Separated by a Common Language

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.

But then again, I'm not sure the possessive is absolutely needed—you wouldn't take something in someone else's stride. So maybe Americans dropped the possessive in both literal and metaphorical usage. A horsey person might have to tell us.

At pace (meaning 'moving fast') is a similar expression—a prepositional phrase involving a noun that alludes to walking—and it has no possessive or other word introducing it. But that doesn't help us explain the American loss of the possessive in in stride, since at pace is a more British and much more recent expression. 

An older version has the indefinite determiner: at a pace. That's found in similar numbers in AmE and BrE. And then there's the very old (Middle English) expression apace, which means much the same thing and sounds much like at pace. It's possible that at pace is an eggcorn for apace, or that it's at a pace without the a, or maybe it's a bit of both—i.e. different people have come to the same form from different angles.

why?

So we have two phrases that originally had a determiner* (a possessive pronoun or an article) between a preposition and a noun for a stepping action, and in just one place (but not the same place) the expression has been getting shorter. Why? Well, the basic answer is: language changes and it doesn't ask anyone's permission. If it changes in one place it doesn't need to change in the other. And for set phrases like this, change is likely to be piecemeal. Just because one phrase loses its determiner, doesn't mean all such phrases will. 

Since these expressions have got(ten) more and more figurative over the ages (referring to properties like ease and speed, rather than literal steps or paths), the determiners have had less and less work to do. Since they are unstressed syllables, they're easy to swallow up. So, if they go, we might not miss them, and if they stay they probably won't bother us. C'est la parole. 

*You'll see above that OED calls these things possessive adjectives. I don't. They act more like determiners (e.g., a(n), the and this) than like adjectives like good or corporate.

Ben has been observing the transit of British English words, pronunciations and grammar for 13 years now at his blog Not One-Off Britishisms. So, to celebrate his book, let's look at one-off, the Britishism in his blog title.  One-off can be used as a noun or an adjective to refer to something happens once and won't happen again.

Ben's blog evaluates previously British-only expressions that seem to be catching on in American English, and one-off was one he first covered in 2011. In the book, he gives more historical context for both the British and American usage. Google Books charts (nicely redrawn by Eric Hansen in the book) provide a handy view of the trajectory of British words in American publications over time.

In the case of one-off, the first known occurrence of it is in 1930s Britain. It seems to take off in Britain in the 1960s, then shows up in the US in the 1990s, picking up speed as it goes along.  Here's the the relevant bit of the book:

 

He also categori{s/z}es each expression as to how entrenched it has become in AmE. In the case of one-off, it's "taking hold."  

While Yagoda keeps track of the migration of Britishisms, my (self-appointed) job on this blog is to give American English translations. One-of-a-kind seems a good candidate But is one-of-a-kind American English or General English? And is one-off displacing it at all?

My first stop is the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, whose data comes from 2012:

 

Now, we don't always hyphenate one of a kind (it depends on how it's being used in a sentence), but this chart at least gives a sense that one-of-a-kind is used proportionally less in BrE, since it has one-off to use instead. In the same corpus, unhyphenated one of a kind is still "more North American," but more gently so: 490 US hits to 320 GB ones. 

All of the Oxford English Dictionary quotations for one-of-a-kind are North American too—the first one from 1954 by American art critic Arthur C. Danto. (The first unhyphenated one is from 1977.) The OED does not, however, mark it as an American expression. 

Now, one-off and one-of-a-kind aren't exactly the same thing. One-off has a more temporal connotation: it's happened once (and won't again). That said, you could say, for example, that a person is a one-off or one of a kind meaning that they're a unique kind of person.

So is the existence of one-off hurting one-of-a-kind? It happens to be easier to look at the unhyphenated version in Google Ngrams and the hyphenated one in the Corpus of Historical American English, so let's look at both.

First, we can see that one of a kind has been increasing fairly steadily in both AmE and BrE, but it's definitely more American. One-off's appearance on the American scene has not caused one of a kind to become less frequent. 

How are both of these expressions doing so well?  Well, it seems to be because everything in the world has got(ten) more unique. Here's the Google Ngram for unique, going up-up-up in English generally since World War II. And just for the pedants, here's the chart for more unique:

Now, this class wasn't really my first crocheting—I'd done straight lines and zigzag crocheting as a child. Also big in my Girl-Scouting (UK Girl-Guiding) childhood was (AmE) boondoggle. Nowadays, this is an American word that can mean 'a wasteful or useless product or activity', often in reference to (more AmE) government/(more BrE) public spending. Originally, it meant 'a trivial thing', from which came to be used for a kind of twisted leather object that Boy Scouts used for fixing their kerchiefs (click link for picture). It then extended to the weaving of flat plastic cords that was a popular craft back when I was a kid.

And I thought of that this week when the Google Doodle in the UK was in hono(u)r of this craft (which has apparently had a revival), except it had the BrE name for it, borrowed from French: scoubidou. 

The Google Doodle was about "Celebrating Scoubidous". On first reading, scoubidous looked like an adjective to me (SCOUb'dous, that which is scoubi?). Part of the reason I read it wrong the first time (even though I knew the word scoubidou) is that I wasn't expecting it to be plurali{s/z}ed.  I use boondoggle as a mass noun, so for me the things in the photos are pieces of boondoggle (or something like that), rather than as boondoggles. I'm not sure if that's just me, and there's too much 'government spending' noise in the data for me to quickly check it. (Happy to hear from other former Girl Scouts on the matter.) 

Is scoubidou related to Scooby Doo? Not directly, I think. There was a song Scoubidou in the 1950s, and I suspect that the craft and the cartoon dog were separately named after it. But the dog's name was for some time spelled/spelt Scoubidou in France.