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.

Slate, the online magazine, asked me to write a piece about my experience doing Not One-Off Britishisms. I had been thinking I should really weigh in on What It All Means, so this gave me the opportunity to cogitate on the matter. It was a bit challenging, since in this and most cases, I’m a lot more interested in observing that and how than in speculating about why or (even worse) weighing in on whether the phenomenon is good, bad or somewhere in between.

But I wrote the piece and you can read it here.

Just a couple of things to add. First, while the headline (“The Britishism Invasion”) is spot-on, I did not write an am not pleased with the subtitle, “Language corruption is a two-way street.” “Corruption” is such a harsh word.

Second, the comments–342 at last count–are a trip. A few are dopey, but most are right in the spirit of this enterprise, adding interesting comments and suggestions for future entries. (Shag seemed to keep coming up.) Also, not a few pointed out that I made an embarrassing mistake–I had the plural of corpus as corpi, which apparently is not a word, rather than corpora. Hey, I don’t know Latin and I’m not a linguist. I don’t even play one on TV.

I heard directly from quite a few people with interesting things to say. One of them was Helen Kennedy, the first journo, according to my unscientific investigation, to use go missing to refer to Chandra Levy’s disappearance. Her e-mail had the subject line “You made my day!” and began:

I always knew I would amount to something, and having some small part in the downfall of American English – well, could one be more subversive? No, one could not.

I’m half-American and half Irish, raised in England and Italy. I am CONSTANTLY having to turn to my colleagues to ask if “advertizing” has a Z here, etc… I genuinely had no idea that “gone missing” was not regular Ammurican.

So “go missing” was (arguably) blown to these shores, like some exotic seed, by someone who learned it in the U.K. As has been observed before, the Internet sure is something.

Adjectival phrase. It does not indicate “characterized by propriety” (as in proper behavior) but rather fits this subsidiary OED definition of proper: “Strictly or accurately so called; in the strict use of the word; genuine, real.” The OED has surprisingly few citations, the first notable one coming from Ann Thwaite’s 1984 biography of Edmund Gosse:  “He had worked with magnifying slides but he had never had a proper microscope.” Three years later, more to the point of Britishisms, came a book called A Proper Tea: An English Collection of Recipes.

Help me out here. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something very British about thinking about or referring to this quality. Americans don’t generally care about whether a particular thing satisfies all the attributes of its category, only whether or not it works or is a good buy. They didn’t used to, that is. Now they are all over “a proper.”

Our distant ancestors probably did not have a proper breakfast when they woke up in their caves, so they gorged whenever they made a kill. (Marian Burros, New York Times, December 18, 2002)/Now that Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet about his admiration for Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, it’s only fitting that they go out on a proper date. (TVGuide.com, September 15, 2011)

Preceded by a number and indicating, roughly,  “… years later.” More so than “later,” “on” provides a retrospective feel, and thus is useful in titles, as in Alan Bennett’s first produced play, the 1968 “Forty Years On.” The two-letter word makes the expression especially tempting for headline writers, and as the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01 approaches, it is ubiquitous. A Google News search for the phrase in headlines yields 424 hits for just the two days Sept. 3 and 4, 2011, from “Bin Laden Wanted a Second Hit, Ten Years On” (Sydney Herald) to “10 Years On: Finally, Smarter Airport Security Screening?” (Wall Street Journal).

A Consummate Teacher: Coach Robinson 50 Years On. (New York Times headline, August 4, 1991)/Though we’ve felt the impact of 9/11, more will yet unfold. Ten years on, it still might be “too soon to tell.” (Sacramento Bee, September 4, 2011)

(Thanks to Nancy Friedman.) Evasive, tricky, artful; dubious, unreliable. OED’s first citation is 1861. Google Ngrams show British use taking off in about 1940 and American, characteristically for NOOBs, circa 1990.

To heighten the fun of the chase, she gives Grace a road buddy in Darcy Kohler, a dodgy market analyst who stands to lose her condo if her missing boyfriend can’t be found to make good on the bond she co-signed. (Marilyn Stasio, New York Times, September 18, 1988)/ I see that the administration is pressing New York’s attorney general to drop its investigation into dodgy foreclosure practices and settle with the banks. (Megan McArdle, TheAtlantic.com, August 25, 2011)

Adjective indicating the state of being in shambles. The OED’s first cite is from 1970 (The Times) but curiously notes in small print: “Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958.”

To which I say, Hah! A Google Books search reveals a few dozen pre-1958 uses, the earliest being this from a 1939 issue of The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics (and the telltale quotation marks indicate it’s a very early use indeed):

If judges are hesitant to adopt the findings made by a commission, and instead substitute their own inclinations, the administrative agency becomes not symbolic of legal progress but “shambolic.”

That is an American journal (don’t know the nationality of the author), but shambolic is nonetheless definitely a Britishism. Google Ngram data suggests it is currently used about five times more frequently in British than American English. But it is also a Not One-Off-Britishism: that same Ngram chart indicates frequency of use in American English has increased some 400 percent since the early ’90s.

Despite its shambolic start, the euro is not going to vanish. (Paul Krugman, New York Times, September 20, 2000.)/Taken together these albums hopefully represent the first unified volley in a new Philly sound — shambolic, shamanistic and completely cool. (Associated Press, August 15, 2011)

OED defines cheeky as “insolent or audacious in address; coolly impudent or presuming” and cites a first appearance in 1859. It was not unknown in the U.S. in subsequent years; a New York Times headline from 1885 read, HOW HILL HELPED PATRICK.; A CHEEKY CIRCULAR SENT THROUGH CHEMUNG COUNTY BY PONY EXPRESS. In 1943, the American writer Max Shulman published a comic novel with the amusing title “Barefoot Boy with Cheek.”

But the Google Ngram below shows that, as with  many Britishisms, American only increased significantly in the 1980s.

Presumably, its popularity was helped along by Mike Myers’ late-80s Saturday Night Live character Simon, one of whose catchphrases was “Cheeky monkey!”

Years after retiring, she became friendly with a 37-year-old cheeky chap who had the habit of forging her name on big checks. (New York Times, March 4, 1990). My man Mark Thompson puts up a cheeky post yesterday that I most heartily approved of. (Thomas P.M Barnett, Time.com, August 9, 2011)