Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English by Ben Yagoda

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Reviewed by Harriet, 30 January 2025

Smog sounds American as American as can be, and that was certainly the case when Joni Mitchell, in her song “Woodstock”, declared, “I have come here to lose the smog”. But it definitely is English in origin.

This is just one of the multitude of examples of a British word that has found its way to America, provided by the American linguist and writer Ben Yagoda. As he writes in his introduction to this delightful and educational book, some years ago he started to notice how frequently British words and expressions have made their way across the Atlantic. We’re used to the reverse case, but in 2011 Yagoda began recording all the instances he noticed of what he calls ‘Not One Off Britishisms’, the title of his blog of the same name [https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/what-it-all-means/]. NOOBs, as he calls them for short, pop up all over the place, and the book is organised by category: Historical NOOBs, Military NOOBs, Modern NOOBs, Insults and Naughty Bits, Sport, Food and Drink, Bits and Bobs (which is of course a NOOB). Then there’s a chapter called Under the Hood, which examines things like punctuation – the British put commas and full stops (periods in the US) outside quotation marks, and the British put them inside. As for quotation marks, in Britain they are traditionally single, in America they are double. This may seem fussy, but anyone who’s ever done proof reading will appreciate the difference. Another bugbear might be the spelling of grey (Britain) and gray (US). And don’t get me stated on dates – apparently America is the only country in the world where the month precedes the day:  the 10th of July 1990 in the US would appear as 7/10/90, which everyone else in the world would read as the 7th of November. 

There are so many things I’ve found annoying about American English, so it’s a relief to find that the archaic-sounding ‘gotten’ is slowly being replaced by ’had got’, and the irritating ‘appetiser’ by  ‘starter’, to name but two. Then there are I things I hadn’t really taken on board, like ‘called’ (British) vs. ‘named’ (US), queue (British) vs. ‘line’ (US), ‘Chat show presenter’ (British) vs ‘Talk show host’ (US). But the book is not simply a list of examples; as Yagoda explains:

At the end of each entry about a word or phrase, I tag it with an assessment of its current level of adoption in the United States: On the radar…Emerging…Taking Hold (real people are using it, including in speaking), Fully Arrived (it seems to American ears like a normal word) or Outpaced (its now used more in America than Britain). 

There are also useful graphs to illustrate all this. But the book goes further than this, locating the origins of each word of phrase, often but not always by reference to the Oxford English Dictionary. I learned a great deal from this, far more than I can include in this review: the origins of bonkers, boffin, dicey, brilliant, cheeky, dodgy, bloody, shag, bum, wanker, peckish, book a table, kerfuffle, awfully, brunch, come a cropper, full of beans, have a go, to name but a few. Then there’s ‘ginger’, which seems to have originated with Geri Halliwell, and ‘posh’, which definitely postdates the Spice Girls. The British definitely have contributed a great many rude words – Yagoda tells the story of Keira Knightly trying the explain the meaning of ‘taking the piss out of’ to an American reporter, and the proper use of  ‘wanker’ seems to have puzzled our US neighbours greatly. There’s also a section about British novelists trying to create American characters but failing to use the US term (‘washing up’ instead of ‘doing the dishes’. ‘poo’ rather than ‘poop’). All great fun.

A while back, Yagoda had a blog called Lingua Franca, which I used to follow and enjoy. Now I think I’d better start reading Not One Off Britishisms. Meanwhile, I enjoyed this book enormously. In theory it’s one you could dip in and out of, but probably, like me, you’d want to read it from cover to cover.

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Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny, and has done a fair amount of proofreading in her day.

Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024). 978-0691262291, 288pp., hardback.

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1 comment

  1. Sadly the best way to sort things by date is month/day. I’d wager that ‘Ginger’ predated the Spice Girls by about a century or more?

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