From in a review in today’s paper about a sitcom called “Men at Work”:

“The show give us four work mates … who are inexplicably kept on the payroll by a magazine called Full Steam even though they rarely seem to do any work.”

 

 

This comes from reader John Stewart (a Londoner), and deals with a term I was not previously familiar with. Thus any objections should be directed to him, not me.

It deals with a moment in the new film “The Avengers”–written by the Americans Joss Whedon and Zak Penn–when Loki addresses Black Widow with the two-word epithet that’s the title of this post. Loki hails from outer space (John informs me) but, perhaps significantly,  is played by a British actor. John writes:

this is possibly the most offensive line in the film, beyond even Wolverine’s in X-Men: First Class. It is just that some people aren’t too familiar with the derivation. In more modern English, this would be “whining cunt”. In American English, “cunt” is generally used as a misogynistic insult, mostly used against women, insulting their very nature of being female. British English doesn’t use the female-specific aspect of this in an insult, which loses much of the mysogynistic tone. Indeed, it’s more likely to be used against a man, an exaggrated form of “wanker”. But “quim”, though rarely used, is done so in a misogynist fashion. It’s only used about women, and is very much about reducing them to their gender, as if that by definition, reduces their importance. And that’s how Loki uses it in Avengers.

Next, I am going to have to look into mewling.

Period of two weeks. This useful word has traditionally been reserved, in the U.S., for tennis commentators referring to the Wimbledon tournament. But that is clearly no longer the case. Consider:

For the rest of us dilettantes, there is the Hallmark aisle and, more precisely, the special section dedicated for a fortnight annually to cards exclusively “For Mom.” (ABCNews.com, May 12, 2012)

Not even a fortnight has passed and now a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the team thicker than at any time since a Ping-Pong ball bounced the Bulls’ way four years ago, bringing forth a Chicago son’s bright rays. (Chicago Daily Herald, May 10, 2012)

‘‘I have to pinch myself every day,” [hockey player Chris] Kreider said of his storybook fortnight, which began with winning the N.C.A.A. championship with Boston College and has continued with five rapidly improving appearances in the Stanley Cup playoffs. (New York Times, April 27, 2011)

Even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is planning a “Fortnight for Freedom” this summer (actually mostly coinciding with Wimbledon), the freedom in question apparently being that of employers to prevent their workers from getting free birth control.

The word this brings to mind is stone, as a unit of weight. I somehow don’t think that one is going to happen over here.

This is a very British way of saying, “I didn’t hear what you said–please repeat.” The OED dates it to the mid-sixties, and it was still novel enough in 1972 for Tom Stoppard to have sport with it in his play “Jumpers”:

Miss Moore, is there anything you wish to say at this stage?

Dotty (in the sense of “Pardon?”): Sorry?

Bones: My dear, we are all sorry—

I’ve felt for a while Sorry? is gaining ground over here. But for a long time I didn’t know any way of finding out. The databases and corpora I usually consult primarily deal with published texts, and Sorry? is, of course, something that’s said far more than it’s written. Moreover, none of my sources pay any heed to punctuation, so any search would bring thousands of leaden I’m sorrys and sorry states for a single piece of gold.

Then Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania advised me that the Corpus of Contemporary American English over at Brigham Young University indeed allows you to include punctuation in searches. Bingo. A search of broadcast transcripts yielded about 150 hits, most recently this from a journalistically hard-hitting ABC Primetime Live segment called DIRTY DINING: WAITER DROPS FOOD, TRIES TO SERVE IT:

GREG-1ACTOR2-# Here you go. And that’s it. (Voiceover) And before they can take that first bite… DINER-1MALE2-# Guys? One of your sandwiches, he just dropped it. ACTRESS-1FEMALE2# I’m sorry? DINER-1MALE2-# He just dropped one of your plates. The sandwich went on the floor, right here.

And this from a 2010 CNN interview:

KING: The mood there must be pretty good, huh? LAVANDERA: I’m sorry? KING: The mood must be pretty good?

The sharp-eyed will notice that in both those cases the speaker said “I’m sorry?” rather than simply “Sorry?” This is the case with a considerable majority of the COLA hits, one exception being this double-sorry from a segment on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. It starts off with the host, Neil Conan, interrupting a long statement by a caller, Eric:

CONAN: Eric – I’m sorry. Eric? ERIC: Sorry? Go ahead. CONAN: I was to ask you if you had any more. ERIC: Oh, no. I’m, you know, the only concern that I have is as far as, you know, I mean, everybody is concerned about their privacy.

Now that I examine the quote, it seems that both Eric and Conan are saying “sorry” to actually apologize. In any case, my hypothesis is that Americans, as is their wont, have subtly altered the British Sorry? into the more literal I’m sorry? Agreement, disagreement, explanation and any other amplification welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker magazine ran an online competition asking readers “to propose a single English word that should be eliminated from the language.” The winner, somewhat puzzlingly, was slacks. This is a rather old-fashioned term for what Americans call “pants” and Brits call “trousers,” which is my subject today.

The term dates from the seventeenth century and virtually all the OED’s citations for it and the many phrases and compounds formed from it (wears the trousers in the family, anything in trousers, not in these trousers) come from Britain, with one of the few exceptions being this 2005 quote from The New York Post: “Lee was game and let his trouser snake loose.”

The word initially forced its way into my consciousness via a moment on the Rolling Stones 1970 live album, “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out,” in which Mick Jagger addresses the audience: “Ah think I’ve busted a button [heavy glottal stop on the “buh-un”] on my trousers. I hope they don’t fall down….You don’t want my trousers to fall down, now do ya?”

Pants, dating from the early 1800, is the preferred American term. In the U.K., of course, that word means something completely different.

Trousers has, or have, been making inroads over here for some time, but seemed to have reached a crescendo of late, referring to articles worn by both men and women. In Anne Tyler’s new novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye, a man reflects about his wife: “Her clothes made her figure seem squat — wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners.”

Writing in the New York Times on May 1 about a new Ferragamo store, Alexandra Jacobs observes, “A fellow wearing cerulean trousers and slicked-back hair sampled driving moccasins while his bored-looking female companion sat on a couch, an amusing inversion of the customary situation.”

To be sure, the Times is fond of trousers. The chart below shows its frequency in the paper in twelve-month periods (May through April), 2006 to the present.

Nice article, Wall Street Journal. Too bad you’re fifteen months too late.

Thanks to Nancy Friedman.

 

They have nothing at all else in common, but David Sedaris and Newt Gingrich are alike in their fondness for clever in the British sense (the quality for which Americans would use smart or intelligent). I noted Sedaris’s use of it last week and Gingrich’s some months back. Now Newt has hauled it again, in his comments yesterday in suspending his presidential campaign. He said his wife, Calista, had commented to him, “approximately 219 times, give or take three, that ‘moon colony’ was probably not my most clever comment in this campaign.”