2015 US-to-UK Word of the Year: mac and cheese

And now...the US-to-UK Word of the Year!

Nominated by Rosemary, and supported by Simon K and my spouse, I'm sure this is going to be met with a chorus of "Bah, humbug! I've never heard that" (as was said in the nominations discussion). But these things happen. We are not each the cent{er/re} of the universe, so we don't all experience everything. This one will, however, be known to those who go to trendy foodie pubs--because what the trendy foodie pubs are into at the moment is Americana. There are two near my house that serve (AmE in this sense) barbecue, boasting their own smokehouses. Another now speciali{z/s}es in Buffalo wings (serving them, somewhat incongrously, with hush puppies, which are associated with the cuisine of the American South, not northeastern Buffalo, NY--but I'm sure that any Chinese person looking at a US or UK Chinese restaurant menu sees greater horrors than this). All the other pubs are serving pulled pork, in paninis, in burritos, in soups...  Now that I think of it, I can think of more pubs in my area that are serving American food now than those serving bangers and mash.

And as part of this trend, fancy dishes of pasta with cheese are making it onto menus. This dish has a name in the UK, and that name is macaroni cheese, but when it shows up in these new milieus, served as a side dish or with often other 'gourmet' ingredients, it is increasingly given its slangy American name. And this name is the 2015 US-to-UK Word of the Year:

mac and cheese

Or possibly mac'n'cheese or mac n'cheese, depending on the menu or recipe you're reading. (I'll just use & to stand for all these variations.) The BBC food website uses it for "glam mac and cheese"and the Daily Mail uses it in several articles. (I enjoy mentioning these two for their hypocrisy: they regularly publish items bemoaning the 'Americani{s/z}ation' of BrE.) There seem to be two London catering companies dedicated to variations on the dish. The sandwich-shop chain EAT has it, but its competitor Pret-a-Manger sticks to the traditional macaroni cheese. (Warning: the one called Macaroni Cheese Prosciutto has cauliflower in it!)

Now, it must be mentioned here that the traditional AmE for this dish is macaroni and cheese--mac & cheese is a recent-ish and informal variation. Until this recent invasion of gourmet versions, I would have only used mac & cheese to refer to the kind that comes from a box, particularly the Kraft brand: an orange staple of many American childhoods.

The and-ful AmE and and-less BrE names for the dish seem to have developed independently in the 19th century. The lack of and (or with or any other connector) in the BrE is kind of interesting. One sees it also in  cauliflower cheese, i.e. cauliflower with cheese sauce. It seems to follow the Romance-language structure of identifying the type of sauce after the main ingredient (e.g. spaghetti bolognese, a much-used term in BrE--but one that came into the language much later than macaroni cheese). This may be French influence in the kitchen, but note that it differs from similar French food descriptions, in that cheese is not an adjective. French can't have noun+noun without a preposition to link the nouns--there is no macaroni fromage, it's macaroni au fromage.

So, mac & cheese is a very current import into certain eating cultures of the UK and a good WotY on that criterion. It also arguably displaces a native BrE term, which makes it interesting in another way. It seems that the reason for its import is to make it more exciting--an import from another food culture. Much like when, for a while, we started using pashmina instead of shawl. It's a matter of exotic style.

I can imagine another objection to mac & cheese as Word of the Year. There will be someone who will complain that "it's not a word".  To them I say: it is only "not a word" on the most primitive definition of word--a written stretch of language with no spaces. The problem with that definition is that it is entirely circular: Why is it a word? Because it has no spaces. Why does it have no spaces? Because it is a word. Written language exists to make spoken language more permanent, and sometimes it reflects the linguistic facts better than others. As a linguistic unit, mac & cheese counts as a word because it has a part of speech: it is a noun. If we make it plural, we do so once at the end: I'll have three mac and cheeses. And it refers to a single (though complex) thing--which has more than just macaroni and cheese in it; so it's not just a descriptive phrase, it's the name for a particular kind of dish. But, really, if you're going to complain that this Word of the Year is "not a word", I'd like to direct your energies toward(s) Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year--which has no part of speech and can't even be pronounced.

Thus ends the SbaCL WotY activities for 2015! For the UK-to-US WotY, see my previous post.