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:

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.

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?

(“Cali”=California. Bear=symbol of University of California.)

As seen on Twitter. (Jack Shafer is an American columnist for Reuters)

Just spotted on East 11th Street in New York City, an up-to-the-minute example of do to mean prepare/offer/serve.

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.

Nancy Friedman alerted me to a passage from the February 22 New York Times because of the NOOB five words from the end.

As she rose from her chair at the Calvin Klein fashion show in Midtown Manhattan the other week, Jessica Chastain was all but engulfed by an onrush of journalists and celebrity groupies imploring the lanky, flame-haired actress for a word, a glance, a nanosecond of her time.

Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, embraced her showily as cameras clicked and whirred. Tim Blanks, the editor at large for Style.com, thrust a microphone in her face, pleading for an interview, before a pair of overzealous handlers leapt onto the catwalk to spirit her away.

Yes, Ms. Chastain can Hoover that kind of attention.

But what also caught my eye was the British leapt at the end of the second paragraph; the traditional American spelling is leaped. Sure, the -pt form is gaining ground. Sticking with the Times, it has used leaped 45,800 times since it started publishing in 1851, compared to 13,100 for leapt. But in the last twelve months, the tables have turned: there have been 793 leapts in the paper and only 301 leapeds.

The Times is ahead of the curve on this. The Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. newspapers reveals 1231 leapts in the past six months compared to 1528 leapeds. But it seems clear that leaped better enjoy its dominance now, because it won’t last much longer.

A Reuters article, datelined San Francisco and posted yesterday, says Microsoft “managed to pip Facebook Inc in the survey – only 42 percent of young adults thought the world’s largest social network is cooler now than in the past. Twitter scored 47 percent, below Microsoft’s 50 percent.”

I heard about this on Twitter, where Kenneth Li provided the link and tweeted: “In which an american writer uses the word ‘pip.'”

What means this pip? I did a search on GoogleNews and this emerged:

That was not helpful, so I turned to the OED, which I should have done in the first place. The relevant definition is “To defeat or beat narrowly,” and the first citation is from 1838, in the journal “Hood’s Own, or Laughter from Year to Year”: “With your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,—getting hypped as well as pipped,—‘talking of Hoyle..but looking like winegar.’”

That settles the meaning. As for NOOB-itude, Kenneth Li was right to single this pip out. It’s an outlier for sure.