“Learnt”

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.

“Chuffed”

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.

Faux Brits, or faux Britishisms?

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?

“Argle bargle” gets love from Scalia

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!

“Go to Ground”

The New York Times’ redoubtable media columnist, David Carr, has provided material for this blog before, and he does so again in today’s paper. Referring to a supposed video of the showing the mayor of Toronto smoking crack, Carr writes, “By then the people who had claimed to have the video had gone to ground.”

My NOOB-dar whirred into action at that phrase gone to ground, with which I was not familiar but which had an unmistakable British sound to it. A look at the OED confirmed the suspicion; but even better, it’s a fox-hunting reference. I had hit some kind of jackpot.

The dictionary dates the phrase to 1797 and defines it as when the fox runs

into a burrow or hole in the ground, ‘to earth’… Also to lie at ground . to go to ground : also said of a dog. Also in other phrases, and fig. (of a person), to withdraw from public notice and live quietly or ‘lie low’

All citations are from Commonwealth countries and all refer foxes or other animals until a 1964 quote (with telltale quotation marks, indicating newness): “The four men ‘went to ground’, probably in Johannesburg.” The expression appears currently to be popular in a sporting context, as in this quote from a 2009 Times rugby article originating in New Zealand: “But on defense, he is less assured and at times puts his team under pressure by offloading when it would be better to go to ground and set up the next phase of play.”

Note that this is different from the American expression “to run [something] into the ground,” meaning to destroy or ruin it by over- or misuse. Someone quoted in 2009 by the N. Y. Times’ Dealbook blog (unclear if he is British or American) seems to have confused the two: “Reuters’s Robert MacMillan argued that by letting the story of The [Boston] Globe’s possible demise leak, The [New York] Times may be betting that a white knight will emerge — ‘someone who fulminates long and hard about civic responsibility and not letting a hallowed journalistic institution go to ground.’”

I’m going to classify the David Carr/fox-hunting go to ground as “on the radar” rather than “outlier” because I found a couple of other uses in the Times in the past several months. Interestingly, they both came from members of the intelligence community, and it makes sense that it would have become popular in a world where people are, frequently, compelled to go to ground. In April, Philip Mudd, “a former senior C.I.A. and F.B.I. official,” referring to a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, said, “He’d get nervous and turn himself in, or he could go to ground.” And in February, Michael R. Shurkin, “a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst,” said, “Are they going to dig in and be guerrillas or go to ground and wait?”

How About “Deft Plank”?

When I pick up the (paper) New York Times, I always turn to page 2 to read the corrections. Since the Times is so obsessive about beating its chest over every error it has made, the record-set-straighting can be amusing. A couple of weeks ago, this classic appeared:

Because of editing errors, an article on Thursday about a duo that has its first Top 10 single and its first No. 1 album on the Billboard album chart misstated its name at two points. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is Daft Punk — not Daft Puck or Daft Pink.

The mistakes came about because daft is still on the radar as a NOOB. Presumably, the success of the French musical duo will speed the word’s ascent to full-fledged status.

Hasn’t happened yet, however. On Sunday, I opened up my home-town Philadelphia Inquirer to find this:

Glo’al sto’ no’ heard in Bri’ish poli’ socie’y?

The dirty if not very surprising little secret of this blog is that the majority of its readers are U.K. residents, who are surprised or possibly amused that Americans have been picking up their lingo. And it’s to these Britons that I address a question.

I was reading an article in the New York Times by critic Alastair Macaulay about the quality of dance in Broadway musicals. At the end, he wrote:

As a Briton going to shows on Broadway, may I add what a fun surprise it is to hear, in two different productions, the British glottal stop? Lauren in “Kinky Boots” speaks of going to “I’aly”; and Mrs. Wormwood in “Matilda” says “Bu’ I’ve go’ a baby.”In Britain the glottal stop is never heard in polite society. In America, however, it’s an exotic thrill.

That rather gobsmacked me. I have written about the current popularity of the glottal stop in the U.S., and I thought it was widespread in Britain. I certainly hear it all the time from Jamie Oliver and Ricky Gervais. But perhaps they don’t belong, in Mr. Macaulay’s view, to “polite society.” In any case, I await the reactions of NOOB readers.

“Cross”

I was perusing Twitter the other day when this turned up in my news feed (written by an American):

Luxembourg must be cross that the UK gets to provide the social services and they collect the taxes from amazon: shelf-awareness.com/theshelf/2013-…

The OED defines cross in this sense as “Ill-tempered, peevish, petulant.” All the citations are British, including Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813): “I have never had a cross word from him in my life.”

This is certainly not an unknown word in the U.S. But it is an old-fashioned one, with a rather twee feel to it. Dawn Powell used it (along with a similarly antique verb form) in her 1944 novel My Home Is Far Away: “In the morning he was cross if they waked him.” I associate the word with bordering-on-precious children’s books, as in anthropomorphic bears and ducks who are cross if they don’t get their porridge on time.

As the tweet suggests, the word appears to be getting some broader currency, in part because of the current appeal of NOOBs and in part because it occupies a useful spot on the ever-wider spectrum of annoyance, along with irked, frustrated, and pissed off.

In June 2012, a writer for minnpost.com observed, “Trying to understand all this made me cross.” And health policy expert Uwe E, Reinhardt wrote in the New York Times in March 2013: “I wouldn’t be surprised if the New Jersey hospital industry was cross at me and the commission for our role in the passage of Assembly Bill.”

My favorite recent American use comes from blogger Everett J. Smith, who titled a recent post post, simply, “The Pope Makes Me Cross.”

More on Footballisms

Interesting article on the BBC website about differences between U.S. and British vocabulary for sports, especially football/soccer. NOOBs has covered the issue, especially in a guest post by Jack Bell, but the BBC piece provides some nuance. The author, Tom Geoghegan, quotes American soccer blogger Chris Harris on a contentious split

between US soccer fans insisting on using American terms to describe the game compared to Americans who insist on using British language to talk about the game, so they’re more accepted by hardcore soccer fans and ex-pats. So when Americans use terms like ‘match’, ‘nil-nil’, ‘kit’ and other terms, many US fans will tag those Americans with the ‘Euro snob’ label.

The BBC piece is datelined Washington, but either Geoghegan or his subeditor is British. I know that because the chart in the piece, depicting U.S. and British terms, shows a striking ignorance of ~~the way Americans speak~~ American lingo.

Screen Shot 2013-05-30 at 8.40.02 AM

Where to begin? Well, shutout and matchup are one word in these United States, on frame rings no bell, and our actual cliche is “in his wheelhouse,” not “in the wheelhouse.” And offence instead of offense? Really, BBC?

“Fit”

There are two relevant senses of the adjective. The first, a commonplace in British sport commentary, is more frequently expressed in the U.S. in the phrase physically fit. But the shorter form is creeping through, thanks in some measure to tennis players, announcers, and reporters, who are partial to it. Thus the New York Times last year quoted Dominika Cibulkova of Slovakia, who had commented that Samantha Stosur “played like a man.” Asked to clarify, Cibulkova said, “As a player, she’s very fit. I’m not saying anything bad.”

A British reader of that quote may have had the impression that Cibulkova fancied Stosur, as the second British meaning of fit is “sexually attractive. The OED cites this 1985 exchange from The Observer: “Better ‘en that bird you blagged last night.’ ‘F—— off! She was fit.’”

I had never encountered a U.S. use of the second fit till this morning, when New York Times media correspondent David Carr sent this out over Twitter:

Screen Shot 2013-05-22 at 9.24.09 AM

Now, it’s possible that Carr was merely imagining a United Parcel Service employee who regularly went to the gym. But where’s the fun in that?