As of now, two friends have forwarded me the New Yorker s recent article about American adoption of British soccer/football terminology especially treating teams as plural, such as England have advanced to the semifinals with messages along the lines of In case you missed it! To which I snarkily replied, More like in case they ve missed the fact Continue reading Half TIME, Red CARD, etc.
Sometimes a NOOB just slips right by me. That was the case with the word at the top of his post. I had definitely encountered it as an adjective meaning characterized by shouting, but didn t think of it as notably British, rather one of a group of relatively newfangled y-ending epithets that includes flirty, melty Continue reading Shouty
Thanks to everybody who entered the competition to win a signed copy of my book Gobsmacked! by suggesting future NOOBs entries. I had said there d be one winner, but two people sent in words or phrases I intend to write about, so I will mail each of them a book. If one of them is Continue reading We Have a Winner! Erm, Two Winners!
Unaccountably, this blog has now has had more than 3,500,000 page views, which would seem to prove that the more arcane the topic, the more attention it will attract. Or, at least, that obscurity is not the kiss of death. I knew this was coming up, and was planning to work up some contest where Continue reading Milestone
I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression to move house, which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, to move. It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, the thrill of seeing, in Continue reading Moving House (and Offices, Apartments, etc.)
Some time ago, I was reading an American friend s Facebook post. He was remembering when, decades back, I was at my folks apartment and put on [the album] Blonde on Blonde. My father said, Take off that garbage. I stared at him, utterly stonkered. For such a productive group of words, stonkered and its variants Continue reading Stonkered, Stonking
It won t surprise you to learn that I keep a file of Britishisms I encounter here in the U.S.A. Some of these make it into blogposts, but others stay in the file, because I don t find any more of them. At this point, I think it s time to give up hope of these one-offs catching Continue reading One-Off (?) Britishisms Round-Up: Prawn, Petrol, Litre
My friend Michael Regan, a Bloomberg journalist, sent me a link to a Bloomberg article Mike commented: Gazump: Fun new Britishism making the rounds on Wall Street. I didn t know from gazump so immediately looked it up. The OED s main definition is swindle and its first cite is from the Daily Express in 1928: ‘Gazoomphing the Continue reading Gazump
I m (usually) not one to turn down a challenge, so a post the other day by Lynne Murphy, the OG of British-American language differences, caught my attention. On her blog Separated by a Common Language, Lynne (a native American who has long taught linguistics at the University of Sussex), brought up a particular preposition, remarking: Continue reading Alongside
I ve just finished a book called The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements, by Sam Kean. It s highly recommended, as Kean makes this ostensibly abstruse subject come alive, even for a complete non-scientist like me. But I bring it up Continue reading Aluminium