This is the Great White Whale of this blog. (Well, one of them, along with you lot and I should have done.) Every once in a while, I am tempted to shout, “Thar she blows!” Wes Davis recently suggested to me that he spied a large albino form on the horizon, so I hunted around and came up with:
“The team are planning for its first trip in June and hopes to begin work by documenting natural orchid pollination…” (Jacksonville Courier, January 28)
“The team are composed of two types of people who usually don’t mingle.” (Bradenton Herald, January 27)
“As for the Midwest bias, I imagine it’s because the team are Big 10 fans or because Robb Heineman is a Notre Dame guy.” (Kansas City Star, January 10)
This may sound impressive, but in fact these are outliers, squeezed to the margins by a sea of the team is‘s. And it would be a fool’s errand to even look for the government are or the company are.
Other than this Oregon sighting (which came courtesy of Nancy Friedman), and in crossword puzzles, loo is not seen or heard much on these shores. An exception is this from an August 2011 New York Times style blog, about a country cottage: “You flush the loo the old-fashioned way — with buckets of water hand-pumped from a spring.”
But this is a Britishism that should be more than one-off. Now that john is antiquated, we don’t have a one-syllable term that’s neither euphemistic nor explicit. So let’s go loo.
And in any case, those stick figures are brilliant.
From the website of the Brooklyn-based "Remedy Quarterly"
The extremely astute Nancy Friedman suggests looking into stockist, noting “US companies are appropriating this BrE term… Until recently, the more-common term would have been ‘where to buy’ or ‘retailers.’” Never even once having come across this term, I would have doubted her, had she not supplied four web sites that list the stockists from which one can purchase their stuff:
Nancy notes that Remedy Quarterly, a magazine, is based in Brooklyn.
I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.
I got an e-mail from Stuart Semmel reading, in its entirety: “‘Boxing Day.’ Suddenly it’s everywhere.”
Preliminary research suggests that Boxing Day–the day-after-Christmas holiday celebrated in the U.K. and around the Commonwealth–is, if not exactly ubiquitous in the U.S., at least establishing some outposts as a not-one-off-Britishism. To wit:
A post today in today’s Washington Post’s weather blog reads, “Welcome to the one year anniversay [sic] of the Boxing Day blizzard, known locally as No-mageddon, as the snow skipped over Washington.”
Jimmy’s No. 43, a New York gastrobub, is celebrating its annual Boxing Day Coat Drive.
“A Penny for your Boxing-Day Thoughts,” reads a headline in today’s Pasadena Star-News.
The footwear website walkingonacloud.com is running a Boxing Day promotion.
If Boxing Day indeed has U.S. legs, the proof of the (Christmas) pudding comes from none other than Republican guru Karl Rove. Interviewed on December 22 by Fox News’s Mark Steyn, Rove said:
We’re now at a point in a primary where every single moment matters. You cannot imagine how many demands there when you have so few days, 12 days plus, you know, including Christmas day and Boxing Day, and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day….
“You stunned me, Karl,” Steyn responded. “I didn’t know they celebrated Boxing Day in Iowa.”
Two separate meanings are in play here. The first, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A cause of laughter; a joke,” was emblazoned onto my brain by the very sharp HBO-BBC comedy series “Extras.” In it Ricky Gervais plays a mediocre actor who finds himself starring in a witless sitcom, wearing a curly black wig and oversized glasses; his signature catchphrase, endlessly derided, is “Are you ‘avin’ a laff?”
The OED (characteristically, IMHO) makes no distinction, as it probably should do, between the plural and singular forms. That is, it is a standard Americanism to refer to “(having) some laughs,” while the singular, “a laugh,” is rare here. But not unheard of: a New York Times headline on November 27 was “Schmekel, a Band Born as a Laugh.”
The other meaning–“an amusing or entertaining person”–presents a more interesting case. The OED says this is “now chiefly Brit.” That means it’s an unusual example of an Americanism that became a Britishism and is now on the verge of NOOB-dom. For the American origin, the OED cites Kodak Magazine from 1921 (“Eight finished acts were presented, including‥Sam Kellman, Hebrew comedian, who was a laugh from start to finish”) and Of Mice and Men, 1937: “Old Susy’s a laugh—always crackin’ jokes.” It might also have mentioned Lorenz Hart’s 1940 lyric to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” which notes with a characteristic double entendre, “he’s a laugh, but I like it, because the laugh’s on me.”
Fast forward to the 2000s, and the word has a strongly British identity. In the film “Shaun of the Dead,” Shaun says of Ed, “I like having him around, he’s a laugh.” And in Sue Townsend’s 2006 novel Queen Camilla, a character refers to “Prince Harry, who were a right laugh but were a proper ginga.”
The phrases laugh riot and laugh a minute have, of course, long been popular in the U.S., and they make searching for a-person-as-a-laugh challenging. However, my college daughter Maria reports that in her circles, it’s a comer. And I’ve found a few outcroppings on the internet, for example, this September 28, 2011, post from the blog thepartywhip.com:
But I just don’t see that friendly banter working with some of the goons who occupy the Tea Party wing of the GOP. “Hey guys, this is Ted. He’s convinced that the president was born in Kenya and is waging a steady effort to take away his gun, but believe me, he’s a laugh!”
My college-student daughter Maria informs me that in Facebook birthday greetings, the normal salutation is xoxo, meaning, “hugs and kisses.” But she says that every one of her friends who has studied in England–as well as all their English friends, and increasing number of people who seem to want to sound English–merely write xx, meaning, presumably, “kisses.”
This bears further study. I wonder if it relates to the hugging epidemic that reached American shores a decade and a half ago. Has it not gotten to the U.K–do acquaintances merely kiss there on greeting each other, and eschew body-on-body content?
In any case, I fancy–and note the writer’s use of the word fancy, suggesting English origin–the definition of xx on urbandictionary.com:
Something every girl says. If she says it to you, you’re not special, she doesn’t fancy you, shut up.
Tom : Hiiiiiiiii :D:D HI
Mel: hi do i know u…
Tom: HOW ARE U !
Mel: Im ok soz g2g bye xx
(Mel signs out, or blocks tom)
Tom (to other friend) HIIII MAN MEL JUST SAID “xx” TO ME!
friend: And?
Tom: SHE LIKES ME
friend: No she doesnt shut youre mouth.
Just a few months ago, the New York Times gave this word the full quotation marks/translation treatment: Now, every ”splash” — a tabloid’s Page 1 story — is assumed to have been ”nicked,” or stolen, by a hacked phone or other illicit means.
But in a September 25 Arts review by Steve Smith, the word was used without the bat of an eyelash: Sultry string figures embellished with sweeping harp recalled what Hollywood composers nicked from Duke Ellington; staggered section entries piled up with Gershwin-esque swagger.
Is nicked ready for the big time? Stay tuned. (Thanks to Devin Harner.)
notoneoffbritishisms.com 