Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president is ailing, badly. Before yesterday’s Iowa caucuses he could not but acknowledge that he had no chance of finishing near the top. He said of the presumed front-runner, Donald Trump, “It’s all about him and insulting his way to the presidency is the organizing principle.”

Then he said of the other leaders in the polls, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio: “The two other candidates that are likely to emerge in Iowa are two people that are backbenchers who have never done anything of consequence in their lives.”

Bush has a fondness for the term (an explanation of which you can find by following the above link), having used it in a Republican debate, after a skirmish between Rubio and Cruz: “this last back and forth between two senators–back bench senators, you know–explains why we have the mess in Washington, D.C.”

Unfortunately for Bush, his efforts to dismiss the senators not only as participants in the mess in Washington, but as junior participants, with no experience at actually running anything, doesn’t appear to have much traction. Cruz won the Iowa caucuses with 28 percent and Rubio was a strong third at 23. Bush’s showing? 2.8 percent.

 

In its first season, the extremely popular American podcast “Serial” released one episode a week. However, in the middle of the second season, currently under way, the producers have changed to a once-every-two-weeks schedule. But what should they call it?

There were two obvious options, the American “biweekly” and the British “fortnightly,” a word that had heretofore been confined on these shores mainly to coverage of Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Serial decided to ask the public to choose, via a Twitter poll. If “fortnightly” were to win, it would truly be a red-letter day for Not One-Off Britishisms.

The final tally was close indeed.

“Fortnightly,” as the saying goes, will have to wait till next year.

Astute reader John Wall points to a sentence in today’s New York Times: “The Guardian said on Monday that it intended to cut its costs sharply in an effort to reduce its losses and break even at an operating level in three years’ time.”

He notes, “I think of the phrase with ‘time’ preceded by the possessive form of a measure of time as a very British expression, as in ‘two hours’ time’ or, in this case ‘three years’ time.’ … A native USA speaker/writer of English would, I think, write ‘in three years,’ without the possessive apostrophe or the word ‘time.'”

I was not aware of the Britishness of the formulation, but John is correct, according to this Google Ngrams Viewer graph showing the relative frequency of the phrase “years time” in British and U.S. sources. (Ngram viewer doesn’t recognize apostrophes, so I left it out; and I didn’t include the number of years, so as to include a wider range of citations.)

Like a number of other NOOBs, “___ years’ time” wasn’t especially British until fairly recently–in this case, the 1920s. It steadily increased in popularity till the late 1980s–the moment when the modest American revival commenced.

As the end of the year approaches, it’s a good time to thank readers, commentators, and tipsters for another good one. Statistically speaking, 197,444 people visited the blog in 2015, leaving 768 comments. Counting this one, I filed 52 posts–an even one a week. The most-viewed posts were the usual golden oldies: number one was European Date Format, followed by “Mewling quim,” “xx,” “ta-ta,” and “easy peasy.”

Right after the New Year, I am off to Melbourne for a month, where I will be teaching a group of University of Delaware students, soaking up the sunshine, and–not last–on the lookout for not one-off Australianisms.

I’ll be reporting in this space on what I find. Until then, have the merriest of happies.

Delegates at the recently concluded Paris climate talks worked from a draft document in which alternate wordings were laid out next to each other. For example:

Parties [shall][agree to] to take urgent action and enhance [cooperation][support] so as to (a) Hold the increase in the global average temperature [below 2 °C][below 1.5 °C][well below 2 °C][below 2 °C or 1.5 °C] [below 1.5 °C or 2 °C][as far below 2 °C as possible] …

An article in the American publication The Atlantic noted that the draft agreement contained “well over 1,000 square brackets.”

“Square brackets” is British English for what Americans call simply “brackets.” I had never encountered the expression until a couple of months who, when an English fellow remarked how odd it seemed when something I’d written referred merely to “brackets.”

“Square brackets” has appeared very occasionally in the New York Times, for example in this 2009 blog post by Jennifer 8. Lee.

My English friend also informed me that in AmE “parentheses” (like this) are “round brackets” in BrE. “Round brackets” has never appeared in the New York Times and I imagine it never will. But as Fats Waller so eloquently said, “One never knows, do one.”

[Update. Some British commenters have said that they are not familiar with “round brackets” but merely say “brackets” for what Americans call parentheses. I certainly take them at their word but the Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for “round brackets” with British citations, including J. P. Mahaffy Empire of Ptolemies vi. 228: “Superfluous words and syllables, written by mistake of the scribe, are enclosed in square brackets. Necessary additions or corrections in round brackets.” I have also learned from my investigations that “brackets”/”square brackets” were formerly called “crotchets.”]

There’s a whole set of distinctly British retail terms. One is “offer” for the American “sale.” The other is “range” to mean (in the OED’s definition) “A set of goods manufactured or for sale.” (The dictionary quotes this quintessentially British line from a 1963 issue of Punch: “Harvey Nichols have a new range of Californian swimwear.”)

Both of them turned up in an advert in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

I know Dyson originates in the U.K. but still, gee whiz.

A few days after the Paris terrorist attacks, Dina Temple-Raston of NPR reported that French authorities “were very focused on trying to abort a second attack. And they’re worried another one, a follow-on attack, will happen.” That night, I heard Rachel Maddow use “follow-on” the same way in her MSNBC broadcast.

Not being familiar with the term, I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and found this definition: “being or relating to something that follows as a natural or logical consequence, development, or progression.” It would seem a useful term, but the origins are murky. The OED reveals a cricket etymology for “follow on,” starting as a verb referring to a side that “go[es]  in again at once after completing the first innings, in consequence of having made a prescribed number of runs less than their opponents in the first innings.” (I can only assume that that sentence makes sense.)  The dictionary quotes an 1865 cricketers’ guide: “Surrey ‘followed on’, but left only 23 runs for Oxford to get to win.”

The first non-cricket use cited by the OED is from a 1960 advertisement in “Farmer & Stockbreeder”: “This new booklet contains advice about ‘follow-on’ feeding.” Not sure what “follow-on feeding” would be, or how it followed (no pun intended) from the cricket term.

Non-cricket “follow-on” was subsequently picked up in various contexts, maybe most commonly in the business term “follow-on effect.” I feel that it’s mainly been a Britishism, but at this point I am unable to say for sure. I can report, however, that the the majority of the results in a Google News search for “follow-on effect” are from Australian sources.

 

 

From a recent article in The New Yorker:

“Inverted commas” is in the category of Britishism for which there’s an exact American equivalent, like “advert” (“advertisement,” “ad”); in this case, it’s “quotation marks.” It’s actually more annoying than that because the whole notion of inverted commas doesn’t make sense in the U.S., where we use double quotation marks, like “this.” (The British single quotes, like ‘this,” do resemble upside-down commas.)

I would have thought this would be a one-off, but in The New Yorker alone, “inverted commas” have been mentioned several times in the past decade, by such writers as Adam Gopnik and Hendrik Hertzberg.

I say stop it now.