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.”
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:
Perhaps thinking "When in Rome...," Barack Obama used European format when he signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey. Unfortunately, he got the year wrong (it was 2011).
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.
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 …
The first citation comes from The Times in 1926: “A protest should be made‥against the uncouth, Latinese word ‘gyratory’ to express the new traffic arrangements‥. Why not use the simple English word ‘round-about’?” The OED also quotes a 1966 U.S. source observing, “In my lifetime I have seen the traffic circle of the Middle Atlantic States become the rotary of New England.”
But the difficulty in labeling roundabout a NOOB lies in the difference among the three terms for circles into which traffic enters and from which it emerges. Wikipedia observes: “In the U.S., traffic engineers use the term roundabout for intersections in which entering traffic must yield to traffic already in the circle, reserving the term traffic circle for those in which entering traffic is controlled by stop signs, traffic signals, or is not formally controlled.” Or, in New England, rotary.
Complicating matters further, roundabouts are apparently on the way to supplanting rotaries and traffic circles in the U.S. A 2009 BBC piece focused on the town of Carmel, Indiana, which has built more than 80 roundabouts under the leadership of its mayor, a fervent proponent of the concept, and bids fair to become the Milton Keynes of the Midwest–that English city apparently being celebrated for its roundabouts.
So maybe my town isn’t building a rotary or a traffic circle but a roundabout and only a roundabout. And maybe roundabout isn’t a NOOB but rather a NOOBT–that is, a Not One-Off British Thing. I will let you know.
The OED defines this noun as: “A person who has charge of or looks after a specified thing or operation, esp. in the course of employment. Without defining word esp.: = baby-minder.” There are many variants, in the realms of public relations, crime and sport, where it refers to a goalkeeper.
Indeed, one indication that minder has moved to NOOB status is this recent quote from a New York Times blog about (U.S.) college hockey: “Patterson had 44 saves on the weekend, Tigers’ net minder Josh Thorimbert had 73.”
There was also this from the Times capsule review of “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked”: “The furry guys and the Chipettes, the gal pals they acquired in an earlier installment of the franchise, find themselves shipwrecked along with their human minder, Dave (Jason Lee).”
In a similar human-on-animal way, there is a dog-walking company in Philadelphia called Monster Minders.
If further proof is needed, I offer the fact that minder recently figured in the popular TV series “Gossip Girl.” I confess I couldn’t udnerstand the references I found on the web, so I turned to my colleague Dawn Fallik, a “GG” aficionado, for explanation. She did not disappoint:
Blair was married to King Louis. She never really loved him, so she came back to New York while he headed to Monaco. But he send a royal minder to watch over her every move, so that he’d find out if Blair cheated on him, thereby annulling the marriage and costing Blair big money in dowry. Alas, it turns out the minder was secretly in love with the prince and did all she could to help Blair slut around. The minder is now back in Monaco.
It has been suggested to me that this all-but-inescapable online bro-phrase is a NOOB, and after some investigation, I believe it. On the British origin, I give you “Well played”, or, The major’s dilemma, a 1894 farce by Arthur Francis Knight. There is a 1921 book called Well Played! by Andrew Home (also the author of From Fag to Monitor: or, Fighting to the Front). Then there is this from Shane Leslie’s 1922 The Oppidan:
As each member of his team came through he cast him a faithful look or a winged word, ‘Well played! You deserved to win and you will win next time.’ He stood there seeing his boys through the bitterness of a defeat which had hit himself hardest. Spectators passed him sympathetically. Morleyites seeing the symbol of the vanquished nudged each other and began rubbing in the defeat. ‘Well played, Morley’s! Morley’s! Morley’s! a goal to a rouge.’ There was a curiosity to see the visible effect. But nothing was there revealed except the well known accent of Jenkinson saying to the dishevelled players, ‘Well played Mr Morley’s, very well played indeed!’
As for American use, it’s everywhere, not only in gaming message boards but, for example, in this Dave Itzkoff post for Arts Beat blog of the New York Times. (He’s describing Betty White talking to Jay Leno about her experience on “Saturday Night Live.”)
Ms. White says, “Somebody grabs your hand, and you’re out horizontal back here, and they take you into something, a room smaller than this desk, and somebody’s taking your clothes off and somebody’s putting them back on——”
“No,” Mr. Leno says, interrupting. “I didn’t ask you how you got the job.”
Well played, Mr. Leno. Well played.
A key figure in U.S. adoption of the phrase appears to be Seth Rogen, who said it first in the 2008 “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and then in “Knocked Up” (the clip below), after being told that he was looks like “Babe Ruth’s gay brother … Gabe Ruth.”
Rogen’s signal contribution may have been ending with the word “sir.” JakeinSD posted an Urban Dictionary definition of “Well played my friend” in January 2008–that is before the release of “40 Year-Old Virgin”:
a statement of extreme agreement/praise for a particular activity that one of your friends has engaged in. can also be used sarcastically to point out a flaw in logic or action (example. when something is not well played, but you say it was in a sarcastic tone).
dude 1: did you get that girls number last night?
dude 2: not only did i get her number, i boned her and didn’t call her.
dude 1: well played my friend!
My intrepid spotter Ellen Magenheim wrote me a couple of weeks ago:
I noticed this morning in the Times that the headline above the story about Jeremy Lin’s latest performance was “Lin Tops Himself” and it briefly took my breath away since my mind went first to the British meaning (i.e., commit suicide) rather than the American meaning. As I thought about it, I wondered if the International Herald Tribune had a different headline–which it did–and then went back to the digital version of the NYT to find that it didn’t have the “Tops Himself” version either. Do you think none of this variation means anything or do you think maybe it dawned on someone about the unfortunate transatlantic ambiguity?
Sure enough, the article she was referring to–about a New York Knicks basketball player who for a time was a U.S. sporting sensation–had in the online N.Y. Times the headline “Lin Puts Knicks Back on Track.” At the very bottom of the article, in small gray print, are these words:
A version of this article appeared in print on February 20, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lin Tops Himself.
Often articles will have different headlines in print and online versions. But it’s amusing to think of some subeditor noting the unfortunate double meaning and stopping the presses to change it. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Unless, of course, the New York Times sports desk reads Not One-Off Britishisms and wouldn’t mind filling us in!
notoneoffbritishisms.com 