Reader Jeanne Nelson comments, simply:

“From the New York Times, 12 December 2103:

“But if Mr. [Colin] Wilson was no Angry Young Man, with his lush Romantic hair and roll-neck sweaters he more than looked the part.”

I gather she is suggesting as a NOOB roll-neck sweater,  a phrase with which I’m not really familiar, though having read it I get the idea.The Oxford English Dictionart defines roll-neck as “A high loosely turned-over collar on a garment; a garment which has such a collar.” The first citation (from 1897) is from the Washington Post, but everything after 1950 is from Great Britain, including this from a 1977 “Time Out” advert: “Former male model—but more the jeans and rollneck type.”

The New York Times obituary of Colin Wilson helpfully provides this cozy photo of the author in roll-neck, with his wife, Joy:

I am familiar with “turtle-neck,” which the OED defines identifies as “orig.” American and defines as: “A close-fitting roll or band collar, now usu. one intermediate in height between a crew-neck and a polo-neck.” The first citation is an 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog:  “The Turtle Neck Shirt or Sweater, double from waist up, one of the most desirable garments ever invented for cold-weather shooting.” Two years later, 15-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt writes home from Groton School:  “I should very much like a red turtle neck sweater for skating and coasting.”

P.G. Wodehouse, who spent many years in the U.S., may have carried the term to Britain, writing in 1946, “He dresses like a tramp-cyclist, affecting turtle-neck sweaters and grey flannel bags.”

The New York Times has used the expression “roll-neck” or “rollneck” (the hyphen comes and goes) about fifty times in its history, including this from a fashion piece in 2009: “Remember when the cast of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ modeled in the J. Crew catalog and suddenly everyone was wearing those rollneck sweaters?”

By contrast, “turtle neck” or “turtleneck” have appeared some 4,000 times, including this sentence, just a couple of weeks ago, from an interview with Will Ferrell’s anchorman character, Ron Burgundy: “Dapper in a glen plaid polyester suit, brown ribbed turtleneck and dark-green leather jacket, Mr. Burgundy strode into the store, stopping to hold aloft some merchandise.”

Here’s the Times’ photo of Burgundy:

To me, this looks awfully close to Colin Wilson’s roll-neck. My sense is that originally, turtleneck referred to collars that were folded-over snugly and more or less low, and roll-neck to those that were folded over loosely and more or less high. I sense, further, that in the U.S., that roll-neck is a subset of the larger category turtleneck, and that roll-neck is in fairly wide use in the U.K., but is common in the U.S. only in fashion circles.

But I await the judgment of those who know better.

 

When Jan Freeman noted on Twitter that she had heard an NPR correspondent use purpose-built, I was momentarily befuddled. Not only did I not know the phrase was a Britishism, I also kind of didn’t know what it meant. Merriam-Webster informed me that the phrase is an adjective meaning “designed and built for a particular use,” adding “chiefly British.” A Google Ngram chart confirmed this, and also that American use is on the rise. (The blue line represents British use, the red line American.)

The New York Times has used purpose-built about 300 times in its history, first in 1929 in a reference to “purpose-built taxicabs.” But things have picked up lately: there have been 49 purpose-builts in the Times in 2012 and 2013 alone. Most of them, interestingly, refer to cars or some car-related things, as in the most recent reference, on November 15, 2013: “After an absence of half a decade from the United States, Formula One returned last year with a Grand Prix at the first purpose-built circuit in the country.” But art critic Michael Kimmelman this year described a Tuscan vineyard as “purpose-built nature  on a very large scale” and columnist Paul Krugman, a serial NOOBer, argued against gerrymandering, writing, “Let’s stop allowing the parties to pick their voters (and put them into purpose-built districts).”

I’m still a little befuddled by purpose-built. One commenter on the Merriam-Webster definition (and since when have definitions had commenters?) said the phrase was frequently superfluous, noting, “One uses ‘purpose-built’ as an adjective to differentiate between items that were built for a reason and items that were built for no reason at all”–the implication being that very few things are built for no reason at all. (Another commenter noted, “Marketing buzzward.” I like the way they think, though not necessarily their spelling.)

But on reflection, and on examination of the Times items above, I can see that the phrase is occasionally useful and apt, especially when you consider the alternative. That’s right, I’m talking about bespoke.

The ever-alert Wes Davis points out that Netflix  has inexplicably changed the name of the “Instant Queue” to “My List.”

Joshua Keating’s recent Slate article had a brilliant conceit: how would the U.S. media report on the current U.S. political crisis if it were happening in another country? The piece started:

WASHINGTON, United States—The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city. Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. Money-changers are not yet buying stacks of useless greenbacks on the street.

I recommend you read the whole thing, but the line that’s relevant to this blog is: “…the president’s efforts to govern domestically have been stymied in the legislature by an extremist rump faction of the main opposition party.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s defines rump (in this context) as “A small, unimportant, or contemptible remnant or remainder of an (official) body of people, esp. a parliament,” and explains that it’s derived from rump Parliament, that is, “the remaining part of the Long Parliament, esp. in its second formation of 1659–60.” As befitting its origin, every citation for rump in the political sense is of British origin.

But it has occasionally been hauled out by Americans. One of the first to use it to refer to the Republican Tea Partyers who have been holding things up in the current mess was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (a Democrat). He was quoted as saying on Sept. 27, “The middle class, working men and women in this country, are the ones we were elected to serve. That’s who we should be thinking about. They’re the ones who are going to pay the price if these rump Republicans force a government shutdown.”

A few days later, Mother Jones magazine wrote, “Once again, a rump group of Republican radicals in the House are throwing the US government into chaos.” The day after that, a Baltimore Sun columnist opined, “fault for the current government shutdown lies with the rump, radicalized, tea party-beholden congressional Republicans who have no regard for the legislative process, the country’s credit rating, political traditions, or the U.S. Constitution they supposedly revere.”

Haven’t seen any beret-wearing colonels on the streets of Washington yet, but give it time.