“Gadget”

The word was used as early as 1868, according to the OED, to refer to a piece of equipment used in glassmaking. Not long after that, nautical and Navy slang gave it another meaning. From an 1886 book: “Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom…”

It wasn’t until World War I that ”gadget” adopted the meaning (and spelling) we associate with it today—in the OED’s words, “a (small) mechanical or electronic device, esp. one regarded as ingenious or novel.” At first it was used in a specifically military context. Rudyard Kipling wrote in The New Army (1915): “They have installed decent cooking ranges and gas, and the men have already made themselves all sorts of handy little labour-saving gadgets.”

It quickly spread to other contexts. Correspondent H. Tapley-Soper wrote to Notes and Queries in 1918: “I have … frequently heard [‘gadget’] applied by motor-cycle friends to the collection of fitments to be seen on motor cycles. ‘His handle-bars are smothered in gadgets’ refers to such things as speedometers, mirrors, levers, badges, mascots, &c., attached to the steering handles.”

And it quickly spread to the United States. A 1919 New York Times article about a transatlantic flight noted, “It was no unusual sight to see [the pilot], tools in hand, busily fitting some ‘gadget’…”

Within ten years, Americans were using it more than Britons, according to Ngram Viewer:

That spike in the ‘30s and ‘40s is presumably what caused The New Yorker, under the editorship of William Shawn, to actually ban “gadget” from the magazine’s pages, along with a remarkable number of other words. Two editors at the magazine, John Bennet and Nancy Franklin, once composed a sentence to try to help them remember all of the things they had to eliminate or find replacements for: “Intrigued by the massive smarts of the balding, feisty, prestigious, workaholic tycoon, Tom Wolfe promptly spat on the quality photo above the urinal and tried to locate his gadget.” (They left out “gotten.”)

“Brunch”

Yesterday, H.L. Mencken inspired a post on historical NOOB portmanteau word “smog,” and now here’s another one, of a slightly earlier vintage. “Brunch” apparently originated as university slang. The Independent reported in 1895, “Breakfast is ‘brekker’ in the Oxford tongue; when a man makes lunch his first meal of the day it becomes ‘brunch’…” Five years later the word had spread far enough for the Westminster Gazette to use it (in quotation marks) as the punchline of a comic poem: “Perish Scrambling breakfast, formal lunch!/Hardened night-birds fondly cherish/All the subtle charms of ‘brunch’.”

“Brunch” took a while to catch on in the United States. The first American citation in the OED is from 1930; as late as 1939, the New York Times felt the need to put the word in quotes and define it as “the present-day phenomenon of the breakfast-luncheon, or ‘brunch,’ as it is affectionately called.”

That was then, this is now. Ngram Viewer shows that right about the time of the Times article, Americans passed Britons in their use of “brunch” and have stayed comfortably ahead ever since.

What’s more, round about 2000, Americans stole the British “boozy” and came up with the “boozy brunch,” meaning that for a set price, you can have all the mimosas you want.

“Smog”

In his classic book The American Language (published in 1919 and periodically revised through 1936), H.L. Mencken has a chapter called “Briticisms in the United States.” I don’t know what’s taken me so long but I’ve just now read it carefully, and was struck, among other things, by the number of early NOOBs he mentions that I didn’t realize were such.

Take “smog.” It sounds American as American can be, and that was certainly the case in 1970, when Joni Mitchell, in her song “Woodstock,” declared, “I have come here to lose the smog.”

But it definitely is English in origin. In July 1905, the newspaper The Globe helpfully reported its apparent creation: “The other day at a meeting of the Public Health Congress Dr. [H.A.] Des Vœux did a public service in coining a new word for the London fog, which was referred to as ‘smog’, a compound of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’.” The same year the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on the development and commented: “London is undoubtedly the proper place for its coinage, for it is said to surpass all other places in the opacity of its smog, but so far as mere darkness is concerned some other British and American cities would afford ample justification for the use of the term.”

The U.S. Weather Bureau picked up the word in 1914, causing a wag to comment in the Kokomo Tribune: “But why end there? Let’s call a mixture of snow and mud ‘smud.’ A mixture of snow and soot ‘snoot,’ and a mixture of snow and hail ‘snail.’ Thus we might have a weather forecast: ‘Snail today, turning to snoot tonight; tomorrow, smoggy with smud.’”

But the term was still unfamiliar enough in America in 1921 for a New York Times reviewer of a book by C.W. Saleeby to comment, “America has no counterpart of that strange mixture, thick as pea soup, the color of faded green, sticky and smutty against the human skin and the facade of buildings, with a taste something like stale beer, which serves much of the time as atmosphere in Edinburgh and London. It acts like smoke and looks like fog. Dr. Saleeby has at last found a name for it, a name that is a positive inspiration. It should be in the next edition of all dictionaries. The name is Smog. The adjective is ‘smoggy.’”

Things soon changed as American cities (notably Pittsburgh and Los Angeles) developed the problem, and Americans adopted the word. Indeed, Ngram Viewer shows that since the early ’20s, U.S. use of “smog” has surpassed that in Britain — most dramatically during the environmental movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. That is, right when Joni Mitchell was writing “Woodstock.”

“Awfully”

In the course of putting together a book based on this blog (you heard it here first!), I found that I am standing on the shoulders of Richard Grant White. White, a nineteenth-century American literary critic (and father of the architect Stanford White), coined the word “Briticism” in 1868, to mean words and usages that had sprung up in Britain (but not America) in the century or so since the countries had been apart. White didn’t look kindly on this phenomenon. Among the instances he cited was a peculiar British use of the word “directly”:

Directly.—The radical meaning of this word is, in a right line, and hence, as a right line is the shortest distance between two points, it means at once, immediately. Its synonyme in both senses is a good English word, now, unhappily, somewhat obsolete, straightway—our equivalent of which, right away, is laughed at by brother Bull as an Americanism. But John Bull himself uses directly in a way which is quite insufferable—to wit, in the sense of when, as soon as. This use of the word is a widespread Briticism, and prevails even among the most cultivated writers. For instance, in the London “Spectator” of May 2, 1867, it is said that “Directly Mr. Disraeli finished speaking, Mr. Lowe rose to oppose,” etc. Anglice, As soon as Mr. Disraeli finished speaking, etc. It is difficult to trace by continuous steps the course of this strange perversion, for which there is neither justification nor palliation.

He also complained about a supposed British insistence on saying “ill” instead of “sick” to describe someone who was under the weather.

They sneer at us for not joining in the robbery and the imposition. I was present once when a British merchant receiving in his own house a Yankee youth at a little party, said, “Good evening! We haven’t seen you for a long while. Have you been seeck” (the sneer prolonged the word), “as you say in your country?” “No, thank you,” said the other, frankly and promptly, “I’ve been hill, as they say in yours.”

He went on, “For the use of ill—an adverb—as an adjective, thus: an ill man, there is no defence and no excuse, except the contamination of bad example.” Like many language peevers through the ages, he was on shaky ground. In fact there was nothing new about adjectival “ill”: “By my troth I am exceeding ill” is a line from Much Ado About Nothing).

Another complaint was “awfully” to mean “very,” instead of its early meaning of “in a manner that inspires awe or terror.” White wrote, “The misuse is a Briticism; but it has been spreading rapidly here during the last few years.” And here he was on the mark. In fact, I put forth this intensifier “awfully” as the very first Not One-Off-Britishism.

The early citations in the OED (which labels it “colloquial”) are all British, starting with one from The Times in 1820: “Let any one..say whether the illustrious defendant [sic]..has not awfully strong grounds for protesting against the tribunal.” I happen to be reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair—published in 1847-48 and set in the 1810s—and came upon a line where Becky Sharp thinks, “I suppose he will be awfully proud, and that I shall be treated most contemptuously.”

Ngram Viewer also confirms White’s impression.

It’s an interesting chart, showing significantly more frequent use in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century (White’s era), and American topping Britain in about 1920.

Since then, the two countries’ use of the word have been awfully similar.

“On the q.t.”

This expression means “in confidence” or “just between us” and is originally British. To expand on that a bit, the first citation in the OED is from the Irish writer George Moore’s 1885 novel A Mummer’s Wife: “It will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.” And the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, also from 1885, is some lines of verse from a Sydney, Australia, newspaper: “Oh, my! what a pious world it is, / And how very good they all seem to be – / But what a ’duffing’ lot you’d find / If you would only raise the blind, / And see ’em on the strict Q.T.” (Green’s also has a citation supposedly from an 1870 song, but that is pretty clearly inaccurate.)

In both the OED and Green’s, all the citations through 1904 except one use the formulation “on the strict q.t.” and are from British, Irish, or Commonwealth sources. The one exception (in Green’s) is from a Provo, Utah, newspaper in 1894: “We got this on the dead Q-T —and will ask you readers, please don’t give it away.” And incidentally, the expression gets some literary pedigree via James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “Sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere.”

All sources that I’ve found say that “q.t.” is short for “quiet,” and that’s convincing, especially since the phrase “on the quiet,” meaning the same thing, can be found pre-1874. However, I was intrigued by an alternate theory offered by a contributor to the Stack Exchange English Language and Usage bulletin board:

“Q.T.” is an odd abbreviation for “quiet.” Since it is of British origin, I would think it would derive from schoolboys’ abbreviations, often derived from Latin. The Latin taceo means “not to speak” and has solemn meaning sometimes, referring to “passing over in silence.” Thus quae tacenda, or q.t., would refer to “things about which one should not speak.” Cf. Horace, Epodes, 5.49, where Horace speaks of Canidia and quid dixit et quid tacuit, what she said and what she left unsaid.

Another Stack Exchange contributor, who goes by “Callithumpian,” antedated the OED and Green’s initial citations by more than ten years, unearthing a passage from a British play called My Husband’s Secret that debuted no later than 1874:

It quickly became a catchphrase: a Google Books search for “on the strict q.t.” yields about a dozen examples from 1877 to 1880, including these:

The phrase had fully arrived in the U.S. in the early 1900s. Green’s has fourteen citations between 1906 and 1999, and nine of them are American, including this lyric from a song by Merle Travis: “You thought your little romance was on the strict Q.T. / So if you want your freedom P.D.Q., / Divorce me C.O.D.”

The song came out in 1946, and indeed the phrase has a mid-century feel. The 1997 film L.A. Confidential was set in the early ’50s and the gossip monger played by Danny DeVito’s trademark line is “Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.”

Nowadays, “on the q.t.” has been replaced by “on the downlow” or “on the d.l.”–though that phrase also has a very particular meaning of its own.

“Have a go”; “Give it a go”

In a previous post about the “Peppa Pig Effect” — the phenomenon of American toddlers picking up British terminology and accent from a television cartoon — I mentioned a Guardian article on the subject whose title starts “Having a Go.”

“Have a go” is indeed a Not One-Off Britishism, of the historical variety (meaning that its U.S. adoption wasn’t recent). Its original meaning, says the OED, was “To aim a blow or shot at someone or something; to make an attack or onslaught upon someone or something.” The first citation is from Lady’s Magazine in 1792: “I felt such a flow of spirits and courage, that I hid myself behind a tree, determined to have a go at him—the moment he passed me, I fired my pistol.”

Fairly quickly it took on a broader sense of attacking verbally or criticizing, and the still broader sense (with which I associate the phrase) of “To make an attempt at something; to have a spell or turn of doing something.” An 1863 citation is from Charles Reade’s novel Hard Cash: “You have stumbled on a passage you can’t construe… Here, let me have a go at it.”

It and (at first glance) all the other citations for all three senses are from British sources. However, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, interestingly, has African-American sources for the attacking meaning, including John Ridley’s 2002 book A Conversation with the Mann: “He was fixing to have a go at these boys like he was Charlie Bad-Brother.”

And I can attest that the meaning of having a try or a turn has been widely used in the U.S. for some time. For example, a New York Times review of the 1961 film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea has the line, “There’s no earthly or oceanic reason why [director Irwin] Allen shouldn’t have had a go at such a subject on a frank entertainment level.” And in a 2020 Times article about the television program Dispatches from Elsewhere, the (American) reporter writes of an actor, “He had a go at defining the show.”

The Guardian article (as opposed to the headline) says American Peppa Pig watchers have adopted a rather different phrase, “give it a go.” To my ears this means basically the same thing as “have a go.” Neither the OED not Green’s has an entry for it, but it shows up in two OED citations in a definition for “go” (as try or attempt). The second is a recent quote from an English newspaper but the first, surprisingly is from The Boston Daily Globe in 1892: “There was an air of diffidence about the different drug stores that were opened yesterday, which plainly said, ‘We are not sure of this matter, but we’ll give it a go and see how it comes out.’”

That would appear to be an outlier both linguistically and geographically. Searching the vast Google Books database, I don’t find “give it a go” showing up till 1915 or ’16, with the early uses all being from Commonwealth sources, especially Australia and New Zealand, as in this screen shot:

And Ngram Viewer, which is based on Google Books, shows that both phrases began in Britain (the blue and red lines), then gained popularity in the U.S. (orange and green) in the 2000s — which is, of course, the era of NOOBs.

Ngram Viewer also confirms my guess that “give it a shot” is the American version of the synonymous “give it a go.”

“Dicey”

Reader Tony Mates, from Seattle, writes:

I am surprised that “dicey” is not on your list. Though fairly common in the US nowadays, I do recall having to ask my English mother about it back in the 1980s.

“Fairly common” might understate the case. Let’s go to Google Books Ngram Viewer. It tells a fairly clear story about the word, which the OED defines as “Risky, dangerous; uncertain, unreliable.”

That is, the word apparently originated in Britain, was picked up in the U.S. in the ’70s, started to be used more frequently here in about 1990, and is now so common that Americans (meaning me) had no idea it originated across the pond. In honor of the word, I have created a new category, “Outstripped.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang classifies the word as “RAF slang” and gives its first citation Nevile Shute’s 1950 novel A Town Like Alice: “He […] made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare.” (Shute was an Englishman with an aeronautics background who moved to Australia late in his life.) The first American quote is from 1961.

Now, to repeat, “dicey” feels like an Americanism. Why else would the New York Times have used it 53 times in the last year alone?

“Clobber”

Correspondent David Griggs sent from England a note saying “you may be interested” in an example of the word “clobbered” in the New York Times. He was clearly implying it was a NOOB, but the word — meaning “to badly beat or defeat” — didn’t strike my ears as such. I checked the Times archive and found that “clobbered” or “clobber” have been used in the paper 1,720 times since 1990, frequently in a sports context. (“

Google Books’s newly beefed-up Ngram Viewer told an interesting story:

Screen Shot 2020-07-22 at 2.13.46 PM

That is, more use in the U.S. from the ’40s through about 1970, then a big spike in Britain over the next twenty years or so — which may account for David Griggs’ sense of it as a British word — followed by a period of slightly greater U.S. use.

But then David sent along a couple of sources asserting that “clobber” originated in British R.A.F. slang. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1941, but doesn’t give any citations or sources. And a Merriam-Webster article says, “Pilots of the British air force during the 1940s were supposedly the first to throw around the punchy verb ‘clobber” (emphasis added): again, no evidence.

The OED does offer some, though from 1944 rather than 1941. Its first citation is from the R.A.F. magazine Gen, which had the line “Did anyone clobber any?” (The “any” apparently referred to flying bombs.)

The next two citations are from American sources, the first, reflecting a move in meaning from bombing to beating, from a 1949 reference to the University of Michigan football team: “The Wolverines clobbered their opponents 42 to 3.” And the second comes from Max Shulman’s 1951 novel The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: “‘Poor loser!’ they kept yelling as they clobbered me.”

And on my own I found a 1946 use by an American writer, Percy Knauth: “Bayreuth was clobbered badly.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang adds some interesting bits to the story, starting with some lines from a poem in an 1894 issue of the Australian magazine Truth: “The larrikin / So full of sin, / has now no fear of getting clobbert.”

Then two citations that illuminate the word’s move to America.

From 1000 Destroyed, 1946, by Grover Cleveland Hall: “It didn’t appear the war was going to last long enough to clobber them.”

And from the 1948 novel Twelve O’Clock High: “‘Hit it?’ Savage asked. ‘Clobbered it, I think, sir.'”

Hall was a public relations officer for the 4th Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Force — which was headquartered at the former R.A.F. base at Debden, England, starting in 1942. And Twelve O’Clock High was modeled on activities of the 306th Bomb Group, based at another R.A.F. facility, at Thurleigh.

As David Griggs said to me in an email, “Interesting just when Ngram says ‘clobber’ took off in the US: the late 1940s; all those American servicemen returning from WW2 Europe…” Exactly. The remarkable thing is just how fast it took hold in the U.S. For reasons I won’t speculate on, “clobber” and America were made for each other.

Update: The comments to this post and some additional investigation revealed several additional points of interest. First, the slogan of the comic book character The Thing has been, at least since 1964, what you see in the image below.

TheThing

Second, I should have pointed out a second, apparently unrelated British use of “clobber,” as a slang term for clothing (dating from the 1870s) or equipment or gear (1890s). They’re still in use today but have not penetrated America.

And finally, “the clobber passages” is a term that refers to the six or seven biblical verses that have traditionally been used to support the idea that the Bible condemns homosexuality.

“Come a cropper”

The always vigilant Nancy Friedman alerted me on Twitter to something she labeled “Attempted Britishism” in this passage from an Esquire piece by Charles M. Pierce:

Screen Shot 2020-04-27 at 10.03.25 AM

The Britishism part is the phrase “come a cropper” and the “Attempted” part is the apostrophe, which doesn’t belong. Nancy checked it out and found Pierce frequently used the expression, always with an apostrophe. (The asterisk after “president” is another story, presumably Pierce’s commentary on the fitness of the current occupant of the office.)

Gary Martin, in his Phrase Finder website, has a good explanation of the phrase’s origin, which has do with the nether quarters of a horse — the “croup” or “crupper.”

In the 18th century, anyone who took a headlong fall from a horse was said to have fallen ‘neck and crop’; for example, this extract from the English poet Edward Nairne’s Poems, 1791:

A man on horseback, drunk with gin and flip,
Bawling out — Yoix — and cracking of his whip,
…
The startish beast took fright, and flop
The mad-brain’d rider tumbled, neck and crop!

‘Neck and crop’ and ‘head over heels‘ probably both derive from the 16th century term ‘neck and heels’, which had the same meaning. ‘Come a cropper’ is just a colloquial way of describing a ‘neck and crop’ fall. The phrase is first cited in Robert S. Surtees’ Ask Mamma, 1858:

[He] “rode at an impracticable fence, and got a cropper for his pains.”

By the time John C. Hotten published his A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words in 1859, the phrase has come to refer to any failure rather than just the specific failure to stay on a horse:

“Cropper, ‘to go a cropper’, or ‘to come a cropper’, that is, to fail badly.”

Martin also debunks the association of the phrase with one Henry Smith Cropper, who began selling a platen printing press in 1866. “It was a successful design and before long all platen presses were known as croppers. It is suggested that ‘come a cropper’ derives from the accidents that print workers had when catching their fingers between the plates of the presses…. There’s no truth to it though.”

Here is an arcane point that you are welcome to skip. Part of Martin’s proof that the Henry Cropper etymology is bogus is the presence of various uses of “cropper” in John C. Hotten’s 1859 slang dictionary. In fact, a search through Google Books reveals that Hatten didn’t include the phrase till his 1874 edition.

The OED cites that 1874 use, as well as these subsequent quotes:

1875 A. Trollope Way we live Now I. xxxviii. 241 He would ‘be coming a cropper rather,’ were he to marry Melmotte’s daughter for her money, and then find that she had got none.

1877 H. A. Leveson Sport Many Lands 464 My horse put his foot in a hole and came down a cropper.

1951 T. Rattigan Who is Sylvia? i. 230 We bachelors welcome competition from married men. We so much enjoy watching them come the inevitable cropper.

1963 Times 30 Jan. 1/7 I came a proper cropper, dearie, all black and blue I was.

The quotes tell an interesting tale. The use of quotation marks in the Trollope suggests that the figurative, non-horse use, at least, was at that point new. And the Terrence Rattigan and Times quotes both have infixed adjectives before “cropper,” suggesting that the phrase had become a cliche, or at least well worn.

As for British and American use of the phrase, the Google Ngrams Viewer chart, showing frequency of use in books, is illuminating:

Screen Shot 2020-04-27 at 11.43.23 AM

It’s similar to the pattern we saw for “we all of us.” British origin, but Americans catch up and use it about the same in the turn-of-the -20th-century period (in this case shortly after the turn). Then separation in the mid-twentieth century, followed by a slight closing of the gap as the phrase begins to seems old-fashioned in the U.K. and appealing in the U.S., in part as a result of the NOOBs phenomenon.

Ngram Viewer only has reliable data through 2008, but the New York Times archives show continuing solid use of the phrase. “Come a cropper” has appeared 94 times in the Times, all since 1920; here’s a baseball article from five years later:

Screen Shot 2020-04-27 at 12.09.43 PM

But the Times has grown partial to the phrase over time, with all but thirteen of the uses coming since the 1970s, and 17 of them since 2000. A couple of interesting things turn up in the newspaper’s archives. For one, Richard Nixon used “come a cropper” in the White House transcripts released as part of Watergate investigation in 1973:

For an inquiry to start with the proposition of [Sam] Ervin and [Howard] Baker, where you don’t come a cropper right there at the beginning on whether you can get the three branches. What’s your view of the three-branch, John [Erlichman]?

And check out the most recent use of the past tense, in a 2017 crossword blog by Caitlin Lovinger:

Screen Shot 2020-04-26 at 6.19.40 PM That’s right, it’s (wrongly) hyphenated, “a-cropper.” The hyphen shows up other times in the Times, including in a column by language maven William Safire. You can sort of see the impetus behind both, as the word “a” in the phrase doesn’t act the way we expect the word “a” to act, making it seem like there’s some sort of abbreviation going on. It’s similar to the way people write highfaluting or highfalutin’, rather than the correct highfalutin. So get rid of the apostrophes and hyphens and use “come a cropper” naked. It feels good!

“Scrounge”

“Scrounge” is the virtual twin of the last word I wrote about, “wangle.” Both mean roughly the same thing, emerged in Britain as World War I slang, and after a few decades got adopted in America.

The OED definition for “wangle” is “To accomplish (something) in an irregular way by scheming or contrivance; to bring about or obtain by indirect or insidious means (something not obtainable openly).” “Scrounge” is more specifically about getting; the dictionary defines it as “To seek to obtain by irregular means, as by stealth or begging; to hunt about or rummage.”

The OED cites a 1909 book, Passing English of the Victorian Era: Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase, which defines “scrunging” as “(Country Boys’), stealing unripe apples and pears—probably from the noise made in masticating.” The word, with an added “o,” gained wide currency and a more general sense during the war. George Goodchild’s 1918 book Behind the Barrage provides this explanation:

In the category of “odd jobs” came “scrounging.” “Scrounging” is eloquent armyese — it covers pilfering, commandeering, “pinching,” and many other familiar terms. You may scrounge for rations, kit, pay, or leave. Signallers are experts at it, and they usually scrounge for wire. Scrounging for wire is legitimized by the War Office, and called by the gentler name “salving.”

As for U.S. adoption, here’s the Google Ngram Viewer graph for “wangle”:

Screen Shot 2018-10-26 at 9.42.44 AM And here’s the one for “scrounge”:

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For whatever reason, “scrounge” reached parity later (in the 1960s as opposed to the 1940s), but ultimately became more (rather than equally) popular in the U.S. than in the U.K. Go figure!