Reader Stuart Semmel sent along a link to a Washington Post article and wondered whether the use of sweets rather than candy in the reference to “the kind of neighbors who can afford a $5 bag of sweets to give to others” was a NOOB.

After reading the relatively short article, I  was ready with an answer: no. In the piece, the word “candy” is used nine times, including twice in the phrase “bag of candy.” Thus I cannot escape the conclusion that the one “bag of sweets” is less a NOOB than a case of elegant variation: H.W. Fowler’s term for writers’ efforts to avoid word repetition by coming up with a variant for the word term in question.

Elegant variation is a fixture of the sports pages, where home runs become “circuit clouts” and a second baseman becomes “a fleet-footed second sacker,” but you see it an all sorts of writing, and to my mind, “bag of sweets” is definitely it.

I got a business e-mail the other day (from an American) that started out with a one-word sentence: “Hullo.” The U.S. version, of course, is “hello.” I had always associated hullo with mum, except I sometimes encounter “mum” here, and I’d never seen an American “hullo.” Until now.

Poking around on the web for examples, I almost immediately encountered this quintessentially British quote from the quintessentially British P.G. Wodehouse (the narrator is the possibly even more quintessentially British Bertie Wooster):

“Hullo, Bobbie,” I said. “Hullo, Bertie,” she said. “Hullo, Upjohn,” I said. The correct response to this would have been “Hullo, Wooster”, but he blew up in his lines and merely made a noise like a wolf with its big toe caught in a trap.

Hello (first citation 1827) and hullo (1857) both have the same etymology as the verb holler, according to the OED, as do the older variants hallo (first seen in Dickens, in 1841) and hollo (Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus). Interestingly, an even earlier version is holla, which has recently come back in full force. The most popular definition on Urban Dictionary gives three meanings, the relevant one being, “A word used to acknowledge the presence of a fellow companion.” This example is offered: “Is that mah boy ova there? HOLLAAAAA!”

Generally, hello is indeed generally American and hullo generally British, through Google Ngram Viewer suggests some nuance:

The decline in hullo use on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that my e-mail correspondent’s use of the word was a one-off–about as likely to catch on as the similarly Wodehousian abbreviation for the thing we used to talk on: ‘phone.

 

 

 

 

The fox-hunting-derived expression go to ground, covered here not long ago, came to mind this morning when I read something President Obama said in an interview with Fox News yesterday:

And, you know, we’ve seen some indications from the Russians as well as the Syrians today, uh, that they may be willing to look at the prospect of getting those weapons under control, perhaps even, uh, international control, and getting them out of there, where they could be vulnerable to use by anybody. And that’s something that we’re going to run to ground over the next couple of days.

(By the way, I assume the Fox intern who transcribed the interview got extra brownie points for ever “uh” he or she could stick in.)According to the OED, “run to ground” is a variant of “go to ground,” both meaning (literally) to burrow into a hole in the earth, or, figuratively, to withdraw from public view or lie low. Something or someone can also be run to the ground, meaning worn out through overuse. Obama seems to have meant something different, more like “explore in every possible way.”

As I noted last week in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog Lingua Franca, one of the distressing aspects the current debate over intervention in Syria is the way it’s led metaphors to run amok, including “red line,” “boots on the ground,” and “shot across the bow.” Now we seem to have come to the stage where metaphors are given new meaning, just because they, uh, sound good.

Listening to a report on NPR the other day by the outstanding food correspondent Allison Aubrey, I heard her utter this sentence:

“It’s a high-protein corn that’s really different to what we’re accustomed to.”

That’s right, not different from or even different than, but different to. Years back, my friend David Friedman, a massive West Ham supporter, had told me this usage was prevalent in U.K. football commentary, and I’d been looking out for U.S. users. Aubrey was the first, so I revved up the databases and hunted for more.

Not much luck. There are plenty of different to‘s in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), but virtually all of them were either uttered by British-born speakers or writers, or were used in expressions like “it’s different to actually go there.” Going back to 2008, the one exception was this from the Denver Post in 2011: “…the roughly $18 billion 2011-12 budget Republicans voted for is more similar than different to those that Democrat-controlled legislatures have written the past several years.” But it seems likely that the writer used to because of the need to work with the earlier word similar, which takes a to.

So I am going to categorize different to as a Doobious NOOB.

By the way, my search informed me that the British usage had been commented on by Americans for at least 140 years. One example among many was an article called “Errors in the Use of Prepositions,” in an 1873 number of American Educational Monthly. The author, identified as “S.W.W.,” wrote:

English people make a sad mistake in saying “different to” for “ different from.” Here is an example from the London Times: “During Swift’s second residence with Sir William Temple, he had become acquainted with an inmate of Moor Park very different to the accomplished man to whose intellectual pleasures he so largely ministered.”

A few days ago, the (London) Daily Mail published an article that began:

Olympic legend Michael Johnson says a ‘superior athletic gene’ in the descendants of West African slaves means black American and Caribbean sprinters will command the sport at the London Games.

The Olympic gold medallist and BBC commentator said: ‘Over the last few years, athletes of Afro- Caribbean and Afro-American descent have dominated athletics finals.

‘It’s a fact that hasn’t been discussed openly before. It’s a taboo subject in the States but it is what it is. Why shouldn’t we discuss it?’

If you’re American, you will probably be puzzled by (the American) Johnson’s comment that certain people “have dominated athletics finals.” In the U.S., athletics is an all-purpose term, pretty much a fancier and more formal version of sports (sport to you). In the U.K., however, athletics is used as Johnson was quoted as using it: to refer to track, that is, running, events.

I said that Johnson was “quoted as” saying athletics. I bet that he did not actually say it, but rather that the Daily Mail–not known for its journalistic scruples–doctored the quote to make it understandable to readers. Anyone think otherwise?