“Saviour” and “Nappies”

Now there’s a combination you don’t normally see, but they are, or at least seem to be, favorites of Amy Bishop, the American woman convicted of murdering three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2010. Patrick Radden Keefe recently published a long article about her case in the New Yorker, and in it a line of dialogue spoken by a “pompous scientist” in one of Bishop’s unpublished novels:

“And you want to change nappies, wipe snotty noses, and shovel green glop into a baby’s mouth like any fat, stupid Hausfrau?”

If you are unfamiliar with the term and the context clues are insufficient, nappy is British for diaper. I don’t know if the pompous scientist is supposed to be British, but I can affirm that nappy has virtually never been used anywhere else in the U.S., even among the hipsters of deepest Williamsburg.

Elsewhere in the article, in discussing Bishop’s religious feelings, Keefe writes: “Amy told me she accepts Christ as her Saviour, and she has been reading the Bible in prison.”

The most common U.S. spelling is savior and has been since the 1930s. In the Google Ngram chart below, the green line is British use of saviour, red is U.S. saviour (note the NOOB uptick on the right), yellow is U.S. savior, and blue is British savior.

Despite the recent NOOB uptick in U.S. saviour, the u-less version is very much the standard here. The New York Times Style Guide mandates Savior in religious contexts, savior in secular ones (such as “the new goalie will be the savior of the hockey team”). The Associated Press Style Guide (followed by most U.S. newspapers) calls for lower-casing both. The New Yorker, true to its idiosyncratic self, calls for hockey saviors and a Christian Saviour.

The nappy may be Amy Bishop’s; Saviour is very much the New Yorker’s.

“Afters”

Commenting on my post on main, the redoubtable Nancy Friedman commented on Twitter: “I’ve seen ‘afters’ on a menu in SF [San Francisco]. It’s right up there with ‘stockists‘ on the pretension index.” To which I replied (in so many words), “Do what now, Nancy?”

She explained that afters means “dessert,” and sure enough, the OED tracks it to a 1909 article in the (London) Daily Chronicle: “They could not all afford ‘dinner and afters’. Many had to be content with ‘afters’.” Interestingly, the word was still getting the quotation-marks treatment in Jennie Hawthorne’s 1958 The Mystery of the Blue Tomatoes: “For ‘afters’ to-day she made them all an apple crumble.” (Note to self: check how long the hyphenated “to-day” remained a thing.)

Fortunately, an admittedly less-than-comprehensive search suggests that the United States is still, for the most part, safe from afters. I went back three years on Google News and the only non-Commonwealth use of the term was from a January 2012 New York Times restaurant review (significantly, of a place specializing in Singaporean food): “For afters: sticky toffee pudding ($5).”

I have no doubt that Nancy has seen what she has seen in San Francisco, but the one afters-using restaurant I’ve been able to turn up is Moe’s, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, which affirms on its website: “The afters are listed on another chalkboard, this one on wheels so it can be rolled to your table in place of the ubiquitous dessert cart loaded with Madame Tussaud’s finest.” Worth a detour, I should say.

“Main”

Reviewing a restaurant called The Marrow this past Tuesday, the New York Post observed, “Many choices — starters $12 to $16, mains $24 to $33 — are dense with butter.” The latest issue of Cooking Light magazine, on my coffee table, has an article called “Skillet Mains.” Reviewing a book in its February 2013 issue, Library Journal says the author “shares recipes for breakfasts, mains, sides, snacks, drinks, and sweets.”

I started hearing main as a sort of familiar nickname for “main course” a couple of years ago. I had the sense that it was a NOOB, and it is, but before that it was an Australianism. A roundup in the (Melbourne) Sunday Herald Sun in April 1991 notes about various restaurants: “Mains about $10”; “Mains about $10”; “Mains from $7.50”; and “Mains such as kang daeng (red beef curry with coconut milk) from $11.95 to $14.95.”

The New York Times, in a 1994 travel piece about Queensland, gave the word the telltale quotation-mark treatment, indicating that it was unfamiliar to the author but commonly used by the locals: “The standard ‘mains’ are an eclectic selection, from a vegetable couscous to Thai-style green chicken curry and beer-battered fish and chips.”

Possibly the word gained currency in Oz because of the way the local accent can stretch out its vowel. But that is speculation. What’s clear is that it had arrived in Britain by 1996, when the New Statesman noted of a restaurant, “The set-price menu offers three starters, three mains, and three desserts.” Mains didn’t show up in The Times (the London one) till 2003, but quickly became the accepted term in its restaurant reviews. The New York Times didn’t adopt it (in describing a domestic restaurant) until 2008, when it described a San Francisco restaurant as having “hearty mains like Miyazaki filet mignon ($48) or loin of kurobuta (pork) with eggplant dengaku ($20).”

Enough for now. For some reason, I feel like I need a snack.

“Cuppa”

My colleague McKay Jenkins writes:

What’s with the newly trendy use of the word cuppa, to imply a coffee- or tea-drinking experience? My lovely wife tells me that this is a “400-year-old” British expression. Is she right?

Well, McKay, 79 years, 400 years, what’s the diff? The OED says the term is used “elliptically” and colloquially to mean cup o’ tea and offers a first citation from Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead (1934): “Taking a strong cuppa at six-thirty in their shirt sleeves.” All subsequent citations are from U.K. or Commonwealth sources.

But McKay is right that it’s hit these shores. The Tampa Bay Times in an article last month referred to a local establishment that serves “lunch and an old-fashioned cuppa,” and the Palm Beach Post said of a tea house in that city, “the experience isn’t complete without a girl to chatter with and a good, strong cuppa.” (Must be something about Florida.)

The interesting thing about cuppa is that, like some other NOOBs (their identity escapes my mind at the moment), it has acquired an additional meaning here. McKay alludes to it: cuppa to mean (the horror!) a cup of coffee. Thus, Holley’s Cuppa is a coffee shop in Las Vegas. And an Associated Press dispatch from December 2012, datelined “Golden Triangle, Thailand,” begins:

In the lush hills of northern Thailand, a herd of 20 elephants is helping to excrete some of the world’s most expensive coffee.

Trumpeted as earthy in flavor and smooth on the palate, the exotic new brew is made from beans eaten by Thai elephants and plucked a day later from their dung. A gut reaction creates what its founder calls the coffee’s unique taste.

Stomach turning or oddly alluring, this is not just one of the world’s most unusual specialty coffees. At $500 per pound, it’s also among the world’s priciest.

For now, only the wealthy or well-traveled have access to the cuppa, which is called Black Ivory Coffee.

The U.S. cuppa contains multitudes. The Philadelphia Daily News recently noted: “One trick is to stir chopped chocolate into a little of the milk to make a paste, then add that to the rest of the steamed milk, for a smoother, richer cuppa.” That’s right, a hot chocolate cuppa. What’s next, cold beverages?

Pardon the Interruption (Again)

As some of you know, my day job is as a professor of English and journalism at the University of Delaware. Several times, I have led study-abroad programs based in London, which is how I first became interested in this whole NOOB phenomenon. Anyway, I am directing a London program again this summer (probable dates are June 2 through July 3), if you know someone who may be interested, I encourage you to pass this along. (The program is open to students from any college or university, not just Delaware). The deadline for applications is February 25.

The program consists of two courses. The first is a literature class called The Great London Novel, in which we’ll read (and visit locations of) Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and a contemporary book (possibly John Lanchester’s Capital). The second is a journalism class called Covering London in which students will both study the British press and write dispatches of their own for a class blog.q

Complete info is at this website. And feel free to contact me at byagoda@udel.edu if you have any questions.

“Crapper” vs. “Crappier”

The New England region of the U.S. just got hit with a massive (30-inch) snowstorm. A friend of mine from Massachusetts wrote on Facebook:

Onto our third basket of firewood since noon. I think this is evidence that crap wood is crappier than non-crap wood. Before I ordered the crap wood I read that this was the case, and lo, it is true.

My friend is British, so her repeated use of crap as an adjective did not surprise me. But her use of crappier was interesting. Certainly, crappier is the appropriate comparative for the traditional American adjective crappy. (“The show … was on the crappy side,” The Catcher in the Rye.) But not for crap, I wouldn’t think.

However, no alternative presents itself. Certainly not crapper–a Google search for that word yields only results related to Thomas Crapper. More crap doesn’t sound right, either. So I put it to NOOB readers: what word do you use to indicate something that surpasses some other thing in the degree to which it is crap?

We Interrupt This Blog…

… for a bit of shameless self-promotion. Today marks the publication of my new book, How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. You can buy it here, and I wish you would!

Partly to assuage my sheepishness at said self-promotion, I have set up a deal where I will donate copies of the book to a worthy organization, Mighty Writers, based on how well the books sells today on Amazon. So go ahead and order a copy. It’s ~~popularity~~ popularly priced at $10.20, and you’ll be helping a good cause. (Full details of the scheme at my website.)

As for the book, the title pretty much sums up the idea. Most writing books are about “How to Write Well” (as one of the best of them, by William Zinsser, is titled). But based on my experience of more than two decades teaching writing at a pretty selective American university, that’s not the most appropriate goal. Before that, students and other people who want their writing to be read (either by the public or in a business setting) need to address a fairly small list of common errors and problems. How to Not Write Bad is a handbook designed to help with that task.

The book is primarily designed for an American audience, since it’s based on my experience, but I’m pretty sure it would be useful to British students and aspiring writers as well. A couple of things would need to be changed in a British edition, of course; the whole section on logical punctuation would have to be eliminated. The other passage that comes immediately to mind is the one about the use of they or related words as a singular pronoun (otherwise known as epicene pronoun, or EP), for example in a sentence such as “Any student who wants to attend the game should bring their ID card to the ticket window.” In the book, I write:

Replacing their with his or her would sound sexist; her would sound like you’re trying too hard not to be sexist; and his or her is a bit stilted. Consequently, the EP is perfectly fine in conversation. I predict that it will be acceptable in formal writing in ten years, fifteen at the maximum. However, it’s not acceptable now, so you’ll have to make adjustments.

I am well aware that the EP has been used in days of yore by all sorts of great writers, including Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. And my sense is that things are currently very different in the U.K.–that the EP is standard in formal and even academic writing.

So, if there ever is to be a British edition of How to Not Write Bad, I will need your thoughts on this matter. But first buy the book.

“Gobshite”

Nancy Friedman asks, “Is Charles Pierce the only U.S. journalist who uses gobshite?” She provides a link to an Esquire Magazine politics blog post by Pierce, titled “What Are the Gobshites Saying These Days?”

I was not familiar with the term, but having previously covered gobsmacked (wherein gob means “mouth”) and shite, I could figure out that it means someone out of whose gob comes shite. The OED confirms the meaning and notes that it’s “chiefly Irish English” and (thanks!) “derogatory.” The first citation is from Hugh Leonard’s 1973 play “Da“: “Hey God, there’s an old gobshite at the tradesmen’s entrance.”

(Interestingly, the OED reports an earlier U.S. Navy use, meaning “enlisted seaman,” with this 1910 quote: “You can imagine all the feelin’s In a foolish ‘gobshite’s’ breast.”)

In answer to Nancy’s question, I would have to say, actually, yes. When I searched for the word in the Lexis-Nexis database of U.S. newspapers, going back to the 1980s, I was initially surprised to find fifty-six hits. But a few were references to or quotes from Ireland, and most of the rest were references to a New England-based band called The Gobshites. The most recent, from August 2012, was a quote from a”political observer” named Charlie Cooke. He was discussing, you guessed it, Charlie Pierce:

“Pierce’s hyperbole transcends mere disagreement, as does his dismissal of all those who dissent as ‘gobshites.'”

“Bugger”

From an NPR report this morning, about a Washington State man who confronted and then was shot by a gunman in a shopping mall:

“The first word that went through my head was ‘Bugger!’ Clearly, too much British TV.”

I categorize this one as an outlier because, as the gentleman’s comment indicates, the word has not penetrated (pardon the expression) U.S. usage yet, either as an interjection, a verb or an adverb (“And the pain, the hellish pain, of spending all that money, and getting bugger all in return,” The Sunday Times, 2002).

“Backbencher”

The BBC provides this explanation and definition of the term:

The vast majority of parliamentarians do not hold ministerial or shadow ministerial office and are known as backbenchers. They are so-called because they sit on the back benches of the Commons or Lords – ministers and their opposition counterparts sit on the front benches.

The OED cites a first British use in 1910, and more than a century later it’s unavoidable in the U.K. and other countries with a Parliamentary system. But it took a long time for Americans to start to use the the term to refer to their own politicos. The moment finally arrived in in 1988 (at least in the archives of the New York Times), and the person who used it was none other than Representative Newt Gingrich, who had filed ethics charges against Speaker of the House Jim Wright. Gingrich (whose fondness for another Britishism has been covered on this blog) was quoted in the Times as saying: ”If Jim Wright were a backbench member, I probably wouldn’t have done anything…. But he’s the Speaker, and everything he could have done all his life as a backbencher becomes self-destructive when he becomes third in line to be President of the United States.”

The first time a Times reporter called an American a backbencher was four years later. Now it’s a commonplace. Four of the last six times the term’s been used in the Times have been in reference to Americans, most recently a January, 5, 2013, Ross Douthat column in which he noted that Speaker John Boehner’s “own backbenchers blew up his attempt at a fiscal cliff negotiating maneuver.”

It’s a useful term, but it bit less potent than in the U.K. since here, it’s not only metaphorical but untrue: since 1913, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been allowed to sit anywhere they want.