In British football, and Britain in general (I infer this from the novel/film Nil By Mouth), nil is the equivalent of the Yank’s nothing. Referring to the local soccer team, the Union, Mike Jensen writes in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Please don’t refer to the score of a Union game as “one-nil” or “a nil-nil draw.” England may have invented soccer, but it hasn’t won the World Cup in 4 1/2 decades and its national team coach is Italian. The rest of the world has moved on. “One-zip” is just fine, or if announcers want to go with soccer’s actual international language, try “uno-cero” or “cero-cero,” since Spain is now ground zero for the real innovation in the sport.

David Friedman will have to clarify this point, but my impression is that the most commonly heard form is this one (taken  from the website of Central Michigan University Chippewas): “Despite a nil-nil draw, Stafford believes his team continued to improve.”

Is it possible that nil and other British football terms will migrate to American sport? Will supporters gathering to cheer their side as they battle on the pitch? At the end of the day, what will be will be.

You have spoken. Earlier this week, I asked for nominees for the next new NOOB, and you chose (narrowly) twee. So twee ’tis.

As for definition, I can do no better than the most popular entry at  urbandictionary.com:

Something that is sweet, almost to the point of being sickeningly so. As a derogatory descriptive, it means something that is affectedly dainty or quaint, or is way too sentimental. In American English it often refers to a type of simple sweet pop music, but in British English it is used much more widely for things that are nauseatingly cute or precious. It comes from the way the word sweet sounds when said in baby talk.

“Belle and Sebastian are the Beatles of twee.”

Americans may find [choreographer Ronald] Hynd all too twee (look that one up in your Anglo-American dictionary). (Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, April 18, 1982)/[Mari Eastman’s] paintings are pretty and a bit twee, and I never found them very interesting, until now. Culture Monster [Los Angeles Times blog], April 21. 2011)

A final set of nominees  for a position, commission or award, from which the final selection is to be made. According the the Oxford English Dictionary, the now common verb form short-listed first appeared in 1961. The term is most associated with the Man Booker Prize, and appropriately so, since the prize (for best novel of the year “written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe”) also has a prestigious “longlist” of twelve or thirteen books, from which the short list of six is chosen. Otherwise, it’s (merely) a synonym for nominee or finalist.

The distinguished critic R.Z. Sheppard, for his part, is short-listed by People magazine as one of the “Most Intriguing People of 2001,” although, frankly, I can’t quite see it. (Lance Morrow, Time, December 27, 200)/A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of [David Foster Wallace’s] books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. (Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker, April 18, 2011)

A first-course dish; appetizer.

Several salads on the menu proved to be better appetite arousers than some of our starter choices. (New York Times, July 14, 1991. Note interesting use of the word arouser.)/While there’s a slew of appetizers and salads to try as starters, the small plates make for a nice way to try and share more dishes. (TheDay.com [New London, CT], April 21, 2011)

The New Yorker is a veritable fount of Britishisms. I have already written about the magazine’s propensity for the participial had got (instead of gotten), which, if anything, has got more pronounced over the years. I still remember the thrill of seeing–in a 2003 Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein–a sentence that began, “She and Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…”: move house being a Britishism (equivalent to Americans’ move) I had not seen before that and have not encountered since.

Alas, Eustace Tilley has slipped. In an April 11, 2011, profile of Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, Ken Auletta refers to a Journal piece about Goldman Sachs “which was intended to be a twenty-five-hundred-word front-page leader.” I am fairly confident it was intended to be nothing of the sort. What James Brander Mathews wrote in his book Americanisms & Briticisms in 1892 still holds today: “An American‥calls that an ‘editorial’ which the Englishman calls a ‘leader’.” It is derived from the older term leading article, which is still in currency in the U.K. The Goldman Sachs piece was surely not an editorial–that is, an unsigned expression of the newspaper or magazine’s collective opinion–but what Americans would call a lead article: the featured report on the front page.

Verb, intransitive and (less commonly) transitive. Kiss, especially in a vigorous or passionate manner; make out. Thus, Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers (1973): “They were enjoying a kiss—well, more of a snog really.” American popularity was certainly aided by Bridget Jones’ s Diary (1996), Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (2001), and other trans-Atlantically popular examples of British chick lit. Google Ngram.

And when couples do start smooching or snogging, they usually get interrupted — partly because [schlock Hollywood director Andy] Milligan throws so many prying characters into the cage of his film frame. (Richard Corliss, Time, November 30, 2011)/We already know that Matt Damon will be playing Michael Douglas’ gay lover in the upcoming biopic Liberace, but now they’ve both confirmed there will be a good bit of guy-on-guy snogging for the big screen. (Tampabay.com, March 23, 2011)

In case the text is too blurry to read, the first line of this ad (from the New Yorker, yes) is, “Bespoke fan.”

And since this is a language blog, I will point out that the absence of a hyphen in the capitalized phrase indicates the ad is pitched at people with a particular anatomical inclination, or, alternatively, at large people with a more generalized version of that inclination.

Expiration date. The OED’s first citation is from 1963, while the first metaphorical use is a Daily Telegraph headline (OED calls it a “heading”) from 1987: “Socialism: the package that’s passed its sell-by date.” Sell-by date is not only more precise than expiration date but also is more mellifluous. Hence its appeal for now-inescapable and wearisome metaphorical applications. (Of the last 20 uses in the New York Times, only five refer to foodstuffs and fifteen to people, ideas, etc.) Google Ngram.

Ms. [Kathleen Hall] Jamieson’s list of double binds is a little past its sell-by date.(New York Times, April 2, 1995) /And the hippie-with-an-expired-sell-by-date look suits him [Paul Rudd] well. (Entertainment Weekly, January 24, 2011)