My book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American of American English–which is of course based on this blog–has gotten a lot of nice attention in the couple of weeks since it’s been out. I plan to do a post with some of the links to articles, reviews, and podcasts soon. But the piece by The Economist‘s “Johnson” columnist–Lane Greene–deserves a post of its own. The title is “Americans Are Chuffed as Chips at British English.” But I’m the one who’s chuffed, especially because it’s being so widely read.

This link will take you to the piece. There’s a paywall but also a free trial subscription offer, plus seemingly you can read it for free if you register. But if you can’t be arsed (or asked) to do that, here it is.

British intellectuals enjoy bewailing the influx of Americanisms into the language of the mother country. The BBC once asked British readers to send in the Americanisms that annoyed them most and was flooded with thousands of entries, including “24/7”, “deplane” and “touch base”. Matthew Engel, a writer who had kicked off the conversation with an article on unwanted Americanisms, even turned the idea into a book, “That’s the Way It Crumbles”, in 2017.

The furore—which Americans would call a furor—seemed to die down. But in September Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph revived it with a column and book exploring Americanisms, a trend he situates “in the past 15 years”. His language evokes violence, bemoaning American words’ “poisoning”, “linguistic assault”, “conquest” and “penetration”. In the end, though, even the hyperbolic Mr Heffer concedes that Brits are, in fact, “willingly adopting” these words, especially via two channels associated with America: digital technology and “corporatespeak”. He just wishes his countrymen would stop.

But linguistic exchange can also be seen in a more upbeat way. This is the approach of Ben Yagoda, emeritus professor of English at the University of Delaware, in “Gobsmacked!” The trend is older and more extensive than many think. Mr Yagoda describes Britishisms like “it’s early days” and “gone missing” taking hold in America almost entirely below the radar in the 1980s and 2000s, respectively.

Mr Yagoda identifies the intensifier “awfully” (as in “awfully tired”) as the first Britishism, having been noticed (disapprovingly) by an American commentator in the 19th century. The early 20th century saw many more Britishisms take hold, especially via military contact: “gadget”, “cushy”, “scrounge”, “bonkers”, “dicey” and “shambolic” all made their way from the British Tommy to G.I. Joe, and thence to the wider American public.

The internet has spread English in both directions. Being able to read the Guardian and to binge “The Crown” on Netflix has probably speeded up the passage of British terms into American speech. Mr Yagoda has compiled a “top 40”, including “brilliant” (merely “OK, good”), “chat up” and “ginger”. Each term gets a rating on a five-notch adoption scale, from “outpacing” (signifying Americans now use the term more than its coiners in Britain do) to merely “on the radar”, meaning only a few newspaper columnists are using it.

American Anglophiles tend to be part of a media elite who holiday in Europe (and might even use “holiday” as a verb), whereas American slang is seen as passing to Britain through less rarefied channels. Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex, notes that “Friends”, an American comedy show, is often blamed wrongly for the rise of “Can I get…?” at coffee shops in Britain. In her study of online lists explaining British terms to Americans and vice versa, she found the ones about Britishisms for Americans were often framed positively (for example, “a guide to the best Britishisms”), whereas for Brits Americanisms were more often negative (“41 things the Americans say wrong”).

Which Britishisms tickle American fancies? A few sounds recur, such as adjectives ending in “y”, from “cushy” and “smarmy”—Britishisms but no longer seen as such in America—to more recent ones like “cheeky” and “dodgy”. B- and p-sounds also feature, including in made-up words (“bumbershoot” is not, as some Americans believe, a British word for an umbrella). The Oatmeal, a web comic, summed up how British English sounds to Americans: “I remember my days at Oxford, we’d often dabble in a little rumpy-pumpy before dingbangling a fresh todger, haha!” That hints at another source of Britishisms making their way west: insults and “naughty bits” like “shag” and “wanker”. A spirit of playfulness pervades Americans’ use of these British words; they may even tend to overuse them and underestimate their rudeness, because the sounds are so silly.

It is possible that the British need “Gobsmacked!” more than their American cousins. The Americanisation of British English is well known; the Britishisation of American English, not so much (as a Californian teen might say). A country not sure what influence it still has in the world might like to know that the superpower across the ocean still fancies the mother country and its culture. ■

Nancy Friedman is one of my favorite writers on language, so I was over the moon to read her write-up of my book Gobsmacked! I can’t imagine a better appreciation of what I’ve tried to do with the blog and the book.

Her piece also reminded me that, some months back, Nancy had suggested I write about “pap”–a noun for paparazzi photographers, and a verb for what they do, as in these examples she provided.

• “The street looks I papped in Paris” (Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack written by two Oakland, California, residents)
• “I met up with my pal of over a decade, Sarah Isenberg, who got papped out the wazoo (what a horrible phrase I’ve just reified) for her extremely cute cotton frock and gingham sailor cap” (Esque, whose author lives in New York)
• “I guess Van’s slip-ons are having a moment? Morgan Stewart sporting the checkered pair sent the IG girls into a tizzy, and now Jennifer Lawrence has been papped in a black pair” (The Love List by Jess Graves, “New York by way of Atlanta”)

And she provided a screen shot of a February 2024 passage in the American ad-industry publication Adweek (which also includes the NOOB “range“).

To give a bit of history, the verb and the noun–“pap” to refer to a paparazzo, which is the singular of paparazzi–both popped up in the U.K. in the early 1990s, according to the OED, which has these early citations for the verb:

• “The Queen, it has been said, doesn’t like being ‘papped’ on her own estate… Certain over-zealous royal flunkeys were sounding off about pictures of HM taking her corgis for a walk in the snow at Windsor Castle.” Daily Mirror, 1991
• “Night is a good time for ‘papping’ celebrities and I’m often called from my bed to follow up a tip-off.” Independent, 1994.

The dictionary has an American use of the noun from the New York Daily News in 1998: “The duo recently noshed at Kobe Club, giving paps ample opportunity to get some shots of them.”

As Nancy’s examples suggest, the verb is pretty common here now. I can offer one example of the noun, from an episode of the sitcom Abbott Elementary last season. Bradley Cooper (as himself) has just unexpectedly shown up at the eponymous primary school, and one of the teachers, busy on his phone, defensively says: “I’m just texting the other teachers, not the paps.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang says this term for “idiot” is “usually Irish.” Green’s gives quite a few alternative spellings — “edgit, eedjit, eegot, eejut, e-jit, ejot, idjeet, idjet, idjit, idjut, ijet, ijit, ijjit, ijiot, ijut” — which complicates the nationality issue, since Green has found “idjut,” “idjit,” “idjet,” and “ijit” in U.S. sources from the 1880s through the twentieth century.

But not “eejit,” which, I’m pretty sure, is a separate thing. Over at Urban Dictionary, some commenters say it’s Scottish as well as Irish; others say that is shite. A couple of them suggest that calling someone an eejit is less harsh than calling them an idiot.

“Eejit” first pops up in a New Zealand newspaper in 1899:

Green’s first Irish sighting is from a 1929 book: “A big eejit of a bobby is after takin’ her to College Street Station.” Since then it’s been common in Ireland, and is frequently used by the characters in Brian Friel’s plays. More recently, Cillian Murphy, the star of Oppenheimer, reflecting on celebrity, said “You’d be an eejit not to enjoy it.”

As for American use, it’s admittedly sparse. In 2017, prizefighter Floyd Mayweather unleashed it on Conor McGregor while in Toronto promoting their upcoming fight.

In 2013, a New York Times reviewer paraphrased Scott McCracken’s memoir Crapalachia: “In other words, we aren’t the eejits; y’all are.”

Not surprisingly, given his fondness for “fecking” and “gobshite,” the heaviest American user is journalist Charles Pierce. Here’s a sampling of some of his Twitter/X posts:

I wouldn’t be surprised if “eejit” catches on. It’s pungent and fun to say, and there sure are a lot of them out there.

Today is publication day for the book based on this blog, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English.

The blog and the book have truly been labors of love, and I can’t think of any better way to celebrate than by reprinting the first paragraph of the book’s Acknowledgments.

My biggest thanks go to the readers of my blog Not One-Off Britishisms, who took to it with enthusiasm, kept on reading, and inspired me to keep it going lo these fourteen years. And a special thank you to the commenters, who (almost) unfailingly have clever and interesting things to say, who gently correct me when I make a misstep, and who have provided many ideas for posts. The most prolific voice belongs to Paul Dormer, who has commented 363 times as of this writing; shout-outs also to Anthony, David Ballard, cameron, David Griggs, Hal Hall, Arthur Jack, popegrutch, Catherine Rose, and Nick L. Tipper.

Cheers to you all. Hopefully, it’s still early days for this enterprise, and it can go from strength to strength.

I owe Piya Chattopadhyay an apology.

Here’s the backstory. The book based on this blog, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, is coming out this Tuesday, September 24 (or 24 September), and I have been doing various interviews to promote it. (And by the way, if you want to buy the book you can do so here.) Ms. Chattopadhyay interviewed me for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) show “The Sunday Magazine.” In the course of the conversation, she mentioned she is married to a British person, and thus has been exposed to Britishisms like “posh” and “nosh.”

I immediately corrected her, saying that “nosh” is Yiddish.

Well, I was right, but she was right, too.

The word derives from the German naschen, meaning to nibble. It shows up in English as a verb in the late 1800s, and shortly after that as a noun, meaning a snack. I was familiar with both forms in my Jewish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and recall going to a Miami Beach restaurant called La Noshery (“noshery” or “nosherie” is an establishment where one noshes).

But Ngram Viewer reveals that, at least until quite recently, “nosh” was significantly more popular in the U.K. than the U.S.:

There are also specifically British variants, including (along the lines of “fry-up” and “cock-up) the noun “nosh-up”; a line in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) is, “I’ll give the auld doll this: she always made a good nosh-up.” And I’ll note that one difference in American and British use of the word is that here, it’s mainly a snack, while there, it can be a full meal.

In addition, Green’s Dictionary of Slang reports, “nosh” in the U.K can refer an act of fellatio. That particular meaning led to a notorious email that restaurant reviewer Giles Coren wrote to his editors at The Times, and what was subsequently leaked to The Guardian. The last line of his review, as he wrote it, was, “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.” But an editor had taken out the second to last word, “a.”

Coren was, to put it mildly, not happy about this. He wrote:

1) ‘Nosh’, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German ‘naschen’. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, ‘nosh’, means simply ‘food’. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the ‘a’. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, ‘nosh’ means “a session of eating” – in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of ‘scoff’. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant….

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually-charged”. I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word ‘gaily’ as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out … You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?

Bottom line, please accept my apologies, Ms. Chattopadhyay.

I’m not speaking about the preliminary coat of paint but the word defined by Merriam-Webster as “a small book for teaching children to read; a small introductory book on a subject; a short informative piece of writing.” The dictionary gives the American pronunciation as rhyming with “dimmer,” and British as rhyming with “climber.” (Which is how both countries pronounce the paint thing.)

I have a strong and particular association with the word. The satiric magazine Mad, which was my bible as a kid, printed several dozen humorous “Primers” between 1956 and 1999. I distinctly recall my mother explaining to me how the word was pronounced–perhaps because, quite logically, I had said “pry-mer.”

As explained by Anne Curzan and Rebecca Kruth in their radio feature “That’s What They Say,”

The “primmer” pronunciation came into English from the Latin term “primarius” which meant “first.” This word can be traced back in written forms of English to the late 1300s. It originally referred to a Christian prayer book for laypeople (as opposed to clergy) that was often used to teach reading. By the 1500s, there are versions of these books that are only used to teach children to read.

In Britain, they go on, the “prye-mer” pronunciation emerged in the nineteenth century and became the dominant one in the twentieth, but “primmer” held on in the U.S.

Until recently, that is. On Facebook, I asked people how they pronounced the word and the results were illuminating. For the most part, it broke down by age: most of the people over 60 said “primmer,” and most under 60, “prye-mer.” The only non-American who responded was an English woman who has lived in the U.S. for some decades, and who said, “I don’t recall ever hearing ‘primmer.'” Of course, the word doesn’t come up that much.

The invaluable Youglish pronunciation website confirmed these impressions. It was hard to come up with a good sample size among U.K. speakers, because everybody seemed to be talking about paint or makeup, but 100 percent of the people referring “primer”-as-handbook said “prye-mer.” Among Americans, there was a perfect 8-8 split among the first sixteen examples, with a similar age breakdown as I saw on Facebook.

Notably, there were two videos featuring Bill Nye, the Science Guy (born 1955), and in both, so as to cover his bases, he said one pronunciation, then the other. In this clip, it comes it at the 1:52 mark.

Judging what I’ve been reading in the sports pages and hearing in broadcasts, sports (“sport” if you’re British) has become a fount of Not One-Off Britishisms. Here is a recent headline from the New York Times’ sports division, The Athletic:

I’m not positive but imagine the circled phrase is a Britishism, as Americans would normally say “changing” or “switching” teams; the British say they are “moving house” or “moving offices.” (I still recall the first time I heard the latter expression from none other than legendary editor Tina Brown.)

And here’s the beginning of an Olympics-related article from an American writer for The Athletic:

As I explained in this post, “athletics” is the British (and international) term for what Americans call track [running] and field [throwing things like discuss and shot put].

But The Athletic is nothing compared to the Tennis Channel, where (American) commentators Jim Courier and, especially, Brett Haber have recently gotten completely jiggy with Britishisms, many of them unfamiliar to most American ears. A sampling:

• Courier said a match between Janik Sinner and Alexander Rublev was “a ginger matchup.”
• Haber referred to Jacob De Minaur’s “kit,” that is, outfit.
• Getting more obscure, Courier said a certain shot “works a treat.”
• Haber said player Jack Draper was “well thrashed” online after he didn’t call an infraction on himself.
• After a certain shot failed, Haber said “No joy.”

And in the deepest cut of all, Haber, said that it was “early doors” in a match. The bloke could commentate for the BBC!

When I saw in headlines that soccer/football commentator Gary Lineker had called England’s national team “shit” or “s—” (the two main variations I saw), I knew I had to find the exact wording. The quote is beyond the scope of this blog, since Lineker is English, but for some years I have been tracking the adjectival use of “shit” and “crap” — both borderline NOOBs — and in the interest of science, I wanted to find out what Lineker said.

It proved deuced hard, as almost every newspaper and website either used the single word or versions with hyphens, or asterisks. Finally, I found a Daily Mail article that linked to another Daily Mail article that had the full quote: “I mean, you can think of all sorts of words or expletives if you like, but it was shit.” (At the risk of stating the obvious, an American would say “shitty,” or “they played like shit.”)

Now, “it” was referring to England’s 1-1 draw with Denmark in the UEFA European Championship on June 24. Since then, the team has advanced to the knockout round, and won three consecutive matches to advance to the championship this Sunday against Spain.

You could argue that Lineker’s criticism motivated England. Or, you could say his commentary was shit.

On May 7 of this year, the New York Times reported the conversation of some Chicago grade-schoolers:

“Some people think cicadas can suck your brains out,” said Willa, a red-haired 8-year-old in a Star Wars T-shirt.

“They’re going to be so loud,” Christopher, 9, said as he colored his cicada intently. “I hate noise.”

“It’s kind of scary,” Madison, 8, said while picking through markers scattered on a green table. “What if they do something to me?”

Not to worry, Madison and Willa: Cicadas don’t actually bite, and they prefer to suck tree sap.

My topic today is the expression in the last paragraph, “Not to worry.” It means, essentially, “Don’t worry” or “There’s nothing to worry about it” or “No worries.” The online Merriam-Webster’s supplies two additional recent examples:

• “But not to worry: These eight online subscription gifts can be purchased within seconds to make your last-minute holiday shopping way less hectic.” — Phoebe Sklansky, Parents, 22 Dec. 2023
• If a tropical trip is not in your immediate future, not to worry.” — Rebecca Angel Baer, Southern Living, 18 Feb. 2024

As with quite a few words and phrases, I remember precisely where and when I first encountered it. I was in Chicago, on a vacation with my parents in 1965 or so, and it was uttered by a character in a comic book I was reading. Struck me as odd, but then it kept popping up over the years, with increasing frequency.

I never had a sense of its origin, but for me it always had a vaguely Jewish/Yiddish feel, like “I could care less” or “What am I, chopped liver?” But that’s not where it came from. When I finally got around to researching “Not to worry” I found, for one thing, that it’s a Britishism. In his A Dictionary of Catchphrases (1985 edition), Eric Partridge, who was born in New Zealand and lived in England his entire adult life, says of the phrase: “current, since the middle 1930s, in the [military] Services, and then, suddenly, in 1957-8, it began to be generally and very widely used.” Partridge quotes a 1967 informant: “It is old hat. I first heard it, ad nauseum, in the Admiralty about ten or twelve years ago.” And he quotes another informant, John W. Clark, saying in 1977 that the phrase is “never heard in US except from Britons or by sophisticated or affected imitators.”

Google Books’ Ngram Viewer graph of British and American usage confirms Partridge to a rather remarkable degree. (I did a case-sensitive search with a capital “N” to eliminate things like “I told him not to worry.”) It shows the phrase emerging in Britain in the ’40s and rising fairly rapidly in popularity in the late ’50s and ’60s. It turns up in American in the mid-’60s (that is, right around the time I read that comic book) and–pace John W.Clark– just keeps rising, surpassing British use in 1979.

It was so established here by 1995 that the singer Abbey Lincoln could write and record a song with that title. https://www.youtube.com/embed/QK40N0Jer-w?si=L12jVR2YxbzTAYiO

The OED finds the origin of the phrase, with its odd syntax, in an old Scottish custom to elide every word except “please” from sentences that start, “May it [or let it] please you…” There’s a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Heav’nly stranger, please to taste These bounties which our Nourisher,..To us for food and for delight hath caus’d The Earth to yeild.” And this from a 1757 letter: “Please to send me the following things Vizt. 1 Dozen of Black mitts. 1 piece of Black Durant fine.”

Here are the first two examples the dictionary has found with “not”:

The first “Not to worry” is from The Daily Mail in 1958–just when Partridge said it was reaching catchphrase status.

I’ll note in conclusion that even though I was wrong about Jewish origin, I’m not the only person who thinks the phrase has a Jewish feel. Here’s the cover of a book that came out in 2003.

In the very early days of this blog, I did a post on “erm,” which I took and still take to be the British version of the American “um,” with similar pronunciation. (That is, the “r” is silent, though on some occasions in the U.K. it’s pronounced more like “em.”) At that time, there was no entry for “erm” in the OED, so I constructed my own definition: “Interjection. Self-conscious vocalism, indicating skepticism.” The idea being that people said “erm” or “um” when they were hesitating, and that writers employed in attempting to cleverly call attention to what follows in the sentence. American speakers and writers had been doing the same thing with “um” but in the post I gave two recent U.S. “erm”s.

• “Here’s a report on the, erm, incident from CBC’s nightly national newscast.” (Slap Shot blog, New York Times, November 29, 2007)
• ”Justice Breyer asks a hypothetical question that he will pose several times today: ‘Imagine a well-educated American woman marries a man from a foreign country X. They have a divorce. The judge says the man is completely at fault here, a real rotter. The woman is 100 percent entitled to every possible bit of custody and the man can see the child twice a year on Christmas Day at 4:00 in the morning.’ (Erm. Isn’t that once a year?)” (Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, January 10, 2010)

In March 2023, the OED published an “erm” entry, with this definition: “Used to express uncertainty, embarrassment, a pause to consider one’s next words, etc., or as a conversational filler expressing hesitation or inarticulacy.” Interestingly, the citations, which ranged from 1911 to 2017, had no jokey written uses of “erm,” only lines of dialogue from works of fiction, or journalistic quotes, including this from The Dalesman in 2017: “The new vicar is visiting members of his Wensleydale parish. ‘Erm, could I just ask why you have a bucket of manure in your front room?’ asks the flustered man of the cloth.”

I had occasion to look this up because over the course of the week, I encountered two U.S. examples. The first was in the New York Times crossword puzzle:

And the second was in the captioning to the FX television series The Veil. (The character speaking isn’t British.)

Here’s what Google Books Ngram Viewer has to say about the use of the word in written sources in Britain and America:

Supporting the idea of a mild uptick in the U.S. is that fact that it’s been used four times in the past year in the New York Times, including:

• “… obsessing over who Donald Trump will pick as his new pain sponge — erm, running mate …”–Opinion columnist Michelle Cottle
• “Every generation, it seems, has a way of ‘discovering’ items of dress that previous generations dismissed in triumph, recontextualizing them and claiming them for its own, like anthropologists unearthing buried treasures. Wide ties? Bell bottoms? So ironically cool! Corsets? Neato! Waistcoats? Funky. Spats? Erm … maybe for a costume party.”–Fashion writer Vanessa Friedman

Such American uses are both cutesy and needlessly British, seeing as we’ve got our homegown “um.” So, erm, maybe give “erm” a rest?