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

 So I tweeted this recently...

Difference of the Day: I seriously cannot believe that I've never done BrE 'fit for purpose'. Thanks for suggesting it @MHanson62. What to give for an AmE equivalent? Nothing so well used... #DotD pic.twitter.com/u2flTPlXZt

— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) July 13, 2022

(click on it to get the whole picture from Twitter)

Here's another view of how much more fit for purpose is used in BrE, and how relatively recent it is:

(click to enlarge)

But then Stephen P wrote to point out this tweet by an American with fit to purpose:

In searching for that tweet on Twitter, I discovered other Americans writing fit to purpose. Their numbers are dwarfed by the number of BrE speakers saying fit for purpose, but it's an interesting development! 

The moral of this story: prepositions change easily. That's because prepositions don't have much meaning in themselves. 

This one doesn't seem to have shown up yet on Ben Yagoda's Not One-Off Britishisms, but then again, is it a Britishism in the US? Did Americans pick up fit for purpose and change the preposition, or did they pick up the rarer to and make it their own? There's the second moral of this story: calling something a "Britishism" or an "Americanism" is a complicated business. (And if you want to know how complicated, I have a book to sell you...)

The annual preamble  (you can make that rhyme if you try hard enough)

Each year since 2006, this blog has designated Transatlantic Words of the Year (WotY). The twist is that I choose the most 'of the year' borrowings from US-to-UK and from UK-to-US. 

This year's WotY posts are a bit later than usual. Had I had strong ideas about which words to crown, I might have written the posts during my Christmas (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation, but I didn't, so I thought I'd wait till I was on the plane back home on New Year's Day. Except that I didn't get on a plane on New Year's Day, and the travel woes got more and more complicated after that. A few days' recovery was needed. So I'm taking the opportunity to announce my Words of the Year on the Zoom programme/show That Word Chat on 11 January, and this post will post at that time.

During the 2020 WotY season, I was very interested in the variability of the language for our universal experiences of the early pandemic. Isolation, lockdown, and quarantine were Words of the Year from different English-speaking nations, but generally referred to the same thing. (In the latest issue of the journal Dictionaries, which I am hono(u)red to edit, Wendalyn Nichols and Lewis Lawyer tell the tale of how the WotY process led Cambridge Dictionary to record new senses for quarantine.)  By the end of the year, there was hope of a vaccine, a word that ended up being or inspiring several dictionaries' 2021 Words of the Year. But BrE jab had already poked its head into the US in December 2020,  thanks to Oxford-Astra Zeneca's early vaccine successes, so it was my 2020 WotY. Since then the transatlantic vocabulary traffic has seemed rather calm. With all of us glued to our computers and our streaming services, you'd think that words would be happily travel(l)ing while we stayed (at) home. But no. It was really difficult to find clear candidates for the 2021 SbaCL WotYs. 

Eligibility criteria:

• Good candidates for SbaCL WotY are expressions that have lived a good life on one side of the Atlantic but for some reason have made a splash on the other side of the Atlantic this year. 
• Words coined this year are not really in the running. If they moved from one place to another that quickly, then it's hard to say that they're really "Americanisms" or "Britishisms". They're probably just "internetisms". The one situation in which I could see a newly minted word working as a transatlantic WotY would be if the word/expression referenced something very American/British but was nevertheless taken on in the other country.
• When I say word of the year, I more technically mean lexical item of the year, which is to say, there can be spaces in nominations. Past space-ful WotYs have included gap year, Black Friday, and go missing.
  

The UK-to-US Word of the Year: university (= AmE college)

Now, of course, the word university is general English and has been in use in the US for a very long time. (The University of Pennsylvania has been so called since 1779.) So rather than talking about the importation of a word, we're talking about AmE adopting a BrE sense/usage for a word form it had already. (We've certainly had WotYs like that before, including jab, ginger, and bump.)

What's changed is that US people are talking about their higher education place/experience as university more than they used to. Back in my day (I hope you read that with a suitably wavering voice), we always called it college, no matter whether the institution had college or university or institute or maybe something else in its name. And, of course, that's what Americans mostly still do.

But some Americans seem to be saying university in some of those contexts, particularly after the preposition in. The News on the Web (NOW) corpus has three US examples of in university for 2011 (from just two sources), but over 20 for 2021. The turning point seems to have been 2019, but 2021 showed us it wasn't going anywhere. Here's a poorly formatted sample (I'll try to fix it later): 

But in BrE, it would be at university in most of those contexts:

Rather than borrowing the BrE expression at university, AmE is using that BrE sense of university in the same prepositional contexts as AmE uses college:

Nestor turned 19 a few days ago & will be off to University. He arrived here at 12.

As you can imagine, I was triggered when (to make an absurd debate point) a fellow congressman diminished the contributions of Republicans because we don’t raise non-white kids.

Well, I have.

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) June 18, 2020

Forbes magazine has a couple of 2020 uses, both by non-Americans about non-American subjects—but what's interesting is the American-seeming capitalization—probably not how the BrE/AusE-speaker authors would have written it.  

[See this old post for discussion of the different meanings/uses of school, college and university in the two countries, which will cover at least half of the things that you might be itching to mention right now.]

As well as familiarity with BrE university, I wonder if part of the motivation for this change-in-progress is a new division of labo(u)r between community colleges and universities. When I went (BrE-from-AusE) to uni, it was usual to apply to a four-year college/university and go for four years (or so). But changes to the costs of higher education have led many Americans to take their first year or two at a community college (see that old post again) and transferring their credits to a bachelor-degree-granting institution after taking their (AmE) general education courses at a cheaper, more local place. Maybe the distinction between a place where you get some tertiary-level credits and where you can get a bachelor's degree seems more relevant now. This is just supposition, but it could be investigated...

This WotY was inspired by Ben Yagoda's posts on his Not One-Off Britishisms blog and his tweets on the topic. As well as noticing preposition+university, he's also been tracking university students, as a synonym for college students in AmE.  I don't want to repeat all his good work, so please see his posts on related topics here. When I asked him yesterday what he'd pick if this were his WotY decision, he chose university. Luckily, I'd already started writing this post! 

Thanks to Ben for all his great, year-round Britishism-in-America tracking, to Mark Allen at That Word Chat for letting me announce my WotYs at his (orig. AmE) shindig, and thank you for reading!  To read part 2 (UK>US) click here.

Since then, off of use declined in the US until the 1970s, when it started to go up—possibly as a result of a general tendency toward(s) colloquiali{s/z}ation in written English. It remains mostly a spoken form but has been on the increase in edited text like magazines and newspapers (though not in academic texts). 

…the older generations may have noticed the increased frequency of off of in public texts (a recency effect), while the younger generations may be sensitive to the form’s high frequency in American English when compared to the other varieties of English. (p. 428) 

…when it comes to regional variation, we have seen that off of is frequently attested in so many parts of England that the whole idea of its being a “regional form” should be questioned. Indeed, based on the results of this study it would seem that in many cases the perceptions that British speakers have of their avoidance of off of [as a regional and/or American form] are due to highly entrenched prescriptive attitudes instead of their actual usage patterns, although we have no doubt that the form is rare enough in some regions, particularly in the West and Northwest of England, to genuinely affect acceptability judgments. (pp. 434–5) 

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.