I am an American, New York-born, but I started to spend time in London in the 1990s, teaching classes to international students. Being interested in language, and reading a lot of newspapers there – one of the courses I taught was on the British press – I naturally started picking up on the many previously unfamiliar (to me) British words and expressions, and differences between British and American terminology.
Then a strange thing happened. Back home in the United States, I noticed writers, journalists and ordinary people starting to use British terms I had encountered. I’ll give one example that sticks in my mind because it is tied to a specific news event, and hence easily dated.
In 2003, it became clear that the US would invade Iraq. Months passed; we did not invade. Then we did. Journalists faced a question: what should we call that preliminary period? In September 2003, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman chose a Britishism, referring to “how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war”.
Run-up, previously unfamiliar in the US, quickly began to be very widely used. I know because of the app Google Books Ngram Viewer, the online tool that can measure the relative frequency with which a word or phrase appears in the vast corpus of books and periodicals digitised by Google Books (including separating out British and American use). Ngram Viewer shows that between 2000 and 2005, American use of “the run-up to” increased by 50%.
This phrase was not – to use a Britishism that’s dear to my heart – a one-off. Over the next several years, I started noticing dozens and dozens of other examples. Finally, in 2011, I decided to chronicle this phenomenon in a blog called Not One-Off Britishisms.
In 1781, US founding father John Witherspoon coined the term “Americanism” and started complaining about the way words concocted by the ex-colonists were polluting the purity of the English language. Far from diminishing over the years, the resentment bordering on outrage has continued apace. Just weeks ago, in the Telegraph, Simon Heffer whinged that – as the headline of his piece put it – “Americanisms are poisoning our language”.
So it can come as a shock to Britons to learn that their words and expressions have been worming their way into the American lexicon just as much, it would appear, as the other way around. I date the run-up (that’s an alternate meaning of run-up: “increase”) in Britishisms to the early 1990s, and it’s surely significant that this was when such journalists as Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens moved to the US or consolidated their prominence there. The chattering classes – another useful Britishism – have a persistent desire for ostensibly clever ways to say stuff. They have borrowed from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, teen culture, African American vernacular, sports and hip-hop, and they increasingly borrow from Britain.
Here are some of my favourite examples.
1. Bit
The first citation for “doing one’s bit” (meaning “to fulfil one’s responsibilities or obligations; to make one’s contribution to a cause or the like, esp. By serving in the armed forces”) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is from George Bernard Shaw in 1889. It gained currency in British first world war propaganda, as in posters with the messages “do YOUR bit – save food” and “come and do your bit – join now”. The US followed suit with a poster that urged “little Americans” to “do your bit” by eating oatmeal and “save the wheat for our soldiers”.
Then there are “bits and bats”, “bits and bobs”, and “bits and pieces”, phrases that mean roughly the same thing. The first never made it to the US. Bits and bobs shows up either in self-consciously British contexts or in twee formulations such as a New York Times Vows column that describes a groom in the following way: “He was always creative and enjoyed making crafts with bits and bobs of paper he had saved, ticket stubs and back-of-the-envelope doodles.”
As for bits and pieces, it started to rise in Britain in the 1930s and the US in the 40s, then had a big American bump in the 60s, doubtless thanks to the Dave Clark Five hit song.
But for my purposes, the key late 20th- and early 21st-century Britishism is “bit” used where an American would most likely say “part”, often used in the plural and often preceded by an adjective. An example is a humorous 1873 sketch in the Saint Pauls magazine, where the narrator describes wandering the halls of parliament and coming upon a man who’s endeavouring to teach the members to “talk better”.
“One of your great debates that fills three or four pages of your Times with the smallest of small print and runs over into the supplement – how much do you read of it next morning?”
“Well, I generally glance my eye down the columns, and read the sentences where I see there have been ‘laughter’ and ‘cheers’.”
“Ah, just so, you read only the good bits. Now my plan is to make my pupils say nothing but the good bits. None of them shall speak longer than half an hour, and each sentence shall have a Thought in it.”
The “juicy bits” and the “naughty bits” show up in Britain in the 19th century as well, but they really established themselves as phrases in the 20th. An American would say “the good parts”, “the juicy parts”, and “the naughty parts”.
Most Americans, that is. One finds the occasional literary sort, like critic Richard Eder of the New York Times, writing of a Lina Wertmüller revival in 1976: “Enthusiasm for Miss Wertmüller’s later work may arm the spectator with the fortitude to mark out the good bits.” The same year, American science fiction novelist Ursula K Le Guin wrote of HP Lovecraft in the Times Literary Supplement: “He imitated the worst bits of Poe quite accurately.”
This use of “bits” picked up steam in the US in the 1990s and 2000s, as in a 1999 quote from Time magazine referring to prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report on the alleged misdeeds of President Bill Clinton: “He wants America to believe he’d only included the good bits to help the legislature reach an informed decision.”
In his humorous 1988 book God: the Ultimate Autobiography, the English writer Jeremy Pascall uses the phrase “dangly bits” five times, including in his reference to the creation of Eve: “So much better formed softer, rounder, smoother, with none of those ugly dangly bits.” Dangly bits caught on as a reference to male genitalia and by 1999, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, had been shortened to just plain “bits”. An example is a quote from a post on Twitter, which I especially like because it uses the word twice: “I was in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday. My favourite bit was where Michelangelo painted in the pope’s adviser, whom he detested, with a snake eating his bits.”
Dangly bits appeared to be exclusively male provinces. To the rescue came “lady bits”, first spotted in 2005 and growing robustly since then. Google reveals that Lady Bits is now the name of a soap, a physical therapy practice, a zine and a cross-dressing boutique in Melbourne, Australia.
The phrase is still an outlier in the US, but I imagine it gained some traction after a 2020 exchange on Drew Barrymore’s talkshow with Gwyneth Paltrow. Barrymore tasked her guest with coming up with alternatives to a word you can’t comfortably say on morning network TV, like “something beginning with v that ends in ‘ina’.”
“Lady bits?” Paltrow offered.
2. Cheeky
The first version of this word was the noun “cheek”, meaning “impudence, effrontery, audacity”. It crops up in the 1820s, and Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel Bleak House has the line, “On account of his having so much cheek.” Various sources reveal that the noun was used a fair amount in the US in the 19th century into the 20th, including in the title of Max Shulman’s 1943 humorous novel Barefoot Boy with Cheek (a takeoff on John Greenleaf Whittier’s once-famous line of poetry “Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!”).
The adjective “cheeky” popped up in the 1830s and soon established itself as the predominant form. It shows up a bit in US sources, but the concept of and various terms for cheekiness really found a home in Britain. So much so that in 1870, Hugh Stowell Brown took it to task in his Lectures to Working Men, contrasting it unfavourably with another word and quality: “It may be very well at the outset to draw a distinction between ‘Pluck’ and ‘Cheek’. They are not the same thing. ‘Pluck’ is courage, ‘Cheek’ is impudence, hard-faced, unblushing impudence. A ‘plucky’ fellow deserves our admiration, a ‘cheeky’ fellow deserves to be kicked.”
Brown’s efforts proved futile, and cheeky continued apace, often portrayed as a positive quality. Ngram Viewer shows the word rising steadily in the UK in the 20th century and then sharply declining in the 1990s. That it shot up around this time in the US as well surely has something to do with comedian Mike Myers, who grew up in Canada but whose parents were English. Myers’s Saturday Night Live character Simon, a little English boy who for some reason conducted a talkshow (chatshow in the UK) while taking a bath, would reach for a prop and say, “Don’t look at my bum! I caught you sneaking a peek, cheeky monkeys, all of you!”
At this point, cheeky is an American commonplace, and perhaps cliche. The word appeared 205 times in the New York Times in 2022, including in the headlines “Cy Twombly in Los Angeles: Cheeky, Challenging, Classical” and “A Book of Cheeky Obituaries Highlights ‘Eccentric Lives’”.
One meaning that has not taken hold in the US is defined this way by the OED: “Of an item of food, drink, etc, or an activity: mildly irresponsible or illicit; indulgent.” The first citation is from a 1989 novel by Irish writer Michael Curtin: “Bourke that had his cheeky pint with George Blake in the King’s Arms.”
This sense was prominent in a 2014–15 phenomenon involving Nando’s, an international chain restaurant that features grilled chicken and fries (chips in Britain). “Having a cheeky Nando’s” became a meme, and Americans spectacularly failed to understand what this meant. An English informant tells me that “crafty” has arisen as a replacement for cheeky, as in “having a crafty pint”. No sign of it yet in the US.
3. Clever
“Clever” has always been used a lot in the US – almost as much as in Britain. But it means rather different things in the two countries. This has been true for a long time. John Witherspoon, who coined Americanisms and was the first to complain about them, observed back in 1781: “Americans generally mean by clever, only goodness of disposition, worthiness, integrity, without the least regard to capacity.” The meanings had multiplied by 1833, when Capt Thomas Hamilton, touring the US, wrote: “I heard of a gentleman having moved into a clever house, of another succeeding to a clever amount of money, of a third embarking in a clever ship and making a clever voyage with a clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these combinations, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation.”
In Britain, meanwhile, the word was settling around the sense of “intelligent”. Jane Austen wrote in Emma (1816), “Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family.” That’s still the principal meaning in Britain. Children who in the US would be deemed “smart” or “bright” or “gifted” are called clever in the UK, where the main meaning for smart is “stylish or fashionable”. In 2006, linguistics professor Lynne Murphy reported: “The Professional Association of Teachers has voted that bright British schoolchildren should [no longer] be labelled clever, but instead should be deemed successful – because among children it’s not cool to be clever.”
Of course, Britain being Britain, clever also has been used ironically, as in the usually disparaging terms “clever boots”, “clever clogs” and “clever Dick”, all originating in the mid-19th century and roughly equivalent to “know-it-all”. The OED quotes a line from John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957): “‘Clever Dick,’ she said. ‘Think yer knows everythink, doncha?’”
Back to the US. By the 20th century, clever had lost its “goodness-of-disposition” sense and was used to indicate a certain type of intelligence. A clever American person doesn’t necessarily have a high IQ, but can solve a puzzle or a mystery or can trick you into doing something you don’t want to. Thus the two relevant definitions and examples from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary: “mentally quick and resourceful (‘a clever young lawyer’); marked by wit or ingenuity (‘a clever solution’)”.
British clever first crossed my radar in 2012, when politician Newt Gingrich used it twice while campaigning for the Republican nomination for president. Complaining about his rival Mitt Romney, Gingrich observed that the media “did exactly what Obama would do this fall, and kept replaying [Romney’s quote, here slightly paraphrased]: ‘Oh, I don’t really care about the poor.’ Which is not a very clever thing for someone who is very wealthy to say.” And on another occasion, Gingrich said: “The message we should give Mitt Romney is, you know, ‘We aren’t that stupid and you aren’t that clever.’”
A variant is “too clever by half”, basically meaning too clever for one’s own good, which appeared by 1829. It became a popular catchphrase in Britain within the next few decades and remained active enough in the late 20th century for British critic Melvyn Bragg to use a variation in calling the polymath Jonathan Miller “too clever by three quarters”.
4. Early days
The OED identifies this expression – which describes an early stage in an event or process, often implying too early, or premature – as “chiefly British”, and finds a 16th-century citation from Sir Thomas More: “She telleth hym then that it is but early dayes, and he shall come tyme ynough.” It also shows up in Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela (“’Tis early Days with Pamela, and she does not yet think of a Husband”) and frequently in the late 1700s and early 1800s, usually with the word “yet”, meaning “still”, at the end. I should note that Americans have always referred to beginnings as “the early days of” something. It’s just that they only started saying “it’s early days” around 1980. An early New York Times use came in 2001, when the restaurant critic William Grimes wrote about the staff at a venerable French restaurant after a change in management: “It’s early days yet, but I think they realise that Lutèce has turned a corner.”
By now, the phrase is common enough to be viewed as a cliche or – as the American tech writer Molly White observed in 2022 – an excuse. White wrote that when she points out some of the shortcomings of blockchain currency (which has been around since about 2009), she’s often told: “It’s early days.” However, she continues: “This raises the question: how long can it possibly be ‘early days’? … How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the ‘early days’ of proof-of-work blockchains? … The more you think about it, the more ‘it’s early days!’ begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.”
Possibly creating confusion is the existence of another British expression (which hasn’t yet penetrated to the US) with a similar sound and meaning. In the late 1800s, “early door” referred to, in the OED’s words, “a door at a theatre which opens for a period of admission ending some time before the performance begins, in order to offer a guaranteed seat or a wider selection of seating, typically for a higher price”. In 1901, the Daily Chronicle commented: “London playgoers are familiar with the iniquitous ‘early-door’ system, under which grasping managers trade on the fears of their nervous patrons.”
By 1979, the term “early doors” was being used to mean “early on” or “early days” – there’s a quote from football manager Brian Clough about his arrival at Nottingham Forest: “Early doors it was vital to me that they like me, too”.
5. Gutted; gutting
The OED reports that use of the word “gutted”, meaning highly distressed, originated as prison slang and defines it as “bitterly disappointed; devastated, shattered; utterly fed up”. Interestingly, the first two citations in Green’s Dictionary of Slang are from American sources, including this from the poet Charles Bukowski in 1974: “There are very few people I can bear to stay in a room with for more than five minutes without feeling gutted.” But I’d say that Bukowski was coming up with a metaphor for an emptied-out feeling, not using a term that was in currency at the time. In Britain, the word early on became a sporting cliche. The OED cites a line from the magazine Arena in 1988: “Think of the sportsman’s comment on defeat, ‘I feel gutted, Brian [Moore], well gutted.’”
A related adjective, not listed in the OED or Green’s, is “gutting”, defined in a 2007 Urban Dictionary post as “a word used to describe a negative emotional state or experience: “My partner of two years just broke up with me, gutting mate, absolutely gutting.”
The “mate” suggests British origin, and it’s also (over)used in sporting contexts in the UK, as in a quote from the Liverpool Women’s football manager in 2022: “To lose 2–1 at Manchester City was gutting, really, because I think we deserved a point at least, and I was gutted for the girls as well.”
My feeling is that American gutted shot up on 9 November 2016, because that was how many people felt following the presidential election. On that day, the writer Ben Greenman tweeted: “I know many people in the press feel gutted, but we need a clear-eyed, unintimidated press more than ever.”
The word became popular enough over the next four years that it had come full circle. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted in January 2021: “A lot has happened in the last week, including [soon to be ex-president Trump] losing his Twitter feed, impeachment coming to the fore and the PGA [the Professional Golf Association] withdrawing from Trump National [golf course]. He’s ‘gutted’ by the PGA move, a person close to the White House says.”
What will happen in (the) future?
For some time, words and expressions have been crossing the Atlantic, with increased frequency, in an eastward as well as westward direction. But in the grand scheme of things, the traffic both ways has been modest. That is, American English and British English remain distinct dialects, with little danger of being homogenised.
Consider the above heading. Just as Americans say “in the hospital”, they refer to something happening “in the future”. But in Britain, there are two slightly different expressions. “In the future” refers to a general or specific time that has yet to occur, and “in future” is used to mean “from now on”. (The recent business jargon, on both sides of the Atlantic, is “going forward”.) This is just one of thousands of small differences, the majority of which stay put.
A few years ago, I read a book called Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To by Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University. If you think there aren’t many differences between British and American English any more, the book will quickly disabuse you of that notion.
In Burnett’s book, I counted only four terms that appear to be Yank imports: “up for grabs”, “fans” (in a sports context – the more common British word is “supporters”); “smart” (Burnett alternates it with “clever”), and the cowboy-movie “pronto” (There were a few others that initially struck me as Americanisms but turned out not to be: “hubbub” came from Ireland, as early as 1555: “a big ask”, meaning an important request, is an Australianism, according to the OED; and the dictionary’s first cite for “middle man”, meaning an intermediary, is from Edmund Burke in 1797.)
Paul Baker, a professor of English Language at Lancaster University, crunched numbers and massaged corpora for his academic study American and British English: Divided by a Common Language (2018). He concluded that despite borrowings in both directions, “for the most part, the two nations [have been] maintaining their differences”.
In discussing this topic a few years ago, Lane Greene, who writes the Economist’s “Johnson” column on language, observed that despite (and to some extent because of) American imports, British English was “in rude health”. I would say the same is true of American English. And note that “rude” – as an adjective meaning “robust” or “sturdy” – is a somewhat archaic Britishism that I haven’t yet encountered in the US, but that is very much on my radar.
This is an edited extract from Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, published by Princeton University Press and available at guardianbookshop.com
