I noted in 2020 that “in Britain, ‘pensioner’ might refer to a person who is no longer working but is not necessarily receiving a pension: what Americans would call a ‘retiree.'” However, “American uses of ‘pensioner,’ what few there are, tend to refer specifically to people getting (often particular) pensions.”
Yesterday’s mail brought the first American example I’ve seen of the British meaning:
The pensioner is me but I do not receive a pension from the state of Delaware or my former employer, the University of Delaware. I do receive medical benefits, so it’s not exactly pensioner-in-the-sense of retiree. But it’s close.
In recent days, London has experienced “The Queue,” in which people waited for up to 24 hours in order to pass by the body of Queen Elizabeth and pay their respects. And so it seems a good time to take another look at “queue,” meaning a line of people waiting for something.
As the spelling might suggest, it originated as a not one-off Frenchism. In French, “queue” means “tail,” and it was adapted by the English in the eighteenth century to mean a long plait of hair, that is, a pigtail. The French initiated the line-of-people meaning in the 1790s, and the first uses noted by the OED either italicized it as a foreign word or used it in a Gallic context, as in this quote from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837): “That talent … of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes … the French People.”
It’s an interesting quote because, of course, we now think of the British has having a talent for standing spontaneously in queue.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, queue-as-line was used in both Britain and the United States. An example of the latter came from New York Representative James Brooks, speaking in Congress in 1864: “Last Monday week I saw a long queue ranged around the New York custom-house waiting turns to buy gold certificates at 65, while gold was selling at 75.” And it’s worth noting that “line” was used in Britain, as in this 1711 quote from Joseph Addison: “The Officers planting themselves in a Line on the left Hand of each Column.”
But in the twentieth century, the British took “queue” up in earnest.
And soon a verb form arrived: “queue up” by 1920, and the “up”-less form some thirty years later.
As the Ngram Viewer graph shows, American use of the noun started ticking up in the 1960s. In January 1960, William Zinsser wrote in the New York Times, about the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, “Only on very rainy days was the queue [for the “Futurama” exhibit] a short one, but few tourists begrudged the hour they spent waiting.” “Queue” has appeared in the Times 5,385 times since then. Some of the increase in use on both sides of the Atlantic has to do with the use of “queue” in computer terminology, and more recently, inspired by Netflix, as a term for a sequence of movies or songs one plans to get to. (“What’s in your queue?”) Even more recently, some people have referred to a DJ “queueing up a record,” instead of the traditional term, cuing cueing it up.
Getting back to waiting in a queue, you can understand the word’s popularity in America, given the ambiguity-inducing multiple meanings of “line,” “line up”and “on line.” (New Yorkers wait on line, the rest of the country in line.) The only downside of “queue” is that it’s harder to spell. The gerund form actually has two versions, “queuing” and “queueing,” the former overtaking the latter in popularity in Britain in around 1990, according to Ngram Viewer. In any case, I knew a milestone had been passed about ten years ago, when I was at my local grocery store, and noticed that a sign indicating the “line” for checkout had been replaced by one indicating the “queue.”
Another milestone came in 2016, when President Barack Obama spoke against the U.K. leaving the European Union. That would portend badly for any U.S..-U.K. trade deals, he was quoted as saying: “I think it’s fair to say maybe some point down the line, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is on negotiating with the E.U. The U.K. is going to be at in the back of the queue.”
Leaving aside the policy aspect, British commentators jumped on the president’s use of “queue,” some suggesting he been “fed” it by Prime Minister David Cameron. However, writing in the Washington Post, Adam Taylor pointed out that Obama had uttered “queue” numerous times in the past, and was kind enough to cite this blog on the president’s use of such other Britishisms as “full stop,” “run to ground,” and “take a decision.”
As with many words, I distinctly recall the first time I heard “peckish.” The student group I was leading on a British trip in the mid-1990s was on a touring bus (which I was learning to call a “coach”), and the tour guide said there would be cafes in the next town we’d stop in, “in case you’re feeling peckish.” From the context I concluded that it meant a little hungry—that is, less than “starving” or “famished”—and so it does.
The OED reveals that the term popped up in Britain as early as 1714. All the pre-1988 OED citations are British, including my favorite, from P.G. Wodehouse in 1936: “Not since the distant days of my first private school had I been conscious of such a devastating hunger. Peckish is not the word. I felt like a homeless tapeworm.” A notable use came in Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop” sketch from 1972:
Owner: What can I do for you, Sir?
Customer: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmon Street just now, skimming through Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, and I suddenly came over all peckish.
O: Peckish, sir?
C: Esurient.
O: Eh?
C: ‘Ee I were all ‘ungry-like!
However, as befitting its pre-Revolutionary origin, the word did migrate to the U.S.; like “reckon,” it appears to have survived mainly in Western or rural settings. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a line from The Clockmaker (1838) by the Nova Scotia author Thomas Haliburton: “I don’t care if I stop and breakfast with you, for I feel considerable peckish this morning.” Its first appearance in the New York Times came in an 1872 Western tale, where a character says, “All hands got to be pretty peckish.” And the word shows up in an 1899 dictionary of Virginia “Folk-Speech,” defined as “Inclined to eat, somewhat hungry.”
The Coen brothers may or may not have been aware of this when they wrote the script for O Brother, Where Art Thou, their 2000 backwoods Depression-era version of The Odyssey. Big Dan Teague, the character played by John Goodman, says, “Thank you boys for throwin’ in that fricassee. I’m a man of large appetite, and even with lunch under my belt, I was feelin’ a mite peckish.”
In America, “peckish” developed another meaning, kind of befitting the way it sounds. The OED defines this as “Irritable, peevish; touchy,” and has an 1857 quote from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine: “I have observed that mothers are apt to be oversweet on their daughters-in-law at first, and terribly peckish on them afterwards.”
Both senses fell out of use in the U.S. until the age of NOOBs. That 1988 OED citation is from the American novelist Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking: “At four in the afternoon, everyone feels a little peckish, but only the British have institutionalized this feeling. Every year one English magazine or another carries an article about the decline of the tearoom, but teatime still exists and many tea shops serve it.”
That was a bit of an outlier, and notably dealt with an British topic. The word really didn’t start taking off in the U.S. until a decade or so later. I saw O Brother but didn’t notice the word, and the first time I recall encountering it here was in 2015, when one of the producers of the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend said in a radio interview that she’d chosen a California town as the setting in part because the local mall had pretzel shops at both entrances, “just in case you got peckish for a pretzel.” (I posted this quote when I first wrote about “peckish,” and several commenters objected to the peckish for something construction as a vulgar Americanism.)
Since 1995, the word has appeared in the Times 107 times, including in a review of a bar on the Lower East Side: “If peckish, try the matzo-meal fried chicken with pastrami-spiced gravy ($23).” Most recently, it was in the first sentence of a fitness article: “Why are we so peckish after some workouts but uninterested in eating after others?”
A few years ago I wrote about the word “shock” used as an attributive noun, meaning “shocking” — as in shock survey, shock victory, shock election results, etc. It’s fairly common in the British press, but at the time I could find only one U.S. use and labeled it “On the Radar.” But I’ve seen quite a few examples over the past few months. I didn’t write them down, but I’m pretty sure they were all in New York Times sports coverage, as was this one, just published by tennis writer Christopher Clarey, in reference to newly crowned U.S. Open champ Iga Swiatek:
The phrase means “available for sale” or, more generally, “available.” The first OED citation is from the (London) Daily News in 1881: “Old wheat scarce and dear. Very little barley on offer.” But using Google Books, I came up with an example more than fifty years older, from a September 1826 issue of Cobbett’s Political Register:
But in any case, the phrase didn’t cross the Atlantic for another century or more:
A relatively early use came in the New York Times in 1990: “Tens of thousands of Apple Macintosh users visited the Macworld trade exposition here earlier this month, examining the hardware and software on offer.” It arrived in the New Yorker through British writers—Kenneth Tynan in 1977 and Salman Rushdie in 1992—and was first used there by an American one, Hendrik Hertzberg (using the magaqzine’s famous editoral “we”), in 1994: “We know, for example, that there are people who picked up their first copy of The New Yorker on account of a story or a “casual”–on account of something by O’Hara or Cheever or Salinger or Perelman or Munro or Updike–and only later, and gradually, became aware that other kinds of writing were on offer in these pages too.”
But it’s all over the place now. The Times used the phrase 112 times in 2021, from to January 21 (at a hair colorist’s studio, “Cappuccino and mineral water were served, and tuna and watercress salad was on offer”) to December 21 (“While the Omicron variant has thrown many people’s New Year’s Eve plans into doubt, there’s no shortage of events on offer in the televised realm”).
This popped up on my New York Times phone app this morning.
The headline, taken directly from the columnist Bret Stephens, spurred to me take another look at shambolic, which I first addressed almost precisely eleven years ago. (Time flies when you’re having fun.) The definition of the adjective is “Chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined” — that is, in a state of shambles. As I noted then, the OED‘s first citation is from The Times of London in 1970, but there’s also an odd note: “Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958.” Doesn’t say who’s doing the reporting.
In any case, there are definitely antedates to the 1970 quote, and even to 1958. Moving in reverse chronological order:
August 3, 1965: “Mr: William Yates The hon: Member must understand that so long as the country is willing to pour more and more money into this ancient, shambolic building in this area of London, there is no chance of getting that or having any of the facilities that he wants…”–Parliamentary debate
July 25, 1965: “Our social life is shambolic.”–The Sunday Times
1958: “He said his club had coined a new word ‘Shambolic,’ which meant spending more time watching the weather than playing.”–West Sussex Times
1952: “… one must admit there were those among us who were somewhat on the shambolic side.”–The Tank. (This citation appears in Wiktionary, which links to a Google Books entry, but I don’t 100 percent trust it because Google Books doesn’t offer a full view and its dating is often dodgy.)
Next is an interesting quote I turned up in the ProQuest database. It’s an abstract of a 1946 article from the Blackpool Tribune reviewing a book by Roland Gant called How Like a Wilderness. It’s not clear who write the abstract, or when, but it has the feel of being composed at the time–and also suggests “shambolic” might have been World War II military slang. The blurb begins: “THE AUTHOR parachuted into the Calvados country on D-Day in an operation which, in the language of those days, would have been described as ‘shambolic.'”
And there’s one more, a full seven years earlier, which I had cited in my earlier post. It’s from a May 1939 number of The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics. (Previously, I had found it via Google Books, but it doesn’t appear to be there anymore, and this time I dug it up in the JSTOR database.)
I’m pretty certain that this doesn’t have any relation to the present-day “shambolic.” For one thing, it’s in an American journal, and Ngram Viewer shows the word not taking hold in the U.S. till the 1990s.
For another, the context (including quotation marks) suggests that the writer, David S. Wald, is inventing a new word based on “sham,” not “shambles.” But the word is undeniably there and I hope the OED takes note.
As I say, American use picked up at the end of the last century. It first turned up in the New York Times in a 1984 William Safire column taking note of the word. Between then and today’s Bret Stephens quote, the word appeared in the paper 365 times.
And finally, I should note that we should be grateful to “shambolic” if only because it spawned omnishambles!
I’ve written about several cases where Americans have adopted the British tendency to pluralize attributive nouns: to use drugs party, covers band, drinks menu, and books editor instead of the customary/traditional “drug party,” “cover band,” “drink menu,” and “book editor.” Check out those links if you’re interested in the ins and outs of the issue.
The latest instance comes via a current National Public Radio (NPR) corporate underwriting spot, intoned by the same plummy-sounding woman who (in another spot) talks about “what-if scenahhrios.” In this one, for Amazon Business, she touts the way it “helps simplify the supplies-buying process with a one-stop shopping experience.” The typical American term, I submit, would be “supply-buying process.”
I acknowledge that I can’t prove that. Both variations of the phrase are uncommon enough that Ngram Viewer and other tools aren’t able to shed much light. However, I can report that “supply buying” has been used nine times in the history of the New York Times and “supplies buying,” as of now, has never appeared in the paper.
If anyone thinks I’m off-base here, please have at me. (Not that you required encouragement.)
The other day I spotted this display of neckties in a local department store, Kohl’s.
To be clear, these ties are pretty much the opposite of “bespoke” — they’re mass-produced, of middling quality, and sold in bulk in a department store, for pete’s sake. Brings to mind what Humpty-Dumpty told Alice in Through the Looking Glass — “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” I reckon we’re living in a Lewis Carroll world.
Some years ago I looked at the expression “can’t be arsed” (that is, can’t be bothered) and the way it has been (mis)construed, notably by Americans, as “can’t be asked.” A couple of developments since then. First, the OED moved its first citation for the expression to 1968 (from 1978, as I recall). In Hunter Davies’s 1968 book The Beatles, Paul McCartney is quoted as saying: “If they can’t be arsed waiting for me, I can’t be arsed going after them.” In the same book, John Lennon says, “I like ‘A Day in the Life,’ but it’s still not half as nice as I thought it was when we were doing it. I suppose we could have worked harder on it. But I couldn’t be arsed doing any more.”
Second, I found a very long, multi-year thread on the wordreference.com forum debating the merits of “can’t be arsed” and “can’t be asked.” I’ll spare you the details, except to say that one commenter found a 1979 article in which the American pianist Keith Jarrett was quoted as saying, “There are things now that I can’t be asked to do that maybe five years ago I would…” Now, that raises the question of whether Jarrett actually said “can’t be asked” or whether he said the British “can’t be arsed” and the interviewer mistakenly rendered it as “can’t be asked.” By a stroke of luck, that 1979 interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, is a Facebook friend of mine and I asked him if he remembered what Jarrett said. In a kind of Annie Hall-Marshall McLuhan moment, he responded quickly and definitively: “He said ‘asked.’”
I can understand why Jarrett and others would have made the change. First, most British people pronounce “arse” and “arsed” without voicing the “r,” so it sounds like they could be saying “asked.” Second, “can’t be asked” actually makes more sense than “can’t be arsed”—suggesting the idea that I won’t do something even if someone asks me to.
Perhaps for those reasons, “can’t be asked” apparently spread to the U.K. quite some time ago. A commenter on my original post said, “Working in and with South Londoners in the late 90s, I can confirm ‘can’t be asked’ as a thing, albeit pronounced ‘can’t be axed’. Actually more common at that time than arsed…”
And in 2007, someone posted a definition of “can’t be asked” on Urban Dictionary: “Used by some Southern UK speakers in place of ‘can’t be arsed’ because they misheard it, or want to be more polite.”
Helpfully dispelling any “arsed”/“asked” confusion is the version that has apparently become popular among young people on both sides of the Atlantic in their texting and commenting: the initialism “CBA.”
A few years ago, I looked at the rather subtle differences between British and American use of the expression “meant to,” and a few examples of the British version being used in the U.S.
Briefly, Americans use it to mean “designed to” (“the speech was meant to convey a sense of solidarity”) or “destined to” (“our marriage was meant to be”). While in Britain there are additional meanings, all where Americans would probably say “supposed to”: “said to” (“this movie is meant to be good”); “tasked with” (“the builder was meant to expand the kitchen”); and a third, seen in this headline that appeared on the New York Times website the other day.
Dr. Bernard is an Indiana ob-gyn who, the essay explains, “became a target of a national smear campaign for speaking out about her 10-year-old patient, a rape victim from Ohio who needed an abortion and had to travel to Indiana to receive one, given the restrictions in her home state.” The “meant to” in the headline is yet another “supposed to,” this time indicating a plan or intention.
Its appearance in the Times is enough to remove the “on the radar” designation from the phrase. Clearly, it was meant to be.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 