It’s always instructive to look at H.L. Mencken’s The American Language,, which was originally published in 1919 and went through many editions before Mencken released the second and final “Supplement” in 1948. In his chapter “Briticisms in the United States” (I have before me the 1936 edition), he writes, “It is most unusual for an English neologism to be taken up in this country, and when it is, it is only by a small class, mainly made up of conscious Anglomaniacs… To the average red-blooded he-American [the stage Englishman’s] tea-drinking is evidence of racial decay, and so are the cut of his clothes, his broad a, and his occasional use of such highly un-American locutions as jolly, awfully and ripping.”

He mention a number of words that have managed to “seep in” among certain classes, some of which I’ve considered in the past, including “mummy” and “smog“; on the other hand, he says, “wowser” and “wangle” “have never got a foothold.”

Wangle eventually did, though it took some time. Over thee next couple of weeks, I’m going to consider some of the other “Briticisms” mentioned by Mencken that took a while to catch on here, starting with one that will probably surprise you. Mencken writes,

When certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams …, fell upon them and quickly routed them.

The surprising one, of course, is “swagger,” which is now common enough in the U.S. to have been used 272 times in the New York Times over the past year, including in these headlines:

These are all “swagger” as a noun, deriving from the OED‘s definition 1 a.: “The action of swaggering; external conduct or personal behaviour marked by an air of superiority or defiant or insolent disregard of others.” The dictionary’s citations, all British and all dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, include this from King Solomon’s Mines (1885): “He was an impudent fellow, and..his swagger was outrageous.”

The noun comes from the verb, defined by the OED as: “To behave with an air of superiority, in a blustering, insolent, or defiant manner; now esp. to walk or carry oneself as if among inferiors, with an obtrusively superior or insolent air.” The dictionary has some interesting quotes, starting with Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: “What hempen homespunnes haue we swaggring here, So neere the Cradle of the Fairy Queene?” Then this from Gulliver’s Travels in 1726: “He..became so insolent..that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me.” And, showing at least some adoption in America, from Washington Irving’s Tales of Traveller (1824): “He took complete possession of the house, swaggering all over it.”

Google Ngram Viewer shows that except for a few years in the 1840s, “swagger” has always been more common in Britain than in the U.S.

The most common current form, I would say, is the shortened form “swag,” an incredibly rich word that has seven separate entries in Green’s Dictionary of Slang–four nouns (including the word for promotional freebies), two adjectives, and one verb. The one that comes from “swagger” has this OED definition: “Bold self-assurance in style or manner; an air of great self-confidence or superiority.” It came out of hip-hop where one of the first uses was in a 2003 Jay-Z song: “My self-esteem went through the roof, man. I got my swag.”

I wonder what Mencken would have made of that.

It started when I sent an article from the sports news site New York Times sports site The Athletic to my tennis buddy Don Lessem, who occasionally uncorks an underarm serve. The article was about the top professional Sara Errani, who uses the same dare I say underhanded tactic. Don wrote back: “What’s ‘nous’?”

I was pretty sure he wasn’t misspelling “new,” but otherwise I didn’t know what he was talking about. But when I read the article all the way through, I found this sentence:

“Instead of letting her serve become a complete albatross, Errani has used her ground skills, tactical nous and the shock factor of a serve that regularly registers around 60mph (96.5kph) on the speed gun to reach the very top of tennis in singles and doubles.”

Looking up “nous” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, I find that it means “instinct or common sense, as opposed to actual learning”; that it rhymes with “mouse”; and that there are more than two dozen citations for it in British and Australian sources, going back to 1704, but only one American one, from an 1878 book.

The explanation for its appearance in the Athletic article is simple. Here’s the bio of the author of the article:

“Charlie Eccleshare is a tennis writer for The Athletic, having previously covered soccer as the Tottenham Hotspur correspondent for five years. He joined in 2019 after five years writing about football and tennis at The Telegraph.” The Telegraph being a British newspaper.

And in fact there are more Britishisms in this one particular piece:

• Eccleshare calls the underarm serve “cheeky.”
• He gives the speed of Errani’s serve as quoted above, and lists Errani’s her as “5ft 5in (164cm).” An American publication would never give the centimeter or kilometers per hour figures. (Eccleshare also leaves out the spaces that normal Times style requires, but that’s too nerdy a topic to get into, even for me.)
• He talks about her being “broken to love,” meaning a game in which she was serving but didn’t win a point. I’m not sure, but I think the American version is “broken at love.”
• He uses logical punctuation when he quotes someone as saying Errani is “the brain of the team”.
• He uses single quotation marks, or inverted commas, when he refers to Errani of being one of the ‘Fab Four’ of Italian women’s tennis.
• He uses British spelling when he writes about a player who “practised,” rather than “practiced,” a particular shot.

Now, I don’t really have a problem with any of this. Arguably, it makes the writing more colorful. But it does point to a new and robust conduit for NOOBs. Other than that the Times owns the Athletic and their staffs are separate, I’m not exactly sure of the precise relationship between the two entities, but I got to the Errani piece and all other Athletic articles via the Times home page, and Athletic content is in the searchable Times database.. However, it’s clear that that Athletic pieces aren’t subject to Times style rules or editing. As a result, in the coverage not only of international sports but also of Premier League and European football, the Athletic is poised to be a massive source of NOOBs.

This caught my eye in the New York Times the other day:

That word, “cleaner,” wasn’t familiar–I imagined it meant what Americans would call a cleaning lady, a cleaning person, a custodian, a janitor, basically, something that sounded a bit fancier than what the job really is. “Cleaner” felt British to me, along the lines of “carer,” also not found in the U.S. (We would say “companion,” “care-giver,” or, wordiest yet, “home health aide.”)

I asked Lynne Murphy about it and she confirmed that “cleaner” is widely used in the U.K.–as did the OED, with citations as early as 1816. (“A tribe of cleaners, keepers, and porters.’)

Lynne mentioned a British sitcom called “The Cleaner,” about a someone who tidies up crime scenes, but that’s a special case, similar to (but on the other side of the law from) Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction, who as I recall was also referred to as a cleaner.

Incidentally, the IMDB description also calls the “High Potential” character a cleaner, but on Wikipedia she’s a “cleaning woman.”

I’ve seen one other U.S. use of the word, making it barely not a one-off. It was in a TV commercial for a company called Homeaglow, which advertised that for an absurdly low price, it would send a “cleaner” to my home.

I’ve got my ears open for more, but I’m not optimistic, as “cleaner” may be just too straightforward and plain to catch on in America.

My book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American of American English–which is of course based on this blog–has gotten a lot of nice attention in the couple of weeks since it’s been out. I plan to do a post with some of the links to articles, reviews, and podcasts soon. But the piece by The Economist‘s “Johnson” columnist–Lane Greene–deserves a post of its own. The title is “Americans Are Chuffed as Chips at British English.” But I’m the one who’s chuffed, especially because it’s being so widely read.

This link will take you to the piece. There’s a paywall but also a free trial subscription offer, plus seemingly you can read it for free if you register. But if you can’t be arsed (or asked) to do that, here it is.

British intellectuals enjoy bewailing the influx of Americanisms into the language of the mother country. The BBC once asked British readers to send in the Americanisms that annoyed them most and was flooded with thousands of entries, including “24/7”, “deplane” and “touch base”. Matthew Engel, a writer who had kicked off the conversation with an article on unwanted Americanisms, even turned the idea into a book, “That’s the Way It Crumbles”, in 2017.

The furore—which Americans would call a furor—seemed to die down. But in September Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph revived it with a column and book exploring Americanisms, a trend he situates “in the past 15 years”. His language evokes violence, bemoaning American words’ “poisoning”, “linguistic assault”, “conquest” and “penetration”. In the end, though, even the hyperbolic Mr Heffer concedes that Brits are, in fact, “willingly adopting” these words, especially via two channels associated with America: digital technology and “corporatespeak”. He just wishes his countrymen would stop.

But linguistic exchange can also be seen in a more upbeat way. This is the approach of Ben Yagoda, emeritus professor of English at the University of Delaware, in “Gobsmacked!” The trend is older and more extensive than many think. Mr Yagoda describes Britishisms like “it’s early days” and “gone missing” taking hold in America almost entirely below the radar in the 1980s and 2000s, respectively.

Mr Yagoda identifies the intensifier “awfully” (as in “awfully tired”) as the first Britishism, having been noticed (disapprovingly) by an American commentator in the 19th century. The early 20th century saw many more Britishisms take hold, especially via military contact: “gadget”, “cushy”, “scrounge”, “bonkers”, “dicey” and “shambolic” all made their way from the British Tommy to G.I. Joe, and thence to the wider American public.

The internet has spread English in both directions. Being able to read the Guardian and to binge “The Crown” on Netflix has probably speeded up the passage of British terms into American speech. Mr Yagoda has compiled a “top 40”, including “brilliant” (merely “OK, good”), “chat up” and “ginger”. Each term gets a rating on a five-notch adoption scale, from “outpacing” (signifying Americans now use the term more than its coiners in Britain do) to merely “on the radar”, meaning only a few newspaper columnists are using it.

American Anglophiles tend to be part of a media elite who holiday in Europe (and might even use “holiday” as a verb), whereas American slang is seen as passing to Britain through less rarefied channels. Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex, notes that “Friends”, an American comedy show, is often blamed wrongly for the rise of “Can I get…?” at coffee shops in Britain. In her study of online lists explaining British terms to Americans and vice versa, she found the ones about Britishisms for Americans were often framed positively (for example, “a guide to the best Britishisms”), whereas for Brits Americanisms were more often negative (“41 things the Americans say wrong”).

Which Britishisms tickle American fancies? A few sounds recur, such as adjectives ending in “y”, from “cushy” and “smarmy”—Britishisms but no longer seen as such in America—to more recent ones like “cheeky” and “dodgy”. B- and p-sounds also feature, including in made-up words (“bumbershoot” is not, as some Americans believe, a British word for an umbrella). The Oatmeal, a web comic, summed up how British English sounds to Americans: “I remember my days at Oxford, we’d often dabble in a little rumpy-pumpy before dingbangling a fresh todger, haha!” That hints at another source of Britishisms making their way west: insults and “naughty bits” like “shag” and “wanker”. A spirit of playfulness pervades Americans’ use of these British words; they may even tend to overuse them and underestimate their rudeness, because the sounds are so silly.

It is possible that the British need “Gobsmacked!” more than their American cousins. The Americanisation of British English is well known; the Britishisation of American English, not so much (as a Californian teen might say). A country not sure what influence it still has in the world might like to know that the superpower across the ocean still fancies the mother country and its culture. ■

Nancy Friedman is one of my favorite writers on language, so I was over the moon to read her write-up of my book Gobsmacked! I can’t imagine a better appreciation of what I’ve tried to do with the blog and the book.

Her piece also reminded me that, some months back, Nancy had suggested I write about “pap”–a noun for paparazzi photographers, and a verb for what they do, as in these examples she provided.

• “The street looks I papped in Paris” (Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack written by two Oakland, California, residents)
• “I met up with my pal of over a decade, Sarah Isenberg, who got papped out the wazoo (what a horrible phrase I’ve just reified) for her extremely cute cotton frock and gingham sailor cap” (Esque, whose author lives in New York)
• “I guess Van’s slip-ons are having a moment? Morgan Stewart sporting the checkered pair sent the IG girls into a tizzy, and now Jennifer Lawrence has been papped in a black pair” (The Love List by Jess Graves, “New York by way of Atlanta”)

And she provided a screen shot of a February 2024 passage in the American ad-industry publication Adweek (which also includes the NOOB “range“).

To give a bit of history, the verb and the noun–“pap” to refer to a paparazzo, which is the singular of paparazzi–both popped up in the U.K. in the early 1990s, according to the OED, which has these early citations for the verb:

• “The Queen, it has been said, doesn’t like being ‘papped’ on her own estate… Certain over-zealous royal flunkeys were sounding off about pictures of HM taking her corgis for a walk in the snow at Windsor Castle.” Daily Mirror, 1991
• “Night is a good time for ‘papping’ celebrities and I’m often called from my bed to follow up a tip-off.” Independent, 1994.

The dictionary has an American use of the noun from the New York Daily News in 1998: “The duo recently noshed at Kobe Club, giving paps ample opportunity to get some shots of them.”

As Nancy’s examples suggest, the verb is pretty common here now. I can offer one example of the noun, from an episode of the sitcom Abbott Elementary last season. Bradley Cooper (as himself) has just unexpectedly shown up at the eponymous primary school, and one of the teachers, busy on his phone, defensively says: “I’m just texting the other teachers, not the paps.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang says this term for “idiot” is “usually Irish.” Green’s gives quite a few alternative spellings — “edgit, eedjit, eegot, eejut, e-jit, ejot, idjeet, idjet, idjit, idjut, ijet, ijit, ijjit, ijiot, ijut” — which complicates the nationality issue, since Green has found “idjut,” “idjit,” “idjet,” and “ijit” in U.S. sources from the 1880s through the twentieth century.

But not “eejit,” which, I’m pretty sure, is a separate thing. Over at Urban Dictionary, some commenters say it’s Scottish as well as Irish; others say that is shite. A couple of them suggest that calling someone an eejit is less harsh than calling them an idiot.

“Eejit” first pops up in a New Zealand newspaper in 1899:

Green’s first Irish sighting is from a 1929 book: “A big eejit of a bobby is after takin’ her to College Street Station.” Since then it’s been common in Ireland, and is frequently used by the characters in Brian Friel’s plays. More recently, Cillian Murphy, the star of Oppenheimer, reflecting on celebrity, said “You’d be an eejit not to enjoy it.”

As for American use, it’s admittedly sparse. In 2017, prizefighter Floyd Mayweather unleashed it on Conor McGregor while in Toronto promoting their upcoming fight.

In 2013, a New York Times reviewer paraphrased Scott McCracken’s memoir Crapalachia: “In other words, we aren’t the eejits; y’all are.”

Not surprisingly, given his fondness for “fecking” and “gobshite,” the heaviest American user is journalist Charles Pierce. Here’s a sampling of some of his Twitter/X posts:

I wouldn’t be surprised if “eejit” catches on. It’s pungent and fun to say, and there sure are a lot of them out there.

Today is publication day for the book based on this blog, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English.

The blog and the book have truly been labors of love, and I can’t think of any better way to celebrate than by reprinting the first paragraph of the book’s Acknowledgments.

My biggest thanks go to the readers of my blog Not One-Off Britishisms, who took to it with enthusiasm, kept on reading, and inspired me to keep it going lo these fourteen years. And a special thank you to the commenters, who (almost) unfailingly have clever and interesting things to say, who gently correct me when I make a misstep, and who have provided many ideas for posts. The most prolific voice belongs to Paul Dormer, who has commented 363 times as of this writing; shout-outs also to Anthony, David Ballard, cameron, David Griggs, Hal Hall, Arthur Jack, popegrutch, Catherine Rose, and Nick L. Tipper.

Cheers to you all. Hopefully, it’s still early days for this enterprise, and it can go from strength to strength.

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.

I’m not speaking about the preliminary coat of paint but the word defined by Merriam-Webster as “a small book for teaching children to read; a small introductory book on a subject; a short informative piece of writing.” The dictionary gives the American pronunciation as rhyming with “dimmer,” and British as rhyming with “climber.” (Which is how both countries pronounce the paint thing.)

I have a strong and particular association with the word. The satiric magazine Mad, which was my bible as a kid, printed several dozen humorous “Primers” between 1956 and 1999. I distinctly recall my mother explaining to me how the word was pronounced–perhaps because, quite logically, I had said “pry-mer.”

As explained by Anne Curzan and Rebecca Kruth in their radio feature “That’s What They Say,”

The “primmer” pronunciation came into English from the Latin term “primarius” which meant “first.” This word can be traced back in written forms of English to the late 1300s. It originally referred to a Christian prayer book for laypeople (as opposed to clergy) that was often used to teach reading. By the 1500s, there are versions of these books that are only used to teach children to read.

In Britain, they go on, the “prye-mer” pronunciation emerged in the nineteenth century and became the dominant one in the twentieth, but “primmer” held on in the U.S.

Until recently, that is. On Facebook, I asked people how they pronounced the word and the results were illuminating. For the most part, it broke down by age: most of the people over 60 said “primmer,” and most under 60, “prye-mer.” The only non-American who responded was an English woman who has lived in the U.S. for some decades, and who said, “I don’t recall ever hearing ‘primmer.'” Of course, the word doesn’t come up that much.

The invaluable Youglish pronunciation website confirmed these impressions. It was hard to come up with a good sample size among U.K. speakers, because everybody seemed to be talking about paint or makeup, but 100 percent of the people referring “primer”-as-handbook said “prye-mer.” Among Americans, there was a perfect 8-8 split among the first sixteen examples, with a similar age breakdown as I saw on Facebook.

Notably, there were two videos featuring Bill Nye, the Science Guy (born 1955), and in both, so as to cover his bases, he said one pronunciation, then the other. In this clip, it comes it at the 1:52 mark.

Judging what I’ve been reading in the sports pages and hearing in broadcasts, sports (“sport” if you’re British) has become a fount of Not One-Off Britishisms. Here is a recent headline from the New York Times’ sports division, The Athletic:

I’m not positive but imagine the circled phrase is a Britishism, as Americans would normally say “changing” or “switching” teams; the British say they are “moving house” or “moving offices.” (I still recall the first time I heard the latter expression from none other than legendary editor Tina Brown.)

And here’s the beginning of an Olympics-related article from an American writer for The Athletic:

As I explained in this post, “athletics” is the British (and international) term for what Americans call track [running] and field [throwing things like discuss and shot put].

But The Athletic is nothing compared to the Tennis Channel, where (American) commentators Jim Courier and, especially, Brett Haber have recently gotten completely jiggy with Britishisms, many of them unfamiliar to most American ears. A sampling:

• Courier said a match between Janik Sinner and Alexander Rublev was “a ginger matchup.”
• Haber referred to Jacob De Minaur’s “kit,” that is, outfit.
• Getting more obscure, Courier said a certain shot “works a treat.”
• Haber said player Jack Draper was “well thrashed” online after he didn’t call an infraction on himself.
• After a certain shot failed, Haber said “No joy.”

And in the deepest cut of all, Haber, said that it was “early doors” in a match. The bloke could commentate for the BBC!