Reader Bruce Stoneback sends along the quote below, and suggests looking into toff (i.e., upper-class twit). I have done so, and strangely found that every recent American reference is to the same person:

“And if you are Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney’s biography, résumé and bankroll, there are certain things you don’t want to be filmed saying in a dining room full of toffs in a Boca Raton, Fla., mansion that looks like a location from Eyes Wide Shut (and whose owner reportedly threw a tabloid-notorious sex party at an estate in the Hamptons).”–James Poniewozik, Time, October 1, 2012

“Romney isn’t the bumbling toff he’s made out to be.”–The Daily Beast, September 17, 2012

“We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes. But what drives his gaffes is his desire to preen over accomplishments.”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times, July 28, 2012, referring to Mitt Romney.

My word for the many, many (, many) comments that have come in since BBC.com featured NOOBs in Cordelia Hebblethwaite’s excellent piece about Britishisms in American English. I have to approve them all before they’re posted, and they are so generally clever and well-written that I don’t want to rush the process–that it, I read them all and comment on some. I’m only about halfway through, the redundancy (not in the British sense) is my fault, not the commenters’.

In the previous post (piece of kit), I promised to feature another Nancy Friedman find. It’s “Opening Hours,” capitalized because it’s what you see on the signs of retail establishments in the U.K., indicating what U.S. stores would announce, simply, as “Hours.”

Nancy sent along a link to a profoundly twee-seeming San Francisco establishment called MAAS & Stacks, which describes itself as “a purveyor of classic pieces with modern tailoring. Inspired by the simplicity of a well-constructed garment, the store aims to present customers with a curated selection of everyday wears.” Their opening hours don’t commence till noon on weekdays; I guess they need extra time for curating.

In these parts, two examples constitute a trend, so I offer this, also from a posh West Coast outfit:

Nancy Friedman has once again alerted me to to a NOOB of which I was not aware. (If you want to know about the other occasions, just key her name into the search field at right.) I was certainly familiar with the BrE kit, meaning both “uniform” (what football players wear) and “equipment,” and had indeed been keeping my eye out for American uses.

Thanks to Nancy, I now know the latter kit, at least, has established a capacious beachhead on these shores. She sent along a link to a September 14 blog post by John Scalzi, about the new iPhone, which includes this line: “As advertised, it is a very lovely piece of kit.”

I poked around the Web for other uses and found it’s most popular among techies like Scalzi. Thus Zack Whitaker, on ZDNet: “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world: a media on-the-go bag has to have every piece of kit you may or may not need.” And Elizabeth Fish, in PCWorld: “The Sandia Hand by Sandia National Laboratories is an impressive piece of kit for a troop to own.” (Both quotes appeared in the last couple of months.)

Besides spotting this rather annoying piece of pretentiousness, Nancy offers a credible starting point for its U.S. popularity: Lenny Kravitz’s 1999 song “Black Velveteen,” which refers to a “nice piece of kit.”

As if all this weren’t enough, Nancy has identified another new NOOB. Watch this space to learn about it.

Yes, yes, I know this is a venerable U.S. expression, so hold your fire. Americans say things like “My fingers are crossed” or “Keep your fingers crossed,” to indicate a wish for good luck. The Brits like to use the phrase by itself, as Americans would say, “Good luck!”, or, similarly, to more or less mean, “Here’s hoping for…” An example is this headline from the local newspaper in the West Midlands town of Solihull: “Fingers Crossed for a Sunny Shirley Carnival.”

I have some sense that the expression is in the early stage of incipient NOOB-itude. I offer this from Andy Benoit’s New York Times preview of the NFL Dallas Cowboys: “The budding star receiver (fingers crossed on off-field matters) Dez Bryant is 23.”

And this quote from American Canadian director James Cameron, about the recent release of his most famous film on Blu-Ray: “We’ve been holding back Titanic. So, fingers crossed.”

The British use this adverb, in a time sense, where Americans traditionally use right or immediately or just, most commonly in such phrases as directly after or directly before, but also by itself, to mean straightaway, as in this line from Jane Eyre (1847): “He sat down: but he did not get leave to speak directly.”

It is popping up over here, prominently in a Sam Sifton New York Times Magazine recipe for rosemary-garlic crusted pork butt that I aim to make tomorrow night (I will let you know how it goes):

“These [peaches] you will cut in half and pit, directly before cooking.”

And there is also:

• “CBS is preparing online specials for directly before and after its television coverage, the latter anchored by Scott Pelley.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 2012)
• “Maj. Gen. Paul Lefebvre retired during a small, private ceremony directly before handing command of Marine Corps special operations to Maj. Gen. Mark Clark…” (Jacksonville Daily News, August 24, 2012)
• “Littlepage stated that directly after hearing the noise, her steering wheel began to jerk from side to side.” (Surfky.com News, August 25, 2012)

I used Google Ngram to compare relative frequency of right after and directly after in the U.S. because I couldn’t figure out any other way to isolate this meaning from all the (many) other ones directly has. The results in the chart below show that right after (red) overtook directly after (blue) in about 1925, but that d.a. stopped the lexical bleeding in the ’90s and is starting on the road back. (In Britain, directly after didn’t take the lead till the ’50s and even since then has had a respectable showing.)

From today’s New York Times:

The following morning,  [suspected burglar Piotr Pasciak] was awakened by police officers in his [Brooklyn] bedroom. One of them said, “Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy,” first handcuffing, then dressing Mr. Pasciak, he said.

Thanks to Gigi Simeone.

From the September issue of “Popular Mechanics.” Courtesy of Wes Davis.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews a book that argues that gay people are “pretty much like straight people, that is, except for what they do with their dangly bits.”