Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English
When we hear “British Invasion” many of us remember the rock groups who appeared out of the UK in the late 60s and 70s to dominate American Top Forty stations—the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals. But not Ben Yagoda. This professor emeritus of English and Journalism from the University of Delaware puts quite a different spin on the term. During years teaching in London, Yagoda noticed a surging new British invasion, not as loud as rock music, but to a wordsmith Ilke Yogada, equally striking. Not only are Britishisms coming, he tells us, they’re already here, “adopted” in degrees ranging from “on the radar” to the fully arrived.
Inspired, in 2011, he began a blog that currently lists up to 9OO NOOBs (a Yagoda term meaning “Not One-Off Britishisms”) that has attracted 3 million viewers who weigh in with their thoughts and observations—a vast word-addicted community. Welcome to the Age of High Noobism: you’re living in it.
Noah Webster’s Revolution
In previous centuries, English speakers in Britain and America have sought to protect what they regarded as the purity of their language—it’s a common form of nationalism that assumes language needs to be defended against misuse or rule-breaking by others. Shortly after the American Revolution, the “chattering classes” (a Britishism) began defending their linguistic territory. One of the more vocal was Noah Webster, a Connecticut lexicographer whose fight for American-language school books led to the 1828 publishing of the American Dictionary of the English Language.
The fight continues to this day. A recent example appeared on an episode of Englishman’s James Corden’s late talk show, when Beatle Paul shared a story about his gentle dad urging the boys to change the chorus of She Loves You from “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” to “Yes, Yes, Yes,” since the former sounded too American. The band rejected the well-meant suggestion as old-fashioned, as indeed it was. A global hit was born.
Indeed, “resentment bordering on outrage” against Americanisms had begun in England as early as 1781 and continues to this day, a vigorous counter-narrative to Yagoda’s theme. Still, language and meanings are stubborn. They mutate: “awfully” became divorced from “awe” to mean the much milder “very”—perhaps the first identified NOOB—soon followed by “on the q.t.” and “smog.” A pattern developed over time, as forceful words softened. “Bloody” for instance—at first a strong, shocking British term, became “blooming,” so when the American lyricists who wrote My Fair Lady have Eliza Doolittle lose her composure at the horse races and shout “Move your bloomin’ arse!” the effect is comic. “Arse,” the British equivalent of the American “ass,” has slowly made inroads across the pond. When the English expression CBA (for “can’t be arsed,” meaning bothered) was used by an up-and-coming band to explain their disinclination to embark on an American tour, it sounds not offensive but funny—an expression of lack of ambition that may be more British than American.
As Yagoda traces NOOBs throughout history (wars prove particularly fertile ground), we learn about “kit,” “piece of cake,” and “posh”—all have roots in the Great War. A note to the English majors who thought that posh was an acronym for the best choices for sailing to colonial India (Port Out, Starboard Home): you’re wrong. No evidence, no ticket exists to prove that this word means anything but classy, as it did in the First World War and right through to stylish Victoria Beckham, once known as “Posh Spice” of the Spice Girls.
Impossible to dislike Ben Yagoda, a knowledgeable and engaging professor whose classes must have been a treat to attend. Even when he misidentifies a word’s origin and his wife corrects him, he seems delighted to be proved wrong.
His sources—apart from his wife—are wide-ranging—from friends and fellow scholars to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), reliable largely for printed, not spoken language, to Jonathan Green’s (free) online Dictionary of Slang, Google Ngram Viewer (tracker of digital word appearances) and, not least, The New York Times. If the Times uses it, a NOOB has arrived.
Leaning in the direction of the academic, Yagoda notices the move away from the American grammatical style of enclosing a quoted sentence’s end (full stop in British) within quotation marks, toward “logical Punctuation” where the full stop is placed outside. This he attributes to the internet’s encroaching prose style. Indeed, High Noobism itself acts like a media-born seedling, a subtle invasion led by wildly popular British TV series like Downtown Abbey, The Crown, Call the Midwife and the two doctors, Who and Martin. Talk shows hosted by Brits—John Oliver and James Corden–did their part and the once-in-a-generation Harry Potter creator, JK Rowling, has become an industry of her own. One of her child wizards is a “ginger,” a Britishism for redhead, a term not previously used in America. Like so many British terms, ginger gradually became a negative—witness King Charles’ reported disappointment when his second son was born a “ginger,” an adjective both comic and cruel. Red-haired singer Ed Sheeran says a mocking episode of the American cartoon series South Park featuring Cartman’s “kill a ginger” campaign, “ruined my…life” by introducing the slur to America.
Bouquets of Britishisms
The British seem exceptionally inventive at insults and Yagoda unearths a few up-and-coming Britishisms to prove his point. Good Morning America audiences were bewildered at the elegant English actress Keira Knightley’s reaction to hearing that Benedict Cumberbatch was on the cover of Time Magazine, saying she’d enjoy “taking the piss” out of her friend—she meant teasing, she finally managed to explain. “Are you taking the piss?” is commonly heard on British TV shows—the equivalent to “Are you being sarcastic?” in North America, meaning the listener hears a sarcastic tone but wants to be sure.
The rude-sounding insult “wanker” has gotten (gotten is another NOOB) recent attention, especially for fans of the popular TV series Ted Lasso who’ve heard British football fans on the show jeering the failures of their hapless but infinitely kind American coach. And they are watching football—called soccer only in North America—despite “soccer” having roots in England, not the States, where it first appeared as an alternative to the other British football game, rugby. Words travel eastward too.
Yagoda has major fun identifying the “trickle” of Britishisms that became a flood in the 1990s to the present, a period he identifies as High Noobishness. Technology sped up borrowing from Britain. An example he likes is “laddish” an adjective used in the UK to describe young male behavior and used by a music critic here about the American band Blink182. Overall, the emergence of words like gobsmacked, gobshite, (Yorkshire proving a rich and colorful mine for language), as well as twee, plonk (cheap wine) and the Scottish kerfuffle are among (amongst, thanks to comic Mike Myers. Raised in Toronto by British parents, Myers also gave us shag) the invasion of “exotic seeds” blown to America from Britain. The effect on American English of these NOOBs was a “brisk, thanks-I-needed-that slap in the face.” Overused British terms indicate anglophile snobbery, but the ones in high circulation are energetic and fashionable.
Yagoda’s radar first lit up when he read about the disappearance of a young government intern in Washington, DC. Only she didn’t disappear. Instead, she “went missing,” a Britishism or NOOB that soon entered the American language, quickly followed by the British “run up”, as in the run-up to the Iraq War or to an election. A diligent detective, Yagoda digs into the origins of these invasive seeds and often (pronounced “offen” in the States, “often” in Britain) finds that the writers of “went missing” and other British terms either grew up in Ireland or went to university (no longer college, thanks to NOOBs) in England (like Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow). The inspired Yagoda soon began collecting his NOOBs, and the result is a thoroughly researched, entirely delightful portrait of cultures on the move. As the Brits would say, “Bob’s your uncle.”
Canada Embraces the U Words
North of the USA lies Canada—with no Revolution, a large French-speaking province and a population that prides itself on its diversity: a mosaic. As for Canadian English, its differences are subtle—the country is known for saying “sorry” too often and “eh” rather a lot. We pronounce and spell words differently—our “out and about” are frequently jeered at by American comics but never sound right to the Canadian ear. “Bonjour-hi” has become a popular mix of our two official languages, at least in Montreal, despite attempts by the Francophone Quebec government to ban it. We say global-EYE-sation—these differences like spelling the British way (labour, honour) and other words like theatre and centre–are minor perhaps, yet become important identifiers in the Ben Affleck film Argo, as Americans pretending to be Canadian during the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran are taught to pronounce “Toronto” as “Torono” as real Canadians do.
As a child of eight “on holiday’ (a NOOB, says Yagoda) in New England I first noticed that American kids my age said “hunh?” instead of “eh?” and they were more outgoing than us British-influenced Canucks. A child trying to befriend me at our seaside rental (as I hid inside) could be heard saying “I think she’s bashful” to his father, a word I’d never heard—we used “shy.” These memories are mere anecdotes, but their effect of marking the difference between two English-speaking peoples was quite real.
Anglo-Canadians spent a long time mulling over our national identity—being neither British nor American—so we produced good satirists. When the authorities decided that American influence on our radio and television was becoming too great, they imposed quotas of 35-50% demanding homegrown content—a policy quickly dubbed CanCon, so Canadian musicians could get airplay. It got good results. But the sketch comedy series, Second City Television (SCTV), a wholly Canadian production, reacted differently. In the early 1980s the country was treated to a SCTV segment called The Great White North. Brothers Bob and Doug Mackenzie, two homegrown bozos, wore toques (woolen winter hats, pronounced “tooks”), checked lumberjack-style shirts and drank Molson’s (a stronger-than-American beer) from bottles called “stubbies” for their short, squat shape. Behind them was a map of an empty snow-covered northern country, as they discussed topics about which they knew little, peppering their chat with “ehs” and then popular phrases like “Get Out.” Crates of twenty-four beers called 2-4s were stacked at the side of the set. The message? You want Canadian Content? We’ll give you some. The boys were a hit and won multiple awards.
India: Repository of Good English
It seems that all former British colonies react differently to their English heritage. English remains an official language (there are twenty-two) in India, the language spoken by the government and by more people than anywhere else, by dint of India’s huge population. The Indian diaspora includes award-winning writers like Rohinton Mistry, a Parsi from Mumbai, who writes about India in English from his home in Canada. When an interviewer asked him about blowback from his home country for writing in English, he firmly replied, “English IS an Indian language.” And so, it is.
But over centuries of colonization, language everywhere changes, adapts and adopts. So many words of Indian origin are used in English that we hardly notice them: curry, loot, verandah, bungalow, thug—to name a few. My local supermarket in Toronto sells a variety of high-end beautifully designed boxes of teas under the “Pukka” label, a word meaning excellent—in Hindi of course.
Nonetheless, an Indian without fluency in English is doomed to a more menial way of life than those educated in the colonial Language. A noble scheme to help raise the status of the millions of Dalits (untouchables) who do not speak English was described in a New Yorker article. An artist designed a new “Goddess of English” to add to the pantheon of deities in the province of Uttar Pradesh, with the aim of encouraging English amongst the Dalit population, thus allowing them to progress economically. The Hindu authorities refused permission.
The Sun Never Sets
Of the so-called “Dominions”, (New Zealand, Canada, Australia) a term that no longer means anything except to a few antique historians, it’s youthful Australia that has led the way in influencing the world with its popular English slang. Where would we be without “No worries” (the “mate” implied and sometimes spoken) a phrase that has pretty much demolished “You’re Welcome” with cheeriness, especially among young people. Yagoda translates it as akin to “copacetic” which dates him a little but carries the same meaning. A while ago, “groovy” was approximately equal, but that went out with the Hippies.
And finally, we come to “Singlish,” for Singapore English also known as Straits English (for the Straits of Malacca) an all-purpose lingua franca used from Malaysia down to the bottom of the Malay Peninsula in Singapore. In Malaysia, newly elected Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad struck a blow against his country’s colonial heritage by removing English from school curricula and making Bahasa Malaysia the sole language of instruction. The trouble came when non-English speaking graduates found the rest of the world could not communicate in what was known as Bahasa. Pressure from business leaders changed this policy allowing English back into the schools.
In contrast, business-minded and hyper-modern Singaporeans once received a stern lecture from their longtime leader, Lee Kwan Yew, about the decreasing quality of their spoken English, and were told in effect, to clean it up. Citizens of Chinese, Malay, Indian and various admixtures had been speaking “pidgin” as Lee called it, known as Singlish. This would not do. Yet Singlish stubbornly persists –you can hear it in the hit film “Crazy Rich Asians” along with a variety of Chinese and Malay dialects. Want to pass as a local? Just add “lah” to the end of a sentence. Or shorten words, Chinese style— ‘Can you do this?” becomes simply “Can?” or “Can-Can” with its negative “Cannot, lah.” For a quick lesson in how to speak like a local, check out Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy. Burgess lived in then-Malaya for nearly nine years and was a skilled linguist—his novel comes with a handy word index.
England may no longer rule the waves or color much of the globe pink, but the English language, in all its infinite variety, carries on, invading and evolving, as if the Union Jack still flew all over the world.
Nancy Wigston is a Toronto-based travel writer. Please see her recent book reviews of A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages and Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens’s London.