Slate, the online magazine, asked me to write a piece about my experience doing Not One-Off Britishisms. I had been thinking I should really weigh in on What It All Means, so this gave me the opportunity to cogitate on the matter. It was a bit challenging, since in this and most cases, I’m a lot more interested in observing that and how than in speculating about why or (even worse) weighing in on whether the phenomenon is good, bad or somewhere in between.

But I wrote the piece and you can read it here.

Just a couple of things to add. First, while the headline (“The Britishism Invasion”) is spot-on, I did not write an am not pleased with the subtitle, “Language corruption is a two-way street.” “Corruption” is such a harsh word.

Second, the comments–342 at last count–are a trip. A few are dopey, but most are right in the spirit of this enterprise, adding interesting comments and suggestions for future entries. (Shag seemed to keep coming up.) Also, not a few pointed out that I made an embarrassing mistake–I had the plural of corpus as corpi, which apparently is not a word, rather than corpora. Hey, I don’t know Latin and I’m not a linguist. I don’t even play one on TV.

I heard directly from quite a few people with interesting things to say. One of them was Helen Kennedy, the first journo, according to my unscientific investigation, to use go missing to refer to Chandra Levy’s disappearance. Her e-mail had the subject line “You made my day!” and began:

I always knew I would amount to something, and having some small part in the downfall of American English – well, could one be more subversive? No, one could not.

I’m half-American and half Irish, raised in England and Italy. I am CONSTANTLY having to turn to my colleagues to ask if “advertizing” has a Z here, etc… I genuinely had no idea that “gone missing” was not regular Ammurican.

So “go missing” was (arguably) blown to these shores, like some exotic seed, by someone who learned it in the U.K. As has been observed before, the Internet sure is something.

Adjectival phrase. It does not indicate “characterized by propriety” (as in proper behavior) but rather fits this subsidiary OED definition of proper: “Strictly or accurately so called; in the strict use of the word; genuine, real.” The OED has surprisingly few citations, the first notable one coming from Ann Thwaite’s 1984 biography of Edmund Gosse:  “He had worked with magnifying slides but he had never had a proper microscope.” Three years later, more to the point of Britishisms, came a book called A Proper Tea: An English Collection of Recipes.

Help me out here. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something very British about thinking about or referring to this quality. Americans don’t generally care about whether a particular thing satisfies all the attributes of its category, only whether or not it works or is a good buy. They didn’t used to, that is. Now they are all over “a proper.”

Our distant ancestors probably did not have a proper breakfast when they woke up in their caves, so they gorged whenever they made a kill. (Marian Burros, New York Times, December 18, 2002)/Now that Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet about his admiration for Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, it’s only fitting that they go out on a proper date. (TVGuide.com, September 15, 2011)

Preceded by a number and indicating, roughly,  “… years later.” More so than “later,” “on” provides a retrospective feel, and thus is useful in titles, as in Alan Bennett’s first produced play, the 1968 “Forty Years On.” The two-letter word makes the expression especially tempting for headline writers, and as the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01 approaches, it is ubiquitous. A Google News search for the phrase in headlines yields 424 hits for just the two days Sept. 3 and 4, 2011, from “Bin Laden Wanted a Second Hit, Ten Years On” (Sydney Herald) to “10 Years On: Finally, Smarter Airport Security Screening?” (Wall Street Journal).

A Consummate Teacher: Coach Robinson 50 Years On. (New York Times headline, August 4, 1991)/Though we’ve felt the impact of 9/11, more will yet unfold. Ten years on, it still might be “too soon to tell.” (Sacramento Bee, September 4, 2011)