Abbreviations
OED=Oxford English Dictionary AmE=American English BrE=British EnglishBen Yagoda's Books
- "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made"
- "How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them"
- "Memoir: A History"
- "The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism"
- "The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song"
- "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing"
- "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse"
- "Will Rogers: A Biography"
- "You Need to Read This: The Death of the Imperative Mode, the Rise of the American Glottal Stop, the Bizarre Popularity of "Amongst," and Other Cuckoo Things That Have Happened to the English Language"
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I don’t find anything unusual there. I’ve been queuing up for years, although I might be in the minority. I’ll give you that standing on line (in the New York area) and standing in line elsewhere prevails, but if I heard someone tell a group to queue up, or stand in a queue, I think most people would be comfortable with the phrase.
This word is always pretentious when used in America. While I’m on my soapbox, so is ‘whilst’
I would roll my eyes at the use of queue within the US. It’s silly and pretentious. I’d complain about amongst, too – but I’ll admit most of my fellow Americans don’t know the proper use of “among” in the first place.
The term “print queue” is commonly used in even the most general computer context. Accurate language is often denigrated as “pretentious” by those who are unfamiliar with the word..
I like this word. For one thing it means we can spell the same two phoneme syllable with one, three, or five letters. C and I can’t do that.
I think this instance seems pretentious because it’s being used as a verb instead of a noun. I’d “join a queue” but I’d never tell a group of Americans to “queue up”.