A commenter on the previous post remarked that “uppity Canadians [from Ontario] are veddy proper Upper Canadians,” and a bunch of British people asked, basically, what the heck is a “veddy”? David Ballard replied:

It’s what Americans (and apparently Canadians) use when pretending to speak like a snobby British person. I reckon it’s what we heard/hear when that type of character (imagine those who populate Wodehouse’s books) says “very” in a confiding or authoritative way in old movies or, perhaps, in person. “My late uncle was a veddy important figure in the Raj, you know.”

My sense aligned with David’s but I was curious as to when, how, and why the custom started. The answer to the first, basically is 1932. That’s the date of the first example I could find, a one-sentence blurg in The Judge, an American humor magazine: “The Oxford Crossword Puzzle Book, veddy, veddy braincracking.” There are a bunch of other similar examples in the ’30s, which Google Ngram Viewer shows to be period when the term was not only introduced but skyrocketed in popularity, It leveled off around 1950, and has been up and down ever since.

(“Veddy” appears in some late nineteenth-century books as a rendition of baby talk, as in this quote from an 1894 book, stating that most men “sympathize with the little girl who, being asked if she had been good, answered, Not veddy good, not veddy bad–just a comferable little girl.”)

“Veddy” first shows up in the New York Times in a 1954 movie review by Bosley Crowther of a Danny Kaye movie, where he says that Kaye impersonates, among other characters, “a veddy British motor car salesman.” Crowther used the term about ten more times through 1967, no doubt contributing to its popularity.

But the backlash had already begun in 1954, when J.B. Priestley wrote an article in the Times about British accents. In it he commented:

“When some American writers want to have some fun with an English accent they make it say ‘veddy,’ presumably instead of ‘very.’ Now I pride myself on having a good ear but never. listening to every possible type of Englishman, have ever heard this ‘veddy.’ Where does it come from ? I find it veddy veddy puzzling.”

Not long afterwards, Edward Artin of the G.C. Merriam Company, publisher of Webster’s dictionary, wrote in to the Times with an answer. I present it as my last word on the subject.

“Americans’ articulation of the r in very (in fact, of all r‘s) may be described as comparatively sluggish. On the other hand, when a Southern Englishman says very he often articulates the r by thumping the tip of his tongue quite lustily but quickly against his palate, producing, to the American ear, a dd effect.

“Now, when this same Englishman says eddy he articulates the dd by hermetically clamping the tip and sides of his tongue against his palate so as to completely shut off the outbreath for a split second (producing what phoneticians call a stop or explosive). His sound between vowels here is appreciably different to his own ear from his sound between the vowels of very, and hence on the basis of purely his own speech the veddy jibe makes no sense. The average American, however, does not cut off his breath for even a fraction of a split second when he says eddy: he articulates the dd by much the same thumping of tongue-tip against palate that the Englishman uses for r in very. Thus the American listening to a Southern Englishman may apprehend the latter’s Perry as Peddy, and vice versa.”

I just read and enjoyed See You in September, a memoir by Darryl Pinckney. Pinckney is a Black American writer (born in Indianapolis) but for some time (at least twenty-five years, it seems), he’s lived part-time in England, with his partner, the writer James Fenton.

So he comes by his Britishisms legitimately. Indeed, the most surprising thing to me, in this regard, is that I only found two of them in the book. However, he uses both of them a lot, and they are both pretty unusual (for an American).

The first is using “got” and “forgot” as the past participle form of “get” and “forget.” So Pinckney:

• refers to “one of [his mentor Elizabeth Hardwick’s] recommendations I’d got from the
  library though she of course had it in her shelves.”
• writes “We’d forgot to ring for the elevator.”
• writes “they’d got engaged.”

Literally every other American would write “forgotten,” and every American with the exception of writers for The New Yorker would write “gotten.”

As the link in the previous sentence shows, I’ve previously written about “had got.” But I’ve only one or two Americans ever using Pinckney’s other main Britishism, and had been waiting for a few more sightings before addressing it. Here are some examples from the book:

• a reference to a novel “which I’d not read.”
• another to “everything I’d not done.”
• “I’d not thought of quiche as heavy.”

The standard American phrasing would be “I hadn’t read,” “I hadn’t done,” and “I hadn’t thought.” Even in Britain, apparently, this is a bit unusual. In Lynne Murphy 2007 blog post on “Have contractions,” she cites another scholar, John Algeo as having examined a corpus and found

How about it, British readers: is the “I’d not VERBed” usage as rare as all that?

I noted in 2020 that “in Britain, ‘pensioner’ might refer to a person who is no longer working but is not necessarily receiving a pension: what Americans would call a ‘retiree.'” However, “American uses of ‘pensioner,’ what few there are, tend to refer specifically to people getting (often particular) pensions.”

Yesterday’s mail brought the first American example I’ve seen of the British meaning:

The pensioner is me but I do not receive a pension from the state of Delaware or my former employer, the University of Delaware. I do receive medical benefits, so it’s not exactly pensioner-in-the-sense of retiree. But it’s close.

In recent days, London has experienced “The Queue,” in which people waited for up to 24 hours in order to pass by the body of Queen Elizabeth and pay their respects. And so it seems a good time to take another look at “queue,” meaning a line of people waiting for something.

As the spelling might suggest, it originated as a not one-off Frenchism. In French, “queue” means “tail,” and it was adapted by the English in the eighteenth century to mean a long plait of hair, that is, a pigtail. The French initiated the line-of-people meaning in the 1790s, and the first uses noted by the OED either italicized it as a foreign word or used it in a Gallic context, as in this quote from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837): “That talent … of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes … the French People.”

It’s an interesting quote because, of course, we now think of the British has having a talent for standing spontaneously in queue.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, queue-as-line was used in both Britain and the United States. An example of the latter came from New York Representative James Brooks, speaking in Congress in 1864: “Last Monday week I saw a long queue ranged around the New York custom-house waiting turns to buy gold certificates at 65, while gold was selling at 75.” And it’s worth noting that “line” was used in Britain, as in this 1711 quote from Joseph Addison: “The Officers planting themselves in a Line on the left Hand of each Column.”

But in the twentieth century, the British took “queue” up in earnest.

And soon a verb form arrived: “queue up” by 1920, and the “up”-less form some thirty years later.

As the Ngram Viewer graph shows, American use of the noun started ticking up in the 1960s. In January 1960, William Zinsser wrote in the New York Times, about the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, “Only on very rainy days was the queue [for the “Futurama” exhibit] a short one, but few tourists begrudged the hour they spent waiting.” “Queue” has appeared in the Times 5,385 times since then. Some of the increase in use on both sides of the Atlantic has to do with the use of “queue” in computer terminology, and more recently, inspired by Netflix, as a term for a sequence of movies or songs one plans to get to. (“What’s in your queue?”) Even more recently, some people have referred to a DJ “queueing up a record,” instead of the traditional term, cuing cueing it up.

Getting back to waiting in a queue, you can understand the word’s popularity in America, given the ambiguity-inducing multiple meanings of “line,” “line up”and “on line.” (New Yorkers wait on line, the rest of the country in line.) The only downside of “queue” is that it’s harder to spell. The gerund form actually has two versions, “queuing” and “queueing,” the former overtaking the latter in popularity in Britain in around 1990, according to Ngram Viewer. In any case, I knew a milestone had been passed about ten years ago, when I was at my local grocery store, and noticed that a sign indicating the “line” for checkout had been replaced by one indicating the “queue.”

Another milestone came in 2016, when President Barack Obama spoke against the U.K. leaving the European Union. That would portend badly for any U.S..-U.K. trade deals, he was quoted as saying: “I think it’s fair to say maybe some point down the line, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is on negotiating with the E.U. The U.K. is going to be at in the back of the queue.”

Leaving aside the policy aspect, British commentators jumped on the president’s use of “queue,” some suggesting he been “fed” it by Prime Minister David Cameron. However, writing in the Washington Post, Adam Taylor pointed out that Obama had uttered “queue” numerous times in the past, and was kind enough to cite this blog on the president’s use of such other Britishisms as “full stop,” “run to ground,” and “take a decision.”

As with many words, I distinctly recall the first time I heard “peckish.” The student group I was leading on a British trip in the mid-1990s was on a touring bus (which I was learning to call a “coach”), and the tour guide said there would be cafes in the next town we’d stop in, “in case you’re feeling peckish.” From the context I concluded that it meant a little hungry—that is, less than “starving” or “famished”—and so it does.

The OED reveals that the term popped up in Britain as early as 1714. All the pre-1988 OED citations are British, including my favorite, from P.G. Wodehouse in 1936: “Not since the distant days of my first private school had I been conscious of such a devastating hunger. Peckish is not the word. I felt like a homeless tapeworm.” A notable use came in Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop” sketch from 1972:

Owner: What can I do for you, Sir?

Customer: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmon Street just now, skimming through Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, and I suddenly came over all peckish.

O: Peckish, sir?

C: Esurient.

O: Eh?

C: ‘Ee I were all ‘ungry-like!

However, as befitting its pre-Revolutionary origin, the word did migrate to the U.S.; like “reckon,” it appears to have survived mainly in Western or rural settings. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a line from The Clockmaker (1838) by the Nova Scotia author Thomas Haliburton: “I don’t care if I stop and breakfast with you, for I feel considerable peckish this morning.” Its first appearance in the New York Times came in an 1872 Western tale, where a character says, “All hands got to be pretty peckish.” And the word shows up in an 1899 dictionary of Virginia “Folk-Speech,” defined as “Inclined to eat, somewhat hungry.”

The Coen brothers may or may not have been aware of this when they wrote the script for O Brother, Where Art Thou, their 2000 backwoods Depression-era version of The Odyssey. Big Dan Teague, the character played by John Goodman, says, “Thank you boys for throwin’ in that fricassee. I’m a man of large appetite, and even with lunch under my belt, I was feelin’ a mite peckish.”

In America, “peckish” developed another meaning, kind of befitting the way it sounds. The OED defines this as “Irritable, peevish; touchy,” and has an 1857 quote from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine: “I have observed that mothers are apt to be oversweet on their daughters-in-law at first, and terribly peckish on them afterwards.”

Both senses fell out of use in the U.S. until the age of NOOBs. That 1988 OED citation is from the American novelist Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking: “At four in the afternoon, everyone feels a little peckish, but only the British have institutionalized this feeling. Every year one English magazine or another carries an article about the decline of the tearoom, but teatime still exists and many tea shops serve it.”

That was a bit of an outlier, and notably dealt with an British topic. The word really didn’t start taking off in the U.S. until a decade or so later. I saw O Brother but didn’t notice the word, and the first time I recall encountering it here was in 2015, when one of the producers of the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend said in a radio interview that she’d chosen a California town as the setting in part because the local mall had pretzel shops at both entrances, “just in case you got peckish for a pretzel.” (I posted this quote when I first wrote about “peckish,” and several commenters objected to the peckish for something construction as a vulgar Americanism.)

Since 1995, the word has appeared in the Times 107 times, including in a review of a bar on the Lower East Side: “If peckish, try the matzo-meal fried chicken with pastrami-spiced gravy ($23).” Most recently, it was in the first sentence of a fitness article: “Why are we so peckish after some workouts but uninterested in eating after others?”

Why, indeed?

A few years ago I wrote about the word “shock” used as an attributive noun, meaning “shocking” — as in shock survey, shock victory, shock election results, etc. It’s fairly common in the British press, but at the time I could find only one U.S. use and labeled it “On the Radar.” But I’ve seen quite a few examples over the past few months. I didn’t write them down, but I’m pretty sure they were all in New York Times sports coverage, as was this one, just published by tennis writer Christopher Clarey, in reference to newly crowned U.S. Open champ Iga Swiatek:

I therefore upgrade “shock” to full-fledged NOOB.

The phrase means “available for sale” or, more generally, “available.” The first OED citation is from the  (London) Daily News in 1881: “Old wheat scarce and dear. Very little barley on offer.” But using Google Books, I came up with an example more than fifty years older, from a September 1826 issue of Cobbett’s Political Register:

But in any case, the phrase didn’t cross the Atlantic for another century or more:

A relatively early use came in the New York Times in 1990: “Tens of thousands of Apple Macintosh users visited the Macworld trade exposition here earlier this month, examining the hardware and software on offer.” It arrived in the New Yorker through British writers—Kenneth Tynan in 1977 and Salman Rushdie in 1992—and was first used there by an American one, Hendrik Hertzberg (using the magaqzine’s famous editoral “we”), in 1994: “We know, for example, that there are people who picked up their first copy of The New Yorker on account of a story or a “casual”–on account of something by O’Hara or Cheever or Salinger or Perelman or Munro or Updike–and only later, and gradually, became aware that other kinds of writing were on offer in these pages too.”

But it’s all over the place now. The Times used the phrase 112 times in 2021, from to January 21 (at a hair colorist’s studio, “Cappuccino and mineral water were served, and tuna and watercress salad was on offer”) to December 21 (“While the Omicron variant has thrown many people’s New Year’s Eve plans into doubt, there’s no shortage of events on offer in the televised realm”).

This popped up on my New York Times phone app this morning.

The headline, taken directly from the columnist Bret Stephens, spurred to me take another look at shambolic, which I first addressed almost precisely eleven years ago. (Time flies when you’re having fun.) The definition of the adjective is “Chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined” — that is, in a state of shambles. As I noted then, the OED‘s first citation is from The Times of London in 1970, but there’s also an odd note: “Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958.” Doesn’t say who’s doing the reporting.

In any case, there are definitely antedates to the 1970 quote, and even to 1958. Moving in reverse chronological order:

• August 3, 1965: “Mr: William Yates The hon: Member must understand that so long as the country is willing to pour more and more money into this ancient, shambolic building in this area of London, there is no chance of getting that or having any of the facilities that he wants…”–Parliamentary debate
• July 25, 1965: “Our social life is shambolic.”–The Sunday Times
• 1958: “He said his club had coined a new word ‘Shambolic,’ which meant spending more time watching the weather than playing.”–West Sussex Times
• 1952: “… one must admit there were those among us who were somewhat on the shambolic side.”–The Tank. (This citation appears in Wiktionary, which links to a Google Books entry, but I don’t 100 percent trust it because Google Books doesn’t offer a full view and its dating is often dodgy.)

Next is an interesting quote I turned up in the ProQuest database. It’s an abstract of a 1946 article from the Blackpool Tribune reviewing a book by Roland Gant called How Like a Wilderness. It’s not clear who write the abstract, or when, but it has the feel of being composed at the time–and also suggests “shambolic” might have been World War II military slang. The blurb begins: “THE AUTHOR parachuted into the Calvados country on D-Day in an operation which, in the language of those days, would have been described as ‘shambolic.'”

And there’s one more, a full seven years earlier, which I had cited in my earlier post. It’s from a May 1939 number of The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics. (Previously, I had found it via Google Books, but it doesn’t appear to be there anymore, and this time I dug it up in the JSTOR database.)

I’m pretty certain that this doesn’t have any relation to the present-day “shambolic.” For one thing, it’s in an American journal, and Ngram Viewer shows the word not taking hold in the U.S. till the 1990s.

For another, the context (including quotation marks) suggests that the writer, David S. Wald, is inventing a new word based on “sham,” not “shambles.” But the word is undeniably there and I hope the OED takes note.

As I say, American use picked up at the end of the last century. It first turned up in the New York Times in a 1984 William Safire column taking note of the word. Between then and today’s Bret Stephens quote, the word appeared in the paper 365 times.

And finally, I should note that we should be grateful to “shambolic” if only because it spawned omnishambles!