This headline, which appeared in the New York Times yesterday, reminded me of someone’s suggestion (please remind me if it was you!), months back, that I do a post based on the title of journalist Tracy Kidder’s most recent book, Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People. The Times’ review in January 2023 helpfully explains that the book “follows Dr. Jim O’Connell, a Camus-quoting, onetime philosophy graduate student turned Harvard-trained physician who, since 1985, has been treating Boston’s most vulnerable unhoused population: the city’s ‘rough sleepers’ (a 19th-century Britishism and Dr. Jim’s preferred term).”

The OED shows that variations of the expression goes all the way back to the seventeenth century. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699) has a definition of a verb form: “To lie Rough, in one’s Clothes all Night.” An 1824 Walter Scott novel has “sleep rough,” and a 1996 issue of Big Issue (the magazine sold by unhoused people) contains the line, “After 18 months living rough I went to Hammersmith Hospital and asked a doctor to help me.”

A quote from a 1987 New York Times article by Francis X. Clines, datelined London, actually predates that:

Up from skid row, Freddie Hooper is living like a lord now – one of the ”dossers,” or welfare recipients, newly ensconced in a 14th-century manor house purchased by an iconoclastic millionaire with a name and attitude straight from Dickens: Philip Stubbs.

”I tend to drink and live rough in the streets,” said Mr. Hooper, claiming sobriety lately in homage to the stately hearth that is his incredible new place in life. ”Mr. Stubbs has given me a home. What more can you say? A terrific man, Mr. Stubbs.”

The OED‘s first cite for the noun phrase in the title of the Kidder book is from a 1925 British novel: “It’s quite true, sir, that he’s a rough sleeper. Hasn’t slept in a bed since I’ve known him.”

As for U.S. use, I’ll first note that Americans have long said “live rough” in the broader sense of a bare-bones, rough-and-tumble existence. (And if you weren’t familiar with the other meaning, the Anchorage headline could be read that way.) The more narrow sense of “sleep rough” and “live rough” to mean an unsheltered existence started cropping up in the Times about twenty years ago. Here’s are some quotes:

• “In [director Michael] Levine’s vision of 21st-century disorder, Siegmund, Sieglinde and Hunding live rough on a construction site; overhead are spider webs of girders and catwalks.”–opera review of Die Walküre, 2004
• “Mr. Brigham knows the names of other homeless men who died sleeping rough.”–2007 article about the homeless in New Jersey.
• “Attitudes toward people living rough in the area — already curdling when the fires struck — hardened further.”–2022 article about the homeless in Chico, California.
• “In New York City, there are many rules on the books that have been used to restrict sleeping rough.”–2023 article

As Thanksgiving approaches, you’ll forgive me if I close with an expression of gratitude for the roof over my head and a wish that in the coming years we’ll have less occasion to use this expression, in whatever form.

I’ve previously noted the use of “range”–a handy British term for what Americans would call “product line”–in U.S. promotional materials from the British company Dyson and the multi-national Unilever. I’ll add to the list this sign I saw the other day in the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

It’s an asterisk-y NOOB because the sign is from the Applegreen shop at the rest stop, and Applegreen started in Ireland and conducts most of its operations there and in the U.K. My guess is that it wasn’t going for a British or exotic feel with “range”; rather, its advertising boffins simply didn’t realize the word is not used in America.

I stopped at Kilmer on my way to Brooklyn to visit my daughter, and coincidentally, saw another “range” there that I count as a proper NOOB. It was in the Blue Bottle coffee shop in Williamsburg, and it was promoting a line of coffee-related apparel.

For more on “range,” read Lynne Murphy’s 2007 post on the word, and don’t neglect the comments.

A much less common (in the U.S.) commercial term is “custom” as in “thank you for your custom.” Americans certainly use the related “customer,” but we would say “thank you for your business,” or “patronage.” Hence faithful reader Tim Orr’s excitement when, he reported it in an email, he “was in a thrift store the other day, and this rocks glass practically jumped off the shelf and into my hands.”

Just for clarification, Michigan Beans isn’t another coffee enterprise, but rather a consortium supporting Michiganders who grow navy beans, pinto beans, etc.

Finally, and speaking of Dyson, I recently splurged on one of their fancy vacuum cleaners when it was deeply discounted on an Amazon Prime Day. I was struck by the last page of the User Manual.

Not only would an American company say “Taking care of” or “Caring for” instead of “Looking after,” but it certainly wouldn’t use such an admonitory tone. “Look after your machine.” “Look after your battery.” Hey, you’re not the boss of me!

I imagine “jumper” will never become a true, proper Not One-Off Britishism. That’s partly because it has (as I understand it) a precise American equivalent, “sweater,” and partly because, in the U.S., “jumper” refers to a different kind of garment entirely. (In Wikipedia‘s words: “a sleeveless, collarless dress intended to be worn over a blouse, shirt, T-shirt or sweater.”) Thus the few times the word been mentioned on this site have been novelties, such as Andy Murray’s Christmas sweater (type “jumper” in the search bar at right to see the others).

What I have to share today is the closest I’ve seen to actual American use, but even it has some special circumstances. It’s an article published in yesterday’s edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

What are the special circumstances? Let me count them:

• The article is datelined “London” and is about stuff that happened in England; Princess Diana herself would probably have called the garment a jumper. So using the word in the article has a certain logic to it.
• “Sweater” was used in the headline, the lede, and about a half-dozen times in article, so the two “jumper”s could be seen as elegant variation.
• The writer of the article, Jill Lawless, is Canadian and has been based in England for a good amount of time.

Even so, it’s not nothing.

The other day, a Facebook friend posted about a recent achievement and, almost without thinking, I responded with the phrase that serves as the title of this post.

I suppose this is the time to admit, or confess, that my attitude about not one-off Britishisms has changed in the nearly thirteen years in which I’ve been doing this blog. At first, I looked at them somewhat askance. That is, unless they had been fully adopted in the U.S., like “a piece of cake,” or, at this point, “go missing,” I tended to think of them as pretentious or at least a bit affected. Maybe it’s getting older, but now I look at them with more equanimity. And I even use them myself.

As NOOBs go, “well done you” is no “go missing.” That is to say, it’s pretty rarely heard in the U.S. As is probably clear, the phrase means more or less the same thing as the Australian “good on ya” or the American “good job!” or “you go girl!” The first example I’ve been able to find is a line of dialogue in the 1860 novel Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, by R.S. Surtees: “Well done you! Bravo!”

It shows up twice in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), by Charles Dickens, the man with the preternatural ear:

• “‘Well done you!’ cried the person of the house.”
• “‘Well done you!’ said Fascination to himself.”

The phrase subsequently got picked up fairly widely in Britain, according to examples culled from Google Books. And it’s still in circulation today. A New York Times review of the American edition of The Graham Norton Effect noted, “”Well done, you!” he often exclaims to someone who proves game for his antics.” A band has taken its name from the phrase. And here’s a quote from a 2020 book called What Have I Done?: Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me, by Laura Dockrill:

And then, there was my pièce de résistance: I had the horror story ‘routine book’ wide open, on display, ready for the midwife to survey my strange scrawls and impressively rigorous timekeeping and applaud me with a gobsmacked, ‘Well done, you! I’ve never seen anything so incredible. You’ve totally nailed this motherhood thing.’

But the phrase has never really caught on in America. We’re far less comfortable than Brits with the direct-address “well verb-ed” construction (see “well played, sir“), and the syntax of “well done you” just sounds odd to our ears. Here’s a chart of frequency of “well done you” use in various countries, taken from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus of sources from 2010 to the present:

And note that many of the 45 U.S. uses aren’t valid ones, including quotes from the online Guardian and phrases like, “if you want your meat well done, you have to cook it long.”

However, the phrase has made its way into American usage, albeit tentatively. It shows up in a 2009 film called The Steam Experiment whose writer appears to be an American, and in a 2012 blog post: “So you finally managed to overcome the writers block. Despite all the distractions and apparently every force in the world conspiring to prevent you, you eventually got some words on the page. Well done you.” (In the U.S. as well as Britain, “well done you” is often sarcastic.)

It still sounded foreign in 2016, when a Time writer wrote about auto-generated responses in a Google messaging app:

A friend emailed me a couple months ago and I opened up the message in my Google Inbox app. He had been sick and miserable and wrote, with false enthusiasm, “Also, I haven’t pooped for two straight days!” The pre-written responses Google supplied me included “That’s brilliant!” and “Well done you!” Both of which would have made me sound not only insensitive but also kind of British.

But the phrase has gotten picked up sufficiently since then for me to label it “On the Radar.” Consider:

• 2017, Apple Insider, on an app called Fantastical: “The instant you say next Tuesday it highlights that day next week and if you instead go on to type ‘Tuesday, July 4’, now Fantastical shows you July’s month and well done you for happening to know that Independence Day is on a Tuesday this year.”
• 2021, The Motley Fool: “If you’re lucky enough to be the beneficiary of a major inheritance or happen to earn a six-figure income, well done you!”
• 2023 the Chicago Sun-Times on the latest Indiana Jones movie: “they used footage and outtakes from every Lucas film featuring Ford to pick up various angles of his face and insert them into the picture, so well done you.”

Well done me?

For Americans, a diary is a book with blank pages in which one records ones thoughts, feelings, experiences. American diaries often come with a lock and key, probably less to use than to convey the idea that the contents are personal and secret.

This is the sense of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. It’s sometimes used in Britain as well. See the fictional Bridget Jones’ Diary and the real-life diaries of such figures as Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson.

But I believe that the main British meaning is different. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it this way: “a book or piece of software with a space or page for each day, in which you record future arrangements, meetings, etc.” The dictionary gives these examples:

• Is there anything in your diary for tomorrow afternoon?
• Please check the appointments diary before scheduling a meeting.
• She has a very full diary this week but she could see you next week.
• Our CEO is seeking a part-time diary secretary to help him manage his appointments efficiently.

None of these would be used in the U.S., and I’ve yet to encounter an American use of this kind of diary (which we call a datebook or calendar). But a couple of days ago, I read this in a New Yorker profile of Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City: “Adams’s diary of official events seems far fuller than those of his predecessors.”

The asterisk mentioned in the title of this post has to do with the author of the New Yorker article, Ian Parker. He has been a staff writer for the magazine since 2000, but his New Yorker bio says that before then, “he was the television critic for the London Observer and a writer and editor at the Independent.” So I’d say that datebook “diary” qualifies as a NOOB, but only by virtue of the New Yorker editors who let it through.

A couple of months ago, the New York Times ran an article called “2023 Is the Year of the Long Walk.” The sub-heading began: “The 500-mile Camino de Santiago has inspired a host of new treks in places from Canada to Bhutan that let travelers take the slow route.” To my American ears, the word “treks” sounded off; I would have expected “hikes.” Same with the following sentences:

• “Here are seven new treks to keep in mind.”
• “In an effort to showcase this history, the Soca Region Foundation has turned the former front line into a 310-mile network of treks.”
• “Across the border in Georgia, Paul Stephens, who was volunteering with the U.S. Peace Corps, had begun envisioning a trekking route across the entire Caucasus range.”

Google Ngram Viewer reveals that “hiking” is about ten times more common in the U.S. than “trekking.” “Hike” and “hiking” are also used in the Times article, and to some extent the “trek”s are a case of elegant variation, or using a synonym to avoid word repetition. But Ngram Viewer also reveals that “trekking” is a Not One-off Britishism that has been gaining ground on these shores:

The OED reveals that the word derives from the Dutch trekken, meaning to pull, tow, or march, and was adopted by English speakers in South Africa in the late nineteenth century. This passage is from The Young Nimrods, 1882:

The OED reports that “trek” acquired the sense of arduous hike by 1911, and of an arduous hike one does for pleasure by 1955, when this quote appeared in The Times: “About 35,000 came last year, and more are expected this summer… They come to fish and shoot or to trek in the mountains. ‘Only the English like trekking,’ one agent said.” Unfortunately, the snippet doesn’t reveal the location being discussed.

Wes Davis credibly suggests that the American popularity of “trekking” may be correlated with the advent of trekking poles, which date from around 1990, and for some reason tend not to be called “hiking poles.” Just last month, the New York Times Wirecutter section ran an article called “The Best Trekking Poles” which used the term “trekking poles” nineteen times and “hiking poles” not once. No elegant variation for the Wirecutter.

The headline above describes not only this blog post but also itself. That is, it consists of two words written in the Gill Sans font. The typeface has a storied past. It derived from Johnston, or Johnston Sans, created by Frank Johnston and used by London public transport (with some adjustments) ever since 1916. It is surely familiar to anyone who has ever ridden the tube in London.

Wikipedia informs me that Johnston is used for the logo of the fictional hospital where the American TV show House takes place (possibly a waggish nod to the Englishness of the actor who plays House, Hugh Laurie):

Eric Gill, a former assistant to Johnston, designed his own san serif font for the Monotype Company in 1928. It was dubbed Gill Sans and it gained wide currency due to its adoption by British Rail and, iconically, by Penguin Books.

Aside from any aesthetic attributes, Gill Sans was used much more widely than Johnston because the latter was the copyright property of London Transport until 2015. If you have Microsoft Word, you can use Gill, but still not Johnston. In any case, I confess that if you put me in a room with some examples of Johnston and Gill Sans, I probably couldn’t tell the difference. But from what I can gather, all or almost all of the examples of this style I’m seeing more and more in America are Gill Sans. Like this:

And this

It’s used in the website and some of the published work of information design guru Edward Tufte:

And, getting back to transport, in the graphics for the Hiawatha Light-Rail line in Minneapolis-St. Paul:

I’ve written several about “kit” as equipment or gear, most recently here. Lately, the California-based bicycle equipment company Thousand has been putting this ad(vert) in my Facebook timeline.

Fateful Faithful reader Stuart Semmel emailed that he had just heard an American reporter use the verb “hoovering” on National Public Radio. As it happened, I had also heard Bobby Allyn, talking about Elon Musk’s recent decision to limit the number of tweets individuals can see: “Musk says this is all about artificial intelligence companies, right? They train AI models, as we know, by hoovering up tons of data from websites like Twitter.” (Almost predictably, Allyn used the now near-mandatory Zuck-talk “right?”)

I’ve written several times about “hoover,” derived from the vacuum company, often (but not always) followed by “up,” and meaning, according to the OED, “To consume or take in voraciously; to devour completely.” But when I Googled the word before answering Stuart, I found almost the entire first screen’s worth of results had to do with a meaning I was unaware of. It’s not in the OED or Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but an Urban Dictionary post from 2010 has it as one of nine (count ’em, nine) “hoover” definitions:

v. colloquial Being manipulated back into a relationship with threats of suicide, self-harm, or threats of false criminal accusations. Relationship manipulation often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The next example I could find was in the title of a 2017 book by (American) Amber Ault: Hoovering: How to Resist the Pull of a Toxic Relationship & Recover Your Freedom Now. And the word seems to be very much still out there, as witness 2022 articles in Psychology Today and Bustle. Those are both American publications, which leads me to suspect that psychological hoovering is an American coinage. But I’m not sure and would be interested in evidence either way.