“Shag” it is

A couple of days ago, I asked you to vote on a new NOOB most likely to succeed, from the suggestions offered by BBC listeners.

The results are in, and all I can say is, you’re a predictable lot. Shag won in a veritable landslide, followed by flat; row and gap year tied for third. I will consider all of them in due course, though I have to say I’m highly skeptical that I will find much evidence on these shores of row, either as a noun or verb meaning argue/ment.

I actually forgot to include twit in the poll, so I’ll look at that one as well.
Many thanks for voting–all the Yanks out there, make sure you do the same on the first Tuesday in November.

More on NOOBS from the Beeb

The BBC’s online article about not one-off Britishisms asked readers to send in their favorite examples, and the results of that exercise have now been published. Going through the list, I see I have already weighed in on quite a few of the nominated terms: bloody, bum (meaning buttocks), cheeky, cheers, fancy (verb), gobsmacked, holiday (meaning vacation), kit, loo, mate, mobile (as in “call me on my mobile”), proper, queue, roundabout, and suss out. (My God, I have been doing this for a long time.)

A few of the others are indeed common in American English, but I’m highly doubtful that they can be called Britishisms: autumn, an item (meaning a romantic couple), and frock (meaning a girl’s or woman’s dress). One reader suggests pop over, meaning to come by for a visit; am I nuts, or have Americans been saying that for decades? Knickers is used here exclusively in the expression knickers in a twist, never as an actual term for a woman’s undergarment. I have actually been working on a post about wonky, which, like snarky, has taken on a decidedly different meaning in the U.S. than it originally had in the U.K.

Here are the remaining terms  (definitions are from the BBC post)

  • Chav, n. Pejorative term to express young person who displays loutish behaviour, sometimes with connotations of low social status.
  • Flat, n. An apartment on one floor of a building.
  • Gap year, n. A year’s break taken by a student between leaving school and starting further education.
  • Innit, adv. A contraction of isn’t it? Used to invite agreement with a statement.
  • Muppet, n. A stupid person; from the name for the puppets used in the TV programme The Muppet Show.
  • Numpty, n. A stupid person.
  • Row, n. and v. A noisy or violent argument, a quarrel with someone.
  • Shag, v. To copulate with.
  • Skint, adj. Penniless, broke.
  • Twit, n. A fool; a stupid or ineffectual person.

Bringing back a favorite feature from NOOB’s past (I’m talking to you, Hal Hall), I ask readers to vote on up to three of these expressions that they feel have actually taken hold in the U.S. It’s a free world out there, but I would ask those of you from the U.K, Oz, Canada, etc., not to vote, unless you’ve been observing American usage. I’ll announce the results tomorrow and get to work on posting about the winners.

“Ahead of”

Meaning before (a particular event or occurrence), and as seen in these U.S. headlines I spied on the morning of the first presidential debate:

  • “Ahead of First Debate, NPR Finds Romney Within Striking Distance”—NPR
  • “Ahead of Presidential Debate, Christie Raises the Bar for Romney”—NJ Today
  • “Ahead of Obama-Romney Debate, Skeptics Abound”—Cherry Hill, N.J., Courier-Post
  • “Ahead of Presidential Debate, Polls Show Obama Favored on Key Issues”—The Washington Post

And so on. It is not a phrase real people use in speaking to each other, but is the province of journalism (mainly headlines, but also creeping into the text of articles and, especially, broadcast reports), business jargon, and other environments where it’s perceived as helpful to express things in as wordy a way as possible. As for its presence on this blog, I’m not absolutely certain but I’m fairly confident that ahead of with this particular connotation is a solid NOOB.

The fuzziness comes from the fact that ahead of time and ahead of schedule are venerable idioms on both sides of the Atlantic, dating to roughly the turn of the 20th century. Ahead of-(event) pops in the early twentieth century, but very rarely. When I discussed this phrase on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, a friendly commenter directed me to a 1910 Atlantic Monthly article titled “Football at Harvard and at Yale” (that’s American football): “Harvard always insisted that her Pennsylvania game (a major contest) should be two weeks ahead of her Yale game.”

But I believe that is an outlier.  I searched for ahead of in headlines from The Times (of London), and the first relevant hit was in 1964, with “Investors Cautious Ahead of Elections,” followed the next year by “Shares Finish Flat Ahead of Trade Figures.” The New York Times didn’t use the phrase in a headline until 1981, with “Maritime Pacts Reached Ahead of Expirations.” But even that was a temporal one-off, as the phrase didn’t show up again in the paper until 1990.

And now, of course, it’s everywhere.

 

The “sarky”/”snarky” conundrum

My post on snarky elicited many comments from British people, the tenor of which can be gleaned from the first two posted:

Jan: That’s bizarre. The word I and all the British people of my acquaintance use is “sarky”, which I’ve always assumed was taken from “sarcastic”, seeing as being sarky so often involves being sarcastic. Sticking an “n” in there makes absolutely no sense at all. Maybe sarky is some kind of backformation.

Cameron: I think there were originally two distinct usages of snark/snarky. The British usage meant “nasty, irritable, unfriendly” and is reflected nicely in the 1913 text cited in the post. The other usage was (I think) originally from Australia/New Zealand and in that sense snarky was a portmanteau word combining nasty and sarcastic. I suspect the increasing usage of snarky in both Britain and North America is the originally antipodean usage becoming part of standard English.
First of all, I looked up antiopdean in the OED so I saved you the trouble. “Of or pertaining to the opposite side of the world; esp. Australasian.”
Second, I believe Jan and all the others who say they have never heard snarky in the U.K. until recently (if at all). Nevertheless, the word was in currency there in the mid-twentieth century.  In addition to the 1913 Vaizey and 1976 Crossman quotes in the original post, the OED cites Eileen Coxhead’s 1953 novel Midlanders: “I’ve known you were the soul of kindness, under that snarky way.”

Poking around on Google Books, I also found this:

 “There’s no need to be snarky,” said Sally clearly. “What’d you say?” Daphne stopped looking bored and stood up straight. “I said you didn’t have to be snarky. I’m not a kid.” “Are you not?” said Daphne, trying to imitate Sally’s accent.

The quote is from the 1973 novel No Place for Love, by Joan Lingard. Ms. Lingard writes on her website:  “I was born in Edinburgh, in the very heart of its old town, the Royal Mile, but when I was two years’ old I went to live in Belfast and stayed there until I was 18. It was there that I grew up, went to school, made my first friends, learned to read and write. Inevitably, then, Belfast and Northern Ireland have had a strong influence on my writing.”

In Captain Cat (1960), Robert Holles writes,  “My mother was snarky that day because my father had gone off early in a coach to some place about two hundred miles away, for a pigeon race.” (According to Wikipedia, Holles [1926-1999] “was the son of a sergeant major, and enlisted in the British army as a boy soldier at 14. He served in Korea as a sergeant with the 1st battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and saw action during the Battle of Imjin in 1951, one of ‘The Glorious Glosters’ greatest battle honours.”)

Finally, in Games of Chance (1965), by the British novelist Thomas Hinde, one can read, “‘No need to get snarky,’ I heard him say. ‘Just stop asking,’ I shouted. ‘Stop, d’you hear. Stop.'”

Now for sarky. First, I can confirm that the word has not reached the U.S.  The OED defines it as “sarcastic” and notes, “Widely used amongst schoolchildren.” The first citation is from a 1912 letter in which D.H. Lawrence asks his correspondent, “Why are you so sarky?” Then, in 1924, Hugh de Sélincourt (an English author) wrote in Cricket Match, “He says it sarky-like and sneering.”

Giving some credence to Cameron’s antipodean theory, and suggesting that even by the ’30s, the term wasn’t universally familiar, is a quote (not cited by the OED) from The Jasmine Farm (1934), by Elizabeth von Arnim, an Australian-born British novelist: “‘Don’t be sarky,’ she at once cut him short. ‘Sarky?’ was all that, pulled up in his stride, he could find to say. ‘Sarcastic. Thinking you’re more than a match for me, when I shouldn’t be surprised if it was the other way about.'”

(Query to readers: is “the other way about” a Britishism, an Australianism, or merely an archaicism?)

My feeling is that, as Cameron says, the original, British meaning of snarky was “nasty, irritable, unfriendly.” I am also with him on the idea, in that its current use, on both sides of the Atlantic and in antipodean regions as well, it is a portmanteau–combining not only nasty and sarcastic, but snide for good measure. The first use of this connotation I have been able to find is still the 1970 Billboard review quoted in the original post.

I await your comments.

Attention is paid

What was that all about? The classic snail joke has often come to mind since a couple of weeks ago, when Cordelia Hebblethwaite’s BBC article featured NOOBs and drive something over 100,000 visitors to this site.  The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Sun all weighed in. Then yesterday, the New York Times published Alex Williams’s very funny article “Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms.” (Best line: “Have we all become Madonna?”) As I write, the piece is the number-one most e-mailed article over at the Times’ website; it has spurred coverage in the Atlantic Wire and, bringing things full circle, an upcoming interview with your truly by the BBC’s World Service.

As Wolcott Gibbs wrote in a very different context, “Where it all will end, knows God!”

“Snarky”

Journalist Nico Hines of the Times of London recently informed me that snarky is a NOOB. This surprised me, as I had always assumed–without really thinking about it–that the term for a certain kind of glib sarcastic negativity, endemic to the the internet, was a recent American coinage, possible derived in a roundabout way from Lewis Carroll’s 1876 poem “Hunting of the Snark.” But Nico was correct.

The term was apparently first used in the New York Times in 1995, in a reference to “snarky put-downs and the fever for electronic communiques” (quaint phrase, that, dating from the dawn of e-mail). That quote does not appear in the Times’ online archive (presumably due to copyright issues) but the redoubtable William Safire referred to it the following year while noting the “growing use” of snarky.  He said he was “reluctant” to attribute this to Carroll, noting that ten years before the poem, the British publication Notes and Queries referred to “a certain kind of snarking or gnashing.” He went on:

In his 1976 diaries, Richard Crossman, a [British] Cabinet minister, used the word to describe a journalistic tone in the sense that snarky is currently used in the White House to deal with some of us who observe the passing political scene: ‘The stream of anti-government propaganda, smearing, snarky, derisive, which comes out of Fleet Street.”

The OED contends the word derives from snork, meaning snore or snort. The dictionary cites Jessie Vaizey’s 1913 (British) novel College Girl:  “‘Why should you think I am “snarky”?’ ‘Because—you are! You’re not a bit sociable and friendly.’” Wonderful quote:  the title of the novel suggests the “crowd” that used the word, the end of the line of dialogue suggests a definition (not sociable, not friendly), and the quotation marks suggest that in 1913 it was slang of fairly recent vintage.

American use came a bit earlier than that 1995 Times quote. In 1970, Billboard called Roberta Flack’s song “Reverend Lee” “an amusing, slightly snarky slam at Southern Baptist morals.” And Marilyn French (a Harvard PhD who wrote her dissertation on James Joyce) wrote in The Women’s Room (1977):

Bliss turned with a snarky smile. “Thanks. Paul thinks so too, I guess. He asked me to go to the Bahamas with him. Some lawyers’ conference. Think I should go?” Mira had learned enough sophistication to be able to play the snarky game.

Google Ngrams show interesting patterns in British and American use of snarky. In the U.K., it was an available but rarely used term through the twentieth century, and rapidly rose in popularity from 1998 to the present. In the U.S., it was hardly ever used (most references are to a mid-century puppet character called Snarky Parker) until 1990, when it went through the roof.

U.S. use of “snarky”

So snarky is number one with a bullet among both peoples, but note this: the Ngrams show that as of 2008 (the most recent year for which figures were available), it was about ten times more commonly used in the U.S. than the U.K. What does that prove? If your answer is that a country gets the words it deserves, you will get no argument from me.

Twee gwows in Bwookwyn

A display at Depanneur, which, by the by, serves up the best sandwiches in New York’s foodiest borough

[Added October 9. I see from comments along the lines of “What’s so twee about Marmite and posh lemon curd?” that an explanation is in order. First of all, there is an American novel from the 1940s called “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Since its publication, roughly 50 percent of all newspaper and magazine articles having to do with the borough of Brooklyn have had headlines that are variations of or puns on that title. (This predilection among what the Brits call subeditors and Americans call copyeditors has only recently abated.) So I was, first, partaking of that tradition and, second, suggesting that it may indeed by slightly twee for residents of Brooklyn–the archetypal dese, dem and dose borough–to be partaking of such quintessentially British products as Marmite and posh lemon curd.]

“Make a hash”

There are many different categories, of NOOBs, I have found. Some are the province of commerce (opening hours, bespoke, stockists), and some of journos (bits, cheeky). Others have flourished in the U.S. in a Darwinian process of adaptation: they filled a need, and survived (go missing, run-up). One of the more subtle groupings consists words or expressions that have historically been used by both Yanks and Brits but alternate as to which side of the Atlantic favors them. Two examples are trousers and amongst, and another is an expression I read today in a Philadelphia Inquirer review of an album by Kurt Elling: his “reworking of [Jerry] Leiber’s ‘On Broadway’ makes a pretentious hash of it.”

To make a hash (that is, mess) of something is, indeed, in moderately wide circulation among the American chattering classes, as in this from a Commentary magazine blog post: “When the Germans take full account of how rapidly they are sinking into the same debt morass that afflicts their profligate neighbors in and out of the euro, they too may well decide that their elites (and their Constitutional Court) have made a hash of it.”

And this, from the Texas Tribune, on the state’s former Governor Rick Perry’s presidential run: “He took the family name out into the world and made a hash of it.”

The expression was coined in the British Isles, probably not long before 1833, when Cardinal Newman wrote in a letter: “Froude writes up to me we have made a hash of it.” But it was picked up in the U.S. soon after that and reached a plateau of popularity here from the 1890s through the 1920s. I know that from this Google Ngram chart showing the frequency of the expression made a hash of it from 1850-2008. Use then sharply dropped, bottomed out roughly 1950-1990, and has increased ever since–predictable, since 1990-present is the golden age of NOOBs.

British use, meanwhile, plateaued roughly 1920-1990. At that point, just as Americans were warming to the phrase, it lost its luster for the British. Their use of it has dropped by about 50 percent, to the point where … wait for it … they currently use it with just about the same frequency as the Americans do.

This is a pattern that has come up many times in these posts and suggests intriguing patterns of linguistic identity among the two peoples.  If anyone out there is looking for a topic for a dissertation, this might be a keeper.