Good On Us

When I started Not One-Off Britishisms, nearly three years ago, it was a sort of experiment. In retrospect, I see that I was testing the commonly voiced proposition that the best blogs tend to be about the narrowest topics.

Well, narrow I have been. And while I won’t make any judgments about “best,” NOOBs recently passed the 750,000 page view mark, which is not nothing. (273,894 have come from the U.S. and 257,247 from the U.K.) Beyond the numbers, it’s been greatly rewarding for me. I’ve been able to explore a fun hobby and add infinitesimally to the fount of knowledge, all while never (knowingly) harming anybody. Best of all for me have been the comments, which continually delight and instruct. There are too many examples to name, but just in the past week, in the discussion of Titbits, I learned about the venerable magazine of that name and even heard from someone who’d worked as an editor there in its last days.

In this general air of self-congratulation, I thought I’d pass along some statistics, To start with comments, there have been 3,981 of them, and the most prolific recent commenters are:

Hal Hall
Martin James
IvanOpinion
czyrko
DW
Bren

Thanks, mates.

The most commented entry has been “Arse” with 99 of them, followed by:

European Date Format is the most-read single post, followed by

“Mewling Quim“
“Ginger“
“xx“
“Streets Ahead“
“Easy Peasy“

All that must mean something, but for the life of my I can’t think of what it is. Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. Talk to you again when we reach a million.

That Olde-Time Feeling

The indispensable Nancy Friedman forwards an e-mail she just got from the American grocery chain Trader Joe’s:

I guess they’re trying to get an old-fashioned feel. And by “old-fashioned” I mean 1842–which was the last time favourite was more common than favorite in American English, according to this Google Ngram Viewer chart:

“Queue” (verb)

Long ago I wrote a post on queue, meaning what Americans would traditionally call a line, and have returned to the word from time to time. But I have concentrated on the noun form, as I’ve felt that Americans would much more frequently talk about “a queue” than say they “queued up” or “queued.” (I’ll note that I’m specifically talking about a physical line with physical people in it, not the variants of the word in music and computers, in which queue has particular meanings that are found on both sides of the Atlantic.)

Even in Britain, the noun came first, with an 1839 citation (from Thomas Carlyle) compared to this 1920 Times advert for the verb: “Taxi-Cabs queued up for their supplies of ‘Shell.’” The first up-less verb queue isn’t until a 1978 quote from a Dick Francis novel: “We are damned lucky to have been given the few weeks’ option. They’ve got other buyers practically queueing for it.”

Francis chooses one of the two variants for the gerund, the other being queuing. They have duked it out over the years, with the streamlined form surging ahead since the 1990s, according to Google Ngram Viewer chart of British usage since 1930:

At this point, American queue (noun) is quite common, one reason being that line has so many meanings that it’s not always clear which one is intended. Queue up has developed a strong presence as well, for the same reason. Yesterday this was in the Los Angeles Times–“The union hall closest to Boeing Co.‘s biggest manufacturing operation swarmed with activity Friday afternoon, as hundreds of machinist union members queued up to vote on the aerospace giant’s latest contract”–and this in the Kansas City Star: “Chappell is the first, but a few others are queued up to receive the implant, including one surgery planned for next month.”

But the up-less verb form is much less common, similar to how Americans will ring someone up, but rarely just “ring” someone. It is making inroads, however, and what a surprise that evidence should come from what could be considered the very epicenter of hipness, a Whole Foods store in San Francisco. Nancy Friedman sends in this photographic proof:

And what a surprise: they stuck in that second “e.”

“Titbit”

Hanks and Thompson, as DIsney and Travers — Hanks and Thompson, as Disney and Travers

My first thought was that I had misheard. I was watching a scene in the film “Saving Mr. Banks” where Walt Disney, played by Tom Hanks, is giving a tour of Disneyland to P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the author of Mary Poppins, which he would dearly love to film. What I seemed to have heard didn’t make sense to me. But a tweet from @NickyD pointed out the same thing and directed me to the movie’s screenplay. That document confirms that Disney tells Travers, “In Adventureland there is a tree–this is a fun fact. A titbit … ”

Then Travers interrupts and corrects him: “Tidbit.”

Disney goes on: “… It has three million leaves, four million flowers”

The surprising thing isn’t that Travers would presume to correct the great Disney. According to the film, that is the very core of her character. Rather, it is an apparent reversal of the characters’ presumed position on the corrected point. I had thought of titbit as both a Britishism and the original form of the expression, and tidbit as a predominately American corruption.

The OED and Google Ngram Viewer gave me some nuance. The first use cited in the OED comes from 1649, is British, and is in fact tidbit, spelled a little differently: “A tyd bit, i.e. a speciall morsell reserved to eat at last.” The first titbit (also British) appears in 1697 and the last, from T.A. Trollope, in 1887: “During the singing of the well-known tit-bits of any opera.”

Ngram Viewer gives a sense of the popularity of the variants in the two countries:

The “Mr. Banks” scene takes place in 1961, at which point, according to Google, tidbit was indeed the favored version in American English and titbit in British English. Now, titbit was still relatively common in AmE until beginning a steady decline in around 1930. (Presumably, that coincided with the rise to prominence of the slang tit, referring to a [usually woman’s] breast, making titbit seem improper, albeit unfairly. British titbit began a decline of its own commencing in around 1950, possibly because by that point the anatomical tit had crossed the Atlantic.) So it’s possible that Disney, who was born in 1901 to an Irish-Canadian father, would indeed have used the term. But that seems far too convoluted a linguistic possibility for this film to make note of.

IMDB tells me that one of the screenwriters of the film, Kelly Marcel, is British, and the other, Sue Smith, is Australian, as was Travers. And it would seem that the only plausibility for the anomaly is the Australian connection. Is it the case that tidbit was and is favored in Oz, to the extent that Aussies would think of titbit as an American corruption? I await wisdom from NOOB readers Down Under.

Collective plural

This appeared a couple of days ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The verb an American would normally use, of course, is “is.” My sense is that the Inquirer’s use of “are” is an aberration, even in coverage of English football.

The same day, John F. Burns had an article in the New York Times about the dodgy job prospects of football managers, and he did indeed use the singular verb form in reference to clubs, as in: “After several lean years, Arsenal is at the top of the Premier League standings, followed closely by Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City.”

However, Burns is English by birth and neither he nor the Times copyeditors could stop him from using another British custom, forgoing the definite article in referring to teams with plural nicknames, like Glasgow Rangers. An American would no sooner refer to “Yankees,” instead of “the Yankees,” than call a field “the pitch.”

Burns, referring to the Tottenham Hotspur club, wrote, “The admonition was not only for Spurs, who have fired eight managers in the past 12 years.”

Well played, sir.

“High Street”

When I first started spending time in England, one new phrase that was completely unfamiliar to me was the High Street, which the OED defines as “very generally, the proper name of that street of a town which is built upon a great highway, and is (or was originally) the principal one in the town.” By the 1950s, metonymic noun and adjective forms had developed, referring to the shops not just on the High Street proper, but on surrounding streets as well, and the goods that could be found in them. From a 2000 article in Elle: “High-street queen Karen Millen launches her first range of spectacles this season, so nab yourself a pair for that librarian-chic look.”

The closest American equivalent, I suppose, would be “Main Street,” but it’s not really the same thing, and besides, to the extent Americans shop in brick-and-mortar stores anymore, they don’t go to High Street or Main Street shops, but instead to big-box stores like Home Depot and Office Depot located in suburban strip malls.

Imagine my surprise, then, to pick up the Philadelphia Inquirer recently and read, “Retail rents on Walnut Street have gone up 33.8 percent in a year, the sharpest annual increase of all ‘high streets’ among U.S. cities…” True, high street was in quotation marks, but it was there.

It turns out the article referred to a report from the real estate company Colliers International. High street is sprinkled all over the Colliers website, but, surprisingly, it’s an American company, based in Seattle. However, a deepish dive into the site reveals that the company originated in Australia, merged with a Canadian company in 1976, and moved to Seattle only in 1976.

So it would appear that Colliers’ use of high street is something between an appendage and an affectation. I would say its chances of catching on here are low.

“Roll-neck sweater”

Reader Jeanne Nelson comments, simply:

“From the New York Times, 12 December 2103:

“But if Mr. [Colin] Wilson was no Angry Young Man, with his lush Romantic hair and roll-neck sweaters he more than looked the part.”

I gather she is suggesting as a NOOB roll-neck sweater, a phrase with which I’m not really familiar, though having read it I get the idea.The Oxford English Dictionart defines roll-neck as “A high loosely turned-over collar on a garment; a garment which has such a collar.” The first citation (from 1897) is from the Washington Post, but everything after 1950 is from Great Britain, including this from a 1977 “Time Out” advert: “Former male model—but more the jeans and rollneck type.”

The New York Times obituary of Colin Wilson helpfully provides this cozy photo of the author in roll-neck, with his wife, Joy:

I am familiar with “turtle-neck,” which the OED defines identifies as “orig.” American and defines as: “A close-fitting roll or band collar, now usu. one intermediate in height between a crew-neck and a polo-neck.” The first citation is an 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog: “The Turtle Neck Shirt or Sweater, double from waist up, one of the most desirable garments ever invented for cold-weather shooting.” Two years later, 15-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt writes home from Groton School: “I should very much like a red turtle neck sweater for skating and coasting.”

P.G. Wodehouse, who spent many years in the U.S., may have carried the term to Britain, writing in 1946, “He dresses like a tramp-cyclist, affecting turtle-neck sweaters and grey flannel bags.”

The New York Times has used the expression “roll-neck” or “rollneck” (the hyphen comes and goes) about fifty times in its history, including this from a fashion piece in 2009: “Remember when the cast of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ modeled in the J. Crew catalog and suddenly everyone was wearing those rollneck sweaters?”

By contrast, “turtle neck” or “turtleneck” have appeared some 4,000 times, including this sentence, just a couple of weeks ago, from an interview with Will Ferrell’s anchorman character, Ron Burgundy: “Dapper in a glen plaid polyester suit, brown ribbed turtleneck and dark-green leather jacket, Mr. Burgundy strode into the store, stopping to hold aloft some merchandise.”

Here’s the Times’ photo of Burgundy:

To me, this looks awfully close to Colin Wilson’s roll-neck. My sense is that originally, turtleneck referred to collars that were folded-over snugly and more or less low, and roll-neck to those that were folded over loosely and more or less high. I sense, further, that in the U.S., that roll-neck is a subset of the larger category turtleneck, and that roll-neck is in fairly wide use in the U.K., but is common in the U.S. only in fashion circles.

But I await the judgment of those who know better.

“Pervy”

Reviewing R. Kelly’s new CD, “Black Panties,” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dan DeLuca describes the performer as “the most pathologically pervy of pop stars.”

Something about that pervy piqued my NOOB-dar. I scuttled over to the OED, which defines the adjective as “Sexually perverted; pornographic” and locates its origin not in Britain but Australia. First cite is from a 1945 novel by the Australian Lawson Glassop, We Were the Rats: “Listen to this… ‘He buried his head in the warm fragrance of her bosom.’ So-and-so, so-and-so. It gets pervy again here. ‘His hungry kisses were returned with passionate abandon.’” The second is from a 1970 British book, Sir, You Bastard, by G.F. Newman: “Twenty maximum security, the lights never out, pervy screws watching every movement.”

There is also this illuminating exchange from the Australian novelist Jon Cleary’s 1982 book Clearfield’s Daughter: “‘What about Aussie men?’ ‘They’re different. They just think it’s pervy for the girl to be on top. Lie still!”

Google Ngram Viewer shows a rapid rise in pervy use in the U.K in the late ’80s, with the U.S. starting to follow suit about a decade later:

(The word shows up pre-1990, but almost all uses are either of proper names or the Russian word pervy. I believe it means “first” in that language, at least judging by this quote I found on the Internet: “‘How was that as a first try?’ asked Trotsky. [Vladimir] Mayakovsky answered with a devastating pun: ‘The first pancake falls like a People’s Commissar’ (pervy blin lyog narkomom), a play on the saying ‘the first pancake falls like a lump.'”)

The word first appeared in the New York Times in 2000, in an interview with the novelist Edmund White: “Even though people act as though you’re being exhibitionistic in some sort of pervy way by writing about all of this stuff, I actually see it as sort of heroic.” Since then it’s been in the paper about seventy-five times, including this telling quote from a 2004 piece about fashion designer Christopher Bailey, datelined London: “You can’t even say the look is British, although in his latest women’s show, for fall 2004, he did have leather buttons and some see-through rain capes. Very pervy, Bridget Jones would say.”

Since 2009, the word has appeared about forty times in the Times, suggesting that it is now firmly in the American chattering class’s lexicon. One quote earlier this year described a (very) new version of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” that was performed earlier this year. “‘Ma’am, I don’t mean to sound twisty or pervy,’ goes one line in his rejiggered ‘Non so più.’ ‘Damn, I just love when a body’s all curvy.’”

“Purpose-built”

When Jan Freeman noted on Twitter that she had heard an NPR correspondent use purpose-built, I was momentarily befuddled. Not only did I not know the phrase was a Britishism, I also kind of didn’t know what it meant. Merriam-Webster informed me that the phrase is an adjective meaning “designed and built for a particular use,” adding “chiefly British.” A Google Ngram chart confirmed this, and also that American use is on the rise. (The blue line represents British use, the red line American.)

The New York Times has used purpose-built about 300 times in its history, first in 1929 in a reference to “purpose-built taxicabs.” But things have picked up lately: there have been 49 purpose-builts in the Times in 2012 and 2013 alone. Most of them, interestingly, refer to cars or some car-related things, as in the most recent reference, on November 15, 2013: “After an absence of half a decade from the United States, Formula One returned last year with a Grand Prix at the first purpose-built circuit in the country.” But art critic Michael Kimmelman this year described a Tuscan vineyard as “purpose-built nature on a very large scale” and columnist Paul Krugman, a serial NOOBer, argued against gerrymandering, writing, “Let’s stop allowing the parties to pick their voters (and put them into purpose-built districts).”

I’m still a little befuddled by purpose-built. One commenter on the Merriam-Webster definition (and since when have definitions had commenters?) said the phrase was frequently superfluous, noting, “One uses ‘purpose-built’ as an adjective to differentiate between items that were built for a reason and items that were built for no reason at all”–the implication being that very few things are built for no reason at all. (Another commenter noted, “Marketing buzzward.” I like the way they think, though not necessarily their spelling.)

But on reflection, and on examination of the Times items above, I can see that the phrase is occasionally useful and apt, especially when you consider the alternative. That’s right, I’m talking about bespoke.

Possible NOOB Backlash?

The ever-alert Wes Davis points out that Netflix has inexplicably changed the name of the “Instant Queue” to “My List.”