“Schooner”

In my Brooklyn wanderings the other week, I came upon this sign outside a bar:

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I had encountered “schooner” as a portion size for beer in my recent Australia visit, but didn’t have a clear sense of what it meant, other than larger than the smallest size (called “pot,” as I recalled). And by the way, if you’re not from here, “Bud” is Budweiser, probably the most famous American beer.

I checked the OED, which told an interesting, somewhat complicated story. It gives a United State origin for “schooner” as a beer vessel, citing a definition in an 1879 edition of Webster’s dictionary: “A tall glass, used for lager-beer and ale, and containing about double the quantity of an ordinary tumbler.” An 1896 quote from a Scottish newspaper shows the term had crossed the Atlantic, and specifies its size: “‘the schooner’ [contains] 14 fluid ounces, or 2 4-5ths imperial gills … [and is] found in everyday use, under various names, in London, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and elsewhere.”

But then, the term seems to have subsided both in Britain and the U.S., only to reappear, by the 1930s, in Australia and New Zealand. A fascinating 2011 article in Australia Beer News traced the tangled history of “schooner” in New South Wales. The author, Dr. Brett J. Stubbs, limits himself to that state because “tracing the history of the schooner glass (let alone of beer glasses in general) in Australia requires more than just a short article.” To summarize his tale would require more than just a short blog post, but fortunately, this graphic is floating around the internet (apologies for not being able to figure out and cite the original source). It brings to mind the apocryphal factoid about Eskimos having 100 or some other large number words for snow.

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Meanwhile, by the 1960s the meaning of “schooner” in Britain had changed to, as the OED puts it, “A tall, waisted sherry glass” holding 3.5 ounces. The writer of a 1973 article in The Times wasn’t happy with this development, referring to “the abominably proportioned waisted Elgin glass, sometimes used for sherry, or its vulgar outsize version, the schooner.”

Screen Shot 2020-03-05 at 10.22.21 AM — Schooners for sherry.

And what of North America? Not surprisingly, we have super-sized the schooner. The OED is no help here, but this is what Wikipedia has to say:

In Canada, a “schooner” refers to a large capacity beer glass. Unlike the Australian schooner, which is smaller than a pint, a Canadian schooner is always larger. Although not standardized, the most common size of schooner served in Canadian bars is 946 ml (32 US fl oz); the volume of two US pints. It is usually a tankard (mug) shaped glass, rather than a pint-shaped glass….

In the United States, “schooner” refers to the shape of the glass (rounded with a short stem), rather than the capacity. It can range from 18 to 32 US fl oz (532 to 946 ml).

Sure enough, here’s an article from a Lawrence, Kansas, newspaper about a bar in that college town that serves 32 oz. schooners in the rounded shape — though “If the bar runs out of clean glasses on a busy night, you’ll get your 32 ounces of beer in a giant plastic cup.”

In my preliminary research on the topic, I posted on Facebook the Brooklyn sign and a query as to the meaning of “schooner.” Someone replied that in New England, it’s 10 ounces — perhaps an example of a British usage that has been retained in that region, like “rubbish.” But my favorite comment came from my friend Jan Ambrose, who is discriminating in her beer tastes: “There is no amount of Bud I would pay $3 for.”

“Tall Poppy”

In honor of my return from a five-week stay in Australia, a post in honor of one of the first Australianisms I encountered on my first visit there, four years ago. Stuart — who collected me and the student group I was leading at the Melbourne airport and drove us to town — commented, vis a vis the national character, on the “tall poppy.” I forget his exact explanation but here’s the OED definition: “chiefly Australian. a prominent or conspicuously successful person or thing, frequently with implication of attracting hostility from envious detractors.” Stuart suggested that the tall poppy syndrome — the reflex to attack anybody who stood out from the crowd by accomplishing anything — was a national characteristic and, to some extent, problem.

The metaphor originated in sixth century B.C.E. Rome — specifically, Wikipedia says, in

Livy’s account of the tyrannical Roman king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. He is said to have received a messenger from his son Sextus Tarquinius asking what he should do next in Gabii, since he had become all-powerful there. Rather than answering the messenger verbally, Tarquin went into his garden, took a stick, and symbolically swept it across his garden, thus cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies that were growing there. The messenger, tired of waiting for an answer, returned to Gabii and told Sextus what he had seen. Sextus realised that his father wished him to put to death all of the most eminent people of Gabii, which he then did.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists examples of the term being used in nineteenth-century Britain, but fifteen of the twenty citations from 1869 on are from or in reference to Australia or New Zealand, including this from Richard Beckett’s 1986 Dinkum Aussie Dictionary:

Tall poppy: Any Australian who reads more than the sporting results and knows how to use snail tongs. Someone who aspires to intellectual excellence and cannot tell the difference between one make of car and another. The species is much hated in Australia and is always being cut down to size.

Here’s what the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which contains 9 billion articles from 2010 to the present, says about the frequency of use of “tall poppy” by country:

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About half of the twenty-three U.S. hits are actually by or about Australians. But that still leaves a few examples.

Actress and singer Carrie Brownstein said in an interview: “How comfortable one is taking credit for their work depends on the person. I think tall poppy syndrome is endemic to smaller creative communities, but I also really value the fairly anti-capitalist approach of the more radical artistic communities from which I came.
Tech businesswoman Marian Salzman wrote in a Forbes article that Meghan Markle “may be under great scrutiny because the tall poppy often gets chopped down, but I think she’s a 2020 version of John F. Kennedy Jr. circa the mid-’80s.” (This was written in July 2019.)
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in her scorecard for the second Democratic presidential debate in August 2019 (how long ago that seems), wrote of then-candidate Kamala Harris: “Tall poppy syndrome. After she garroted Biden in the first debate, everyone came after her, challenging her health care plan as she struggled to explain it herself.”

As we are wont to do, some Americans have tried to turn the expression on his head. In 2018, two entrepreneurs started a company to protect people, especially women, against online harassment. They called it Tall Poppy. One of the founders, Leigh Honeywell, explained it to Fast Company: “The idea of tall poppy syndrome is that…anyone who becomes prominent in their field or in politics or whatever, they get cut down. So we protect the tall poppies.”

“Tipped to”

A recent New York Times article about the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards noted that the film Joker “had been tipped to win big at the awards.”

I’ve been in Australia for the past month or so, and that phrase “tipped to” is quite common here. Merriam-Webster online provides a definition: “chiefly British: to mention as a likely candidate, prospective winner, or profitable investment.”

The results for a Google News search for a phrase are all British, Irish, or Australian, for example this Daily Mail Headline: ‘Meet your new Bachelor! Jett Kenny is tipped to be this year’s suitor.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the origin of the term, since the OED doesn’t have an entry for it. It is, however, used in a citation for another word (“super,” meaning “superannuation,” which is what Americans refer to as 401 (k) plan). It’s from the Sydney Bulletin in 1973: “In some cases where the executive’s own company contributes substantial sums to his super scheme … the tax commissioner is tipped to take a far more sceptical view.”

Google Books has only use prior to that. It’s from the 1964 proceedings of the Kenya National Assembly.

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As for American use, there isn’t much. The only other recent use in the Times was in the article about last year’s BAFTA awards, which noted that The Favourite “had been tipped to win big.”

But it turns out that both articles were written by Times correspondent Alex Marshall, who is British. And so I dub “tipped to” a faux NOOB. But it is very much a British/Australianism, so shouldn’t it have an OED entry?

“Good on You” (not “Ya”)

The American clothing chain Men’s Wearhouse has a new ad campaign. You don’t have to watch the whole thing; the relevant bit comes in the last three seconds.

I’ve covered the expression “Good on (someone, usually “you”) a couple of times, and I’m slightly embarrassed to see that the second time I did it, I had forgotten the first time. Anyhoo, the Men’s Wearhouse spot is consistent with usual American–as opposed to the original Australian–pronunciation. That is, the announcer says. “Good on you,” as opposed to the Australian “Good on ya.” Of course, with the attempted pun (Men’s Wearhouse clothes supposedly look good on its customers), he would have to.

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“Mate” as Direct Address

I have covered “mate” a couple of times as a synonym for “buddy” or “friend.” But this sign in a men’s room in the Seattle airport is the first time I’ve seen it in America as a form of direct address:

The capital M in “Mate” suggests to me that the writer wasn’t especially comfortable or familiar with the term. Meanwhile, both the excessive politeness and the “eh” at the end suggest that he or she might be Canadian.

In any case, the first two citations in the OED for this use of the word are both from Englishmen (Arthur Polehampton and Lord Robert Cecil) who noticed it in their travels in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.

1852 R. CecilDiary 31 Mar. (1935) 36 When the diggers address a policeman in uniform they always call him ‘Sir’, but they always address a fellow in a blue shirt with a carbine as ‘Mate’.

1862 A. PolehamptonKangaroo Land 99 A man, who greeted me after the fashion of the Bush, with a ‘Good day, mate’.

It had arrived in Britain by 1880, when this line of dialogue appears in a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “Who’s the magistrate hereabouts, mate?”

In the U.S., the comparable terms include “buddy,” “pal,” and, in recent years, “dude.” Those words are often used in a hostile, or at least passive-aggressive manner. “Mate” works well for this purpose, as the men’s room admonition illustrates. I’ll be curious to see if it catches on in these parts.

“Big ask”

This line appeared in a December 2018 New York Times review of the Nicole Kidman movie Destroyer: “That she’s also a better detective than a mother makes her somewhat of an outlier, at least in American movies. If Bell [the Kidman character] were a man and father, and played by, say, Denzel Washington, this wouldn’t be a big ask.”

That “ask” is a shift of the word from verb to noun, meaning, basically, “request.” (“Request” started as a noun in about 1400 and was being used as a verb no later than 100 years later.) The OED cites uses of noun “ask” back to the 13th century, including this from a 1656 Bible translation: “God saith concerning Christ, thou art my Son, there presently followeth an Ask of me and I will give thee.” The dictionary says it is now “somewhat rare,” with three exceptions. The first is in bridge and whist, where it means “A play or bid having the primary purpose of eliciting information about a partner’s hand.” (“Who has not suffered when he has played correctly second hand..from his partner assuming that there has been an ask for trumps?” Westminster Papers, 1872.) The second is in finance, where it means “asking price.” And the third is when it’s modified by an adjective like “big,” “huge,” or “impossible, as in the Times quote above.

I would tend to disagree with the last category. That is, I accept that the current popularity of “ask” as a noun started with “big ask,” as we’ll see, but I think it’s very much out there by itself, as are such similar nouns as “get,” “reveal,” and “fail.” See the title of a 2017 book about fundraising by Laura Fredericks, The Ask: For Business, For Philanthropy, For Everyday Living. So I would recommend including “big ask” citations in the main definition.

As I say, the recent surge in “ask”-as-noun started with “big ask,” and it started in Australian sport(s). The OED has a 1987 quote from the Sydney Morning Herald, the quotation marks indicating a fairly recent coinage: “Four measly pounds is what the critics say. But according to his trainer..that four pounds is ‘a big ask’.”

I believe I can antedate that. The Google Books database has a “big ask” from what appears to be a short story in the Australian journal The Bulletin, vol. 97, 1975. “A big ask, though. They wanted a grand. Anyway I got two spot bail and the case is still swingin’.”

The phrase stayed in Australia for a while. Writing on the American Dialect Society listserv, Peter Reitan reported checking the newspapers.com database and finding that “every single hit from 1988 through 2006 is either from an Australian newspaper, or quotes a native Australian, typically athletes.”

Some American uses in that period can be found elsewhere. The (California) Orange County Register, August 29, 1993, referring to a program at the University of California, Irvine, reported: “[The American-born director] bundled seven projects into one Big Ask, for a regional alliance called Defense Photonics Medical Consortium.”

A chart showing frequency of “big ask” in American newspapers in the Lexis-Nexis database shows growth that’s gradual in the decade of the 2000s, and dramatic in the 2010s.

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Over in the U.K., the phrase was in circulation no later than 2006, when Friends of the Earth started a “Big Ask” campaign to fight climate change.

And someone posted this definition on Urban Dictionary in 2012:

Misused by stupid British soccer commentators as a substitute for job, task, or assignment.

“He has to stop Messi from scoring tonight: that’s a big ask.”

“Sunnies”

A few days ago, Louise Linton, the wife of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, got into trouble for posting this picture on Instagram:

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The trouble stemmed from her hashtagging various items of her designer clothing–weird and creepy in itself, all the more so when accompanying a picture of getting off a U.S. military jet with official government markings.

What caught my eye was the reference to Tom Ford “sunnies”–sunnies being Australian shorthand for sunglasses. All citations for the term in both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang are from Australian or New Zealand sources.

Linton is a native of Scotland who has lived in the U.S. for more than fifteen years. Did she pick up “sunnies” in Scotland, or is the term prevalent in the U.S. circles in which she travels? Please weigh in if you know.

“Lost the Plot”

When a friend wrote in a Facebook post the other day that a certain political figure had “lost the plot,” my NOOB-dar came on. I wasn’t familiar with the phrase but it had the definite feel of a Britishism, and sure enough, it is.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “lose the plot” as “to lose one’s ability to understand or cope with events; to lose one’s touch; to go off the rails.” There is a dubious 17th-century citation, with the next not coming till a 1984 quote from The Times, presumably about a fashion show: “Arabella Pollen showed sharp linens, lost the plot in a sarong skirt and brought out curvaceous racing silk and a show-stopping bow-legged Willie Carson.”

As to the phrase’s national origin, the OED doesn’t say. A 1994 article in The American Scholar claims it’s Australian. It would be interesting to hear about that from an Australian. In any case, it definitely is a Britishism, as shown in this Google Ngram Viewer chart comparing uses of the phrase “lost the plot” in books published in the U.S. and the U.K:

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Interestingly, the first time it shows up in the New York Times, in 1998, it’s also in a fashion article:

From the parade of Mao worker jackets with frog closures and cheongsam dresses at Ferragamo to the indiscriminate layering of tulle and other sheer fabrics over trousers and skirts at Anna Molinari, many designers in Milan had a story’s worth of ideas, but they had lost the plot.

It’s been used a few dozen of times since then, most recently less than a week ago, in a May 14 article about entertainment mogul Sumner Redstone:

The legal fracas has changed Mr. Redstone’s public image from a firebrand whose business acumen and ruthlessness won him control of Viacom, Paramount Pictures and CBS, a $40 billion empire, into something quite different. In the local parlance, he lost the plot.

“Good on [someone]”

In a television interview yesterday, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had given “voice to a voiceless part of the Turkish population – good on him for that.”

Hayden was using a phrase that I’ve started to notice fairly frequently among American recently–an equivalent of the familiar (to us) expression of approval “good for you,” or him, her, them, me, etc. I think the adoption here is partly due to a slight difference of nuance. “Good on you” feels like it’s always used in praise of someone’s effort or actions, whereas “good for you” could apply either to that or good fortune, as in winning the lottery or having good weather on vacation.

The OED says “good on” was chiefly found in Australia and New Zealand until the 1970s, though it has an intriguing citation from a 1905 book called The Bush Boys of New Zealand: or Dinkums and Mac: “First one and then another came up and congratulated in true British boys’ style. ‘Good on you, Dinkums, old man. Put it there, old feller.’”

Also intriguingly, the OED says that “good on” formulations have “a stress on good, unlike good for you where the stress is on you.” That has not been my experience, though I hasten to add my experience is limited. I feel that in “Good on you,” I’ve most commonly heard the stress is on “on.” And “good on him,” which developed later, is usually said “good on him“–as Michael Hayden said it in the clip I linked to at the top.

But I wonder what Australian readers have to say.

“Fully”

A few years back, my daughter Maria Yagoda, who knows a lot of British and Australian young people, told me to be on the lookout for the arrival of a word she always heard them saying: “fully.” Now, this adverb is common in the U.S., in two particular contexts: a synonym for “completely” or “totally” (“the hotel is fully booked”) and a kind of antonym for “only” (“fully two thirds of registered voters sat this election out”).

The connotation Maria had picked up on was slightly different and is well-put by “Diego” (evidently an Australian) in this Urban Dictionary entry:

I found a few other examples out on the web, two from British sporting types:

A rugby coach: “We had so many chances and the game was fully in our hands for 80 minutes. I was worried, but we got there in the end. George North saved the day.”

A government official: “Large unmanned aircraft, when they come, should be as safe as manned aircraft and the British public should be fully consulted before companies fly large, remotely-piloted aircraft over their homes alongside passenger planes.”

Of course, this isn’t a blog about Britishisms, so the above examples are beside the point. Unfortunately, after being on the lookout for a couple of years, I was drawing a blank on British “fully.”

Then, in July, I came on this quote in the New York Times, attributed to a (San Francisco) “Bay Area cook”: “It’s fully this crazy superstitious thing with all these stories attached to it.” Trouble was, the cook, Samin Nostrat, was identified as having grown up in Iran.

There things stood until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended (with Maria) a talk by Lena Dunham at the New Yorker festival. She showed a scene from a film she had made five or six years ago, and when the lights came up, she said, ” I forgot that I fully had acne.”

Maria and I high-fived each other. The rest of the crowd thought we were nutters.