Verb, transitive, from the brand of vacuum cleaner, which was apparently hugely popular in the U.K in the mid-20th-century period. The OED reports that the literal verb–that is, to clean by means of a vacum cleaner–appeared no later than 1939 (impressive, since Hoover was patented only in 1927). The first cite for the metaphorical verb (“To consume voraciously; to devour completely. Freq. with up or (occas.) in”) is from the 1970 Times:  “The populace‥sit hoovering up the drivel poured out on television at peak viewing times.” A Google Ngram suggests that, as with so many Britishisms, U.S. use started to rise in the early 90s and is still going up.

Urban Dictionary offers two additional meanings for the verb. One of them you can guess. The other:

Being manipulated back into a relationship against your will with threats of suicide or self-harm, threats of harm to others or property, or threats of false criminal accusations. A “hoover” is relationship blackmail. This slang term is often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

“Where are we rolling?” “Into the heart of the night. Wherever there are dances to be danced, drugs to be hoovered.” (Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984)/For years, Mr. Madoff’s elusive genius act beguiled his Jewish neighbors, as well as friends of those neighbors, and so on, and so on, until vast chunks of local money were hoovered into his Ponzi scheme. (New York Times, April 11, 2009)

Varies in meaning according to context, and preposition. Thus keen to+verb, and keen by itself as an adjective both mean, roughly, eager. Keen on+gerund or +noun means enjoying that activity or thing, while to be keen on a person means to fancy him or her (in the British sense). An example of the last is an oft-quoted–in my family–exchange from the wonderful film (and fount of Britishisms) “About a Boy.” The Hugh Grant character, Will, is developing feelings for a woman, as Will’s young mate, Marcus, explains to the woman’s son, Ali:

Marcus: Oh, don’t worry, I think your mum is keen on him.
Ali: [shouting] She’s not keen on him! She’s only keen on me!

Google Ngram shows a roughly 100 percent increase in the use of both keen on and keen to in American English between 1990 and 2008.

Scientists are keen to explore cloning as a potential source of embryonic stem cells, which could be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. (Time, Dec. 11, 2001)/ If You’re Keen on Quinoa (New York Times headline, May 27, 2011).

Noun or adjective corresponding, respectively, to the U.S. redhead  and redheaded or red-haired. Also a nickname for a ginger person (equivalent to U.S. Red) as in drummer Ginger Baker or singer Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell (impressively, the second consecutive Spice Girls reference in NOOBs).

The term first appeared on my radar when, in London in 2004, I read this sentence in the Daily Telegraph: “The ginger asthmatic was always going to struggle in Coimbra’s oppressive heat.” I eventually figured out that this was a reference to footballer Paul Scholes–and “the ginger asthmatic” still ranks as my favorite all-time example of the class of misguided synonym that H.W. Fowler referred to as “elegant variation.”

Undoubtedly, the term gained traction in the U.S. with the popularity of the Harry Potter books. According to the Harry Potter Wiki, “Scabior, Fenrir Greyback, and a drunk man on Tottenham Court Road” all referred to Harry Potter’s famously ginger-haired mate Ron Weasely by this term.

The term has a long and sometimes unsettling history in Britain. According to Wikipedia (don’t judge me! there are footnotes!)

A UK woman recently won an award from a tribunal after being sexually harassed and receiving abuse because of her red hair;^[55] a family in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, was forced to move twice after being targeted for abuse and hate crime on account of their red hair;^[56] and in 2003, a 20 year old was stabbed in the back for “being ginger”.^[57] In May 2009, a British schoolboy committed suicide after being bullied for having red hair.^[58] The British singer Mick Hucknall, who believes that he has repeatedly faced prejudice or been described as ugly on account of his hair color, argues that Gingerism should be described as a form of racism.

Ginger prejudice arrived in the U.S. in 2005 with an episode of the animated comedy series “South Park” entitled “Ginger Kids.”  In the episode, a satire on racial and other sorts of prejudice, “Cartman rallies all other ginger kids to rise up and assume their role as the master race” (in the words of the series website). As is often the case with satire, there were unintended consequences. A 14-year-old Vancouver boy started a Facebook group devoted to “National Kick a Ginger Day”; it attracted almost 5,000 members, and the founder was eventually investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for possible hate crimes

Marc Torsilieri, who looked like a ginger-bearded lumberjack and played the part in splendid fashion by annually felling the Christmas tree for Rockefeller Center, died on March 12 in Somerville, N.J. (Douglas Martin, New York Times, March 17, 2007)/Scarlett Johansson, who is now a ginger, and Donald Trump. Really, I would love to know what’s being said here. “Scarlett, I’d like to bring you back to the Trump Tower so I could tell you you’re fired while we make love on a bearskin rug.” “OH DONALD YOU’RE TOO MUCH! HAHAHAH, don’t you know I’m with Sean Penn now?!” (photo caption, BostonHerald.com, May 1, 2011)

OED cites a 1914 use and defines it as  “Smart, stylish, splendid, luxurious. Also (chiefly Brit.): typical of or belonging to the upper class; (affecting to be) superior or genteel; ‘snooty’, pretentious.” The closest American equivalent would be fancy, or maybe fancy-schmancy.

Posh has been used in the U.S. for decades, of course, but, until the mid-1990s, at roughly half the rate as in Britain and chiefly without the ironic or sardonic connotation noted by the OED. (It’s a similar case to brilliant, in that the word was used here but more sincerely than across the pond.) What happened in the mid-1990s? The Spice Girls, of course. The group was formed in 1994, but it was two years later that Melody Maker magazine bestowed nicknames on the members. Victoria Adams (now Victoria Beckham) actually had an upper-middle-class (what the Brits would call middle-class) upbringing, but she was dubbed Posh Spice because of her bearing, which was, well, posh.

In his article ex-Buster [Thurman] Arnold judicially recorded his opinion that labor has become a national headache, that it is perhaps more unpopular in the slit trenches of World War II than in the posh clubs of professional New Deal haters, and that the great body of public approval essential for effective labor support is crumbling all along the line. (Time, October 18, 1943)/Discerning the difference between “posh” and “body hugger” denims was like trying to tell the Olsen twins apart. (New York Times, May 11, 2011)

Up to this point, Not One-Off Britishisms has concentrated exclusively on words and phrases. But there are other sorts of Britishisms. One them is punctuation, and the one British custom that has been widely adopted here has to do with the placement of periods and commas vis a vis quotation marks.

The day before yesterday, I published an essay about this in the online magazine Slate.com. As of today, it is the most e-mailed and most read article on the whole site, with more than 11,000 “like”s and some 35o comments (many of them heated). Who knew that punctuation could inspire such passion?

Anyway, here’s how it starts:

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

Indeed, unless you associate exclusively with editors and prescriptivists, you can find copious examples of the “outside” technique—which readers of Virginia Woolf and The Guardian will recognize as the British style—no further away than your Twitter or Facebook feed. I certainly can. Conan O’Brien, for example, recently posted:

Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfor- tunately, in this case  “darndest” means “incriminating”.

The British style also rules on message boards and bulletin boards. I scanned four random posts in Metafilter.com (about Sony Playstation’s hacking problems, the death of Phoebe Snow, the French police, and cool dads) and counted nine comments with periods and commas outside, seven inside.

I spotlight the Web not because it brings out any special proclivities but because it displays in a clear light the way we write now. The punctuation-outside trend jibes with my experience in the classroom, where, for the past several years, my students have found it irresistible, even after innumerable sardonic remarks from me that we are in Delaware, not Liverpool. As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions. The current semester is nearing its end, but I am still taking points away.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Verb, transitive. OED gives its first use as 1906 (in a Rudyard Kipling story), and defines it as, “To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness.” It is so common now, and used in so many different contexts, that it probably doesn’t seem like a Britishism. But it is: a Google Ngram (for “vetting” and “vetted”) shows it starting to become popular in British English in the 1930s and peaking around 1990–exactly the same time, according to an Ngram for American English, that it started to take off in the U.S. Currently, it’s roughly equally popular on both sides of the ocean.

“If I was on a matchmaking site, I would want to know that the people they are going to hook me up with had at least been vetted.” (The Desert Sun, May 8, 2011)/Vetting for [Zoe] Baird’s appointment began at once. Exactly what her position might be was left unclear; the vetting team was simply told that it would be something important. (Sidney Blumenthal, The New Yorker, February 15, 1993)