“Well done you!”

The other day, a Facebook friend posted about a recent achievement and, almost without thinking, I responded with the phrase that serves as the title of this post.

I suppose this is the time to admit, or confess, that my attitude about not one-off Britishisms has changed in the nearly thirteen years in which I’ve been doing this blog. At first, I looked at them somewhat askance. That is, unless they had been fully adopted in the U.S., like “a piece of cake,” or, at this point, “go missing,” I tended to think of them as pretentious or at least a bit affected. Maybe it’s getting older, but now I look at them with more equanimity. And I even use them myself.

As NOOBs go, “well done you” is no “go missing.” That is to say, it’s pretty rarely heard in the U.S. As is probably clear, the phrase means more or less the same thing as the Australian “good on ya” or the American “good job!” or “you go girl!” The first example I’ve been able to find is a line of dialogue in the 1860 novel Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, by R.S. Surtees: “Well done you! Bravo!”

It shows up twice in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), by Charles Dickens, the man with the preternatural ear:

• “‘Well done you!’ cried the person of the house.”
• “‘Well done you!’ said Fascination to himself.”

The phrase subsequently got picked up fairly widely in Britain, according to examples culled from Google Books. And it’s still in circulation today. A New York Times review of the American edition of The Graham Norton Effect noted, “”Well done, you!” he often exclaims to someone who proves game for his antics.” A band has taken its name from the phrase. And here’s a quote from a 2020 book called What Have I Done?: Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me, by Laura Dockrill:

And then, there was my pièce de résistance: I had the horror story ‘routine book’ wide open, on display, ready for the midwife to survey my strange scrawls and impressively rigorous timekeeping and applaud me with a gobsmacked, ‘Well done, you! I’ve never seen anything so incredible. You’ve totally nailed this motherhood thing.’

But the phrase has never really caught on in America. We’re far less comfortable than Brits with the direct-address “well verb-ed” construction (see “well played, sir“), and the syntax of “well done you” just sounds odd to our ears. Here’s a chart of frequency of “well done you” use in various countries, taken from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus of sources from 2010 to the present:

And note that many of the 45 U.S. uses aren’t valid ones, including quotes from the online Guardian and phrases like, “if you want your meat well done, you have to cook it long.”

However, the phrase has made its way into American usage, albeit tentatively. It shows up in a 2009 film called The Steam Experiment whose writer appears to be an American, and in a 2012 blog post: “So you finally managed to overcome the writers block. Despite all the distractions and apparently every force in the world conspiring to prevent you, you eventually got some words on the page. Well done you.” (In the U.S. as well as Britain, “well done you” is often sarcastic.)

It still sounded foreign in 2016, when a Time writer wrote about auto-generated responses in a Google messaging app:

A friend emailed me a couple months ago and I opened up the message in my Google Inbox app. He had been sick and miserable and wrote, with false enthusiasm, “Also, I haven’t pooped for two straight days!” The pre-written responses Google supplied me included “That’s brilliant!” and “Well done you!” Both of which would have made me sound not only insensitive but also kind of British.

But the phrase has gotten picked up sufficiently since then for me to label it “On the Radar.” Consider:

• 2017, Apple Insider, on an app called Fantastical: “The instant you say next Tuesday it highlights that day next week and if you instead go on to type ‘Tuesday, July 4’, now Fantastical shows you July’s month and well done you for happening to know that Independence Day is on a Tuesday this year.”
• 2021, The Motley Fool: “If you’re lucky enough to be the beneficiary of a major inheritance or happen to earn a six-figure income, well done you!”
• 2023 the Chicago Sun-Times on the latest Indiana Jones movie: “they used footage and outtakes from every Lucas film featuring Ford to pick up various angles of his face and insert them into the picture, so well done you.”

Well done me?