Nice article, Wall Street Journal. Too bad you’re fifteen months too late.

Thanks to Nancy Friedman.

They have nothing at all else in common, but David Sedaris and Newt Gingrich are alike in their fondness for clever in the British sense (the quality for which Americans would use smart or intelligent). I noted Sedaris’s use of it last week and Gingrich’s some months back. Now Newt has hauled it again, in his comments yesterday in suspending his presidential campaign. He said his wife, Calista, had commented to him, “approximately 219 times, give or take three, that ‘moon colony’ was probably not my most clever comment in this campaign.”

To bring you up to date: my sense is that the British use clever the way Americans use smart or intelligent or bright. The traditional American clever is a more limited honorific; it seems to be implicity preceded by the word merely and suggests a facility with puns or puzzles.

But things are changing. The latest indication that clever is reaching NOOB status is this line from a David Sedaris interview in today’s New York Times:

“I was a judge for this year’s Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, so until very recently I was reading essays written by clever high school students.”

Mark my words, it’s a comer.

Takeout and takeaway (hyphenated versions are also commonly found) refer to food purchased in a restaurant or other shop and consumed at home. Both terms can be adjectives or nouns and can refer to the meal itself or the establishment that prepares it. OED describes take-out as “orig. U.S.” and finds it first in a line from James M. Cain’s 1940 Mildred Pierce: “Pies she hoped to sell to the ‘take-out’ trade.” Again according to the OED, take-out arrived in the U.K. no later than 1970, when The Times reported, “One of New York’s finest restaurants will provide gourmet ‘take-out’ lunches for the hard-pressed executive.”

By contrast, all of the OED’s citations for takeaway are from the U.K. or British Empire outposts, commencing with a 1964 quote from Punch: “Posh Nosh‥was serving take-away venisonburgers.”

Takeaway (in the food, rather than the golf-swing, football-interception-or-fumble, or business-jargon, sense) felt strange in the U.S. as recently as 1977, when the New York Times noted about Terence Conran’s new New York furniture store, “delivery is discouraged, and everything stocked carries a tag that says, ‘takeaway price.'” But it has made itself comfortable over here in recent years–for example, in this headline two days ago from the blog Culturemap Austin (Texas): “Fresa’s Chicken al Carbon brings a giant chicken mascot and fresh take-away food to Austin at a decent price.”

Or this from a New York Times review last year of a Brazilian restaurant in Queens: “For takeaway, banana and cassava cakes ($2.75 each) travel well.”

Thus, for my money, takeaway is a clear-cut NOOB. However, I have a nagging sense that I encountered it long ago (I’m talking a half-century) in the Washington, D.C., area, and at the time did a mental double-take to find it instead of the more familiar takeout.

Normally, when I want to look up a word in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), I’m frustrated, because I only possess Vol. V., which covers Sl-Z. I got excited because both takeout and takeaway fall within its purview. However, DARE doesn’t have an entry for either one. Help?

Update, 4/21: The comment from Laura Payne, below, made me realize I was mistaken about remembering takeaway being used in Washington. The term I actually encountered was carry-out.

The New York Times publishes a lot of words, including some by me. So it’s not surprising that its contributors would occasionally let loose with some truly (presumably?) one-off Britishisms. Three recent examples:

“We keep reading that someone has done the maths and found the third Monday in January to be the most depressing day of the calendar year.” (Freakonomics blog, January 16, 2009)

“For the rest of us, the lesson might be that even if you’re not interested in going barefoot, you might want to invest in a slimmed-down trainer.” (Well blog, March 12, 2012. Note: trainers is British English for sneakers.)

“Jefferson Mays makes an effectively sweaty impression as a squirrelly former Army mate of Cantwell’s…” (Charles Isherwood, review of “The Best Man,” April 1, 2012.)

Note: the extremely common American phrase is Army buddy. I had always suspected that Isherwood is English, I imagine because of example of Christopher Isherwood. But apparently he is not:

In the United Kingdom and, in fact, most of the rest of the world, today’s date would be indicated 9 April 2012 or 9/4/12. In the U.S., it would be April 9 (or 9th), 2012, or 4/9/12. We tend to think (as in most things) that we are doing it the “normal” way, but, Europe Blog notes, “The only countries that do not share the European date format in fact are the US, Philippines, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Canada and Belize.”

(Interestingly, the blog goes on, the European Union and other international organizations do not use the European style but rather the “‘ISO 8601’ standard date format. Here the organisation is closer to the US dating but with the year placed at the start, for example ‘2010/12/20’.”)

In my opinion, the U.K./European way looks cooler than the U.S. style; it also avoids having to use commas and decide whether to write 9 or 9th. It is, in any case, getting more and more popular over here, as in this post from the web site Military.com:

Ah, another holiday weekend approaches and I’m getting tons of mail asking “When will we get paid?”   Folks, payday is Tuesday, 15 November 2011.  You’ll get paid on Tuesday, or on Monday if your bank releases direct deposit pay funds early.

More on the migration of sports into sport: a Nike gift card.

The 2013 Philadelphia Flower Show will be, apparently, brilliant.

My NOOB ears perked up when I recently read in my local newspaper, The Swarthmorean, this line from an editorial supporting a local traffic project: “The proposed single-lane traffic-circle, or roundabout, with proper signs, would direct traffic to multiple destinations at slower rates of speed.”

What got my attention wasn’t a proper, which I’ve already covered, but roundabout, which struck me as a NOOB variant of the tried-and-true U.S. traffic circle or rotary. Sure enough, quite a few U.S. uses turned up, for example, this article posted today in the East Cobb (Georgia) Patch.com: “Dozens of East Cobb residents brought questions and concerns to Monday night’s information session about the roundabout being installed in their neighborhood this summer.”

Turning to the OED, the dictionary indeed says that roundabout, in a traffic sense, is “orig. and chiefly Brit.” The definition:

A junction of several roads consisting of a central (usually circular) island around which traffic moves in one direction. Vehicular roundabouts developed from large-scale circuses or rond-points in France and America … Typically smaller in size, British roundabouts are sometimes distinguished from similar junctions by the rule in which oncoming traffic must give way to traffic moving around the central island. Traffic circle and rotary are the more common terms in America …