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.

… from Massachusetts to the City of Brotherly Love:

(Thanks, Dawn Fallik)

Reader Richard Raiswell, of Prince Edward Island, Canada, writes:

You don’t seem to have done “on the back foot”. This (I think) comes from cricket and refers to a defensive shot which also has some attacking merit. I have heard it creeping into use in US English recently.

Well, yes. You need only look at today’s Chicago Tribune to find it in a baseball article: “In Oakland, starter Travis Blackley tossed six solid innings while his offense scratched out enough runs to seize their fifth straight win and put the Rangers (93-68) on the back foot.”

Then there’s this, from an early September post on NewsBusters, a blog dedicated to “exposing & combating liberal media bias”: “New York Times campaign reporter Ashley Parker tried to put Mitt Romney on the back foot from the opening sentence of her article on his speech to the National Guard convention in Reno.”

But in the Times itself, you have to go back to March 2011 to find a non-sporting, non-direct-quote back foot: “Activist investors generally prefer to be on the attack. So it’s odd to see them on the back foot, fighting to preserve an important arrow in their quiver.”

Interesting that these uses don’t appear to conform with Richard’s notion that the phrase suggests a ploy that “has some attacking merit.” I am sure that readers will weigh in with their thoughts on this matter. As for NOOB status, it appears that on the back foot is only on the radar at this point. Time will tell if it has (sorry) legs.

This noun phrase meaning “expert” (usually followed by at, as in “a dab hand at cookery“) derived from the now-archaic dab, meaning the same thing, which is “frequently referred to as school slang,” according to the OED. The first citation is from The Athenian Mercury in 1691: “[Love is] such a Dab at his Bow and Arrows.”

Dab hand apparently originated as Yorkshire dialect pre-1800, but didn’t become widely used in Britain until the 1950s, according to a Google Ngram. Following a familiar pattern, it peaked in Britain in about 1990, while U.S. use continues to rapidly increase (though it’s still used less than half as often here as there).

There are many dab American  hands nowadays. The distinguished Stanford Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg was quoted in the New York Times in 2011 as follows: “I fancy myself a dab hand at Google, but it drives me crazy,” but the term shows up in less elevated company as well:

“Hughes graduated in May with a degree in entrepreneurship management from Boise State University. Now he’s putting what he learned to work as he functions as a driver, a furniture mover, and at times a dab hand with the little wrenches IKEA encloses in its packaging (his business offers assembly).”–Idaho Business Review, August 22, 2012

“[‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ director Timur] Bekmambetov, who proved himself a dab hand at vampire thrillers (‘Night Watch,’ ‘Day Watch’) before he directed the 2008 graphic-novel adaptation ‘Wanted,’ handles the violence in an arresting if flashily impersonal style.”–Variety, June 22, 2012

“At Virginia Polytechnic, [architect Kimberly Peck] started playing around with industrial design, and became a dab hand at using the lathe, the milling machine and other mechanical equipment.”–New York Times, April 15, 2012

Reader Bruce Stoneback sends along the quote below, and suggests looking into toff (i.e., upper-class twit). I have done so, and strangely found that every recent American reference is to the same person:

“And if you are Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney’s biography, résumé and bankroll, there are certain things you don’t want to be filmed saying in a dining room full of toffs in a Boca Raton, Fla., mansion that looks like a location from Eyes Wide Shut (and whose owner reportedly threw a tabloid-notorious sex party at an estate in the Hamptons).”–James Poniewozik, Time, October 1, 2012

“Romney isn’t the bumbling toff he’s made out to be.”–The Daily Beast, September 17, 2012

“We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes. But what drives his gaffes is his desire to preen over accomplishments.”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times, July 28, 2012, referring to Mitt Romney.

My word for the many, many (, many) comments that have come in since BBC.com featured NOOBs in Cordelia Hebblethwaite’s excellent piece about Britishisms in American English. I have to approve them all before they’re posted, and they are so generally clever and well-written that I don’t want to rush the process–that it, I read them all and comment on some. I’m only about halfway through, the redundancy (not in the British sense) is my fault, not the commenters’.

In the previous post (piece of kit), I promised to feature another Nancy Friedman find. It’s “Opening Hours,” capitalized because it’s what you see on the signs of retail establishments in the U.K., indicating what U.S. stores would announce, simply, as “Hours.”

Nancy sent along a link to a profoundly twee-seeming San Francisco establishment called MAAS & Stacks, which describes itself as “a purveyor of classic pieces with modern tailoring. Inspired by the simplicity of a well-constructed garment, the store aims to present customers with a curated selection of everyday wears.” Their opening hours don’t commence till noon on weekdays; I guess they need extra time for curating.

In these parts, two examples constitute a trend, so I offer this, also from a posh West Coast outfit:

Nancy Friedman has once again alerted me to to a NOOB of which I was not aware. (If you want to know about the other occasions, just key her name into the search field at right.) I was certainly familiar with the BrE kit, meaning both “uniform” (what football players wear) and “equipment,” and had indeed been keeping my eye out for American uses.

Thanks to Nancy, I now know the latter kit, at least, has established a capacious beachhead on these shores. She sent along a link to a September 14 blog post by John Scalzi, about the new iPhone, which includes this line: “As advertised, it is a very lovely piece of kit.”

I poked around the Web for other uses and found it’s most popular among techies like Scalzi. Thus Zack Whitaker, on ZDNet: “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world: a media on-the-go bag has to have every piece of kit you may or may not need.” And Elizabeth Fish, in PCWorld: “The Sandia Hand by Sandia National Laboratories is an impressive piece of kit for a troop to own.” (Both quotes appeared in the last couple of months.)

Besides spotting this rather annoying piece of pretentiousness, Nancy offers a credible starting point for its U.S. popularity: Lenny Kravitz’s 1999 song “Black Velveteen,” which refers to a “nice piece of kit.”

As if all this weren’t enough, Nancy has identified another new NOOB. Watch this space to learn about it.