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.
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?
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.
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.) Butnot 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?
… 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.
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.'”
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).
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.
I wrote this for the Lingua Franca, the blog I contribute to at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The post is below, followed by some subsequent reflections:
The expression po-faced has achieved, as expressions sometimes do, a vogue. The following quotations all appeared in print in the last 15 months:
“And it is satisfying to be allowed to hoot publicly at a man who is likely to remind you of every po-faced schoolteacher who told you to stop giggling.” (New York Times theater review.)
”To me, the scurrilousness has the pasty complexion of po-faced error. The worry, the criticism, feels tacky and fatuous.” (Darin Strauss, New York Times, on the supposed death of literary fiction.)
“Rather than coming off all po-faced and ‘I told you so,’ the 2012 edition of Muse is instead busy smirking, raiding the mini-bar and slurring ‘I told you so.’” (Buffalo News.)
“But 2011 has brought a crop of foreign-language films in which po-faced pedantry has taken a back seat to dynamic storytelling.” (Variety.)
” … a yearning Irish busker and a po-faced Czech pianist.” (New York Post, review of the musical play One.)
If you don’t know what po-faced means (as I did not the first couple of times I came across it), the examples won’t be very helpful in instructing you. TheOxford English Dictionary‘s definition is, “Characterized by or assuming an expressionless or impassive face; poker-faced; (hence) humourless, disapproving.” The first citation is from Music Ho!, a 1934 book by the British composer and critic Constant Lambert, and suggests an origin not long before that: “I do not wish, when faced with exoticism, to adopt an attitude which can best be described by the admirable expression ‘po-faced’.”
That the OED is far from certain on the expression’s origin can be gleaned from the fact that, in a two-line etymological note, it uses the word perhaps four times. Perhaps it derives from the interjection poh (or pooh), or perhaps from the noun po, meaning chamber pot. Or perhaps it’s a shortening of poker-faced. A comparison to pie-faced could be useful as well. Perhaps.
I don’t find any of these convincing, to tell you the truth. The first doesn’t jibe with the early uses. The interjection-derivation rings slightly truer (po-faced as one who says “poh”), but why would the h be dropped in the compound word? And those early uses are all British, while poker-faced and pie-faced are Americanisms. The OED defines the latter as, “Having a round, flat face or a blank expression; stupid”; all the early citations are in reference to babies or children.
Searching through Google Books, I found this in Who’s There Within?, a 1942 novel by the British author Louis Golding (1895-1958): “But how could she act like that, like an outraged Victorian matron, how could she? How could she be so po-faced! (She was using the favourite word of the Bohemians in the London of the early twenties, the Cave of Harmony, and Harold Scott, of Elsa Lanchester, and all that.)”
I mentioned all this to my daughter Elizabeth Yagoda, a teacher of history and a keen student of the Bright Young Things. She mentioned the post-Great War generation’s fondness for abbreviations and acronyms, and speculated that po-faced may have originally been p.o.-faced, though she didn’t have a thought on what p.o. may have stood for. I will go with that till proven otherwise, and, naturally, welcome opinions and speculation.
Not only Elizabeth but all the Americans to whom I’ve mentioned po-faced initially thought that the first word was a Southern rendition of poor (as in the New Orleans po’ boy sandwich) and that the term was related to the familiar American verb poor-mouth, meaning (the OED says), “The action of claiming to be poor, or of belittling or understating resources, abilities, etc.”
I initially had that sense, too. But that can’t be the case if the expression was created by London Bohemians in the 1920s. However, I believe recent American adopters have somewhere in the front or back of their minds a po-faced/poor-mouth relationship. That is, to them, po-faced is an attitude characterized by some sort of combination of impassiveness, disapproval, and feigning of poverty or humility.
Clearly, further research is called for. For the time being, I’ll merely note that the second use by a New York Times staff member (the first was in 1984 by the columnist Anthony Lewis, a well-known Anglophile) came in a 1988 piece, datelined London. Howell Raines—a Southerner who would later become the Times’ executive editor—wrote about a British performer who adopted the identity of an American named “Hank Langford”Wangford”–a “self-described ‘po-faced’ country singer.” Can anyone doubt that in his mind Raines connected po and po’?
Quintin Hogg in his later years
I’ll close with the observation that no matter how popular po-faced becomes on these shores, no one can use it like a Brit. A case in point is the Conservative leader Quintin Hogg (1907-2001), otherwise known as Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone, KG, CH, PC, QC, FRS. In 1966 The Times of London reported:
Mr. Hogg said at Watford that he had been given five new walking sticks since he broke his at Chiswick on Mr. Wilson’s portrait. [Apparently a Labour supporter had waved a Harold Wilson placard in Hogg’s face, whereupon he struck it with one of the two canes he employed, owing to the many times his ankles had been injured while he was engaged in his favorite pastime, mountain-climbing.] “Politics should be fun,” he said. “Politicians have no right to be pompous or po-faced.”
Additional thoughts:
First, I found a use of po-faced nearly a quarter-century earlier than the OED’s 1934 cite. Surprisingly, it was in an American novel, The Annals of Ann (1910), by Kate Trimble Sharber. A character named Mammy Lou is speaking (“Mammy” being a term for an African-American female servant) about the suitability of a certain gentleman as a marital prospect”
“But, honey, he is tolerable po-faced, which ain’t no good sign in marryin’. If thar’s anybody better experienced in that business than me and King Solomon I’d like to see the whites o’ ther eyes; an’ I tell you every time, if you want to get a good-natured, wood cuttin’, baby-tendin husban’ choose one that’s fat in the face!”
So she’s using po-faced to mean more or less gaunt. Since this doesn’t show up anywhere else, and since the Bright Young Things most likely weren’t reading obscure American novels, I would take this as a rare, possibly unique, piece of regional dialect.
When the Lingua Franca piece appeared, the prolific and valuable language commentator Stan Carey posted a comment that the American HeritageDictionary was a bit more definitive than the OED about etymology, stating that the term comes from pot (pronounced “po”) de chambre, French for chamber pot, “a po-faced expression being likened to that of a person observing the contents of a chamber pot with disgust.”
On reflection, I am inclined to accept this hypothesis. The OED has an 1880 citation for po-as-chamber pot (in a dictionary of the Scottish Language, interestingly), and a use of it by Leonard Woolf in a letter written in 1905 (a time when Woolf, having graduated from Cambridge, was serving in the Ceylon Secret Service): “I have to help to see that King’s House is prepared for him, to reckon out how many fishknives & pillow cases & pos he wants.”
Faithful reader Wes Davis sends along a link to the outstanding American public radio show “This American Life.” He explained that the show’s staff “got a tip that hog rectums [known in the trade, collectively, as “bung”] were being sold as calamari and they set out to investigate the story.” Wes said that at roughly the 8:30 point in the segment, a NOOB erupted.
The reporter, Ben Calhoun, is talking to Ron Meek, an employee at a meat processing plant who confirms having been told that such a calamari bait-and-switch had indeed taken place. From the transcript available at the show’s website:
Ben Calhoun: And is there any possibility that you think that when they were explaining this to you, that they were kind of having you on a little bit?
Ron Meek: Having me on?
Ben Calhoun: Yeah, like–
Ron Meek: Bullshitting me?
Ben Calhoun: Yeah.
As Wes says, “It’s great because the exchange comes with a built-in reminder that American English already has a perfectly serviceable way of saying ‘having you on.'” (The OED has an 1867 first citation for the phrase and defines it as: “to puzzle or deceive intentionally; to chaff, tease; to hoax.”)
Indeed, AmE is especially rich in words denoting cheating and/or lying, which is one reason I am naming this one an Outlier. And Ben Calhoun doesn’t get any dispensation for using it by virtue of his heritage or education. Wikipedia says he was born in 1979 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and now lives in Brooklyn, New York–which is, of course, the most enthusiastic U.S. outpost of NOOBs.
Incidentally, later in the episode–which is very funny and highly recommended–Calhoun has an exchange with his sister Lauren, a chef, in which they each use a NOOB. They are staring at bung in a butcher case:
notoneoffbritishisms.com 