Nancy Friedman asks, “Is Charles Pierce the only U.S. journalist who uses gobshite?” She provides a link to an Esquire Magazine politics blog post by Pierce, titled “What Are the Gobshites Saying These Days?”

I was not familiar with the term, but having previously covered gobsmacked (wherein gob means “mouth”) and shite, I could figure out that it means someone out of whose gob comes shite. The OED confirms the meaning and notes that it’s “chiefly Irish English” and (thanks!) “derogatory.” The first citation is from Hugh Leonard’s 1973 play “Da“: “Hey God, there’s an old gobshite at the tradesmen’s entrance.”

(Interestingly, the OED reports an earlier U.S. Navy use, meaning “enlisted seaman,” with this 1910 quote: “You can imagine all the feelin’s In a foolish ‘gobshite’s’ breast.”)

In answer to Nancy’s question, I would have to say, actually, yes. When I searched for the word in the Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. newspapers, going back to the 1980s, I was initially surprised to find fifty-six hits. But a few were references to or quotes from Ireland, and most of the rest were references to a New England-based band called The Gobshites. The most recent, from August 2012, was a quote from a”political observer” named Charlie Cooke. He was discussing, you guessed it, Charlie Pierce:

“Pierce’s hyperbole transcends mere disagreement, as does his dismissal of all those who dissent as ‘gobshites.'”

From an NPR report this morning, about a Washington State man who confronted and then was shot by a gunman in a shopping mall:

“The first word that went through my head was ‘Bugger!’ Clearly, too much British TV.”

I categorize this one as an outlier because, as the gentleman’s comment indicates, the word has not penetrated (pardon the expression) U.S. usage yet, either as an interjection, a verb or an adverb (“And the pain, the hellish pain, of spending all that money, and getting bugger all in return,” The Sunday Times, 2002).

A letter to the editor to my local weekly newspaper, The [Swarthmore, Pennsylvania] Swarthmorean, starts off this way:

Why is the college not using all the available space on the campus for a new car park?

If the present car park were expanded, it could accommodate many cars.

It was signed “Dorothy Moffett.”

I do not know if Ms. Moffett is British, but I suspect she is, because I have never  encountered an American who uses car park instead of one of our two alternatives, parking lot and parking garage.

But I found that the term at one time has some currency in the U.S.–at least among headline writers, who are always looking for ways to trim words and phrases. A 1953 New York Times headline reads “City Set to Start Metered Car Park.”

The only recent U.S.-datelined use in the Times came in a 2011 style-section piece about the Art Basel Miami Beach festival: “The event was originally scheduled to take place at a mansion on Indian Creek Island but ended up, more conveniently and also more appropriately, at the Herzog & de Meuron car park at 1111 Lincoln Road.”

And in that case, parking garage is hardly sufficient. Here is how Wikipedia’s description of the seven-story, $65 million Miami Beach facility begins:

The design has been characterized as resembling a house of cards. It is an open-air structure with no exterior walls constructed around buttresses and cantilevers that features floor heights varying from 8 to 34 feet.Some of the internal ramps are quite steep in order to accommodate the wider height intervals. Elevators and a central, winding staircase take drivers to and from their cars.A glassed-in high-fashion boutique sits on an edge of the fifth floor.The parking garage features retail space at the street level, with tenants such as Maxposure Media Group, and is joined to another structure at the same address that serves as an office for SunTrust Banks.[Developer Robert] Wennett has built a penthouse apartment for himself as part of a 18,000-square-foot (1,700 m²) space on the structure’s roof that also features a pool and gardens with hanging vines.

Now that is a proper car park!

Among the several unfamiliar (to me) British expressions used in Justin Peters’ Slate piece (discussed below) was one used by Janet Maslin yesterday in her New York Times review of the memoirs of Rod Stewart, CBE:

“Mr. Stewart’s antics have earned him a richly deserved Jack the Lad reputation.”

In considering the expression, the OED suggests that the reader should “perhaps compare the expression Jack’s the Lad, found in a nautical song,” which it dates from the 1840s and from which it quotes this line: “For if ever fellow took delight in swigging, gigging, kissing, drinking, fighting, Damme I’ll be bold to say that Jack’s the lad.” The definition: “a conspicuously self-assured, carefree, and often brash young man; a ‘chancer’.”

Every day, I read the Tirdad Derakhshani’s “SideShow” gossip column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I would call it a “guilty pleasure,” except that I don’t really enjoy it all that much. But anyway.

I have noticed that, probably because of the banality and repetitiveness of his material, Derakhshani makes a (visible) effort to use unorthodox lingo. Sometimes the lingo consists of Britishisms, and that is the case today, when he writes about Britney Spears: “her finances are still under the control of her da, James Parnell Spears.”

If I’m not mistaken, da is actually (unlike mum, which by the way I just heard Tom Magliozzi use on the radio show “Car Talk”–is it a Boston thing?) not a Britishism but an Irish diminutive for “father.” I first became aware of it when reading about and then seeing Hugh Leonard’s excellent play of that name, in a 1978 Broadway production starring Barnard Hughes.

Surprisingly, the OED doesn’t mention this, even though its only two twentieth-century citations are from Irishman: James Joyce (“Waiting outside pubs to bring da home.”–Ulysses) and C. Day-Lewis, writing under his pen name “Nicholas Blake” (“Miss Judith grew up to be..the apple of her da’s eye”).

The New York Times recognized the Irishness of the term just last week, in an article about an Olympic boxing gold medalist: “As the years passed, and as [Katie]Taylor became well known, Ireland grew evermore fond of her: a nice girl without any airs, coached by her Da.”

In any case, it’s clear to me that Derakhshani pretty much all alone in the American use of da, and in fact that inspires me to start a new category: Outliers. I will be retroactively adding stroke, zed and a bunch of other one-offs.

I always listen carefully when Mike Nichols is talking–he is as smart, witty and sophisticated as they come–and that was the case last month, when he appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” to discuss the production of “Death of a Salesman” he recently directed. Referring to the library research he did about two previous directors of Arthur Miller’s play, Nichols commented: “I saw a letter from [Elia] Kazan to [Harold] Clurman, who is sort of his partner-stroke-nemesis.”

Naturally, what struck me was the word stroke. I sensed from context and subsequently confirmed that it is the British equivalent of the punctuation mark Americans call slash (/), or nowadays forward slash, and similarly used orally, as the OED puts it, “to indicate or stress alternatives.” The dictionary lists these examples:

1965   M. Allingham Mind Readers xv. 153,   I have my own feel, of course, which would be ‘glad stroke laughing at’ in his case.

1971   J. Yardley Kiss a Day ii. 39   The Truman stroke Eisenhower regime.

As for U.S. use of stroke, I haven’t been able to find a single example other than Nichols’. That makes sense. If it emerged from the mouth of anyone of lesser stature, it would come off as insufferably pretentious.

What would this blog do without Nancy Friedman? I shudder to think. Hard on the heels of spotting an Oregon loo, she reports that on last Thursday’s “Parks and Recreation,” Chris (Rob Lowe) said to Ben (Adam Cooper Scott): “The Ben Wyatt I know, I don’t think he’d be happy just sitting here faffing around.” (I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this first from Elizabeth Yagoda, “Parks and Rec” fan that she is.)

The Britishism in there is derived from faff, a verb meaning dither or fuss, and is usually followed by about. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation, from an 1874 volume called Yorkshire Oddities, suggests that it originated as a regionalism: “T’ clock~maker‥fizzled an’ faff’d aboot her, but nivver did her a farthing’s worth o’ good.”

Up till now, U.S. use has been spotty (and I don’t mean spotty in the English sense). It is a favorite of New York Times sports blogger Jeff Z. Klein, who, covering the 2008 women’s soccer matches at the 2008 Olympics, wrote:

Much faffing about as these final minutes tick down. New Zealand have a throw in deep in the Amerk zone, but the one Fern is surrounded by four Americans and winds up on her back as they run away with the ball.

Klein’s use of the plural verb have with the collective New Zealand indicates he has absorbed a bit too much English football coverage, and suggests that faff  is still more or less a one-off.