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“Bairn”

The gossip writer for my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer used an impressive three Britishisms in two sentences in yesterday’s paper:

“Pop star-thesp Pink has been gushing about her daughter, Willow Sage Hart, since the bairn was born in June 2011. But Doylestown [Pennsylvania]’s proudest daughter wasn’t always so keen on becoming a mum.”

I’ve previously covered two of them; links will take you to the relevant entry. The third is bairn, meaning (one’s) child, which derives from the Old English bearn. It is found in Beowulf, written in 529, and the most recent citation in the OED is from History of the Norman Conquests, by E.A. Freeman:  “Harthacnut too..was at least a kingly bairn.” I get a sense that Freeman used it in 1867 because even then, it seemed like an antique word.

When one searches for it in a contemporary context, most of the hits refer to the expression “Jock Tamson’s bairns,” about which Wikipedia has some interesting things to say:

“We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” is Lowland Scots and Northumbrian English for we’re all John Thomson’s children, It is a popular saying in Scotland and the far north of England, and is known in other parts of the world. Nowadays, the phrase is often used to mean “we’re all the same under the skin”.

It has been suggested as a euphemism for God, so the saying could mean “we are all God’s children”. The expression “We’re a’ the bairns o’ Adam”, conveys exactly the same meaning, see Freedom Come-All-Ye a song written by Hamish Henderson. Scottish Gaelic also has the shorter saying “Clann MhicTamhais” (Thomson/MacTavish’s children/clan). This is a common egalitarian sentiment in Scottish national identity, also evident in the popularity of the Robert Burns song A Man’s A Man for A’ That.

Although Jock Tamson’s Bairns is used as a personification of the Scots nation, it is also used to refer to the human race in general.

In the United States, bairn is very much a novelty item, used for variety or comic effect or elegant variation (both apply in the Philadelphia Inquirer item). The most recent use by a New York Times writer came in 2006, in a Natalie Angier column about mothers (in the animal kingdom) who eat their young or allow them to die:

In other cases, mothers turn infanticidal because they are born optimists, ever tuned to the sunny expectation that good times lie ahead. Each year they breed for a banquet, producing a maximum of begging bairns as the season starts; and when there is plenty of food, they will provision every young.

By the way, there may have been another word that puzzled you in the Inquirer item. Thesp was originated by the trade-newspaper Variety; it’s show-biz slang for actor.

Faux Brits, or faux Britishisms?

I’ve been at this too long. That, anyway, was my reaction when I read the following in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine profile of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, an American who now lives in London:

He uses Britishisms that make him sound a little like the famous faux-Brits Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna. He told me he had “a good ol’ time” at the Olympics, where he attended beach volleyball and an equestrian event as Boris Johnson’s guest. Living in Marylebone is nice, he says, because “we have loads of friends and people pop by.” Unlike in the United States, where politicians are remote Wikipedia subjects, in Britain he “literally” (pronounced LIT-ruh-lee) knows them.

The passage left me dazed and confused. Is “good ol’ time” a Britishism? Is “pop by”? (Or is the author referring to “loads”?) And what about that pronunciation of “literally”? I associate it with Rob Lowe’s character on “Parks and Recreation,” who is certainly not a Brit, even a faux one.

I wish I could look all that up on Wikipedia, but even that remarkable resource is no help here. So I’ll crowd-source it to you lot. Help?

“Argle bargle” gets love from Scalia

After I published a post about various U.S. uses of argle bargle (“Disputatious argument, bandying of words, wrangling”–OED), a veritable flood of U.K. commenters observed they heard this term rarely if at all, while a variant, argy-bargy, was quite familiar to them.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent to last week’s Supreme Court decision overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, continued the tradition of Americans using the archaic version, noting:

As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “bare … desire to harm.”

Elsewhere in his dissent, Scalia doubled down on his NOOB-itude, writing, “It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here.”

Cheeky monkey!

How About “Deft Plank”?

When I pick up the (paper) New York Times, I always turn to page 2 to read the corrections. Since the Times is so obsessive about beating its chest over every error it has made, the record-set-straighting can be amusing. A couple of weeks ago, this classic appeared:

Because of editing errors, an article on Thursday about a duo that has its first Top 10 single and its first No. 1 album on the Billboard album chart misstated its name at two points. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is Daft Punk — not Daft Puck or Daft Pink.

The mistakes came about because daft is still on the radar as a NOOB. Presumably, the success of the French musical duo will speed the word’s ascent to full-fledged status.

Hasn’t happened yet, however. On Sunday, I opened up my home-town Philadelphia Inquirer to find this:

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More on Footballisms

Interesting article on the BBC website about differences between U.S. and British vocabulary for sports, especially football/soccer. NOOBs has covered the issue, especially in a guest post by Jack Bell, but the BBC piece provides some nuance. The author, Tom Geoghegan, quotes American soccer blogger Chris Harris on a contentious split

between US soccer fans insisting on using American terms to describe the game compared to Americans who insist on using British language to talk about the game, so they’re more accepted by hardcore soccer fans and ex-pats. So when Americans use terms like ‘match’, ‘nil-nil’, ‘kit’ and other terms, many US fans will tag those Americans with the ‘Euro snob’ label.

The BBC piece is datelined Washington, but either Geoghegan or his subeditor is British. I know that because the chart in the piece, depicting U.S. and British terms, shows a striking ignorance of the way Americans speak American lingo.

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Where to begin? Well, shutout and matchup are one word in these United States, on frame rings no bell, and our actual cliche is “in his wheelhouse,” not “in the wheelhouse.” And offence instead of offense? Really, BBC?

“Local”

I was listening to the public radio show “The Takeaway” today. They had an interview with Thomas Kershaw, who for many years has owned the Boston bar after which the one in the TV show “Cheers” was modeled. Talking about the atmosphere in the city after the recent bombings, he said, “People have places they frequent, that they call their local.”

My ears perked up. This sounded like local in a very British sense, the one usually referred to as the local and defined by the OED as “the public house in the immediate neighborhood.” The dictionary quotes Germaine Greer: “Women don’t nip down to the local.”

After some looking around, I am going to label local as On the Radar. The only possible U.S. use I was able find about wasn’t about a bar at all. It was a March 2012 New York Times article that talked about how a man “came to own his local: the Mud, Sweat and Tears Pottery studio.”

But I bet local will eventually come into its own as a full-fledged NOOB. Probably in Brooklyn.

 

 

“On About”

The British say someone is on about something; Americans say going on, or going on and on. The first citation in the OED is from Rosamund Lehmann’s 1936 novel, Weather in Streets: “Marda’s always asking me why I don’t get a divorce… Last year she was always on about it.”

Welcome to NOOB-hood, bro.

  • Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) writes on Twitter: “While I’m on about etymology (I’m always on about etymology): ‘adamant’ gets its root from ‘diamond’ — hard, unbreakable.”
  • Kelly Dwyer on Yahoo Sports a couple of weeks ago: “I didn’t see a second of TNT’s Thursday night package, and didn’t hear what [basketball commentator Chris] Webber was on about.”
  • “G. Funk”‘s comment on an article about professional wrestling on The Bleacher Report: “That’s why [the Ultimate Warrior] was the best. No one had a clue what he was on about, but everyone loved it.”

An early U.S. use came from the Rev. Al Sharpton, quoted in a 2002 New York Times article about a taped conversation he had with an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer: ”The guy had come to me. In the middle of conversation he started talking about how he could cut me in on a cocaine deal. I didn’t know what this guy was on about. I didn’t know if he was armed. I was scared, so I just nodded my head to everything he said and then he left.”

Always a groundbreaker, the Rev. is.