In his always illuminating Baltimore Sun blog, “You don’t Say,” John McIntyre offers a word of the week. Today, he presents a British phrase, argle-bargle, and notes:

Originally meaning a squabble, argument, or bandying of words–it rises from a Scottish variant of argue–its meaning has broadened to include meaningless talk or writing, nonsense. There’s a variant, argy-bargy.

Naturally, this led me to look into the investigate the popularity of argle-bargle and argy-bargy in these parts. They pop up here and there. One veritable fount of spottings is the right-wing National Review, especially its writer Jonah Goldberg, who prefers the argy-bargy form and uses it incessantly. One time he criticized Attorney General Eric Holder because “he thinks this isn’t nearly enough racial argy-bargy”; another, he ripped an Obama energy ad for “endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy.”

Elsewhere, the terms appear only intermittently. A couple of years ago, Alex Beam wrote in a New York Times op-ed about conflicts in the Episcopal church, “The schismatics invoke endless biblical argle-bargle to defend their un-Christian bigotry.” And just last week, a commenter on the Portland (Oregon) Mercury website humorously responded to a silly season article about how breakfast is overrated: “Shame on you and all those who truck with such joy-murdering argle-bargle.”

Bottom line, there is life in argle-bargle (I like that version better), so I say have some fun with it. Except for you, Goldberg. You are grounded.

On my first extended visit to London fifteen or so years ago, I noticed a front-page headline on a (legitimate) newspaper that read something along the lines of: RANDY ANDY’S BAWDY JAPE. The article that followed reported (using anonymous sources) that Prince Andrew had apparently made an off-color joke at a party.

Thus was I introduced to the concept of silly season, which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1861 and defines as “the months of August and September, when newspapers supply the lack of real news by articles or discussions on trivial topics.” (The Randy Andy article was actually printed in a sort of subsidiary silly season, the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day.)

The phrase has been picked up and as far as I can tell broadened in the U.S. in recent years. That is, it doesn’t primarily refer to silly newspaper articles–in that regard, every season is silly season–but to idle or unsubstantiated speculation in politics and sports. For example:

• “The silly season has officially begun. The start is defined by a sudden desire among political reporters to speculate about who might be chosen by a presidential candidate — in this case, Mitt Romney — to be the vice presidential nominee.” (New York Times, June 21, 2012)
• “What [Matt] Kenseth and [Denny] Hamlin did last week is show that NASCAR’s traditional “silly season” — that time of year when drivers jump from team to team — isn’t so silly anymore, and may never be that way again.” (Washington Post, July 2, 2012)
• “The silly season, aka free agency, begins today at 9:01 p.m., Pacific time, and Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak figures to be busy.” (Los Angeles Daily News, June 29, 2012)

“Veep” is a very caustic, very foul-mouthed, and pretty funny HBO series about a U.S. vice president played by the brilliant Julia Louis Dreyfus. It is also written and put together by a group of British blokes. They must have some good minders at the network, because up until the June 3 episode, I hadn’t noticed a single Britishism that had crept in.

A plot point on that show had to do with the veep’s getting rid of a secret service agent on her detail. At one point, a headline on a TV screen said: “Guard Sacked.”

My glee was short-lived, however, because it turned out that sacked–that is, fired from a job–has been a legitimate NOOB for some time, as witness:

“The surprising return would come more than a month after Mr. Woodford was sacked by the board as president and chief executive after questioning a series of outsize transactions at Olympus.”–New York Times, November 22, 2011

“The mysterious death of Neil Heywood in the Chinese city of Chongqing last year is emerging as a key element in the drama surrounding Bo Xilai, who was sacked as Chongqing’s Communist Party chief in April.”–Wall Street Journal online, June 20, 2012

“In Stages 5, 6, and 7, the star editor gets sacked, a pushover is hired as replacement, the moguls strip the publication down to its chassis and wheels, and they look for a new sucker to buy the publication.”–Jack Shafer, Slate.com, November 12, 2010, referring to “the seven stages through which all vanity press moguls pass after buying a faltering magazine or newspaper.”

It makes perfect sense that sacked would gain popularity over here, as it sounds more brutal than fired and thus suits the act it denotes. I don’t expect, however, that the British term for what Americans call laid off will follow suit. Made redundant is too much of a mouthful, and too odd.

Watching ESPN’s coverage of the England-Croatia European Cup football soccer match yesterday, I was struck by an on-screen graphic announcing, “If results hold, England advance.”  Jack Bell’s recent guest post on Not One-Off-Footballisms did not cover the grammatical Britishism of plural verbs for collective nouns, but to me it’s an even more significant development than announcers saying “boots” instead of “cleats” or “pitch” instead of “field.” After all, the announcers are Brits, but the graphic represents a corporate editorial decision by all-American ESPN.

Coincidentally, the National Basketball Association finals are currently being played between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat–apparently the first time in U.S. major sports history that a championship is being contested by two teams whose names are not plural. (There’s a fun fact for you!) The outstanding public radio show “On the Media” last week had a segment about the dilemma faced by copy editors (that’s what we call subeditors) writing headlines: do they go singular (American) or plural (British?).

“On the Media” host Bob Garfield had an exchange with Tom Scocca, the editor of the online sports magazine Deadspin, that shows the surprising passion this issue can provoke. (Note: The OED defines poncy as “Affected, pretentious, self-consciously refined or superior; overly fancy or elaborate; effeminate, homosexual.”)

SCOCCA:  In Britain, there’s a longstanding habit of treating collective nouns, or these kind of mass nouns, as plurals. So in British English you would say, “The team are doing well,” and, therefore, in British English they don’t really care what they call their sports teams. And so, you have people say “Arsenal are the superior side in this match.”

GARFIELD:  But the problem is, as you observed, if you use the British convention, you sound like a poncy–

SCOCCA:  Rock critic, yeah. That’s a longstanding problem in writing or talking about rock music, because so many bands have these names that are singular to describe this collective unit that’s the band. And, you know, there’s a lot of Anglophilia in rock writing, and so there are people who will say things like, “Pavement are the most important band since Wire.”

GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] And how does that make you feel , when you run across – “Pavement are the greatest band since Wire?”

SCOCCA:  Despite the fact that I might agree with the sentiment, the skin crawls on the back of my neck.

GARFIELD:  And you basically want to find the critic and just  kind of slap him around, come on –

SCOCCA:  Yeah, give him a wedgie or something.

GARFIELD:  You’ve got some examples illustrating the issue.

SCOCCA:  Right. Sports Illustrated pretty consistently embraces the British usage, so their headline would be, “Heat Have Experienced Motivation to Win It All.”

GARFIELD:  Poncy.

SCOCCA:  Yeah, extremely. “Have another crumpet, Sports Illustrated.”

Funny story: in a previous post written under the influence of jetlag, I wrote “eff” instead of “egg.” Before I had a chance to correct it, reader John Stewart noted that effing–euphemism for fucking–is itself a Britishism.

This surprised me: I have gotten used to effing in these parts and had no sense of a transatlantic origin. But John is correct. The OED’s examples are all British, starting with this from Robert Graves’ 1929 “Goodbye to All That”: “He was charged with..using obscene language to the bandmaster; the bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: ‘Sir, he called me a double effing c—.'”

I have a sense that effing’s U.S. popularity stemmed in large part from radio and later TV personalities seeking to avoid Federal Communication Commission strictures on foul language. A 2004 New York Times piece about shock jock Gregg “Opie” Hughes noted that even after moving to satellite radio (where the FCC has no sway), “Mr. Hughes often carefully and sometimes almost primly avoided expletives, using euphemisms like ‘freakin’ ‘ or ‘effing’ even though he was free to spew the foulest language they could come up with.”

A Google Ngram shows a 100 percent increase in U.S. usage of effing between 1998 and 2008

British usage is still about 50 percent more common, according to Google Ngram, but at this point, effing has passed its sell-by date on both sides of the Atlantic, with an unappealing naughty little child quality. Take a recent headline in Jezebel (which has used effing an astonishing 71 times in its history): “What’s the Big Effing Deal About Having a Second Baby?”

Nor does British actress Emily Blunt’s quote about her marriage to John Krasinski augur great things for the union: “All I can say is that it’s an effing blast.”

So why did the New York Times use this Britishism in its headline referencing Cash’s song?

I just got back from vacation (a beautiful tour of the Amalfi Coast) and I did the traditional vacation thing of reading a mystery novel, End in Tears, by the splendid (and English) Ruth Rendell. Three passages struck me as relevant to this blog. The first related to a recent entry on trousers. A character meets an old-fashioned woman and reflects on her garb: “The only name for her trousers, Hannah thought, was one her own mother used, ‘slacks.'” No mention of pants.

The second reminded me that I have been meaning to do an on-the-radar entry on flat, the dwelling unit that Americans have traditionally called apartment. In Rendell’s world, things are moving in the opposite direction, with the American term apparently a sign of pretension. A character refers to “these flats or ‘apartments,’ as the prospectus calls them.”

The final quote relates to the issue of the extent to which Britishisms are Americanized in American editions of books. Here’s a description of a bad guy:

He was sitting in front of the television on a sagging sofa eating a burger with a fried egg on top, a large portion of fries, and a thick slice of fried bread, the lot doused in tomato ketchup.

Surely Rendell wrote chips rather than fries? If so, on the very next page, the translator nodded, leaving unchanged a reference to “the coagulated egg, burger and chips on Prinsip’s plate.”