Keeping with the prepositions theme (a rich lode), British and American speakers use different ones when referring to the telephone. To be more precise, on both sides of the Atlantic we talk about calling on the phone, on a mobile, or on a particular day of the week; and we all say, “Call me at noon.” However, they say, “Call me on 555-555-5555,” while we say, “Call me at” a specific number. Or, we did do; the British on is creeping in.

I don’t have many published references, since this is very much a conversational deal. However, Stephen Hunter’s 2009 novel “Night of Thunder” contains this voice-mail message by a character: “Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.” And the internet is full of instructions such as this one, from performance-anxiety.org: “Call me on 1-888-512-2913 or use the contact form here to request a callback …”

Finally, the rapper known as C-Murder (who  is currently serving life imprisonment following his conviction for a second degree murder committed in 2002) has the following lyric in his song “Betya”:

You can call me on 1-900-break bread
Or 1-800-getting paid but don’t tell
Or imma send Cut Boy to rang yo bell

There was some interesting back-and-forth on a recent post that offered as a NOOB the verb sit for, meaning to take a test or examination. A couple of British speakers replied, in essence, Nonsense; we don’t sit for exams, we sit them, minus the for. With no little satisfaction, I reprinted several Oxford English Dictionary examples of sit for=take. But my correspondent correctly pointed out that the most recent was written in 1955. I hadn’t noticed it the first time around, but the OED also has an entry for sit=take (an exam). The oldest citation was from 1957.

On reflection, it occurred to me that something similar has occurred with some other verbs, such as ring up, queue up, and sort out. In all these cases, common British usage has dropped the second word; the current idioms are ring, queue and sort. But–and this is the interesting bit–Americans have picked up the older, two-word form. I call this Phrasal Verb Lag Time, or PVLT for short.

I understand why the Brits would shorten the form, but not why Americans would adopt the long one. Any ideas? I’d be especially interested if Lynne Murphy, over at her excellent blog Separated by a Common Language, has any thoughts.

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.