Showing posts with label WotY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WotY. Show all posts

2011 UK-to-US Word of the Year: kettling

This year, I'm spreading the SbaCL Words-of Year announcement into two posts -- partly to make up for hardly blogging at all this autumn and partly so that I can go to bed tonight.  So, starting with the BrE-to-AmE import of the year, I give you: 

kettling

I'm thinking of it here mostly as a gerund (a verb made into a noun by adding -ing), but, of course, the verb itself has been imported too: to kettle - '(for police) to herd protesters/demonstrators into a restricted, exitless area in order to restrain them'.  Now, this is fairly new to BrE too, and Michael Quinion wrote about it last December. He traces its use in English to happenings around the London G20 summit in 2009 and notes that it seems to be a calque (loan-translation) from German. When students were protesting and then kettled in London at the end of 2010, a number of American readers of internet newspapers contacted me to ask what it meant.  A year later, American newspapers use the word to describe the treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters.  This Gawker piece uses the similar-though-not-police-related AmE word corral in its headline, then explains the police procedure as kettling in the article.

Kettling makes an ideal SbaCL WotY for two reasons:
  1. It's a word of this year.  Other nominees like gobsmacked  have been slowly making their way into AmE for a number of years. Kettling is very 2011. 
  2. America didn't really need it (we had corral), but took it anyway.  This is the usual complaint about AmE imports to BrE: "Why use this horrible foreign word when we have perfectly good words from OUR side of the ocean that we should have PRIDE in?!  We're being Americanised!! Or, worse, AMERICANIZED!!"  This just goes to show that AmE can both dish it out and take it.

So, congratulations kettling and many thanks to Nancy Friedman for nominating it and other commenters and tweeters for supporting it.

Before turning to the AmE-to-BrE winner tomorrow, let me just mention an AmE-to-BrE also-ran that relates to kettling: occupy.  It was nominated by Roger Owen Green and supported by others, but I don't think it qualifies.  The meaning of occupy in Occupy Wall Street and later Occupy London Stock Exchange (etc.) is a meaning that was already common to the two dialects. What has been imported is not a new word, or a new meaning of a word, but a new slogan or a new template for a proper name. Definitely influential, but not what I'd consider a suitable WotY.

So, come back tomorrow for the AmE-to-BrE winner!



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Word of the Year 2011: Nominations, please!

(A lightly edited version of last year's announcement for this year. There is one more week of the Term from Hell, after which there is the Marking from Hell, but I do hope to get back to regular blogging soon.)

Word of the Year season has begun (though I must say, I do not approve of announcing WotYs in November. Oxford Dictionaries is so cruel to December). This means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY escapades.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:

1. Best AmE-to-BrE import
2. Best BrE-to-AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2011, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.

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Words of the Year 2010

Thank you to everyone who nominated words for this year's SbaCL Words of the Year.  I needed them more than ever this year, as I had few ideas or preferences of my own on this matter.  But thanks to my kind readers, we have some winners.


Let's start with the more competitive AmE-to-BrE category.  Here we've had some nice suggestions, and the hono(u)r nearly went to primary in the sense of 'preliminary election'. Reader-in-Ireland mollymooly had suggested this at the end of 2009, noting that the Conservative party had an open primary to choose a candidate for the House of Commons seat for Totnes. Perhaps it should have beaten staycation last year--but it came to my attention a little too late.  But it was ousted as frontrunner in the last day of nominations, when SP nominated a gerund that has both been discussed in the news this year and made its way into UK news.  And that gerund, The 2010 American-to-British Word of the Year is:

shellacking

The word came into the news, of course, when President Obama said that the Democrats had taken a shellacking in the midterm elections. It made enough of an impression in its native US that it came 7th in Merriam-Webster's top 10 words of 2010.  But it required even more looking-up in the UK.  The OED lists it as 'originally and chiefly U.S.', and it also lists the plain verb, shellac (note the lack of k!), as originally and chiefly AmE (while the noun, for the varnish-type substance, is not dialectally marked).  The BBC Magazine ran an article on 'What is a Shellacking?', David Crystal discussed it on Radio 4, Michael Quinion covered it on World Wide Words, and Jenny McCartney in the Telegraph thanked Obama for 'an extremely useful addition to the lexicon'--just to name a few UK commentators on the subject. One does seem to find shellacking in the UK sports press (especially regarding [BrE] football/[AmE] soccer) before Obama brought the word to public attention, but since Obama's statement, it seems as if the frequency of that usage has increased.  For example, in the Guardian, there are seven uses in November and December, but only two in Sept/Oct.  (However, there are five during the World Cup in South Africa and other clumps of them during the year.)  A search for the word in UK political contexts shows up in colloquial contexts such as:

Like, for instance, his [Cameron's] current 'shellacking' (love that word) over a supposed lack of vision and confidence in the recent Guildhall speech. [Skol303 comment on Nick Robinson's blog]

Vince Cable being torn a new one by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight...she got him so rattled he developed a Herbert Lom-like twitch (left eye) halfway though the shellacking by Wark (I kid you not). [samandmai comment on digital spy]

So thank you, SP, for a fantastic nomination!

And on to the BrE-to-AmE winner.  This is always a tougher category--in part, because I live in the UK, but mostly because of the lesser impact that UK news and popular culture makes in the US. The winner is not a particularly 2010 word--instead, it's one that's been making steady progress in AmE over the past decade.  But in hono(u)r of the near-culmination of the Harry Potter film adaptations, the British-to-American Word of the Year is:

ginger


...in particular, the adjectival use to describe hair colo(u)r and, to some extent, the noun use to mean 'a red-haired person'. Twice this year I've heard from US parents (including Mark Allen) who have said that their children use ginger in this more British way because of the influence of the Harry Potter stories, which features the red-headed Weasley family, including Harry's sidekick Ron. (Here's my old post on the topic.)  The much-discussed new Google n-gram tool shows 'ginger hair' steadily increasing in American English books since 1995, though Harry Potter was not released in the States till September 1998.  In British English books, however, there's an increase in the Harry Potter days (after some years of decline), but what looks to be a decrease as we come toward(s) the present. It's hard to say if that's meaningful--and unfortunately I don't have access to any British corpus that takes us up to date.  In the more reliable Corpus of Historical American English, there are 8 uses between 1940 and 1979, none in the 1980s, five in the 1990s and 8 in the 2000s, which seems to show the Harry Potter effect.  It's harder for me to find incursions of the noun ginger in the meaning 'red-head' in AmE, since one must search for word strings, not meanings.  All I can think to do is to note that the Urban Dictionary entry for the noun ginger include some contributions that spell color without a u.  Further evidence is welcome in the comments.


Also welcome in the comments are your thoughts on whether I've done an effective or abominable job in choosing this year's Words of the Year.  But if you don't like them and didn't nominate any, I reserve the right to roll my eyes at you.  Through the computer.  Ouch.
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Word of the Year 2010: nominations, please!

(A lightly edited version of last year's announcement for this year.)

Word of the Year season has begun. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2010, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week before Christmas.
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Words of the Year 2009: staycation and go missing

My thanks to everyone who has engaged in the nominations and debate on Words of the Year for 2009. Here's a reminder of the rules (I'm a Libran with Virgo rising/ascendant, I've gotta have rules):
We have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2009, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.
And now, without further ado...

The 2009 SbaCL Best American English to British Import is...

staycation

Yes, the recession has hit the UK and it's become both stylish and necessary to forgo a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation in Thailand or Morocco and instead brave the British weather in a seaside town or scenic valley. But wait...what's that you say? That's not what it originally meant in American English? All the better for proclaiming it the best AmE to BrE import of the year!

The word is eminently American--the British do not use vacation to refer to something that one can 'go on'. (They do use it to refer to the time in which, say, university is out of session--but not for the non-work activities that one does while free from one's term-time duties. That's your holiday.) And while more British alternatives, like home-iday and holistay have been proposed, they have not caught on:

CoinageGoogle hits
on .uk sites
Broliday1
homeliday73
holistay445
home-iday613
staycation16,000

Word Spy's early AmE citations have it squarely as staying in your own home during one's time off--making a vacation/holiday of being at home (which may include doing the local touristy things or indulging oneself in other ways). WordNik's more current quotations show its use as being more 'vacationing/holidaying close to home'. In BrE it generally has the latter sense, and one's staycation might not be all that close to home, as long as it's in the UK. (Then again, many US states take longer to cross than the longest journeys in the UK, so 'close' is always relative...)

Why did it catch on? First, there was definitely a need for it. The British discuss holidays/vacations a lot more than Americans do, since they generally get a longer vacation/holiday period from their employment. And many of them use that time to go abroad. Abroad is pretty close, for one thing, and many people are keen to get some sun. (They ought to be. Did you know that "in the UK, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in all adults is around 14.5%, and may be more than 30% in those over 65 years old, and as high as 94% in otherwise healthy south Asian adults"?) Second, the euro strengthened while the pound weakened and other financial calamities. Third, the papers still had their travel sections and supplements to fill and, boy, do they like portmanteau words (or blends, as we linguists tend to call them).

But all of this doesn't tell us why the AmE one was preferred over the BrE equivalents. This may be a matter of taste, but I would say that it's just because staycation sounds better. Unlike home(l)iday, there's no unclarity about how to spell or pronounce it. Unlike holistay it doesn't sound like it should have TM after it. And unlike Broliday, you can immediately recogni{s/z}e the ingredients in the blend.

Thanks to Emmet for nominating this, and to the commentators on the nomination, who helped to seal its fate as AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year.



So, on to the BrE-to-AmE WotY. It's not a particularly new borrowing, but it generated a fair amount of discussion this year. Ladies and germs, I give you:

go missing

And now I brace myself for the complaints that "It's not a word!" Well, that depends on how you define word, and "Lexical Item of the Year" just doesn't have the same ring to it. And I make up the rules, so why am I having to answer to you, Little Commenter Voice in My Head?

At the Dictionary Society of North America conference this year, Garrison Bickerstaff of the University of Georgia gave a paper on the rise of go missing and its various forms (went, gone, going, etc.). His research, based on newpaper data from the past 10 years, shows that the form has steadily gained momentum in US newspapers. Meanwhile, it's also increased in frequency in UK newspapers--indicating that it is less and less seen as 'too informal' for the news. Here are some numbers from the first and last year in Bickerstaff's study. Each represents the number of forms of went missing (the most common form) per ten million words of his corpus:


19982007
AmE0.77014.675
BrE53.25398.400

So, while it is still not used in AmE at anything like the rate at which it's used in BrE, we can see that it has made definite inroads.

Bickerstaff was not the only academic type to ruminate on go missing this year--it was the subject of quite a bit of discussion on the American Dialect Society e-mail list. Another academic discussion was by Anya Luscombe of the Netherlands, who gave a paper on BBC Style at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference [warning: link is a pdf file]. Luscombe discusses four 'pet hates' of BBC writers, one of which is 'Americanisms' and another is go missing. While her work clearly isn't about the phrase in AmE, it's interesting to see how attitudes to it have changed in the BBC style guides. Luscombe quotes these editions:
Prior to 1992: no mention
1992: ‘“Gone missing” was originally Army slang. It now has wider use, and has become journalese.’
2000: ‘People do not “go missing”. They are missing or have been missing since.’
2003: ‘Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms. Disappear and vanish do not convince and they suggest dematerialisation, which is rare.’
And going further, a current BBC webpage says:
Missing
Perhaps it's to time to admit that further resistance against "go missing" is in vain. The problem comes when you are writing about the event in the past. " Mr Childers disappeared last Tuesday" is as improbable as "Mr Childers went missing" is ugly. ".....was last seen" is an acceptable alternative.
What I love about the importing of go missing into AmE is that American peevologists don't like it in spite of the fact that it is British! While Americans often suffer a verbal inferiority complex when they encounter a British English (standard or not), grumpy Americans are standing their ground on this one. Perhaps they don't realize that this phrase comes from the Mother Country?

Went missing was Grammar Girl's pet peeve of the year 2008. Another example comes from Peevologist-at-Large Robert Hartwell Fiske's Silence, language and society (reproduced by the eminently reasonable Mr Verb on his blog in June):
"Gone" or "went" missing is dreadfully popular today. Everyone from reporters on "CNN" to detectives (or their writers) on "Without a Trace" now prefer it.

People are so dull-witted and impressionable that, today, in this country, the popularity of "gone" or "went missing" has soared. Words like "disappeared," "vanished," "misplaced," "stolen," "lost," "deserted," "absconded" are seldom heard today because "went missing" has less meaning, or less exact meaning, than any of them, and people, especially the media, perhaps, are afraid of expressing meaning. What's more, "went missing" sounds willful or deliberate, and, indeed, sometimes that connotation is accurate, but the child who has been kidnapped is hardly agreeable to having been so.

Now, that kind of language grumpiness is just precious (and published regularly in Mr Fiske's publication, the Vocabula Review)--language is changing because people are afraid of meaning anything. My goodness, I do hope Mr Fiske is wearing his tin foil hat because the media are probably right now trying to suck meaning directly from his brain so that they can club baby seals with it.

Go missing
is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

For more on this, I point you to another language commentator who picked up on this phrase this year, Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe (and not just because she quotes me!). It was her research on the phrase earlier in the year that put it in my mind as the frontrunner for the WotY crown, and it wears it well, I think.

Happy New Words!
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Words of the Year 2009

I'm celebrating (for two-and-a-half minutes) a major milestone in the preparation of the book manuscript (FINAL VERSION--eek!) that is due by the 30th (double EEK!) by logging on briefly for a little cut-and-paste posting. (Spot the differences between this and last year's version!)

Word of the Year season has begun. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2009, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. (I'll admit I have something in mind for category 2--but I can be persuaded.) I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness (WotYness?) in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. Click on the WotY tag at the bottom of this post in order to visit times gone by.

Vote early and often! I plan to announce the winners in the week after Christmas.
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Words of the Year 2008

Any organi{s/z}ation with any tangential relation words seems to make Word of the Year pronouncements these days (or these years, at least). I believe there is a correlation between how early the pronouncements are made and whether the organi{s/z}ation is trying to sell you something. The American Dialect Society wait(s) until January (when they have their annual meeting). And that is as it should be--one needs some perspective on the year in order to evaluate its words. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, are keen to get their press releases out in time to serve as subliminal reminders that dictionaries make great holiday gifts.

I have nothing to sell you, but I'm going to give you the SbaCL words of the year a little early this year--just to make sure that I get them out at all while a horrible deadline, not to mention a trip to the States and winter holidays and birthdays come (chiefly AmE) careening (=careering) toward(s) me. Words of the Year will be my airbag. (That metaphor is the evidence, if you need it, that my brain is not handling the pressure well.)

So, without further ado (wait, is that a drumroll I hear?), the SbaCL British-English- to-American-English Word of the Year is:

vet (verb, transitive)

meaning:
3. To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness. (OED)

as in:
It raises the singular question of when and how well the Senator's campaign vetted the woman he named to be his running mate. (commenter on NewsTrust, 2 September 2008)
"Wait, wait!" you say. "How can you count that as BrE to AmE? It was right here in my AmE dictionary all along!" Oh, it was, but wasn't it interesting for those of us who live in the UK to see the big deal that was made of this word in the American blogosphere and press--like this article on Slate and this one by the Word Detective. In fact, it was number 2 on Merriam-Webster's top ten words of the year and has provoked a backlash from people who became tired of and even hate the word. Thus, it qualifies as a WotY in that it 'came into its own' in AmE this year.

The Slate article tells us that:
Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s [...] Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945 but only in the context of a quote from "The Anatomy of Courage," a newly published study on the psychological effects of war by the Briton Lord Moran: "A young subaltern with 'dark eyes under long lashes, a pink and white complexion' was sent to Moran for 'vetting.' " The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959 (in an article on picking a new symphony director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic), pops up once in the 1960s, and then several times in the 1980s.
But the word continues to be put in (AmE) quotation marks/(BrE) inverted commas of the "scare quote" variety (for instance here and here), indicating that the verb is still considered a bit "foreign". (I'm not claiming here that the writers knew that vet is BrE, just that they don't feel that the word is at-home in their dialect.)

So, congratulations vet! And president-elect Obama!

Onwards and overwards to the SbaCL American-English-to-British-English Word of the Year. It's:
meh

That was rather anticlimatic, wasn't it? Let me try to spruce it up.

Ta-da! It's meh!

Maybe I should stop trying so hard. Meh is an interjection expressing indifference. While there was some debate among readers as to whether it qualifies as AmE-to-BrE, since it's most at home in a cyberspace that doesn't respect dialectal isoglosses, there's a widespread perception that it was populari{s/z}ed by that very American institution, The Simpsons. It's not the kind of word that British grandmothers are going about using (or American grandmothers, for that matter), but it made a splash recently when the Collins dictionary people announced that it would be included in their next edition, and their PR people ensured that the newspapers took up the story. I've since noticed my students using it, particularly on Facebook--one suspects that all the press attention has spread meh's popularity--or at least has made me more sensitive to it.

So, hurrah for meh and meh to hurrah!

Thanks to all who took the time to nominate a word. (Unlike last year, I've actually selected a nominated word. I'm softening up to you people.) Happy Word of the Year, and happy holidays!
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Words of the Year 2008 - nominations

Word of the Year season has begun, with bloggers calling for Word of the Year nominations and publishers showing little faith in the word-generating power of December. That means it's time for me to start the ball rolling for our little twist on WotY fever.

Long-term readers will know that we have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim. I'd like your nominations for the main categories. The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2008, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year.

Please nominate your favo(u)rites and give arguments for their WotY-worthiness—in the comments to this post. It might be helpful to see my reasoning on why past words were WotY worthy and other nominations weren't. So click away for 2007's nominations and results and 2006's nominations and results.

Fire away! Please!
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2007's Words of the Year

Better late than never, I hope (I have a fairly good excuse...), here are my picks for SbaCL Words of the Year. Thanks to all of you who have nominated words...

US-to-UK Word of the Year

In the category of Best AmE to BrE Import, I was fairly convinced by dearieme's nomination of subprime (though I took some convincing; see comments back here for the discussion). But I've decided against it in the end because (a) I'd like to see if it lasts in BrE beyond the current mortgage crisis, (b) the American Dialect Society chose it as their Word of the Year, so it's already had a lot of attention (and I like to support the [orig. AmE] underdog), and (c) I was reminded of another AmE word that made British headlines this year, which has demonstrated staying power in BrE.

So....the AmE-to-BrE SbaCL Word of the Year is:

cookie


Why, you ask? Well, British television has been wracked by controversy this year because of several incidents in which contest results had been fixed, and none of these was stranger than the Blue Peter controversy. On that children's program(me), there was a viewer vote on what to name the new Blue Peter kitten. The viewers voted for Cookie, but the production team named the cat Socks instead. This is how the Blue Peter website explains the situation to the kids:
Back in January last year we introduced you to a new kitten and asked you to suggest names that would suit him. You gave us lots of great ideas and then voted for your favourite name on the website.
Your first choice was Cookie and your second choice was Socks. Part of the production team working on the programme at the time decided that it would be better to choose Socks, as they felt this suited the kitten better. This was wrong because we had said that it was your vote that would decide.
They then tried to make up for their misstep by introducing another kitten and naming it Cookie. No one seems to know why Cookie was deemed unsuitable. One theory is that it's because the name could encourage child obesity. I can't help but wonder if it wasn't because the name was felt to be too non-traditional (i.e. American!).

But the success of Cookie in a poll of children indicates that the word is now entrenched in BrE. What it doesn't show is that the meaning of cookie has shifted between AmE and BrE. In AmE, cookie refers to what BrE speakers would refer to as biscuits, but also to a range of baked goods that were not typically available in Britain until recently--what we can call an 'American-style cookie'--that is, one that is soft and (arguably) best eaten hot. Since in the UK these are almost always bought (at places like Ben's Cookies or Millie's Cookies), rather than home-baked, they also tend to be of a certain (largish) size. In BrE, biscuit retains its old meaning and applies to things like shortbread, rich tea biscuits, custard creams and other brittle things that can be dunked into one's tea, but cookie denotes only the bigger, softer American import. (In fact, twice this year I heard Englishpeople in shops debating the definition of cookie, and had noted this for further discussion on the blog...and here it is. For previous discussion of this and other baked good terminology, click here.)

Postscript (Jan 2015): Since writing this I've given a talk about how often American words don't mean the same in the UK. Here's the slide on cookie:



UK-to-US Word of the Year:


The front-runner in the reader nominations for best BrE-to-AmE import was pint, to refer to a unit of beer. The nominators report that the pint measurement is not literal in this case (and anyhow, the British pint is 118 millilit{er/re}s bigger than the American). I've not experienced non-literal use of pint in the US...but then again I wasn't drinking on my last trip to the US. As fine as the support for that nomination was, I'm going to be entirely selfish (what, again?!) and give the award to a word that was personally very relevant this year. So, the BrE-to-AmE SbaCL Word of the Year is:

(baby) bump


That is, the abdominal protuberance evident in pregnancy, illustrated (unflatteringly) here:

I distinctly remember first hearing this term from Kate Winslet (not in person!) when she was pregnant with her daughter in 2000, the year I moved here. At that point, I assumed it was a Winsletism, but soon learned it was general, informal BrE. (While the OED has only added it in its 2007 draft, its first citation for it is from 1986. The first American citation is from 1999.) Shortly thereafter the American celebrity gossip media started using it too, to my chagrin, as I thought it was a nasty term--too (orig./chiefly AmE) cutesy, in a crude way. And I'm not the only one. Google-search hate baby bump, and one finds lots of American discussions of the term, including:
Can we have a moratorium on the phrase "baby bump"? Ugh... I hate it so much. (commenter on Jezebel)

And yes, by the way, I, too, absolutely hate that stupid term "baby bump". It is EXTREMELY annoying. It sounds like something that a 12-yr old might say because their uncomfortable with the word "pregnant". Any adult who uses the term is a jackass. (commenter on Huffington Post)

The term 'baby bump' sounds so juvenile and pedestrian. How did this term come in to existence, and why do presumably semi-intelligent people use it? (commenter on StyleDash.com)
No one in these discussions seems to reali{s/z}e that its origins are British, and one wonders whether they'd have more affection for the term if they could associate it with "the Queen's English" (not that Her Majesty would ever say baby bump). I should say, in the UK, one is more likely just to hear bump, while in the US it seems more often to be prefaced by baby.
As I said, I used to hate this use of bump, but goodness, if you've got one, it's a useful term. So, in hono(u)r of ex-bump Grover, it is the BrE-to-AmE WotY.
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Words of the Year 2007

Apologies for my silence over the past couple of weeks. I’m afraid that I’ll be silent for a while longer, as I’m a guest of the National Health Service, having been in (the) hospital for two weeks now, and expecting to be here for a while longer. Everything’s going pretty well so far—I feel well-cared-for. What would be great is if I could use the time for blogging, but although there is an internet connection on the bedside television, almost any site you’d want to use is blocked—including Blogger, SbaCL and, oddly enough, my doctor’s (BrE) surgery/(AmE) office.

So, the very kind Better Half has brought me his laptop so that I can type a little message and he can post it for me. While there are many things that I could blog about these days (my backlog will get back into ridiculous mode, I’m certain), let’s turn it over to you for a while with our second annual SbaCL Words of the Year competition. (Since I can’t get to my blog, I can’t do nice links to past postings, so please hit on the tags below to get to related posts, including last year’s WotY discussions).

Last year, we had three categories for WotY. I’ll keep the third category for the time being, but will reserve the right not to make an award in that category if there isn’t a clear winner. The categories are:

1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
3. Best word coined by a reader of this blog (on this blog)

For the first two categories, the word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2007, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year.

How it works: you nominate words—preferably with arguments for their WotY-worthiness—in the comments to this post. From those nominations, I will choose the winning words—at the end of 2007, or the beginning of 2008, depending on how this hospital business goes.
In the meantime, I will not be answering e-mails. You’re welcome to continue sending requests for coverage of BrE/AmE issues, but please don’t expect any quick responses, and please use the comments section, not the e-mail option, for nominating words.

All best wishes for the holidays!
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ish and moreish

Do we have our first contender in the soon-to-be-annual SbaCL Word of the Year awards? The two main WotY categories are:
  • a heretofore BrE word that's found success in AmE
  • a heretofore AmE word that's found success in BrE
In the first of those categories, we seem to have ish. Peter in the UK wrote to ask about the suffix -ish some months ago:
Do Americans use the informal suffix "ish" to indicate vagueness.? "She was wearing a yellowish dress":"He was tallish" etc.. We also use it with time e.g. "What time shall we call round?" "Oh,make it around eightish". I have even heard a double "ish" to indicate even greater flexibility "Oh make it eightishish".
To which I privately replied:
Yes, -ish is used in AmE too [...] What is British is the use of ish as a word.
For example, a Scottish blogger writes that s/he's 'temporarily working, ish'--meaning that s/he's kind of working or working a bit. When it's used in this way, it serves as an adverb--usually modifying an entire sentence/proposition. Ish is also a useful answer to questions, as in the following OED example (draft entry, 2003) from a Northern Irish writer:
1995 C. BATEMAN Cycle of Violence vi. 94 ‘Trust Davie Morrow.’ ‘You know him?’ ‘Ish. He's a regular across the road.’
So there it's modifying the (un-uttered) proposition 'I know him'.

Of the OED examples so far, the first (1986) is English (well, it's the Sunday Times--I don't know who the author was), the second (1990) I can't tell (does anyone know Petronella Pulsford?), the next two are Irish (North and South). (Note that just because its first example is from an English --or at least national UK-- source doesn't mean that it didn't start out in Ireland...the OED has to rely on printed sources, and it would have existed in speech for a while before print.) In 2002, we get to one in an American publication, but it's spoken by someone in London, and the apparent foreignness of the expression is clear from the fact that the NYT has to explain it:
2002 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 5 Sept. D8/5 Mr. Langmead, speaking by telephone from London, hesitated. ‘Ish,’ he said, employing the international shorthand for slight hedge.
But today I was reading Mr. Verb's post on degrammaticali{s/z}ation (i.e. affixes become independent words) and found that his (an American's) primary example was ish, indicating that it must have more currency in the US now. I certainly hadn't experienced it before I moved to the UK in 2000. Is it popular enough to qualify as BrE-to-AmE Word of the Year? You will have to be the judge of that. I'll formally open nominations in December.

But as long as we're on ish, a BrE word that really fills a gap for me is moreish (sometimes more-ish) as in These chocolate biscuits are really moreish--i.e., they make you want to eat more of them. Here's a real example from a review of Tia Maria creme liqueur in Scotland on Sunday:
Tia Maria has blended a winner here. It is a moreish mix of Jamaican coffee, rum and cream that slides down so easily it should be served in an iced glass - pint-sized.
As my mother likes to say: "'To each his own', said the old woman as she kissed the cow."

For a more amusing example, watch this bit of Peep Show. (And if you don't know what Blue Peter is, see here.)
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Words of the Year 2006

Ta-da! Here are the results of the first annual SbaCL Words of the Year Awards, celebrating the words that demonstrated a lessening of the separation of our common language in 2006. I thank readers of this blog for their nominations. My selections from among those nominations have been based upon the timeliness of the nomination (in other words, if the word enjoyed a particular surge in popularity this year) and the success of the word in the relevant dialect--i.e., whether people are actually using the word.

The first category is Most Useful Import from American English to British English. This is a difficult category because of the regularity with which words travel from AmE to BrE these days. Nominations included Size 00, through when used to describe an inclusive range (e.g. the numbers 1 through 5), and cookie. Only the first of these meets the timeliness criterion, but I think it must be disqualified on two counts. First, its lack of nativi{s/z}ation in BrE is evident from the fact that no one seems to be able to agree how to pronounce it. Second, it remains a name for an American thing. American size 00 is equivalent to British size 2. The term size 00 was in the news a lot, but it is regularly noted as an American phenomenon.

So, the winner of best AmE import to BrE is...


muffin topthe roll of fat that bulges over the waistband of (BrE) trousers/(AmE) pants that are too tight and too low
Muffin top is found almost as often in the UK news as size 00 this year, but when it is used, it's usually to refer to British muffin tops--thus clearly filling a gap in the BrE lexicon. Here we must take issue with Hadley Freeman at the Guardian who incorrectly (a) confuses a muffin top with a double hip (a phenomenon that is not dependent on tight jeans) and (b) claims that muffin top is a British coining. As I've pointed out here before, the term depends on an understanding of American muffins that few BrE speakers have--since it's rare to see an "American-style muffin" in the UK that has an actual muffin top, as illustrated at the right here. And it's been popular in AmE slang for several years now, while it's still used somewhat tentatively in BrE. The majority of my 19-year-old students did not know the term at the start of the Autumn (AmE prefers Fall) term this year, but few Americans who have recently survived high school would have missed the term.

On to our next category: Most Useful Import from British English to American English. Here there is a clear winner, with no other nominations meeting the timeliness criterion. And the WotY goes to:

wanker (and its derivatives)
a detestable person, a loser, a self-aggrandi{s/z}ing person
The meaning of wanker is difficult to make precise, but it derives from the BrE verb to wank, i.e. to masturbate. Wanker has been sneaking into American popular culture under the radar for some years (e.g. Peggy Bundy's maiden name on television's Married with Children [1987] was Wanker, which was certainly meant as a joke that could make it past the censors' noses--though it would have more trouble doing so on British television). But it came into its own in AmE this year, especially, it seems, in political blogging, where many variants on the term are found, including: wankiest (in American Prospect), wankerism (quoted on Firedoglake), wank-fest (in a letter to Salon.com), wankery (on Brendan Calling from the Underground). Though some of these don't include the -er suffix, I'm treating this as backformation from wanker rather than derivation from wank because of my hunch that wanker was the vanguard word in the move from BrE to AmE. In other words, the British had the word wank and made wanker out of it, wanker travel(l)ed to America, then lost its -er. Notice that all of the above words are derogatory, but there is at least one positive member of the wank(er) family: wankalicious. According to the Urban Dictionary (never the most reliable source), this describes something "so good it compares with masturbation". My understanding of the term, however, is that it's something so good that it inspires masturbation. This one definitely derives from wank without involving wanker.

Finally, our last category of the evening, Best Word Coined by a Reader of this Blog. And the WotY goes to:
Googleschaden
"the way in which pundits' past pontifications can now come back to haunt them"

Regular reader/commenter Paul Danon created the word, after Andrew Sullivan created the definition (and an ill-fitting word) on his blog, which was forwarded to this blog by M.A.Peel during the nomination stage. Sullivan then noted Paul's word on his blog, leading more than 9500 of his readers to this blog (and the entry in which Paul coined the term) in two days. While I'm sure many of you have created new words this year, and we even witnessed monetary exchange for a new word on this blog, Googleschaden was definitely the one that got the most attention this year. Tip for next year's WotY contest: make sure your word has a good PR machine behind it.

Thanks again to everyone who's played a role in making the first SbaCL WotY happen!
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Word of the Year update

The response to my call for British Word of the Year nominations has not been overwhelming, in part, no doubt, because so many words of the year have already been proclaimed by various sources. So, instead, I propose the following categories for recognition, which are more in keeping with the purpose of this blog:
  • Most useful import from American English to British English
  • Most useful import from British English to American English
  • Best word invented by a reader of this blog
The second category is the hardest, I think. Do people have any ideas about BrE words that have made a splash in AmE this year? I can think of some that were popular in recent years, but this year is harder...possibly because Sacha Baron Cohen's presence is Kazakh, rather than West Staines-ian this year. (What do you call someone from West Staines? Nevermind--I can imagine the answers that some of you might come up with.)

I do recall that we discussed some BrE words from lyrics by The Streets that AmE speakers had been introduced to--but I think I need to hear from people who spend more time Stateside before declaring the most useful BrE import to AmE.
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nominations: British Word of the Year

The American Dialect Society will soon be voting on its Word of the Year for 2006. The WotY is a word that best captures the Zeitgeist of that year. (They/we [when I'm there] also vote for words in other categories, for example 'most likely to succeed', 'most unnecessary', etc.) The WotY is often a new word, but it doesn't have to be, so long as it fits the bill.

I'd like to propose a British Word of the Year vote. This is how it works:
  1. You nominate a word (or expression) that you feel captures some particularly "2006" aspect of UK life. You can nominate via the comments for this entry, or by e-mail.
  2. On/around 1 Jan 2007, I present a shortlist of nominations for your vote.
  3. Voting closes 8 Jan, and a winner will be crowned.
The only word I've discussed here that looks like a contender is WAG.

Nominations are open!
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)