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’.
I also hadn’t thought of runup in that sense as particularly British or recent.
Nor I.
Cuchuflete realises that knobby is the polite form, right?
I hesitate to ask, but: what is the impolite one?
I would have thought d***head.
kn**head (same meaning)
Thanks, I am now enlightened.
As with many words, there are multiple meanings. Knobby (the proverbial “put the kettle on” working fellow) is not the same as knob end/bell end/etc. It’s an affectionate or mildly deprecatory name, as opposed to the noun that has hundreds of synonyms.
It shouldn’t be confused with nobby, as in Clark.
But it is originally a cricket term
The OED has over fifty years’ worth of citations from athletics (long jump, javelin, etc) before its first example from cricket.
Is the primary function of the run-up in a cricket context to allow the bowler to hurl the ball with greater speed? If so, why can’t they end up throwing any faster than baseball pitchers who do their throwing from a stationary position? Weaker arms? Different game strategies?
Remember, remember
the bell-ended Member
who cocked up his terrorist plot!
Is the primary function of the run-up in a cricket context to allow the bowler to hurl the ball with greater speed? If so, why can’t they end up throwing any faster than baseball pitchers who do their throwing from a stationary position?
They aren’t allowed to throw in the most effective way, or as they might put it, they aren’t allowed to throw at all.
Indeed. Accusations of throwing (“chucking”) have ruined or compromised the careers of many bowlers over the years.
IME, Yagoda is right. At my U.S. East Coast publication in the 1990s, editors were discouraged from allowing “run-up” because it was a Britishism, and the archives show the phrase “the run-up to” used rarely, almost always in articles about foreign elections (and even more rarely, random sports events). Today, though, it shows up in my publication all the time; it’s a useful phrase.
Here’s Safire discussing “run-up” as a Britishism: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/20/magazine/on-language.html
Oh, I never doubted that Yagoda was right; I was merely expressing my surprise that I (and, it appears, others) had no memory of its origin as a Britishism.
AmEng speakers may become aware of Britishisms (and that they are Britishisms) in different ways, depending on the nature and usage of the particular Britishism. This sense of “run-up” is NOT one an American would have learned of via rock music lyrics (like the verb “to suss”), nor via British-setting children’s books or genre fiction, whether Swallows & Amazons or Lord Peter Wimsey (like “lift” for elevator or “torch” for flashlight). You would have instead had to have been the sort of sad American who read British ephemera such as magazines talking about upcoming elections to have been aware of it as a Britishism. (I hereby incorporate by reference that clip where Homer Simpson is saying “Look at me! I’m reading The Economist! Did you know that Indonesia is at a crossroads?”).
I’d also like to offer a possible additional theory about the spread of “run-up”: After the invasion came months and months of American journalists hanging out in Baghdad at the various hotel bars with war correspondents with charming British accents and phrases (that is, when they weren’t facing roadside bombs and kidnappings). And it wasn’t just veteran correspondents from The Washington Post and The New York Times, or the Knight-Ridder Mideast bureau chief, but a parade of young metro reporters from The Sacramento Bee or Mercury News who would spend three months in Iraq, the only time in their careers they got to be foreign correspondents. They went back home with new vocabularies and a British voice in their heads.
Very likely!
I am probably a victim of some kind of illusion, but the “run-up” to an election doesn’t feel that recent to me. Since I left Australia in 1977 and only returned in 2022, I feel I would have noticed if “run-up” were a relatively recent term. Is it possible that it started in Australia? I don’t know how I could check or confirm this, however…