It started with an email from my eclectic friend Wes Davis. He said he’d been reading Tinkerbelle, by, he told me, “Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, in 1965, took a leave of absence from his job and sailed a 13-and-a-half-foot wooden boat across the Atlantic, from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England.” He’d come upon a passage he thought would interest me. Manry is just starting out and it’s a beautiful day, “the wind strong enough to keep us moving along briskly.” He observes: “I told myself that if most of the days ahead were as pleasant as this, our trip would be a breeze, or, as the English say, a piece of cake.”

Wes sent me the quote because of my blog about British expressions that have entered American parlance, Not One-Off Britishisms. In particular, his sense (like mine) was that “a piece of cake” is as American as red velvet cake, so what was with Manry’s attribution to the English?

As usual in such matters, I turned first to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which yielded the graph below. (The blue line represents British uses of the phrase “was a piece of cake” and the red line, American uses.)

Thus at the time Manry was writing, it was still predominantly a British phrase, but that would soon change.

There’s a bit of noise in the graph — that is, it tracks not only the figure of speech but literal uses, like “What they served me was a piece of cake.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase is from a 1936 poem by the American Ogden Nash: “Her picture’s in the papers now,/And life’s a piece of cake.” But I feel that’s an outlier — merely a fresh metaphor concocted by Nash. I wasn’t able to turn up any uses until 1942, and all of the ones from then through the early 50s are English.

And specifically English military, and even more specifically, RAF. The first quote in the Google Books database comes from a 1942 Life magazine article written by an RAF pilot: “It sounds incredible considering that we were 150 miles from the target but the fires were so great that it was a piece of cake to find the target area.” The phrase, so redolent of the plucky fliers, really caught on. The same year, Terrence Rattigan’s play Flare Path has the line, “Special. Very hush-hush. Not exactly a piece of cake, I believe.” By 1943, it had become so well-known that Cyril Henry Ward-Jackson titled his book It’s a Piece of Cake: or R.A.F. Slang Made Easy.

As the Google chart indicates, American use started to pick up but often (as with Manry) with attribution to the English. A 1951 article in an American flying magazine had the line, “The radio operator’s weather reports show all stations ahead in good shape and as the English say, ‘It’s a piece of cake.’” Eventually, we took it to heart, and rightly so, since it’s a great phrase, nicely complementing easy as pie (which refers to a process, rather than a task) while still staying in the realm of baked goods. As with a number of other phrases — including bonkers, nonstarter, and ta-ta (meaning “goodbye”) — Americans have ended up using it far more than the Brits.

There’s a coda to the tale of a piece of cake. Fans of Roald Dahl may recognize it as the title of one of his short stories, included in his 1946 collection Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. That story is actually an extensive reworking of his first published work, an article in the August 1942 edition of The Saturday Evening Post called “Shot Down Over Libya.” In the piece, labeled a “factual report,” Dahl talks about being given the assignment, in 1940, to bomb a group of Italian trucks in the Libyan desert. One of his fellow flyers remarks, “Hell’s bells, what a piece of cake!” Another agrees, “What a piece of cake.” (This is retroactive evidence of an earlier British use of the expression than given in the OED, but can’t be included in the dictionary as such since the publication date is 1942.)

It wasn’t a piece of cake for Dahl. As the story describes, he had a bad landing and was badly injured. But the story was far from a “factual report.” His plane was not shot down, as the title asserts and the text strongly implies. His biographer Jeremy Treglown writes, ”He stopped twice to refuel, the second time at Fouka, where he was given directions that may have been confused by events. 80 Squadron was not where he expected to find it, and as dusk gathered over the North African desert and his fuel gauge fell, he decided to try to land.”

The 1946 reworking was presented as fiction but had a more accurate account of the forced landing. In fact, just about the only thing it has in common with the 1942 version is “a piece of cake.”

A tweet by Questlove, the drummer for The Roots.

In a press conference a couple of days after the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who had made rather obnoxiously boastful comments after the game, was asked if he was bothered by being repeatedly referred to as a “thug.” (The sports website Deadspin calculated that thug was uttered 625 times on American television the day following the Seahawks’ win.) Sherman, a Stanford University graduate, said he was,

because it seems like it’s an accepted way of calling somebody the N-word now. It’s like everybody else said the N-word and then they say “thug” and that’s fine. … What’s the definition of a thug? Really? Can a guy on a football field just talking to people [be a thug?] … There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey! (Laughter from the media) They just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that and said, “Ah, man, I’m the thug? What’s going on here?” (More laughter from the media).

At this point, it seems unquestionable to me that Sherman was on the mark, as was the former CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien, who echoed his point and his words recently on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”: “Thug is a proxy, it’s a word we use instead of the n-word.” She read on the air from a newspaper article about Ohio State University students who, after their school won the national football championship, set more than 90 fires. The article described them as “revelers.”

The topic came up on “Reliable Sources,” of course, because of recent events in Baltimore. In the days after the killing of Freddie Gray, individuals destroyed property, stole things from stores, set fires, and threw bricks and other dangerous objects at police officers. These people were commonly called “thugs” — and, it should be noted, not only by whites but by President Obama and by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore, who is African-American. Rawlings-Blake subsequently apologized for using the term, saying, “Sometimes my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”

The seeming ubiquity of the word prompted a spirited discussion (restricted access) among New York Times readers about its associations and implications, and numerous investigations, such as this one, into its history. Thug derives from a Hindi word referring to members of an Indian association of professional robbers and murderers who strangled their victims. The first English use cited by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1810; less than 30 years later, Thomas Carlyle was using the term figuratively: “‘Glasgow Thuggery’, ‘Glasgow Thugs’; it is a witty nickname.” It subsequently became a common way to refer to violent ruffians. In the early 90s, the rapper Tupac Shakur popularized the expression “thug life.”

A lot of history, complexity, and ambivalence resides in thug, and I do not mean to suggest that it is primarily, or even usually, a straight-up dog-whistle code word. But as O’Brien and others have observed, it almost always seems to be used about African-American males, who are surely not the only people who engage in the sort of behavior the word connotes. That would seem to be reason enough to refrain from using it.

Rawlings-Blake’s reference to her own anger is to the point. When we are angry and frustrated — as she was, seeing her constituents engage in destructive acts that hurt their their neighborhoods, their city, and their cause — we want to lash out. Several months back, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer (African-American) was shot and killed at a video store, while buying a game to reward his 10-year-old son for good grades. Two African-American males were arrested and charged with the crime. A decent person of my acquaintance posted on Facebook a reference to “the Philly police office[r] slain by sub-human criminals.”

Anger again, and understandable. But name-calling isn’t really an adult form of discourse. It allows the sort of attitudes described by Sherman and O’Brien to creep into the equation, whether or not the speaker is conscious of that. It’s closely tied to demagoguery. It doesn’t help reach insight or resolution, or convince an opponent of one’s position. In fact, it tends to do the opposite.

So what word to use instead? Rioters has been similarly critiqued for being racially charged. But I don’t have a problem with it, so long as it’s used in reference to people who run roughshod and destroy things. And as long as it’s also used about rioters at Ohio State.

“The world’s elderly need fed, bathed, their dentures or teeth cleaned, catheters changed, etc.,” a student of mine wrote in a recent paper. And so they do. But does that grammar need changed?

Not if you’re from Pittsfield in the southern part of Illinois, as this student is. Or Pittsburgh, Pa., for that matter.

You’ll find it also, for example, on Page 120 of a new novel, The Heart Does Not Grow Back. The author, Fred Venturini, comes from southern Illinois and sets the first part of his book there. “You come over, I’ll feed you and we’ll talk about it,” says a small-town doctor to the protagonist, who replies, “About what?” “All the shit that needs talked about.”

This pattern isn’t news. It’s well known among linguists and lexicographers that, in needs + to be +past participle, people who live south of the North, north of the South, west of the Atlantic coast and east of the Rockies sometimes omit to be. It helps define what linguists call the Midlands dialect region, though there are a few outliers as well.

The well-informed Dictionary of American Regional English, for example, knows all about the construction. It gives examples from the Appalachians, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania, especially Pittsburgh. And DARE notes that needs + past participle probably came from the English of Scotland or Northern Ireland, where the construction is also found. (There’s a similar, though more complicated, situation with wants, as DARE indicates, with examples from Pittsburgh, “The customer wants served” and “You want spanked?”)

What’s notable about this pattern is that for the most part it escapes the opprobrium of prescriptivists. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage simply calls it “a curious construction,” though it cites a 1984 dictionary, published in London, saying it is “widely disliked.”

More typical, however, is Grammar Girl’s ambivalence: “It’s reasonable to say that, at least in certain communities in the North Midland region, the ‘needs washed‘ construction is standard. Nobody who grew up there notices it as odd or thinks it’s wrong.” But, she adds, “people who move to the North Midland region from other areas will likely think everyone else there is speaking ‘bad’ English.” The quotation marks around “bad” indicate that Grammar Girl herself isn’t casting stones.

So we find on the Internet a service in Salina, Kan., asking “Do you have furniture that needs repaired?” and from Iowa, “I know, my windshield needs washed,” and from Columbus, Ohio, on Craigslist, a Samsung 500 gb hard drive, “like new, I’m just upgrading to a larger one. It only needs erased/reformatted before use.”

I’m from Chicago, north of the Midlands, so the absence of to be still catches me by surprise, like the double modals that might could actually be heard in the South. But in a student paper, does it need corrected?

Humility is always a good thing. I got a dose of it recently, courtesy of a BuzzFeed article posted to Facebook by a friend of mine, Siobhan Wagner, a journalist who was born in the U.S, but has been living in London for nine years. The article was called “Americans On Tumblr Are Trying To Find Out What A ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ Is And Are Struggling” and concerned a meme that had become popular in England. Here’s an example:

As the title suggests, the article detailed the exasperation expressed by Americans, in trying to cypher out the meaning not only of “cheeky Nando’s” but of the definitions for it put forward by Brits. Here’s one exchange:

And another:

I mentioned humility. The notion is relevant because for some years I have been conducting a blog called Not One-Off Britishisms, in which I discuss British words and expressions — like one-off, go missing, brilliant, and, as of now, 398 others, that have become popular in the United States. An implicit premise of the blog is that the gap between the two brands of English — American and British —is diminishing and will one day recede to nothing.

The cheeky Nando’s discourse showed me how far away that day is. Both the above explanations could be in a foreign language, so full are they with slang that a Yank can barely comprehend, much less consider utilizing.  Take the second one. We get “mate,” to be sure;  “wif” is a rendition of Mockney th-fronting (as in calling Keith Richards “Keef”). “jd”: I have no clue. Same with “curry club” and “the ‘Spoons.” Urban Dictionary has this for “ledge”: “Shortened slang for ‘legendary’, or, more commonly, for ‘legend’.” Then there’s this whole “banter” thing, which seems to elevate joking around with the lads to a sacred pedestal. (I love the #barackobanter hashtag.) Turning again to Urban Dictionary,  I find the brev defined as “chav word for brother,” i.e, it’s a case of th-fronting abbreviation. And note that the person giving the definition calls him- or herself “chavvesty.” The OED, which doesn’t include ledge or brev, defines chav this way: “In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.” (Sportswear??) I can figure out “Top. Let’s smash it” from context clues, but I couldn’t imagine using it.

That still doesn’t explain “cheeky Nando’s”! I have actually written about cheeky, which is something like a cross between sassy and impudent. And I know from my time in the U.K. that Nando’s is a chain of restaurants specializing in spicy grilled chicken, which has now expanded into the U.S.; I can figure out that in the meme, “Nando’s” signifies, basically, “food ordered and eaten in a Nando’s establishment.” (For a humorous take on the chain see this video.) But I still didn’t have a clue as to what the expression means. Taking on the established befuddled Yank role, I asked Siobhan if she could supply a definition/explanation, and she kindly did so:

Basically, the concept of a “cheeky Nandos” is similar to a “cheeky pint.” Maybe when you were in London, someone might have asked you ‘Fancy a cheeky pint after work?’ Effectively they’re saying: I know it’s only Tuesday and I really should be rushing home to make something for dinner or perhaps (more virtuously) going to the gym, but do you want to have a quick drink or two in the local pub before heading on the torture chamber known as the rush hour tube? A “cheeky Nandos” is, similarly, an unexpected suggestion. You’re probably already out with friends, maybe at the pub, actually maybe having that “cheeky pint” that was suggested, and then your stomach rumbles and you’re like: “Actually, how would you fancy a cheeky Nandos now?” Nandos following the consumption of 1.5-2 alcoholic beverages probably falls under the category of “cheeky.” Going to Nandos drunk isn’t cheeky, though. The idea is you are in the mid-point of your night out with friends when “banter” is really going. Everyone is laughing, probably “taking the piss” (making fun) of each other, and a relaxed sit-down restaurant where you pay up front (so you don’t have the messiness of figuring out how to split the bill later) is totally perfect.

I get it, kind of. But what I’m really getting is that slang can go wonderfully deep — with intricate, subtle, and sometimes hilarious notes of class, gender, and group identity. And also that “cheeky Nando’s” won’t be coming to America any time soon.

Brooklyn Beckham, the 16-year-old son of the soccer star David Beckham and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, met Professor Stephen Hawking during a day in Cambridge recently. Brooklyn put a photo of the encounter on Instagram, adding a brief remark: “What a honour to meet Stephan Hawking. Such an inspiring afternoon.”

Such is the delight taken by the British press in silly linguistic caviling that Brooklyn’s grammar became the scandal of the day. BBC radio’s World at One had an embarrassing interview with John McRae of the University of Nottingham (here, at 41:49) containing a totally confused account of what “a honour” means for English. And the coverage in the Daily Mail carried the following eyebrow-raising caption:

Inspiring: Brooklyn Beckham shared this picture of him with Stephen Hawking, when he paid a visit a visit to the professor on Monday, although his grammar would no doubt have horrified the esteemed physicist

Notice, the paper commits a clear grammar blunder of its own: Mistaken doubling of an article (see my recent observations about the the) is not uncommon, but accidentally doubling a whole noun phrase (as here, with a visit a visit) is a rather spectacular grammar flub.

Brooklyn Beckham, by contrast, committed at most two small spelling mistakes (“Stephan” for Stephen and “a” for an). So let’s not have any charge of carelessness leveled at this young man: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye.

I doubt that Professor Hawking shares the Daily Mail’s small-minded snobbery and hypocritical pretense at grammar shock. But it is true that Brooklyn either dropped the letter n when typing an, or wrongly thought that a was correct (notice, we don’t know which).

I wonder whether anyone at the Daily Mail could correctly state the key generalizations that govern the a/an alternation. There are some subtleties.

The basic rule is that if the pronunciation of the word following the indefinite article begins with a vowel sound, then an is the correct choice (spelling has nothing to do with it); and if the word begins with a consonant sound, then a is the correct choice. Hence we find an apple, an orange, an hour, an honor; but a pear, a ghost, a host, a horror.

But there are some few complications when we come to words spelled with an initial letter h. They come in three types:

1. habit, hero, history, horror, hostel, etc.
2. hour, heiress, honest, honor, etc.
3. habitual, heroic, historical, historian, hotel, etc.

Group 1, the overwhelming majority of h-words, contains all the words with a stressed initial syllable beginning with a clear phonetic [h] in standard varieties of English. The [h] sound is consonantal, so a is correct: a habit; a hero. (In Standard British English, herb belongs in Group 1.)

Group 2 comprises a small set of words in which nobody uses a phonetic [h], so an is correct: an hour; an honor. (In American English, herb belongs in Group 2.)

Group 3 comprises words that begin with an unstressed h-initial syllable. The [h] sound is often dropped in unstressed syllables: Even in careful educated Standard English speech varieties, a sentence like Did historical novels interest her? would have no audible [h] on either historical or her. So which form of the indefinite article is used in writing? An older tradition recognizes the consonantal elision (an historical novel, an habitual criminal, and even an hotel among older speakers), while the modern trend is toward assuming the initial consonant (a historical novel, a habitual criminal, a hotel).

Into this already confusing situation we must now inject a significant dialectal fact: In the vernacular speech of the London area, initial [h] has completely disappeared, as if all the Group 1 words had collapsed into Group 2.

And Brooklyn Beckham is a native speaker of the London vernacular: He was born in London to parents who both came from working London-area families. All of his closest relatives speak a dialect of English which in its purest form has no [h] sounds at all. For such speakers, the spelling system is even more annoyingly irregular than for you and me: It’s not just that our and hour are pronounced the same but spelled different; the same holds for eel and heel, eat and heat, owl and howl, ale and hail, I’ve and hive. … Positively perverse.

So if the casual writing on Instagram of a 16-year-old from north London didn’t occasionally have a wrong indefinite article before an h-initial Group 2 or Group 3 word (Brooklyn may have mistaken honor for Group 1), it would be utterly amazing.

But, typically, the British press made a kids-today grammar horror story out of it. Show British journalists a trivial spelling slip with an angle that opens the door to mockery of a famous working-class teenager and they’ll hop all over it like vultures on a corpse. Forgive me if I look away in disgust.

Toward the end of NPR’s Planet Money podcast last week, the host, Jacob Goldstein, said: “You can tweet at us at ‘planetmoney.’ You can tweet at me at ‘jacobgoldstein.’”

In March, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter addressed the U.S. Cyber Command task force and said (I quote from a transcript posted on Lexis-Nexis), “If you do nothing else and get nothing else out of this encounter today, I want you to do one thing, which is to go home tonight or make a call or tweet at your family, or do whatever you people do … (LAUGHTER) … but in whatever medium you use, please tell them that you were thanked today by the leadership of the department, and through us, the entire country, for what you do.”

President Obama, in April 2014 remarks on the minimum wage, said, “Tell [members of Congress] it’s time for $10.10. You can tweet at them. Use hashtag #1010Means.”

The noteworthy thing (to me) about those quotes is the expression tweet at. I’ve been noticing it more and more over the past few months as an alternative and challenge to the traditional and simpler tweet, as in “Tweet me.” At is, of course, a preposition, and its attachment to this transitive verb is in keeping with other recent examples of what I’ve called “preposition creep”:

• Excited for supplanting excited about.
• Obsessed with supplanting obsessed by.
• Enamored with supplanting enamored of.
• Bored of challenging bored by.

Twitter launched in July 2006 and within months, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, tweet was being used as a noun meaning a Twitter posting, as an intransitive verb (“I love to tweet”), and as a transitive verb. Its first citation of the last is a December 2006 tweet: “Got the new phone, so you can tweet me again, you sick bastards!”

The prepositionless form has a strong pedigree, following the model of such verbs as (in technological order) tell, write, wire, phone, email, text, and IM. Yet people found a need to stick an at in there. The earliest use I’ve been able to find is in a 2010 Los Angeles Times article. The usage took a while to gather steam. In a 2012 State Department press conference conducted by Victoria Nuland, a reporter said that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “wants people to tweet at Barack Obama to have him go to the Rio Plus 20 Summit in June.”

MS. NULAND: … I have not seen Ban Ki-moon’s tweets, but I think it’s interesting.

Q: He tweets at people.

MS. NULAND: He tweets at people. (Laughter.) Tweets at people. (Chuckles.) I barely know how to do that.

Tweet at is hardly a juggernaut: Searching Google News for the past week, tweet at me yields four hits compared with 64 for tweet me. But it’s gaining ground and will continue to do so, I predict, because it is apt. Tell, write, etc., don’t need or take an at because they describe direct person-to-person communication. Twitter doesn’t work that way. When you include someone’s handle (@byagoda, or @potus) in your tweet, you really don’t know if the person will get it or read it. What you’re doing, as Monty Python would put it, is sending your message in their general direction. The at also suggests a kinship with such verbs as yell at, shout at, scream at, and throw stuff at — also apt, given the state of discourse on Twitter.

If you agree, disagree, or otherwise want to weigh in, tweet at me: @byagoda

What’s a nibble?

You’d know the answer — or at least one answer — if you’d had the good fortune to attend the combined conferences of the Dictionary Society of North America and Studies in the History of the English Language this month, at the University of British Columbia. The first morning’s schedule specified, at 10 a.m., a Coffee & Tea Break With Nibbles. And those Nibbles turned out to be … various sweet rolls and breads.

In other words, a Nibble (at least this kind) is one possible answer to Question H5, asked 50 years ago by fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English: “What do you call a small amount of food eaten between regular meals?”

DARE didn’t venture into Canada, so we don’t know if nibble is a common Vancouverian or Canadian word, but the fieldworkers did visit all 50 U.S. states. So we know that three individuals in the U.S. answered Question H5 with nibbles: one in Texas, one in Indiana, one in Wisconsin. Maybe one of them later moved to Vancouver.

The question also elicited four examples of nibble: one in Minnesota, one in Pennsylvania, one in Tennessee, one in Alabama. The responses for both nibbles and nibble were too scattered to merit a regional label in DARE.

Not so the related word nibbling. DARE fieldworkers collected three examples of nibbling: two from Florida and one from New York. DARE‘s entry for nibbling includes five additional instances from other dialect surveys, enough for the editors to characterize the word as “especially Gulf States.”

We can imagine a Floridian, eager for mountains and a mild climate, emigrating to Vancouver and bringing nibblings along. Or maybe not.

So much for nibble. But this is only part of the information DARE provides with regard to “a small amount of food eaten between regular meals.” The sixth volume of DARE and the online version available (for a fee; get your library to subscribe) at daredictionary.com list all of the answers to each question. And the online version automatically maps them.

Here’s a bit of what the other responses to H5 tell us.

Not surprisingly, the most frequent answer was snack (843 responses), and it’s found everywhere, though it is said to have been originally a Southern term. The next most common, with 174 responses, was lunch, showing up especially in the Midwest and Northeast. DARE also tells us the social distribution of those who gave each response, so we learn that lunch was more likely to be used by older rural males.

Still, lunch is widespread enough that DARE doesn’t give it a regional label. The next most frequent, however, piece, with 40 responses, does pattern regionally, labeled by DARE as North Midlands and West, and as old-fashioned. The related word piecing has a similar distribution.

As is typical of the answers to most of DARE‘s questions, there were a few predominant answers and many infrequent ones — nearly 60 different responses all told, including two dozen single instances, including afternoon tea and forbidden food and fat on your middle.

Between the conferences’ Nibbles, other matters of lexicography and language were considered as well in Vancouver. I’ll tell about a few of them in coming weeks.

What’s new at the Dictionary of American Regional English?

Boneless cats, for one. Badgers and back-budgers. Beach-walks, bodegas, (cellar) bugs, and beelers.

The six-volume dictionary has a continuing updated online presence now, thanks to support from friends who saw the benefit of such updating in the print version — and thanks to some additional grants and very strict budgeting. Its postprint era is just beginning, but a sampling of new and updated entries is now available at the dictionary website.

The new entries, like previous ones, have examples of actual usage along with regional labels, pronunciations, and definitions. They tell us, for example, that in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, to budge is to push in line ahead of others, and to back-budge is to push in behind someone. Someone who does this is a budger, of course. Six generous quotations illustrate this usage.

And how about a beeler? That, we are told, is “an attractively wild or mischievous person, especially a child” — in other words, someone who might be a budger — but only in Green Bay, Wis. Useful to know next time you visit a Packers game with your attractive kids. But they’ve never heard of it in Milwaukee or Madison.

Bodega is another word with its strongest presence in one city — New York this time, of course; from Puerto Rican Spanish; defined as “a small neighborhood grocery store … commonly, a Hispanic one.”

The beach-walk is a kind of rubber sandal, chiefly southern California. And there’s a kind of bug, a cellar bug in the southern Appalachians, known elsewhere as a sow bug.

Beyond the Bs, new entries include Old Gappy, a nickname for a crosscut saw, most often heard in the South; mop sauce for a barbecue basting sauce, originally Texas, now more widespread, and sty-baked, meaning “very dirty,” heard in Rhode Island.

And a boneless cat? Well, it’s a little complicated, so look it up yourself. Did I mention that you’ll also find 19 revised entries there, as well as the  19 new ones? Don’t miss this chance for a free preview.

Sojourner Truth’s first language was Dutch.

If you want to become an expert on the English language in North America, and maybe teach it too, a good place to start is with the American Dialect Society’s quarterly journal, American Speech. The latest issue is Volume 90, Number 2, dated May 2015.

From its beginnings nearly a century ago (H.L. Mencken was one of the founders), American Speech has been accessible to readers with no special training in linguistics — at least in many of its articles. That’s the case with the lead article, by Jeroen Dewulf of the University of California at Berkeley: ”‘A Strong Barbaric Accent’: America’s Dutch-Speaking Black Community From Seventeenth-Century New Netherland to Nineteenth-Century New York and New Jersey.”

Among the African-Americans whose first language was Dutch was Sojourner Truth, whose narrative of her life as a slave was published in 1850. The article includes a sample of her English speech with a Dutch accent, not recognized by many as Dutch:

“But what’s all dis here talkin’ ’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. … ”

The next article, by Ashley Hesson and Madeline Shellgren of Michigan State, is about that little word like in one of its many uses: as a “discourse marker” at the start of a sentence, as in “We had to basically do everything but gut it. Like we didn’t knock the walls down.” The authors expected that use of this like would lower a listener’s impression of the speaker’s intelligence but raise the impression of the speaker’s friendliness. Not quite; their research found the impression of friendliness lowered as well as that of intelligence. However, in the long run friendliness was raised again. Apparently, though, you’re not going to impress people with your intelligence or friendliness by starting sentences with like.

The third article, by Umashanthi Pavalanathan and Jacob Eisenstein of Georgia Tech, studies Twitter and finds that as audiences increase, the language of tweets is more standard. The article incidentally includes a list of some 60 nonstandard words they consider “twitspeak,” ranging from wassup to tryna to lol.

And that’s barely the half of it. There’s the column “Among the New Words” by Benjamin Zimmer, Jane Solomon, and Charles Carson, that appears in almost every issue. And there’s the annual supplement on how to teach about American speech, with four articles covering a wide variety of topics.

You won’t find it on your neighborhood newsstand, but it is available at major university libraries and by membership in the American Dialect Society — for information about that, see the publisher, Duke University Press.

(Disclosure: Allan Metcalf is executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.)

E.B. White

I learned something frightening yesterday. Just by chance, really. I happened to discover that in the syllabus for a course on crisis management at a noted law school (a sound and well-organized course as far as I could judge) students are informed that 60 percent of their grade will be based on a case study, and “because proper English usage is essential to effective communication, a portion of the final grade will be based upon compliance with the principles outlined in The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.”

Part of the grade in a professional-school course is being determined by “compliance” with the misguided edicts in an overrated little book of bad advice originating as a required text prescribed for students of English at Cornell nearly 100 years ago! It’s chilling.

The currently standard edition of The Elements of Style (fourth edition, paperback, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2000) derives from E.B. White’s 1959 revision and expansion of Strunk’s privately printed 1918 original. White rectified hardly any of the book’s faults, but added a fifth chapter, plus plenty of other extra stupidness, like the appallingly undisciplined paragraph on modal-adjunct uses of hopefully (Page 48).

It is White’s own opinion that up to the end of the fourth chapter, originally due to Strunk, the book is not primarily about style, despite its title. It is “concerned with what is correct, or acceptable, in the use of English” (Page 66). White’s Chapter 5 concentrates on style, and what it says seems to me to range from the vapid (“Be clear”) to the ridiculous (“Do not inject opinion”). But what concerns me most is that most of what the book says about correctness and acceptability is untrue.

Let me illustrate just how bad the advice is. Following the book’s “principles” strictly would mean rejecting all of the 10 sentences below. They are all linguistically flawless, or at the very least (allowing for random stylistic nitpicking) properly and unremarkably constructed; but each of them violates at least one S&W edict. For each example I give a page reference to the fourth edition where you can see at least one injunction with which the sentence conflicts.

1. None of the demonstrators were interested in negotiating. (Page 10)
2. In the fall new recycling bins were distributed to all city residents. (Page 18)
3. This is not what most people believe. (Page 19)
4. It is hard to believe that this has not already been done. (Page 23)
5. Residents can use the procedure or not, as they wish. (Page 42)
6. However, what happened the following year was even more surprising. (Page 48)
7. President Roosevelt called the day of the Pearl Harbor attack a date which will live in infamy. (Page 59)
8. No one should imagine that they can simply ignore this regulation. (Page 60)
9. A once peaceful neighbourhood was suddenly disrupted by civil disorder. (Page 71)
10. The crisis plan that the committee looked at was vague and confused. (Pages 77-78)

Now, I worry that oppressed students might draw the conclusion that in the light of all this they should set to work ridding their work of anything reminiscent of the sentences above without knowing why (the nervous cluelessness reaction, as I have called it); so let me stress again that the usage “principles” Strunk and White propose are mistaken. They do not define “proper English usage,” and obeying them would not make your writing better or improve “effective communication.”

Nobody who is fluent in Standard English, and not in a state of panic, could seriously believe that there is anything linguistically incorrect about the sentences listed above (though in some contexts you might choose to modify their style). But people get cowed into thinking such things when they wrongly assume that The Elements of Style is holy writ.

The instructor who wrote that syllabus might want to acquaint himself with some more modern and useful works on writing and style; I would suggest first and foremost Steven Pinker’s book The Sense of Style (Viking, 2014).

A brief survey of what’s wrong with Strunk and White can be found in my Chronicle of Higher Education article from 2009. For a more thorough review of Strunk and White’s crimes, read this paper (English Today 102, 34-44, 2010).

And if you happen to be a student who got dinged for usage on your case study at the university in question, I will be pleased to consider testifying in your favor should you decide to take legal action over your grade.

Starbucks watchers were taken aback last month when the company made a surprise announcement about its standard-bearing fall beverage. This year, for the first time in its 12-year history, a Pumpkin Spice Latte will contain actual pumpkin, instead of merely spices associated with pumpkin pie.

I will not be able to report on the difference, regrettably. I never tasted the pumpkinless Pumpkin Spice Latte, so vile did it sound to me.

The PSL, as it’s affectionately known, has a cultlike following, supposedly. Starbucks has provided it with a cutely anthropomorphized Tumblr featuring photos of the beverage wearing sunglasses with bright orange rims. The company also has a Twitter feed with 114,000 followers. It promotes the hashtag #PSL and claims it’s used by 3,000 people a day, though when I searched for the hashtag, a substantial majority of tweets that came up were about the Pakistan Super (cricket) League.

But PSL is undoubtedly successful and has spawned many imitators, one of which leads to my topic of the day. A number of times while watching the U.S. Open tennis tournament, I saw this ad for Dunkin’ Donuts’ pumpkin-flavored food and beverage items:

What caught and gnawed at my ears was the way the announcer says punkin. I grew up in New York and never knew from punkin. Same with my wife, from Massachusetts. Similarly, the more than a dozen people I’ve polled over the last week, from various states, all reported that they grew up saying pumkin.

I first became aware of thepunkin pronunciation when I moved to Pennsylvania a few decades back, and especially when I started teaching in Delaware, in which a contest called Punkin Chunkin (it’s not what you think) is held each November. The state’s well-regarded Dogfish Head brewery has adopted the spelling for one of its seasonal offerings.

Some research reveals that not only the pronunciation but the spelling has a long and varied history in the United States. Joseph Pickering, an English farmer who toured the U.S. and Canada between 1824 and 1830, reported, “Pumpkins (Americans call them punkins) are very large.” In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain has Jim say, “Ef we hadn’ … ben sich punkin-heads, as de sayin’ is, we’d a seed de raf’.” The Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley, wrote “When the Frost is on the Punkin” in the 1860s. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a study of the dialect of Grant County, Ind., in the 1890s that found that the punkin “pronunciation is so universal that one never hears ‘pumpkin’ without its seeming forced.” In Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, the bumpkin-y American Hannibal Chollop refers to “men beaten into punkin’-sarce.” Speaking of which, in 1926, a writer in American Speech observed that in Maine, “Strangely enough, [bumpkin] is pronounced as it is spelled whereas pumpkin is uniformly spoken ‘punkin.’”

A colorful piece of old-fashioned slang, roughly meaning “great shakes” or “a big deal,” is alternately rendered as “some pumpkins” and “some punkins.” Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913), has the line “Say, friend, you’re some punkins at a hundred yards dash, ain’t you?”

Especially since the second p in the word is rarely if ever said, it’s easy to see how punkin developed. The Oxford English Dictionary says the form “reflect[s] assimilation of the nasal /m/ to /N/ before /k/.”

That leaves open the question of how often — outside of Dunkin’ Donuts commercials and Punkin Chunkin contests — punkin is actually said. When I raised the question on Twitter, Jan Freeman said that when she was growing up in Ohio, pumkin was the more common term, with punkin serving as “a self-conscious joke or an endearment.” That seems right. If I were the sort of a person to address a little baby with the name of a large orange fruit (which I am not), I would probably say punkin, not pumkin.

But that doesn’t excuse the Dunkin’ Donuts ad, which is cutesy and icky and definitely not, in my opinion, some pumpkins.

Ira Glass at Carnegie Hall
(Photo by Brighterorange via Wikimedia Commons)

I was frankly a little disappointed to read Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times piece “‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.” Not that I’m not obsessed with the way people talk on the programs carried by National Public Radio stations. (If you have any doubt on that point, you can read my extensive reflections on the matter here.) The problem — suggested by the singular in the title — is that there isn’t just one NPR voice but a multitude, each with its own characteristic tics and inflections. How could you cram under the same stylistic umbrella Terry Gross’s “Anyways,” Cokie Roberts’s “Look,” Scott Simon and Audie Cornish’s “Help us understand,” Steve Inskeep’s “Oh!,” Linda Wertheimer’s “Now,” and the way so many interviewees now say “Sure” before starting in on their answers?

The answer is you can’t. In fact, Wayne focuses on a particular “verbal mannerism” favored by public-radio personalities who are younger than the eminences I’ve just named:

If I could attempt to transcribe it, it sounds kind of like, y’know … this.

That is, in addition to looser language, the speaker generously employs pauses and, particularly at the end of sentences, emphatic inflection. … A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.

That is in fact a thing. Other characteristics are vocal fry (both male and female), the greeting “Hey” in two-way conversations, the talking over each other in two-ways, the not infrequent giggling, and, of course, the starting of sentences with the word So. The style can be heard in such programs and podcasts as RadioLab, Reply All, Serial, Planet Money, The TED Radio Hour, and This American Life, whose host and founder, Ira Glass, is the clear pioneer. (If all this is not ringing a bell, someone put out this devastating and hilarious takeoff.)

Wayne is a bit shaky in his sense of the style’s forebears: It’s tough to see any connection with Carrie Bradshaw’s “I couldn’t help but wonder” monologues in Sex and the City, or Michelle Obama’s emotional speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He’s on more solid ground when he cites David Foster Wallace’s self-conscious faux-folksiness in prose, as analyzed by Maud Newton’s 2011 essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace.” Newton still offers the best analysis of how Wallace’s literary use of aggressively unliterary phrases (in one essay he wrote that it was “hard not to sort of almost actually like” someone) was a clever strategy for making “ethical arguments while soothing and flattering his readers and distracting them from the fact that arguments were being made.”

Wallace, Glass, and their followers are on to the fact that the days when we expected and believed in glossy opacity are over. A smooth delivery is no longer trustworthy. In contrast, when a speaker attempts or invokes transparency — putting the process out there, foregrounding his or her hunches or reactions, leaving in the um’s, or embracing what once would have been deemed a speech impediment (Glass voices a velarized alveolar lateral approximant when confronted with the letter “l”) — the result will seem more credible. Wayne quotes Glass: “Back when we were kids, authority came from enunciation, precision. But a whole generation of people feel like that character is obviously a phony — like the newscaster on The Simpsons — with a deep voice and gravitas. … Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn’t sound like a news robot but, in fact, sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.”

The trouble arises when the nonstyle becomes a style. Newton points out, “Wallace’s rhetoric is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.” Wayne’s piece is a sign that this particular radio manner is starting to be seen as a convention, as predictable and artificial in its way as the old deep-voice Ted Baxter gravitas. It’s probably time for the pendulum to swing back, and for a generation of NPR producers to start editing out “ya know.”

If Twitter users want to respond to a tweet, they have three options: reply to it, retweet it, or mark it with a symbol of approval. Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has begun changing that symbol from a star to a heart, and the word the symbol represents from “Favorite” to “Like.”

On its blog, the company gave an explanation for the momentous shift:

We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.

That would seem to be a reasonable position, albeit a tad condescending and literal-minded. But it was definitely not perceived as reasonable by a substantial body of Twitter users, who turned out to be really attached to the star. They protested that it was capable of expressing a far broader spectrum of meaning than the heart. The main coloring lost, tweeters asserted, was irony:

The discussion was carried out with a level of nuance and, indeed, irony that was impressive given the 140-character limit. But I have to admit that I remain unconvinced about the gravity of the change, and the outcry seems to me an instance of the narcissism of small differences. Bottom line: You can heart/like a tweet just as ironically as star/favoriting it.

But the tilde? That is a different story. People have taken to putting tildes on either side of a word — like ~this~ — to indicate, well, here’s what Joseph Bernstein had to say in a January post on BuzzFeed:

The most common usage of bracketing tildes — or at least the one I see the most in my digital-media-heavy, arch, sincerity-averse Twitter feed — is used to signify a tone that is somewhere between sarcasm and a sort of mild and self-deprecatory embarrassment over the usage of a word or phrase. …

one special power of the tilde is to let the enclosed words perform both sincerity (I sincerely want to share this with you) and irony (Man are we both sick of people who share or what?) without a cynical effect. It may be the only gesture on the Internet, short of a many-thousand-word think piece, that can synthesize snark and smarm into something … else.

Just before the Twitter change, the productivity/messaging app service Slack snatched the tilde away from its users. Now, if you put tildes around a word in Slack, the word will appear in strikethrough. @SlackHQ tweeted.

The BuzzFeed senior editor Katie Notopaulos was unimpressed, noting: “Strikethrough humor is sooooooo 2010.” She tweeted a poll about the change, as follows:

It’s unclear how many of the nine hearts her tweet got were ironic.

Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense (originally the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors, now a general professional organization of anglophone editors in the Netherlands) in the palatial surroundings of the beautifully restored 16th-century Paushuize (pictured). Knowing that the editors and translators who belong to Sense are much concerned with the international character of English, I chose to speak about the global role that the English language has taken on. And I stressed that English doesn’t deserve its role, linguistically: In many ways it is a terrible choice for a world language.

For example, to mention an obvious demerit, it has probably the worst alphabetical writing system in the world. The Chinese and Japanese orthographies are much worse for the learner, of course, but they aren’t alphabetic. Chinese uses a logographic system, with symbols corresponding roughly to concepts, and not at all to vowels or consonants. Japanese uses two different syllabaries (one symbol per syllable) plus a selection of about a thousand Chinese characters sprinkled in amongst them just to ensure that learning will be time-consumptive and difficult. Thai and Cambodian also have very difficult, complicated, and opaque writing systems, but those are abugidas rather than alphabets. What an alphabet does is spell out the sounds of words at the level of consonants and vowels. And I don’t think you can find a language that does it worse or more perversely than English does.

Jokes about this, often attributed to G.B. Shaw, go back to the 1800s (see Ben Zimmer’s Language Log post). Can you say ghotimboungyrrh? Easy: gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in station, mb as in comb, oung as in younger, and yrrh as in myrrh. The usual spelling is fishmonger. (Yes, it’s somewhat unfair, because gh for [f] is always syllable-final, and ti for [ʃ] is always medial; but hey, you get the point.)

English phonology is a horror show too, as judged by speakers of more typical languages. Where Spanish has just five vowels (si, se, la, lo, tu), nicely spaced out through the acoustic spectrum, the English vowel system is a nightmare of more than 20 distinct vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs. In my original native dialect of southern British (the one I spoke before I emigrated to the U.S.A. and began to Americanize), it seems to be 25, because the red parts of the following words all represent clearly distinct vowel sounds:

The fine distinctions of English vocalism are beyond many adult learners’ phonetic abilities, which is why some foreigners pronounce modal and model the same, or bird and bed the same, or seat and sit the same, and so on.

English also has consonant clusters that would seem grotesque to the speakers of some other languages: Whereas in Hawaiian no consonant is ever followed by another consonant, the underlined part of Our strengths spring from our unity  has between 5 and 7 in a row (various renditions occur, but a careful one has [ŋkθsspr]).

There are plenty of other undesirable features as well. One is the absurdly large multilayer vocabulary. For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek. You may think of this as a rich lexical treasure-house that we should prize; some might call it a needless and memory-burdening overstock of alternatives, reminiscent of the cereal aisle of a modern supermarket. The English lexicon could have been far less profligate, given a little forethought. But of course languages never get forethought; they just grow.

Even before we get to grammar, then, and the roughly 200 irregular verbs of our misbegotten language (Swahili, by comparison, has none), English reveals itself as a very poor choice for a global language.

My talk to the Sense conference reviewed a few points of this sort, and then went on to discuss how English managed to attain its astonishing (and increasing) global status despite its manifest unsuitability. It’s an interesting tale that I may decide to tell here. Perhaps next week.

How did Robert Frost pronounce often?

I was listening the other day to “Reply All,” a podcast about the Internet, and P.J. Vogt, the reporter/host, had occasion to say the word often. I was pretty confident that I knew how he was going to pronounce it. After all, Vogt is young (I would judge in his early 30s), and speaks with vocal fry, list lilt, uptalk, and, generally, a pronounced Ira Glass-esque lack of slickness.

In other words, I knew he would say off-ten, pronouncing the t.

And he did.

A good deal of history is embedded in his choice. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word often became commonly used (supplanting oft) only in the 15th century, and that in the 16th and 17th, it was sometimes said with the t voiced, sometimes not. Queen Elizabeth I said offen (the dictionary doesn’t say how it knows this), and that pronunciation became the accepted one. In the blog Daily Writing Tips, Maeve Maddox quotes John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, published in 1791: “in often and soften the t is silent.”

John Keats seemed to be assuming such a pronunciation in lines he wrote for a draft of Endymion (1818):

“… O foolish rhyme! / What mighty power is in thee that so often / Thou strivest rugged syllables to soften … ”

(My colleague Charles Robinson, a Romantics scholar, cautions, “I would agree that he probably pronounced often without the t — but you cannot prove it from the rhyme. Remember, there are partial and sight and near rhymes — so even if he did pronounce it off-ten, it would still ‘rhyme’ with soffen.“)

But the t version would soon revive. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “With the rise of public education and literacy and, consequently, people’s awareness of spelling in the 19th century, sounds that had become silent sometimes were restored, as is the case with the t in often.”

The dictionary is noncommittal about the shift, but in the 20th century, usage commentators often got exercised about off-ten. H.W. Fowler wrote in Modern English Usage (1926) that the t-voiced version was “practised by two oddly consorted classes — the academic speakers who affect a more precise enunciation than their neighbours’ …  &  the uneasy half-literates who like to prove that they can spell.” Alan S.C. Ross’s “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English,” the 1954 essay that coined the terms “U” (upper-class) and “non-U” (everyone else), put off-ten decidedly in the non-U camp.

Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1957) quotes a contemporary edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary as calling the t-pronunciation “vulgar.” He adds: “It is certainly unnecessary and is usually due to an affectation of refinement.”

There is a regional as well as a class element to this, at least in the United States. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a 1928 issue of American Speech: “The Ozarker nearly always pronounces the t in often.” And DARE also cites the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (1989) as reporting 453 informants who said the t as opposed to 290 who did not.

Data on pronunciation, as opposed to writing, are hard to come by, but I did my best. I listened on YouTube to 12 versions of the opening line of “On the Street Where You Live” — “I have often walked on this street before.” It was offen in both the My Fair Lady original cast album and the movie soundtrack, and in the renditions by Vic Damone, Etta Jones, Bobby Darin, Nat King Cole, Harry Connick Jr., Dean Martin, and Willie Nelson (whose version is my favorite). Only Tom Jones (a Welshman), Nancy Wilson (African-American, born in Ohio), and Smokey Robinson (African-American, born in Detroit) sang off-ten.

“Birches” by Robert Frost, has the lines:”Often you must have seen them/Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning/After a rain.” Frost says offen.

As I suggested at the outset, it’s my sense that in recent years, young people have become partial to off-ten. The language blogger Jan Freeman agrees and offers anecdotal support:

I’ve been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don’t think it’s a regional thing — I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don’t remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends.

To at least pseudo-scientifically test this proposition, I met individually with the undergraduates in the class I’m currently teaching and asked them to read aloud the sentence, “Experience has shown that first impressions are often lasting ones.” Eight said off-ten and five said offen. (Obviously, their pronunciation may have been affected by seeing the t on the piece paper in front of them, or by self-consciousness.)

Whence the appeal of this pronunciation? All I know is that it seems of a piece with the popularity of amongst, whomever,  saying “a person that” instead of “a person who,” pronouncing either as eye-ther, and the spellings grey and advisor. These are all changes in previously accepted usage that seem more formal, British, and/or fancier, and (in off-ten and the first three examples) are slightly longer. I leave to greater minds than mine the question of why these qualities are desirable.

In any case, in keeping with these trends, the question of how to pronounce often may soon cease to matter. Just as it replaced oft back in the day, it is being supplanted — if my students’ work can be trusted — by an amongst-ish antique word. That’s right, I’m talking oftentimes.

Illustration by Ellen Winkler for The Chronicle

OK, word lovers. Here’s the perfect gift for yourself, or any other logophile: A whole year of the complete online Dictionary of American Regional English at your fingertips for only $47.50, half the usual subscription price.

Yes, for that price you can leave the six monumental volumes of DARE reposing majestically on your shelf and access their contents with a few keyboard commands. And there’s much more in the interactive digital version. For a sample and an explanation of what the digital version provides, go to DARE‘s About page.

To get the special price (available only through January 3), use this web page.

On that page, below the product details, there’s a narrow gray box labeled “Special Holiday Offer.” Click on the box where it says “Order Form,” and you’ll get all the details.

Meanwhile, under the new chief editor, George H. Goebel, the contents of DARE are being updated every quarter. The fall 2015 update includes about 40 revised entries and 20 new ones.

And you probably won’t be familiar with many of them. Ever play a game of ticklish? If so, congratulations on surviving. Ever found beading oil in your whiskey? Too bad. Are you an upstreeter or a downstreeter? It can make a difference. Ever popped a squirter when you were young? Hope you enjoyed it. Full details on these and the other new entries and updates are just a click away.

And this is my last post for 2015, so happy Sylvester Eve, everyone!

Hey, if you don’t mind, listen to the first 20 seconds or so of this conversation between National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro and Gene Demby:

If you didn’t care to listen, or experienced technical difficulties, here’s the exchange in which I’m interested:

Shapiro: Hey Gene.

Demby: Hey Ari.

Hank Kingsley of “The Larry Sanders Show”: “Hey now!”

Ari and Gene are partaking of a meaning for hey that’s not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED defines the word as “A call to attract attention; also, an exclamation expressing exultation, incitement, surprise, etc.; sometimes used in the burden of a song with no definite meaning; sometimes as an interrogative.” This is the hey of the first word of this post, of “Hey nonny nonny,” “Hey, you,” “Hey, what’s the big idea?,” Fat Albert’s “Hey, hey, hey,” fictional sidekick Hank Kingsley’s “Hey now!,” and numerous song titles and lyrics: “Hey There” (from The Pajama Game), “Hey Ya” (Outkast), “My, my, hey, hey” (Neil Young), “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” (Leonard Cohen), and “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!” (Mick Jagger).

It’s a somewhat raucous word, and I was amused to find out that the familiar grown-up retort to kids’ use of it was invented by Jonathan Swift in Polite Conversation in 1738:

Neverout: Hay, madam, did you call me!

Miss: Hay why hay is for horses.

The Ari-Gene hey, by contrast, is basically a synonym for hi– a friendly greeting. Until fairly recently, it was was confined to the American South. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) cites a 1944 survey as reporting that hey is “the common term of familiar salutation of children and young people in most of the South; hello seems to them either semiformal or archaic. On many northern and western campuses the term is hi.” Since the 1940s, Auburn University, in Alabama, has observed an annual “Hey Day,” when faculty, students, and staff are supposed to greet each other with the word. In the 1960s, one of the North Carolinian Gomer Pyle’s catchphrases was “Tell him Gomer says ‘Hey’!” The regional lines were still drawn in 1971 — DARE quotes a letter written that year: “In the North, what is hi to us, is hey in a Southerner’s vocabulary” — and I would say a good couple of decades beyond.

But not anymore. Shapiro is 37 years old and grew up in Portland, Ore. I haven’t been able to determine Demby’s age and home town, but his NPR page suggests he is in his 30s and a Philadelphian. My sense is that among people under about 40 from all regions, hey for some time has been at least as popular as hi, and probably more so, and now seems completely unremarkable. You certainly can’t go more than a half hour or so on NPR before confronting it.

It even shows up in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in exchange between Han Solo and a character called Maz Kanata (not a spoiler):

Maz: Han Solo!

Han: Hey, Maz.

Hey Name is also making a move to overtake Hi Name (which itself overtook Dear Name) in email greetings. Behold three items from my inbox:

What explains the popularity of hey? Some other Southernisms have lately gone wide, including visit as an intransitive verb meaning “chat” (“We had a chance to sit down together and visit”), wait on to mean “wait for,” and emphasizing the first syllable in Thanksgiving, insurance, and umbrella. But I’m thinking that’s coincidental. More important is the marked informality of hey–informality being in vogue at the moment. And it provides a useful function, being a combination of the original hey, which demands the listener’s attention, and hi, which is merely a greeting.

I’m well over 40, but I just checked my “Sent” e-mail box and it turns out I’m a heavy hey greeter myself. So hey, it could take over the world.

The tiddly oggie is actually of English origin, but it typifies the Australian penchant for diminutives and abbreviations.

I’ve been in Australia for two weeks now, and all I can say is the people here must be extremely busy. Why else would they feel obliged to abbreviate so incredibly many words? I started to write down examples shortly after I arrived, and already my notebook is almost full.

A lot of the abbreviations are diminutives: Tasmania is Tassie, mosquitoes are mossies, politicians are pollies, Australian Rules Football is footy, motorcyclists are bikies, a machine on which you play poker is a pokie, a bathing suit (or costume) is a cossie, and you wear Wellies in the rain. I don’t know what a tradie van is, but I saw an ad for one.

Sometimes the Aussies (that’s another one, come to think of it) just chop off the end of a word: university is uni, afternoon is arvo, linoleum is lino, Mitsubishi is Mitsu, and a pickup truck (that is, a utility vehicle) is a ute.

It all comes together in food lingo. Chicken parmigiana is parmie (I saw a sign at the Palm Hotel proclaiming, “Have a Parmie at the Palmie”), avocado is avo, Woolworth’s (a grocery chain here) is Woollie’s, McDonald’s is Macca’s (Burger King is Hungry Jack’s, but that’s another story), a sandwich is a sanga, a grilled sanga is a toastie, breakfast is brekky, a bottle of beer is a stubbie, dim sim dumplings are dimmies, and we all know what you throw another shrimp on.

If you don’t believe me, here’s some photographic evidence of abbros (that’s not really a word, but it should be). Click on the pictures to see larger versions.

I also have official backup. An Australian government website confirms, “Australians also demonstrate a strong impulse to abbreviate and alter word endings.” One researcher has estimated that some 4,300 such words are in circulation.

The question remains, why? Hearing all the diminutives, you might be led to conclude that Australians are stuck in some preteen state of arrested development. It seemed that way the other night at the Australian Open, when supporters cheered on Nick Kyrgios with the chant “Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!” But in my dealings with the locals, they have seemed just as mature as the next nationality. And they do not rush about, as my facetious opening comment suggested; in fact, the opposite tendency is more noticeable among Australians, for whom the term “laid back” may have been invented. Part of the explanation is surely British influence, but abbreviationwise, the Aussies outdo the Brits, by a long chalk. I asked a distinguished Australian academic for her thoughts and she said, “We’re just lazy, I guess.” She pondered a minute and said, “Maybe it has to do with the fact that so many immigrants come here, and they need a simple way to communicate with each other.”

That makes sense. So does a link with the almost aggressively informal culture here. Nenagh Kemp, a psychologist specializing in language at the University of Tasmania, who has conducted research on the phenomenon, has been quoted as saying, “Australians who use these diminutives might be trying to sound less pretentious, more casual and more friendly than they would by using the full words.” So g’day, mate, and good on ya.

By the way, Australians are into anthimeria, too: I just saw a commercial for a railroad line with the tagline, “All aboard amazing.”

As the self-appointed watcher of commas, known to some (OK, known to myself) as The Comma Maven, I naturally was concerned when I saw the provisional title of my friend Craig Pittman’s forthcoming book about the weirdness of Florida. The book grew out of the tweets that Pittman (a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times) has been putting out for some time, like this:

And this:

(Craig is not connected with the person or persons who send out tweets like the following under the handle @_FloridaMan:

)

Some months ago Craig took to social media to announce that this manuscript was at the publisher and his book was on its way to a July 2016 release. All good — until, as I say, I saw the title. It was Oh Florida: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country.

I felt strongly–very strongly–that he needed a comma after the Oh. And I told him so.

Oh Florida without the comma was “O Canada,” “Oh Tannenbaum,” “O Holy Night” — a sort of adulatory apostrophe. What Craig was going for was more the half-fond, half-exasperated sighing expression that I first heard my daughter Elizabeth Yagoda vocalize maybe a half-dozen years ago. You hear it in a variety of places and see it all over the Internet. (Click on the images for bigger versions.)

Now, admittedly, two of these four examples omit the comma. But I believe it’s necessary for an accurate rendition of the vocalization, with its pause and descending musical fourth between the Oh and the noun that follows.

So much for punctuation. That leaves the question of where this formulation came from. Jody Rosen has written at fascinating length about the 1909 Tin Pan Alley song, “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!”; the tune became a monster hit and the last three words  a lasting catchphrase. But that’s yet another slightly different Oh (the word contains multitudes), a winking cousin of “Oh brother!” or “Oh man oh man!”

The only origin story I’ve been able to find on the Internet comes from Know Your Meme, which has an entry for a four-panel graphic, in the last of which a dude says to a dog, “Oh, You.”

The site dates this meme to 2006. However, the most memorable “Oh, you,” as far as I’m concerned, was broadcast on NBC on the night of March 18, 1993. In the Seinfeld episode “The Junior Mint,” Jerry is chagrined to realize he cannot remember the name of the woman he is dating, and it would be embarrassing to ask her. (You might recall the episode if I tell you that one of his guesses is “Mulva.”) The “Seinology” website has the key moment:

(They embrace and a couple of light kisses and a hug)

WOMAN: Oh, oh Jerry…

JERRY: Oh … *you*…

I put this moment forth as the progenitor of “Oh, you” and subsequently of the all-purpose “Oh, [noun].” I await alternative theories and hypotheses.

And Craig’s book? You can see for yourself whether he took my advice. And while you’re at it, pre-order a copy. What could be bad about a book whose cover features a mustachioed orange in a ball cap smoking a cigarette?

You may have caught this Budweiser ad during the Super Bowl. Dame Helen Mirren sits before a burger, is served a Bud (not bloody likely), and counsels, in strong language, against driving drunk. Anyone who does so, she avers, is a “shortsighted, utterly useless, oxygen-wasting human form of pollution.” Then, at about the 41-second mark, she says, “Don’t be a pillock.”

My guess is that somewhere north of 99 percent of the people who saw the spot had no idea what a pillock is — though they could clearly tell by context clues that it isn’t a good thing. I certainly wasn’t familiar with the term and went straight to the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first definition is: “orig. Sc[ottish]. The penis. Now Eng. regional (north.) and rare.” The copywriter for the Mirren commercial was clearly going for definition No. 2, which is “Chiefly Brit. colloq. (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot.” The first OED citation for the figurative use is from 1967, the most recent from a rugby magazine in 2004: “Those mindless pillocks in New Zealand who slated England for the way they played in Wellington in June.”

Pillock may have rung a faint bell in the minds of English majors. It is likely a shortening of another word for penis that turns up in King Lear. Edgar, in his guise as the mad beggar Poor Tom, pipes up at one point with a line from a perverse ditty: “Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill. La, la, la, la!” (Use your imagination for the meaning of “Pillicock hill.”)

Salty British insults seem to be in the air at the moment. Returning from Australia, I caught up on some Simpsons that had piled up in my absence. In “The Girl Code,” which aired January 3, Lisa creates an avatar with a British accent (voiced by Stephen Merchant), who ultimately comes to life and, à la Mirren, delivers some hard truths, including: “Your species is on the precipice of turning into complete and utter wankers.” Wanker, of course, is an epithet whose literal meaning is habitual masturbator. One hears and reads it occasionally from Americans, who do not seem to be aware that it’s considered a fairly coarse term in the U.K., certainly more so than pillock. Indeed, a British website that provides transcripts of Simpsons episodes could not bring itself to print the word, rendering it “w*nk*rs.”

Yet another British derogatory term attracted attention in January, when — after a petition advocating banning Donald Trump from the United Kingdom attracted some 600,000 signatures — the House of Commons actually considered the question. They ended up not taking a vote, but in the course of debate, MP Victoria Atkins said Trump was a “wazzock.” Surprisingly, wazzock seems never to have meant penis. It sprang up as slang in the North of England in the 1970s as an all-purpose insult. If you would like to learn quite a bit about its origin and use, listen to this Lexicon Valley podcast with Ben Zimmer.

Sweary language seems to buzz around Trump like flies on a carcass. No need to go through all the particulars, except one that fits the theme of this post, Trump’s observation in December that Hillary Clinton had been “schlonged” by Barack Obama in the 2008 Michigan primary. Schlong is Yiddish slang for … well, at this point I really don’t need to say what. Trump’s seeming innovation was not merely to use it, but to convert it via anthimeria into a verb. The Washington Post subsequently did a deep dive on schlonged and determined that, though the verbing is rare, Trump was not in fact the pioneer: It had been used back in 2011 by an NPR reporter.

We interrupt this post with late-breaking news: In a Baton Rouge rally on February 11, Trump announced, “I won’t use foul language. I’m just not going to do it. … I’ll never do it again, actually,” he said. Lingua Franca will believe that when it sees it.

Back to the post. It has been little remarked that Trump’s name itself is a British term for a bodily function. An American friend of mine with British relatives emailed me, “When I was in England over the holidays, my 6-year-old grandnephew said, ‘I trumped!’

“The adults from America wondered why no one at home had pointed out that our leading Republican candidate’s name means to fart.“