2012 UK-to-US WotY: bollocks

For the first time in six years, I feel spoil{t/ed} for choice in deciding on a UK-to-US Word of the Year, but have a hard time thinking of even one good candidate for US-to-UK. After the 2011 UK mediafrenzy of anti-Americanismism, 2012 was the year of hoopla about Britishisms in America. There were many to choose from, and before announcing my less printable choice, I’d like to give special mention to stockist, which Nancy Friedman (Fritinancy), an excellent observer of commercial language, has noted on the rise in US contexts.

In many ways, I regret my choice of UK-to-US Word of the Year. In other ways, I felt I didn’t have a choice: the word kept coming up in American contexts this year. And it is:

bollocks

…which has a good AmE equivalent in bullshit. At least, the use that has come into AmE has that equivalent. In BrE the word means ‘testicles’, and by some extension it is used to mean ‘nonsense’. But as is often the case for loanwords, the people borrowing it are not always aware of its other meanings, including the anatomical one. Another use that doesn't seem to be  making its way across is the phrase the dog’s bollocks, which means something good—a cruder, stronger and less dated version of other animal metaphors like (orig. AmE) the bee’s knees or (now AmE) thecat’s meow. 

In support of bollocks as WotY we have Newcastle Brown Ale’s US (and not UK) advertising campaign:

We also have Richard Hammond of Top Gear promoting its use in the US, before admitting that it’s already started making its way into AmE:

Sightings in AmE start before 2012, of course. The Corpus of Historical American English, which has materials from 1810 to 2009 shows this trend in the last few decades (each column stands for a decade and each number is per approximately 25 million words).

The reason I’m not too excited about having bollocks as my WotY, despite feeling compelled to have it, is that it joins 2006’s wanker on my list of WotYs, which means that now one third of my UK-to-US WotYs are rather crude. SbaCL continues to secure its place in the list of websites banned in schools.

Are Americans really so crude that all we want is vulgar words from the UK? Absolutely not. But if you’ve ever been around exchange students, you’ll have discovered that it’s much easier to swear in one’s second language. British vulgarities are perceived as fun and quaint in American English. They are also perceived as fun and enjoyable by many British English speakers—swearing is a major British pastime.  

But it’s not seen as quaint, and the British are more aware of contexts in which these words should not be used. As I noted in a previous post, The Advertising Standards Authority's 'Deleting Expletives' [link is pdf] report of 2000 put bollocks as the 8th most offensive word according to the British public. Words lower in the 'severity of offence' list than bollocks include arsehole, twat and shit. Most British people I know would contest that ordering of offensiveness, with bollocks feeling pretty mild these days. But still, it's not something that would easily make its way onto a billboard.

So, the UK-to-US WotY for 2012 is bollocks. In so many ways. There’s still a little time to get a last-minute US-to-UK word nomination in. I hope to post it tomorrow.