This is the Great White Whale of this blog. (Well, one of them, along with you lot and I should have done.) Every once in a while, I am tempted to shout, “Thar she blows!” Wes Davis recently suggested to me that he spied a large albino form on the horizon, so I hunted around and came up with:
“The team are planning for its first trip in June and hopes to begin work by documenting natural orchid pollination…” (Jacksonville Courier, January 28)
“The team are composed of two types of people who usually don’t mingle.” (Bradenton Herald, January 27)
“As for the Midwest bias, I imagine it’s because the team are Big 10 fans or because Robb Heineman is a Notre Dame guy.” (Kansas City Star, January 10)
This may sound impressive, but in fact these are outliers, squeezed to the margins by a sea of the team is‘s. And it would be a fool’s errand to even look for the government are or the company are.
The Huffington Post notes: “Brad Pitt was on hand at Saturday night’s Producer’s Guild Awards, in part to support his partner Angelina Jolie…” That partner caught my eye–specifically as a way to denote someone’s opposite-sex, longterm and, all things being equal, permanent love interest. My observation is that this has long been common in the UK–among both unmarried and married couples. The former makes sense because of the lack of suitably dignified terms. (Girlfriend? Lover? Main squeeze?) The latter case is more interesting. I hear it as an implicit disapproval of the traditional husband, wife and spouse, which presumably bring with them whiffs of an oppressive heteronormative (thanks, Elizabeth Yagoda) patriarchy.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s note about partner supports this political interpretation:
Now increasingly used in legal and contractual contexts to refer to a member of a couple in a long-standing relationship of any kind, so as to give equal recognition to marriage, cohabitation, same-sex relationships, etc.
Anyway, opposite-sex amorous partner is on the rise in the U.S. Just in the last few days, there has been:
Denver Post, January 24: “[Jim Jesperson] is preceded in death by his partner, Erin O’Niell…”
Chicago Sun-Times, January 24: “Even in his final days, [Yuri Rasovsky’s] partner, Lorna Raver, could hear him calling out directions to actors in his sleep.”
Tewksbury (Mass.) Patch.com, January 21: “Besides his wife, Angela, Michael Callhan] is survived by his three sons; Michael Callahan and his partner Patricia Lamirande of Lowell…”
You do not need to have sharp eyes to notice that all three examples are from obituaries. That makes sense, because if it’s undignified to refer to the girlfriend of a man in his 60s or 70s in ordinary speech, it’s borderline insulting to do so in a recognition of his passing.
All that said, I have not noticed many–or even any–U.S. uses of married partner, that is, to refer to an opposite-sex husband or wife. Please send on any sightings!
My homegirl Ellen Magenheim (who besides being a NOOBs informant is a distinguished Professor of Economics at Swarthmore College) writes: “another one: easy peasy. I just saw it on the Facebook page for Green Aisles Grocery [a South Philadelphia market]; i.e., ‘Easy Peasy Dinner courtesy of Green Aisle and Severino Pastas!'”
Ellen is spot on. The OED’s first citation for the phrase–whose non-rhyming American equivalent is easy as pie–is from 1976, but it originated some years before that in the expression easy peasy lemon squeezy, which may or may not have originated in an advertising slogan for the “washing-up liquid” (aka dish detergent) Lemon Sqezy [sic].
Whatever, easy peasy is now officially all over the U.S.: a blog, a song from the (Baltimore) band Ponytail, a netbook operating system, and the press, including this three days ago from the Huntsville (Alabama) Times: “You would think the area would be thick with restaurants and operating one successfully would be easy-peasy.”
Previously, Ellen had suggested dead easy, noting this quote from a Nicolas Kristof article in the New York Times:
Along with a no-fly zone, another important step would be to use American military aircraft to jam Libyan state television and radio propaganda and Libyan military communications. General McPeak said such jamming would be “dead easy.”
What would this blog do without Nancy Friedman? I shudder to think. Hard on the heels of spotting an Oregon loo, she reports that on last Thursday’s “Parks and Recreation,” Chris (Rob Lowe) said to Ben (Adam Cooper Scott): “The Ben Wyatt I know, I don’t think he’d be happy just sitting here faffing around.” (I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this first from Elizabeth Yagoda, “Parks and Rec” fan that she is.)
The Britishism in there is derived from faff, a verb meaning dither or fuss, and is usually followed by about. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation, from an 1874 volume called Yorkshire Oddities, suggests that it originated as a regionalism: “T’ clock~maker‥fizzled an’ faff’d aboot her, but nivver did her a farthing’s worth o’ good.”
Up till now, U.S. use has been spotty (and I don’t mean spotty in the English sense). It is a favorite of New York Times sports blogger Jeff Z. Klein, who, covering the 2008 women’s soccer matches at the 2008 Olympics, wrote:
Much faffing about as these final minutes tick down. New Zealand have a throw in deep in the Amerk zone, but the one Fern is surrounded by four Americans and winds up on her back as they run away with the ball.
Klein’s use of the plural verb have with the collective New Zealand indicates he has absorbed a bit too much English football coverage, and suggests that faff is still more or less a one-off.
Other than this Oregon sighting (which came courtesy of Nancy Friedman), and in crossword puzzles, loo is not seen or heard much on these shores. An exception is this from an August 2011 New York Times style blog, about a country cottage: “You flush the loo the old-fashioned way — with buckets of water hand-pumped from a spring.”
But this is a Britishism that should be more than one-off. Now that john is antiquated, we don’t have a one-syllable term that’s neither euphemistic nor explicit. So let’s go loo.
And in any case, those stick figures are brilliant.
Always seeking new horizons for Not One-Off Britishisms, I turn the focus for the first time to pronunciation. This is not because I have ever heard an American say lefftenant, conTRAHversy, shedule, Re-NAY-sunce,pass-ta, or rahhther. Rahhther, the word in question is scenario.
This term for a future situation comes directly from Italian (scena=scene), and I believe that in contrast to Renaissance and pasta, the British have always pronounced the second syllable in accordance with the original language–to rhyme with car, that is—whereas Americans render it scen-AIR-io.
We have, that is, until now, the age of NOOBs. I have heard more and more Americans say it in the British manner in recent years, sometimes with the telltale syllable drawn luxuriously out. As an example, I plucked from cyberspace an exchange that took place on NPR’s “All Things Considered” this past September. Michelle Norris is interviewing Michael Mackenzie about the European financial crisis.
NORRIS: So if we do see defaults and chaos and uncertainty, could you give us a quick picture of what the best-case scenario would look like and the worst-case scenario as well?
MACKENZIE: Well, the best-case scenario is that it would be relatively quick.
Norris is American and Mackenzie is British, but they both say scenahhrio. You can hear for yourself here. The exchange comes at about the 2:40 mark.
In his recent book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, the English Welsh journalist Jon Ronson has a set piece in which he encounters the disgraced American corporate executive Al “Chainsaw Al” Dunlop. The book is about psychopaths–whether they exist, what they are–and the issue in this scene is if Dunlop qualifies. Ronson quotes him as saying:
“Listen. The psychopath thing is rubbish. You cannot be successful unless you have certain”–he pointed to his head–“controls.”
Well, no. As everybody knows, American say garbage while the British say rubbish (and whilst). Well, not everybody. Jon Ronson was clearly unaware and put a bogus rubbish in Al Dunlop’s mouth. Good thing NOOBs is on the case!
From the website of the Brooklyn-based "Remedy Quarterly"
The extremely astute Nancy Friedman suggests looking into stockist, noting “US companies are appropriating this BrE term… Until recently, the more-common term would have been ‘where to buy’ or ‘retailers.’” Never even once having come across this term, I would have doubted her, had she not supplied four web sites that list the stockists from which one can purchase their stuff:
Nancy notes that Remedy Quarterly, a magazine, is based in Brooklyn.
I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 