I meant to note a Britishism uttered on my favorite television show, The Simpsons, a few of weeks ago. I figure that two days after the Super Bowl is about the right time! In the words of the recap on Celebrity Cafe:

Lisa emerges in the kitchen with a book titled “Pretending to Like Football” by Mrs. John Madden. Lisa dishes out a fact about “American football” before Bart interrupts her saying that it’s not “American” football; it’s just football. Lisa rubs it in that Milhouse invited her to the “American” football game instead of Bart. And Bart tattles on Lisa to Marge.

Congrats to the Seattle Seahawks side and their supporters for a brilliant match.

I’ve been reading about the return tour of an American cult rock band from the 1990s, Neutral Milk Hotel. The reviews all mention the album that’s considered their best, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.”

Aeroplane was first used for a “heavier-than-air aircraft,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1868, that is, before the aeroplane before it was invented. The OED describes airplane as “chiefly North American”; its first citation is from a 1906 Scientific American article that notes: “Air-plane is a much better word than aeroplane. It is as good etymologically, and much better when it is spoken.” The OED comments: “Airplane became the standard U.S. term (replacing aeroplane) after it was adopted by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1916. Although A. Lloyd Jones recommended its adoption by the BBC in 1928, it has until recently been no more than an occasional form in British English.”

Google Ngram Viewer confirms this analysis:

If the chart is too small to make out, it shows that aeroplane is still (barely) the preferred spelling in the U.K., and is virtually never used in the U.S.–other than in Neutral Milk Hotel albums.

Of course, I’d bet that in both lingos, the far preferred term is plane.

When I first started spending time in England, one new phrase that was completely unfamiliar to me was the High Street, which the OED defines as “very generally, the proper name of that street of a town which is built upon a great highway, and is (or was originally) the principal one in the town.” By the 1950s, metonymic noun and adjective forms had developed, referring to the shops not just on the High Street proper, but on surrounding streets as well, and the goods that could be found in them. From a 2000 article in Elle: “High-street queen Karen Millen launches her first range of spectacles this season, so nab yourself a pair for that librarian-chic look.”

The closest American equivalent, I suppose, would be “Main Street,” but it’s not really the same thing, and besides, to the extent Americans shop in brick-and-mortar stores anymore, they don’t go to High Street or Main Street shops, but instead to big-box stores like Home Depot and Office Depot located in suburban strip malls.

Imagine my surprise, then, to pick up the Philadelphia Inquirer recently and read, “Retail rents on Walnut Street have gone up 33.8 percent in a year, the sharpest annual increase of all ‘high streets’ among U.S. cities…” True, high street was in quotation marks, but it was there.

It turns out the article referred to a report from the real estate company Colliers International. High street is sprinkled all over the Colliers website, but, surprisingly, it’s an American company, based in Seattle. However, a deepish dive into the site reveals that the company originated in Australia,  merged with a Canadian company in 1976, and moved to Seattle only in 1976.

So it would appear that Colliers’ use of high street is something between an appendage and an affectation. I would say its chances of catching on here are low.

There must be something about American movie stars and British lingo. We just witnessed Mark Wahlberg going all NOOB-y. Now Anna Kendrick is quoted in GQ magazine about the horror of being approached for an autograph while shopping for underwear:

“There’s something deeply embarrassing about being approached when you’re holding knickers. And it’s happened TWICE!”

It’s enough to put your you-know-what in a twist.

Legend has it that when the Harry Potter books were published in the United States, all of the Britishisms were removed with a few exceptions that were deemed essential to the books’ identity, such as ginger, used to describe Ron Weasley’s hair. I wonder the extent to which such translation is generally undertaken. I would imagine it’s routinely done in matters of spelling, as programme, centre, and such would be jarring to American eyes, whereas vocabulary, especially in dialogue, could justly be seen as part of a novel’s flavour flavor.

The actual title of a book would appear to be a special case. A British novel called Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love, by Sarah Butler, has just been published in the U.S., and the fourth in the title word is still spelled Learnt, rather than Learned. That made me curious about the history of the two spellings in the two nations, and so I did a Google Ngrams search for the phrases has learned and has learnt, the results of which are below.

The chart shows that learned has always been the preferred word in both places, though around 1920, learnt (red line) was briefly as popular as learned (yellow line) in Britain. U.S. learned (blue line) as always kicked the butt of learnt (green line), and unless Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love has Harry Potter-level success, it is likely to continue to do so.

This is an as near as I can tell exact British equivalent of U.S. “tough guy,” usually used in a sporting or criminal context. The quintessential hard man is footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones. The OED gives no definition or etymology, but the phrase appeared as early as 1984, in this capsule movie review in The Guradian.

“Sequel again features Gene Hackman as maverick, hard-man cop Popeye Doyle, back on the trail of his old drugs-czar adversary Fernando Rey.” (The Guardian, 1984)

Some other examples (taken from OED citations in other words’ definitions):

“There was no room to express love and only space for one kind of man: the hard man, the man’s man.” (Face, 1995)

“To his prison mates Archie was a swaggering hard man who never let a sliver of emotion through the tough exterior he had built against the world.” (Evening News [Edinburgh], 1998)

“Self-styled Hampstead hard man..is actually just a big-mouthed wet.” (Q, February 2003)

Historically, to the extent the the phrase could be found in the U.S., it was in phrases like “You’re a hard man to track down” or in the off-color Mae West chiasmus “A hard man is good to find.” I had assumed I would never encounter the tough-guy meaning here. But I assumed wrong. In a column about (American) footballer Jim Brown in yesterday’s New York Times, sports columnist George Vecsey wrote, “His aging high school teammates still shudder from the dreaded Tuesday tackling drills and know him as a hard man in public life.”

Figures it would be Vecsey, a soccer fan and a man of the world. I don’t expect to come across it again.

The New York Times yesterday had an article about four UK television series (“Gavin & Stacey,” “Pulling,” “Second Sight,” and “Spy”) and one Australian one (“Rake”) that are being remade in the U.S. It interested me that ABC appears not to be giving a new title to “Pulling,” the original version of which the Times’ Mike Hale describes this way: “Featuring three unrepentantly randy women, it’s brutally frank about sex, booze and lowered expectations, while also being smart and raucously funny.”

The title thing intrigued me because I have never encountered that meaning of pull in the U.S. For the benefit of American readers, here’s the OED definition and citations:

I predict that if the show (which stars the excellent Kristen Schaal) ever makes it to air in the U.S., it will be with a new title.

Incidentally, Hale seems to have been inspired by his subject here to use not only randy but another NOOB, in this description of “Rake”: “The protagonist, now called Keegan Joye, will be played by one of American’s most gifted portrayers of kindhearted sleazeballs, Greg Kinnear.”