In April, Jody V. sent me a link to this New York Times article with the note "I noticed the word shouty in this piece. I can’t recall having seen the word used in an American publication before."
Here it is in the context of the article:
But in a social media post after talks with Mr. Rutte, the president reiterated his ire and threw in Greenland for good measure: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!”
At least there was no new talk of leaving NATO, for now. The shouty missive elicited no major pushback from foreign leaders. This was Mr. Trump being Mr. Trump: tedious, repetitive, vulgar.
Indeed, shouty is a very British word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
Characterized by shouting. Of a person: inclined to shout, habitually shouting. Of a sound (esp. the human voice): having a harsh quality comparable to shouting; strident, loud.
But as the NYT example shows, one can be shouty without using the voice: the shouty missive is so characteri{s/z}ed because of its shouty all-caps typing.
Though the OED traces shouty back to the late 19th century, it only starts to show up in any numbers in British books in the 1990s (and really takes off around 2000), as shown in the Google Books Ngram graph below. Before that point, it was probably used in speech more than in print.
The prevalence of this voice-related word in 21st-century writing might have something to do with how we've started using the (electronically) written word in place of our physical voices. Shouty is now almost as likely to refer, as it did in NYT, to text as to oral communication. In the British portion of the News on the Web corpus, for example, two of the top five collocating nouns for shouty are capitals and caps:
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The fact that shouty has shown up in the New York Times is more Ben Yagoda's beat than mine, but it's not one he's covered yet on his Not One-Off Britishisms blog. It's nice to see that the author of the piece, Serge Schmemann, is 81. It just goes to show that one's vocabulary grows throughout life and trendy British slang isn't just for the [used more in AmE] young'uns.
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