I need to come up with a term for the phenomenon where Americans adopt a British term but get it wrong. It has come up quite a bit on this blog, recently with “garden/ing leave,” and now with this term for what Americans call and “on [or entrance] ramp” or “off [or exit] ramp.”

The OED defines “slip road” as “a short (usually one-way) road giving access to or exit from a main highway, esp. a motorway; an approach road.” The first citation is from 1953; it and all the other ones are from British sources.

On January 25, Lynne Murphy, of the Separated by a Common Language blog, tweeted this as her “Difference of the Day.” @zekeys_mom responded, “‘Slip ramp’ is creeping into AmE. Used for toll road, minor exits to relieve congestion at major exits. Must have an auto-pay EZPass [the regional electronic toll collection system] to use it.”

Note: she said “slip ramp,” not “slip road.” When I checked Google Books for “slip road,” all the hits appeared to be from British sources, except a quote from a 2014 book by David Reynolds called Slow Road to Brownsville (Texas): “I took a slip road off 83, thinking it would lead into town—and found myself on a dark and crowded interstate heading west away from town.” But it turns out Reynolds is a Brit who wrote about his U.S. travels. I checked the New York Times archives and found “slip road” had been used exactly twice–once in a Reuters news article from London, and once in an article about Formula One car racing. Further research suggested that the term is used racing to mean a sort of escape path, for example: “That wing of his ended up 100 yards from where the car ended up down the Turn 1 slip road.”

That’s pretty much it for U.S. “slip road.” “Slip ramp” is another story. There is no definition for it in the OED, dictionary.com or merriam-webster.com. However, @zekeys_mom sent some links with uses of it, including a 2002 news release from the (U.S. state of) Pennsylvania, which helpfully defines the term: “The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission today announced it will not advance preliminary plans to design and construct two ‘slip ramps’ — which are unmanned, E-ZPass only ramps built between existing interchanges.” The quotation marks indicate a newish usage, but as of 2015 it still hadn’t taken hold; a Pennsylvania newspaper article that year refers to “so-called slip ramps.”

Consulting Google Books, I found the earliest use of “slip ramp” in a 1959 issue of a state of California publication,  “California Highways and Public Works.” The caption to a map says, “The circled ‘A’ and arrow point out the new slip ramp on the Harbor Freeway.” This was long before the invention of E-ZPass and such systems and suggests the term was used more generally, for exit ramp.

But it’s been used in different ways as well, as shown by a 2011 discussion on the AARoads Forum. Someone asked, “Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t know exactly what a slip ramp is? What is it, and how does it differ from a normal freeway exit ramp?”

The answers were somewhat all over the map. A San Diegan said he had always used it to mean “a ramp between parallel sets of carriageways – for example, freeway main lanes to the frontage road, or vice versa. Basically, you end up ‘slipping’ over a few feet, but going in the same direction as before.” A number of commenters agreed with this, but a New Jerseyan posted, “My understanding was that it was a connector between two freeways, that was full speed, at least that is what I think.”

Then a Bostonian said, “I’ve regularly heard and used the term to refer to a right turn at an intersection separated by an island of some sort from the intersection, like this example at Causeway and Washington Streets in Boston.” But then someone else said that what he was really talking about was a “slip lane,” not a “slip ramp.” (I’m not sure why I assume all these people are male, but I feel pretty confident about it.)

Someone from Virginia said, “I remember the old version of the AAA map of Northern Virginia from the mid-1980s used the term ‘slip ramps’ … in reference to the ramps connecting the Dulles Toll Road and the Dulles Access Road. For those unfamiliar, it’s a quad-carriageway with two carriageways in each direction; the inner (free) ones serve airport traffic and the outer (tolled) ones serve local traffic.”

No one could top (or possibly understand) that, and the discussion ended.

Every December, Lynne Murphy, who runs the blog Separated By A Common Language, chooses two Words of the Year: an American word that has gained popularity in the United Kingdom (US>UK) and one that has gone the other way (UK>US). Recent winners in the latter category (obviously more interesting for NOOBS purposes) are gutted, backbencher, gap year, dodgy, and bum.

Yesterday, Lynne announced “shitgibbon” as her 2017 UK>US word, and I’m chagrined to say I have not yet covered it. It first got notice in the U.S. as one of a flurry of insults hurled at Donald Trump in 2016, the only one of which I wrote about was “wazzock.”

One of the prominent insults was this tweet, posted after Trump (falsely) claimed that Scotland had voted in favor of Brexit.

Among the prominent Americans to pick it up, Lynne notes, was a Pennsylvania Democratic state legislator from my home region, the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Leach seems to have come up with “loofa-faced” on his own. Coincidentally, he is currently in a bit of hot water for matters unrelated to his Trump insults.

“Shitgibbon” is an insult of rather recent provenance. Uber language guy Ben Zimmer investigated its history in two articles published in Slate. He reported

Spotted on the door of a coffee shop in my home town, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

For more on Boxing Day in the U.S., see this post.

I love it that New York Times food editor Sam Sifton, in his Thanksgiving Cooking newsletter, not only used “pear-shaped” but linked to the NOOBs post on it.

Recently this exchange occurred on the American radio show/podcast “On the Media”:

KATHRYN VAN ARENDONK: …. when you go about separating art from artist, you can then run into all of these problems where you love work and you love an understanding of that artist that turns out to not actually be at all who they were in life.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Did I just hear you say “Louis C.K.”?

VAN ARENDONK:  I may have done.

And this from a recent New Yorker article: “Araten acknowledged that, relative to sales, the Hatfield factory employed fewer people than it had done in the past.”

The “may have done” and “had done” are examples of what ace Anglo-American linguist Lynne Murphy calls “pro-predicate ‘do'” (which I’ll abbreviate as PPD). As she explains in a blog post, in expressing the same thought, British people would say, “I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn’t have done,” where Americans would say, “I ate all the chocolate, even though I shouldn’t have.” In the examples at the top, the normal American constructions would be “I may have” and “… than it had in the past.” (Lynne doesn’t mention this, but I think an American alternative in the first case is to extend the sentence with another pronoun–that is, “I may have done it,” or “I may have done so.”)

In her post, Lynne has a full explanation of the relevant grammar, as well as a quote from a scholar who has found that the construction only became popular in Britain in the 1920s. (By the way, the “pro” in PPD stands for “pronoun”; as with pronouns, the “do” stands in for another word, in this case a verb.)

Since starting this blog six years ago, I’ve been on the lookout for American uses of PPD, with very little results, until now. Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed a handful examples, the “On the Media” and New Yorker ones being the most recent. Will Americans soon adopt PPV more broadly?

They may do.

The hot kitchen appliance in the U.S. right now is the Instant Pot, a programmable electric pressure cooker that can also be used as a slow cooker and does various other things as well. I’ve been in the market for one and in the store snapped this picture, which shows just some of its functions.

The function that caught my eye was “Porridge,” which is a word we don’t really say in the U.S. (other than in “The Three Bears” and other fairy tales). Having been served it in English B and Bs, I had the sense that in the U.K., “porridge” means what we call “oatmeal.” Anglo-American linguist Lynne Murphy confirmed this, basically. Over Twitter, she said that in Britain, “the default porridge is made of oats…. if you ask for porridge, you will get oatmeal. For others, you’d need to specify–‘buckwheat porridge’ or whatever.”

It turned out that Instant Pot’s “porridge” isn’t a pure NOOBs. Although the product is hugely popular in the United States, it originated in Canada, whose residents seem to use “porridge” much as the British do. Indeed, Lynne forwarded me an article from the Canadian grain journal Grainews (and it somehow warms my heart that there’s such  a thing as a Canadian grain journal) titled, “What’s more Canadian than a bowl of porridge?” The article seems to use “oatmeal,” “porridge,” and “oatmeal porridge” interchangeably.

Of course, Instant Pot could have changed “porridge” to “oatmeal” for its U.S. shipments. But keeping the original term adds an exotic flavor that–who knows?–could have contributed to the product’s immense success.

Prompted by some comments to my post on “stand (for election)” to take a deeper look, I find some interesting nuances. To start, “stand” in the sense of put oneself forward for an office dates to at least 1551, according to the OED. For the first couple of centuries, it was always used in reference to a specific position (“Were he to stand for Consull”–Shakespeare, Coriolanus), especially, from the 1700s on, Parliament (“Dr. Thorne intended to stand for the county on the next vacancy”–Trollope). This Google Ngrams chart shows the frequency of that “stand for Parliament” in the Google Books database.

Then the more general “stand for election” popped up, slowly. Google Books contains only two uses of that phrase prior to 1900–one in Connecticut in 1814, the other in South Africa in 1888. Things picked up in the 20th century, as this Google Ngrams chart shows.

The graph is instructive in terms of this blog’s subject. It shows “stand for election” was used roughly equally in U.S. and British sources until about 1920, when it took off in the Britain and stood still here. And what replaced “stand” in the U.S.? Basically, “run” followed by the name of the office. This Google Ngrams chart shows only American sources.

In other words, the phrasing in Rachel Maddow’s statement quoted in the original post–that FDR “stood for president”–had, until then, basically never been used in American English.

I have to admit I was surprised to find “stand for election” as popular in the U.S. as Google Ngrams shows it to still be; certainly, I don’t recall ever coming across it. To try to get some insight, I searched the phrase in the New York Times archives, and got some interesting results. A lot of the hits come from articles about foreign (especially British) elections. The most recent American story came in February 2016 and was about the governing board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science: “Traditionally, nominees stand for election by the individual branches.” The next one, published a month earlier, was: “Lion Point Capital …has proposed two director candidates, whose names were not released, to stand for election at the company’s annual meeting.”

The next five examples, dating back to 2013, were along the same lines–all referred to people putting themselves forward to boards of trustees or directors. That makes sense because it doesn’t sound quite right to say someone is “running” for such a position.

Incidentally, the other example in the original post, besides Maddow’s, was from an article in the New York Times Magazine by Sasha Chapin. I noted that he’s Canadian and wondered whether “stand for election” is common in that country.

Chapin (@sashachapin) responded on Twitter:

“But here’s a twist: that line was inserted by my editor, an American. Cor blimey!”

Top NOOBs scout Nancy Friedman alerted me back in September to U.S. news host Rachel Maddow’s use of a certain Britishism:

… standing for re-election as president in 1972, Richard Nixon was due to make history. He was going to match FDR`s record for being on the national ticket for his party in five different elections. FDR had stood for vice president once. Of course, he stood for president four times…

The Britishism is “stand”–the exact Americans equivalent is “run.” I mentally filed away the example and planned to eventually write a post on it. I expected that I would find that it was a true one-off from the mouth of Maddow, who studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and is quite fond of British expressions.

Well, it’s at least a two-off, as Nancy has detected another use, in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine: “… Jeff Flake, in a speech announcing he would not be standing for re-election…”

The author of the article, Sasha Chapin, is Canadian. Following a Twitter discussion, ace Anglo-American linguist Lynne Murphy kindly searched a corpus of Canadian English. She found three hits for “run for election” and six for “stand for election.”

Still, even if it was normal for Chapin, the usage got by the Times copy editors. Oh, I forgot, the Times has eliminated the position of copy editor.

Anyway, such is the press’s need for elegant variation, I expect to see “stand for election” pop up again.