“Saviour” and “Nappies”

Now there’s a combination you don’t normally see, but they are, or at least seem to be, favorites of Amy Bishop, the American woman convicted of murdering three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2010. Patrick Radden Keefe recently published a long article about her case in the New Yorker, and in it a line of dialogue spoken by a “pompous scientist” in one of Bishop’s unpublished novels:

“And you want to change nappies, wipe snotty noses, and shovel green glop into a baby’s mouth like any fat, stupid Hausfrau?”

If you are unfamiliar with the term and the context clues are insufficient, nappy is British for diaper. I don’t know if the pompous scientist is supposed to be British, but I can affirm that nappy has virtually never been used anywhere else in the U.S., even among the hipsters of deepest Williamsburg.

Elsewhere in the article, in discussing Bishop’s religious feelings, Keefe writes: “Amy told me she accepts Christ as her Saviour, and she has been reading the Bible in prison.”

The most common U.S. spelling is savior and has been since the 1930s. In the Google Ngram chart below, the green line is British use of saviour, red is U.S. saviour (note the NOOB uptick on the right), yellow is U.S. savior, and blue is British savior.

Despite the recent NOOB uptick in U.S. saviour, the u-less version is very much the standard here. The New York Times Style Guide mandates Savior in religious contexts, savior in secular ones (such as “the new goalie will be the savior of the hockey team”). The Associated Press Style Guide (followed by most U.S. newspapers) calls for lower-casing both. The New Yorker, true to its idiosyncratic self, calls for hockey saviors and a Christian Saviour. 

The nappy may be Amy Bishop’s; Saviour is very much the New Yorker’s.

Oh, come on

In a profile of the director Robert Wilson in the September 17 issue of the New Yorker, Hilton Als relates how Wilson studied as an undergraduate at the University of Texas in his native state. Als then writes:

“While at university, where he enrolled in business administration to please his father, he took a job as a kitchen aide at the Austin State Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped.”

The “at university” sets a news standard for conspicuous and gratuitous use of Britishisms (CAGUOBs), even for the New Yorker.

“Barman”

This is a pure play. By that I mean there is a precise (?) U.S. equivalent, bartender, so that the use of barman in the U.S. can be explained only by the  desire to use a Britishism, or the conscious or unconscious imitation of others who have done so. (I suppose another possibility is retrograde sexism.)

According to this Google Ngram, the use of barman increased about 20 percent in the U.S. between 2000 and 2008 (actually, between 2000 and 2005; it has held steady since then):

(It’s interesting to look at an Ngram, below, showing the use of barman [blue] and bartender [red] in British English between 1920 and 2008. At least since about 1960, it appears to be a case of an encroaching Americanism, with the two terms recently nearing equality. However, barman is still used about twice as often in Britain as in the U.S., and bartender is six or seven times more prevalent in the U.S.

)

The New Yorker has used barman 34 times from 1937 to the present, including in a 1939 poem called “Forsaken Barman,” a 1964 Talk of the Town piece called “Barman,” and this, from a January 30, 2012, Profile by Nick Paumgarten:

He cuts off the drinks, keeps spare umbrellas on hand for sudden squalls, shuffles customers around to make space for someone’s mom, and, like any barman with a following, dispenses a lot of free drinks.

But you can find the word in all sorts of other sources as well:

“Whiskey You’re the Devil”: The best version of this traditional song is the one you sing right before the barman kicks you out. (Rosie Schaap, New York Times, March 8, 2012)

I grabbed a spot at the bar and was immediately greeted by the friendly barman, Christopher. (HoustonPress.com, March 2, 2012)

Etc.

“Picture”

A picture of Martin, which can be yours for $750

In a short New York Times essay about his personal art collection some time back, Steve Martin wrote,  “There are great pictures mixed in with good pictures, mixed in with oddballs, but I endorse and have found something worthwhile in every one of them.” In all he used the word picture or picture fifteen times, always as a synonym for painting.

This is a distinctly British, U (in the sense of U vs. non-U) and old-fashioned sense of the word. John Ruskin wrote in 1852, “Every noble picture is a manuscript book, of which only one copy exists or ever can exist.”

Wilde didn’t call his novel The Painting of Dorian Gray, after all. In that book, Lord Henry Wotton, after seeing the title portrait for the first time, tells the man who painted it, Basil Hallward: “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The [Royal] Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”

Most Americans tend to use painting for paintings, reserving picture for photographs, drawings or what children produce at nursery school. But the Ruskin-Wilde-Martin picture crops up now and again, for example in the title of Richard Wollheim’s 1988 book Looking at Pictures the Old-Fashioned Way: Painting as an Art.

And then, as is often the case with NOOBs, there is The New Yorker, which is quite fond of pictures, as in a 1935 Talk of the Town piece: “A cold cop wandered into one of the most elegant art galleries in town the other day and asked the lady in charge if he could stay until his hands got warm. He walked around for a while, blowing on his hands, and looking at the pictures.”

Project Tope

Quoth the OED: “One who topes or drinks a great deal; a hard drinker; a drunkard. Now chiefly literary.”

Hals’s relentless jolliness isn’t confined to his genre scenes of rollicking topers… (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, August 8, 2011)

NOOB Much?

“[Andrew] Stanton is ginger-haired, candid, and boyishly eager.”–Tad Friend, “Second Act Twist,” The New Yorker, October 17, 2011

“They settled in Los Angeles, where he’d got a glamorous, welcome-to-show-biz job…”–ibid.

“The task of adaptation was further complicated by [Edgar Rice] Burroughs’ racial bushwa, Mad Libs terminology … and general barminess.”–ibid.

(Note: in the above sentence, bushwa is 100 percent American slang.)

“On offer”

This image, weirdly, advertises the Australian Government's "Defence Work Experience Program"

For sale, or on sale (that is, discounted); more generally, available. First cited in the OED in a (London) Daily News in 1881: “Old wheat scarce and dear. Very little barley on offer.”

The Google Ngram chart below shows the use of the expression in American English from 1900 through 2008, with the relentless increase commencing in about 1972.

Tens of thousands of Apple Macintosh users visited the Macworld trade exposition here earlier this month, examining the hardware and software on offer.(Peter H. Lewis, New York Times, April 22, 1990)/Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, October 3, 2011)

On the radar: “daft”

When I recently wrote a post about mad and nutter I considered including one additional Britishism indicating insanity. I ultimately decided not to because the chance of any American using seemed closer to slim than none.

I did not count on the New Yorker. Reading the August 1 issue of that publication this morning, I came upon this sentence from Sasha Frere-Jones: “My Morning Jacket, on the recently released album ‘Circuital,’ its sixth, makes it clear that the real hippie is neither biddable nor daft.”

That’s right, daft. Wikipedia informs me that Frere-Jones is an American, Manhattan-born, though it also notes “he is a grandson of Alexander Stuart Frere, the former chairman of the board of William Heinemann Ltd, the British publishing house, and a great-grandson of the novelist Edgar Wallace, who wrote many popular pulp novels, though he is best known for writing the story for the film King Kong.”

Turning to the New Yorker’s merciless online database, I find that Frere-Jones has used daft eleven times since 2005. This gives him a narrow lead over the magazine’s (American) film critic David Denby, with eight.

Onward and upward with “had got”

I have noted the New Yorker’s insistence on having its writers use the British “had got” instead of American “had gotten.” But the magazine seems to have kicked things up a notch; now, people being quoted are required to use it as well. In an April 25 profile of Reed Krakoff, CEO of Coach Leather, Krakoff recalls a period when “I had got poison ivy on my hands.”‘ I submit that every American, of which Krakoff is one, would have said gotten. Anyone disagree?