When I recently wrote a post about mad and nutter I considered including one additional Britishism indicating insanity. I ultimately decided not to because the chance of any American using seemed closer to slim than none.
I did not count on the New Yorker. Reading the August 1 issue of that publication this morning, I came upon this sentence from Sasha Frere-Jones: “My Morning Jacket, on the recently released album ‘Circuital,’ its sixth, makes it clear that the real hippie is neither biddable nor daft.”
That’s right, daft. Wikipedia informs me that Frere-Jones is an American, Manhattan-born, though it also notes “he is a grandson of Alexander Stuart Frere, the former chairman of the board of William Heinemann Ltd, the British publishing house, and a great-grandson of the novelist Edgar Wallace, who wrote many popular pulp novels, though he is best known for writing the story for the film King Kong.”
Turning to the New Yorker’s merciless online database, I find that Frere-Jones has used daft eleven times since 2005. This gives him a narrow lead over the magazine’s (American) film critic David Denby, with eight.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 