Last month on National Public Radio, longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison said about a venerable L.A. drive-in movie: “You can get up to some romantic hanky panky if you want. Or you can have the kids asleep in the back seat.”

A couple of years ago, Tim Hererra, or the New York Times Smarter Living newsletter, had this signoff at the end of an entry on what to do with a day off: “Tweet me … and let me know what you get up to, and have a great week!”

They were both using the expression “get up to” in the sense of this OED definition: “to become engaged in or bent on (an activity, esp. of a reprehensible nature).” The dictionary’s first citation is from an 1864 book: “And you know, when people do get up to mischief on the sly, punishment is sure to follow.” That and the next four cites are British, the most recent being Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986): “As anyone might who was as keen as he on what you could get up to indoors.” The sixth and final quote is from an anonymous 2009 article in the American magazine Wired.

I can’t resist one more example, from a 2021 New York Times obituary of the Montreal-born photographer Marcus Leatherdale, who lived on the Lower East Side of New York in the late 1970s:

The Grand Street loft was an unusual household. [His wife Chloe] Summers was a dominatrix working under the name Mistress Juliette; one of her clients cleaned the place free of charge. [Robert] Mapplethorpe assisted Ms. Summers with her work by offering her a pair of leather pants, a rubber garter belt and S&M tips. Mr. Leatherdale, sober, tidy and decidedly not hard core despite his leather uniform, was mock-annoyed one morning when he awoke to find an English muffin speared to the kitchen table with one of Ms. Summers’ stilettos. “What did you get up to last night?” he asked her.

The OED and Google Books Ngram Viewer agree that this was originally a British expression. The apparent recent American adoption isn’t surprising, given that we’ve long similarly used “up to” without the “get,” for example, “He was up to no good.” For now I’m labeling it “on the radar.”

“Row”–defined by the OED as “a noisy or violent argument”–is a useful word, being roughly in the middle between “fight,” on the one hand, and “quarrel” or “argument,” on the other.

It is definitely a Britishism–or at least, has been one since about 1930, according to this Ngram viewer chart. (The OED‘s first citation is from 1746.) I searched for the phrase “had a row” to reduce other uses of the word.

My sense is that in recent decades, “row” has generally been limited in the U.S., first, to pretentious people  and, second, to headline writers, based on another useful quality: its brevity. However, this sentence appeared recently in the text of a Wall Street Journal article, in reference to a Philadelphia woman: “Mrs. Stokes, 63, was arrested twice in 2008 and 2010 during rows with her now-estranged husband.”

I searched “had a row” on Google News and had to go back about 90 hits before I found one from an American source–a Chicago classical music website. But it turned out to be a quote from a British director. So for now, useful or not, “row” is still “on the radar.”

Rose Jacobs, a colleague of mine at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca” blog, recently reported a use of “in hospital” on the public radio show “This American Life.” I’ve never come upon one myself, only “to hospital.” So I still count the expression as “On the radar.”

Rose also linked to an amusing New York Times column by Roger Cohen, an Englishman who, returning there after more than thirty years in the U.S., was reminded of the significant differences in language. He also found that British English had changed in his absence:

Somewhere in the interim the letter aitch had become “haitch,” with the result that spelling out my family name (surname) was painful. You had somehow morphed into the ghastly reflexive “yourself,” as in, “And for yourself?”

I had thought non-reflexive “yourself,” like “myself” (“Myself and Bill went to the movie”) was as American as it gets. Live and learn.

I was listening to the public radio show “The Takeaway” today. They had an interview with Thomas Kershaw, who for many years has owned the Boston bar after which the one in the TV show “Cheers” was modeled. Talking about the atmosphere in the city after the recent bombings, he said, “People have places they frequent, that they call their local.”

My ears perked up. This sounded like local in a very British sense, the one usually referred to as the local and defined by the OED as “the public house in the immediate neighborhood.” The dictionary quotes Germaine Greer: “Women don’t nip down to the local.”

After some looking around, I am going to label local as On the Radar. The only possible U.S. use I was able find about wasn’t about a bar at all. It was a March 2012 New York Times article that talked about how a man “came to own his local: the Mud, Sweat and Tears Pottery studio.”

But I bet local will eventually come into its own as a full-fledged NOOB. Probably in Brooklyn.