An item from Jessica Simpson’s “I Fancy You” Collection at Macy’s
Fancy, a useful verb (deriving from a noun referring to the imagination, as in a young man’s f. lightly turning to thoughts of love in spring), has two main senses. The first, followed by that, is a sort of combination of speculate and imagine with just a hint of improbability. A common idiom is I fancy myself a …
This fancy is more British than American, I would say, but has long been in view on both sides. So James Parker, in a February 24, 2012, New York Times review of a novel called The Technologists, wrote:
“Do you hear a whisper of ”The Da Vinci Code’ in all this? I fancy I do.”
The other fancy means some combination of like and desire, has traditionally been applied to people, and is more British. Thus Walter Raleigh in TheHistory of the World (1616): “Ninus..fancied her so strongly, as (neglecting all Princely respects) he tooke her from her husband.”
It’s sprung up from time to time in the U.S., memorably in Yip Harburg’s lyric to “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” from the Broadway musical “Finian’s Rainbow” (1947): “When I’m not facing the face that I fancy,/I fancy the face I face.”
Anne Tyler, who overall is rather fond of British diction, has this line in her new novel The Beginner’s Goodbye: “I decided that our reader in this case was a young woman who had been invited to go birdwatching with a young man she secretly fancied.”
In recent months Americans have shown a marked fancy for fancying not boys or girls but stuff. I first became aware of this when a Facebook friend of mine started posting the objects of his desire through an app called Fancy, which describes itself “part store, blog, magazine and wishlist. It’s a place to discover great stuff, to curate a collection of things you love, to get updates on your favorite brands and stores and to share your discoveries.”
In short order I found a blog called “Things I Fancy,” which I gather to be written by an American because she describes herself as a “stay-at-home mom” (not “mum”), and “Fashion I Fancy,” by “a California native living in NYC.”
Today, the splendid writer James Wolcott (@James Wolcott) tweeted: “Romney’s multi-gaffe cock up: these are the times that try Jennifer Rubin’s soul.” (Ms. Rubin is a conservative blogger.) Naturally, that made me wonder whether cock-up had verged into NOOB territory
The OED defines this expression as meaning “a blunder, a mistake, a confused situation,” and cites it first in a 1948 dictionary of soldiers’ slang compiled by Eric Partridge. It is widely used in the U.K., notably in the phrase, “What a cock-up!” (Jonathan Coe has a novel with the subtitle “What a Carve-Up,” which I always imagined was a bowdlerized version.)
Wolcott notwithstanding, it’s very much still on the radar in these parts, its use mainly limited to hip or pseudo-websites, to wit:
“So yeah, maybe this isn’t Ryan Reynolds’ cock-up.” (Gawker.com, June 20, 2011, on the failure of the film “The Green Lantern”)
“But by any measure, this has been a monstrous cock-up.” (Slate.com, May 27, 2010, on BP’s handling of the Gulf oil spill)
But it’s certainly an evocative expression, and I look for more penetration soon.
I originally posted this in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog:
Man in van
The ABC television network has announced that in 2013 it will air a sitcom called FamilyTools. Previously, the show was called Comeback Jack; before that it was called Red Van Man, and before that, it was called White Van Man. And therein lies a tale.
Like many American comedies, including All in the Family,Sanford and Son, and The Office, this one took its premise from a British original, White Van Man. If you are American, that phrase probably means nothing to you. And neither does the much older expression from which it sprang, “man with a van.”
I myself first became aware of the latter when I got an e-mail from a BBC correspondent, Michael Wendling, who was interested in Not One-Off Britishisms, the blog I conduct about British expressions that have become popular in the United States. He observed, “I was in Brooklyn recently and I saw signs for ‘rubbish removal’ and ‘man with a van.’ There was a sex shop called ‘Shag.’”
I was aware of rubbish (what we would call garbage or trash) and Austin Powers had universalized shag, but I’d never come across man with a van. I asked Michael what it meant, and he explained:
A ‘man with a van’ is a person who will move your belongings to your new flat, or take them to the rubbish tip, or any other odd jobs that need a large vehicle and an extra pair of hands. Particularly common in London where there are a lot of people moving and fewer people have cars. Inevitably the man is Australian, and the van is white (you may have come across the related Britishism, ‘white van man’, a working class male usually employed in some sort of manual labour, avid reader of tabloids and connoisseur of full English breakfasts).
When I looked into the expressions (as how could I not?), I encountered some surprises. One would have presumed man with a van to have originated during the time when vans, as we know them, started to be manufactured—maybe the 1940s? In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary has a definition of van as “A covered vehicle chiefly employed for the conveyance of goods, usually resembling a large wooden box with arched roof and opening from behind,” and locates a first citation in 1829. Man with a van was in circulation by 1876, when an article in The Times noted, “The practice of the firm was to send to customers a man with a van.” And an Australian agricultural journal wrote in 1903: “Where the factory is so situated that a man with a van could collect the cans from the different suppliers, deliver them to the factory, and bring back the empty cans at a small charge the factory should lie supported.”
White van man, meanwhile, was apparently coined by a Times writer called Jonathan Leake, who in 1997 published an article headlined “Number Is Up for White Van Man—Scourge of the Road.” It began:
He is known as White Van Man and is the most feared driver on the road. But he is about to be tamed. Transport watchdogs plan to crack down on the young male van driver who looms in your rearview mirror, comes within feet of your bumper and usually makes obscene gestures until he forces his way past. The phenomenon of White Van Man—a tattooed species often with a cigarette in his mouth, who is prone to flashing his lights as he descends on his prey—has been identified in a report by the Freight Transport Association (FTA). It says his bullying antics have now become a threat to all motorists, and it believes the problem is so serious that a nationwide re-education programme is needed, possibly backed by legislation.
Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun subsequently ran a regular feature in which a white van man, shown through the window of his vehicle, was interviewed about the issues of the day. The BBC ran a documentary about the phenomenon, and at least two studies have been devoted to it, one comparing the frequency of bicycles being overtaken on the road by cars and white vans, and the other a seemingly half-serious, half-facetious composite portrait of the species.
When ABC started working up its sitcom, White Van Man was a reasonable working title, but even the dimmest suit could see that it would lack any meaning or resonance for American viewers. ABC cleverly put a post on its Facebook page asking people to weigh in on the alternatives it was considering: Red Van Man, Get Back Jack, Comeback Jack, The Family Tools, and Tool Guys. A surprising 118 people replied, the majority of whom actually took the task seriously. (One who didn’t was the woman who noted, “How about canceled after 3 weeks”). And ABC actually took the counsel of Annette Zaripov-Brand, who wrote, “Family Tools … no ‘The’.”
So will this show be worth watching? The plot description doesn’t fill one with hope:
Mixing family with business is never easy, and Jack Shea (Kyle Bornheimer) is about to learn that lesson the hard way. When Jack’s father, Tony (J.K. Simmons), has a heart attack and is forced to hand over the keys to his beloved handyman business, Jack is eager to finally step up and make his father proud. Unfortunately Jack’s past career efforts have been less than stellar, so everyone seems to be waiting for him to fail. …
Moreover, the online trailer suggests the dominant motif of the show will be staple-gun humor. However, a show about a bunch of neurotic New Yorkers who have to figure out what to do when the fascistic owner of a soup restaurant throws them out wouldn’t have sounded so great, either. So I will give Family Tools a shot.
Meanwhile, I have to find out what a “rubbish tip” is.
Greengrocer is a really useful word. American English doesn’t have a good equivalent, possibly because up until recently we haven’t had that many greengrocers. The only alternative that comes to mind is “produce store,” which clearly isn’t very good.
However, it sounds inescapably pretentious–much like fishmonger. Perhaps that’s why the Times changed the word, in its online edition, to just plain “grocer.”
I was talking last night to Steven Rea, film critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer and proprietor of Rides a Bike, a Tumbler page devoted to vintage photographs of Hollywood personages riding bicycles. (Check it out–very cool.) Naturally, the subject of not one-off Britishisms came up, and he mentioned that the Brooklyn Bike Jumble, which, he said, invoked the Britishism “jumble sale.”
I confess that the only time I had ever come across the expression was in the town I live in, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in which the local Friends Meeting holds an annual jumble sale–that is, rummage or tag sale. I confess I thought that the Friends had made the term up. But it turns out that it is indeed a Britishism, first spotted by the OED in 1898 and still in heavy rotation in the U.K., according to Google News.
Steven was also right about the Brooklyn Bike Jumble, in which used bikes and accessories are on offer, the latest edition of which is to be held September 8:
The phrase shows up here and there in U.S. print sources, as in this quote from an April 15, 2011, New York Times article about Los Angeles’s Chinatown:
“Cutting-edge performance artists staged happenings and smart collectors trolled to find future art stars at jumble sale prices.”
In his always illuminating Baltimore Sun blog, “You don’t Say,” John McIntyre offers a word of the week. Today, he presents a British phrase, argle-bargle, and notes:
Originally meaning a squabble, argument, or bandying of words–it rises from a Scottish variant of argue–its meaning has broadened to include meaningless talk or writing, nonsense. There’s a variant, argy-bargy.
Naturally, this led me to look into the investigate the popularity of argle-bargle and argy-bargy in these parts. They pop up here and there. One veritable fount of spottings is the right-wing National Review, especially its writer Jonah Goldberg, who prefers the argy-bargy form and uses it incessantly. One time he criticized Attorney General Eric Holder because “he thinks this isn’t nearly enough racial argy-bargy”; another, he ripped an Obama energy ad for “endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy.”
Elsewhere, the terms appear only intermittently. A couple of years ago, Alex Beam wrote in a New York Times op-ed about conflicts in the Episcopal church, “The schismatics invoke endless biblical argle-bargle to defend their un-Christian bigotry.” And just last week, a commenter on the Portland (Oregon) Mercury website humorously responded to a silly season article about how breakfast is overrated: “Shame on you and all those who truck with such joy-murdering argle-bargle.”
Bottom line, there is life in argle-bargle (I like that version better), so I say have some fun with it. Except for you, Goldberg. You are grounded.
On my first extended visit to London fifteen or so years ago, I noticed a front-page headline on a (legitimate) newspaper that read something along the lines of: RANDY ANDY’S BAWDY JAPE. The article that followed reported (using anonymous sources) that Prince Andrew had apparently made an off-color joke at a party.
Classic silly-season article, from a Cambridge (England) newspaper.
Thus was I introduced to the concept of silly season, which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1861 and defines as “the months of August and September, when newspapers supply the lack of real news by articles or discussions on trivial topics.” (The Randy Andy article was actually printed in a sort of subsidiary silly season, the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day.)
The phrase has been picked up and as far as I can tell broadened in the U.S. in recent years. That is, it doesn’t primarily refer to silly newspaper articles–in that regard, every season is silly season–but to idle or unsubstantiated speculation in politics and sports. For example:
“The silly season has officially begun. The start is defined by a sudden desire among political reporters to speculate about who might be chosen by a presidential candidate — in this case, Mitt Romney — to be the vice presidential nominee.” (New York Times, June 21, 2012)
“What [Matt] Kenseth and [Denny] Hamlin did last week is show that NASCAR’s traditional “silly season” — that time of year when drivers jump from team to team — isn’t so silly anymore, and may never be that way again.” (Washington Post, July 2, 2012)
“The silly season, aka free agency, begins today at 9:01 p.m., Pacific time, and Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak figures to be busy.” (Los Angeles Daily News, June 29, 2012)
“Veep” is a very caustic, very foul-mouthed, and pretty funny HBO series about a U.S. vice president played by the brilliant Julia Louis Dreyfus. It is also written and put together by a group of British blokes. They must have some good minders at the network, because up until the June 3 episode, I hadn’t noticed a single Britishism that had crept in.
A plot point on that show had to do with the veep’s getting rid of a secret service agent on her detail. At one point, a headline on a TV screen said: “Guard Sacked.”
My glee was short-lived, however, because it turned out that sacked–that is, fired from a job–has been a legitimate NOOB for some time, as witness:
“The surprising return would come more than a month after Mr. Woodford was sacked by the board as president and chief executive after questioning a series of outsize transactions at Olympus.”–New York Times, November 22, 2011
“The mysterious death of Neil Heywood in the Chinese city of Chongqing last year is emerging as a key element in the drama surrounding Bo Xilai, who was sacked as Chongqing’s Communist Party chief in April.”–Wall Street Journal online, June 20, 2012
“In Stages 5, 6, and 7, the star editor gets sacked, a pushover is hired as replacement, the moguls strip the publication down to its chassis and wheels, and they look for a new sucker to buy the publication.”–Jack Shafer, Slate.com, November 12, 2010, referring to “the seven stages through which all vanity press moguls pass after buying a faltering magazine or newspaper.”
It makes perfect sense that sacked would gain popularity over here, as it sounds more brutal than fired and thus suits the act it denotes. I don’t expect, however, that the British term for what Americans call laid off will follow suit. Made redundant is too much of a mouthful, and too odd.
Watching ESPN’s coverage of the England-Croatia European Cup football soccer match yesterday, I was struck by an on-screen graphic announcing, “If results hold, England advance.” Jack Bell’s recent guest post on Not One-Off-Footballisms did not cover the grammatical Britishism of plural verbs for collective nouns, but to me it’s an even more significant development than announcers saying “boots” instead of “cleats” or “pitch” instead of “field.” After all, the announcers are Brits, but the graphic represents a corporate editorial decision by all-American ESPN.
Coincidentally, the National Basketball Association finals are currently being played between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat–apparently the first time in U.S. major sports history that a championship is being contested by two teams whose names are not plural. (There’s a fun fact for you!) The outstanding public radio show “On the Media” last week had a segment about the dilemma faced by copy editors (that’s what we call subeditors) writing headlines: do they go singular (American) or plural (British?).
“On the Media” host Bob Garfield had an exchange with Tom Scocca, the editor of the online sports magazine Deadspin, that shows the surprising passion this issue can provoke. (Note: The OED defines poncy as “Affected, pretentious, self-consciously refined or superior; overly fancy or elaborate; effeminate, homosexual.”)
SCOCCA: In Britain, there’s a longstanding habit of treating collective nouns, or these kind of mass nouns, as plurals. So in British English you would say, “The team are doing well,” and, therefore, in British English they don’t really care what they call their sports teams. And so, you have people say “Arsenal are the superior side in this match.”
GARFIELD: But the problem is, as you observed, if you use the British convention, you sound like a poncy–
SCOCCA: Rock critic, yeah. That’s a longstanding problem in writing or talking about rock music, because so many bands have these names that are singular to describe this collective unit that’s the band. And, you know, there’s a lot of Anglophilia in rock writing, and so there are people who will say things like, “Pavement are the most important band since Wire.”
GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] And how does that make you feel , when you run across – “Pavement are the greatest band since Wire?”
SCOCCA: Despite the fact that I might agree with the sentiment, the skin crawls on the back of my neck.
GARFIELD: And you basically want to find the critic and just kind of slap him around, come on –
SCOCCA: Yeah, give him a wedgie or something.
GARFIELD: You’ve got some examples illustrating the issue.
SCOCCA: Right. Sports Illustrated pretty consistently embraces the British usage, so their headline would be, “Heat Have Experienced Motivation to Win It All.”
GARFIELD: Poncy.
SCOCCA: Yeah, extremely. “Have another crumpet, Sports Illustrated.”
notoneoffbritishisms.com 