Separated by a Common Language

I've been struck by the lack of election-related 2024 Words of the Year from the English dictionaries  (for a list, see November's newsletter). So I am here to repair that with my US-to-UK Word of the Year: 

landslide

...which was much-used in its figurative sense to describe the result of the UK election that ended 14 years of Conservative government.

some landslide headlines in UK media

Here's how it it's been showing up in British news sources: 

landslide in UK sources in the NOW corpus

The 2017 peak relates to both discussion of political landslides and a number of literal ones, particularly a big one in China.

Though the Google Books data is not as up-to-date, it shows a general increase in the term in BrE, starting at the turn of the 20th century, but speeding up from the 1980s. (It's possible that has something to do with the 1975 hit song "Landslide" by the Anglo-American band Fleetwood Mac.) I'm not too worried about the dip in the 2000s. Most words I look up in Google ngrams dip in the 2000s for some reason.

landslide in UK publications in Google Books

Whether or not we continue to hear of electoral landslides, it's a fair bet there will be more environmental ones in the news. Landslide is likely to hang around in BrE. That doesn't mean it will necessarily boot out landslip. It's handy to have different words to represent the difference between disasters and inconveniences. 

So much of the "news" this year was about female popular music stars. The year started with Beyonce going country, then Charlie XCX declared a brat summer (leading Collins dictionaries to declare brat their Word of the Year). Facebook keeps feeding me videos of Ariana Grande acting and interviewing, and an incredible number of my middle-aged (and beyond) friends went to see Taylor Swift. Album-of-the-year lists are filled with female solo artist megastars. 

It is Ms Swift who gives us our UK-to-US Word of the Year:

fortnight

This is the title of the single she released in April, co-written by Jack Antonoff and featuring Post Malone. It has been nominated for Record of the Year in the 2025 Grammy Awards. Thank you to Helen Zaltzman for nominating the word!

Ben Yagoda noticed US use of fortnight all the way back in 2012 on his Not One-Off Britishisms (NOOBs) blog. But as the above graph shows, it was not much more than a one-off then. Its last peak (in US usage) came in 2018. The game Fortnite was released in 2017 and took over the world in 2018. This seems to be unrelated to the fortnight surge, which seems to come from the news story about the Thai boys' football team rescued after two weeks trapped in a cave. US news outlets repeated sentences with the word fortnight from non-US news agencies, including Reuters. A fair proportion of the 2018 number are also from US versions of foreign-owned sources like The Guardian and Al Jazeera. 

When I was growing up in New York State, a beanie was a silly kind of skull cap, mostly worn by young people. My high school gave away felt ones like this (though with different letters). At the time, it was a very retro/jokey thing to wear.

The word beanie is originally an Americanism, derived from bean (also originally AmE), a slang term for 'head'. The OED entry for beanie was written in 1972 and has not been updated since. All its examples hint at felt hats—not necessarily silly ones like the one in the picture, but small hats worn toward the back of the head:

At some point after I moved to the UK in 2000, I started noticing British folk using beanie for what I had called a winter hat, others call a stocking cap, and Canadians (and some Americans) would call a toque (or tuque). It's a knit(ted) hat that might be rolled up at the bottom. Soon after that, I started noticing Americans using beanie (in) this way. So I was never sure where this use of beanie had originated. Nevertheless, it's definitely the predominant sense of the word now.

Google Image Search results for beanie

For some reason, I was thinking about beanies yesterday, and so I tweeted about them on Bluesky (yes, I'm reclaiming the word tweet). Monika Bednarek, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, replied that she thought the knit(ted) hat usage was Australian. Aha!

Now, I have no access to Australian dictionaries, and as we've seen, the OED is out of date on this. On top of that, there's no option to look at Australian sources only in Google Books ngrams. But Wikipedia says:

In New Zealand and Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a toque in Canada and parts of the US, but also may apply to the kind of skull cap historically worn by surf lifesavers and still worn during surf sports.

The lifesaver's beanie is much more like the silly American school cap. This photo comes from a National Post article about Australian lifesavers choosing (some years ago) to continue to wear the hat despite it being "uncool". 

But surfers seem to like to wear knit(ted) hats, so perhaps it was the association with surfing that transferred the meaning to the knit(ted) kind? Maybe? At any rate, it does look Australian in the 2013 Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

beanie in GloWbE

Since there are a lot of meanings of beanie (and use in proper names, like Beanie Baby), I checked again with kn* before beanie to capture knit(ted) beanies, and Australia still dominates:

kn* beanie in GloWbE

Now, whether the new use of beanie spread directly from Australia to both US and UK is another question. I suspect it probably travel(l)ed by many routes. Initially, it does look like the new use took off more quickly in the UK (around 2005), and it remains higher there.

But we don't know how many of those hits are about Beanie Babies or other uses of the word. So here it is again with knit or knitted before beanie. The difference in acceleration of the term is no longer evident, though BrE still uses it more than AmE.

The first ngram graph also shows beanie hat in greater numbers in the UK than in the US. This is also true in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

This falls into a pattern with goatee beard and chocolate brownie, where originally AmE words are sometimes two-word compounds in BrE, presumably because the addition of an 'old' word helps people to interpret the less-familiar word. 

So, an Americanism turned Australianism which was then populari{s/z}ed in US and UK. If English is any one thing, then it is a mutant.