Back in April I posted about bumbershoot, pointing out that it was not, despite what Americans tend to think, a Britishism; at the end of the post I said “Ben posted it in connection with his forthcoming book Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, which I’m sure will be well worth reading.” Well, the book is now out, and the Guardian has run a long excerpt from it that discusses the terms bit, cheeky, clever, early days, and gutted. But it begins thus:
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%. […]
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.
I liked the opening nod to Saul Bellow, but what really struck me was that I had no awareness of the fact that run-up was a Britishism. I must have realized it at the time, but I guess I’ve seen it (and used it) so often since that it’s simply become an unremarkable part of my dialect. (I asked my wife, and she had the same reaction.) Does this still smack of the UK to any of my American readers?
(A tip of the Languagehat hat goes to that great link-finder Trevor.)
I am also an American who doesn’t think of „run-up“ as a Britishism and who has a hard time believing the word wasn’t widely used by us before this century. But it is originally a cricket term so that story makes sense.
I suppose „run-up“ is immediately intuitive though, in a way that „gobsmacked“,“pitch“ or „bellend“ are not.
The Ngram machine is showing me nearly identical charts for “the run-up to” (without quotation marks, which it doesn’t like), for British and American English, basically a sine curve that starts from nothing around 1980 for British English, and around 1990 for American English, only a small lag. I can’t reproduce that 50% increase at all.
Google Books (advanced) results from 1900 to 1980 show only a small number of technical results (like a motor running up to speed), nothing indicating general usage. But then for the 1980s it shows things like “the run up to the next election.” In fact, runs-up to an election (or campaign, or vote) may have been the earliest uses in popular books or magazines, dominating the results from the 1980s and 1990s.
I must say that “run-up” immediately suggests “election” to me, though I am familiar with it as a cricketing term, and would have guessed that it started out as such and then spread from sports journalism into political journalism.
I may very well be wrong, though.
Backing up from this noun to the verb-plus-preposition it derives from, I am suddenly reminded that while you can:
1. Run up a big bill.
and
2. Run up a big hill.
You can also
3. Run a big bill up.
But can’t grammatically
4. *Run a big hill up.
This is one of the comparatively few things I learned in Syntax I (taught by Larry Horn in some room in HGS, fall 1985) that did not become useless with the subsequent collapse of the creaky and epicycle-laden iteration of Chomskyanism that had unfortunately dominated the textbooks we were using.
I don’t know why that’s the end point, because it goes on shooting up after that, but I see a rise from ~32ppb in 2000 to ~55ppb in 2005, which is more like a 70% increase.
Well, unless you’re this man, maybe 🙂 https://nortabs.net/tab/2154/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP1wiLd1oiM&t
(The lyrics aren’t quite right, but I’m not writing them out again tonight. I’ve been looking for that song for a while – I thought it was called ‘Crazy Ole’ and google was denying all knowledge of it – so thank you for reminding me!)
“ Does this still smack of the UK to any of my American readers?”
Speaking only for myself, no.
Another BE term that has migrated from my East Midlands wife’s lexicon to mine is
Knobby. It doesn’t seem to have set down roots in American English.
This morning, as we drove into the village, we saw many DOT employees in reflective vests, doing not much beyond waiting on the roadside for some piece of equipment or a bureaucrat. My wife asked what a good collective noun might be for those Knobbies. I suggested ‘Lassitude’.