Giving a Toss About Language Bits and Bobs
Chatting up Ben Yagoda, author of a new book for those who fancy Britishisms going on holiday to America.
Lots of us love watching language. Ben Yagoda does it with one eye on each side of the Atlantic.
The longtime University of Delaware professor’s new book — Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English — takes a data-driven approach to understanding when and how those quintessentially British words make the leap to American English. It’s a quick and breezy look at what he calls NOOBs — Not One-Off Britishisms — and how they sometimes become more prevalent in the U.S. than in their native tongue.
I talked with Yagoda about how language changes, the unique digital tools available to anyone who wants to study language, and the rare excitement of finding a citation that the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t yet have.
Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and concision.
For the newbies, what is a NOOB?
It's a phenomenon I started chronicling on this blog called Not One-Off Britishisms back in 2011, and it's essentially a British word or phrase that previously was used only or primarily in Britain, in the U.K., sometimes Ireland and Australia, and that has subsequently become used or commonly used over here in the U.S. And one-off is an example: The phrase meaning ‘a unique occurrence that's only happened once’ was, 20 or 25 years ago, exclusively used in the U.K., and now it's pretty common over here.
Since you started chronicling these, what has the response been from readers?
As far as I’m concerned, it's been brilliant, to use another Britishism. It’s been so much fun. I think maybe because the topic is so obscure, it's attracted clever, interesting people — not a lot of trolling or character assassination. There have been, like, 3.3 million page views since I started, which is kind of crazy. But it shows you where the readers are coming from, and
it's mostly the U.S., but U.K. is a very close second — and some days more. Most of the commenters are from the U.K. I think that's because maybe they're a little bit more interested in language over there. They've been told for years that Americanisms are polluting the wonderful mother tongue, and people are saying cookie instead of biscuit and fries instead of chips, and saying you guys and stuff like that. And they are, well, to use the title of my book, rather gobsmacked to hear that has been going the other way. They're amused by that.
What words were you surprised to learn had British roots?
Smog sounds as American as, you know, apple pie. But you can date when the word was invented. There was an article — I think it was in the London Times, 1905 or something. And in London, in those days, there really was smog, a combination of smoke and fog. And this guy gave a speech and invented the word smog, and it caught on first over there. And then there's often this lag of 30, 40, 50 years, until Pittsburgh and L.A. had that experience. The line I always think of from Joni Mitchell's “Woodstock”: “I have come here to lose the smog.” It just sounds so American.
The other one that's a little surprising is brunch, which started out as university slang. And again, 30, 40 years later, in the 1930s, ’40s, it caught on in the U.S., and now probably is used more in the U.S. than in Britain.
The internet is rightfully criticized for a lot of things, one of which is that it has incorrect stuff on there. But if you're charting language, there's nothing incorrect. Somebody said it and put it out there, and all these wonderful corpora and databases, whether it's the New York Times or Google Books or Oxford English Dictionary — not a database, but an amazing resource — Green's Dictionary of Slang, Google Ngram Viewer lets you chart the use of a word or phrase over time, and to compare British and American use of it. It's a great subject for researching in this day and age.
And it's not a book that you could have written 20 years ago, or it would have been a lot harder.
It would have been harder and different. I'm gobsmacked and very appreciative of people who were doing this sort of thing in the pre-internet age. H.L. Mencken’s book The American Language is in some ways much like this, where he's charting these words over time. I don't know how he did it. He must have spent a lot of time in dusty archives, and when he was doing it in the 1920s and ’30s, it was even before microfilm. But he's got these great, great examples in there. So yeah, this kind of thing can be done now, unlike any other time in history.
I was struck by how often you were able to cite a specific pop culture reference or usage in a book, usage in a political speech, to pinpoint the moment where a word made a leap across the Atlantic.
The Oxford English Dictionary has the word, the definition, the etymology, where it came from. But then its unique selling proposition is it’s got the historical list of the first use they and their army of volunteers have been able to find. I am very proud to say that on at least a couple of occasions I have found an example that predated or antedated, as they say, the first one in there.
Do you send it to them?
Oh, absolutely, yeah. It's like a birdwatcher finding a rare ruby-crowned wren or something like that.
What causes a word’s usage to take off, either here or abroad?
They're all kind of different. I was a professor at the University of Delaware from 1992 to 2017, and back in the ’90s, I started leading study abroad classes to London. One of the classes was on the British press, which is a great, very interesting institution. I was reading all these papers, and noticed there were a whole bunch of words that they used that we didn't use. A small number of these words were kind of a caricature, like telly for television and lift and old chap. But there were hundreds of words and phrases, one-off and gobsmacked and kerfuffle and all these others, that I didn't know. Then around the late ’90s, early 2000s, back in the U.S., I started noticing these words being picked up. That was the beginning of the blog.
The example I always point to was 2001: I'd been aware of reading in the British press this verb to go missing, meaning something disappeared. Americans would have said vanish, disappeared, was missing. But they said went missing. It hadn't been used in the U.S., and it was fairly recent over there as well. It was used in the case of a congressional intern named Chandra Levy who in 2001 disappeared. It had a kind of lurid quality to it. Very sadly, she was later found dead, and someone was arrested and convicted of her murder. My hypothesis was that journalists — repeatedly saying vanish, disappear, vanish, disappear — wanted to find some other new way of saying it. And somebody said, ‘Hey, how about went missing?’ If you look it up, you'll see that it started to be used. I found an article in USA Today, and I put it on my blog, and I think I tweeted it, and then I got an email from the writer of the article, who had written go missing. And she said, “I was gobsmacked, because I grew up in the U.K., and I thought it was normal.” And so my hypothesis is she was the Typhoid Mary that brought it in.
An American can go to England and have a conversation with somebody on the street and they perfectly understand what each other is saying. But to be a writer in England would be incredibly difficult for an American, because there are so many of those little turns of phrase that haven't made the jump.
But a lot of them have come over here, from Christopher Hitchens to Andrew Sullivan to dozens of others, and that's one of the reasons that Americans, at least, find this phenomenon charming. But if they try to sound like an American, it would, to use a Britishism, go pear-shaped very quickly.
Do Brits view American writing with the same kind of charm as Americans view British writing?
Yes and no. There's this narrative that American lingo is polluting the language. On the other hand, they are charmed: Friends and Seinfeld and American movies. Martin Amis was a big fan of Saul Bellow. There is definitely an appreciation for American novelists and writing over there.
You use all of these fabulous internet tools that we didn't have 15, 20, years ago. If you could have one word evaluation tool that doesn't yet exist, what would it be?
Google Books has essentially digitized, let's say, for the sake of argument, every book.
And Google Ngram Viewer allows you to chart any word or phrase of five words or less over time, any time, the frequency of its use. And you can compare British vs. American, and it comes up with these beautiful graphs that I have in the book that Eric Hansen did a brilliant job of illustrating. That gives you the picture over time. But if I want to try to find the first use of the word in 1951, I can't see that book because it's under copyright.
What does it mean for a British word to be adopted by Americans, and even to have its usage in America surpass its usage in England?
Language has a Darwinian quality to it, like natural selection: go missing had the advantage of being in some ways better than what was there before, plus having a bit of the cachet, the fanciness, the sort of snob appeal, and that led to its success. For other words, I don't think I've used the word pretentious, but my wife used to work with somebody who would say ‘when I was at university,’ and this is an American guy; people don't say that. And some things are kind of vogue words: kerfuffle has a certain charm to it, for a little controversy, and then they dissipate over time. But if it really provides value that no existing word has, that’s a good sign it will become established as an American word.
Do you have a personal favorite NOOB?
It changes from time to time. Sometimes I’ll favor something like what’s he on about? I’ll haul that out of the garage and use it for a couple weeks. But no all-time favorite.
Throughout the book you sprinkle in traditionally British words and phrases but don’t even call them out as such. Was that intentional and conscious?
It was kind of half and half. Half having a bit of fun, having a bit of a laugh, as they would say. But partly I was just so involved in that language that it couldn’t help expressing itself.
Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English comes out later this month from Princeton University Press. Preorder it here, where it’s cheaper than on Amazon, and better for your soul.
Speaking of preorders, we’re one week away from the opening night for The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical at the Arden Theatre in Philadelphia. Tickets are selling fast, especially for the Saturday performances — don’t get edited out.
Get your seats here.