What's All the Kerfuffle About?
When Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, it was the culmination of his lifelong mission to declare America's linguistic independence from Great Britain. A free people with a distinctive national identity required a distinctive language, and that meant fighting off foreign influence, particularly what one author calls "nostalgia for English manners and customs." But like our obsession with the royal family or Michigander Madonna's embrace of an English accent, Americans just can't shake distinctively British words and expressions. In fact, according to Ben Yagoda, author of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, we seem to be using them more than ever.
Yagoda, professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, has coined a term for British expressions that have wormed their way into common parlance: Not One-Off Britishisms, or NOOBS. The term itself has a NOOB smack in the middle, "one-off," which he defines as "a noun meaning 'a one-of-a-kind happening,' or an adjective meaning 'one-of-a-kind.'" Yagoda has been tracking NOOBs on a website bearing that name since 2011, and Gobsmacked! compiles the most interesting of the site's more than 900 entries.
Britishisms are not new, but whereas their spread in previous centuries was delayed by the difficulty of transatlantic travel, now there are countless and nearly instant ways for them to migrate. In Yagoda's account, this current lexical invasion dates back to the early 1990s, with the arrival of influential British journalists and editors (Tina Brown, Andrew Sullivan), J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and the Spice Girls. I'd add that the influence of screenwriter Richard Curtis's romantic comedies—including Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), and Love Actually (2003)—may have had Americans speaking a bit more like Hugh Grant, albeit with less stammering and tidier hair. The process has been sped along by the ubiquity of British shows on American television (Downton Abbey, The Crown, The Great British Baking Show—which, ironically in this context, is known in the U.K. as The Great British Bake Off) and streaming services like Acorn and BritBox. And the Premier League's more popular now, innit? (Though the league's American fans often call it the "EPL" to make it sound more like the acronym for their homegrown American football league.)
Yagoda devotes chapters to NOOBS with military origins (such as gadget, piece of cake, and shambolic), those related to food (starter, boozy, and peckish), many about sports (sport, on the back foot, and own goal), and a few scatological entries (shag, arse, and poo). For each NOOB, Yagoda designates a level of American usage on a five-point scale, ranging from "on the radar" to "outpaced" (that is, used more by Americans than Britons).
The book is stuffed with fascinating discussions of how our language changes, the surprising routes specific words take to arrive here. I've long been annoyed by the disappearance of disappear in favor of gone missing. When the English band Maximo Park released a song called "Going Missing" in 2005, I assumed it was a sign of America's corruption of British English. But as Yagoda shows in his compelling introduction, the term is an invasive species from Britain that Americans started using widely in 2001 during the sordid news reports about Chandra Levy, a young woman who disappeared that May and whose body was found in Rock Creek Park in D.C. the following year. Which means that the California band Rooney's 2007 song "When Did Your Heart Go Missing?" is a product of British influence.
Some expressions you may think have long been a part of our language are relatively new, and vice versa. Readers will likely be surprised some NOOBS are NOOBS at all—soccer, for example, or streets ahead, which I thought was just a joke from Community. Then again, Yagoda has a chapter about false NOOBs, words that only sound like they have a British ancestry.
Yagoda recognizes that some of this Britishisms are more useful than others. Certain new arrivals do the jobs American English won't do: "describing a thing for which there's no precise American equivalent and in the process giving the American language a brisk, thanks-I-needed-that slap in the face." On the other hand, "the threat and menace of NOOBS, such as it is, is pretentiousness." That's particularly the case for "Britishisms that have an exact U.S. equivalent." This strikes me as exactly right. Never use a NOOB when a perfectly good American English word will do, lest you sound like that college classmate who came back from his semester abroad talking like Oliver Twist.
In general, Yagoda is a reliable and likable guide, as when he proclaims: "At the end of the day is not only hackneyed but also pompous and pretentious." Part of this book's delight is that it's not just about language—it's about Yagoda's research, resourcefulness, and diligence. He pulls from newspapers, dictionaries, television shows, pop songs, and Twitter. He includes comments from his blog's readers and displays charts from Google's Ngram Viewer to illustrate spikes in usage. He tells you when he first started noticing a word, how he dug into it, and how his experiences differed from those of his readers. He occasionally hears back from people whose NOOB usage he cites. He mentions trying to contact the Beastie Boys about lyrics, but never got a response from Mike D to my dismay.
Sometimes, though, Yagoda's reliance on the New York Times and NPR creates blind spots. The most glaring to me was that in his entry on kerfuffle, he credits Times columnist Maureen Dowd for using it several times in the 1990s. But as any reader of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today blog could tell you, the reigning King of Kerfuffle is James Taranto, whose frequent use of the word between 2000 and 2017 was a running joke. And then there's Yagoda’s entry on gutted, which he speculates "shot up on November 9, 2016, because that was how many people felt following the presidential election." But the Ngram Viewer shows the word's use did not shoot up in 2016; it merely continued an upward trajectory.
Other oversights result from a virtuous ignorance of television. In his analysis of the rise of done and done, Yagoda surmises that the term made its way into American parlance only recently, but any fan of The Simpsons will tell you that Principal Smithers and Homer used it at least three times in the 1990s. (I only ever use the phrase with a Homeric cadence.) Similarly, Yagoda's entry on cheeky rightly points out that American use of the term rose in the 1990s in part because of Mike Myers's use of it on Saturday Night Live. But there's an earlier candidate for introduction: In 1989, Ringo Starr first told Americans that Thomas is "a cheeky little engine" when Shining Time Station premiered on PBS.
These oversights, though, are one reason the book is so entertaining, and why the website has been so popular. Yagoda invites us to speculate with him, to think about where we first encountered these words, and why we use them ourselves—or why we cringe when we hear them. In Gobsmacked! Yagoda has written a fun, informative exploration of our language, even if Noah Webster would find it worrying—or worrisome.
Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English
by Ben Yagoda
Princeton University Press, 288 pp., $24.95
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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