In a mere five paragraphs in yesterday’s New York Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that on January 21, the actor Kevin Bacon “turns up as the star of a new series on Fox, ‘The Following’”; that the villain of the series has  “a knack for bewitching attractive women, who would later turn up dead, their eyes gouged out”; and that the series is similar to “Alcatraz,” a Fox series “in which investigators had to track down scores of inmates and guards who vanished from Alcatraz in 1963 and began turning up in the present.”

Genzlinger also writes that the bad guy “seems always to be one bloody step ahead,” but he’s probably being literal.

This turned up in a New York Times article a couple of months ago:

Susan Kamil, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Random House, confirmed the acquisition on Monday, saying in a statement, “We’re thrilled to welcome Lena [Dunham] to Random House. Her skill on the page as a writer is remarkable — fresh, wise, so assured. She is that rare literary talent that will only grow from strength to strength and we look forward to helping her build a long career as an author.”

I was surprised, because I’d always thought of from strength to strength–meaning, basically, that something is already doing well and is expected to do even better–as one of those British expressions, such as spoiled for choice, that would probably never make it over here.

But I found that the Susan Kamil quote wasn’t a one-off, as witness this from the Yale Daily News: “After winning every Ivy game this season, the women’s volleyball team is going from strength to strength.” (October 17, 2012) And this February 2102 quote from the Times’ David “Think British, Act Yiddish” Brooks: “Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength.”

It turns out that the expression has a long history, on both sides of the Atlantic. Forgive me for stating what may be obvious to some, but it appears first to have been used in Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible, where Psalms 84:7 is rendered “They go from strength to strength and so the God of Gods apeareth unto them in Zion.” The phrase was used in the King James and other subsequent versions, as well as by religious writers, including Julian Hare in an 1849 sermon: “Mounting from strength to strength, from highth, to a higher highth!”

The Google Ngram chart below shows the use of the phrase in Britain (blue line) and the United States (red line) from 1800 through 2008:

The uses appear predominantly religious until about 1900–and note that in the nineteenth century it was considerably more popular in the U.S. The ascendance of the blue line in the early twentieth reflects its acceptance as a secular metaphor in the U.K.; the (presumably continuing) upturn of the red line starting in about 2000 suggests that from strength to strength is a solid NOOB.

Can spoiled for choice be far behind?

No one can say that we here at NOOBs don’t tackle the profound issues of the day. A Smithsonian Magazine headline, posted just an hour ago (as I write) read: “The Most Exclusive Coffee in the World Is Harvested From Elephant Poo.”

On the other hand, American Republican political operative Grover Norquist notoriously said after our recent election: “The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head, and you should vote against Romney”

I don’t care much about Grover Norquist or the most exclusive coffee in the world, but I am interested in the possibility that British poo is taking over from good old American poop in the faeces euphemism department.

The question turns out to be a somewhat complicated one, as these questions tend to be. The OED offers two separate sets of entries for these terms, with separate etymologies. One derives from the onomatopoeic interjection “Poo,” dating from the 1600s, when it was more commonly spelled “Puh” or “Pooh,” or, as Fielding rendered it in this quote from Tom Jones: “‘Pugh,’ says she, ‘you have pinked a Man in a Duel, that’s all.’”

It was not until the 1960s, according to the OED, that the word began to be used as a noun or verb for excrement, as The Guardian did in 1981: “That doggy’s doing a poo.”

The second entry derives from a different instance of onomatopoeia. The OED cites this definition from an early eighteenth-century dictionary: “to break Wind backwards softly.” By the 1920s, poop had acquired, in the United States, solidity. The OED quotes Ezra Pound in a 1940 letter: “This federation poop is just the same old..secret committee of shit.”

Complicating manners are at least three additional meanings of poop. One, derived from the term for the rear of a boat, refers to the rear of a person or animal. The second–which Pound may have had in mind–is an American slang term, originating in the military, for inside information. The third, which probably isn’t relevant, is pooped, an Americanism meaning “exhausted” or “worn out.”

Getting back to poo versus poop, here is a Google Ngram chart showing use of dog poo and dog poop n Britain and the U.S. between 2000 and 2008 (the most recent year for which figures are available):

It confirms that the dominant form is poop in the U.S. (red line) and poo Britain (yellow line), and that poo (green line) is on the rise in the U.S., with a roughly 100 percent increase in the period.

Further research is clearly needed. For the time being, my sense is that my fellow Americans are rather conflicted on the matter, sometimes, as in this Huffington Post piece from March, trying to have it both ways:

“Poop. Is there anything it can’t do? On Wednesday, The Denver Zoo introduced what is believed to be the world’s first poo-powered motorized tuk tuk showcasing The Denver Zoo’s very own patent-pending gasification technology.”

Make up your mind, Huffington Post!

If Hair Cuttery means smart in the sense of fashionable, this is a potential NOOB. If it means it in the sense of clever, then the ad isn’t.

Two readers have independently alerted me to this recent quote in the New York Times:

“It’s a sticky wicket for Obama,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, saying any aggressive move on such a high-profile question would be seen as “a slap in the face to his base right after they’ve just handed him a chance to realize his presidential dreams.”

I initially resisted investigating sticky wicket, relegating it to the telly-lift-old chap sort of term that in the U.S. is a stereotype of a Britishism, and thus can’t be a proper NOOB. I was wrong. It turns out that the Times has used the phrase six additional times in the past two years, all either by its own reporter or a quote by an American source. For example, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal sportswriter Tom Haudricourt commented in 2010 about the Hall of Fame prospects of baseball’s Mark McGwire, who had just admitted to using steroids: “Should we be voting guys in who admit to doing it? The sticky wicket just got stickier.”

The original British expression dates from the 1880s, according to the OED, and is (sorry for stating the obvious, to some) is a cricket metaphor. Thus it’s traditionally phrased as (batting) on a sticky wicket. The batting on is always lost in the U.S.

Looking at Google Ngram data (below) makes me think I need a new category for this bad boy. It’s a quintessentially British expression that’s so quintessential, it’s hardly used there anymore. Meanwhile, it has gradually grown in the U.S. from being an exotic novelty item to a solid NOOB–to the point that, in 2004, it was as popular here as it was there! Google’s data only goes up to 2008; I bet that at this point, there are more U.S. sticky wickets than British ones.

I refer to the intransitive verb that basically means “to appear,” possibly unexpectedly, and that can refer to a person, thing or concept (and not to the transitive form, e.g, “The search turned up a few artifacts” or “She turned up her nose and the cuffs of her jeans.”) I think of it as a Britishism mainly, I suppose, because there’s such a common and reliable U.S. equivalent: show up.

The Google Ngram above, which shows the relative popularity of showed up early and turned up early  in the U.S. and Britain between 1975 and 2008 (the last year for which data is available), pretty much supports my sense. ( I stuck the early in there to avoid false positives in the transitive and other forms.) So does the OED, which reports turn up as having turned up very early in the eighteenth century. The dictionary cites an 1863 British newspaper report: “The Police have been astonished lately at the number of criminals who have turned up of whose previous career they knew nothing…” And the phrase was used memorably by  Dickens in David Copperfield:   “‘And then,’ said Mr. Micawber,..‘I shall, please Heaven, begin to be beforehand with the world,..if—in short, if anything turns up.’”

As for show up, the first citation is from the Lisbon (Dakota) Star, 1888: “Will Worden is expected to show up next week.”

The verb without up can mean the same thing, most often used as a negative or interrogatory. (“Did he show?” “Nope, he didn’t show.”) That’s certainly a popular slangy alternative in the U.S., but it didn’t originate here, according to the OED, which quotes Theodore Hook, The Parson’s Daughter (1833): “The breakfast party did not assemble till noon, and then Lady Katherine did not ‘shew.’” I reckon that was the source for the eventual U.S. show up.

Anyway, if and when Ngram offers data beyond 2008, I predict it will show a sharp uptick in U.S. turned up. My ears feel it has become the preferred alternative among the chattering classes. I was writing this on November 30 and found four separate uses in the N.Y Times that day:

• “…John McGraw’s futile attempt to trump the Yankees by finding a Jewish version of ‘the Babe.’ An exhaustive search turned up a prospect named Mose Solomon, likened in the press to an exotic animal. (‘McGraw Pays 50K for Only Jewish Ballplayer in Captivity.’)”

• “Two months later, though, Barnum turned up in Tennessee and, in June 1865, he signed an oath of allegiance to the federal government.”

• Books that writer Joe Queenan keeps as gags “mostly turned up over the transom at jobs I used to work at. ‘Hoosier Home Remedies’ is my favorite.”

And finally, this immortal sentence: “If Kristen Holly Smith turned up to your costume party in Dusty Springfield drag and started singing, there would be no mistaking the woman she was channeling.”

Great piece in Slate by Justin Peters, who decided to try out as many as he could of the bizarre trends sanctified by the New York Times Style section. He managed to do seven of them, including wearing his hair in a man bun, shaving his pubic hair, and, yes, filling his vocabulary with Britishisms. Peters writes:

“What’s up?” “You the man.” “Take it easy.” I use these slang phrases all the time, which is one of the top five reasons I’ve never been invited back to the Yale Club. According to the Times, British slang is the only slang that a trendy American ought to use: “Snippets of British vernacular—‘cheers’ as a thank you, ‘brilliant’ as an affirmative, ‘loo’ as a bathroom—that were until recently as rare as steak and kidney pie on these shores are cropping up in the daily speech of Americans (particularly, New Yorkers) of the taste-making set who often have no more direct tie to Britain than an affinity for Downton Abbey,” the NYT’s Alex Williams writes.

Reader Priscilla Jensen alerts me to this from the November 7 Wall Street Journal: “But [Barack Obama’s] opportunity will quickly go pear-shaped if the bond market loses confidence . . . ”

Unfamiliar with this metaphorical pear-shaped, I went to the OED and was informed that the expression, usually preceded by to go or to turn, is chiefly British and originally RAF slang, and means “to go (badly) wrong, to go awry.” The dictionary offers no etymological explanation as to why the metaphor would have this meaning, and I would be interested in any thoughts on the matter. In any event, the first citation is from a 1983 book called Air War South Atlantic and has telltale quotation marks: “There were two bangs very close together. The whole aircraft shook and things went ‘pear-shaped’ very quickly after that.

The first use of go pear-shaped or went pear-shaped in the Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. newspapers is a 1999 New York Observer column by Phillip Weiss about the Clinton impeachment hearings. He writes:

Eve MacSweeney, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, sends me an e-mail that says, “couldn’t e you back from england as friend in hospital and everything went pear-shaped.” I call to ask about the phrase. She tells me that “pear-shaped” is the reigning metaphor in England now. Things are going pear-shaped. They say it in the financial district when a stock goes bad. They say it in W11 about a marriage. Ms. MacSweeney says the term resonates because English women are frequently referred to as being pear-shaped, the men in England being buttless, but she and I agree that when the phrase gets here — the land of the aging, big-butted male — it will have wider resonance.

(Weiss’s subsequent aside is relevant to this blog: “I think of when that other Anglicism, ‘at the end of the day,’ came here a few years ago, landing in New York. The House managers use the phrase ‘at the end of the day’ over and over again, summing up their case on the Senate floor. Now we know what the end of the day looks like.” I find, to my shock, that on this blog I have never looked in to at the end of the day. I imagine that’s because, even when I started NOOBs, it was already such a dispiriting cliche on both sides of the Atlantic that I couldn’t bear to write it down several times in a blog post. But I digress.)

The next one Lexis-Nexis hit comes in in 2001, when a reporter for the University of Massachusetts student newspaper wrote, referring to a soccer player’s injury, “That is when it all went pear-shaped.” The phrase pops up now and then in the early and mid-2000s, but really took hold around 2009. There are twenty-eight Lexis-Nexis hits through 2008 and twenty-nine since then, including the testimony of  James Grant, editor of “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer,” to the House of Representatives in September 2012: “Nowadays, when things go pear-shaped, Chairman Bernanke is front and center with broad hints to print enough money or suppress enough prices or inflate enough assets to make us forget our troubles.”

Now go pear-shaped seems to be fully established, especially in  financial and, for some reason, sporting circles. But does it truly resonated in this land of the aging, big-butted male? The jury is still out on that one.