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?

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve put together a book based on this blog. I’m happy to announce that it has a publisher (Princeton University Press), a publication date (September in the U.S., November in the U.K.), a title, and a brilliant cover (designed by Chris Ferrante):

I’m especially pleased by the use of Gill Sans for the subtitle and my name, as it is in itself a Not One-Off Britishism.

Already, the book has received some great endorsements from really distinguished people:

• “The best exploration of British and American lexical variation and change that I’ve ever read. Or, to put it in the terms of this book: it’s brilliant, gobstoppingly spot-on, streets ahead of anything else.”–David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
• “One could do worse than to have a lie-in with this valuable and entertaining book, in which Ben Yagoda gets his Britishisms sorted for our benefit. Brilliant, in the best American sense!”—Mary Norris, author of the New York Times bestselling Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
• “Ben Yagoda is one of our most insightful and entertaining commentators on language and culture. In Godsmacked!, he focuses his formidable talents on an original and fascinating story: Britain’s growing influence on U.S. speech. If you’ve ever wondered why you have suddenly started saying things like cheeky, dodgy, or twee, you’d be bonkers not to devour this wonderful book.”—Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The New Yale Book of Quotations
• “Despite my decades of experience with English on both sides of the Atlantic, and all my academic study of its varieties, Ben Yagoda’s delightful book taught me things I had not yet realized about the British influence on American speech. As anyone acquainted with Yagoda’s writing might expect, his book is both fascinating and fun.”—Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of Edinburgh, coauthor, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

As I say, the book won’t be available for several months, but pre-orders are always helpful, as they show the publisher that people are interested. If you’re so inclined, you can pre-order here.

When events or interviews are scheduled, I will announce them here.

One one more thing. I could not have written the book, or sustained the blog for so long, without its corps of discerning, clever (in both the British and American senses), and passionate readers and commenters, many of whom are quoted in the book. So a big ta to you all, and TTFN.

One of the first posts I did for this blog was on the expression “the run-up to,” meaning a preliminary period. It was a really short post, as was my custom in those days, so here’s some more about it.

“Run-up” emerged in the nineteenth century in dog racing, to mean the section of the chase up to the first turn. Next, it referred to a preliminary run taken by an athlete before a long jump or—most common in recent years—a cricket bowler’s throw. The figurative use—”A period of time or series of occurrences leading up to some significant event”—arrived no later than 1961, when The Times of London referred to “the run-up to the next general election.”

The term became popular in the U.S. because it filled a need. Early In 2003, it became clear that the United States would invade Iraq. Months passed; we did not invade. Then we did. Journalists again faced a question: what to call that preliminary period? In September 2003, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman chose a Britishism to offer a collective answer that now appears inevitable, referring to “how France behaved in the run-upto the Iraq war.”

“Run-up” quickly began to be very widely used. Ngram Viewer shows a doubling of frequency in the U.S. between 2000 and 2006. (Note that another meaning of the term is traditionally more common in the U.S.: a rapid rise in price or some other measure. Thus the Times reports that the pandemic years saw “a run up on home prices at a pace never seen before in U.S. history.”)

In America, from 2003 till about 2010, the period-time “run-up” was most commonly used to refer to the months before the Iraq invasion. But then it started to spread to other contexts, the Times writing in 2011, “The Packers’ report is more than a novelty in the run-up to their playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl on Feb. 6.” The ProQuest Recent Newspapers database shows 1,757 American uses between 2000 and 2022, including references to the Olympics, Christmas, the Capitol riots, and (back to the future), the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I believe “lead-up” means the same thing as “run-up.” It emerged about the same time (the OED has a 1959 citation), but took longer to establish itself and still lags behind “run-up” in frequency of use. Here’s the Ngram Viewer chart for the two phrases in British books:

The graph for American usage shows the same pattern.

An early “lead-up” in the New York Times. came in the 1977 transcript of the interview between (the British) David Frost and Richard Nixon, where Frost refers to “the lead up to the China breakthrough.” The first American to use it in the paper seems to be erstwhile language columnist William Safire in 1984, who didn’t comment on the phrase but merely used it in referring to the “lead up” to a joke’s punchline.

That was then, this is now. “The lead-up to” appeared 154 times in the Times in 2023. My favorite is an article about the sex lives of an insect called Neotrogla, the females of which have a penis-like anatomical feature. The article notes researchers found

“two groups of muscles that help female Neotrogla control their penislike gynosomes. One set of muscles was taut in the copulating pair of barklice when the penislike structure was inflated. The other set of muscles, which hooks the gynosome to the female’s internal organs, was active in the flaccid gynosome of the solo Neotrogla specimen. The researchers concluded that these muscle groups helped the females both to unfurl their gynosomes in the lead-up to their prolonged mating sessions and to retract their engorged gynosomes afterward.”

Ninety percent of the ads I see on Facebook are either for shoes (especially with wide sizes), electric cars, or glasses, especially sunglasses and reading glasses. That’s because I’m interested in those things, and keep clicking on attractive ads. What can I say? It keeps me off the street.

The other day, I clicked on a shoe ad and this appeared:

I’ve been on the elusive trail of “trainers” (BrE for American sneakers, running shoes, or tennis shoes) for quite some time. My most recent post is here, and you can follow the trail back to the first one, or simply put “trainers” into the search bar at right.

The New Balance ad seemed a palpable hit. But then I noticed the spellings “colour” and “grey”–the first completely British, the second still predominantly so. And when I clicked through to the “About” page of the company, Wide Fit Shoes, my fears were confirmed.

Oh well. At least I have a field trip for my next visit to London.

The New York Times had a nice headline the other day:

The word “swans” in the title of the TV series refers to the word author Truman Capote used to refer to the upper-crust New York women he socialized with, and ultimately betrayed. For an article about a party celebrating the series, the clever Times headline writer used the British verb “swan“–meaning (according to the OED), “To move about freely or in an (apparently) aimless way.”

The next one’s from the print edition of the Times.

In this case, substituting the British “chat show” for the American “talk show” isn’t especially clever. It doesn’t even save any space in the headline. Possibly the term was meant as a criticism for the show in question, but as I’ve never watched it or otherwise heard of it, I can’t really say.