I first became aware of massive as a Britishism about ten years ago, when I interviewed the English tennis player Tim Henman and he used the word roughly every third sentence. The Britishism, I should point out, is not the adjective in the traditional meaning of very big but its use, in the OED’s words, “in weakened senses: far-reaching, very intense, highly influential.” The OED cites the periodical “Sound” in 1984: “Personally, I’m convinced the Immaculate Fools are going to be massive.” Massive Attack (I quote from Wikipedia because I am not conversant with the terminology and because of plural verb for a collective noun makes me weak in the knees) “are an English DJ and trip hop duo” that began operations in 1988.

Weakened-massive got on my radar as an NOOB when I read an October 2, 2011, article by David Hiltbrand in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hiltbrand was interviewing the British actor Damian Lewis, who said of a character he played, “Brody is treated as a war hero but he’s carrying a massive secret.” Then, just two paragraphs later, Hiltbrand himself picks up the word, referring to a “massive cattle call for [the miniseries] Band of Brothers.”

Here’s a relatively early American use: The series [“Survivor: All Stars”] made its debut immediately after the game, and minutes after the first contestant was bounced from paradise, an anonymous gremlin posted a massive ”spoiler” on the entertainment Web site Ain’t It Cool News — a detailed list of upcoming plot twists. (Emily Nussbaum, New York Times, May 9, 2004)

The OED definition of larky, adj.: “Inclined or ready for a lark; frolicsome, sportive.” The verb form is commonly used in the gerund and followed by about. As Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins famously instructed Dick Van Dyke’s Bert in the Disney film (words and music by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman): “None of your larking about!”

It is a portrait of the larky upper-class sleuth of King’s College, Cambridge, and his thunderous middle-class quarry at the red-brick University of Newcastle. (Richard Eder, New York Times, August 13, 2000)/…Robert Wagner, who enjoyed his biggest success on Hart To Hart and It Takes A Thief, this larky series about an urbane jewel thief recruited to steal for the government when they’re not free to act. (Huffington Post, November 17, 2011)

The diction of mental instability is rich indeed. Already NOOBs has covered daft, nutter,  and mad; now comes barmy. The etymology is interesting. From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth, the adjective balmy was commonly used to mean (in the OED’s words), “weak-minded, idiotic.” In due time, this combined in the public mind with barmy, an obscure term derived from barm, that is, “the froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors,” which had been metaphorically, but sparingly, used to mean  “flighty” or “excited.”

By 1896, the confusion about the two words was such that a writer in the Westminster Gazette asked, “Should not ‘balmy’ be ‘barmy’? I have known a person of weak intellect called ‘Barmy Billy’.‥ The prisoner‥meant to simulate semi-idiocy, or ‘barminess’, not ‘balminess’.” As he suggested, barmy has since prevailed, no doubt in part to the felicitous barmy army, used to refer to political factions or supporters (a NOOB?) of particular teams.

The weak spot, whose center is off the coast of Brazil, is called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or S.A.A., and it has created a Bermuda triangle of space science. Under its influence, spacecraft can go barmy, losing data, having computer upsets and seeing ghostly images where none exist. (New York Times, June 5, 1990)/Our colleague Ron Charles checks in with Shakespeare scholars, who say Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous” theory is half-snobby, half-barmy. (Washington Post, October 31, 2011)

 

Complain, kvetch, whine, moan. Most often used in gerund form, i.e., whingeing. Interestingly, in U.S., spelling is frequently given as whing and whinging, which, sensibly (as the first g is soft, as in fringe), have not been common in U.K. in recent decades.

… money alone won’t do it [produce happiness]. Listen to the poor rich lottery winners whingeing away. (The word whinge, as used in my poker game, is a whine from a winner.) (Walter Goodman, New York Times, April 15, 1996)/And as much as I adore Sheldon’s persnickety nature, watching him devolve into a whingeing man-child, bitching about his mother not making him fried chicken or pecan pie, kept what had the potential to be a top-flight episode from ever taking off. (Entertainment Weekly, “Big Bang Theory Recap,” October 20, 2011)

THE OED appropriates Samuel Johnson’s definition (“The buttocks, the part on which we sit”), notes that it is “Not in polite use,” and offers a first citation from 1387.

The Google Ngram below shows the relative use of his bum (blue), her bum (red) and my bum (green) in American English books published from 1800-2008.

The chart is interesting to me for two reasons. First, it shows a fairly common pattern of frequent use of a British expression (or spelling) around 1800, declining for a hundred years (give or take), then increasing, slowly at first, then more rapidly in the last twenty or thirty years, the age of NOOBs. More subtle and surprising, to me, is the relative frequency of the three expressions. At first her is the most common by far and my is barely (no pun intended) used. But now the three forms are all about equal. Surely someone can make of this a monograph on sexuality and identity!

Runway falls don’t get any more straightforward than this: blame the shoes — again. The beauty of this clip, however, is the drunken-looking wobbly-ness of her recovery. The model in question falls on her bum, but looks like she might have bumped her head and seen some little birdies. (Time.com, February 13, 2009)/Up first was Rob Kardashian with a jazz-influenced cha-cha to “Walk Like A Man” from “Jersey Boys.” In practice, he asks partner Cheryl Burke to teach him to shake his bum like pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy. (Baltimore Sun, “Dancing with the Stars” blog, October 24, 2011)

Bum is definitely a Britishism, but is bottom (a word with which, surprisingly, it has nothing in common etymologically)? The OED dates it to about 1800 and cites all British sources, including this from Carlyle’s 1837 The French Revolution: “Patriot women take their hazel wands, and fustigate … broad bottoms of priests.”

Bottom is certainly commonly used in the U.S. now, often (oddly) either fully or semi-lasciviously or in addressing children, but also more straightforwardly, as in this 2003 New Yorker review of a Martha Graham dance performance: “I saw that Gary Galbraith, when he played the Minotaur, was provided with a pair of shorts that covered his bottom.“

I would appreciate your thoughts on whether bottom is a Britishism, as well as a vote in the poll below.

“To smuggle in a West Virginia reference, [Jerry] West seems here like both the Hatfields and McCoys. He shoots himself repeatedly in the head, feet and private bits.” –Dwight Garner, New York Times, November 3, 2011