"Gobsmacked!," by Ben Yagoda

How Americans went bonkers for "bum," "poo," "kerfuffle," and "easy peasy."

I’m a big fan of Ben Yagoda’s writing about language: his 13-year-old blog, Not One-Off Britishisms (“British words and expressions that have got popular in the U.S.”); his contributions to the much-missed Lingua Franca blog; and his books, of which I’ve read four.

Make that five: I delightedly read Ben’s newest book, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, as soon as I could get my hands on it.

Caveat: This is not going to be a wholly unbiased review.

I was gobsmacked and chuffed — a Britishism that is not covered in these pages — to discover that I’m a subject of Gobsmacked’s dedication along with Jonathon Green and Lynne Murphy, two writers I greatly admire. By the way, it’s my duty to inform you that the job of dedicatee does not come with tangible perks. (“Perks” is another NOOB!). I paid full retail for my copy for Gobsmacked.

It’s true: I’ve been happy, over the years, to pass along to Ben my occasional sightings of Americanized Britishisms, especially when they appear in commercial language. (Here’s a new one for you, Ben: Afters, a chain of trendy ice cream shops in Southern California. “Afters” is a Britishism for “dessert”; the founder of Afters was reared in Westminster, California.) Then I’ve sat back and marveled at how Ben applies his formidable research skills to tracking the arrival and spread of terms like ginger (the hair color), poo (poop), and easy peasy.

That last expression, by the way, while definitely a NOOB (Not One-Off Britishism), is “shrouded in mystery,” Ben tells us:

Start with the fact that most British people’s idea of the origin of the phrase — that it came from an advertising slogan for Sqezy [sic] dishwashing liquid, “Easy Peasy, Lemon Sqezy” — is flat-out wrong. The language historian Barry Popik and Pascal Tréguer, who runs the WordHistories,net blog, have both established that there was never such a slogan. Rather, from 1957 until 1962, the product’s tagline was “It’s Easy with Sqezy.” Shortly after that, the brand was discontinued.

You’ll have to buy your own copy of the book to read the rest of the entry, which goes on for another page and a half and which includes my favorite line from In the Loop (2009): “Difficult difficult lemon difficult.”¹

Gobsmacked! is organized by category: historical NOOBs (including smog, which did not originate in Los Angeles); military slang (boffin, dicey, piece of cake), modern NOOBs (brilliant, cheeky, dodgy), insults and the naughty bits (bloody, shag, bum, wanker), sport(s) (nil, wrong-foot, own goal), food and drink(s) (book a table, peckish, starter). Ben relies heavily on the New York Times (“If a Times writer hasn’t used it, it ain’t a NOOB”); The New Yorker (almost four pages are devoted to that magazine’s perverse attachment to the Britishism “had got” in lieu of American “had gotten”); Green’s Dictionary of Slang (accessible to all at no charge); and Google Books Ngram Viewer, “especially its remarkable feature of being able to sort out the use of words or phrases from American and British sources.” Illustrator Eric Hanson contributed hand-drawn renditions of Ngram charts.

The chapter titled “Bits and Bobs” — what Americans might call “a miscellany” — introduces us to “lexical anatopism,” which Ben says he coined “out of necessity.” It’s “the equivalent of anachronism, except referring to something that is located in the wrong place, instead of happening at the wrong time.” Thus the Britishisms washing up instead of “doing the dishes” and a big brother called Paul instead of “a big brother named Paul” in Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which is set in the United States.

My favorite chapter may be “Under the Hood,” which examines the subtler aspects of Britishization. There’s the whole “logical punctuation” debate, for example: Brits go in for commas and periods (full stops) outside quotation marks, Americans prefer them inside. (I follow the American style here and everywhere else, but Yagoda notes that the British style is catching on in North America.) Although I’ve worked as a typesetter, I hadn’t known that the American style is sometimes called “typesetters’ quotation,” and was “apparently initially promoted by those artisans for aesthetic reasons.”

And while I’d known that there’s a kerfuffle (another NOOB!) over the spelling of gray/grey, with the latter ticking up in the U.S. in the 21st century (though still far less prevalent than gray), I hadn’t stopped to consider the influence of brand names like Grey Poupon mustard and Grey Goose vodka.

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In the final chapter, Ben concludes that although Brits have frequently deplored the perceived takeover of the mother tongue by barbarian Yanks, in fact British English is doing very well, thank you — certainly well enough to be a linguistic-export power itself.

I myself continue to find evidence to support that conclusion. Here’s my latest: the verb to pap, which was truncated from paparazzo (an aggressive freelance photographer; originally the surname of a character in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita). It means, roughly, “to photograph covertly or without permission,” and it was taken up with great enthusiasm by the British press, but until a few years ago the truncated form was hardly to be seen in the U.S. except in reference to Pap tests, a different eponym altogether.

I wrote a little about the rise of to pap in a 2022 blog post. Since then I’ve spotted a bunch of American paps, including:

• “The street looks I papped in Paris” (Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack written by two Oakland, California, residents)

• “I met up with my pal of over a decade, Sarah Isenberg, who got papped out the wazoo (what a horrible phrase I’ve just reified) for her extremely cute cotton frock and gingham sailor cap” (Esque, whose author lives in New York)

• “I guess Van’s slip-ons are having a moment? Morgan Stewart sporting the checkered pair sent the IG girls into a tizzy, and now Jennifer Lawrence has been papped in a black pair” (The Love List by Jess Graves, “New York by way of Atlanta”)

And then there’s this February 2024 passage in the American ad-industry publication Adweek, which is notable for two NOOBs, papped and range — the latter being what Americans might call a “product line.” (You can read Ben Yagoda’s observations on range here.)

For the full NOOB treatment, the author would have substituted “run-up” for “lead-up.”

So far, though, I haven’t spotted any form of to pap in the New York Times. I guess that means, per Ben Yagoda’s criterion, that it ain’t yet a NOOB.

1. Lemon Sqezy enjoyed an American afterlife as Lemon Squeezy, an online-payments company founded in 2020 in Salt Lake City (“We make running your software business easy peasy”). In July 2024 Lemon Squeezy was acquired by its competitor Stripe.