“Cheers,” Again

This is an interjection with a history, and a fair amount of complexity. It started as the nautical affirmative “Cheer ho!”, said in response to “What cheer, ho?” The variants cheeroh and cheero then became used as “a friendly greeting or a call to attract attention” (OED) and subsequently to express good wishes on parting, to express encouragement (“take heart!”), and as a toast or salutation on drinking. A bit of doggerel composed in 1919 by the American philologist Charles Alphonso Smith commented on the term’s all-purpose nature: “The British have a funny word—Cheer-O!.. They said it when we joined the fleet, They say it now when e’er we meet, Till smilingly we all repeat, Cheer-O.”

A third variant, cheerio, surpassed cheero in 1916 (according to Ngram Viewer) and became, along with old chap, one of main words the American caricature of an Englishman habitually said. The idea had been established by 1941, when Judy Garland encouraged a besieged Britain with the song “Chin Up! Cheerio! Carry On!”, lyrics by Yip Harburg, in the movie Babes on Broadway. The same year, General Mills introduced a breakfast cereal called Cheerioats. In 1946, faced with a legal challenge by the Quaker Oats, they changed the name to Cheerios.

Cheero and cheerio begat cheers, which took on all the old meanings. My experience tells me that the only one adopted in the United States was the drinking toast, which has been widespread here for as long as I can remember and served as the title of the NBC sitcom, set in a bar of the same name, which starred Ted Danson.

Meanwhile, over in the U.K., the word took on yet another sense. As Philip Howard wrote in The Times in 1976: “By a remarkable transition from the pub to the sober world at large outside cheers has become the colloquial synonym in British English for ‘thanks.’” In his 1978 novel Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis described a news agent saying “Cheers five times, the first time when he noticed the approach of his customer, again when he handed the magazines, again when he took money, again when he gave change and the last time when bidden good-bye.”

Flash forward twenty years, to when I started spending a good amount of time in London. I was struck precisely by a newsagent’s “Cheers” when I handed over payment for my Independent or Evening Standard. And over the next few years, as I paid attention, it seemed to me that “thank you” was indeed the preeminent meaning for the word.

Not long after that, the word exploded for a simple reason: email, where “Cheers” became immensely popular as a sign-off, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S. But here’s the odd thing: I believe that over there, it more or less means “thanks,” while in here, it more or less means “good tidings” or “all the best wishes” or something vague and positive along those lines. I acknowledge that, short of interviewing people who use the sign-off, I can’t prove or disprove my proposition. So I’m hoping readers will help me out. Those who sign off with “Cheers,” what do you mean by it?

“Eye-ther”

As late as 1777, when the Royal Standard Dictionary was published, the predominant pronunciations of “either” and “neither” in England were “ee-ther” and “nee-ther.” But that gradually changed. In its 1907 edition, The Oxford Dictionary remarked that “eye-ther” was more prevalent in the “educated speech” of Londoners. H.W. Fowler predicted in 1926 that this pronunciation would “probably prevail,” and by 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers revised Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, it had “almost wholly displaced” the long e pronunciation.

For a long time, the United States stuck with “ee-ther,” for the most part. In 1873, the philologist W.D. Whitney harrumphed that the ”eye-ther” pronunciation had “spread …by a kind of reasonless and senseless infection, which can only be condemned and ought to be stoutly opposed and put down.” A 1928 satirical sketch called “The Lady Buyer” noted of that personage,

always, standing her in good stead, and ready at the tip of her tongue is her crystal-clear, British pronunciation of “either.” She says the staunch word with such hauteur as to make one forget other mistakes and even feel apologetic for having noticed them. Nothing on earth could make her whisper “ether” in the darkest corner of a stock-room. She knows it would ruin her socially.

Memorably, “eye-ther” was one of the British pronunciation choices (along with “to-mah-to”) in Ira Gershwin’s 1937 lyric to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” In 1961, Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid called “eye-ther” “a sporadic feature of the cultivated speech of Metropolitan New York and Philadelphia…. it is in all probability a recent adoption from British English.”

My ears tell me is that “eye-ther” and “nIe-ther” are currently on the rise in America, especially among young people. My own millennial-generation daughter, despite having two parents who say “ee-ther,” says “eye-ther.” On the pronunciation site Youglish, six of the first twenty American utterances of the word are “eye-ther” (all youngish people), and fourteen are “ee-ther,” including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

I would be interest in the observations of readers, both American and British–or any other English-speaking country, for that matter.

“X years on,” 12 Years On

I wrote about “x years on” in 2011, where “x” is a number and the phrase means, roughly, “x years later.” (I say “roughly” because I think “years on” is only used in ongoing contexts, whereas “years later” can be retrospective. You could write, Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. Four years later, he was defeated.” But not, “…. Four years on, he was defeated.”) The date of my previous post is significant, since it was prompted by discussions of the 9/11 attacks on their tenth anniversary. A good number of them used the expression, especially in headlines, where the brevity of “on” is a virtue. For example, “10 Years On: Finally, Smarter Airport Security Screening?” (Wall Street Journal). And “Though we’ve felt the impact of 9/11, more will yet unfold. Ten years on, it still might be too soon to tell.” (Sacramento Bee.)

We’ve just experienced the twentieth anniversary of of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and my sense is that “years on” is even more popular in discussions of it. Thus, from Google News, and then the New York Times:

The phrase is hard to research since it’s used in many other contexts, e.g., “She served two years on the president’s staff” or “I’ve spent five years on the problem.” But I can say a few things about it. First, it’s fairly new, and second, it’s British in origin. The first use I’ve been able to find is in a Parliamentary address in 1964: “We are more than ten years on since Aneurin Bevan uttered those words.” Four years later, an Alan Bennett play called “Forty Years On” was produced in the West End. “Ten years on” was said Parliament twice in the ’70s and ten times in the ’80s, some in reference to a book called Ten Years On in Northern Ireland.

Here’s the Ngram Viewer graph for American and British use of “years on”:

There’s a lot of noise in the graph; that is, it includes uses of the phrase in other contexts. But I believe the gap that begins to yawn in the late ’60s represents British adoption of the “X years on” expression. The first American used I’ve been able to find is a headline from 1991: “A Consummate Teacher: Coach Robinson 50 Years On.”

Thirty-two years on, it’s fully arrived.

Update: Reader Ian Christian reports that the Harrow school song, composed in 1872, starts out:

“Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,…”

So obviously, Bennett’s was referring to the song in the title of his 1968 play. I still have the sense that the “x years on” formulation was rarely used until the 1980s. But I could be wrong.

“Fecking,” “Fookin'”

For the purposes of this blog, “British” refers to the British Isles, meaning not only the United Kingdom but Ireland as well. I mention that now because “feck” is of Irish origin, emerging in the nineteenth century as a verb meaning “steal.” From Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: (1916): “They had fecked cash out of the rector’s room.”

Some decades later, clever Irish people took advantage of how similar “feck” is to another word and began to use it as a Hibernian alternative. This line appears in The Bogman (1952), by the Irish writer Walter Macken: “The whole feckin world I’d give to be with her on the banks of the Ree.” Since then, various forms—including “feck off’,” “fecker,” and “feck it”—have been seen in the work of other writers, mostly Irish, in reproducing dialogue in novels, plays, and films.

A power user is the playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, whose parents were Irish but who was born and raised in London. I was initially excited to see the Corpus of Contemporary American English list 51 uses of “fecking” between 1995 and 99, but it turned out 44 of them were from McDonagh’s play The Cripple of Inishmaan, which was published in the American journal The Paris Review. Example: “Oh thank Christ the fecker’s over. A pile of fecking shite.” (The other seven “fecking”s in COCA came from Irish contexts as well.)

There has been a sprinkling of American uses over the years, for example in the title of a 2014 blog post by Charles Pierce of Esquire: “Not in My Fecking Backyard.” (It had to do with a controversy in Ireland.) I’ve noticed an uptick recently, which I peg to McDonagh’s popular 2022 film The Banshees of Inisheran. The word is used endlessly in it, including in costar Kerry Condon’s mic-drop line “You’re all feckin’ boring!”

In an interview, Condon contended, “It’s not a swear word. You can say it until the cows come home. My mother doesn’t swear ever. But she says ‘feckin’ all the time.” Stan Carey, who is both Irish and a scholar of language, bears her out, noting that in the 1990s TV comedy Father Ted, Father Jack shouts “Feck off!” regularly enough to make it a catchphrase. “’Feck’ is family-friendly, “ Carey wrote on his blog, “even according to advertising standards authorities…. As expletives go, it has a playful, unserious feel. People who are genuinely furious – as opposed to merely annoyed – or who want to be properly abusive, tend not to use feck: it just isn’t forceful enough.”

“Fooking”—commonly rendered as “fookin’”—is an example of what is known as eye dialect, spelling a word the way it’s pronounced, in this case from the north of England. Someone offered this definition on Urban Dictionary in 2003: “The result of someone with a Mancunian accent trying to say the word ‘fucking.’” An oft-repeated quote from singer Louis Tomlinson, from West Yorkshire, is “I hate fookin’ avocadoes.” And Adrian Chiles’ book We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, about supporters of West Bromwich Albion football, has the line, “He can’t see a fookin’ thing … and he’s got to drive we home.” (Note also the regionalism of “we” as the object of a verb.”)

As for American use, it’s sparse but growing. Journalist Charles Pierce, again, has a favorite epithet on Twitter: “Fookin’ eejit” (idiot). I searched Twitter for tweets containing “fookin’” and emanating in a 200 kilometer radius of New York City and it turned up a couple of dozen hits over the course of a week, including this from an account emanating from East Hampton, N.Y.: “For fook sake man! Im eating my fookin lunch here!!”

“Bits,” Revisited

As I have mentioned before, I am working on turning this blog into a book. True to form, I’ve left some of the most extensive and therefore difficult entries to the end, which is why it wasn’t until yesterday that I tackled “bits.”

To state the obvious, this is a common word. How common? It is the 808^th most frequently used word in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), just behind “decade” and ahead of “reduce.” The OED considers it to be six separate words—two of them verbs and four nouns. I am concerned here with the one of the nouns (the others have to do with the biting of horses, leather flasks, and computer information) that denotes a piece or part of a larger whole, literally or figuratively bitten off. Its entry has within it twenty-five separate variations, most of which are as commonly used in American as British English. (And some more so: as in a “bit part” in a movie, calling twenty-five cents “two bits,” and the meaning of schtick or well-rehearsed routine, as in this quote from Fred Astaire’s autobiography: “We were in Detroit—stranded—and that is where Mother did the pawning-of-the-jewels bit.”)

If you want my full thoughts on the matter, you’ll have to get the book (hopefully available later this year), but I’ll share here some thoughts on what I view as the main NOOB “bit”: using the word for what an American would most likely say “part,” often used in the plural and often preceded by an adjective. An early British example is from an 1873 humorous sketch in The St. Pauls Magazine, where the narrator describes wandering the halls of Parliament and coming upon a man who’s endeavoring to teach the members to “talk better.” This fellow poses a question:

“One of your great debates that fills three or four pages of your Times with the smallest of small print and runs over into the supplement—how much do you read of it next morning ?”

“Well, I generally glance my eye down the columns, and read the sentences where I see there have been ‘laughter’ and ‘cheers.'”

“Ah, just so, you read only the good bits. Now my plan is to make my pupils say nothing but the good bits. None of them shall speak longer than half an hour, and each sentence shall have a Thought in it.”

“The juicy bits” and “the naughty bits” show up in Britain in the 19^th century as well, but really established themselves as phrases in the twentieth. An American would say “the good parts,” “the juicy parts,” and “the naughty parts,” or rather “the dirty parts.”

Most Americans, that is. One finds the occasional literary sort, like critic Richard Eder of the New York Times, writing of a Lina Wertmuller revival in 1976, “Enthusiasm for Miss Wertmuller’s later work may arm the spectator with the fortitude to mark out the good bits.” The same year, American science fiction novelist Ursula Le Guin wrote of H.L. Lovecraft in the Times Literary Supplement, “He imitated the worst bits of Poe quite accurately.”

This use of the word picked up steam in the U.S. in the ‘90s and 2000s, as in a 1999 quote from Time magazine, referring to prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report on the alleged misdeeds of President Bill Clinton: “He wants America to believe he’d only included the good bits to help the legislature reach an informed decision.” More recently, a reader reports that the Turbo Tax program, while it’s loading, displays the message, “Hold on, we’re getting all the technical bits together.” (The be really British, it would have said, “Hang on.”)

One particular kind of “bits” deserves mention. A 1970 episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a sketch called “How To Recognise Different Parts of the Body,” which included this, well, bit (I quote from the Python Wiki):

A voiceover (John Cleese) points out more parts of the body:

10. The big toe

11. More naughty bits (a man standing wearing spotted Bermuda shorts)

12. The naughty bits of a lady (a lady posing wearing spotted Bermuda bra and shorts)

13. The naughty bits of a horse (a horse wearing spotted Bermuda shorts)

14. The naughty bits of an ant

15. The naughty bits of Reginald Maudling (a picture of Reginald Maudling wearing spotted Bermuda shorts)

In his humorous 1988 book God—The Ultimate Autobiography, Jeremy Pascall uses the phrase “dangly bits” five times, including his reference to the creation of Eve: “So much better formed, softer, rounder, smoother, with none of those ugly dangly bits.” “Dangly bits” caught on as a reference to men’s genitals and by 1999, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, had been shortened to just plain “bits.” An example is a quote from Twitter, which I especially like because it uses “bit” twice: “I was in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday. My favourite bit was where Michelangelo painted in the Pope’s advisor, whom he detested, with a snake eating his bits.”

No surprise that at the U.S. vanguard was NOOBs hall-of-famer Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who, in a review of basketball star Jerry West’s memoir in 2011, wrote, “West seems here like both the Hatfields and McCoys. He shoots himself repeatedly in the head, feet and private bits.” The following year, Garner wrote that an author portrayed gay people as “pretty much like straight people, that is, except for what they do with their dangly bits.”

“Dangly bits” and “bits” appeared to be exclusively male provinces. To the rescue came “lady bits,” first spotted in 2005 and growing apace since then. Google reveals that “Lady Bits” is currently the name of a soap, a physical therapy practice, a zine, and an Australian cross-dressing salon.

The phrase is still an outlier in the U.S., but I imagine gained some traction after a 2021 exchange on Drew Barrymore’s talk show with Gwyneth Paltrow (an honorary English person, of course). Barrymore tasked her guest with coming up with alternatives to words you can’t comfortably say on morning network TV, like “something beginning with v that ends in ‘ina.’”

“Lady bits?” Paltrow offered.

“Kidnap” (noun) and ACBL

I’ve written several times, I believe most recently here, about the phenomenon I call American Characters, British Lingo. It’s where a British novelist creates an American character and (unintentionally) has him or her use Britishisms. I am going to give it the acronym ACBL and plan to tag all relevant posts, starting with this one.

The current case is a fairly minor one. I’m a fan of the British mystery novelist Anthony Horowitz and just finished his latest, The Twist of a Knife. It takes place in London theatrical circles, and one of the characters is an American actor named Jordan Williams. At one point he says he and his wife “had a stupid row.” If that were the only ACBL in the book, I wouldn’t have bothered writing about it, because it is believable. Williams’s wife is English, he has lived in the country for a number of years, and furthermore, “row” is a useful word, with a slightly different nuance than “argument” or “fight.”

But I believe the second one is a slip on Horowitz’s part. Williams is talking about his background. He is Native American, and when he was three years old, social workers removed him and his three sisters from their home because their parents were deemed “unsuitable guardians.” He says, “You or I would call it kidnap, but they believed they were saving us.”

I can’t recall ever encountering “kidnap” used as a noun in this way. I (and I believe Americans in general) would say “kidnapping.” Is it a Britishism? The OED has an entry for “kidnap” as a noun meaning “the act of kidnapping,” but in three of the four citations, it’s used as an attributive noun, familiar to me from headlines referring to “A Kidnap Plot” or “Kidnap Verdict.” And the fourth (from a 1970s British novel) is “There was no money in killing you, but maybe a lot in a kidnap.” That sounds borderline okay to me.

I got a bit more confirmation from two other British dictionaries. Collins has a definition of “kidnap” as “the crime of taking someone away by force” and gives as an example “Stewart denies attempted murder and kidnap.” Macmillan has something similar and has the example “the kidnap of a local businessman.” I would absolutely say “kidnapping” in both those cases.

The American Merriam-Webster, meanwhile, doesn’t recognize “kidnap” as a noun.

I’d be interested in you all’s sense of whether this “kidnap” is a Britishism, and very much not an Americanism.

“Brekkie,” “Brekky”

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent January in Australia, where there is virtually no word too short to be abbreviated. One of the most prominent is the first meal of the day, which is rendered as “brekky.” Or “brekkie.”

Hungry Jack’s is Australia’s version of Burger King.

I saw both versions with what seemed like equal frequency. Unsurprisingly, there’s been debate on the issue, as in this article (which punted) and a Perth subreddit where someone posed the question: “Brekky, breaky or brekkie?” Most of the answers were facetious, but among the serious ones, “brekkie” beat out the “brekky” by a score of 3-2. “Breaky” does sometimes show up in the wild but, as some of the commenters pointed out, it’s been contaminated by the Billy Ray Cyrus song “Achy Breaky Heart.”

According to Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), Australia leads the world in the use of both terms, with “brekky” being slightly more popular. Here’s the chart for “brekkie”:

Although Australia has outstripped both countries, the abbreviations started out in Britain and Ireland. The OED has a quote from the 1904 children’s book The Phoenix and the Carpet, by E. (Edith) Nesbit: “I’ve brought your brekkie, and I’ve put the little cloth with clover-leaves on it.” And in Elizabeth Bowen Ann Lee’s (1926), “Do call poor Bingo in..and give him his brekky.” Bingo is a spaniel. The first use in reference to adults I’ve seen is Green’s Dictionary of Slang’s citation of a line from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “And then, when they settled down in a nice snug and cosy little home, every morning they would both have brekky, simple but perfectly served.”

In her youth, in the same period as the Bowen and the Joyce, Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, was partial to yet another variation. From her diary:

My sense is the words took off in Australia in mid-century but lay dormant in Britain till the 2000s, when both rose sharply, especially “brekkie.” Here’s a Google Ngram Viewer chart showing use in British English:

America has lagged behind, obviously.. GloWbE, which tracks usage in 2013-14, shows nine “brekkies” in U.S. sources, but even that’s deceiving, as most of them are quotes from Brits or Australians. However, there’s been a slight uptick in recent years, and I’ve labeled the terms “On the Radar” instead of “Outliers.” Here’s a graphic from a U.S. kids’ news service, posted just last week:

And Denver Post sports columnist Mark Kiszla wrote this in 2021: “The best breakfast in the world is a freshly baked almond croissant, eaten on a ski lift in Val d’Isere, France. Got get up early and move fast if you want to brekky with me, pal.”

Sign me up.

“Fit” Carries the Day

Apologies for the long gap in posting — I have been in Melbourne, Australia, leading a study abroad program for the University of Delaware, and pondering whether the preferred spelling is “brekky” or “brekkie.” The program is winding down and I have a free moment, so wanted to tardily report on Lynne Murphy’s annual U.K.-to-U.S. Word of the Year selection.

As the heading says, it was “fit,” in the sense of sexually attractive. Lynn notes that I have deemed it an “outlier,” but, as she delicately and accurately suggests, “Ben’s probably not in the right demographic for hearing it.”

The OED has the word first showing up in an exchange quoted in a 1985 Observer article: “Better ‘en that bird you blagged last night.” “F—— off! She was fit.” It seems to have been given a boost by its use on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show and on British reality TV shows, such as Made in Chelsea; the clip below is from a “super-fan show,” “Mad on Chelsea.”

Lynne suggests that the U.S. uptick in awareness of “fit” is largely due to another reality show, Love Island, where the word apparently is uttered so often that it’s included in an American glossary of unfamiliar terms used on the show. (And by the way, I think I have to take another look at “banter.”) The British characters on Ted Lasso throw it around as well.

And it shows up in a Love Island takeoff on SNL (at 1:12).

All well and good. But I still say it’s an outlier.

“Shrinkflation”

Lynne Murphy’s final nominee for U.K.-to-U.S. Word of the Year is “shrinkflation,” a portmanteau coinage so new it’s not even in the Oxford English Dictionary. Merriam-Webster added it just this past September, with the definition “the practice of reducing a product’s amount or volume per unit while continuing to offer it at the same price.”

The word’s certainly been used a lot in America of late — seven times in the New York Times in 2022 (and none before that). And it’s certainly a phenomenon. A brief glimpse of my own fridge shows me a 52-ounce Tropicana orange juice container that used to be 64 and a 1.5-quoart Breyer’s ice cream package that used to be 2.

And it’s certainly of British origin. In an online article about the word, Merriam-Webster credits it to the British economist Pippa Malmgren, in 2015 (while also noting than another economist used it with a different meaning, which didn’t catch on, in 2009). However, using the News on the Web (NOW), I found British journalist Marc Shoffman using it in 2013.

In any case, NOW shows the word being used fairly infrequently through 2021, all or almost all in U.K. sources. It expanded into the U.S. in 2022, but, as Lynne Murphy says in her newsletter, it may not “have had enough of a run as a ‘British’ term to be considered an import to the US.”

So what’s my vote for Word of the Year? As noted in the last post, “fit” is not yet common enough here. “Fiddly” is a solid choice, but I’m going with the cheeky one and casting my vote for “soccer.”

When Lynne names a winner, I’ll let you know.

“Soccer” and Other WOTY Candidates

I’ll get to the subject of this post in a minute, but first wanted to note that a couple of days ago, the blog had its three millionth page view. Luckily, I was there and ready to take a screen shot.

So hooray for us. Just goes to show that, for a committed and interested audience, there is no such thing as a too-narrow topic.

As long-time readers know, every year the estimable Lynne Murphy chooses two Words of the Year: an American word picked up in the U.K. and a NOOB. Last year’s U.S.-to-U.K. winner was the pronunciation of the title of the film Dune, and the U.K.-to-U.S. winner was “university,” which has been frequently discussed here. In her newsletter, Lynne listed this year’s nominees (as well as a link where people can express their preference or suggest other words). The U.K.-to-U.S. contenders:

“Fit“
“Fiddly“
“Soccer”
“Shrinkflation”

As the links indicate, I’ve covered the first two. “Fiddly,” more or less meaning “balky” and frequently appearing in the expression “fiddly bits,” is a full-fledged NOOB and I would support it as WOTY. “Fit”–meaning sexually attractive–on the other hand is still, in my experience, an outlier in the U.S.

“Soccer” might be surprising to some, as nowadays (especially during the World Cup), Americans are sometimes mocked or derided for using it to denote the game the British (and more or less the rest of the world) know as “football.” But is indeed a NOOB. It originated as a a reference to the Football Association, and to differentiate it from other forms of football, notably rugby. OED citations from the first, in 1873 (with the spelling “socker”), through 1935 are all from British sources.

“Soccer” did get picked up fairly quickly in America, seeming first by headline writers as a conveniently short word, as in this from the New York Times in 1906:

And of course, since then it’s become the American term of choice. To a slight extent, “football” has emerged as a NOOB to indicate the game with the round ball. It’s been slight because 99.9 percent of Americans will understand “football” to mean the game with the touchdowns and helmets. I don’t think there’s been a real life counterpart to the uber-pretentious Lisa Simpson, who refers to the home-grown sport as “American football.”

Next: “shrinkflation.”