“Turn up” keeps turning up

In a mere five paragraphs in yesterday’s New York Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that on January 21, the actor Kevin Bacon “turns up as the star of a new series on Fox, ‘The Following’”; that the villain of the series has “a knack for bewitching attractive women, who would later turn up dead, their eyes gouged out”; and that the series is similar to “Alcatraz,” a Fox series “in which investigators had to track down scores of inmates and guards who vanished from Alcatraz in 1963 and began turning up in the present.”

Genzlinger also writes that the bad guy “seems always to be one bloody step ahead,” but he’s probably being literal.

Th-fronting

I have remarked on the fondness of young Americans–especially African-American rappers and/or people from the New York metropolitan area–for the glottal stop. Now it appears that another of Cockney characteristic, th-fronting, is ready for its U.S. closeup.

Th-fronting is a feature of Cockney–and now, apparently, of Estuary English–in which a th sound is pronounced like an f (as in I fink instead of I think) or v (as in the way the TV show “Big Brother” is commonly referred to in U.K. red-top tabloid headlines: “Big Bruvva”). Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G is a heavy user, and it’s been prominent recently in hip U.S. references to the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards as “Keef.”

That same word actually represents the only indigenous U.S. use I’m aware of. It’s in the name of a teenage rapper from Chicago: Chief Keef. His website reports that he was born Keith Cozart but is silent on how Keith became Keef.

NOOB readers are a clever lot, and among them are probably one or two hip-hop fans. If so, I would be grateful for any enlightenment on the phenomenon of th-fronting among the rappers.

“From strength to strength”

This turned up in a New York Times article a couple of months ago:

Susan Kamil, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Random House, confirmed the acquisition on Monday, saying in a statement, “We’re thrilled to welcome Lena [Dunham] to Random House. Her skill on the page as a writer is remarkable — fresh, wise, so assured. She is that rare literary talent that will only grow from strength to strength and we look forward to helping her build a long career as an author.”

I was surprised, because I’d always thought of from strength to strength–meaning, basically, that something is already doing well and is expected to do even better–as one of those British expressions, such as spoiled for choice, that would probably never make it over here.

Screen Shot 2012-12-26 at 11.45.36 AM But I found that the Susan Kamil quote wasn’t a one-off, as witness this from the Yale Daily News: “After winning every Ivy game this season, the women’s volleyball team is going from strength to strength.” (October 17, 2012) And this February 2102 quote from the Times’ David “Think British, Act Yiddish” Brooks: “Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength.”

It turns out that the expression has a long history, on both sides of the Atlantic. Forgive me for stating what may be obvious to some, but it appears first to have been used in Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible, where Psalms 84:7 is rendered “They go from strength to strength and so the God of Gods apeareth unto them in Zion.” The phrase was used in the King James and other subsequent versions, as well as by religious writers, including Julian Hare in an 1849 sermon: “Mounting from strength to strength, from highth, to a higher highth!”

The Google Ngram chart below shows the use of the phrase in Britain (blue line) and the United States (red line) from 1800 through 2008:

The uses appear predominantly religious until about 1900–and note that in the nineteenth century it was considerably more popular in the U.S. The ascendance of the blue line in the early twentieth reflects its acceptance as a secular metaphor in the U.K.; the (presumably continuing) upturn of the red line starting in about 2000 suggests that from strength to strength is a solid NOOB.

Can spoiled for choice be far behind?

“Poo”

No one can say that we here at NOOBs don’t tackle the profound issues of the day. A Smithsonian Magazine headline, posted just an hour ago (as I write) read: “The Most Exclusive Coffee in the World Is Harvested From Elephant Poo.”

On the other hand, American Republican political operative Grover Norquist notoriously said after our recent election: “The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head, and you should vote against Romney”

I don’t care much about Grover Norquist or the most exclusive coffee in the world, but I am interested in the possibility that British poo is taking over from good old American poop in the faeces euphemism department.

The question turns out to be a somewhat complicated one, as these questions tend to be. The OED offers two separate sets of entries for these terms, with separate etymologies. One derives from the onomatopoeic interjection “Poo,” dating from the 1600s, when it was more commonly spelled “Puh” or “Pooh,” or, as Fielding rendered it in this quote from Tom Jones: “‘Pugh,’ says she, ‘you have pinked a Man in a Duel, that’s all.’”

It was not until the 1960s, according to the OED, that the word began to be used as a noun or verb for excrement, as The Guardian did in 1981: “That doggy’s doing a poo.”

The second entry derives from a different instance of onomatopoeia. The OED cites this definition from an early eighteenth-century dictionary: “to break Wind backwards softly.” By the 1920s, poop had acquired, in the United States, solidity. The OED quotes Ezra Pound in a 1940 letter: “This federation poop is just the same old..secret committee of shit.”

Complicating manners are at least three additional meanings of poop. One, derived from the term for the rear of a boat, refers to the rear of a person or animal. The second–which Pound may have had in mind–is an American slang term, originating in the military, for inside information. The third, which probably isn’t relevant, is pooped, an Americanism meaning “exhausted” or “worn out.”

Getting back to poo versus poop, here is a Google Ngram chart showing use of dog poo and dog poop n Britain and the U.S. between 2000 and 2008 (the most recent year for which figures are available):

It confirms that the dominant form is poop in the U.S. (red line) and poo Britain (yellow line), and that poo (green line) is on the rise in the U.S., with a roughly 100 percent increase in the period.

Further research is clearly needed. For the time being, my sense is that my fellow Americans are rather conflicted on the matter, sometimes, as in this Huffington Post piece from March, trying to have it both ways:

“Poop. Is there anything it can’t do? On Wednesday, The Denver Zoo introduced what is believed to be the world’s first poo-powered motorized tuk tuk showcasing The Denver Zoo’s very own patent-pending gasification technology.”

Make up your mind, Huffington Post!

Kind of a riddle

If Hair Cuttery means smart in the sense of fashionable, this is a potential NOOB. If it means it in the sense of clever, then the ad isn’t.

“Sticky wicket”

Two readers have independently alerted me to this recent quote in the New York Times:

“It’s a sticky wicket for Obama,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, saying any aggressive move on such a high-profile question would be seen as “a slap in the face to his base right after they’ve just handed him a chance to realize his presidential dreams.”

I initially resisted investigating sticky wicket, relegating it to the telly-lift-old chap sort of term that in the U.S. is a stereotype of a Britishism, and thus can’t be a proper NOOB. I was wrong. It turns out that the Times has used the phrase six additional times in the past two years, all either by its own reporter or a quote by an American source. For example, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal sportswriter Tom Haudricourt commented in 2010 about the Hall of Fame prospects of baseball’s Mark McGwire, who had just admitted to using steroids: “Should we be voting guys in who admit to doing it? The sticky wicket just got stickier.”

The original British expression dates from the 1880s, according to the OED, and is (sorry for stating the obvious, to some) is a cricket metaphor. Thus it’s traditionally phrased as (batting) on a sticky wicket. The batting on is always lost in the U.S.

Looking at Google Ngram data (below) makes me think I need a new category for this bad boy. It’s a quintessentially British expression that’s so quintessential, it’s hardly used there anymore. Meanwhile, it has gradually grown in the U.S. from being an exotic novelty item to a solid NOOB–to the point that, in 2004, it was as popular here as it was there! Google’s data only goes up to 2008; I bet that at this point, there are more U.S. sticky wickets than British ones.

Google Ngram showing popularity of the phrase "sticky wicket" in Britain (blue line) and the U.S. (red line), 1915-2008 — Google Ngram showing popularity of the phrase “sticky wicket” in Britain (blue line) and the U.S. (red line), 1915-2008

“Turn up”

Screen Shot 2012-12-05 at 10.23.37 AM — Google Ngram showing use of “turned up early” and “showed up early” between 1975 and 2008. Yellow line: U.S. “showed up.” Red line: British “turned up.” Green line: British “showed up.” Blue line: U.S. “turned up.”

I refer to the intransitive verb that basically means “to appear,” possibly unexpectedly, and that can refer to a person, thing or concept (and not to the transitive form, e.g, “The search turned up a few artifacts” or “She turned up her nose and the cuffs of her jeans.”) I think of it as a Britishism mainly, I suppose, because there’s such a common and reliable U.S. equivalent: show up.

The Google Ngram above, which shows the relative popularity of showed up early and turned up early in the U.S. and Britain between 1975 and 2008 (the last year for which data is available), pretty much supports my sense. ( I stuck the early in there to avoid false positives in the transitive and other forms.) So does the OED, which reports turn up as having turned up very early in the eighteenth century. The dictionary cites an 1863 British newspaper report: “The Police have been astonished lately at the number of criminals who have turned up of whose previous career they knew nothing…” And the phrase was used memorably by Dickens in David Copperfield: “‘And then,’ said Mr. Micawber,..‘I shall, please Heaven, begin to be beforehand with the world,..if—in short, if anything turns up.’”

As for show up, the first citation is from the Lisbon (Dakota) Star, 1888: “Will Worden is expected to show up next week.”

The verb without up can mean the same thing, most often used as a negative or interrogatory. (“Did he show?” “Nope, he didn’t show.”) That’s certainly a popular slangy alternative in the U.S., but it didn’t originate here, according to the OED, which quotes Theodore Hook, The Parson’s Daughter (1833): “The breakfast party did not assemble till noon, and then Lady Katherine did not ‘shew.’” I reckon that was the source for the eventual U.S. show up.

Anyway, if and when Ngram offers data beyond 2008, I predict it will show a sharp uptick in U.S. turned up. My ears feel it has become the preferred alternative among the chattering classes. I was writing this on November 30 and found four separate uses in the N.Y Times that day:

“…John McGraw’s futile attempt to trump the Yankees by finding a Jewish version of ‘the Babe.’ An exhaustive search turned up a prospect named Mose Solomon, likened in the press to an exotic animal. (‘McGraw Pays 50K for Only Jewish Ballplayer in Captivity.’)”

“Two months later, though, Barnum turned up in Tennessee and, in June 1865, he signed an oath of allegiance to the federal government.”

Books that writer Joe Queenan keeps as gags “mostly turned up over the transom at jobs I used to work at. ‘Hoosier Home Remedies’ is my favorite.”

And finally, this immortal sentence: “If Kristen Holly Smith turned up to your costume party in Dusty Springfield drag and started singing, there would be no mistaking the woman she was channeling.”

“Trainers”

Mike Jensen, writing in today’s Philadelphia about a legendary high school runner: “Her left foot hurt her sometimes in the front ‘near the toes,’ but only when she walked, not running. (Could it have been her Adidas LA trainers?)”

In these parts, we would still normally say “running shoes,” or maybe “sneakers,” but I have the feeling we have not heard the last of trainers.

“Knock-on” (effects)

Over on Twitter, Neal Whitman notes that the adjectival phrase knock-on appears twice in the current issue of New Scientist (British) and wonders if it’s “a recent BrE innovation? Just BrE? Just recent? Neither?”

My answer: fairly recent and, until quite recently, almost exclusively British English. The “quite recently” means that for this blog’s purposes, it’s an on-the-radar NOOB. The OED calls the phrase “chiefly” British and defines it as “Being a secondary or indirect consequence of another action, occurrence, or event; knock-on effect n. a secondary, indirect, or cumulative effect.” First citation is from The Times in 1972: “They would be more than willing to move towards a minimum wage of about £20 a week..if they could be assured..that there would be no ‘knock-on effect’ in the differentials demanded by the rest of the labour force.”

As to derivation, although the term (apparently) has a meaning in rugby football, it’s more likely that the adjectival phrase comes out of physics, where it means “Ejected, produced, or caused as a result of the collision of an atomic or sub-atomic particle with an atom.” (“Knock-on protons produced by 3MeV neutrons would not..produce visible flashes.” Nature, 1971.)

Joining in the Twitter conversation, Lynne Murphy reports finding twenty-nine instances of knock-on in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which boasts of containing 450 million words used by Americans in writing and on the air since 1990. My own search of COCA yielded twenty-seven hits, but that’s close enough for jazz.

At least half of the uses, I would judge, were written in American publications or uttered on American broadcasts by British people. However, fifteen of the twenty-seven have occurred since 2008, and Americans are responsible for a increasing number of these. For example, in 2011, Steve Coll wrote in a New Yorker blog, “The probable knock-on effect of a second Taliban revolution in Afghanistan would be to increase the likelihood of irregular Islamist attacks from Pakistan against Indian targets.” Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan wrote in Foreign Policy this past January, “[Citizens of industrialized countries] also expect their representatives to deal with surging immigration, global warming, and other knock-on effects of a globalized world.” And Annie Lowrey wrote in the New York Times in August: “Mr. Obama’s address coincided with the release of a White House report quantifying education job losses and detailing the knock-on effects, like bigger classrooms and shorter school years.”

The slowness with which the phrase has been adopted here relates, I would say, to the longstanding presence of perfectly adequate alternatives, side effects and unintended consequences, or, more simply, results. But never underestimate the appeal of a NOOB. I predict that knock-on effects will continue and indeed accelerate its ascent.

“Small beer” and “hard cheese”

A line in David Carr’s column in the New York Times a couple of days ago caught my eye: “Fumbling an editorial change may seem like small beer when viewed against the backdrop of an industry in which bankruptcies are legion and rich business interests are buying newspapers as playthings.”

I wasn’t familiar with small beer, but it had the ring of a NOOB, so I investigated. The first OED definition is “Beer of a weak, poor, or inferior quality” (what Americans might call near beer). The second, by extension, relates to Carr’s meaning: “Trivial occupations, affairs, etc.; matters or persons of little or no consequence or importance; trifles.” Or, what Americans would typically term small potatoes.

Although Shakespeare does use the term in “Othello,” the OED quotes Joseph Addison rather purposely and self-consciously crafting the metaphor in 1710: “As rational Writings have been represented by Wine; I shall represent those Kinds of Writings we are now speaking of, by Small Beer.” The next quotation is from John Adams, who wrote in 1777, “The torment of hearing eternally reflections upon my constituents, that they are..smallbeer [sic],..is what I will not endure.”

Adams, of course, was an American, and therefore small beer isn’t a NOOB along the lines of gobsmacked or toff. But I do classify it as a “Historical NOOB.” Back in 1777, there wasn’t any, or much, difference between the way Englishmen and Americas used the language. Over the years, however, this particular expression, like many others, acquired a British patina; all post-1777 OED citations are British. The Google Ngram chart below shows use of the phrase in Britain (red line) and the U.S. (blue line) between 1900 (by which time it was mostly used metaphorically) and 2008. Up until the mid-2000s, it was used between two and three times more frequently in Britain.

Google’s data goes up only to 2008, but I would imagine that by now blue and red lines have met, or are about to. That is, small beer is getting some U.S. traction. Stanford Professor David M. Kennedy, writing for CNN after the recent election, regretted that “as committed a change agent as Obama is doomed to four more years of nothing more than Lilliputian, small-beer tinkering.” In September, a Los Angeles Times writer observed, “Of course, in San Diego a dispute that has lasted only a decade is but small beer.”

Another colorful British food metaphor has had less success over here. I refer to hard cheese, i.e, “tough luck.” (That brings to mind another Britishism, the one-word sentence that’s a favorites of sports commentators, “Unlucky!” No spottings here as yet and I don’t expect there ever to be.) A fair amount of hard cheese searching yielded only a couple of hits, both of them facetious. In 1990, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker channeled the notoriously preppy then-President George H.W. Bush: ”Gee, fellows, we can talk about anything but maybe the graduated income-tax thing; but, golly, if there’s going to be an increase, sorry, hard cheese, but you Democrats have to propose it. Then I’ll just have to tell the taxpayers I’m going along only because you big tax-and-spenders left me no choice.” And a St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist wrote in 2007: “It’s a cold, cruel, capitalist world out there, Bunky. You put in your 20 years in the gunk at the chemical plant and one day . . . whack! It’s all over. It’s hard cheese for you and your family.”

All the rest of the American uses I encountered referred either to dairy products or to baseball, where the expression is an accepted elegant variation for fastball. From a New York Times recap of a 2010 game: “So, at 3-0, Robertson threw Young some hard cheese at the knees for a strike.”