Over the years, when I’ve been asked about the NOOBs phenomenon, part of my standard answer (along with the arrival in America of British journos like Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens and Tina Brown, and the rise of global internet culture) has been that the Harry Potter books introduced and popularized a lot of British words. The one example I always gave was “ginger,” in reference to Ron Weasley’s hair.

It finally occurred to me to check this assertion out. My local library had on offer a digital version of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (… and the Philosopher’s Stone in the U.K). I checked it out and searched for “ginger.” Nothing. On the other hand, there were multiple references to Ron having “red hair” and one calling him “redheaded.”

My world was rocked.

Apparently, “ginger” becoming “red-haired” was one of the numerous changes from the British versions of the books to the American. Wondering if any Britishisms remained, I found an article called “Six British Words from Harry Potter That I Never Understood.” The author doesn’t specify, but I assume she’s referring to words found in American editions. The words are:

• “Budgerigar” or “budgie” (American: “parakeet”).
• “Wotcher!” (“An old informal greeting, possibly Cockney in origin, possibly a contraction of “what cheer.”)
• “Tea cozy.”
• “Fug.”
• “Candyfloss” (American: “cotton candy”).
• “Treacle” and “trifle.”

The only ones of these that showed up in my digital edition were “tea cozy,” “treacle,” and “trifle”–an item and two foods that don’t have American equivalents. The foods appeared in the same sentence, an interesting one, describing the desserts at Hogwarts:

“Blocks of ice cream in every flavor you could think of, apple pies, treacle tarts, chocolate éclairs and jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, Jell-O, rice pudding . . .”

Here’s my take on the list. “Blocks of ice cream” and “jam doughnuts” are Britishisms that somehow made it through. (We would be more likely to refer to “scoops” of ice cream and much more likely to say “jelly donut.”) “Jell-O” (U.K.: “jelly”) was probably and “apple pies” (“apple tarts”) possibly changed for the American market. And chocolate éclairs, strawberries, and rice pudding work equally well in both countries.

Since I first wrote about the expression, I’ve learned that “easy peasy” and its origins are shrouded in mystery, or, at least, uncertainty. Start with most British people’s Mandela effect notion that it came from an advertising slogan for Sqezy [sic] dish-washing liquid, “Easy Peasy, Lemon Sqezy.” It is flat-out wrong. The language historian Barry Popik and Pascal Tréguer, who runs the WordHistories.net blog, have both established that there was never such a slogan. Rather, from 1957 until 1962, it was, “It’s Easy With Sqezy.”

Shortly after that, the brand was discontinued. However, a commenter on my 2012 post noted that Star Brands, which had (temporarily) reintroduced Sqezy, had a message on its website which bought into the folk/faux/fake etymology: “From its origins in 1958 when Sqezy was launched as the world’s first washing up liquid in a plastic squeezy bottle, we’ve now brought it bang up to date. Although when you consider that 99.9% of people can complete the line ‘Easy peasy ..’ you’d hardly believe that it had ever been away!”

In fact, the first documented (by Tréguer) instance of the full phrase is in a 1983 article in The Guardian: “Chap comes in, sits down, says, ’I want to be a marine biologist.’ Easy peezy lemon squeezy.”

Another odd thing about the short version of the phrase is its nationality. Ngram Viewer confirms it’s a NOOB (and that widespread use began in the late ‘70s):

Yet two of the three early uses of it cited by the OED come from American sources. The first is very early and not American: in a 1923 article about traditional mummers’ plays, there is a reference to “The Berkshire Doctor’s cure of the ‘easy-peasy, palsy, and the gout.’” In the 1940 American film Long Voyage Home, the character played by John Wayne says, “Easy-peasy. Take it easy, Drisc!” And a 1953 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer noted, “There’s a brief air travelogue of highlights of a jet trip from London to Cairo… The flight is such an easy-peasy affair for the air travellers, they seem to be motionless in a fantastic and lovely, sun-drenched cloudland.”

My guess would be that in all three cases, the phrase was used not because it was in circulation but because the rhyme came easily to the tongue. The same is true of the other popular variant, “Easy peasy, Japanesey,” which Popik has spotted in 1982 (that is, a year earlier than the “Lemon Sqezy/Squeezy” version). The character played by James Whitmore uses the phrase in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, which is set decades earlier and is therefore anachronistic.

“Easy peasy” has been used in the New York Times sixty-five times from its first appearance, in 2001, through 2021. That includes a 2012 article about a New York City burglar: “The following morning, he was awakened by police officers in his bedroom. One of them said, ‘Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy,’ first handcuffing, then dressing” him. The comma after “Easy” is the doing of the Times reporter and should not be there.

While the phrase is popular here, it hasn’t yet become a cliché and ripe for parody. It has in Britain, where in the 2009 satire In the Loop (Nancy Friedman has pointed out), a character says, “Difficult difficult lemon difficult.”

Here’s my most recent bit on “bit” — probably the word I’ve written the most about over the years. You can follow the link and go backwards through all the posts, but the basic deal is that British people commonly use “bits” where American would traditionally use “parts” — as in the good bits, the best bits, fiddly bits, lady bits and so on.

I’m inspired to write again because of a 1976 quote by the American science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement and posted on Facebook by Benjamin Friedman:

[H.P.] Lovecraft was an exceptionally, almost Impeccably, bad writer. He was not even originally bad. He Imitated the worst bits of Poe quite accurately, but his efforts to catch [Lord] Dunsany’s sonorous rhythms show an ear of solid tin. Derivative, inept, and callow, his tales can satisfy only those who believe that a capital letter, some words, and a full stop make a sentence.

I was immediately suspicious that Le Guin would have written “worst bits” (or, for that matter, “full stop” rather than “period”). And indeed, Ngram Viewer shows 1976 to be pretty much the nadir of American “worst bits”:

I commented about this on Facebook and Friedman replied: “It’s quite possible that her TLS editor amended the piece to accord with British usage. That certainly happened to me more than once back when I used to occasionally write proper reviews for them. The revisions would part of the back-and-forth as the editor and I arrived at a final draft, so if that was the case with Le Guin, she would have agreed to them.”

We’ll probably never know the truth. But my bet is on editorial suggestion.

I wrote about the originally Australian “no worries” — as a response to “thank you” or an apology — in the first year of this blog, 2011. Since then it has continued a sharp increase in popularity, especially in the U.S., which has outpaced British use, as this Ngram Viewer graph shows.

Apple’s iOS artificial intelligence has jumped on the bandwagon. For some time now, when I start to respond on my phone to an email, there are three options on the bottom of the screen for what to say. Here’s a screenshot of what appeared on my phone when I was about to respond to a friend who said he couldn’t play tennis because of an injury.

FYI, I chose “Ouch!”

The phrase originates in education, specifically the custom of indicating every correct answer in an examination with a mark. Hence, “full marks” would be getting everything right. The phrase appears as early as 1852, according to the OED, with a figurative use in 1889: “I was once fifteen hours on the road… By rail I have done it in an hour and three-quarters. Full marks for steam, it may be thought…”

Though “full marks” shows up in an anonymous 1924 New York Times movie review — “the film version of ‘Monsleur Beaucaire’ is entitled to full marks for the splendor of the settings and the extraordinary beauty of the costimes” — I ascribe that to an Anglophile reviewer. Or, at least, the phrase fell out of favor after that and became unfamiliar here. In the U.S., “marks” is a more general term: one can talk of getting good or not-so-good marks, meaning grades. And I judge the modern American equivalent of “full marks” to be “full credit.”

When I wrote about it in 2019, I categorized “full marks” as “On the Radar.” But it has started to get more popular here. Here’s the Ngram Viewer chart.

It actually showed up a week ago in the Times (as I write), from Bret Stephens in an exchange with fellow columnist Gail Collins: “[President Biden has] done a much better job standing up for Ukraine than I had expected he might, and I’ll give him and his national-security team full marks for that.”

Expect to see it pretty widely, pretty soon.

I recently discussed the expression “on the night,” meaning “on the night in question,” “night of the game/event/performance,” etc; that post has a link to the similar “on the day.” The phrase came to mind yesterday, when I was saw the online New York Times coverage of an epic Manchester City-Real Madrid Champions League match.

For those not versed in Champions League soccer/football (and for those who are, correct me if I botch this), it’s a tournament where, once the field gets down to sixteen teams, each contest consists of two games, and the team with the highest aggregate score advances. In this case, Manchester City won the first leg 4-3, but Real Madrid advanced on aggregate because they won the second leg 3-1.

Thus the caption should have read “on the night”; “on a night” is meaningless, to my ears. My theory is that a British person (perhaps Rory Smith, the author of the article) or someone well-versed in NOOBs originally wrote “on the night,” but some well-meaning but ill-informed person changed it.

Any other theories?