Slate, the online magazine, asked me to write a piece about my experience doing Not One-Off Britishisms. I had been thinking I should really weigh in on What It All Means, so this gave me the opportunity to cogitate on the matter. It was a bit challenging, since in this and most cases, I’m a lot more interested in observing that and how than in speculating about why or (even worse) weighing in on whether the phenomenon is good, bad or somewhere in between.
But I wrote the piece and you can read it here.
Just a couple of things to add. First, while the headline (“The Britishism Invasion”) is spot-on, I did not write an am not pleased with the subtitle, “Language corruption is a two-way street.” “Corruption” is such a harsh word.
Second, the comments–342 at last count–are a trip. A few are dopey, but most are right in the spirit of this enterprise, adding interesting comments and suggestions for future entries. (Shag seemed to keep coming up.) Also, not a few pointed out that I made an embarrassing mistake–I had the plural of corpus as corpi, which apparently is not a word, rather than corpora. Hey, I don’t know Latin and I’m not a linguist. I don’t even play one on TV.
I heard directly from quite a few people with interesting things to say. One of them was Helen Kennedy, the first journo, according to my unscientific investigation, to use go missing to refer to Chandra Levy’s disappearance. Her e-mail had the subject line “You made my day!” and began:
I always knew I would amount to something, and having some small part in the downfall of American English – well, could one be more subversive? No, one could not.
I’m half-American and half Irish, raised in England and Italy. I am CONSTANTLY having to turn to my colleagues to ask if “advertizing” has a Z here, etc… I genuinely had no idea that “gone missing” was not regular Ammurican.
So “go missing” was (arguably) blown to these shores, like some exotic seed, by someone who learned it in the U.K. As has been observed before, the Internet sure is something.
Great article. I found about it through metafilter.
So…how about “remit”? ‘Fraid to say my wife will use it when we’re feeling a bit poncey.
And since my entire family enjoys MasterChef UK, we will occasionally or regularly say pudding (“That’s a good pud”), aubergine, courgette, minced beef, fillet (rhymes with grill it) of beef, spring onions…I’m sure there are other bits and bobs.
What is “remit”?
From the OED:
noun (chiefly British): the task or area of activity officially assigned to an individual or organization:
“the committee was becoming caught up in issues that did not fall within its remit”
Heard a lot on Spooks or other British dramas with govt as part of the plotline.
For many uses of remit, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/services/channels_radio.shtml
For the record, I spent quite a bit of time puzzling over the meaning of NOOBS until it finally dawned on me that it’s short for Not One-Off Britishisms. And no, that doesn’t make me a dolt (though I suppose it does make me a NOOB, at least around here) because NOOB has a long established history in Internet slang as a shortened, deliberately corrupted form of Newbie, which in turn is short for anyone who’s new to a website or forum or otherwise laughably clueless about some feature of the Internet or its culture or of a software program. Anyway, the cognitive dissonance I experience when seeing “ABOUT NOOBS” in your header menu — not to mention Faux NOOBs in your right nav — is quite vexing. I’m guessing you’d never have adopted this misleading acronym if you hadn’t been an Internet NOOB yourself.