“Backbencher”

The BBC provides this explanation and definition of the term:

The vast majority of parliamentarians do not hold ministerial or shadow ministerial office and are known as backbenchers. They are so-called because they sit on the back benches of the Commons or Lords – ministers and their opposition counterparts sit on the front benches.

The OED cites a first British use in 1910, and more than a century later it’s unavoidable in the U.K. and other countries with a Parliamentary system. But it took a long time for Americans to start to use the the term to refer to their own politicos. The moment finally arrived in in 1988 (at least in the archives of the New York Times), and the person who used it was none other than Representative Newt Gingrich, who had filed ethics charges against Speaker of the House Jim Wright. Gingrich (whose fondness for another Britishism has been covered on this blog) was quoted in the Times as saying: ”If Jim Wright were a backbench member, I probably wouldn’t have done anything…. But he’s the Speaker, and everything he could have done all his life as a backbencher becomes self-destructive when he becomes third in line to be President of the United States.”

The first time a Times reporter called an American a backbencher was four years later. Now it’s a commonplace. Four of the last six times the term’s been used in the Times have been in reference to Americans, most recently a January, 5, 2013, Ross Douthat column in which he noted that Speaker John Boehner’s “own backbenchers blew up his attempt at a fiscal cliff negotiating maneuver.”

It’s a useful term, but it bit less potent than in the U.K. since here, it’s not only metaphorical but untrue: since 1913, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been allowed to sit anywhere they want.

“Po-faced”

I wrote this for the Lingua Franca, the blog I contribute to at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The post is below, followed by some subsequent reflections:

The expression po-faced has achieved, as expressions sometimes do, a vogue. The following quotations all appeared in print in the last 15 months:

• “And it is satisfying to be allowed to hoot publicly at a man who is likely to remind you of every po-faced schoolteacher who told you to stop giggling.” (New York Times theater review.)
•  ”To me, the scurrilousness has the pasty complexion of po-faced error. The worry, the criticism, feels tacky and fatuous.” (Darin Strauss, New York Times,  on the supposed death of literary fiction.)
• “Rather than coming off all po-faced and ‘I told you so,’ the 2012 edition of Muse is instead busy smirking, raiding the mini-bar and slurring ‘I told you so.’” (Buffalo News.)
• “But 2011 has brought a crop of foreign-language films in which po-faced pedantry has taken a back seat to dynamic storytelling.” (Variety.)
•  ” … a yearning Irish busker and a po-faced Czech pianist.” (New York Post, review of the musical play One.)

If you don’t know what po-faced means (as I did not the first couple of times I came across it), the examples won’t be very helpful in instructing you. The Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition is, “Characterized by or assuming an expressionless or impassive face; poker-faced; (hence) humourless, disapproving.” The first citation is from Music Ho!, a 1934 book by the British composer and critic Constant Lambert, and suggests an origin not long before that: “I do not wish, when faced with exoticism, to adopt an attitude which can best be described by the admirable expression ‘po-faced’.”

That the OED is far from certain on the expression’s origin can be gleaned from the fact that, in a two-line etymological note, it uses the word perhaps four times. Perhaps it derives from the interjection poh (or pooh), or perhaps from the noun po, meaning chamber pot. Or perhaps it’s a shortening of poker-faced. A comparison to pie-faced could be useful as well. Perhaps.

I don’t find any of these convincing, to tell you the truth. The first doesn’t jibe with the early uses. The interjection-derivation rings slightly truer (po-faced as one who says “poh”), but why would the h be dropped in the compound word? And those early uses are all British, while poker-faced and pie-faced are Americanisms. The OED defines the latter as, “Having a round, flat face or a blank expression; stupid”; all the early citations are in reference to babies or children.

Searching through Google Books, I found this in Who’s There Within?, a 1942 novel by the British author Louis Golding (1895-1958): “But how could she act like that, like an outraged Victorian matron, how could she? How could she be so po-faced! (She was using the favourite word of the Bohemians in the London of the early twenties, the Cave of Harmony, and Harold Scott, of Elsa Lanchester, and all that.)”

I mentioned all this to my daughter Elizabeth Yagoda, a teacher of history and a keen student of the Bright Young Things. She mentioned the post-Great War generation’s fondness for abbreviations and acronyms, and speculated that po-faced may have originally been p.o.-faced, though she didn’t have a thought on what p.o. may have stood for. I will go with that till proven otherwise, and, naturally, welcome opinions and speculation.

Not only Elizabeth but all the Americans to whom I’ve mentioned po-faced initially thought that the first word was a Southern rendition of poor (as in the New Orleans po’ boy sandwich) and that the term was related to the familiar American verb poor-mouth, meaning (the OED says), “The action of claiming to be poor, or of belittling or understating resources, abilities, etc.”

I initially had that sense, too. But that can’t be the case if the expression was created by London Bohemians in the 1920s. However, I believe recent American adopters have somewhere in the front or back of their minds a po-faced/poor-mouth relationship. That is, to them, po-faced is an attitude characterized by some sort of combination of impassiveness, disapproval, and feigning of poverty or humility.

Clearly, further research is called for. For the time being, I’ll merely note that the second use by a New York Times staff member (the first was in 1984 by the columnist Anthony Lewis, a well-known Anglophile) came in a 1988 piece, datelined London. Howell Raines—a Southerner who would later become the Times’ executive editor—wrote about a British performer who adopted the identity of an American named “Hank Langford”Wangford”–a “self-described ‘po-faced’ country singer.” Can anyone doubt that in his mind Raines connected po and po’?

Quintin Hogg in his later years

I’ll close with the observation that no matter how popular po-faced becomes on these shores, no one can use it like a Brit. A case in point is the Conservative leader Quintin Hogg (1907-2001), otherwise known as Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone, KG, CH, PC, QC, FRS. In 1966 The Times of London reported:

Mr. Hogg said at Watford that he had been given five new walking sticks since he broke his at Chiswick on Mr. Wilson’s portrait. [Apparently a Labour supporter had waved a Harold Wilson placard in Hogg's face, whereupon he struck it with one of the two canes he employed, owing to the many times his ankles had been injured while he was engaged in his favorite pastime, mountain-climbing.] “Politics should be fun,” he said. “Politicians have no right to be pompous or po-faced.”

Additional thoughts:

First, I found a use of po-faced nearly a quarter-century earlier than the OED’s 1934 cite. Surprisingly, it was in an American novel, The Annals of Ann (1910), by Kate Trimble Sharber. A character named Mammy Lou is speaking (“Mammy” being a term for an African-American female servant) about the suitability of a certain gentleman as a marital prospect”

“But, honey, he is tolerable po-faced, which ain’t no good sign in marryin’. If thar’s anybody better experienced in that business than me and King Solomon I’d like to see the whites o’ ther eyes; an’ I tell you every time, if you want to get a good-natured, wood cuttin’, baby-tendin husban’ choose one that’s fat in the face!”

So she’s using po-faced to mean more or less gaunt. Since this doesn’t show up anywhere else, and since the Bright Young Things most likely weren’t reading obscure American novels, I would take this as a rare, possibly unique, piece of regional dialect.

When the Lingua Franca piece appeared, the prolific and valuable language commentator Stan Carey posted a comment that the American Heritage Dictionary was a bit more definitive than the OED about etymology, stating that the term comes from pot (pronounced “po”) de chambre, French for chamber pot, “a po-faced expression being likened to that of a person observing the contents of a chamber pot with disgust.”

On reflection, I am inclined to accept this hypothesis. The OED has an 1880 citation for po-as-chamber pot (in a dictionary of the Scottish Language, interestingly), and a use of it by Leonard Woolf in a letter written in 1905 (a time when Woolf, having graduated from Cambridge, was serving in the Ceylon Secret Service): “I have to help to see that King’s House is prepared for him, to reckon out how many fishknives & pillow cases & pos he wants.”

“Have (someone) on”

Faithful reader Wes Davis sends along a link to the outstanding American public radio show “This American Life.” He explained that the show’s staff “got a tip that hog rectums [known in the trade, collectively, as "bung"] were being sold as calamari and they set out to investigate the story.” Wes said that at roughly the 8:30 point in the segment, a NOOB erupted.

The reporter, Ben Calhoun, is talking to Ron Meek, an employee at a meat processing plant who confirms having been told that such a calamari bait-and-switch had indeed taken place. From the transcript available at the show’s website:

Ben Calhoun: And is there any possibility that you think that when they were explaining this to you, that they were kind of having you on a little bit?

Ron Meek: Having me on?

Ben Calhoun: Yeah, like–

Ron Meek: Bullshitting me?

Ben Calhoun: Yeah.

As Wes says, “It’s great because the exchange comes with a built-in reminder that American English already has a perfectly serviceable way of saying ‘having you on.’” (The OED has an 1867 first citation for the phrase and defines it as: “to puzzle or deceive intentionally; to chaff, tease; to hoax.”)

Indeed, AmE is especially rich in words denoting cheating and/or lying, which is one reason I am naming this one an Outlier. And Ben Calhoun doesn’t get any dispensation for using it by virtue of his heritage or education. Wikipedia says he was born in 1979 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and now lives in Brooklyn, New York–which is, of course, the most enthusiastic U.S. outpost of NOOBs.

Incidentally, later in the episode–which is very funny and highly recommended–Calhoun has an exchange with his sister Lauren, a chef, in which they each use a NOOB. They are staring at bung in a butcher case:

Ben: What do you think those bits are in there?

Lauren: Oh, you know. Poo.

“Grotty”

The OED’s first citation for this adjective comes from the 1964 movie tie-in The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, by John Burke, and helpfully includes an etymology and partial definition: “‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in them. They’re dead grotty.’ Marshall stared. ‘Grotty?’ ‘Yeah—grotesque.’” The OED’s full definition: “Unpleasant, dirty, nasty, ugly, etc.: a general term of disapproval.”

A Google Ngram graph shows that grotty is a dead Britishism, with steadily increasing U.S. use. That appears to have picked up in recent years, including in a piece about the HBO series “Girls” in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “Hannah is still waiting hand in foot on Adam (Adam Driver) in his grotty apartment.”

An April 2012 New York Times theater review by Eric Grode says the play’s setting, in “a wood-paneled living room in Paterson, N.J., is more strip mall than Vegas Strip. (Mimi Lien contributed the suitably grotty set.)”

The reviewer’s name reminds me that there is more or less exact American equivalent, spelled, variously, grody, groaty, groady, and groddy, with all but the last rhyming with toady. The OED’s first cite for this is a 1965 Houston Chronicle but it gained immortality in the early ’80s, via Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her immortal phrase “grody to the max.”

Is there any difference between grotty and grody? I leave a definite answer to wiser heads than mine, but I will note that all the OED definitions of grody refer to people and all but one of grotty refer to places.

“Year on year”

The expression is a compound adjective that, according to the OED, is “used with reference to a comparison of figures with corresponding ones for a date twelve months earlier.” The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1976 article in the Daily Telegraph: “It is hoped this will show a year on year rise in average earnings of between 14 and 15 per cent.”

The Google Ngram chart below showing use of year on year between 1975 and 2008 suggests it is both a Britishism (the blue line represents British use) and a NOOB (the red line, showing U.S. use, climbs steadily starting in the mid-1990s).

Certainly, it’s often been seen in U.S. financial pages in recent months, for example:

• “Consumer spending suffered its sharpest year-on-year drop since World War II, according to Italy’s leading business association.” New York Times, December 12, 2012
•  ”Home values in San Francisco have been growing on a year-on-year basis for four consecutive months.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 2012:

Interestingly, year on year has an (as far as I can tell) exact synonym: year over year. This one is an American speciality (to use a Britishism which has not yet appeared here). U.S. use of year over year is the green line in the chart, British use the yellow line. An example from the Associated Press, December 26, 2012: “October was the fifth straight month of year-over-year gains, after nearly two years of declines.” And the New York Times, December 28, 2012: “The pace of rental growth year over year has also slowed.”

The two expressions seem to be battling it out on these shores. I predict over will ultimately prevail. We like our literalisms even more than our Britishisms.

“Turn up” keeps turning up

In a mere five paragraphs in yesterday’s New York Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that on January 21, the actor Kevin Bacon “turns up as the star of a new series on Fox, ‘The Following’”; that the villain of the series has  “a knack for bewitching attractive women, who would later turn up dead, their eyes gouged out”; and that the series is similar to “Alcatraz,” a Fox series “in which investigators had to track down scores of inmates and guards who vanished from Alcatraz in 1963 and began turning up in the present.”

Genzlinger also writes that the bad guy “seems always to be one bloody step ahead,” but he’s probably being literal.

“From strength to strength”

This turned up in a New York Times article a couple of months ago:

Susan Kamil, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Random House, confirmed the acquisition on Monday, saying in a statement, “We’re thrilled to welcome Lena [Dunham] to Random House. Her skill on the page as a writer is remarkable — fresh, wise, so assured. She is that rare literary talent that will only grow from strength to strength and we look forward to helping her build a long career as an author.”

I was surprised, because I’d always thought of from strength to strength–meaning, basically, that something is already doing well and is expected to do even better–as one of those British expressions, such as spoiled for choice, that would probably never make it over here.

But I found that the Susan Kamil quote wasn’t a one-off, as witness this from the Yale Daily News: “After winning every Ivy game this season, the women’s volleyball team is going from strength to strength.” (October 17, 2012) And this February 2102 quote from the Times’ David “Think British, Act Yiddish” Brooks: “Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength.”

It turns out that the expression has a long history, on both sides of the Atlantic. Forgive me for stating what may be obvious to some, but it appears first to have been used in Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible, where Psalms 84:7 is rendered “They go from strength to strength and so the God of Gods apeareth unto them in Zion.” The phrase was used in the King James and other subsequent versions, as well as by religious writers, including Julian Hare in an 1849 sermon: “Mounting from strength to strength, from highth, to a higher highth!”

The Google Ngram chart below shows the use of the phrase in Britain (blue line) and the United States (red line) from 1800 through 2008:

The uses appear predominantly religious until about 1900–and note that in the nineteenth century it was considerably more popular in the U.S. The ascendance of the blue line in the early twentieth reflects its acceptance as a secular metaphor in the U.K.; the (presumably continuing) upturn of the red line starting in about 2000 suggests that from strength to strength is a solid NOOB.

Can spoiled for choice be far behind?

“Poo”

No one can say that we here at NOOBs don’t tackle the profound issues of the day. A Smithsonian Magazine headline, posted just an hour ago (as I write) read: “The Most Exclusive Coffee in the World Is Harvested From Elephant Poo.”

On the other hand, American Republican political operative Grover Norquist notoriously said after our recent election: “The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head, and you should vote against Romney”

I don’t care much about Grover Norquist or the most exclusive coffee in the world, but I am interested in the possibility that British poo is taking over from good old American poop in the faeces euphemism department.

The question turns out to be a somewhat complicated one, as these questions tend to be. The OED offers two separate sets of entries for these terms, with separate etymologies. One derives from the onomatopoeic interjection “Poo,” dating from the 1600s, when it was more commonly spelled “Puh” or “Pooh,” or, as Fielding rendered it in this quote from Tom Jones: “‘Pugh,’ says she, ‘you have pinked a Man in a Duel, that’s all.’”

It was not until the 1960s, according to the OED, that the word began to be used as a noun or verb for excrement, as The Guardian did in 1981: “That doggy’s doing a poo.”

The second entry derives from a different instance of onomatopoeia. The OED cites this definition from an early eighteenth-century dictionary: “to break Wind backwards softly.” By the 1920s, poop had acquired, in the United States, solidity. The OED quotes Ezra Pound in a 1940 letter: “This federation poop is just the same old..secret committee of shit.”

Complicating manners are at least three additional meanings of poop. One, derived from the term for the rear of a boat, refers to the rear of a person or animal. The second–which Pound may have had in mind–is an American slang term, originating in the military, for inside information. The third, which probably isn’t relevant, is pooped, an Americanism meaning “exhausted” or “worn out.”

Getting back to poo versus poop, here is a Google Ngram chart showing use of dog poo and dog poop n Britain and the U.S. between 2000 and 2008 (the most recent year for which figures are available):

It confirms that the dominant form is poop in the U.S. (red line) and poo Britain (yellow line), and that poo (green line) is on the rise in the U.S., with a roughly 100 percent increase in the period.

Further research is clearly needed. For the time being, my sense is that my fellow Americans are rather conflicted on the matter, sometimes, as in this Huffington Post piece from March, trying to have it both ways:

“Poop. Is there anything it can’t do? On Wednesday, The Denver Zoo introduced what is believed to be the world’s first poo-powered motorized tuk tuk showcasing The Denver Zoo’s very own patent-pending gasification technology.”

Make up your mind, Huffington Post!

Kind of a riddle

If Hair Cuttery means smart in the sense of fashionable, this is a potential NOOB. If it means it in the sense of clever, then the ad isn’t.

“Sticky wicket”

Two readers have independently alerted me to this recent quote in the New York Times:

“It’s a sticky wicket for Obama,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, saying any aggressive move on such a high-profile question would be seen as “a slap in the face to his base right after they’ve just handed him a chance to realize his presidential dreams.”

I initially resisted investigating sticky wicket, relegating it to the telly-lift-old chap sort of term that in the U.S. is a stereotype of a Britishism, and thus can’t be a proper NOOB. I was wrong. It turns out that the Times has used the phrase six additional times in the past two years, all either by its own reporter or a quote by an American source. For example, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal sportswriter Tom Haudricourt commented in 2010 about the Hall of Fame prospects of baseball’s Mark McGwire, who had just admitted to using steroids: “Should we be voting guys in who admit to doing it? The sticky wicket just got stickier.”

The original British expression dates from the 1880s, according to the OED, and is (sorry for stating the obvious, to some) is a cricket metaphor. Thus it’s traditionally phrased as (batting) on a sticky wicket. The batting on is always lost in the U.S.

Looking at Google Ngram data (below) makes me think I need a new category for this bad boy. It’s a quintessentially British expression that’s so quintessential, it’s hardly used there anymore. Meanwhile, it has gradually grown in the U.S. from being an exotic novelty item to a solid NOOB–to the point that, in 2004, it was as popular here as it was there! Google’s data only goes up to 2008; I bet that at this point, there are more U.S. sticky wickets than British ones.

Google Ngram showing popularity of the phrase “sticky wicket” in Britain (blue line) and the U.S. (red line), 1915-2008