There must be something about American movie stars and British lingo. We just witnessed Mark Wahlberg going all NOOB-y. Now Anna Kendrick is quoted in GQ magazine about the horror of being approached for an autograph while shopping for underwear:
“There’s something deeply embarrassing about being approached when you’re holding knickers. And it’s happened TWICE!”
It’s enough to put your you-know-what in a twist.
Lynne Murphy, a native American linguistics professor now living in the U.K. (and a good friend of this blog), has been visiting the U.S. and came across a startling magazine ad:
Wait, what??
I’ve previously noted that bum has certainly made inroads on these shores, but this advert still was a bit surprising. It turns out that the manufacturers of Cottonelle, Kimberly Clark, put out a press release just two weeks ago:
Dallas, August 5, 2013-As bath tissue maker Cottonelle® looks to open the door on bathroom conversation, toilet talk is about to go mainstream. That’s right, Cottonelle wants to get North Americans talking about their bums and on the road to a better way to clean “down there” by using the Cottonelle Clean Routine — combining dry toilet paper and flushable wipes for a cleaner, fresher experience. With the help of London-based immersive journalist, Cherry Healey, Cottonelle is helping consumers to open up about their bathroom behaviors and “makeover” their old toileting routine. And with a sleek, newly designed dispenser for Cottonelle Flushable Cleansing Cloths, Healey is set to start the conversation now.
I had not heard of Cherry Healey, nor of “immersive journalism,” but I learn from Wikipedia that she has done a number of TV documentaries in the U.K,. including the one-offs “Drinking with the Girls, ” “Cherry Gets Pierced,” and “Cherry Goes Drinking,”” and this year had a six-part series: “The Year of Making Love.”
I imagine Kimberly Clark chose the word bum both as a nod to Healey’s nationality and a way of signaling that the ad is a little, well, edgy.
That’s all well and good, but it turns out that there are issues with the “Cottonelle Clean Routine,” specifically the bum-related use of “flushable” wipes. Nancy Friedman informs me that they are one of the prime causes of “fatbergs,” a serious environmental problem. Read her post on the subject … if you have the stomach for it.
My friend Bruce Beans forwarded his “Word-of-the-Day” e-mail from Merriam-Webster. The word was boffin, and M-W defined it as “a scientific expert; especially : one involved in technological research,” then provided this note:
“Boffin” is an informal word that is more common in the U.K. than in the U.S. It is a relative newcomer to the English language, only appearing toward the end of World War II. Despite its youth, however, the origins of “boffin” are a mystery to us. The term was probably first applied by British Royal Air Force members to the scientists and engineers working closely with radar technology. The term was soon being more broadly applied to scientists involved in technological research. British speakers also use “boffin” colloquially to refer to academics or intellectuals in general, often in a manner that is synonymous with “nerd” or “egghead.”
The OED is similarly circumspect on etymology. The editors sniff, “Numerous conjectures have been made about the origin of the word but all lack foundation”; apparently Dickens’ character Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend is not considered worthy of mention. The dictionary does provides these illuminating early citations:
1945 Times 15 Sept. 5/4 A band of scientific men who performed their wartime wonders at Malvern and apparently called themselves ‘the boffins’.
1948 ‘N. Shute’ No Highway iii. 61 ‘What’s a boffin?’ ‘The man from Farnborough. Everybody calls them boffins. Didn’t you know?’.. ‘Why are they called that?’.. ‘Because they behave like boffins, I suppose.’
1948 Ld. Tedder in A. P. Rowe One Story of Radar p. vii, I was fortunate in having considerable dealings in 1938–40 with the ‘Boffins’ (as the Royal Air Force affectionately dubbed the scientists).
The word has been used once on this blog, by a commenter on the kit post:
‘KIT’, from my (UK) service days could be clothing/uniform – “sort your kit out!” – personal equipment – “don’t leave your kit around or it’ll go in the scan bag**” – and bigger things – “..it’s the latest all-singing-all-dancing swept-up bit of kit”. The latter was almost always ironic, usually said just before the wretched thing blew up on launch/crashed, to the merriment of all except attendant boffins.
Clearly, it’s a Britishism. But is it a not one-off Britishism? Well, yes, barely. The New York Times hasn’t used it since 2012, but that year it appeared three times in five months:
And it shows up intermittently in the years before then.
So welcome to the fold, boffin. What you really need now is a proper etymology.
A few days ago, the American entertainer Mark Wahlberg gave an interview to The Sun in which he made some cutting remarks about singer Justin Bieber. Given that we are in a permanent silly season, it’s not surprising that his quote should have been picked up by new outlets all over the world, including my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer. Wahlberg–a former teen idol himself–supposedly apostrophized Bieber, telling him, in part: “Don’t be so naughty. Be a nice boy, pull up your trousers, make your mum proud.”
I say “supposedly” because the lingo is suspiciously British for a Bostonian like Marky-Mark. I’ve already covered trousers and mum on this site; naughty is certainly widely heard in U.S., but I believe it’s much more of a thing in the U.K., especially when applied to adults.
Presumably either Wahlberg tailored his diction to the Sun‘s readership, or the editors did the doctoring themselves. I suspect the latter. I couldn’t check the original quote because the Sun‘s archives are behind a paywall and I don’t subscribe. So all I learned at its site was “Gap Year Girls in Acid Attack” and “Towie Lucy Debuts Dodgy Afro.”
(Thanks to Nancy Friedman.)
The gossip writer for my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer used an impressive three Britishisms in two sentences in yesterday’s paper:
“Pop star-thesp Pink has been gushing about her daughter, Willow Sage Hart, since the bairn was born in June 2011. But Doylestown [Pennsylvania]’s proudest daughter wasn’t always so keen on becoming a mum.”
I’ve previously covered two of them; links will take you to the relevant entry. The third is bairn, meaning (one’s) child, which derives from the Old English bearn. It is found in Beowulf, written in 529, and the most recent citation in the OED is from History of the Norman Conquests, by E.A. Freeman: “Harthacnut too..was at least a kingly bairn.” I get a sense that Freeman used it in 1867 because even then, it seemed like an antique word.
When one searches for it in a contemporary context, most of the hits refer to the expression “Jock Tamson’s bairns,” about which Wikipedia has some interesting things to say:
“We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” is Lowland Scots and Northumbrian English for we’re all John Thomson’s children, It is a popular saying in Scotland and the far north of England, and is known in other parts of the world. Nowadays, the phrase is often used to mean “we’re all the same under the skin”.
It has been suggested as a euphemism for God, so the saying could mean “we are all God’s children”. The expression “We’re a’ the bairns o’ Adam”, conveys exactly the same meaning, see Freedom Come-All-Ye a song written by Hamish Henderson. Scottish Gaelic also has the shorter saying “Clann MhicTamhais” (Thomson/MacTavish’s children/clan). This is a common egalitarian sentiment in Scottish national identity, also evident in the popularity of the Robert Burns song A Man’s A Man for A’ That.
Although Jock Tamson’s Bairns is used as a personification of the Scots nation, it is also used to refer to the human race in general.
In the United States, bairn is very much a novelty item, used for variety or comic effect or elegant variation (both apply in the Philadelphia Inquirer item). The most recent use by a New York Times writer came in 2006, in a Natalie Angier column about mothers (in the animal kingdom) who eat their young or allow them to die:
In other cases, mothers turn infanticidal because they are born optimists, ever tuned to the sunny expectation that good times lie ahead. Each year they breed for a banquet, producing a maximum of begging bairns as the season starts; and when there is plenty of food, they will provision every young.
By the way, there may have been another word that puzzled you in the Inquirer item. Thesp was originated by the trade-newspaper Variety; it’s show-biz slang for actor.
Legend has it that when the Harry Potter books were published in the United States, all of the Britishisms were removed with a few exceptions that were deemed essential to the books’ identity, such as ginger, used to describe Ron Weasley’s hair. I wonder the extent to which such translation is generally undertaken. I would imagine it’s routinely done in matters of spelling, as programme, centre, and such would be jarring to American eyes, whereas vocabulary, especially in dialogue, could justly be seen as part of a novel’s flavour flavor.
The actual title of a book would appear to be a special case. A British novel called Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love, by Sarah Butler, has just been published in the U.S., and the fourth in the title word is still spelled Learnt, rather than Learned. That made me curious about the history of the two spellings in the two nations, and so I did a Google Ngrams search for the phrases has learned and has learnt, the results of which are below.
The chart shows that learned has always been the preferred word in both places, though around 1920, learnt (red line) was briefly as popular as learned (yellow line) in Britain. U.S. learned (blue line) as always kicked the butt of learnt (green line), and unless Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love has Harry Potter-level success, it is likely to continue to do so.
John Polk (@ClichesGoneWild) noted on Twitter yesterday, “‘Chuffed’ means pleased… or displeased. Not helpful when a word is its own antonym.”
I was only familiar with the “pleased” meaning but the OED confirms that “displeased” is a legitimate thing, as in this from David Storey’s 1960 “This Sporting Life”: “I felt pretty chuffed with myself.”
I was inevitably prompted me to check chuffed (with either meaning) for NOOB-ness. A quick search of the New York Times archives suggests it deserves On the Radar status, but only in the positive sense (I couldn’t find a single example of the other one).
Most recently, Deb Amlen wrote last month in Times crossword blog, Wordplay: “I was also pretty chuffed at the beginning because I was able to fill in so many of the long answers.” I’m not 100% sure that Amlen is American, but her online bio confirms residence (and suggests, to me, birth): “She lives in New Jersey with her family and her Extremely Spunky Border Terrier™, Jade.”
The word also appears in a Times article earlier this year about a “adventure design camp” in Texas: “For this camp, Mr. Dyer had made a massive, lusty grill from rusted steel pipe, after a design sketched by the chef Rene Ortiz. It was the first thing he had made besides fence work, and he was pretty chuffed about it.”
For the next Times use (by a non-Commonwealth speaker), you have to go back to a 201o post in the Dealbook blog: “And it seems that Ms. [Cara] Goldenberg does indeed feel chuffed about the meeting [with Warren Buffett].”
What will allow chuffed to rise above the radar? Well, my attention will be caught if I see it used in a U.S. source preceded by one of the customary British modifiers, well or dead. I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been at this too long. That, anyway, was my reaction when I read the following in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine profile of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, an American who now lives in London:
He uses Britishisms that make him sound a little like the famous faux-Brits Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna. He told me he had “a good ol’ time” at the Olympics, where he attended beach volleyball and an equestrian event as Boris Johnson’s guest. Living in Marylebone is nice, he says, because “we have loads of friends and people pop by.” Unlike in the United States, where politicians are remote Wikipedia subjects, in Britain he “literally” (pronounced LIT-ruh-lee) knows them.
The passage left me dazed and confused. Is “good ol’ time” a Britishism? Is “pop by”? (Or is the author referring to “loads”?) And what about that pronunciation of “literally”? I associate it with Rob Lowe’s character on “Parks and Recreation,” who is certainly not a Brit, even a faux one.
I wish I could look all that up on Wikipedia, but even that remarkable resource is no help here. So I’ll crowd-source it to you lot. Help?
After I published a post about various U.S. uses of argle bargle (“Disputatious argument, bandying of words, wrangling”–OED), a veritable flood of U.K. commenters observed they heard this term rarely if at all, while a variant, argy-bargy, was quite familiar to them.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent to last week’s Supreme Court decision overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, continued the tradition of Americans using the archaic version, noting:
As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “bare … desire to harm.”
Elsewhere in his dissent, Scalia doubled down on his NOOB-itude, writing, “It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here.”
Cheeky monkey!
notoneoffbritishisms.com 