OED cites a 1914 use and defines it as  “Smart, stylish, splendid, luxurious. Also (chiefly Brit.): typical of or belonging to the upper class; (affecting to be) superior or genteel; ‘snooty’, pretentious.” The closest American equivalent would be fancy, or maybe fancy-schmancy.

Posh has been used in the U.S. for decades, of course, but, until the mid-1990s, at roughly half the rate as in Britain and chiefly without the ironic or sardonic connotation noted by the OED. (It’s a similar case to brilliant, in that the word was used here but more sincerely than across the pond.) What happened in the mid-1990s? The Spice Girls, of course. The group was formed in 1994, but it was two years later that Melody Maker magazine bestowed nicknames on the members. Victoria Adams (now Victoria Beckham) actually had an upper-middle-class (what the Brits would call middle-class) upbringing, but she was dubbed Posh Spice because of her bearing, which was, well, posh.

In his article ex-Buster [Thurman] Arnold judicially recorded his opinion that labor has become a national headache, that it is perhaps more unpopular in the slit trenches of World War II than in the posh clubs of professional New Deal haters, and that the great body of public approval essential for effective labor support is crumbling all along the line. (Time, October 18, 1943)/Discerning the difference between “posh” and “body hugger” denims was like trying to tell the Olsen twins apart. (New York Times, May 11, 2011)

Up to this point, Not One-Off Britishisms has concentrated exclusively on words and phrases. But there are other sorts of Britishisms. One them is punctuation, and the one British custom that has been widely adopted here has to do with the placement of periods and commas vis a vis quotation marks.

The day before yesterday, I published an essay about this in the online magazine Slate.com. As of today, it is the most e-mailed and most read article on the whole site, with more than 11,000 “like”s and some 35o comments (many of them heated). Who knew that punctuation could inspire such passion?

Anyway, here’s how it starts:

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

Indeed, unless you associate exclusively with editors and prescriptivists, you can find copious examples of the “outside” technique—which readers of Virginia Woolf and The Guardian will recognize as the British style—no further away than your Twitter or Facebook feed. I certainly can. Conan O’Brien, for example, recently posted:

Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfor- tunately, in this case  “darndest” means “incriminating”.

The British style also rules on message boards and bulletin boards. I scanned four random posts in Metafilter.com (about Sony Playstation’s hacking problems, the death of Phoebe Snow, the French police, and cool dads) and counted nine comments with periods and commas outside, seven inside.

I spotlight the Web not because it brings out any special proclivities but because it displays in a clear light the way we write now. The punctuation-outside trend jibes with my experience in the classroom, where, for the past several years, my students have found it irresistible, even after innumerable sardonic remarks from me that we are in Delaware, not Liverpool. As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions. The current semester is nearing its end, but I am still taking points away.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Verb, transitive. OED gives its first use as 1906 (in a Rudyard Kipling story), and defines it as, “To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness.” It is so common now, and used in so many different contexts, that it probably doesn’t seem like a Britishism. But it is: a Google Ngram (for “vetting” and “vetted”) shows it starting to become popular in British English in the 1930s and peaking around 1990–exactly the same time, according to an Ngram for American English, that it started to take off in the U.S. Currently, it’s roughly equally popular on both sides of the ocean.

“If I was on a matchmaking site, I would want to know that the people they are going to hook me up with had at least been vetted.” (The Desert Sun, May 8, 2011)/Vetting for [Zoe] Baird’s appointment began at once. Exactly what her position might be was left unclear; the vetting team was simply told that it would be something important. (Sidney Blumenthal, The New Yorker, February 15, 1993)

Alcoholic drinks; cocktails. In the U.S., both the singular and plural forms have traditionally been used by themselves (I need a drink; She had three drinks before dinner), whereas in Britain, drinks is commonly paired with another word: drinks party, drinks menu, drinks tray, interval drinks (which you imbibe at the theatre between the first and second acts).

At the height of summer, nothing makes a splash like a drinks party at your weekend house.(New York Times, July 16, 2004)/The other day, at loose ends in Midtown at the tenebrous end of happy hour, I larked into an averagely bad, decently fun Tex-Mex restaurant in the Theater District. The barman presented the drinks menu. The drinks menu presented an assault, its plastic cover a window onto a plane of existence where 29 distinct margarita flavors live, or at least refuse to die. (Troy Patterson, Slate, May 4, 2011. Note the use of the moderately British  barman [instead of bartender] and larked, for which the OED cites H. O’Reilly’s 1889 5o Years on Trail:  “I was always larking about and playing pranks on my schoolfellows.”)

Verb, transitive or intransitive. The OED’s definition:

To bring (something) up to its full capacity; to fill to the top (a partly full container, spec. (the cells of) a motor vehicle’s battery). Used esp. with reference to a drinker’s glass, freq. with the person as object.

The first citation is from a 1937 article in The Times: “In order to help the owner-driver to look after his battery, a combined acid-level indicator, vent plug and filler cup has been introduced, thus enabling the cells to be ‘topped up’ accurately and visibly, without removing the vent plugs.”

Top up is subtly different from the similar fill or fill up, indicating the the real or metaphorical receptacle is not (or not yet) empty. Replenish would probably be the closest equivalent, a word that does not trip off the tongue. Its widest use in the U.K. came from pay-as-you-go mobile phone companies, such as Virgin, who, interestingly, slightly changed the meaning. That is, there is no such thing as being “full” of minutes; topping up your mobile means simply adding more money to your account.

Chris topped up the generator with gas, spilling it on the hot metal. Then he urinated on some paint cans in the alley and locked the door. (Dan Baum, The New Yorker, September 19, 2005)/ I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.(Paul Krugman, New York Times, April 4, 2011)

Imperative verb phrase. According to the OED, “said (often parenthetically) to create an interval of suspense before imparting something remarkable or amusing, in order to heighten its effect. Also ironically.” Often doubled, as in an example cited by the OED from R. Laidlaw’s 1979 book Lion is Rampant:  “The real attack will come from, wait for it, wait for it—anither direction a’thegither.”

It has been popularized recently by Barney, the character played by Neil Patrick Harris (left) on the American sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” one of whose verbal ticks is to infix wait for it in the middle of words. For example: “Our friend Robin used to do porn—wait for it—ography!”

When Karl Baedeker (or, more likely, one of his minions) passed this way [Phoenix, Arizona] in 1904, he found ”a well-built, modern city” of . . . wait for it . . . exactly 5,554 inhabitants. (R.W. Apple, New York Times, February 19, 1999)/Judging by my inbox, a large proportion of angry white men also believe that the burst housing bubble and financial meltdown of 2007-8 were caused by — wait for it — President Jimmy Carter. (Salon.com, April 29, 2011)

In the future; “going forward.” One of several cases where the British delete the article favored by Americans, the most famous other one being in hospital.  Also, the football teams Blackburn Rovers and (strangest of all, to American ears) Rangers.

Wes Davis alerted me to this passage from Charles Portis’s 1979 novel, The Dog of the South. Wes writes:

An American named Jack is helping some British soldiers load sandbags during a hurricane in Belize. When one of the Brit trucks gets stuck in the mud, Jack takes the wheel, claiming to know a special way to get a truck moving again. It doesn’t work. Here’s what comes next:

Jack said the gear ratios were too widely spaced in that truck. The young British officer, none too sure of himself before, pulled Jack bodily from the car and told him to stay away from his vehicles “in future”–rather than “in the future.”

But if the President now admitted a knowing falsehood, that admission would probably be admissible in evidence against him if in future he is prosecuted for perjury.(Anthony Lewis, New York Times, December 15, 1998)/If [Mickey] Hart should ever attempt to work with dancers again in future, he should consider consulting with [Jay] Cloidt. (The Bay Citizen, April 18, 2011)

In the UK, one disposes of unwanted stuff in the rubbish bin or merely the bin. The venerable U.S. equivalents are garbage can and trash can. In the April 18, 2011, edition of (yes) the New Yorker, one finds this in (American) Evan Osnos’s article about Chinese tourists in Europe:

He was a sanitation specialist by training, and he couldn’t help but notice Milan’s abundant graffiti and overstuffed trash bins.