiddly’, which usually means that they don’t like it as much…. So, what makes a game fiddly, and why should that detract from the game? Is chess fiddly because of all those pieces you have to move? Is Alea Iacta Est fiddly because you have to deal with all those dice? Is Dungeon Lords fiddly because of all those imps, adventurers, monsters, damage cubes, etc.? Dominion must be fiddly, because you have to shuffle so much. So what are your thoughts? Help me to understand.”

There are twenty-three responses, including this clear and non-fiddly one:

“I use the term and think it a nice summation to what most have voiced here: at discreet points in the game, players are required to perform the tasks listed in the rules. Those tasks, for one reason or another, are usually difficult to remember and sometime cause errors in play or recurring rules consultations. The number of bits isn’t necessarily the cause though. It just as easily can be caused by a litany of housekeeping at the ends of rounds (player A gets a free X cause he’s in last, player B moves up two because they lost dominance, player B also gets to choose a consolation prize from the items in board area 3.”

Thanks for clearing that up!

I was reading a transcribed conversation of New York Times theater critics a couple of weeks ago and came upon this comment, uttered by Matt Wolf, about the London production of Evita: “I was especially poleaxed in that show by the young American Diego Andres Rodriguez as the narrator Che…” That word “poleaxed” wasn’t familiar to me. It felt like a Britishism.

Google Ngram Viewer confirms that it is. (And by the way, Wolf turns out to be an American who has lived in Britain for 30 years.)

But what does it mean? The word has a long history, beginning as a noun. The OED‘s definition begins:

“Originally: a weapon for use in close combat, existing in various forms but generally having a head consisting of an axe blade or hammer-head, balanced at the rear by a pointed fluke. Later also: any of various long-handled weapons of this type, as carried (now only ceremonially) by the bodyguard of a monarch or great personage. b. A similar shorter weapon of this type used in naval warfare until the end of the 18th cent. for boarding, resisting boarders, cutting ropes, etc.”

The first citation is from 1294. Later, it referred to an ax used in slaughtering cattle; a verb form appeared in the nineteenth century. Interestingly and surprisingly, the OED‘s first citations for a figurative use–meaning striking someone with close to the impact of actually poleaxing them, came from a U.S. source, the Zanesville, Ohio, Signal in 1927: “That overnight punch with which he pole-axed Jimmy Maloney on Friday night has made of him the greatest potential fighter of them all.” And so did the first time it was used as a simile, from the Baltimore Sun in 1954: “The poor lady sits down in a daze, as if pole-axed.”

But the next step–its use to mean “To stupefy, stun, or overwhelm. Frequently in passive.”–was first seen in Britain, and became a popular metaphor there, as the the Ngram Viewer graph suggests. The OED‘s first citations:

America followed along, and by the end of the 2010s, the term was pretty robust here, as witness some quotes on Merriam-Webster’s site:

• “Moreover, some strong farm and minerals prices persisted even after the financial-sector debacle of 2007-09 put the general U.S. economy into recession and poleaxed the stock market.—Twin Cities, 2019
• Iran’s oil production has dropped by 1.5 million barrel a day over the past year, poleaxing the Islamic Republic’s economy. — Time, 2019
• “House Republicans, who began the week with just 40 days of work left on their calendar — seriously, check for yourself — will have spent four of them being poleaxed on issues that divide their conference and alienate most voters. — Washington Post, 2018

There’s one more sub-meaning, at this point strictly British, and pointed out to me by my West Ham–supporting friend David Friedman. I forgot the exact way he described it, so I asked Google AI for a definition. It replied: “In a football context, to be ‘poleaxed’ means a player has been hit or tackled so hard that they are completely knocked down or ‘upended,”‘often falling to the ground as if struck by a heavy blow.” AI goes on:

“General Commentary on Fouls: Commentators use the term when a player is completely upended or knocked down in the penalty area in what appears to be a clear foul, often leading to debates about whether a penalty should be awarded. Examples include:

• Sunderland manager Phil Parkinson claiming Joel Lynch was ‘absolutely poleaxed’ in the area during a match.
• Commentary on a St Johnstone vs Rangers match where goalkeeper Alan Mannus was said to have ‘crudely poleaxed’ striker Alfredo Morelos.”

Ouch.

I was watching the Ted Danson Netflix series Man on the Inside when an English professor (the subject, not the nationality) played by David Strathairn says this to Danson:

I (of course) have written about “kerfuffle” but only as a noun. When I heard the verb on TV, I initially thought it was an American invention, but it in fact, the first use I’ve been able to find (I’ve searched for the past tense, to avoid getting false positives) was from David Cunliffe Lister in the House of Lords in 1985: “The Earl of Swinton, My Lords, he could if the noble Earl would give him time: He is absolutely kerfuffled with figures here.”

And, talking of America, the great political columnist Molly Ivins used the word in Mother Jones in 1991, referring to George H.W. Bush:

The New York Times has used “kerfuffled” once, in 2014.

But one syntactical thing is different about the Man on the Inside example. The others are in the passive voice, talking about people who are kerfuffled. But in Man on the Inside, the riddle has kerfuffled Danson. I’ll be monitoring whether that’s a one-off.

I knew a tipping point of sorts had been reached last week, when I was at the gym of the small liberal arts college in my town. (I have gym privileges because my wife works at the college.) Two undergrads, one of them sitting at a weight machine, were chatting. There was a pause, then the other said, “I’ll leave you to it,” and walked away.

That phrase, “I’ll leave you to it,” had been on my NOOB-dar for a while. I had a sense of it as a British thing, yet characters recently used it on the American sitcoms Midcentury Modern and Abbott Elementary. A 2023 New York Times cooking column (unsigned but undoubtedly written by NOOBs favorite Sam Sifton) closed with the paragraph:

“Or maybe you’d like something decidedly soupy? Yotam Ottolenghi’s herby sweet potato soup with peanuts is also substitute friendly, like the sancocho, with added carby comfort from bulgur or short pasta. Yotam calls it a soup for when you just want to be left alone,’ so we’ll leave you to it.”

As for British origin, some research backed my hunch up. The OED actually has a definition for the phrase, which, I learned, doesn’t necessarily have to begin with the word “I’ll”:

“to leave (a person) to it: to leave (a person) alone to proceed with a task in hand; to allow to get on with something without interference.”

The dictionary’s citations–which go back a surprisingly long time–are all British:

(BTW, the “S. Mather” in the 1671 quote isn’t one of the American preaching Mathers, but Samuel, an English minister.)

Google Ngram viewer adds a little more nuance.

That is to say, the expression has always been more common in Britain the the U.S., but it shot up in popularity in both countries in the decade of the 2000s, to the point of becoming a catch phrase.

Thanks for reading. Now, I’ll leave you to it.

Of the words at the top of this post, Merriam-Webster defines the adjective, “snarky,” as “sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner.” “Snark,” meanwhile, can be either a noun (“an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm”) or verb (“to say something snarky”).

Google Ngram Viewer shows both words shooting up in popularity over the past twenty-five years or so, in both the U.S. and the U.K. They apparently felt somewhat fresh in 1997 when Spy magazine took the trouble to point out numerous recent uses: “people on SNL made ‘snarky portrayals.’ VHI’s Pop-Up Videos had ‘snarky comments.’ Tennis players used ‘snarky, talk.’ Chris Rock’s HBO show ‘got off to a snarky start,’ The Dandy Warhols’ hit single had a ‘snarky title,’ (‘Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth’). Gen Xers were reading ‘snarky free weeklies.’ … The New York Observer had ‘snarky commentators.'”

The etymology does not go back to Lewis Carroll’s 1876 poem about an imaginary creature, “The Hunting of the Snark” (as some have assumed). Instead, the word has multiple roots, An 1866 glossary of “Shetland and Orkney Words” lists “snark” as a verb meaning “to make a snoring noise.” Sixteen years later, the OED reports, Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language included the verb as meaning, “To fret, grumble, or find fault with one.” The OED also suggests a connection with “nark,” meaning “An annoying, unpleasant, obstructive, or quarrelsome person.” The dictionary has a citation from 1846: “They are the rankest narks vot ever God put guts into, or ever farted in a kickses case.” Most of the later examples of “nark” are from Australia or New Zealand. Another antipodean connection is that Digger Smith, a 1917 Australian book-length poem by C.J. Dennis, has a glossary at the end defining “snarky” as “angry.”

The first OED citation for “snark” as a verb comes from a 1904 novel, The Phoenix and the Carpet, by the English children’s book author E. (Evelyn) Nesbit: “He remembered how Anthea had refrained from snarking him about tearing the carpet.

Remarkably, the dictionary’s first example of “snarky” is a line of dialogue from another Nesbit book, the well-known The Railway Children, from 1906: “Don’t be snarky, Peter. It isn’t our fault.” But I can antedate that by a year, with this quote (with telltale quotation marks) from Law Notes, published in London in May 1905:

For the purposes of this blog, it’s relevant that all the other examples from the next decade I’ve found either in the OED or through Google Books are from Britain. Nesbit’s niece, Dorothea Deakin, seemed to have caught her aunt’s enthusiasm for the word, and put this line in a 1908 short story: “Martin isn’t often snarky, but he remarked then in a cold voice, that he objected to backstairs gleanings about any one…” And the following appeared in Punch in 1913: “It didn’t matter a bit if I left my new bat out all night or had to sing a solo in chapel or was bottom of the form and got snarky letters from home or broke rules or anything.”

By 1915, “snarky” had appeared in a U.S. book, Ruggles of Red Gap: “I had received a rather snarky letter from him demanding to know how long I meant to remain in North America.”

“Snark” the noun, meanwhile, doesn’t show up till the very late 1980s. Relevant to the recent popularity of all forms of the word, on both sides of the pond, is the way “snarky” sounds like a portmanteau word, combining “sarcastic” and “snarl.” That, plus the fact that we live in extremely snarky times.

The title of this post is a reference that will be understood by one person, at most, my former University of Delaware colleague McKay Jenkins. A few years ago, McKay wrote a prescient book about the plastic and other bad stuff that has entered human beings’ bodies, and I suggested What’s Gotten Into Us? as a title. His publisher liked that, except they wanted to change it to What’s Got Into Us? I remonstrated loudly when McKay informed me of this, exclaiming that no American would say “got.” Reason prevailed and the book was published under my suggested title.

The Stephen King reference comes from the fact that I have just finished and enjoyed his latest book, Never Flinch, and for some reason it is chock full of Britishisms, some from the narrator, some spoken by characters. I’ve read a number of other King books–including the entire series featuring the protagonist of this one, the detective Holly Gibney–and don’t recall this being a feature of any of them. (And I would notice.) I’m not sure what’s gotten or got into the master of horror. The internet tells me he spent three months in England in 1977 but doesn’t reveal any more recent contact. Maybe he’s been watching a whole bunch of British crime shows.

Anyhoo, the Britishisms in the book break down into four categories, as follows.

Common NOOBs

These are words or expressions that I’ve covered on the blog and are widespread in the U.S.

• “Jerome is too gobsmacked even to laugh.”
• “Kerfuffle.”
• “That was what Daddy would have called ‘too clever by half.'”

Less Common NOOBs

I find it unlikely that King’s American characters would use these, and when the narrator does, it strikes a discordant note.

• “’I don’t know what you’re on about,’ Roxanne said.”
• “We have a valuable lead and that’s down to [attributable to] you.”
• “Stewart’s gone to ground.”
• “Her anxiety has been replaced by a kind of nervy [nervous] anticipation.”

Words and Phrases I’ve Heard in America but Haven’t Yet Covered on the Blog

• “I’ll leave you to it.”
• “He needs four more days. Until then, he’ll stand down. No more killing.” [Definition of “stand down”: “to withdraw from a contest, a position of leadership, or a state of alert or readiness. Chiefly British.]

What Was He Thinking?–Things I Can’t Imagine an American Saying

Definitions of italicized words (as of “stand down) are from Merriam-Webster.

• “They split a strawberry shortcake for afters,” [“British: Dessert.”]
• “She left us, buddy. Went walkabout.” [“To go on a walkabout (a long walking journey on land that is far from towns and cities.”]
• “Midday custom is slow.” [“Business patronage.”]

I had the good fortune a couple of weeks ago to give a talk about Not One-Off Britishisms in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the admirable organization Profs and Pints. The fact that about a hundred people turned out on a hot Monday evening to hear me talk about an obscure language topic did my heart good.

It was a rousing group, who laughed in all the right places and had brilliant questions afterwards. I subsequently got an email from one member of the audience, “Dru,” as follows:

“I’ve heard on the Internet (so of course it’s true /s) that the word ‘raspberry,’ as in using your mouth to make a fart sound, comes from Cockney rhyming slang. The rhyme being ‘raspberry tart.'”

What Dru heard was in fact correct, at least according to the OED, which cites a 1902 slang dictionary as giving the rhyming-slang etymology. Green’s Dictionary of Slang provides an earlier explanation (dated circa 1880) of the term from the Sporting Times:

“The tongue is inserted in the left cheek and forced through the lips, producing a peculiarly squashy noise that is extremely irritating. It is termed, I believe, a raspberry, and […] is regarded rather as an expression of contempt than of admiration”

All this was news to me, not only the rhyming-slang etymology, but the British origin, as I had always thought of giving the raspberry as an American thing. But all subsequent citations in Green’s are British or Australian until this rather opaque headline from the New York Evening World in 1918:

“When the Hohenzollerns Stepped Out to Slip the World the Old Razzberry They Forgot That There Is Many a Skid Between the Chinaware and the Chin.”

Note that spelling, “razzberry.” It calls to mind another familiar-word, “razz.” This is both a noun (give someone the razz) and verb (to razz someone), and Green’s and the OED agree that it derives from “raspberry” and that it is very American. It also quickly expanded in meaning from making the “raspberry tart” sound to teasing or verbally abusing someone. Green’s first citation for the verb is from New York State in 1914: “It is not long before you have all of the fun of a baseball game, with one side razzing the players of the opposing side as well as the umpire.” And the noun from Washington, D.C., in 1919: “A fresh cake-eater […] tried to tell Monahan this and got an awful raz.” (All subsequent citations have the double “z.”) In the 1938 edition of The American Language, H.L. Mencken treats both “razz” and ‘raspberry” as strictly American slang.

The concept was so quickly embraced in the U.S. that it acquired a geographically precise synonym. The indefatigable researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake has found an early example from Damon Runyon, writing in a New York newspaper in 1921. The reference is to Georgia-born baseball player Ty Cobb: and a game against the New York Yankees, who of course played in the New York City borough of the Bronx: “The Jewel of Georgia got the old familiar Bronx cheer when he came to bat for the first time in the first inning. Tyrus would probably be sadly disappointed were he not so greeted in New York.”

In any case, the rapidity with which “razz” was adopted in America suggests to me at least that it may have come from something other than “raspberry.” One possibility is “razoo,” which the OED has found in a Wisconsin newspaper as early as 1888: “Mayor Lawson’s veto of the police service bill..has a strong resemblance to what the political toughs would call ‘giving a man the razoo’.” That’s suspiciously chronologically close to the “raspberry” coining. .No dictionary I have access to gives a helpful etymology for “razoo,” but I found this in a 1945 New York Times book review: “A certain newspaper man is likely to say, come make-up time: ‘I hate to tell you, but I think we’ve got to razoo that back page. I’ll give you a new layout.’ It’s doubtful he knows where the ‘razoo’ comes from. Almost surely it is from razee, a shipbuilder’s term for drastically cutting down the rig of a ship.”

Clearly, further research is called for.