Americans traditionally “took” tests or exams. Now, increasingly, they are sitting. What’s next: standing for a by-election?

Certain readers of ”Herzog” complained the book was difficult. Much as they might have sympathized with the unhappy and comical history professor, they were occasionally put off by his long and erudite letters. Some felt that they were being asked to sit for a difficult exam in a survey course in intellectual history. (Saul Bellow, New York Times, March 8, 1987)/City School Superintendent Neel Durbin opened the meeting by celebrating the number of Dyersburg High School students enrolled in AP courses as well as the number that are passing the AP exams at the end of the course. …”Fifty-five percent of our students that sit for the exam pass it,” said Durbin… (Dyersburg [PA] State Gazette, October 18, 2011)

I fired up my e-mail this morning to find a note containing the following blurb for a collection of poems:

I was made silent and watchful by the continuing poetry here. I kept reading, sort of mesmerized by the consistent achievement, watching out for the occasional weakness. Surely the level couldn’t be maintained. But the weakness never showed.

One phrase jumped out at me. The phrase was sort of. A couple of years ago, my daughter Maria, then and now a college student (and a sharp observer of linguistic trends), commented to me that these two words were crack cocaine to her professors: irresistible and deadly. Note that she didn’t say “sort of crack cocaine”; she recognized that the qualifier would have sort of ruined her metaphor.

Ever since then, I had noticed my colleagues’ (and, truth to tell, my own) overuse-verging-on-abuse of the phrase in department meetings and lectures. The poetry blurb was a sign that it has migrated from speech to print.

Sort of is an adverbial phrase with two bloodlines, one distinctly British and the other American. The latter is a homespun qualifier; think of the bashful cowboy who is sorter (as it’s often rendered) sweet on the schoolmarm. The academic sort of follows the British tradition in suggesting an attitude of qualification and noncommittal diffidence that’s at once specific and universal. It is characteristically used either between noun and verb or in the construction a-sort of-noun or noun phrase. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1780 quote from The Mirror (“There is a sort of classic privilege in the very names of places in London”) and a line from Shaw’s 1903 “Man and Superman”: “I’ll sort of borrow the money from my dad until I get on my own feet.”

More recently, Tom Stoppard brilliantly nailed the Englishness of a character, Henry, in “The Real Thing” who is defensive about his love of popular music. Henry says: “I was taken once to Covent Garden to hear a woman called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing. … As though the place were a kind of Lourdes for the musically disadvantaged.” (Kind of is synonymous with sort of.) Graham Greene, meanwhile, invoked a cosmic sense of the phrase in entitling one of his memoirs A Sort of Life.

The academic sort  of is in the British tradition and is neither brilliant nor cosmic. Sometimes it is a signal that a metaphor or figure of speech is coming up (an only marginally less smarmy as it were), and sometimes it merely signals a reluctance to stand fully behind what we have to say. It is uncannily like our students’ like: a crutch that has sort of turned into a tic.

Note: this above post originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog. I would like to update it with a sort of (sorry) crowdsourcing contest. This morning, the (British) Newsweek editor Tina Brown appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition for her weekly “Must Reads” segment. The seven-minute appearance was interlarded with so many sort ofs and kind ofs that the capacity of my fingers and toes to count them was quickly exceeded. I will send a free copy of my book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing to the first reader to give me an accurate count of how many time Tina used each phrase.

When I first spent significant time in London, about fifteen years ago, one of the first words that struck me as unusual was book–used as an all-purpose verb to indicate, well, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: “To engage for oneself by payment (a seat or place in a travelling conveyance or in a theatre or other place of entertainment).” The OED cites a first use in Disraeli’s 1826 novel Vivian Grey –“I’ll give orders for them to book an inside place for the poodle”–and then an 1887 theatrical advert: “Seats can be booked one month in advance.”

In London a hundred-plus years later, people were always talking about booking theater, excuse me theatre, tickets, hotel rooms, tables at restaurants. (Granted, this came up a lot because I was in a tourism/study abroad situation.)

The usage was not unheard of in the U.S., but (the significantly less strong) reserve was much more common in reference to eating and sleeping. For theatre, I guess our best word has been get, which isn’t very good. Hence it’s not surprising that book has gotten traction here.

This Google Ngram shows the change in use of book a room (blue) and reserve a room (red) in American English, 1970-2008. Book surges ahead in 1993, which puts it in a sweet spot for NOOBs.

I have to say I was gobsmacked when a reader suggested baby bump as a NOOB. I always thought of this euphemism for a pregnant celebrity’s stomach as a relatively recent invention of American tabloids. How wrong I was.

The term seems to have originated in late 1980s Britain as merely bump, sans the “baby.” The OED’s first citation (with telling quotation marks) is from The Times (of London) in January ’86: “The old idea was to hide ‘the bump’ under voluminous maternity dresses.”

Interestingly, as my correspondent pointed out, bump–sometimes, facetiously, the bump–came to refer not only to the protuberance but to the future child beneath it.

The OED quotes a 1999 novel by Charlotte Grimshaw, Provocation:  “Harry … wiped his hands on his kiddie jeans and leaned against her and the bump, his sibling-to-be.”

The addition of the alliterative baby now seems to be inevitable. But it came only in December 2003, my investigations suggest, in the pages of the Australian publication MX: “While Danielle Spencer’s baby bump has really popped out, hubby Rusty Crowe is hitting the streets and parks of Sydney to lose any tummy bulges for his next flick.”

First British sighting: Liverpool Daily Post and Echo caption from September 22, 2004, “Sarah with and without her baby bump.”

And the first U.S. one goes to the San Antonio Express-News, January 27, 2005:

“For the last couple of years, it seemed all of Hollywood’s reigning clotheshorses and glamourpusses were trading in their Birkin bags for diaper bags, their Pilates bellies for baby bumps.”

The most recent use? Well, USA Today posted this sentence two hours ago as I write: “Beyonce debuted her baby bump at the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 28.”

Enough already! I am baby bummed.