“American” words in English: where would we be without them? They own the bulk of the shares

 

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“There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”

Mark Twain said that as far back as 1897 (Following the Equator, Chapter XXIV). While many Brits continue to entertain the attitude typified (or satirized) by Max Beerbohm:

“He held, too, in his enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford.” Zuleika Dobson, 1911

all of us (i.e. English-speakers) use U.S.-coined words some – if not all – of the time. Oscar Wilde’s quip “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language” really does not apply to so very many words – though the differences between British and U.S. English as indefatigably explored by Lynne Murphy, are still legion.

Twentieth-century “new” words

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I’m having great fun looking at words that “came into the language” year by year from 1900 onwards, and tweeting one or two a day. To find them, I use “advanced search” in the OED specifying “headword” and a given year. Each year there are usually round 500 such words, and in some years rather more (e.g. 1900: 686), but very occasionally rather fewer (e.g. 1913: 451). [Note that very careful use of fewer, ;-)] That search excludes words which [yes, oh Word grammar checker, it’s fine to use “which” in a defining clause] acquired new meanings in any year. So, what I end up with is a list of completely new “visitors” (in bird terms) to our language. For each year, I generally look at the first 100, ordered by frequency, and then select 20 or so according to criteria explained in the earlier blog. Now, while doing this (at the time of writing, I had got up to 1915), I found myself wondering more and more insistently just how many emerged in British English and how many in U.S.English. I was expecting U.S. English to produce the greater number, but my little sample surprised even me.

A 50-word personal sample

I chose 20 words from 1909 and 30 from 1913, thus giving me a nice round figure of 50 to do easy percentages with. The OED lists a few of them as “Orig. U.S.” and variants on that theme. But I had a suspicion that more of them were U.S. than that labelling suggested. I decided to look at the written source which the OED had tracked down as the first record of the word: was it an American journal/newspaper/book, or a British one? The totals are as follows: U.S. = 33; Brit = 16; other = 1 i.e. 66% of words are first cited in U.S. sources. Some caveats are in order, of course. First, several of the OED entries have not been revised for the third edition; different dates and sources may therefore be found. Second, the fact that a word first appears in a U.S. source does not prove conclusively that it is an American coinage, though it does point strongly in that direction. And, third, my sample is neither random, nor large enough to prove anything. But it is, to my mind, very suggestive, given that most of these words must surely be considered part of everyday language, rather than technical. I also labelled the words with a subject field. “Modern life” is a bit of a cop-out, to avoid too many labels; “General language”, as you will see, includes several informal or (once) slangy terms.

“Bull” does not mean what you might think

Hopefully, the abbreviations in the list of sources are self-explanatory. “Bull.”, by the way, means “Bulletin”. Newspapers figure as the first citation for ten words; three appear first in dictionaries. Finally, some of the first citations are piquant: Winston Churchill for seaplane, Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street for lav, P.G. Wodehouse for fifty-fifty, and Arnold Bennett for turn-round. The relevant citations follow the table.   Words are in order of frequency as listed in the OED.  Finally, quite why piggy bank first appears in the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette for March 1913 is anyone’s guess.

Headword	Year	Country	Source	Field
gene	1909	US	Amer. Naturalist	science
movies	1909	US	Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican	entertainment
cinema	1909	Brit	Tragedy of the Pyramids	entertainment
trade-off	1909	US	St. Louis Post-Dispatch	business, economics
coke	1909	US	Coca-Cola Bottler (Philadelphia)	modern life
air conditioning	1909	US	Useful Information Cotton Manufacturers	modern life
exponentially	1909	US	Cent. Dict. Suppl.	science
libido	1909	US	Freud Sel. Papers on Hysteria	psychology
fuselage	1909	Brit	Flight	transport
empathic	1909	US	Lect. Exper. Psychol. Thought-processes	psychology
multi-party	1909	Brit	Englishwoman	politics
mindset	1909	US	Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods	psychology
rite of passage	1909	Brit	Folk-Lore	anthropology
neo-cortex	1909	Brit	Arch. Neurol. & Psychiatry	psychology
counter-offensive	1909	Brit	Daily Chronicle	warfare
xenophobia	1909	Brit	Athenæum	politics
socialite	1909	US	Oakland (Calif.) Tribune	general language
scrounge	1909	US	Webster’s New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang.	general language
gaffe		Brit	Pall Mall Gaz.	general language
bakelite	1909	US	Jrnl. Industr. & Engin. Chem.	modern life
isotope	1913	Brit	Nature	science
close-up	1913	US	Technique Photoplay	entertainment
Salmonella	1913	Brit	Pract. Bacteriol	medicine
project management	1913	US	Nevada State Jrnl	business, economics
behaviourism	1913	US	Psychol. Rev.	psychology
superconductor	1913		Proc. Sect. Sci. K. Akad	science
big picture	1913	US	Titusville (Pa.) Herald	entertainment
comic strip	1913	US	Altoona (Pa.) Mirror	entertainment
streamlined	1913	Brit	Aeroplane	transport
not-for-profit	1913	US	Ann. Amer. Acad. Polit. & Social Sci.	business, economics
talkie	1913	US	Writer’s Bull.	entertainment
petrochemical	1913	US	Chem. Abstr.	science
record player	1913	US	Waterloo (Iowa) Times-Tribune	entertainment
seaplane	1913	Brit	Hansard Commons	transport
turn-round	1913	Brit	The Regent	general language
stooge	1913	US	Sat. Evening Post	general language
person-to-person	1913	US	Lincoln (Nebraska) Daily Star	general language
anti-freeze	1913	US	Dict. Automobile Terms	transport
pre-eclampsia	1913	Brit	Lancet	medicine
fifty-fifty	1913	US	Little Nugget	general  language
once-over	1913	US	N.Y. Evening Jrnl	general language
lav	1913	Brit	Sinister St	general language
pep talk	1913	US	Colorado Springs Gaz.	general language
intelligence quotient	1913	US	Psychol. Bull.	psychology
parsec	1913	Brit	Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc.	science
reflexology	1913	US	Med. World	medicine
sexologist	1913	US	Pract. Treat. Causes, Symptoms & Treatm. Sexual Impotence	medicine
admin	1913	US	Trans. 15th Internat. Congr. Hygiene & Demography	general language
headcount	1913	US	Motion-pict. Work	general language
piggy bank	1913	US	Dietetic & Hygienic Gaz	general language

seaplane: Hansard Commons, 17 July – We have decided to call the naval hydroplane a seaplane, and the ordinary aeroplane or school machine, which we use in the Navy, simply a plane. (Churchill) lav: Sinister St. I. vii. 99 – Tell the army to line up behind the lav. at four o’clock. (Mackenzie) (lav is marked as “Chiefly Brit” and “colloq.” in the OED) fifty-fifty: Little Nugget vi. 121 – Say, Sam, don’t be a hawg. Let’s go fifty-fifty in dis deal. (Wodehouse) turn-round: The Regent x. 291 – She’s going to do the quickest turn-round that any ship ever did… She’ll leave at noon to-morrow.