Yesterday, I declared the UK-to-US SbaCL Word of the Year. You can read about it here. 

The US-to-UK one may be as controversial as it was the first time (a)round (in May). But here goes: 

2022's US-to-UK Word of the Year is: homer

• Because it is possibly the most talked-about Americanism in British social media this year.
• Because if I chose the other finalist,* I'd get too many "that's not a word!" complaints.
• Because it alludes a huge, wordy phenomenon of 2022.

That phenomenon is Wordle, the word game invented by a Welsh engineer in the US, an added transatlantic bonus. 

Homer was the Wordle solution on the 5th of May, setting off a lot of grumpiness on social media. The cartoonist Stephen Collins provides a good illustration of the depth of feeling on the matter on the part of many committed UK Wordlers:

So, this isn't a Word of the Year because British people have taken on the word to refer to baseball home runs. There is very little need to talk about baseball in Britain. It's US-to-UK Word of the Year because it was an Americanism talking point in Britain, demonstrating how separate our vocabularies can be.

But is it an Americanism? The thing is, British people do say homer for lots of other reasons. In various BrE dialects or jargons, it can be a homing pigeon, a (BrE) match played on the home (BrE) pitch in some sports, or "a job that a skilled worker, such as a house painter or a hairdresser[..], does for a private customer in the customer's home, especially when they do this in addition to their main job and without telling their employer or the tax authorities" (Cambridge Dictionary). It's also the name of an ancient Hebrew measurement. But none of these uses are as common in BrE as homer meaning 'home run' is in AmE, and so the word was definitely perceived as an Americanism by British Wordle players. 

Now, this choice isn't exactly original on my part. Cambridge Dictionary made homer their Word of the Year back in November. It's also been noted as one of the most Googled words of the year. But that's another reason why it feels right as the US-to-UK Word of the Year. It not only spiked high in their look-up statistics on the day, it continued to be looked up in their online dictionary for months after—perhaps because BrE speakers just can't stop talking/tweeting about it. Homer was again showing up in tweets about losing one's Wordle streak on 27 December, when the answer was the tricky HAVOC. (And I imagine it was showing up in the less searchable social media as well.)  It'll be interesting to see if it's still being put to these purposes next year, or if it'll have been forgotten. The chances that it'll be forgiven seem thin.

I do encourage you to have a look at Cambridge's Word of the Year site for more on this word, British–American linguistic relations and how Wordle's been affecting dictionary usage. 

*My other "finalist" was them's the breaks, as spoken by Boris Johnson in his resignation speech outside 10 Downing Street. I was sure in July that that would be my "Word" of the Year, but, two Prime Ministers later, this well and truly feels like ancient news now.

It's FIFA World Cup Time, a fact that is hard to avoid in this part of the world. I am not the kind of person who’s interested in watching it, regardless of who’s playing or where it’s being held. But I'm nothing if not opportunistic, so I'll use this as an excuse to write about some linguistic differences related to sport(s) more generally. 

It’s old news that the British mostly call it football and Americans mostly call it soccer. It’s even older news that the name soccer is actually British. To quote myself (from The Prodigal Tongue):

Britain, Americans call your football soccer because you taught them to. Just like rugger is a nickname for rugby football, soccer came from the full name of the game, association football. The word comes from England. You should be proud of it. 

But that’s not the difference I want to feature this time. I want to talk about fixtures. If your eyesight’s good (the words are very faint, for some reason), you can see the term repeatedly used on the local team’s website (I've added the purple boxes to highlight them):

BrE fixture in this sense means ‘who’s "fixed" to play whom when’. In the plural, it's the whole list of who's playing whom when. It's a necessary word at any kind of tournament in the UK. I initially learned it through tournament Scrabble (at my first UK tournament 22 years ago), and I recall it (probably orig. AmE) throwing me for a loop then.

You won’t see the word fixtures on most American sports sites or advertising. Instead, you’ll see schedule, as seen here for my "local" (BrE) American football /(AmE) football team back in the US:

In The Prodigal Tongue, I cover the strange history of the pronunciation of schedule. (If you haven't read it, tell Santa. Or your nearest bookseller.) In that discussion, I note that the word schedule is used much more in AmE than BrE, because BrE uses other words for the things Americans call schedules in various contexts. Words like: timetable, programme, and fixtures.

A related term is AmE bracket, which derives from the use of this kind of diagram for showing who's playing whom in an elimination tournament. (For more on differences in the punctuation term bracket, see here.) Randall Munroe, at his comic xkcd,  has done some fantastic brackets, like this one, which I will share because we've had enough sports talk now, haven't we?

click image to enlarge

In BrE one might instead talk about the draw, i.e. who's been "drawn" (as if from a hat) to play against whom. Bracket is a bit different from draw because it's not just who's playing whom in the initial random arrangement, but also eventually who's playing whom all the way up the various rounds of competition. 

And speaking of draw, England were drawn against USA this week, and it ended in a 0–0 draw, which could also be called a tie. Tie is generally more common in AmE, but it's used in BrE too.

Here's 'ended in a tie/draw' in the News on the Web corpus:

If you’re interested in more football/soccer-related content, here are a couple of posts:

• World Cup words (from 2006!)
• Up the Albion! 

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.

This is part 2 of an examination of the words that were very country-specific in Brysbaert et al. (2019)'s study of vocabulary prevalence. For more detail on the study, please see part 1, on American words Britons don't tend to know. This half-table shows the words that British survey respondents tended to know and American ones didn't:

All of the terms will be discussed below, but not necessarily in the order given in the table. Instead, I'll group similar cases together. The unknown items from AmE were overrun with food words—that's less true here, though there are some.

Stationery items

The first two items are generici{s/z}ed brand names for office supplies. Tippex is correction fluid, known in AmE by brand names Wite-Out and Liquid Paper. Tippex is used as both noun (for the fluid) and as a verb for the action of covering things over—literally with correction fluid or figuratively. Here are a few examples from the GloWBE corpus that show some range:

• Her contact details had been TippExed over a number of times. 
• make-up, hair extensions, fake tan and tippexed teeth
• But one series of game Tippexed over the old rules   

Biro is an old trade name for a ball-point pen, based on the name of the inventor László Bíró. The first syllable is pronounced like "buy" (not "bee").

Amusements

Pic from here

Dodgems (or dodg'ems) are (orig. AmE) bumper cars. The BrE has the look of a brand name turned to a generic, though it's unclear to me if that name was ever trademarked. The cars were first called dodgems by their inventors, the Stoeher brothers of Massachusetts. This isn't the first time we've seen an American product name become the generic name for the product type in BrE—but I'll let you sort through the trade names posts for others.

Abseil might not quite belong in the amusement category, as it seems more like hard work, but let's put it here. It's a verb from German for a means of descending a mountain (etc.) using a rope affixed on a higher point. Americans use the French word for the same thing: rappel. The idea comes from the Alps, where both German and French are to be found, so it looks like Americans and Brits might go to different areas of the mountain range. (This is a counterexample to my usual claim that the English will take any opportunity to use a French word.)

Food

Chipolata is a kind of small sausage. They've been mentioned already at the pigs in blankets post. The name comes from French, which got it from the Italian name for an onion dish.

Plaice is a kind of flatfish that's common at British fish-and-chip shops. The OED says "European flatfish of shallow seas, Pleuronectes platessa (family Pleuronectidae)", but some other fish (esp. outside the UK) are sometimes called plaice. The name came from French long ago. It shows up in *many* punny shop names. 

Korma is a type of very mild curry typically made with a yog(h)urt-based sauce. BrE speakers generally have large vocabularies of the types of curry that are popular at UK Indian take-aways and restaurants, which often have menus with headings based on the curry type, like this at the right. It (orig. BrE) flummoxed me at first when English friends invited me over for a take-away and I was expected to already know this vocabulary and be able tell them what I'd like without reading the fine-print descriptions of the curry ingredients. The OED tells us korma comes from an Urdu word for 'cooked meat', which itself derives from a Turkish word.

Escalope takes us back to French, and the French influence on UK menus. OED defines it as "Thin slices of boneless meat (occasionally of fish), prepared in various ways; esp. a special cut of veal taken from the leg." It's found in menu phrases like veal escalope or an escalope of chicken.
P.S. Thanks to Cathy in the comments we have an AmE equivalent for this, the Italian scallopini. Another case (like courgette/zucchini) of a French-derived food word in BrE and an Italian one in AmE. (The Prodigal Tongue covers this a bit more.)

Slang

Yob is an example of back slang. It's the word boy backwards, and it's used particularly for young men/boys who engage in anti-social behavio(u)r. Hooligans, etc.

Naff is a word that's hard to translate exactly, which is why it has been one of my 'untranslatables' in the past. It's an adjective that refers to a certain kind of 'uncool', or as Jonathon Green defines it: "in poor taste, unappealing, unfashionable, bad" and more recently it's also meant "second-rate, workaday".  I've seen Americans get this word very wrong, so best not to attempt it until you've been in the UK for a some time. Some Brits will tell you it stands for 'not available for f***ing', but, as with almost all such acronymic slang tales, that is almost certainly false. Green's Dictionary of Slang gives this for etymology:

[? north. dial. naffhead, naffin, naffy, a simpleton; a blockhead; an idiot or niffy-naffy, inconsequential, stupid or Scot. nyaff, a term of contempt for any unpleasant or objectionable person; however note Polari etymologist WS Wilcox in a letter 25/11/99: ‘I have long believed that naff may well derive from Romany naflo, a form of nasvalo – no good, broken, useless. Since several other Parlary words derive from Romany this is not impossible’; in this context note also 16C Ital. gnaffa, a despicable person]

Brolly isn't in the same slang league as the previous examples. It's a kind of (orig. AmE) cutesie way of referring to an umbrella. As I discuss in some detail in The Prodigal Tongue, this is what BrE speakers say instead of (AmE) bumbershoot, an Americanism that Americans often erroneously believe to be British. That bit of my book is excerpted at Humanities magazine. Have a read and if you like it, maybe buy or borrow the book? (Please?)

Bolshy is an adjective derived from bolshevik, and as such it originally meant 'left-wing, Communist', but these days it's more often used to mean 'uncooperative, obstructive, subversive' (thanks again Mr Green) or 'Left-wing; uncooperative, recalcitrant' (OED). Don't get bolshy in the comments, OK? 

The rest

The other items on the list are just too miscellaneous to fit together under meaningful subheadings.

Gazump (and its sister gazunder) have been treated in an Untranslatables post already, so you can read about it there. It's about underhanded (BrE) property/(AmE) real-estate -buying behavio(u)r.

Kerbside is just (AmE) curbside in BrE spelling. Here's the old post about curb/kerb. 

Judder is an onomatopoetic verb. Like shudder, but used more often of mechanical things, like engines that aren't working well. Here's an example from the GloWBE corpus: "the bus juddered over potholes".  The OED's first citations of it are in the 1930s, so it came into English long after AmE & BrE separated.

Chiropody is used as AmE (and more and more BrE) would use podiatry, though some specialists try to force a difference in meaning between the two (see this, for example). You'll find other sites telling you there is no difference, and that, for the most part is true. The word podiatry was coined in the US and there covered the same things that chiropody covered in the UK. Chiropody comes from the Greek for 'hands' and 'feet', and you can see the similarity with chiropractor, who uses their hands to treat people. What's a bit funny about chiropody/chiropodist is that the pronunciation is all over the place. Some use the /k/ sound for the ch, following the Greek etymology. That's how dictionaries tend to show it. Others use a 'sh' sound as if it comes from French. You can hear both on YouGlish.

Quango stands for 'quasi-autonomous non-governmental organi{s/z}ation'. I remember learning about non-governmental organi{s/z}ations, or NGOs, when I lived in South Africa in the 90s. Apparently NGO has taken off as a term in the US in the meantime (see comments), but not quango. A quango is an NGO that gets public funds to do something that the government wants and maybe has government participants. Google says the word quango is 'derogatory', but I think that depends a bit on your political persuasion. Here's a BBC fact sheet on quangos.

A pelmet is a decorative window-covering that doesn't cover a window—it covers the top of the window and maybe the curtain rail. It can be a little curtain or a kind of box or board. Here's a selection of those that come up on a Google Image search:

The curtainy type of pelmet would be called a valance in AmE—which we've seen before because it has a bed-related use in BrE. I honestly do not know what the boxy things would be called in AmE. I've never had one in an AmE house, and my efforts to find them on US websites have not (orig. AmE) panned out. If you have the answer, say so in the comments and I'll update this bit.

P.S. Thank you commenters! Grapeson offers cornice as an AmE possibility. Usually (and in BrE too) this is a thing at the joint of the wall and the ceiling (often decorative). But Wikipedia has a little section on 'Cornice as window treatment' that confirms this usage. Then Diane Benjamin offers box valance as an AmE alternative. The Shade Store says this:

The primary difference between a curtain valance and a cornice is that valances are made out of drapery or fabric, while cornices are typically made out of wood.

Thanks to the commenters for helping out!

Finally, chaffinch is a bird species (which didn't come up in the recent bird posts). The Wikipedia map to the right makes it easy to see why Americans didn't recogni{s/z}e the word (the green areas are where chaffinches typically live). Wikipedia does say "It occasionally strays to eastern North America, although some sightings may be escapees."

Many of these words are relatively unknown in the UK because they refer to things that are not common in the UK. So, less linguistic difference than cultural difference. Many reflect the US's ethnic diversity.

Glorious food

The first two are pasta-related. Manicotti are a kind of large tube pasta, which are stuffed, usually with ricotta, to make the dish pictured to the right. The name is used both for the empty pasta and for the dish. It comes from the Italian for 'little sleeves', but is, according to Wikipedia, "an Italian-American dish". BrE speakers are more likely to know the very similar pasta/dish canneloni, which is also found in the US and Italy. The difference? "Manicotti tubes are ridged, larger and slightly thicker. Cannelloni tubes are smooth, a touch smaller and slightly thinner."*

Tilapia is a fresh-water fish that is apparently easy to farm. Its popularity in the US is fairly recent—I only learned it on a trip back to there maybe 15 years ago. Wikipedia says: "Tilapia is the fourth-most consumed fish in the United States dating back to 2002". It's originally from Africa, and the name is a Latini{s/z}ation of a Setswana word for 'fish'. Apparently you can get tilapia in the UK, but it's just not as common. My guess is that an island nation has less need of fresh-water fishes to eat.

‘Whether you know them as mudbugs, ditch bugs, river lobsters, crawlybottoms, crawdads, or crawfish, anyone who has spent time in streams is familiar with crayfish.’

 

Other foods, other cuisines

Kabob is simply a different spelling from what BrE speakers are used to. In BrE it's usually kebab. Since it comes from Arabic (and other languages that got it from Arabic), it's not surprising that the spelling varies—that happens easily when different people are moving a word from one alphabet to another. The cultural place of this food is very different, though. Americans tend to think of shish kabobs—little pieces of food (especially meat) on a stick, typically cooked over fire. In the UK, one often thinks of doner kebabs, which AmE speakers might call gyros, getting the idea from Greek rather than Turkish. That's the compacted meat cooked on a big spit, then sliced off for putting in a pit(t)a bread or similar. In the UK, that kind of kebab is stereotypically found at the end of a night of binge drinking. 

 

(Late addition: here's a corpus view. Note that K-Bob is not a spelling of this food. It's a prolific commenter's handle on a political website. Kubab and Kibib are names of other things as well.)

In AmE hibachi is usually a tabletop (AmE) grill/(BrE) barbecue or a kind of iron hot plate used in Japanese restaurants. The word comes from Japanese, but has shifted in meaning. Wikipedia can tell you more. 

Kielbasa means 'sausage' in Polish, but in AmE it refers to a specific type of sausage, which Wikipedia tells me "closely resembles the Wiejska sausage". You can find the word kielbasa in the UK in Polish shops, but it remains to be seen how many of these will survive Brexit.

Goober (or goober pea) is a regional (mostly southern) word for

the peanut. It came into English from a Bantu language (perhaps Kikongo or Kimbundu), brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. Americans who don't use this as a word for peanuts will still know it as a brand name for chocolate-covered peanuts—a mainstay of (AmE) movie theater/(BrE) cinema concession stands.
Goober can also refer to a foolish person—but that might have a different etymology. (Goober Pyle was a kind but simple character on The Andy Griffith Show—which still shows in repeats on US television.)

Medicine / disease

Two of the items in the list are generic drug names. I've written about acetaminophen (BrE paracetamol) in another post. Albuterol is a bronchodilator (asthma inhaler) known in the UK as Salbutamol, but I'd bet most BrE folk are more familiar with the trade name Ventolin. In the UK, this comes in a blue inhaler, while preventative inhalers' sleeves are mostly brown, so they're often referred to by colo(u)r: take your brown inhaler twice a day and your blue inhaler as needed.

 

Staph is short for Staphylococcus bacterium. Americans worry about getting staph infections. I'm sure British people do too, but they haven't obsessed about this particular germ enough to it a nickname. (At least, not until MRSA came along. That's is a very severe kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection, but Americans talked about staph infections long before that was in the news.) I remember staph being mentioned a lot in relation to gym mats at school. A partner to staph is strep — which (looking at the data file) is also much, much better known in AmE than BrE. Now I see I've written about both of these germs before. So please have a look at the post on infections for more info!

 

I'll stick chiggers in this category. They're not a disease, but they feel like one. Chiggers are the larvae of a kind of mite. They burrow under the skin and it itches LIKE HELL. They exist in the UK and some people call them chiggers here, but the word comes up a lot less. Where I'm from, you get chigger "bites" from walking around in grass with bare ankles. There is less cause for walking around in grass with bare ankles in the UK, thanks to fewer lawns and colder weather, so I assume that's why people talk about them less. Wikipedia lists other names for them, which I've looked for in the GloWBE corpus. I give the US/UK (in that order) numbers after the names: berry bugs (1/0), harvest mites (1/2), red bugs (4/1), scrub-itch mites (1/0), and aoutas (0/1). Chigger is the most common name for them in both countries, but with 48 hits in AmE and just 7 in BrE.

 

Other cultural references

Kwanzaa is an African-American holiday that takes place between Christmas and New Year. I assume that's what Americans were recogni{s/z}ing in kwanza, rather than the Angolan currency. 

A sandlot is a piece of undeveloped land. The word is used especially when such land is used as a playing field, e.g. sandlot baseball.

 

A luau (or lūʻau) is a traditional Hawaiian party with food and entertainment. 

And all that's left is...

Conniption.  Origin unknown. It means a tantrum, hysterics, a fit of rage, and the like. It's often used in the phrase conniption fit (which means the same thing). Here are a few examples of its use from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

• They had a conniption when he starred in a movie
• Your mom'd have a conniption fit if she heard you talkin' like that. 
• wealthy Americans have conniptions at the possibility of a tax increase 
  

 

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So that's that! I'll do the words from other side of the table, known by Brits and not by Americans, in the next post. I won't promise it'll be next week. I might take the weekend off for my birthday!