Red Nose Day

John Wall writes with the suggestion of new concept for this blog: the cultural Not One-Off Britishism. The import he has in mind is Red Nose Day, which I just learned was started in the U.K. in 1988 as a way to raise money for charitable causes through comedy performances on TV and, apparently, rampant photos of people wearing red noses, in the manner of clowns.

On May 21, Red Nose Day is coming to the U.S., through a variety of NBC broadcasts and other events.

It seems like a good cause, but with all due respect, the brand needs some work, since (in my humble opinion), there is little that’s unfunnier than a clown.

“Cuttings”

“Cuttings” is the BrE equivalent of the AmE “clippings”–that which one clips, or cuts, out of the newspaper and puts into a scrapbook or whatever. It turned up in a New York Times article the other day about Herbert Warren Wind, the late golf writer for the New Yorker, whose papers at Yale University, Karen Crouse wrote, “contain seven boxes brimming with the cuttings of a well-sown life.”

I had been a longtime reader and admirer of Wind (who died in 2005) and, because of his name and literary style, always had a sense that he was British–which would make the “cuttings” rather appropriate. But no–Crouse’s article reveals that he was a native of Brockton, Mass.

[Update: The comment by “popegrutch,” below, convinces me that I made a mistake and Crouse wasn’t perpetrating a Britishism at all: the “cuttings” she referred to was a botanical metaphor, not a journalistic reference.]

I swear I didn’t plan this

In my e-mail inbox just now:

Spotted in Greenwich Village, NY

More on “Weds.”

I’ve just finished the new thriller “The Girl on the Train,” written by the Englishwoman Paula Hawkins. I read the American edition and I’m not sure to what extent (if any) British expressions in the original were translated into Americanese. But there were a few that cropped up repeatedly: “buggy” (Americans would say “stroller”), “come round for a visit” (“around”), and one I wasn’t aware of–the transitive verb “quieten,” as in “quieten a baby.” Americans say “quiet.”

When I was almost done with the book, I came upon this (I’m pretty sure there aren’t any spoilers):

The thing that caught my eye was “Weds.” Longtime readers may recall my dislike of this abbreviation for “Wednesday” (my preference is “Wed.”), and my not notably successful attempt to determine if it’s a Britishism.

(If you want to know why it annoys me, here’s why: “Wed.” is a perfectly good, shorter, abbreviation; there is no tradition of skipping over letters in abbreviations [there is “Dr.” and “Mr.” but they go right to the last letter in the word]; and “Weds.”–unlike a decent abbreviation–doesn’t even represent how the first part of the word sounds–that would be “Wends” or “Wens.”)

“The Girl on the Train” would suggest, though it doesn’t prove, that a Britishism “Weds.” is.

“On the up and up”

Jan Freeman remarked on Twitter that she had been hearing the phrase “on the up and up” meaning “improving” instead of “honest.”

There are indeed two general meanings of the phrase. The one I’m familiar with is “honest” or “on the level,” and the OED identifies it as originally American, with citations going back to 1863.

The OED doesn’t specify any nationality for the “Steadily rising, improving, or increasing” meaning. The first citation is from The Baltimore Sun, 1930: “From now on, we are led to believe, law and order will be on the up and up, as the current phrase is.” But that strikes me as ambiguous–that is, it could mean that law and order is on the level, as opposed to on the rise. All the other citations are from British sources.

But in any case, as Jan suggests, it’s now being used in the U.S., as in this from a March post in Forbes.com: “to say that Thrive [Capital] is on the up and up would be a massive understatement.”

Any Yanks out there who have a sense that “on the up and up”=”on the rise” is a long-term thing over here?

Pronunciation of “-man”

This is (probably) off-topic, but I’d appreciate your help in something I’m looking into for another blog, Lingua Franca. I’m investigating how people pronounce the suffix “man” in such words as policeman, mailman, gunman, etc. (understanding, of course, that they are sexist and on the way out). The issue is whether the syllable is pronounced with a reduced stress and a “schwa” vowel, as in “woman,” or with equal stress, rhyming with “can” or “fan.”

Please take the survey at the link below, and do your part in helping the advancement of (pseudo-)science.

https://delaware.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cMUN9GM9BbwcXXv

“Bog standard”

Keith Huss (@keithhuss) writes on Twitter: “Having British wife and friends, I’m familiar with the phrase “bog standard”. Recently read it twice on US tech blogger sites.”

New one on me!

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “bog standard” as: “slang (depreciative, chiefly Brit.). Ordinary, basic, standard without extra features or modification; unexceptional or uninspired.”

The citations (the earliest one is from 1962) all refer to cars or computers, with the exception of this 1995 quote from Empire magazine: “A bog-standard biography with a cheap ‘Psycho’ sales gimmick, you can’t help thinking [Anthony] Perkins deserved better.”

An Urban Dictionary definition from 2006 goes:

“Completely, utterly, absolutely ordinary in every way. British slang. ‘Dave drives a totally bog standard Escort. Not even aircon. Dave is a cheap bastard.'”

The etymology is uncertain but interesting. The OED suggests that it may have derived from “box-standard,” an obsolete noun denoting “a frame or standard hollow tubing forming the main framework of a machine, engine, etc.” “Box-standard” shows up as an adjective meaning the same thing as “bog-standard” in 1983. According to Google Ngram Viewer, the two phrases were roughly equally popular until the late 1990s, when “bog” took off and crushed the opposition.

Is “bog-standard” a NOOB? It’s out there, a little. Suzy Menkes wrote in the New York Times in 2012 that a fashion show has a “focus on outerwear, including cropped jackets rather than the bog-standard trench.” But most of the quotes I find are, as Keith Huss suggests, on tech sites, such as this from Ziff-Davis’s Extreme Tech: “The company’s plans for an ARM-based server business may be in their infancy, but AMD has built at least one bog-standard ARM core.”

Whatever that means.

Lena Dunham fully is committed to “fully”

Not long ago, I quoted Lena Dunham’s use of the (originally) Australian “fully” as a more all-purpose emphasizer than Americans’ use of the word. Now here she is again in yesterday’s New York Times, talking about when, as a teenager, a therapist asked her to picture a soothing location:

“I fully just imagined Eloise’s home at the Plaza.”

(~~Heloise~~ Eloise was the heroine of a series of picture books who, indeed, lived at the Plaza Hotel.)

Seems like Dunham is on a one-woman crusade to get this word some traction.

A hard man is good to find

I thought that alleged Mae West quote might get your attention…

Back in May 2013, I wrote that I didn’t expect to come across hard man (BrE for “tough guy”) in the U.S. again. It did take almost two years, but in any event, on NPR this morning, host Scott Simon described the captain of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania as “the kind of guy that you might actually, you know, like to have schnapps with, but a very hard man.”

On Google News, all the recent uses of the phrase are British, but I found one interesting. This was an article from the Daily Mail about Tom Benson, the owner of the (American) football team the New Orleans Saints. The article anonymously quotes “a close family source” as saying, ‘Tom has always been a hard man.”

I wouldn’t trust anonymous sources generally, even less so in the Daily Mail. But when a presumably American anonymous source starts throwing around British expressions in that English rag, well, as we say in New York, fuhgeddaboutit.