“Nosh”

I owe Piya Chattopadhyay an apology.

Here’s the backstory. The book based on this blog, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, is coming out this Tuesday, September 24 (or 24 September), and I have been doing various interviews to promote it. (And by the way, if you want to buy the book you can do so here.) Ms. Chattopadhyay interviewed me for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) show “The Sunday Magazine.” In the course of the conversation, she mentioned she is married to a British person, and thus has been exposed to Britishisms like “posh” and “nosh.”

I immediately corrected her, saying that “nosh” is Yiddish.

Well, I was right, but she was right, too.

The word derives from the German naschen, meaning to nibble. It shows up in English as a verb in the late 1800s, and shortly after that as a noun, meaning a snack. I was familiar with both forms in my Jewish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and recall going to a Miami Beach restaurant called La Noshery (“noshery” or “nosherie” is an establishment where one noshes).

But Ngram Viewer reveals that, at least until quite recently, “nosh” was significantly more popular in the U.K. than the U.S.:

There are also specifically British variants, including (along the lines of “fry-up” and “cock-up) the noun “nosh-up”; a line in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) is, “I’ll give the auld doll this: she always made a good nosh-up.” And I’ll note that one difference in American and British use of the word is that here, it’s mainly a snack, while there, it can be a full meal.

In addition, Green’s Dictionary of Slang reports, “nosh” in the U.K can refer an act of fellatio. That particular meaning led to a notorious email that restaurant reviewer Giles Coren wrote to his editors at The Times, and what was subsequently leaked to The Guardian. The last line of his review, as he wrote it, was, “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.” But an editor had taken out the second to last word, “a.”

Coren was, to put it mildly, not happy about this. He wrote:

1) ‘Nosh’, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German ‘naschen’. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, ‘nosh’, means simply ‘food’. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the ‘a’. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, ‘nosh’ means “a session of eating” – in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of ‘scoff’. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant….

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually-charged”. I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word ‘gaily’ as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out … You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?

Bottom line, please accept my apologies, Ms. Chattopadhyay.