“Local”

I was listening to the public radio show “The Takeaway” today. They had an interview with Thomas Kershaw, who for many years has owned the Boston bar after which the one in the TV show “Cheers” was modeled. Talking about the atmosphere in the city after the recent bombings, he said, “People have places they frequent, that they call their local.”

My ears perked up. This sounded like local in a very British sense, the one usually referred to as the local and defined by the OED as “the public house in the immediate neighborhood.” The dictionary quotes Germaine Greer: “Women don’t nip down to the local.”

After some looking around, I am going to label local as On the Radar. The only possible U.S. use I was able find about wasn’t about a bar at all. It was a March 2012 New York Times article that talked about how a man “came to own his local: the Mud, Sweat and Tears Pottery studio.”

But I bet local will eventually come into its own as a full-fledged NOOB. Probably in Brooklyn.

 

 

“Nervy”

I was reading The New Yorker the other night (the March 25 edition–I’m always a few weeks behind) and came across this description of 1970s punk rock: it was “spare, nervy music created in reaction to the embarrassing excesses of arena rock.”

It reminded my that my friend David Friedman, a massive West Ham supporter, had for years been telling me about the British use of nervy, especially in a sporting context, to mean something similar to what Americans call nervous.  I found this example, which is British in every possible way, in a headline on a website called “This Is Staffordhire”: “It’s getting nervy for all as Stoke City enter relegation battle.”

We use nervy, too, but here it’s traditionally meant something between audacious and impudent. The OED cites a 1991 short story by Joyce Carol Oates: “I was nervy enough to ask Joan how she’d gotten the little scar beside her mouth.”

Is nervy=nervous happening as a NOOB? The difficulty in answering is that in many quotes you have to study context clues to figure out how the word is being used. In the New Yorker quote, based on my sense of punk as a pretty twitchy affair, I think the British sense is being used. Same with these from the New York Times:

  • “Ms. Rebeck has created a noisy roomful of sharp-tongued characters who are uncomfortable in their own skin — none more so than the self-conscious Lorna, who is preoccupied with dieting, and her nervy brother Jack, who is elusive about his sudden return from New York.” (November 2012)
  • “Federer earned game point a point later with a 1-2 punch of serve and forehand winner that he followed with a deep bark of ‘come on!’, only to send another forehand well wide on the next point. Federer closed out the nervy hold two points later, however…” (July 2012, and note the logical punctuation)

I found another Times quote, from September 2012, interesting: “Those who followed [Rory] McIlroy’s final round will say he won the tournament with three birdies on the closing nine and two nervy par putts, at Nos. 14 and 17.”

It seems to me that the writer, Karen Crouse, was using nervy to mean something else, sort of the opposite of the British usage. It’s basically the OED’s definition 2a, “courageous, bold,” which the dictionary says is “now rare.” Its most recent citation is a 1942 Stevie Smith poem:  “What man will spoil the brick walls of their yellow brim? Such a one as is nervy bold and grim.” U.S. sportswriters may be bringing it back.

“Pulling”

The New York Times yesterday had an article about four UK television series (“Gavin & Stacey,” “Pulling,” “Second Sight,” and “Spy”) and one Australian one (“Rake”) that are being remade in the U.S. It interested me that ABC appears not to be giving a new title to “Pulling,” the original version of which the Times’ Mike Hale describes this way: “Featuring three unrepentantly randy women, it’s brutally frank about sex, booze and lowered expectations, while also being smart and raucously funny.”

The title thing intrigued me because I have never encountered that meaning of pull in the U.S. For the benefit of American readers, here’s the OED definition and citations:

Screen Shot 2013-04-02 at 9.23.24 AM

I predict that if the show (which stars the excellent Kristen Schaal) ever makes it to air in the U.S., it will be with a new title.

Incidentally, Hale seems to have been inspired by his subject here to use not only randy but another NOOB, in this description of “Rake”: “The protagonist, now called Keegan Joye, will be played by one of American’s most gifted portrayers of kindhearted sleazeballs, Greg Kinnear.”

“Yoghurt”

Screen Shot 2013-03-23 at 12.52.59 PM

I recently became aware of the product featured above. The thing that struck me as odd (as I believe it would most Americans) is the unusual spelling of what we know as yogurt. I suspected it was a Britishism because of Alan Rickman. To be more precise, there’s a scene in the movie “Love, Actually” in which Rickman is trying to buy some jewelry for a woman not his wife, and the sales clerk (played by Rowan Atkinson) won’t let him just get on with it. Rickman finally says in exasperation: “Dip it in yogurt, cover it with chocolate buttons!” He pronounces yogurt with a short o in the first syllable–that is, to rhyme with hog–and that’s consistent with the yoghurt spelling.

(If you want to hear Rickman say this line, check out this hilarious YouTube mashup:


)

According to the OED, up until the mid-twentieth century, various spellings for the word (derived from Turkish) abounded, including yoghurd, yogourt,yahourt, yaghourt, yogurd, yoghourt, yooghort, and yughard. Subsequently, according to this Google Ngram chart, yogurt (red line) has prevailed in the U.S., and has roughly tied in the U.K. with yoghurt (yellow and green lines).

Screen Shot 2013-03-23 at 1.47.36 PM

Google Ngrams only goes up till 2008, and when more recent data come in, I’m sure that as a result of companies like the Minnesota-based Mountain High, U.S. yoghurt (blue line) will be on the upswing.

“On About”

The British say someone is on about something; Americans say going on, or going on and on. The first citation in the OED is from Rosamund Lehmann’s 1936 novel, Weather in Streets: “Marda’s always asking me why I don’t get a divorce… Last year she was always on about it.”

Welcome to NOOB-hood, bro.

  • Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) writes on Twitter: “While I’m on about etymology (I’m always on about etymology): ‘adamant’ gets its root from ‘diamond’ — hard, unbreakable.”
  • Kelly Dwyer on Yahoo Sports a couple of weeks ago: “I didn’t see a second of TNT’s Thursday night package, and didn’t hear what [basketball commentator Chris] Webber was on about.”
  • “G. Funk”‘s comment on an article about professional wrestling on The Bleacher Report: “That’s why [the Ultimate Warrior] was the best. No one had a clue what he was on about, but everyone loved it.”

An early U.S. use came from the Rev. Al Sharpton, quoted in a 2002 New York Times article about a taped conversation he had with an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer: ”The guy had come to me. In the middle of conversation he started talking about how he could cut me in on a cocaine deal. I didn’t know what this guy was on about. I didn’t know if he was armed. I was scared, so I just nodded my head to everything he said and then he left.”

Always a groundbreaker, the Rev. is.

“Hoover” spotting; “Leapt”

Nancy Friedman alerted me to a passage from the February 22 New York Times because of the NOOB five words from the end.

As she rose from her chair at the Calvin Klein fashion show in Midtown Manhattan the other week, Jessica Chastain was all but engulfed by an onrush of journalists and celebrity groupies imploring the lanky, flame-haired actress for a word, a glance, a nanosecond of her time.

Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, embraced her showily as cameras clicked and whirred. Tim Blanks, the editor at large for Style.com, thrust a microphone in her face, pleading for an interview, before a pair of overzealous handlers leapt onto the catwalk to spirit her away.

Yes, Ms. Chastain can Hoover that kind of attention.

But what also caught my eye was the British leapt at the end of the second paragraph; the traditional American spelling is leaped. Sure, the -pt form is gaining ground. Sticking with the Times, it has used leaped 45,800 times since it started publishing in 1851, compared to 13,100 for leapt. But in the last twelve months, the tables have turned: there have been 793 leapts in the paper and only 301 leapeds.

The Times is ahead of the curve on this. The Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. newspapers reveals 1231 leapts in the past six months compared to 1528 leapeds. But it seems clear that leaped better enjoy its dominance now, because it won’t last much longer.

“Pip”

A Reuters article, datelined San Francisco and posted yesterday, says Microsoft “managed to pip Facebook Inc in the survey – only 42 percent of young adults thought the world’s largest social network is cooler now than in the past. Twitter scored 47 percent, below Microsoft’s 50 percent.”

I heard about this on Twitter, where Kenneth Li provided the link and tweeted: “In which an american writer uses the word ‘pip.'”

What means this pip? I did a search on GoogleNews and this emerged:

Screen Shot 2013-02-22 at 9.18.15 AM

That was not helpful, so I turned to the OED, which I should have done in the first place. The relevant definition is “To defeat or beat narrowly,” and the first citation is from 1838, in the journal “Hood’s Own, or Laughter from Year to Year”: “With your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,—getting hypped as well as pipped,—‘talking of Hoyle..but looking like winegar.’”

That settles the meaning. As for NOOB-itude, Kenneth Li was right to single this pip out. It’s an outlier for sure.