A few days after the Paris terrorist attacks, Dina Temple-Raston of NPR reported that French authorities “were very focused on trying to abort a second attack. And they’re worried another one, a follow-on attack, will happen.” That night, I heard Rachel Maddow use “follow-on” the same way in her MSNBC broadcast.

Not being familiar with the term, I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and found this definition: “being or relating to something that follows as a natural or logical consequence, development, or progression.” It would seem a useful term, but the origins are murky. The OED reveals a cricket etymology for “follow on,” starting as a verb referring to a side that “go[es]  in again at once after completing the first innings, in consequence of having made a prescribed number of runs less than their opponents in the first innings.” (I can only assume that that sentence makes sense.)  The dictionary quotes an 1865 cricketers’ guide: “Surrey ‘followed on’, but left only 23 runs for Oxford to get to win.”

The first non-cricket use cited by the OED is from a 1960 advertisement in “Farmer & Stockbreeder”: “This new booklet contains advice about ‘follow-on’ feeding.” Not sure what “follow-on feeding” would be, or how it followed (no pun intended) from the cricket term.

Non-cricket “follow-on” was subsequently picked up in various contexts, maybe most commonly in the business term “follow-on effect.” I feel that it’s mainly been a Britishism, but at this point I am unable to say for sure. I can report, however, that the the majority of the results in a Google News search for “follow-on effect” are from Australian sources.

From a recent article in The New Yorker:

“Inverted commas” is in the category of Britishism for which there’s an exact American equivalent, like “advert” (“advertisement,” “ad”); in this case, it’s “quotation marks.” It’s actually more annoying than that because the whole notion of inverted commas doesn’t make sense in the U.S., where we use double quotation marks, like “this.” (The British single quotes, like ‘this,” do resemble upside-down commas.)

I would have thought this would be a one-off, but in The New Yorker alone, “inverted commas” have been mentioned several times in the past decade, by such writers as Adam Gopnik and Hendrik Hertzberg.

I say stop it now.

“Long list” (or “longlist”) is list of potential nominees from which a  “shortlist” will be selected. It can be both a noun or a verb, e.g., “The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.”

“Shortlist” came first–as early as the 1920s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary–with “long list” showing up in the 1980s. That’s when it showed up in Britain, that is: the first appearance I’m aware of in the U.S. was last year, when the body administering the National Book Awards instituted a ten-book longlist in each category, subsequently to be trimmed to five.

A measure of the term’s unfamiliarity here is the divergence in rendering it: in this Google search, you can see that Time and The New Yorker use “longlist” while NPR and Vulture use “long list.” The concept and the word will probably catch on, because the more nominees, the more interest can be stoked in a particular prize or award. If and when it does, the one-word form will become standard, as it is in Britain.

When I wrote about the expression in 2014, it was very much an outlier. Its use by American food television personality Anthony Bourdain in an (excellent!) People.com interview suggests it may be catching on.

As I say, NOOB readers predicted “flat”–AmE equivalent, “apartment”–would catch on here, and so it seems to have, judging from the above and similar advertisements. The term is, in my experience, largely restricted to commercial attempts to fancy up a dwelling, rather than being a word an actual American person would use.

Except in San Francisco, Nancy Friedman reports: “One of the things that struck me when I moved to the Bay Area 40+ years ago [from Southern California] was that San Franciscans ALWAYS said ‘flat’ instead of ‘apartment.’ I’d never heard the term at all, and I grew up 370 miles away. It’s still true, and I still have no idea why.”

I see that back in 2012, I gave a poll asking readers for NOOB nominees. I promised to follow up and do posts on the winners, which were shag, flat, and a tie for third between gap year and row.

Typically, I proceeded to totally forget about it, though I did ultimately write about row and gap year.

Bringing this to mind is a line in an article by an American college professor that just came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s writing about the depiction of professors in Woody Allen’s films, starting with “Manhattan” (1979) where

Michael Murphy plays an English professor dragging his feet on an F. Scott Fitzgerald book while still having enough money to wonder if he should trade in his spacious apartment on the Upper East Side for a house in Connecticut, with seemingly endless time and money to eat the overpriced food at Elaine’s (and being enough of a celebrity to get a table there) and have an affair with Diane Keaton, with whom he can have a spontaneous shag at a hotel somewhere between Bloomingdale’s and 68th Street.

So, “shag.” It’s of course a verb and noun (as above) referring to the act of copulation, made popular worldwide by the subtitle of one of Mike Myers’s Austin Powers movie: “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Fascinatingly, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for it came from none other than Thomas Jefferson in 177o: “He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body.” All the subsequent citations are from British and Commonwealth sources.

I’m not sure of its current state of play thereabouts, but in the U.S., post-Austin Powers, it seems to have settled in as a euphemism slightly more randy  than some of the others on offer but still respectable enough to meet the standards of such publications as the Chronicle.

Next: “flat.”