Keeping with the prepositions theme (a rich lode), British and American speakers use different ones when referring to the telephone. To be more precise, on both sides of the Atlantic we talk about calling on the phone, on a mobile, or on a particular day of the week; and we all say, “Call me at noon.” However, they say, “Call me on 555-555-5555,” while we say, “Call me at” a specific number. Or, we did do; the British on is creeping in.

I don’t have many published references, since this is very much a conversational deal. However, Stephen Hunter’s 2009 novel “Night of Thunder” contains this voice-mail message by a character: “Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.” And the internet is full of instructions such as this one, from performance-anxiety.org: “Call me on 1-888-512-2913 or use the contact form here to request a callback …”

Finally, the rapper known as C-Murder (who  is currently serving life imprisonment following his conviction for a second degree murder committed in 2002) has the following lyric in his song “Betya”:

You can call me on 1-900-break bread
Or 1-800-getting paid but don’t tell
Or imma send Cut Boy to rang yo bell

There was some interesting back-and-forth on a recent post that offered as a NOOB the verb sit for, meaning to take a test or examination. A couple of British speakers replied, in essence, Nonsense; we don’t sit for exams, we sit them, minus the for. With no little satisfaction, I reprinted several Oxford English Dictionary examples of sit for=take. But my correspondent correctly pointed out that the most recent was written in 1955. I hadn’t noticed it the first time around, but the OED also has an entry for sit=take (an exam). The oldest citation was from 1957.

On reflection, it occurred to me that something similar has occurred with some other verbs, such as ring up, queue up, and sort out. In all these cases, common British usage has dropped the second word; the current idioms are ring, queue and sort. But–and this is the interesting bit–Americans have picked up the older, two-word form. I call this Phrasal Verb Lag Time, or PVLT for short.

I understand why the Brits would shorten the form, but not why Americans would adopt the long one. Any ideas? I’d be especially interested if Lynne Murphy, over at her excellent blog Separated by a Common Language, has any thoughts.

Americans traditionally “took” tests or exams. Now, increasingly, they are sitting. What’s next: standing for a by-election?

Certain readers of ”Herzog” complained the book was difficult. Much as they might have sympathized with the unhappy and comical history professor, they were occasionally put off by his long and erudite letters. Some felt that they were being asked to sit for a difficult exam in a survey course in intellectual history. (Saul Bellow, New York Times, March 8, 1987)/City School Superintendent Neel Durbin opened the meeting by celebrating the number of Dyersburg High School students enrolled in AP courses as well as the number that are passing the AP exams at the end of the course. …”Fifty-five percent of our students that sit for the exam pass it,” said Durbin… (Dyersburg [PA] State Gazette, October 18, 2011)

I fired up my e-mail this morning to find a note containing the following blurb for a collection of poems:

I was made silent and watchful by the continuing poetry here. I kept reading, sort of mesmerized by the consistent achievement, watching out for the occasional weakness. Surely the level couldn’t be maintained. But the weakness never showed.

One phrase jumped out at me. The phrase was sort of. A couple of years ago, my daughter Maria, then and now a college student (and a sharp observer of linguistic trends), commented to me that these two words were crack cocaine to her professors: irresistible and deadly. Note that she didn’t say “sort of crack cocaine”; she recognized that the qualifier would have sort of ruined her metaphor.

Ever since then, I had noticed my colleagues’ (and, truth to tell, my own) overuse-verging-on-abuse of the phrase in department meetings and lectures. The poetry blurb was a sign that it has migrated from speech to print.

Sort of is an adverbial phrase with two bloodlines, one distinctly British and the other American. The latter is a homespun qualifier; think of the bashful cowboy who is sorter (as it’s often rendered) sweet on the schoolmarm. The academic sort of follows the British tradition in suggesting an attitude of qualification and noncommittal diffidence that’s at once specific and universal. It is characteristically used either between noun and verb or in the construction a-sort of-noun or noun phrase. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1780 quote from The Mirror (“There is a sort of classic privilege in the very names of places in London”) and a line from Shaw’s 1903 “Man and Superman”: “I’ll sort of borrow the money from my dad until I get on my own feet.”

More recently, Tom Stoppard brilliantly nailed the Englishness of a character, Henry, in “The Real Thing” who is defensive about his love of popular music. Henry says: “I was taken once to Covent Garden to hear a woman called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing. … As though the place were a kind of Lourdes for the musically disadvantaged.” (Kind of is synonymous with sort of.) Graham Greene, meanwhile, invoked a cosmic sense of the phrase in entitling one of his memoirs A Sort of Life.

The academic sort  of is in the British tradition and is neither brilliant nor cosmic. Sometimes it is a signal that a metaphor or figure of speech is coming up (an only marginally less smarmy as it were), and sometimes it merely signals a reluctance to stand fully behind what we have to say. It is uncannily like our students’ like: a crutch that has sort of turned into a tic.

Note: this above post originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog. I would like to update it with a sort of (sorry) crowdsourcing contest. This morning, the (British) Newsweek editor Tina Brown appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition for her weekly “Must Reads” segment. The seven-minute appearance was interlarded with so many sort ofs and kind ofs that the capacity of my fingers and toes to count them was quickly exceeded. I will send a free copy of my book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing to the first reader to give me an accurate count of how many time Tina used each phrase.

When I first spent significant time in London, about fifteen years ago, one of the first words that struck me as unusual was book–used as an all-purpose verb to indicate, well, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: “To engage for oneself by payment (a seat or place in a travelling conveyance or in a theatre or other place of entertainment).” The OED cites a first use in Disraeli’s 1826 novel Vivian Grey –“I’ll give orders for them to book an inside place for the poodle”–and then an 1887 theatrical advert: “Seats can be booked one month in advance.”

In London a hundred-plus years later, people were always talking about booking theater, excuse me theatre, tickets, hotel rooms, tables at restaurants. (Granted, this came up a lot because I was in a tourism/study abroad situation.)

The usage was not unheard of in the U.S., but (the significantly less strong) reserve was much more common in reference to eating and sleeping. For theatre, I guess our best word has been get, which isn’t very good. Hence it’s not surprising that book has gotten traction here.

This Google Ngram shows the change in use of book a room (blue) and reserve a room (red) in American English, 1970-2008. Book surges ahead in 1993, which puts it in a sweet spot for NOOBs.

I have to say I was gobsmacked when a reader suggested baby bump as a NOOB. I always thought of this euphemism for a pregnant celebrity’s stomach as a relatively recent invention of American tabloids. How wrong I was.

The term seems to have originated in late 1980s Britain as merely bump, sans the “baby.” The OED’s first citation (with telling quotation marks) is from The Times (of London) in January ’86: “The old idea was to hide ‘the bump’ under voluminous maternity dresses.”

Interestingly, as my correspondent pointed out, bump–sometimes, facetiously, the bump–came to refer not only to the protuberance but to the future child beneath it.

The OED quotes a 1999 novel by Charlotte Grimshaw, Provocation:  “Harry … wiped his hands on his kiddie jeans and leaned against her and the bump, his sibling-to-be.”

The addition of the alliterative baby now seems to be inevitable. But it came only in December 2003, my investigations suggest, in the pages of the Australian publication MX: “While Danielle Spencer’s baby bump has really popped out, hubby Rusty Crowe is hitting the streets and parks of Sydney to lose any tummy bulges for his next flick.”

First British sighting: Liverpool Daily Post and Echo caption from September 22, 2004, “Sarah with and without her baby bump.”

And the first U.S. one goes to the San Antonio Express-News, January 27, 2005:

“For the last couple of years, it seemed all of Hollywood’s reigning clotheshorses and glamourpusses were trading in their Birkin bags for diaper bags, their Pilates bellies for baby bumps.”

The most recent use? Well, USA Today posted this sentence two hours ago as I write: “Beyonce debuted her baby bump at the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 28.”

Enough already! I am baby bummed.

Slate, the online magazine, asked me to write a piece about my experience doing Not One-Off Britishisms. I had been thinking I should really weigh in on What It All Means, so this gave me the opportunity to cogitate on the matter. It was a bit challenging, since in this and most cases, I’m a lot more interested in observing that and how than in speculating about why or (even worse) weighing in on whether the phenomenon is good, bad or somewhere in between.

But I wrote the piece and you can read it here.

Just a couple of things to add. First, while the headline (“The Britishism Invasion”) is spot-on, I did not write an am not pleased with the subtitle, “Language corruption is a two-way street.” “Corruption” is such a harsh word.

Second, the comments–342 at last count–are a trip. A few are dopey, but most are right in the spirit of this enterprise, adding interesting comments and suggestions for future entries. (Shag seemed to keep coming up.) Also, not a few pointed out that I made an embarrassing mistake–I had the plural of corpus as corpi, which apparently is not a word, rather than corpora. Hey, I don’t know Latin and I’m not a linguist. I don’t even play one on TV.

I heard directly from quite a few people with interesting things to say. One of them was Helen Kennedy, the first journo, according to my unscientific investigation, to use go missing to refer to Chandra Levy’s disappearance. Her e-mail had the subject line “You made my day!” and began:

I always knew I would amount to something, and having some small part in the downfall of American English – well, could one be more subversive? No, one could not.

I’m half-American and half Irish, raised in England and Italy. I am CONSTANTLY having to turn to my colleagues to ask if “advertizing” has a Z here, etc… I genuinely had no idea that “gone missing” was not regular Ammurican.

So “go missing” was (arguably) blown to these shores, like some exotic seed, by someone who learned it in the U.K. As has been observed before, the Internet sure is something.

Adjectival phrase. It does not indicate “characterized by propriety” (as in proper behavior) but rather fits this subsidiary OED definition of proper: “Strictly or accurately so called; in the strict use of the word; genuine, real.” The OED has surprisingly few citations, the first notable one coming from Ann Thwaite’s 1984 biography of Edmund Gosse:  “He had worked with magnifying slides but he had never had a proper microscope.” Three years later, more to the point of Britishisms, came a book called A Proper Tea: An English Collection of Recipes.

Help me out here. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something very British about thinking about or referring to this quality. Americans don’t generally care about whether a particular thing satisfies all the attributes of its category, only whether or not it works or is a good buy. They didn’t used to, that is. Now they are all over “a proper.”

Our distant ancestors probably did not have a proper breakfast when they woke up in their caves, so they gorged whenever they made a kill. (Marian Burros, New York Times, December 18, 2002)/Now that Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet about his admiration for Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, it’s only fitting that they go out on a proper date. (TVGuide.com, September 15, 2011)

Preceded by a number and indicating, roughly,  “… years later.” More so than “later,” “on” provides a retrospective feel, and thus is useful in titles, as in Alan Bennett’s first produced play, the 1968 “Forty Years On.” The two-letter word makes the expression especially tempting for headline writers, and as the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01 approaches, it is ubiquitous. A Google News search for the phrase in headlines yields 424 hits for just the two days Sept. 3 and 4, 2011, from “Bin Laden Wanted a Second Hit, Ten Years On” (Sydney Herald) to “10 Years On: Finally, Smarter Airport Security Screening?” (Wall Street Journal).

A Consummate Teacher: Coach Robinson 50 Years On. (New York Times headline, August 4, 1991)/Though we’ve felt the impact of 9/11, more will yet unfold. Ten years on, it still might be “too soon to tell.” (Sacramento Bee, September 4, 2011)

(Thanks to Nancy Friedman.) Evasive, tricky, artful; dubious, unreliable. OED’s first citation is 1861. Google Ngrams show British use taking off in about 1940 and American, characteristically for NOOBs, circa 1990.

To heighten the fun of the chase, she gives Grace a road buddy in Darcy Kohler, a dodgy market analyst who stands to lose her condo if her missing boyfriend can’t be found to make good on the bond she co-signed. (Marilyn Stasio, New York Times, September 18, 1988)/ I see that the administration is pressing New York’s attorney general to drop its investigation into dodgy foreclosure practices and settle with the banks. (Megan McArdle, TheAtlantic.com, August 25, 2011)