Welcome to The New Books Network.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast, a joint production of Princeton University Press and The New Books Network.
I'm Mark Clovis, and today I'm speaking with Ben Yegoda, author of the book Gobsmacked, The British Invasion of American English.Ben, welcome to The New Books Network.
Thank you so much.It's delightful to be here.I'm chuffed, as the British would say.
I'd have a response, but after reading your book, I'm kind of at a seed right now as to what's Britishisms and what's Americanisms.
They're so intermingled now.They are, they are. The book is about British words and phrases that have become popular or common over here in the US.But there are still a lot of both American phrases that aren't used in Britain.
And by the way, that's been the kind of dominant narrative over the years is Americanism is going over there more recently. Britishism's coming over here, but there are a lot that haven't come over.And chuffed is one of those.
It's a British term, slang term meaning happy, please, so forth.And I chart these things.I keep an eye out.
And I've seen one or two uses of it, but it really hasn't become as common as, for example, the title of the book, gobsmacked, word meaning surprised. And derivation is gob is word for mouth and smacked means smack.
So something so surprising that you smack yourself in the mouth.That has become very, very common over here to the point where sometimes when I tell people it was British in origin, they're surprised or they're gobsmacked.
I was about to say. That's, that is one of the things that I enjoyed about your book is you're right, it's, we are so often think of it as a predominantly one way traffic.
And I don't think we appreciate the degree to which it is kind of a transatlantic transaction that's taking place.What was it that led you to write a book about what the sort of the American end of this relationship?
Well, it's kind of a long gestation.It started back in the probably mid to late 1990s.I am now retired, but I was a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware for quite a few years.
And on several occasions, I led study abroad programs over in London for sometimes it was a winter session or a summer session or a full semester.And one of the courses I always taught was the British press.
And of course, the British press with the tabloids and the broadsheets, and the Fleet Street tradition is quite an institution and different from the US press in a lot of ways.So I read a lot of newspapers, both because that's what I do and
in preparation for teaching those classes and began to notice first that there were so many more British terms that I was aware of.I mean, coming up in America, there's these sort of stock
terms, maybe a couple of dozen or so that you hear British characters use like telly for television or the left or a few others, but there were so many.And it was it was really fun and fascinating for me to observe all those.So that happened.
But then the next thing that happened, probably late 90s into the 2000s, I started to notice American, especially journalists, but sometimes also just regular people using what I had learned to be British phrases.And this trend continued.
And over the years, as the decade of the 2000s proceeded, it seemed to be happening more and more.And then finally, in 2011, I decided I would write about it.I started a blog. about it, and the blog was called Not One-Off Britishisms.
Now, one-off is one of these not one-off Britishisms, a word meaning a one-time occurrence or a one-of-a-kind event that have become used in the U.S., and that's one.So, I started in 2011.I've now been still doing it for
13 years and probably done a thousand entries.It's gotten over, or as the British would say, it's got over 3 million page views, which is kind of amazing for such a narrow topic.
And then a couple of years ago, I decided, well, this trend is continuing.I can expand what I've written on the blog into a book. And that's what happens.So long answer to your question, that is the origin of the book gobsmacked.
I should add that while, I mean, your blog is great, that what you do in the book is an evolution of that.So it's a nice complement to it, but it is also a few steps more developed and more detailed than what you do in the blog.
Yeah, absolutely. for every entry, most of them I'd written at least once or maybe more on the blog, but every single one is expanded and brought up to date and more information.And also one of the fun things the book was putting into categories.
So each chapter is a category and I start with, you know, it's this phenomenon is a relatively recent one, but to some extent it's been happening for, over 130 years.
The term Britishism, and actually it was originally, the term that was originally used was Briticism with a C, was coined in 1890 by an American literary critic named Richard White, and he wrote an article complaining about British terms that had come over here and that he didn't approve of.
The commentary in both directions.The term Americanism was coined back in the 1790s, also by a guy complaining about them.And usually it's been a complaint.
I try to avoid that, as the British would say, whinging, meaning whining or complaining about the phenomenon. But Richard White gave a list of Britishisms that he felt were not good English and had a bad effect in the American language.
And one of them was the one I nominated as the very first not one off Britishism or noob as I abbreviate it.And that is the word awfully. A-W-F-U-L-L-Y.And it's very common today, awfully to mean very, as an intensifier.
But back in 1890, that was a new thing.And he didn't like that the word awful, meaning a bad thing, was, as he felt it, twisted as an intensifier, meaning very, that is awfully nice to see you or something like that.
He felt that was a British import that had a bad influence on the American version of the English language.
That's one of the things that I, you know, enjoyed about reading your book is that there's the subtext you don't really go into great detail about this aspect of it, but the element of subjectivity and individuality in this about how sometimes there's certain things that
people seem to adopt, and you do talk about the pattern of adoption, which is really at the core of this, how people just pick up phrases or words that they, if I'm going to go for another Britishism, fancy, and that they decide that they're going to use it or drop in their language, or sometimes they're even doing it unconsciously.
And because they pick it up from, say, watching a TV show or reading a British novel, and pretty soon it just you know, spreads like a virus and becomes part of the language.
Absolutely right.And, you know, I sometimes look at it in Darwinian terms so that, you know, In American lingo, we had terms shared with Britain, a controversy, a fight, something like that.
But then British slang came up, and this is a regional slang that I forget which region of Britain it started in, I think maybe Scotland, the word kerfuffle, kerfuffle, which means that, but it's so much more colorful and evocative of the idea.
It tries to get across.So usually the sort of, you mentioned viruses, the typhoid Marys are the journalists who are always trying to find new ways to say things and stand out from the crowd and look clever, as the British would say.
And so they start using them and then other journalists and readers say, hey, that's a good word, I'm going to use that.And, you know, sometimes maybe it's conscious, other times not, it's just a word that one has encountered.
And then there comes a time when you need a word for a controversy, and up comes kerfuffle.And then somebody else hears it, and then it goes, it continues.And a lot of these have become
establish, just for that reason that they're very useful words, that the previous equivalent wasn't quite as strong.
I'd like to get into some of what you do in this book in terms of focusing upon these words and explaining their introduction.
But I want to start us off by talking about the three categories you identify in the beginning, because as you explain, not every new business is the same.
and that there are different forms of it and how with the different forms, the different categories, they help us to better understand where these new business come from and why it is that we adopt them.
I'm going to ask Mark if you can remind me of the categories.Oh, I was talking about the three you identify of value, equivalent, and trendy.OK.
Yeah, interesting.So value is what I was just talking about, a word that gives good value.Kerfuffle, gobsmacked.One that was one of the early ones that I noticed
And again, when I say it to people, it surprises them, young people especially, that it was not always used in the US, is the verb to go missing.Something went missing, a person, your wallet, or something like that.
It's quite a useful phrase, but up until 30 or 40 years ago, So years ago, it was not used hardly at all, if at all, in the US.
We had words like vanished and disappeared, which when you think about it, it makes it sound like it's a magician doing some sort of vanishing act trick.And go missing really served that purpose.And so those are the ones that are of value.
I think you mentioned that one of them categories was trendy.And yeah, there's a bit of that as well.I try to avoid the P word for pretentious, but sometimes one can't help it, especially when one is saying one.
An example of that might be one that I hear more and more nowadays.I mean, in American parlance, there was this perfectly serviceable phrase, going on vacation.
It's what, you know, I said as a kid, probably you said as a kid, it pretty much explains what it is. You either have time off or you go away.The British equivalent is going on holiday.And as far as I can tell, it really means the same thing.
When an American says going on holiday, it sounds like they're trying to be a bit posh, to use another not one off Britishism.So that would be a good example.My wife used to work with someone, an American, who went to college at Boston College.
But he used to say, when I was at university.And that's just not something Americans traditionally said we would say in college.But he's not the only one.
I've noticed over the last few years more and more examples of people being called university students, Americans instead of college students, or at university instead of in college. Then I think the other one you mentioned was the equivalent.
Yes, sir.Yeah.Yeah, I guess.I think maybe we cannot talk about that because it's not that fresh in my mind.I mean, I talked about the.
university and college and holiday and vacation being equivalent and would we be able to just cut out the third one and go on?
No, it's understandable.It's just one of the reasons why I wanted to feature that was because it shows how the newbisms end up being adopted for different reasons.And I think that
It's one of those things where I find that you could practically write a book on any one of those categories.It's just really interesting to think about why it is we adopt these words.
Part of the time it's because the words are so fun, sometimes it's because the words are so functional.I was wondering if you could help illustrate this by choosing some of the newbisms you feature in your book, because you have various categories.
You talk about newbisms in the military, newbisms in sport,
And I was wondering if there were like maybe two or three of new of new business in these various categories that really I feel for you are ones that exemplify how you how these new business become America adopted by Americans, or just once you find are particularly fun to talk about.
Yeah. Well, one that that always comes to mind, as you mentioned earlier, I think the military in this sort of general category of historical noobs, what was the British military was a very rich vein of these things.
And World War I and World War II each had its own stash of them.So World War I brought forth the British terms, later adopted by Americans, Cushy, as in a cushy job, a job that's not too taxing.
Sounds a little more modern than that, but it's from World War I. Gadget, for a thingamajig, also British military slang.
One expression that has, I've started to see more and more in the last few years, that was originally military has been adopted in what Americans call sports, but British call sport, Americans sometimes are saying sport now, a kit, to kit out.
So originally that meant equipment, your kit.Americans had always used it like a, you know, radio making kit or a drum kit or something like that, but it was used there more widely as any sort of equipment.But now you see it as a sports uniform.
So a Manchester United kit. that I'm starting to see over in the US as well.Posh, I mentioned, meaning fancy, was a World War I slang.
There's a bit of false etymology about posh that it stands for the initials Port Outward Starboard Home, P-O-S-H, and meaning that on sailing trips to the east,
The rich customers would be on the port side going out and the starboard side coming home so that the sun wouldn't bother them.Completely false, but it's a great story and you see that repeated.
a fair amount.If I could add here, I'll be honest, I was one of the ones who believed that story.I don't think I shared it, but I did think about it.
One of the things you did that I thought was very convincing, and this is to get to what you do in the book, is that you chart the appearance of these words. And it was that that I found as really especially convincing.
I was thinking about the, it's the figure you have in that chapter where you talk about the usage of it.And you would think that if it was for like port outward starboard home, that you would see the usage say in like the early 20th century.
And yet you have this graph which shows how the usage really takes off only in the past, say, know, quarter century.
And which, which, which I thought was was a very telling piece of evidence that that it was a much more modern creation, and maybe somebody, you know, you invented it or misattributed it to to something that they maybe have heard somewhere else.
Yes, and a lot of, there are a lot of investigators working in the field, not so much of British citizens, but of looking into origins of words and phrases, a lot of really smart and clever people.And
they have found, people, others did kind of groundbreaking research on the origin of posh, and that they found uses of the term that predate the first appearance of that so-called etymology, and pretty much categorically proved it wasn't true.
But the charts you mentioned, Mark, really
You know, I don't think I would have done the blog for this long, and then probably not the book if it hadn't been for the appearance of something called Google Books Ngram viewer and listeners can can Google that Ngram is
is one word, N-G-R-A-M, and then viewer.And what that is, is it's something produced by the Google company.And Google Books, as listeners probably know, is a long-term project by which Google has digitized virtually every book ever
printed, certainly since the 1700s.I mean, they've gone through the major research library and scanned and digitized these books, many of which one can then read.
Not so much, though, for ones in the last, say, 100 years, which are under copyright, but Google still has the data.So what you can do on Google Ngram Viewer is It's an X, Y axis sort of graph.And you can put in any word or phrase up to five words.
or series of words or phrases, and it will produce a graph that shows the frequency of use over time in the books digitized by Google, which is essentially every book.But wait, there's more.
The thing that makes it so valuable for the blog is you can separate out British books versus American books.
So in the case of Posh, which you mentioned, the Google Ngram Bureau graph shows from the 1920s on to the 40s, pretty much flat, both lines, British and American.The British one, though, starts to pick up in the 40s.
gradually increases over the decades and then in the decade of the 2000s shoots way up, whereas the American line is always below the British one, meaning less frequent use, and has a more gradual rise, but again, a sharper rise in post-2000.
And Mark, do you know why, or can you hypothesize why Posh rose so rapidly post-2000?
I'm guessing because of its association with a member of a popular musical group, the Spice Girls?
Exactly, exactly.That was about late 90s, very early 2000s is when the Spice Girls hit and one of the members
was known as Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham, in sort of a commentary that even though she was had a middle class upbringing, it was felt that she had a rather posh bearing to her.And then it took off.So
you know, you can't really say cause and effect, but it, Spice Girls hit, Yusuf Posh took off, so it seems like a pretty good hypothesis that one thing led to the other.
Now, another member of the Spice Girls was Ginger Spice, a pun on the ginger spice cookies.She was called Ginger because of her red hair, and traditionally,
In Britain, people who Americans would call redheads were called gingers, and that shot up Post Spice Girls. Another phenomenon that happened around the same time that also I think has been influential in the larger trend is the Harry Potter books.
One of the characters, Ron Weasley, was very famously a ginger.So then there were other well-known gingers like Prince Harry, the South Park animated series, had a couple of episodes about gingers, and so now ginger in the U.S.
is a fairly common occurrence.You know, it does, as far as I know, mean the same as redhead, so it might sound a little pretentious to use it, but it is here, that's for sure.
And again, one of the things you highlight there is how these things end up establishing a presence in the American languages.You have this cultural exchange.
And this goes back to something you talk about earlier in the book, which is how the degree to which sometimes we adopt this out of a sense of pretentiousness.We choose to use these words because maybe we heard it
on an episode of something we watched on Masterpiece Theater back when that was a thing, more of a thing.And nowadays, because we have things like Harry Potter, it seems to be more fluid than ever before, the crossover from Britain to America.
I think there's no question about it.And, you know, both ways, of course, because they're watching Friends and Seinfeld and NCIS over there.
But Brickbox, I don't know about you, but a lot of people I know are really enamored of British detective series or watching those.And even I understand my kids are adults now, they were
young when the Spice Girls hit and Harry Potter, but there's an animated series called Peppa Pig.Are you familiar with that?I am.Yeah.
And it's as far as my investigations tell me that the characters speak in posh British accents and three and four year olds in America are watching it and picking up language from Peppa Pig.
And, you know, the Guardian, British newspapers like the Guardian and the Times are read over here, the Daily Mail.
Quite a few British journalists, or as they would call them journos, have come over and written to pursue their writing career in the U.S.from Tina Brown to Anna Wintour to Christopher Hitchens.
So I think you're absolutely right that the back and forth is more rich than ever.I was talking to someone the other day about this, and yet another thing is YouTube videos.
And this guy, or bloke as they would say over there, said his interests are film criticism, and guitars, and I guess music criticism, and watches a lot of YouTube videos on those subjects.
For some reason, many if not most of them are done by British people.So he picks up all sorts of slang and phrases from them and introduces those to his regular vocabulary.And then I'm sure his friends hear him and it goes from there.
And that Darwinian selection, if people find the phrase attractive or useful or gives them some value, they'll use it and it'll go from there.
One of the things that I thought was intriguing was the idea that this is percolating down through another way.
And here I'm thinking about both what you just talked about with Kit and your later chapter about sports, because it occurs to me that another medium which really expands the influence is the fact that you have so much more access to British sports than was previously the case.
When I was growing up, for example, there was soccer, but to the degree to which you were knowledgeable about it, it was because of the American efforts to get soccer going.
Nowadays, you can watch Manchester United, you can watch Arsenal, you can watch all these.And of course, when you're watching, you're not watching Americans commenting on it, you're watching British commenting on it.
and how this is an entry point for people who may never watch Masterpiece Theater, may never, you know, be exposed to that, you know, or Downton Abbey or something like that, but who nonetheless are picking it up because they're now, you know, experiencing not just English football, but maybe even say, you know, rugby or cricket, where you hear phrases like kit or on the back foot or something like that.
Yeah, absolutely.I mean, it's interesting about football slash soccer.In the course of researching the book, I discovered that even though in recent decades over in Britain, people make fun of Americans for calling football soccer,
It turns out that soccer was an old time, not one-off Britishism.The term soccer originated in Britain.Soccer and football, both terms around the same time, the late 1800s when the game was really starting to take hold.
And soccer, British love abbreviations, and soccer was an abbreviation for association football.So there were two kinds of football.
rugby football, which became known as rugger or rugby football, and association football, which was the game with the round ball that you kick, that became known as just playing football.
Now, Americans couldn't call it football because we have another game called football with a goalpost and all that.So we really took to soccer.And the British
It seems to me in sort of the mid to late 20th century as a kind of sticking into the Americans thing, moved away from soccer and stuck Americans with that, with the label, the soccer using people, but it was originally there, used there as well.
And, you know, in terms of the commentators, as you've said, announcing soccer, of course, they wouldn't call it a game, they would call it a match.From what I understand, American soccer announcers have picked up quite a few of the Britishisms.
The one that I'll mention, because it's so striking to our ears, is the plural noun for collective, a plural verb, excuse me, for collective noun.So they would, we would say the Miami Heat.Well, let me start that again.
They would say Manchester United are a good team this year.Manchester United are winning.We would say is winning.But from what I understand, American commentators have picked that up.
And yeah, I did notice that in the Olympics and the World Cup, the United States are ahead. as opposed to what Americans would say is the United States is ahead, calling the field a pitch, a game a match, the kit for uniforms.
American announcers have apparently picked up a lot of these terminology.
It's interesting to think about where that comes from, too, because one of the things that I've read about is how we used to use that plural more when we were talking about, say, the country.
And then it was after the Civil War that we went to talking about the United States are to the United States is.And I'm wondering if Americans just then transplanted that because it is what you've described there makes more sense.
We're talking about a team.We're talking about a group of people who are engaged in something so we can talk about them are. as opposed to them being some sort of monolithic entity is.Yeah.
Well, Mark, when you start to look for making sense that I wouldn't go down that road because so much of language doesn't apparently make sense.
But yeah, the plural verb thing also shows up in, I mentioned my friend who watches the YouTube videos about music. band names.So the British, you know, they would say Led Zeppelin are appearing tonight.Americans would say Led Zeppelin is appearing.
I started noticing while, when it still existed in its original form, the American music website Pitchfork used that
that convention of the plural verbs and actually did some journalistic reporting for this book and got in touch with the then editor of Pitchfork and asked him about it.
He said, well, yeah, we were just imitating the Brits, New Musical Express and things like that.We thought it, you know, it sounded cool. So, you know, sometimes these things get used not so much because they make sense, but because they sound cool.
Now, I think one of the things I think that has come out from this so far is just how rich of a topic this is.
And I think another way this gets demonstrated in your book is by the fact that you go beyond simply talking about the adoption of British words and slang and terminology to discussing how
we start to, how we see Britishisms in grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation.I was wondering if you could give us an example there of how it is that these are getting adopted.
Also, perhaps why it is that Americans are, you know, breaking away, shall we say, from their adoption of, from their usage of Americanisms to considering these British forms.
Sure.Well, I think the best example of that would be, you know, so on the blog, not one off British isms, which is, you can find it not one off British isms.com.I can go behind the dashboard and sort of see
which posts have gotten the most reaction, comments, views, and so forth.
And all time, and I can do it for the year, for all time, for the month, whatever it is, the post that's gotten the most page views and probably the most comments is so-called logical punctuation. Now, we could do a series of podcasts about that.
So I'm not going to go in as deep as I probably could.But essentially, logical punctuation refers to a convention of, let's say I wrote the sentence, he called me, quote, cute, quote.Now, at the end of a sentence, you have a period.
Where would you put the period?
at the, in that sentence?I would be, I mean, the standard way I would put it was I'd put period and then the end quote marks.
Right, period, end quote.That's the American standard.And there's a whole history to why and when that became the case.
The British style is not to do it that way, is to have, he called me, quotation mark, cute, quotation mark, then the period outside. the quotation mark.Which makes more sense.Sorry?Which makes more sense.It makes more sense, exactly.
And that's sometimes called logical punctuation, because it makes sense.And the same with commas.Now, I won't get into semicolons and question marks, because that's too much in the weeds.But the trend has been in recent years for Americans
not in published writing, because it's still edited by the New York Times or Random House or whatever it is, and they follow the copy editors follow that convention.But as I mentioned, I was a teacher and I taught writing.
And over the past, I retired several years ago, but in the last decade of my teaching, I would say 75% of my students used logical punctuation, which is contrary to the American standard.
And I would tell them, okay, that's logical, but you know, we're in America.So if you want to write for the New York times, you don't use it that way.And they continue to do it.
Then I said, I'll take, I'm going to take one point away from your grade every time you do that.And they continue to do it.No, no cessation in it.So The urge to punctuate that way is quite strong.
And, you know, it hasn't really entered published prose.
But if you look on, you know, X, or Instagram, or things where just people read it, people are writing, and it's not edited, I would bet, even from American people, half the time or more, they use that form of logical punctuation.Wikipedia, uses it.
Now, that's an international entity.It hasn't really penetrated any other American edited sources yet, but I predict that it probably will, just because, as you say, it makes so much sense and it's apparently so irresistible to people.
One of the things I was thinking as I was reading your book is how it inspired me to start hunting in my own mind of noobisms and examples of what you were talking about.
And yet, as you go on to explain that it's easy to get a little carried away with this, that there are these faux noobisms.
And I was wondering if you could perhaps give us maybe an example of a faux noobism and what it is that distinguish a faux noobism from a noobism.
Yeah, exactly.So that's faux, F-A-U-X, Frenchism for false or fake, not F-O-E for enemy. I mean, two examples come to mind.
So basically what I call faux-Britishisms are things that people are saying or writing, and I think they're doing it because they think it sounds British, but it really isn't.So the two examples that come to mind are the spelling of the word advisor.
which traditionally in the US and Britain is A-D-V-I-S-E-R.Somewhere in the last couple of decades, or maybe 30 years, People in America have started to spell it A-D-V-I-S-O-R.And, you know, TripAdvisor is spelled that way.
My Merrill Lynch financial consultant spells it that way.It's officially spelled that way in a lot of especially commercial entities.My wife's an advisor at Swarthmore College where I live in Swarthmore, PA, and that's how her job title is spelled.
And it's a totally new thing. It didn't exist, essentially, more than 30 years ago.And it sounds maybe more official, more British, fancier.I don't know.But it's not a traditional British spelling, even though maybe it seems it is.
I believe that now the Brits are starting to follow the Americans, and they're starting to use OR a bit more over there.But they got it from us.We didn't get it from them.
And the other one that comes to mind is a word that really, really sounds British.It's a pronunciation.And that's because the British say things like rivacy, for what we would say privacy.And that's the word that's spelled D-I-V-I-S-I-V-E.
I believe it was George H.W.Bush who first notably pronounced it divisive. Sounds British, doesn't it?It's not.Barack Obama not only used the word a lot, but also pronounced it divisive.
And now there's a great, we talked about some of the resources I use, there's a site called Youglish, Y-O-U-G-L-I-S-H, that's an outgrowth of YouTube. And you can go on there and key in any word, and I think, or phrase, but certainly word.
And it'll provide you with a series of clips from YouTube videos of people saying that word.And you can specify American English, or British English, or just everything.And if you go to American English and key in divisive,
I think the last time I checked, it was about half and half.About half the people had this faux British divisive and half divisive.So those would be examples of the faux Britishisms.
By the time, reading through your book really makes me think a lot about both the past of the English language, and this is something that your text definitely emphasizes, but also has me thinking about the future of it.
This is something you anticipate because your last chapter offers some interesting ruminations as to what the future of new business holds.I was wondering if you could perhaps give me just a bit of a sense of
what, you know, where you think we're going from, where we're going from here, in terms of the language in this process of exchange?
Sure.You know, I mentioned before the narrative of whinging or complaining, which you especially see over there about Americanisms, polluting the language.
I think just a few weeks ago, there was the latest of these articles in the Daily Telegraph, and I think the headline was Americanism's poisoning language, which seems a bit harsh.And, you know, when these articles come out, people like
me or Lynne Murphy or Elaine Green of The Economist.Lynne Murphy's a brilliant American-born linguist who writes—who's a professor in Britain and writes about this topic in her book, The Prodigal Tongue, and also
her own blog, we sort of say, ha ha, half the things you said aren't really American after all.And it's just, in Britain, it's a thing, when it's something you don't like, you say it's American.
And it's not such a common narrative over here, which is why this book is amusing to the British people especially.But the fact is that
Even though, as we've said before, this process has gotten a bit more robust in recent years with the internet and all the cross-cultural exchange, it's still, from as far as I can tell, the majority of the Americanisms have stayed put.
The majority of the Britishisms have stayed put in Britain.It's still a minority.I did some research into the work of a linguist who kind of came to that conclusion in crunching the numbers, and I did my own kind of anecdotal
experiment on this, and I picked up a book written by a psychologist from Cardiff, Wales, about the brain, and I was interested in reading it, but I started noticing, hey, this has a lot of British terms in it, and I think I ended up writing down about 50 terms that I pretty felt pretty strongly were Britishisms, and about a quarter of them, 25-30%, had
some use over here in America, but the majority not.They were just totally British.And that also included spelling of words like colors, C-O-L-O-U-R, which has not been used over here.
Organized with an S instead of what they would call a Z, but we still call a Z. I have not yet heard any American use the term Z. That'll be the day that I I think protectionist is really good because that's a pure equivalent.
Zed is just the British word for Z. So my feeling is that this process will continue because there are new A lot of these words come from slang and new words are being coined all the time.
I think one of the most recent, if not the most recent post I did on the blog, it's not in the book, is the verb pap, P-A-P.And this verb came from
itself a relatively recent term, paparazzi, which is a term for photographers of celebrities that was originated in the movie La Dolce Vita.It was the name of one of the characters, actually.
So in Britain, the tabloid journalists, journos, 20 or so years ago, shortened it to PAPT, that Posh Spice was PAPT by the paparazzi yesterday, or she's trying to avoid being PAPT.
Then, probably inevitably, it got picked up by the Americans in the last 10 years or so.And you're starting to see it more and more.So the process is going to continue.
And as we talked about earlier, it's the useful, colorful words for which there's no equivalent like that.The equivalent for that would be photograph taken by the paparazzi.That's a little bit unwieldy to say.
So pap does good service, gives good value. And so it's been picked up.So the process will continue.
But I think that in both cases, in Britain and the US, we will still retain quite a few words, expressions and phrases that are unique to our country or to their country.
Well, we appreciate the time that you've taken to speak with us.But before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now? Sure, I'd be delighted to.
I am working on another book.I think I mentioned that the Britishisms is a quite narrow topic, and that's part of why it's been interesting to me and I think to other people.This other book I'm writing, also for the Princeton University Press, is
very, very broad and very challengingly broad.And that's a book, a history, and a general consideration of the concept of irony, I-R-O-N-Y, through the ages.
And right now, I'm up to what probably will be the longest chapter on the 18th century, which was the the probably the high point golden age of irony, at least in the English-speaking world.So that's been occupying my time and it's been quite fun.
Well, it does sound like a really interesting book.I hope we can have you on the podcast when it's published.
I hope I finish it.It's published, and I would be delighted to come back.It would be a pleasure.Well, Ben, thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us.I hope you have a wonderful day.You as well.Thank you, Mark.
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