Separated by a Common Language

Two matters for this belated blog post:  Words of the Year nominations and the Untranslatables Month summary.

WotY Nominations
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 2012, 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 in order to visit times gone by.

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


Untranslatables II
Last year, as a birthday treat to myself, I declared October to be Untranslatables Month, which meant that I tweeted an expression that was unique to one dialect or another, in that its meaning was not captured by an expression in the other dialect. This year, I did it again, but made the job easier on myself by deciding not to tweet on weekends. Here's a summary of the 'untranslatables' I tweeted. In some cases, you can follow links to places where I (or someone) have discussed them in more detail.

• BrE lie-in (noun). The act of staying in bed later in the morning than usual. Sleeping not required, but lazing is. Example: 'The family was away, so I had a lie-in on Saturday as an early birthday treat.'  (AmE & BrE both have sleeping in for when one sleeps late.)

• AmE cater-corner, kitty-corner, catty-corner (regional variations), adj & adv, meaning 'diagonally opposite to'. Example: 'I live kitty-corner to the bordello'.

•  BrE builder's tea. Very strong (hot, of course), basic (i.e. not a special cultivar/flavo[u]r) tea with milk and lots of sugar. The 'lots of sugar' part is in most definitions for it, but some of my correspondents don't consider 'sweet' to be a necessary feature.

• AmE Nielsen rating. The television rating system that determines advertising rates, used figuratively as a measure of popularity. Example: 'When you give babies a choice of what to listen to, a kind of baby Nielsen rating, they choose to listen to mothers talking to infants' (from The Scientist in the Crib).

• BrE It's not cricket. 'It shouldn't happen because it's not fair/proper'. Occasionally heard in AmE too.

• AmE poster child. Figuratively, an emblematic case of something, esp. a cause. Originally a child on posters promoting a charity. This one has come into BrE--as untranslatables often do (because they're useful). In the US, it's especially associated w/the (US) Muscular Dystrophy Association, which is also responsible for the US's longest-running charity telethon. It's interesting how different diseases are 'big' in terms of fundraising in different countries...

A short post, but this headline (courtesy of this tweeter) is worth reproducing:



The headline is about an American basketball player, Jeremy Lin, who is all the rage these days. The problem is that the headline would be rather upsetting reading for a BrE-speaking Lin fan.  In BrE to top oneself is a colloquial way of saying 'to kill oneself'.  But it was the AmE meaning 'to surpass oneself/one's previous achievements' that was clearly intended by the New York Times. 

It's not necessarily the case that the "AmE" meaning is entirely AmE here--the 'surpass' meaning of top is general English. But with the reflexive pronoun, it's not the first meaning to come to mind in BrE. The 'suicide' meaning comes from a more general use of top meaning 'to kill'--which originally referred to killing by hanging, but which is used more generally now for execution/killing in BrE, but not AmE.

And while I'm talking about topping... The OED mentions to top and tail [a baby], which I only learned as a new mother in the UK. Not having been a new mother in the US, I can't swear this is BrE only, but corpus and internet evidence seems to suggest so.  If you know top and tail meaning to cut the ends off (of) vegetables (e.g. green beans) (which seems to be used a bit in AmE, but not as much as in BrE), then the image of topping and tailing one's infant child is a horrid thought. But what it means is to wash only the head and bottom of the child, as newborn skin doesn't need or appreciate lots of unnecessary washing.

And for another verbal use of top in BrE, see this old post on top up.

------------------------------
Oh, and P.S.
I'm sorry not to have been blogging much lately, in spite of my grand intentions at the start of the year. But here's a bit of what I've done instead:

• A guest blog post on whether this blog constitutes 'academic blogging' at the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog.
• A podcast about this blog and other stuff with some of the [AmE] guys at Emphasis Writing.
• And my colleagues' and my new book has come out. Yay!

Robert W. M. Greaves wrote to me (in July 2010--my [seemingly orig. AmE] backlog is huge!):

I was somewhat surprised yesterday to be asked by an American woman (mid 70s from Montana) what more haste, less speed meant. She had never heard the expression before. I checked with another American friend (woman from Kentucky, in her late 50s) who also didn't really know what it meant but was aware of some younger people occasionally using it.

For me (and I would have thought most people in the UK) this is a piece of folk wisdom parents and grandparents use to admonish children. (In case you haven't come across it before either, the idea is that if you do something in too much of a hurry you'll be careless or make mistakes and have to go back and do it again, so it's actually faster to work more slowly and carefully and get it right first time.)

Have I just happened to hit the only two people in America who don't know the expression?

No, you've hit two members of the majority, Robert.  More haste, less speed (and less frequent variants, like less haste, more speed and more haste, worse speed) is mainly a BrE expression. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary marks it as UK, and it does not occur at all in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (but three times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus).  

Americans, on the other hand, say haste makes waste, which is not unknown in the UK, but it's not in the British National Corpus and only 9 times on the guardian.co.uk site (versus 140 for more haste, less speed).  Many people treat it as if Benjamin Franklin first said it, as it occurs in his Poor Richard's Almanack. But look look up haste in the OED and one finds this (my emphasis added):

 6. In proverbs and phrases: chiefly in sense 2.

a1525  (1500)    Sc. Troy Bk. (Douce) l. 1682 in C. Horstmann Barbour's Legendensammlung (1882) II. 275   Of fule haist cummis no speid.

1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiii,   Haste maketh waste.

1546    J. Heywood Dialogue Prouerbes Eng. Tongue i. ii. sig. Aiii^v,   The more haste the lesse spede.

That is, by 1546 both of these phrases were familiar enough to be recorded as English proverbs. The source of these is often attributed to a similar Latin phrase, Festina lente ('make haste slowly'). But if he wasn't the originator of Haste makes waste, Franklin was at least a great populi{z/s}er of the phrase.

Looking a bit more at the history,  the Corpus of Historical American English has two instances of more haste, less speed (in 1869 and 1920) and 11 of haste makes waste--seven of those before 1860. The early 19th-century boom for haste makes waste might have been a Franklin (orig. AmE in this sense) boom, but what's happening around 1860? Something, for sure:


That's a Google Ngram for more haste less speed and haste makes waste in English books generally.  This is American English:

And this is British English:

In each case, more haste, less speed increases in frequency around 1860--where the phrase was used in the name of a story (1856) and in other books.Why the fashion in the UK turned so dramatically in favo(u)r of the longer phrase, I do not know. Perhaps because it's closer to the Latin, perhaps because the rhyming version was perceived as Americanism, perhaps because someone really stylish and influential was using it. I don't know.

What is clear from all of this is that Americans invented neither phrase.  What is suggested from it is that the relative lack of more haste, less speed in AmE could be due to its lack of popularity in English when the AmE was getting going, since it seems to have been rather (orig. AmE) under-the-radar in the early 19th century.  The missing link here is what was happening in the pre-Richard's Almanack 18th century.

Many thanks to the intrepid readers who have nominated words and phrases for SbaCL Words of the Year this year. Yesterday, kettling was announced as the BrE-to-AmE WotY. Tonight's post does the other (AmE-to-BrE) half of the job.  Unusually, both Words of the Year come from readers' nominations. Am I getting less bossy and opinionated and more generous in my old age? We can only hope so.

And so the AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year is (you're going to hate this):

FTW

Yes, you are going to hate it. And you will hate it for one or more of the following reactions:

1. "WTF does it mean?"
2. "That's internet-speak, which is border-crossing by nature. Why should we think of this as inherently AmE?"
3. "That's not a word! It's an alphabetism [or initialism]! At best, it's a phrase!"
4. "My nomination was so much better."

@HarrysSmile 
god, love sophia grace and rosie, essex girls ftw!

@tweet_han
Big bang theory FTW!

@sunny_hundal
What I need is a 'Labour Insider' (unhappy SpAd will do) who has same axe to grind & can repeat himself every week. Journalism job FTW!

@LouiseMensch 
This made me laugh. tithenai.tumblr.com/post/321518623… Catholics FTW
[Editor's note: it made me laugh too. Go ahead, (BrE) have/(AmE) take a look!)

* (Or we could think of it as a lexicali{s/z}ed construction--and I like to think of things that way. But let's not try to squeeze too much of a linguistics degree into this post. It's already way past anybody's bedtime.)

In English orthography, word is easily defined as a unit of language that is written contiguously, with a space on each end. The notion of orthographic word is, however, circular since spaces were introduced into the written code in order to mark the boundaries between words. A more satisfying definition would help explain why such boundaries are perceived in the flow of language. Orthography is also an unreliable indicator of wordhood. Some languages do not have a written form, some orthographies
(e.g., Chinese, Lao) do not mark word boundaries, and any orthographical system is subject to fossilization and arbitrary fashions. For example, on most linguistic criteria, the compound noun ice cream is a single word, in spite of the space within it.

There is no clear linguistic definition of word, however. The most theoretically useful definitions are based on grammatical or phonological criteria [...], but their usefulness is limited by the fact that a) grammatical word and phonological word do not delimit the same set of expressions and that b) no grammatical or phonological criteria for wordhood are applicable to all types of words in all languages.

Goodbye Untranslatables month!

I probably unfairly privilege Ben Zimmer when he comes into my blog-suggestions inbox (which is to say, I'm about to cover a suggestion of his only 13 months after he suggested it). As a lexicographer, he knows what counts as an answerable question (so many that I'm sent are not), and, as a language columnist, he has a good sense of which topics might have a bit of (orig. AmE) mileage in them.

The suggestion he sent me last July was BrE use of nous.  And I thought to myself: "Is that British? I just think of it as extremely intellectual." The problem, it seems, is that I don't read the sports pages.

The first definition in the OED is the one that I knew:

1. Ancient Greek Philos. Mind, intellect; intelligence; intuitive apprehension.

As in:

1884    Encycl. Brit. XVII. 336/1   What Plotinus understands by the nous is the highest sphere accessible to the human mind‥, and, along with that, pure thought itself.

But the meaning that Ben was referring to was:

2. colloq. (chiefly Brit.). Common sense, practical intelligence, ‘gumption’.

And he pointed out:

It's surprisingly common in UK sports reporting (search Google News for "have|has|had the nous").

Reading the sports pages would require a level of dedication to this blog that I demonstrably don't have. But I am aware that I miss linguistic riches by not paying attention to them (in any country). Searching have/has/had the nous, I got six hits (half British, the others from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand), four of which were from the sports pages. Here are a couple (bold added):

[About a senior police figure who's resigned in the phone-hacking scandal] “I don’t think any of us would question his integrity. It’s his judgement that has been called into question. But he’s had the nous to realise that if he stays the speculation goes on.” 

and 

[About a cricket player(BrE) cricketer/(AmE) cricket player--T20 is an abbreviated name for an abbreviated form of the game] In many ways du Toit exemplifies the way T20 has gone – he’s hardly a household name in his own household and has played more T20 matches than first class or List A, but he has the nous to get the job done.

The 'common-sense' history of nous is hardly recent. I liked the first OED example for it [though I don't know what Demo-brain'd means here. The only OED entry for Demo is a colloquial name for the US Democratic Party]:

1706    E. Baynard Cold Baths II. 306   A Demo-brain'd Doctor of more Note than Nous.

According to OED, the usual pronunciation of nous in BrE rhymes with mouse, but the AmE pronunciation sounds like noose.


There's another AmE/BrE difference to be found in the OED entry for nous: its definition as 'gumption'. To my AmE mind, gumption (orig. Scots) is an odd synonym for 'common sense'.  We can see the reason for this reflected in US/UK dictionary treatments of the word. The American Heritage Dictionary has:

1. Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
2. Guts; spunk.*
3. Common sense.

Whereas Collins English Dictionary has:

1. Brit common sense or resourcefulness

2. initiative or courage

As the AHD entry reflects, the 'common sense' sense is not the primary sense in American English. A better AmE synonym for gumption is (orig. AmE) get-up-and-go.


What do we have in AmE for 'common sense'?  Well there's horse sense ('strong common sense'), which is originally AmE, but now found in BrE. A more specific kind of common sense is (orig. AmE) street smarts 'the ability to live by one's wits in an urban environment' (OED). But when I think of Americans talking about common sense, I think of the construction X has[n't] [got] the sense God gave Y (or:  X doesn't have the sense God gave Y).  Looking for "the sense God gave" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I found:

He's got the sense God gave a fruitfly.
The sense God gave a goose, you might say-except He didn't give it to all the geese
That man ain't got the sense God gave a goat.  
you ain't got the sense God gave a mule.
You don't have the sense God gave crawfish.
Anybody who'd choose to live in Texas hasn't got the sense God gave a squirrel
they'd missed the sign and hadn't had the sense God gave a turnip to stop and look at a map
you don't have the sense God gave you.
You city noodles haven't the sense God gave hedgehogs
If I'd had the sense God gave a horny toad I'd have turned and run

As you can probably tell from the examples, this construction (partially filled-in idiom) has a definite 'rural' feel to it--it's colloquial and very (orig. AmE) folksy and stereotypically very Southern.

But if I've missed some good nouns for 'common sense', I'm sure you'll fill us in in the comments!




* I've no doubt that some readers will find this definition humorous, as spunk is BrE slang for 'semen'. But the primary meaning in AmE (also found in BrE, and originating from a Scots/northern England dialect for 'spark') is 'Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck' (OED).

Fellow American-academic-in-UK @PurlHussy suggested a Twitter Difference of the Day for me, and I thought: why tweet when I could blog AND tweet? (Um/Erm, because I should be marking/grading essays? Hey, blogging it is!!)

The difference is in how we more informally say 'it is your (or her or his or my) responsibility'. It may seem strange, but BrE and AmE look like they're complete opposites on this one. In BrE, one can say It's down to you to mean 'it's your responsibility to do that', whereas AmE would say it's up to you.

One does see it's up to you in BrE to mean 'it's your responsibility', or more specifically (as in AmE) 'it's your choice'. It's common enough in BrE that the OED marks it as just 'originally' AmE. There are two examples of It's up to you in the British National Corpus (accessed through corpus.byu.edu), both with this 'choice' sense:

I've done it and er I mean it's up to you as to which date you choose. [spoken in a meeting]

"Well, it's up to you of course, Mr Dakin, but this is the third time I've had to stitch her teats and I'm afraid it's going to keep on happening." [from James Herriot's Vets might fly]

 But all the ones that are straight responsibility meanings are it's down to you in the BNC (10 hits):

But if they get arrested it's down to you. [conversation]

Unless you're a tenant, it's down to you to make sure gas appliances receive the regular expert servicing they need. [advert]

Between now and Sunday it's down to you to decide that you definitely want to go ahead [speech]

(Of course there may also be examples of it'll be down to you or whether you do it is down to you or it's down to her or it's down to Nigel, etc. Searching for a single set phrase made it easier to avoid senses of down to that have nothing to do with responsibility.)

Meanwhile, in AmE, the Corpus of Contemporary American English has 398 hits for it's up to you and only one for it's down to you--and in that (fictional) context it might have just meant 'you're the only one left' (hard to tell--the responsibility meaning or the 'only you' meaning would both fit in the context).

So, up and down. Why are two opposite words used to mean the same thing? Because figurative language is slippery stuff, that's why. The OED tells us that up to [someone] is from the game of poker (traced to 1896), and is in general use from 1913. In the poker context it means basically 'it's your turn to make a decision and act on it'. So, it's sort of 'we've got(ten) up to you in the series of people who need to act in this game'. (One could have seen it going the other way, with one going 'down' the list of people whose turn it would be next. But poker is a game of escalation, so it doesn't seem surprising to me that the turn-taking metaphor goes upward.)

The BrE down to [someone] is only traced back to 1970 in the OED.  One can see how this might come about from the 'there's no one else left' reading of down to (as in we're down to one candle). It's down to you says that, for the purpose of its context, the people who could have responsibility for something are reduced to one: you.

From my non-native perspective, it seems to me that up to and down to have different connotations in BrE--up to being choice and down to being serious responsibility.  AmE doesn't make any such distinction and has up to for both.

It's down/up to you to tell us what you think.

Of course, I can't exactly remember the conversation that inspired this post. But as we were leaving a café, Better Half said  I'm not being funny, but Costa's coffee has really gone downhill.† And I thought: that's the British idiom I'm going to cover next, because there is just so much Britishness in it.

In fact, in a 2009 paper in Discourse & Society, Judith Baxter and Kieran Wallace describe a particular use of it as:

the typically British idiom ‘I’m not being funny’ [used] to downplay the effect of a sensitive or non-politically correct comment

The phrase I'm not being funny but occurs five times in the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and zero times in the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (both at corpus.byu.edu). The material in the BNC is 20+ years old, and since the phrase seems to be on the rise, I would expect it to occur more often these days. In 2008, it made a BBC list of 20 most hated clichés. There, a 'Rosie Spectacle' comments that it's "usually followed by a highly irritating and officious remark." Let's see if that's true.

All the BNC examples come from the 17.8-million-word spoken part of the corpus:

1. I 'm not being funny but she can't stick up for herself, that girl can't
2. Giles won't tell me but he definitely knows the two people that've laid her. Oh aren't they lucky gits. And I think that I 'm not being funny but I think that Jim did one.
3. I 'm not being funny but I think that's actually maybe quite important, 
4. The contract sorry is very specific. I 'm not being funny but we're nitpicking now at the difference between [...] site instructions and V Os
5. And I 'm not being funny but when Malcolm did it, we would do that [a physical recount] almost two or three days after the stock taking if there were odd counts

Is I'm not being funny but preceding "sensitive", "irritating" or "officious" comments in each case? Well, it depends on what you are sensitive about. In some of these cases, there is clearly the potential for causing offen{c/s}e--for instance, in (1) the person might be saying something critical about a friend. In others, it's not clear that anyone would disagree with the statement, as in BH's comment about coffee, or in (3), a context in which all the interlocutors seem to be agreeing that it's important to be sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired at some event. In my experience, the minimal requirement for an I'm not being funny but prologue is that the speaker is expressing an opinion. The optimal contexts for using it are those in which the statement (a) could be interpreted as a complaint or a criticism or (b) might not be shared by everyone. In the coffee example, it was hardly the type of thing that would have offended me, so I was amused that he'd bothered to preface it in this way. But he still said it, he says, "So you won't think I'm petty. Out of some insecurity." It expresses a strange kind of plea to be taken seriously along with what seems like an implicit apology for having had an opinion.

This relates to various things that Kate Fox discusses in Watching the English. There are the "modesty rules"--i.e. cultural rules that enforce the appearance (but not necessarily the reality) of modesty and the importance of not seeming earnest, but instead always being ready to keep things light with humo(u)r. So, you have an opinion, but the need to appear modest means that you have to avoid sounding self-important. The avoidance of earnestness means that people are always ready to assume that you're joking if you seem het up* about something. So, what do you do if you want to state an opinion? You try to disguise it as a small fact ("she can't stick up for herself"), preface it with I'm not being funny but to signal that something controversial is coming, then let the listener fill in a lot of the opinion (e.g. 'she is weak and probably deserves what she gets if she won't stick up for herself'), so that you don't have to earnestly or controversially say it. 

I should say, one doesn't absolutely need the but in the phrase, but it's very often there. And we can say I'm not being funny to sincerely mean just that--for instance, as a protest when someone starts laughing after you've told them something sad. That's not the pre-emptive use--the 'let me put this negative opinion here' use--that one hears so much in the UK. That said, I think that in AmE, at least, one would be more likely in those more literal cases to say I'm being serious rather than the negated I'm not being funny. 

Blogger is acting very strange these days...I hope you'll be able to post comments below!

Postscript, the next morning:
I blogged in a rush last night, which isn't the best thing for working on something pragmatic.  Let me just add--the funny in I'm not being funny but can indeed (as some people have written to say) be read as the 'queer, peculiar' sense of the word. But that meaning is not unrelated to the 'humorous' meaning. It's best translated, I think, as 'I'm not trying to be difficult, but...'. But I do believe that the choice of funny in this phrase plays on this ambiguity--it's saying both 'I'm not making a joke' and 'I'm not being eccentric'. (Glad to see some comments are getting through--I know some others haven't. What's up with Blogger, eh**?)

† I belatedly found where I'd written down what BH said, so I've replaced my earlier 'the coffee is really disgusting' with the much more British understatement 'has gone downhill'. 'Has become disgusting to me' is what he meant though. This means I've also changed some further references to his statement. And, for the record, I like Costa's coffee and BH has been complaining about everyone's coffee lately...
* orig. BrE dialectal & AmE, now more common in BrE
** The eh is prevalent in Canadian English but also in my not-so-far-from-Canada AmE dialect.

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...


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:

Coinage	Google hits on .uk sites
Broliday	1
homeliday	73
holistay	445
home-iday	613
staycation	16,000

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:


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:

	1998	2007
AmE	0.770	14.675
BrE	53.253	98.400

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!