953. In honor of Veterans Day, Ben Yagoda tells us tales of military words that marched from the British lexicon to American English and influence the way we speak today. "Omnishambles," "gadget," "boffin" and more! We'll dispel some posh myths, and you'll be gobsmacked by the linguistic invasion.
953. In honor of Veterans Day, Ben Yagoda tells us tales of military words that marched from the British lexicon to American English and influence the way we speak today. "Omnishambles," "gadget," "boffin" and more! We'll dispel some posh myths, and you'll be gobsmacked by the linguistic invasion..
Find Ben at BenYagoda.com. His forthcoming book, "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English," will come out in fall of 2024.
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and regular listeners know we talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. And today we have some history - British military word history, to be exact. My guest is Ben Yegoda, who taught writing and journalism at the University of Delaware for 25 years and has written about language for many, many publications, including Slate, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Lingua Franca. You've heard his pieces on Grammar Girl before, but he's here today to help us talk about military words for Veterans Day, particularly words we get from the British military, because he has a long running blog called "Not One-Off Britishisms" about words that make the transition from British English to American English. And he has a book coming out in the fall of 2024 called "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English." And that book has a section on military slang.
Hi Ben. Thanks for being here with me today.
Ben: Mignon, it's my great pleasure. Great to see you.
Mignon: You too. So, before we jump into the wonderful words, I'd love to hear how you got started - your passion, your blog, of looking at words that have come into American English from British English.
Ben: Yeah, it's been a very long standing project. I think, well, first of all, I've always been interested in language and words, as you can relate to, I'm sure. And I notice, I notice language, I notice words, big things, little things, all sorts of things. And I, recently retired, or some few years ago retired as a professor of English at the University of Delaware. And in that capacity I was the professor for some study abroad trips, specifically to London. And this would have been starting in the mid to late 1990s. And, you know, it was great, I loved it there. But of course, I noticed the different language they used, so many things. I mean, there's the sort of, you know, stereotype, the telly and the lift and a couple of dozen others, but there's so many more terms that are different there.
So I, you know, noticed those and appreciated those. And, kept a sort of informal list in my brain, but then the funny thing that happened was a few years later back in the US I started noticing Americans using some of these terms and at first it was just a few - the one that really comes to mind as the most dramatic one was "go missing" to mean someone has disappeared or a person or a thing. My wallet went missing and when I tell young Americans that 25 years ago, that expression was just not used in America. They don't believe me because it's so common now, but it's true. It was a British expression that, yeah, around about, 20, 25 years ago started being used here, and now it's incredibly common.
And so many of these crossed my radar that I started going from my informal compilation to a blog where I would write about them. And, that's how "Not One-Off Britishisms" was formed. And, of course, "One-Off" is an example, one off being a term meaning a one time occurrence. It's a one off. And again, it's so common now in America that people don't believe me when I say that 20 years ago it was not used in America at all. It was only in Britain.
Mignon: I remember when "gone missing" burst onto the American scene because people kept complaining to me about it. They did. It wasn't, there was an intern who went missing in Washington DC.
Ben: Well, that was my theory. Yeah. Chandra Levy went missing and, you know, her situation was sometimes talked about as the kind of thing America was interested in right before 9/11. So that really dates that it was 2001, and my theory is that, you know, the normal American words would be "vanished," "disappeared," which aren't the greatest words, they sound like a magician's act, and plus, some term had to be used so often in the accounts of this unfortunate situation that, just to come up with another synonym, "go missing" entered the equation and it really seemed suitable and became popular and, and really seemed to fit. So now it's very common.
Mignon: Yeah. So one thing that struck me going through your book is, I mean one, it's just fun to look at the words that have come into American English from British English, but so many of them came from the military and that kind of surprised me.
And we have good words. Bad words. Well, all words are good words, but words for good things and bad things. Let's start with the bad things. How about … one of my favorites is "pear shaped." Yeah. That is such a fun phrase.
Ben: Yeah. And it's very evocative and, and so it's commonly, maybe always used, with the verb "go." So something "went pear shaped," like "go missing." It just, you know, it just flattened out. And it's interesting, you know, as you say, a lot of these words started in the British military, which is a great repository of slang. Britain, in general, is a great repository of slang. You know, America as well. It's hard to quantify which is more. But certainly the British military, and there have been, you know, great books written about it. Eric Partridge and others. One of the books is called "A Piece of Cake," which is a good thing, something easy as pie, pie, cake. Americans are shocked that it started in the RAF, the Royal Air Force, in World War II, but it did.
"Go pear shaped," interestingly, most of the terms that I have in the book and that I'm aware of started either roughly in World War II or World War I, or even before World War I. "Go pear shaped," you know, my research shows that the first example, which I found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the great resource, was from 1983.
So this is well, well past World War II, and the quotation they have from from '83 is "There were two bangs very close together...the whole aircraft shook and things went pear shaped very quickly after that...the control ceased to work...the nose started to go down" and that's a great quote for people like me and you because the quotation has quotation marks around the phrase "pear shape," which indicates that it was new and kind of unfamiliar at the time.
So seemingly it started not long before 1983. And yeah, it was like most of these terms. The use broadened out. So initially it had to do with a pear shape, an aircraft going down or something bad happening, but then it became broadened to a whole situation. Just everything going bad. Or as another British expression — it's not military — that I write about is when people just "lost the plot" and things went downhill in a hurry.
Mignon: I mean when I think about "going pear shaped," I think as you know, as I get older, maybe I get a little more pear shaped and that's not a good thing. Yeah,
Ben: Same. I mean and certainly when that phrase was originated, no one had that in mind, but maybe that's one reason why it, you know, became popular that people, a lot of these things have multiple meanings or nuances or reverberations. So that might be one with this one.
Mignon: Yeah. So another great British way to describe things going badly is saying something is "shambolic."
Ben: "Shambolic," you know, I think the origin of that is the term, the noun "shambles." Something "in a state of shambles," just messed up, disorganized, has been around for a long time. And again, it's a fairly recent one.
The OED dictionary's first citation was 1970 for "shambolic" adjective, but my research, you know, nowadays with things like Google Books and all the great corpora of language, many of which can be found near you in Utah at Brigham Young University sponsors, I found one, a quote back in 1946 — a quotation about a book related to World War II, and the quote was "The author parachuted into the Calvados — I'm not sure how to pronounce that country— on D Day in an operation, which in the language of those days would have been described as (again, quotation marks) 'shambolic.'"
So that shows that the origin was not too far before then. And again, you know, it was started in the military, but it's now been applied to … our government can be described as shambolic, personal affairs shambolic, and it led to another coined noun, "omnishambles," which started on the television show, the TV show in Britain, "The Thick of It." They made up that word, and, but now it's used to describe a thing that's just totally messed up.
Mignon: You know, since we're talking about military and history, you bringing up Utah reminded me of a really funny, weird story that has nothing to do with words, actually. But when I was a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno, when I was signing my contract, there was a line in there, I had to assert that I would be willing to take up arms to defend the state. As a state employee, and I was like, what is this about? And it turned out that when the university was founded, they were very concerned about being invaded by Utah. And so this was put in the contract and then never taken out.
Ben: You know, it's fascinating. It makes me think that if you were in the English department, you would be asked to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. Being the line from "Hamlet," but I guess they weren't thinking about that.
Mignon: Um, yeah, I was looking up about "shambolic" because I was thinking the suffix must be "-olic" (O-L-I-C). I was thinking "vitriolic," "symbolic" …
Ben: "Alcoholic."
Mignon: "Alcoholic." But I was really surprised when I went to the OED. It's not "-olic." It's just the "-ic" suffix, and all those words happen to end with an L.
Ben: Oh, so it's coincidence.
Mignon: It's a coincidence. Yeah. So I was very surprised when I read that. But "shambolic" is "shamble" with the "-ic" suffix.
Ben: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah.
Mignon: Yeah. And "omnishambles," that "omni-" prefix — it's somewhat familiar — it comes up in "omniscient," so "all knowing."
Ben: "Omnipotent."
Mignon: Yeah. I love the definition of "omnishambles" in the OED, "comprehensively mismanaged."
Ben: Yeah, you know, that's great. I often fantasize about the … another British word is "boffins." The boffins in the OED in the back offices, coming up with these definitions, some of which are the phrasing is just perfect. And you can imagine, you know, going back and forth between them for polishing to get it just right. It's an incredibly great institution. Yeah.
Mignon: Well, talking about the boffins, let's talk about "gadget."
Ben: What could be more American than "gadget"? So, again, very surprising. Yeah, so the history of "gadget" is the term originated back in the 19th century referring specifically to a piece of equipment used in glassmaking, but in the late 1800s, Navy slang picked it up and, it was used to mean what we would call a "thingamajig" or a "thingamajiggy," and it's a great quote, 1886 book talking about the names of all the other things on board a ship. "I don't know half of them yet. Even the sailors forget at times and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call a chicken fixing or a gadget or a gillguy or a timmynagi or a wimwom." These words are so great. Most of them lost to history.
And then it's spread to that meaning of that we use today of an all-purpose device, that, that can, you know, do surprising things. In World War I that was when that first picked, picked up. And Rudyard Kipling had a quote from 1915, talking about the Army, "They've installed decent cooking ranges and gas. The men have already made themselves all sorts of handy little labor saving gadgets," which is pretty much the same way we use it today.
Mignon: Yeah. And I love the fabulous detail in the draft of your book. And as I mentioned in the intro, it's coming in the fall of '24, but I had no idea the "New Yorker" had banned the word "gadget."
Ben: Yeah. You know, my previous book, one of my previous books "About Town," was a history of the "New Yorker" and their long-time editor, William Shawn, had literally had a list of words that were banned, and "gadget" was one of them. I think most of them were because they were … had become cliches, but he also had peculiar feelings. Another one was "balding," and maybe he thought that someone was either bald or not. And then another one that relates to Britishisms is Americans tend to say "gotten" where British people say "got." Like, "you've got very tall," the British would say, and Americans would say, "you've gotten very tall."
Well, the "New Yorker" still, to this day, bans the word "gotten." And they never use "gotten," they only use "got."
Mignon: Wow. Do you know if they use "gadget" today?
Ben: You know what? I don't, but we can easily find out by going to newyorker.com and searching for "gadget" and it'll ... Maybe one of your listeners will do that right now.
Mignon: Yeah, hit pause! But, I mean, you mentioned earlier, the tools for finding out about words and word history are just so much better now than they were 10 or 15 years ago. When they were … are some of your favorite tools?
Ben: Well, you know, absolutely. So, and I sometimes say that researching language is, well, the internet is the perfect tool for researching language and vice versa. They are made for each other because what's the problem with researching things on the internet? They're false and untrue and all that stuff, but with language there is no false — it's use — if you're looking into the way people use words. It's always true now — there are false quotations and false etymology and things like that, but if you're just looking for use of a word or term or phrase, it's right there.
I mean, I love Google Books — Google has digitized essentially every book ever published and you can search them. You can't read them all because some are in the, not in the public domain yet, but you can search them. And the most brilliant tool is related to Google Books is called Google Books Ngram Viewer. And it's N G R A M, viewer, and people can look that up, and that allows you to … it charts for you the use of any word or phrase over time, in all the books that Google has digitized, plus the beauty part, as S. J. Perelman said, is that you can compare a lot of things, but one of the things you can compare is British and American use.
So it makes these beautiful graphs showing, you know, when it started in Britain, when it started in America, often, in the case of "gadget," when America outstripped Britain, and, without it, well, I don't think I would have done this blog or this book without that tool because that's just perfectly suited for the comparison of British and American use of words.
Mignon: Yeah, no, it's one of my favorites too. Do you know, wasn't there a TV show called "Inspector Gadget"?
Ben: There absolutely was.
Mignon: Do you think that played a role in popularizing the term?
Ben: I think it had already become as popular as it would be by the time of "Inspector Gadget." And that was more of a function of it than a cause for the popularity.
Mignon: Mm hmm. That makes sense. They would name it that because it's already familiar. OK, so another word about... bad things is "dicey."
Ben: Right. And you know, the two British expressions that are kind of similar, sound alike and have similar meanings to "dicey" and "dodgy."
"Dicey"means, potentially dangerous or might not work out.
"Dodgy" is a shady, character, or situation, "dodgy" versus "dicey." But yeah, same with the others. It was World War II Air Force slang, Royal Air Force. And the OED first citation is Neville Shute's 1950 novel, "A Town, Like Alice," and it refers to it and a flyer: "He made a tight dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare," and it pretty quickly grew from strictly an air operation to the more metaphorical. So an earlier quote I found in Google Books was from 1945 "to attack a train under those conditions was dicey" with the word in quotation marks.
So, "tricky, dangerous, hard to do." And in the US, it shows up in the early sixties and then just very quickly became a common American term.
Mignon: Yeah. I wondered where it came from because when I hear "dicey," I think of chopping vegetables, dicing food. You know?
Ben: I hadn't thought of it, what the origin was, but I've got to say rolling the dice.
Mignon: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, and then it turns out that dicing food comes from cutting them up in the shape of dice.
Ben: I don't, can't remember any time when I cut a piece of, diced a piece of food in the shape of a die. It's always much smaller, but it totally makes sense that would be the origin.
Mignon: Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned fake etymologies earlier and that applies to one of the words on our list today, which is "posh." So we're moving on to the good things, but there's a story probably half the audience has heard that actually is inaccurate. So tell us about "posh."
Ben: It's like the last line of Hemingway's "Sun Also Rises": "Isn't it pretty to think so?" It's such an appealing story that you could see, like a lot of the urban legends we encounter today, how it would just catch on and people would believe it. But so "posh" as your listeners I'm sure know, means fancy, expensive, and so forth.
And the story that actually occurred as early as 1932, a researcher named Bonnie Taylor Blake came up with this 1932 citations, and the OED gives that so common is it says it's false, but they say a popular explanation, still frequently repeated, is that the word "posh" derives from the initial letters of the phrase "port "outward, starboard home," P O S H, with reference to the more comfortable because cooler and more expensive side for accommodation on ships going between Britain and India.
So it's such a cool story. Yeah, that makes sense. Again, I can imagine someone sort of making it up and putting it out there for the world and rubbing their hands with glee when it got adopted. But, you know, unfortunately, the OED, which is great on etymology is, well, as many other things, says "origin unknown," so no one really knows what the true origin is.
It did appear as early … it did show up in World War I, in the British Army, in World War I. There's a 1914 book called the "British Army from Within." It says "the cavalryman makes a point of wearing quotation mark 'posh' clothing," and helpfully explains "posh" being "a term to designate superior clothing or articles of attire other than that issued by and conforming to regulations."
So it was around in 1914 where it came from, still don't know.
Mignon: Nobody knows. Yeah. It's just so funny because when I hear the word, I think of Posh Spice from the Spice Girls to think of soldiers on the front using the word and …
Ben: Certainly Posh Spice. Victoria Beckham was nicknamed Posh because she seemed to have a kind of fancy way about her, and I'm sure that that popularity [of] that group in the nineties led to even more currency of the term in the US after that.
Mignon: Yeah. And then I imagine that posh people have cushy lives and "cushy" is another word.
Ben: Nice one. Nice segue. Yeah. So again, these historical ones are interesting because like so many "dicey" and "a piece of cake," "gadget," — they seem so American. A lot of the words I write about in the blog and the book come from suggestions from readers.
So I got, I would imagine you would have a similar experience of having great readers and great commenters. I mean, I think people who are interested in language tend to be good people. There's not a lot of ... or any hate speech or anything like that on my blog. And just a lot of people who are really interested.
And a lot of British people who are gobsmacked by the fact that British terms have come into America when they've always heard that American terms are corrupting British English. So they're amused. So I think a reader must have said, look into "cushy," and the origin of that is pretty clear.
There's words in Persian and Urdu that connote pleasure or convenience that sound like "cush,y" and the definition is "of a job situation that is undemanding, easy, requiring a little or no effort, et cetera." And this emerged in the late 19th century, before World War I, and OED has this quote from the "Penny Illustrated" paper, which is "He told me that I had gotten into a 'cushy' (quotation mark, and then parenthesis, "easy," defining it) "troop." So it's just the perfect quote because it shows you that it's new, and it gives the definition and Green's Dictionary of Slang, which is another wonderful resource. Jonathan Green has put online for free his life's work of basically doing the OED of slang. And it's just a wonderful resource.
He has a quote from 1912 referring to cushy jobs, which is, you know, the way we say it a hundred plus years later. The particular British thing was in World War I, and this meaning is not used anymore, OED describes it as "of a wound." So describing a wound that is "serious enough to necessitate withdrawal from active duty, but not life threatening." So that's called a cushy wound, and people with such wounds that take them out of battle but don't threaten their lives were actually referred to as cushies. So it would refer to the person with that, with that cushy, cushy, wound.
Mignon: Oh, wow. Now, were people who weren't wounded called cushies for other reasons, or do we just know about the wounded people?
Ben: No, I think the term cushy for a person was only in that one particular context. So, but it was most often used to refer to cushy jobs, cushy assignments and things like that.
Mignon: Fascinating. Is it related to the word "cushion"? I think of people who are cushy jobs sitting on cushions.
Ben: Yes. I correct myself. So the OED says "cushion" and "cushiony" are etymologically distinct. Huh. So it seems like it's a coincidence and probably that meaning, which clearly relates to the cushy meaning, led to the strength and the popularity of the word. Mm hmm.
Mignon: See if they're not related, people make that connection and like the word.
Ben:Yes.
Mignon: Yeah. Great. Well, uh, one last military word. Let's talk about "kit." I had heard some of the uses, but not all. I'd heard, I've heard of "kitting out," getting "kitted out," but I had not heard of "a piece of kit."
Ben: Yeah, it's a British military one, and of all the words we've discussed, this is the one that has the lowest level of popularity and frequency in the US. I mean, we say things like, uh, and they all come from the same origin, so US will say a drum "kit" or a "kit" to make a model, a model "kit." But the British use it much more broadly. The "kit" could be the uniform for a sports team, military, started the military as a piece of "kit" or equipment.
And as you said, the verb "kitted out," you know, originally meant to put on your uniform, now is often used to mean kind of dressed up or maybe even excessively so. And you asked about my sources, the other one that I go to maybe too much is the New York Times both because it's so searchable, completely searchable back to 1865 when it started, and it also is, you know, for journalists and other sorts of writers.
It's a gauge of what terms and expressions are being used. So New York Times writers have started to use "kitted out" and a "piece of kit." Probably, you know, among the moms and dads at the cook out, not so much. And a lot of these terms are used by what the Brits call the journos and the chattering classes first.
And then sometimes they filter down like a "go missing" or "dicey" to just regular people.
Mignon: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here with us to discuss the military words, we'll have you back next year when your book "Gobsmacked" is actually out, but it was wonderful to have this discussion today. Explain to people how they can find your blog or wherever else you'd like them to find you.
Ben: Thanks. Well, benyagoda.com is my website. And if you just search "not one off Britishisms" or even "Britishisms," it should pop up pretty quickly. So thank you so much. Is really a delight to talk to you. So thank you for having me.
Mignon: You too. Thanks, Ben. Bye. Bye.