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

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

In the last one there, the headline says landslip, but landslide is in the first line of the article.

To me, landslide sounds much bigger than landslip, and that might be reflected in the large in the former definition. Around here in the South of England, landslips occasionally close down rail travel between Brighton and London. In that case, it'll be that some earth has washed down from the slopes along the (BrE) railway line/(AmE) train tracks. There, I don't tend to hear landslide, and sure enough, those headlines tend to be about landslips.

In Google Books, landslide started showing up in UK publications in the early 20th century. Landslip has been going down, but it was not that high to begin with. That suggests that landslide is doing work that landslip wasn't doing—both metaphorical work and description of more catastrophic land movement. I note that the Aberfan disaster of 1966 is described by the British Geological Society as a landslide and an avalanche, but not as a landslip.

landslide in GloWbE corpus

 

This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table, ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema/(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the wherewithal to support it, click!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelwithaclause/rebel-with-a-clause

 

to take (something) in (one's) stride

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

It seems to come from the UK in the early-mid 1800s, and then takes off in its possessiveless form in 1930s US. (The possessive-ful lines are low in the following graph because I had to choose just one possessive form to search—I chose his for the illustration because it's the most frequent in this phrase in Google Books.)

It's not clear to me whether AmE speakers back then were familiar with the racing expression. If not, then the expression might not have been recogni{s/z}ed as metaphorical, and therefore might be more likely to change.

at (a) pace

For part 1 of 2020 Words of the Year, click here.

In recent years, I've had a good slate of candidates for UK-to-US Words of the Year, but something seemed to happen to transatlantic word travel in 2020. You might think that an internet-age pandemic would make the world more open to words from elsewhere. We're all in the same boat. We're talking about it on social media. We're watching a lot of the same program(me)s on Netflix. But, as we saw for terminology for isolation/lockdown/quarantine, the pandemic has shown how local linguistic preferences still grow and thrive in the Anglosphere. In fact, those three terms made it as Words of the Year for different dictionaries in different places: the Australian National Dictionary Centre chose iso (for isolation), Collins (UK) chose lockdown, and Lexico (US-UK hybrid) and Cambridge (UK w/ strong US presence) chose quarantine. 

You'll have already seen in the title that the UK-to-US Word of the Year is:

jab

I thank my friend Paul for sending me this fitting memorial of the moment:

From @birdyword on Twitter

But before I write about why and how jab got the title, I'd like to review the strange year it's been for UK-to-US word transit.

During the year I noted words that I wanted to remember when it came to WotY time. Before Covid became a pandemic, my money had been on rubbish, particularly in its grammatically malleable usage to mean 'not good': e.g. as an adjective a rubbish idea and as a verb: don't rubbish my idea. Americans were using it a lot in 2019. But then, it crashed:

Another one to consider had been reckon, a verb that is present in AmE and BrE, but limited to regional usage (and possibly lower registers) in AmE. Here we're interested in its particular use where other AmE registers might use figure or suppose. The fact that it's not low-register in BrE can be seen in the fact that I reckon has been much-said in recent-ish decades in the UK Parliament: 

Ben Yagoda had blogged about this one twice in 2020 on his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, so it seemed like a good candidate. But was it coming over from BrE or was it coming "up" from American dialects? Yagoda's examples in the press made the BrE argument: lots of Britishisms come in through the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., because they're written by well-travel(l)ed, cosmopolitan, word-loving, and often foreign people. His reckons looked like that. 

But when I looked at American reckon examples in the News on the Web corpus, I found a lot of cases where Americans, particularly African Americans, were being quoted in relation to local matters. That made me more suspicious of the increasing numbers of reckons in the corpus data. Maybe it wasn't people sounding more British, maybe more speakers of varied dialects were being quoted in the news this year (and there were plenty of reasons for that to happen this year). 

And then there was also the 2020 effect. Reckon was showing up lots in the NOW corpus in 2019, and then it went down in 2020. (Its up-and-downness might well be a product of its regionality.)

So, it ends up looking like AmE is turning away from BrE a bit this year. With all that was going on in the US in 2020, perhaps this is not all that surprising. 

So, we ended up with jab as a very late contender for WotY, showing up in December when the UK approved the first vaccine for Covid. (This is why one shouldn't do one's Words of the Year in November, dictionaries!) It's hard to do a corpus search that includes only the 'inoculation' or (AmE) 'shot' sense of jab and not senses to do with poking and hitting of the manual or verbal type. But the December doubling of jab in American news is clearly due to the BrE sense of the term:

Again, Ben Yagoda covered this one at his blog. Here's what he had to say:

Unsure that I wanted to crown such a late entry as WotY, I ran a vote on the matter at the online event I did for Atlas Obscura on 19 December. I was hoping to show you the vote result, but the Zoom polling screen doesn't show up in the video that AO shared with me. What a pain! So all I can tell you is that jab was the clear winner against rubbish and reckon. Will it remain a word-in-the-news about inoculations elsewhere, or will Americans start using it as a synonym for shot? Remains to be seen.

And thus I close the 2020 SbaCL WotY celebrations. Do keep your eye out in 2021 for the words you'll want to nominate this time next year!

For US-to-UK, the choice was clear. Readers had nominated it repeatedly over the last few months. That's not to say there weren't runners-up (so read all the way to the end for those).

The US-to-UK Word of the Year is (dum-tiddy-dum-dum-DUM!):

furlough

If you consider a word to be a series of letters, then you could say "that's not new to the UK!" because it's not. The noun goes back to the early 1600s from the Dutch verlof, meaning 'exemption from service'. But words are not just series of letters; a word is bunch of letters (and, more importantly, sounds) that's linked to a conventionally shared meaning. It's a particular meaning in combination with this form that made a splash in the UK this year—one that originated in the US.

The splashy usage this year had to do with a UK government (more BrE) scheme / (more AmE) program that paid employees whose workplaces didn't need them during the pandemic shut-downs: The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. This involved bringing in this sense of furlough from AmE. (Quoted from the OED.)

3. Originally U.S. Dismissal or suspension from employment, usually due to economic conditions; unplanned (and typically unpaid and involuntary) leave; the period of such suspension or leave. Also: an instance of this.

The new usage was striking enough in the UK that the OED added this note to the entry:

Chiefly U.S. until use of the term became more widespread in March 2020 when the U.K. government introduced a furlough scheme in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, under which the government gave grants to employers to pay part of the wages of employees left without work, or unable to work, as a result of the crisis.

The sense has existed in AmE since the 1860s, though, and until recently it was mostly associated with government jobs, undoubtedly due to its military roots. AmE also uses furlough for periods of relief from active duty in the armed forces, especially during wartime or when posted abroad. The OED marks that sense as 'chiefly U.S. or historical'. BrE now mostly uses leave in this case—a word that deserves its own post.

The non-military use of furlough (sense 3 above) got a lot of attention in recent years because of US government shut-downs, when government employees (and contractors) were out of work until the federal budget was agreed. I think it's because of such recent US usage that the word was on UK governmental and/or human-resources minds when needing vocabulary for their pandemic-induced actions. 

Thanks to all who nominated it for this year's US-to-UK WotY.

Runners-up

There were other strong contenders for this year's US-to-UK word, chief among them the word that Collins Dictionary chose for its Word of the Year: lockdown. Originally (1830s at the latest) it was a wooden piece used in the construction of rafts, and later a wooden peg or similar to keep other things in place, but in the 1970s it started to be used in the now-familiar sense of confining prisoners to their cells, usually as a security measure. From there it spread out to use in other places where heightened security might be needed, and finally to our pandemic lives. I've blogged about it previously here.

Whack-a-mole also saw increased BrE usage this year, thanks to the contentious decision to lock down certain areas and not others earlier this year:

Though the Whac(k)-a-mole arcade game is Japanese in origin, the name of it, and its metaphorical use, has till this year been more AmE than BrE:

But in 2020, it was a BrE term:

Finally, I also had my eye on AmE normalcy, which seemed to be showing up in BrE a bit more. For example, it was used a couple of times in this article on my employer's website. Happily I screen-shot this. It seems to have disappeared from the staff news archives—perhaps a signal that we won't be returning to normalcy after all.

"Return to normalcy" was Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan for the 1920 US presidential election, appealing to the public's desire to go back to the way things were before World War I. (The noun normalcy itself goes back some decades more.) It was then and remains a controversial word for those who don't care for language change. Normality remains a 'normal' word in AmE and BrE, though normalcy has become more 'normal' in AmE in recent decades. People tend to talk about it more when things aren't normal and we long for them to be. And so here's how things are going in the news internationally: 

But in BrE, normality still rules (and return to normal is used more in any case):

I'm going to (orig. AmE) root for normalcy for next year's US-to-UK WotY because it's much more pleasant a prospect than furloughed, mole-whacking lockdowns! 

Stay tuned tomorrow for the 2020 UK-to-US WotY.

On occasion, I invite people whose insights I trust to contribute guest posts for the blog. On rare occasions, they deliver the goods! I hope you enjoy this one on terminology in the game of contract bridge.

My mother could never understand how I was allowed a (AmE) college/(BrE) university degree without learning to play bridge, but I was educated in the decade of Trivial Pursuit. I tried to rectify this gap in my education in the early 2000s. After maybe three lessons, the couple who were teaching me had a fight and that was the end of that! Maybe learning to play bridge be my retirement project. One of the dozens I have in mind. At any rate, I am not the person to tell you about bridge terminology, but here’s someone who is.

Simon Cochemé is an English bridge writer and is a regular contributor of light-hearted articles to bridge magazines. He has recently published a collection of the best of them in a book, Bridge with a Twist (Master Point Press). ‘Destined to be ranked as a classic, alongside its prequel, Oliver Twist.’

There are seven chapters on the language of bridge – vocabulary and idioms from (a)round the world. This post is an edited version of the chapter on American terminology – written with American spelling.

***

The Language of Bridge III

In which we look across the Atlantic at what the Americans have to say

George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) said that England and America were two nations separated by a common language. Bridge terminology certainly proves the point. We say protect, they say balance; we say switch, they say shift; we say dummy, they [sometimes] say board; we say peter, they say echo; we say tomahto, they say tomayto; we say finesse, they say hook; we say singleton, they say stiff; we say discard, they [often] say pitch.

There’s more. They say push instead of flat board, down one instead of one down, ace-fourth instead of ace-to-four, set for beating the contract, and drawing trump rather than drawing trumps, as though they always played in twelve-card fits. You will still occasionally read deuce for the two of a suit, although the quaint trey for the three has all but disappeared.

There are some words that have yet to cross the Pond: tight, meaning doubleton, as in ‘He held king-queen tight’ and swish, meaning passed out, as in ‘The bidding went 2♠, swish’. I have also heard (but not seen in print) ‘Four hearts in the East’ where the British would say ‘Four hearts by East’.

Things get even more confusing with the word tap. Where we say force (as in force declarer), they say tap; but where we say tap (in plumbing), they say faucet. 

The most extreme of American phrases is ruff ‘n’ sluff for ruff-and-discard. I haven’t seen sluff or slough used anywhere else in bridge literature, so presumably the lure of the rhyme was too hard to resist, as it was with surf ‘n’ turf.

Americans like variety in the presentation of their sports results: ‘The Red Sox downed the 49ers’, for example, or ‘The Chipmunks whupped the Bears’. The English tend to stick to the ‘Chelsea beat Liverpool’ formula, with the occasional ‘Villa lost to Spurs’ thrown in. Americans [tend to] put the winning team first, whereas the English usually put the home team first. Either way, the English results are a bit boring. 

Sporting metaphors abound in American writing, and I have seen bridge articles where a player covers all bases, or makes a clutch shot, or plays a shut-out. I have no idea what slam-dunk means; it sounds as though you had twelve tricks on top but went one down. I have yet to find mention of a triple-double (basketball) or pass interference (American football), but I’m sure they’re out there.

We must fight fire with fire; difficult contracts must be played on sticky wickets and small slams hit for six Declarer must play a blinder, and overbidders should be caught offside or shown the red card.

There is a nice expression that I have seen American teachers use, encouraging their pupils to draw trumps before the defenders can ruff something: Get the kids off the streets.

The French have names for the kings on their cards (David (from the Bible), Charles (after Charlemagne), Caesar (Julius), and Alexander (the Great). I understand the Americans have noted it and like the idea. They don’t have any real kings of their own, so the debate is whether to reuse the Mount Rushmore quartet, or to go with four from the shortlist of Martin Luther, Stephen, Billie Jean, Burger, Kong and Elvis. [jk—ed.]

Let’s have a deal. This one features Zia Mahmood, who was (AmE) on (BrE in) the USA team against Italy in the final of the World Championships in 2009. …

[The chapter goes on to describe a bridge deal, the bidding and play, in great detail using the American terms. It will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t play bridge. If you want to see whether the USA team wins or loses, you will have to buy the book …]

***

Lynne says: For good measure, here’s a corpus search of that last difference, in/on the team, which goes far beyond bridge:

Bridge with a Twist (RRP £14.95) is available at a number of online sites.