1017. How did British words find their way into American English? Author Ben Yagoda shares insights with us from his new book "Gobsmacked!"
1017. How did British words find their way into American English? Author Ben Yagoda shares insights with us from his new book "Gobsmacked!" We learn about words like "brilliant" and "ginger" that have crossed the pond, some words you might think came from Britain (but didn't), which politicians are prone to using Britishisms, and why some adopted terms might sound more pretentious than others to American ears.
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PARTIALLY COMPUTER-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here today with Ben Yagoda, Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware and author of this fabulous new book, “Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English.”
Ben, welcome to the Grammar Girl.
BEN: Thank you so much. It is an honor and pleasure to be here.
MIGNON: Oh, it's a delight to have you here. These fabulous words. You know, one thing I was wondering is the British invasion of American English, but you know, doesn't American English kind of start from British English? Like what makes a word worthy of inclusion in this book?
BEN: Yeah, I mean, flashback 250, 300 years, there were the colonies and there was Britain and the language was pretty much the same. The same vocabulary, same grammar, and so forth. But over the years, they've diverged a little bit. The famous quote is that there are two countries separated by a common language.
And, you know, each side had slang, words for new technology that came up, just new words that pop up. And they wouldn't really pop up across the ocean at the same time. They would tend to pop up there or here. And then there began to be a little bit of cross pollination maybe a hundred years or so after the revolution, you know, late 1800s, when things had kind of settled in the American language in the British language. And in fact, and one reason why British people are gobsmacked or amused by this book is that the narrative has been that it's been more the other way and that Americanisms have come to affect or sometimes described as “pollute” British English.
And they've been upset about that for quite some time. The example that somehow … two examples always seem to come up: “You guys,” they are not very happy about that. And when you order food, saying, “Can I get a coffee?” That's considered an Americanism. Oh yeah. And then the other one is “awesome.” They don't like people coming over and say, “This is awesome. That's awesome.” And then they complain that people call chips “fries,” which they call them “chips,” we call them “fries.” And they call them “biscuits” we call them “cookies,” and they feel that cookies and fries have come over and infected their pure language. So, the fact that it has also gone the other way, that British terms have become popular in American English for over a hundred years, but I believe much more rapidly and more frequently in the last say, 25, 30 years, is really surprising to them.
MIGNON: Have you spent a lot of time in England? Like what made you embark on this journey?
BEN: I have. You mentioned my teaching career at the University of Delaware, and I was lucky enough to, on I think it was five occasions, teach a study abroad class in London, either for a five week winter session or summer session. So, that adds up to six, seven, eight months over there. And one of the classes I taught actually as a professor of journalism, was on the British press.
So I was reading the British press a lot and became aware of just how many different words and terms they have there. When you're an American and you're watching British comedies about British people, there's just a few words they say, like “telly” and “the tube” and a “lift” for elevator, but there's really more. There's hundreds and hundreds of different terms that they use.
So I started noticing that and then, five, six years after, I started doing this in the mid '90s. Five, six years later, I started noticing the terms I had encountered in British journalism coming over and appearing here. And first there was one, then two or three or four, then a dozen, then more. And it became a trend.
MIGNON: Yeah, and this started on your long-running blog, right?
BEN: Yeah, so I started a blog about this phenomenon called “Not One-Off Britishisms.” And “one-off” is one of them. A “one-off” is an expression that means a one time only, you know, one-time only occurrence. And that was one of the ones that I noticed in the British press. This election was a “one-off,” or this game was a “one-off.”
It started popping up in the New York Times and the things I'd read here. So the blog started in 2011, still going strong. You know, I've done, I don't know exactly how many, but I'm sure over 1,000 entries have had, weirdly for such a narrow topic, over 3 million page views, which for you, that's small change, but for like this weird topic about British expressions in America, it's kind of amazing.
And then a couple of years ago, I decided I would try to adapt it into a book and that's what's about to come out.
MIGNON: That’s great. And we're going to get to the words in a sec, but it just occurred to me, you mentioned The New York Times. You talk a lot in the book about The New York Times. Do you feel like that is kind of a conduit for the British words that come into American English or is it just a coincidence that that's what you read a lot?
BEN: Yeah, it is. It's a coincidence. It's a conduit. I'm trying to think of another “con” word. You know, it's also … New York Times is great because they've got newyorktimes.com and it's very easy to search for any word or phrase back to the first edition in 1851 so you can chart these things over time. So that's very convenient.
I use a lot of other resources as well, different Google databases and corpora from … actually at BYU in Utah, they've put together just an amazing collection of these things. So in this day and age, you can chart these things historically and see when a word popped up and see how popular it's become.
But The Times also, it's like, I don't know, it's the biggest, the best, the most-read American news source. So, if it's not in The Times as a Britishism, it hasn't happened yet. It's very convenient … Is that another … coincidence, conduit convenient? It's a very convenient source for me to look at.
I try not to rely too much on it because it's only one source, but it's probably the most useful way of looking at whether a word has penetrated into American consciousness.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we have to start with the cover word “gobsmacked.” Do you want to talk about that one?
BEN: Yeah. You know, it's funny. A lot of these words, when I talked to people about the concept of this, it's sometimes a little hard to grasp because it is so narrow and complicated, but I give some examples like “go missing” and “gobsmacked” and among Americans, especially young Americans, they find it hard to believe that that word hasn't always been around in America.
And it hasn't. I mean, you're not old, but you remember a time when people didn't say “gobsmacked.”
MIGNON: I do, yeah. It seems newish.
BEN: Now they do. The definition is flabbergasted, astounded, speechless, or incoherent with amazement. And it's a Yorkshire word. I mean, the other great, probably the greatest resource is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is online.
And it has this historical bent. So, when you look for a word, it shows you the earliest use they have found in their team of people around the world sending in examples. So, yeah, they report that this word is from Yorkshire, and there's a great quote of a politician from that region of Britain, Roy Hattersley in 1980, who wrote a sentence, “It was his dazzling display of simultaneous social and intellectual sophistication that left me in the patois of the place whence I came, quote, ‘gobsmacked.’”
And that's brilliant — to use another Britishism — for me because the quotes around the word “gobsmacked” indicate that it's still rather unfamiliar so people put it in quotation marks. He also identifies that it's from whence he came, so it's just a perfect quote.
And that was 1980, so it already, even then, wasn't that familiar even in Britain. But quickly it became so. New York Times used it 46 times in 2021 and 2022, so probably these words, you know that when they first get adopted over here, they're sort of new and shiny and sound different and clever. The danger is, they become cliches, which probably “gobsmacked” has become.
And now I realize it's the title of my book. So, too late to change now.
MIGNON: I think it works. It does. Well, you've been dropping the Britishisms. There's … I’m marking ... I want to talk about this one. I want to talk about that one. “Gone missing,” you mentioned. So many years ago, probably, I don't know, 15 years ago or so when I still did this kind of thing, it was the Grammar Girl pet peeve of the year because so many people had complained to me about the phrase “gone missing.”
Do you want to talk as … and so now I know we can blame the British.
BEN: I mean, again, that's probably Exhibit One that young people don't believe it wasn't always an Americanism. And using these tools and corpora and databases, you can sort of chart the use. And before around 2000, it was very, very rarely used in the U.S. Interestingly, it's actually fairly new in Britain.
It's kind of a late 20th-century term. Like I was saying, these things just pop up, and I believe it started in Australia. And so you can talk about a person who went missing or an object. You know, could be a battleship. It could be your wallet. And it's very useful. What we had, and a lot of times these terms become popular, not just because they're new and shiny, but because they serve a need.
So what we had before was, "it vanished," "disappeared." It sounds like a magician describing their act. It's “gone missing” is better, I would say, and it really caught on. And this was one that I kind of was able to tie to a particular event: 2001, this congressional intern, Chandra Levy disappeared.
And it was a big, big news story kind of thrown off the front pages by the 9/11 attacks. And my hypothesis is that the reporters were talking about it so much that they were grasping around for a nickname, excuse me, not a nickname — they were grasping around for a synonym, just not to have to say “vanish” and “disappear” so many times.
And “go missing” started to pop up then. I later got an email from the reporter on the first time I was able to find it used about Chandra Levy. I'm not sure it was the first. And she said, essentially, she was gobsmacked to see that in my blog because she grew up in Britain and thought it was normal and was writing for Americans.
So that might've been the Typhoid Mary that got “go missing” into American parlance.
MIGNON: Amazing. Yeah, it is pretty unusual to be able to trace it back to one thing like that, but that was a huge story at the time. I remember that.
BEN: Another one — and you had sent me a list of some of the terms that you wanted to talk about — "smog," that was one that was traceable.
MIGNON: I would have thought, I would have thought that was American.
BEN: Right. You know, it certainly was used much more in the U.S., but it was literally invented in Britain in 1905. And again, using the databases and resources — Google Books, and The Times of London Index, and these University of Utah corpora, there was a newspaper, The Globe that reported in 1905, “The other day at a meeting of the Public Health Congress, Dr. DeVoe did a public service in coining a new word for the London Fog, which is referred to as, 'smog, a compound of smoke and fog.'" So there you have it in black and white. And it's really fun to be able to come across a nugget like that, that shows the exact moment when, when a word that we feel is common was coined.
MIGNON: Yeah, that is great. And I guess in retrospect, it shouldn't surprise me that it came up in London. I was in London in the mid-eighties and I'm not making this up. I sneezed like every three minutes from the air pollution. I was walking around with a Kleenex box. It was awful. And then when we went to the countryside, I was fine.
So it was clearly the air pollution. And then I went back more recently and they’ve …
BEN: It is.
MIGNON: … cleaned it all up. It's great. I love London.
BEN: Pittsburgh, you know, was famously associated with smog. LA. I think it's gotten marginally better in all those places.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, another word you mentioned was “awfully,” “awful.” How the Britons don't like, “awesome.” That was it. The Britons don't like “awesome” coming from America, but in your book, you say “awfully” comes from Britain saying “that's awfully nice” or something like that.
BEN: Yes. And yeah, that's the one I put forth as the very first not one-off Britishisms. And there was a guy, an American guy, Richard Grant White, who coined the term — he called it “Briticisms”; I prefer “Britishisms”— complaining in 1868 about British words that had infected (that's the language that's often used) the American language, and he complained about using “awfully” to mean “very,” like “it was awfully nice of you” that offended him for some reason.
I don't see the objection.
MIGNON: Well, I still hear people complain about it sometimes. They tend to be much, much older people, but they will say that, you know, "awfully" should be referred to for awe, "awesome" and "awfully," it should, it should relate to awe.
BEN: Yeah, I mean, that's really old-fashioned …
MIGNON: … The feeling of awe.
BEN: Along time ago, “awful” took on the meaning of “bad” or “terrible.” And then this “awfully,” meaning intensive or very, was even after that. So, you've got some old-school people you're in touch with. Well, you're sort of the, you're the conduit of all complaints.
You've heard them all probably.
MIGNON: It feels like it, but then new ones still pop up …
BEN: Sure. Sure. No, of course there are new ones. Yeah. Interesting.
MIGNON: I do hear a lot. Another one that I would have thought — I absolutely would have thought it was new and American — is “brunch.” “Brunch” feels very new to me, but you said it’s not.
BEN: It is not. And you know, that's one of those words that you know, it's an unusual word. So you can just plug it in and search it, and it spits out these various search engines. It's how I basically spend or waste my time, is searching for these words. Keeps me off the streets. But yeah, it was university slang originally. In 1895, The Independent reported, breakfast is “breaker” in the Oxford tongue.
And when a man makes lunch, his first meal of the day, it becomes “brunch.” And it caught on and it took a while. These words that are successful in one country, the more successful they are, they generally cross the ocean eventually. And brunch took about 30 or 40 years. So, 1930s, 1940s, that was when “brunch” in America started to become commonly used.
And, you know, I've got a category in the book. I try it for every word, I indicate whether it's on the radar or emerging or fully adopted or outpaced that it's actually used more in the U.S. than Britain. And I think “brunch” is one of those words that at this point is used more here.
MIGNON: Mm hmm. And it's so useful. So useful. Yeah. I went through a period where I would miss lunch and then have a big meal like around three and then skip dinner and we started talking about “linner” and that's really useful too, but it hasn't caught on like “brunch.”
BEN: It does have that hard consonant at the start. Yeah. I'm amazed that whenever I hear that people skip a meal. I've never skipped a meal in my life. So I salute you. “Good on ya” as they say.
MIGNON: You know, you put me in front of a spreadsheet or something, and I'll forget to eat.
BEN: Yeah, my powers of concentration are not on that level. So…
MIGNON: That's brilliant. So “brilliant” is one of the words, and I just find myself wondering … I feel like “brilliant” started being used a lot more after Harry Potter became really popular. Did you, in your research, have you found that Harry Potter was a big influence in words crossing over?
BEN: I'm sure it was, and I did some forensic research comparing the British editions to the American editions. And actually, a very high percentage of the Britishisms were changed. So one of the words, and I see it's on your list as well, is “ginger,” referring to a red-haired person.
What we used to call a redhead is a “ginger.” And that's become quite common in the U.S., and I thought that it was because of Harry's friend, whose name escapes me.
MIGNON: Ron.
BEN: Ron, Ron Weasley, right, yeah, who is a ginger-haired bloke. But in fact, as far as I could tell, even in the British edition, she doesn't use the word “ginger” about him.
There's one pun where it's always red-haired. And one pun where it's like a Tom Swifty where she said he did something “gingerly,” as the adverb. So it was clever. But probably the more important influence for “ginger” was Ginger Spice and the Spice Girls.
MIGNON: Of course.
BEN: She was one of the Spice Girls. But yeah, it's interesting. I don't recall looking into the extent to which “brilliant” was used in the Harry Potter books. I actually think I read half of one. My kids were just at the age where they read them themselves. And so I didn't read them aloud to them. So I don't know whether “brilliant” was used, but that word certainly has come over.
And it's a complicated one because people sometimes say, “Well, we've said ‘brilliant’ all the time,” and we have, but with different kinds of nuances and different connotations. In the U.S. we've for a long time talked about a “brilliant star,” "bright," or a “brilliant person,” meaning very, very smart, but the Brits use it about kind of inanimate objects.
So, you know, “That meal was brilliant.” Okay. That's not something we would traditionally have said. It's a little bit on the radar edging over here. They also use it ironically. So, somebody says something you don't quite agree with and you say, “Brilliant.” And you could hear the dripping irony in there.
MIGNON: I didn't realize that. It's kind of like “bless your heart.”
BEN: It's very much like”bless your heart.” "Brilliant, brilliant" or “yeah, right,” you know, one of those somewhat sarcastic comebacks.
MIGNON: I'll watch out for that now. Is “clever” like that? Does “clever” have a different meaning in British and American English?
BEN: It does. It really does. So, and it relates to the word “smart.” Okay. So when we're talking about intelligent people, the word that Americans commonly use is “smart.” In Britain, “smart” means stylish. Like “That's a smart outfit you're wearing” or “smart furnishings.” For what we call “smart kids,” “smart children,” they use “clever.”
So the clever children are in the most advanced class. That is on the radar. It's kind of making its way over here. Don't hear it that much, but it pops up now and again.
MIGNON: And there's a couple of words that you highlighted that feel like when people use them, I feel like it sounds a little bit pretentious. So “bespoke” is one of those. I think I would just say “custom,” but when I hear “bespoke” it feels fancy.
BEN: Well, yeah, I mean, that's one of those words that has really reached the level of cliché. So, in Britain from the 1800s, the word was used strictly about clothing and often actually shoes. That was the place where it was most commonly used. And there was a movie that I saw when I was a kid called "The Bespoke Overcoat" that was made in the fifties, but it started to become more popular and become a vogue word and a buzzword, and now you have bespoke investment planning, bespoke computer systems, bespoke audio components, and it's just over the top to use another Britishism. It's gotten a little bit too far.
Similar to a word that's not a Britishism that's also become a cliche and overused is “curated,” a curated experience. You know, it's overdone.
MIGNON: What about “on holiday”? You know, and it just occurred to me, I have a lot of British listeners, so I hope that you know we love British English. Where I just … when I said “pretentious,” I didn't mean that.
BEN: Of course. I mean, the British people aren't pretentious when they use it. That's their common word. It's the Americans. So I think that would be one where I would legitimately call an American who says “I'm on holiday” pretentious, “the p-word.” Just because like some others, unlike “go missing” and “gobsmacked” and some of these others that really, there's no substitute, “on holiday” is exactly equal to “on vacation,” and I mean, being pretentious isn't the worst thing. It's not like being mean to animals or anything like that.
It's fine. But I would have to say that an American who says they're “on holiday,” as I've heard people say, is in fact a bit pretentious.
MIGNON: Yeah. And here's an interesting difference between British and American English is that we call the dot at the end of a sentence a “period,” and British people call it a “full stop.” And so are people starting in the U.S. to call it a “full stop” too?
BEN: They are and, you hear it frequently, that might sound a little more forceful. You know, it's so that when people say, “This situation is terrible, full stop” or “This situation is terrible, period” to emphasize the force of which we're saying. There are certain people, a lot of them are New York Times writers, but there are others as well who are really prone to Britishisms.
One of them is actually the politician Newt Gingrich, who is very, very fond of “clever.” He's talked about Mitt Romney once, “That wasn't very clever of him, was it?” Which is a pure British way of saying things. But another one is our former president, not the guy who's running now, but Barack Obama. He was fond of a number of Britishisms, “full stop” being one of them. That was a term he used a lot when he wanted to emphasize something.
I have a chapter on “faux Britishisms” — certain words that people think are Britishisms, but really aren't. And Obama used one of those, which is the word that spelled D-I-V-I-S-I-V-E. I think I spelled it right. And how would you pronounce that?
MIGNON: I would say “divisive.”
BEN: Yes, I would say “divisive.” Americans and British people have always said “divisive,” but the pronunciation “divisive” started to pop up. Actually, I think George W. Bush might have been, or no, it was H.W. Bush might have used it, and it was called out on it. It sounds British because they say things like “vitamin” and some other words like that, but it's not.
Obama said “divisive.” I heard it on NPR, I think yesterday, “divisive.” It kind of isn't, has for me, a nails on chalkboard kind of sound too, just because it's not a real thing. It's not even a real Britishism. And another one that's a faux Britishism that is almost universal, the New York Times and the Associated Press are still, Chicago Manual of Style, are still holding out, but spelling the word “adviser.” It's always been A-D-V-I-S-E-R because “advised,” and then you put an R in it, but around about 20, 30 years ago, it started to be common to spell it, A-D-V-I-S-O-R, which sounds fancier, perhaps, more British. “Advisor.” I'm your advisor. But it's not done that way in British, except now they've adopted a bit of the Americanism of spelling it O-R.
MIGNON: You know, there's so much cross pollination now with the internet, and you know, do you think that in the long run British English and American English are just going to merge and be much more similar than they are today?
BEN: No, I don't. I get that in the last chapter a bit. I think it certainly is the case that word "cross pollination" is a good one that in recent decades, there has been more travel both ways than previously. But I started out by talking about reading the British press and encountering all the words.
The considerable majority of them haven't crossed over. And similarly, the majority of the Americanisms haven't crossed over. So it's not gonna become the same, or at least not for a really long time, I don't think. Not in our lifetime.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're gonna wrap up the main segment right now. So, we've been talking with Ben Yagoda about his new book, “Gobsmacked!” I love that exclamation point. And Ben, where can people find you?
BEN: They could find me at my website, benyagoda.com, and also at my blog on, Britishisms which is notoneoffbritishisms.com. All one word, notoneoffbritishisms.com.
Mignon: Wonderful.
Ben: They can listen to my podcast The Lives They're Living, which is on Apple and Spotify and all the other platforms.
Mignon: Wonderful. Thank you.
Ben: Thank you very much.
Great. That's "The Lives They're Living." Well, now for the lucky Grammarpaloozians, we're going to have a bonus segment that you will find in your feed, which you can get through Apple Podcasts or through Subtext where you've signed up to get text messages from me.