For the first time in six years, I feel spoil{t/ed} forchoice in deciding on a UK-to-US Word of the Year, but have a hard timethinking of even one good candidate for US-to-UK. After the 2011 UK mediafrenzy of anti-Americanismism, 2012was the year of hoopla about Britishisms in America.There were many to choose from, and before announcing my less printable choice,I’d like to give special mention to stockist, which Nancy Friedman (Fritinancy), an excellent observer of commerciallanguage, has noted on the rise in US contexts.
In manyways, I regret my choice of UK-to-US Word of the Year. In other ways, I felt Ididn’t have a choice: the word kept coming up in American contexts this year. And it is:
bollocks…which has a good AmE equivalent in bullshit. At least, the use that has come into AmE has thatequivalent. In BrE the word means ‘testicles’, and by some extension it is used tomean ‘nonsense’. But as is often the case forloanwords, the people borrowing it are not always aware of its other meanings, including the anatomical one. Another use that doesn't seem to be making itsway across is the phrase the dog’s bollocks, which means something good—acruder, stronger and less dated version of other animal metaphors like (orig. AmE) the bee’s kneesor (now AmE) thecat’s meow.
In support of bollocks as WotY we have Newcastle Brown Ale’s US (and not UK) advertisingcampaign:
We also have Richard Hammond of Top Gearpromoting its use in the US, before admitting that it’s already started makingits way into AmE:
Sightings in AmE start before 2012, of course. The Corpus of Historical American English, which has materials from 1810 to 2009 shows this trend in the last few decades (each column stands for a decade and each number is per approximately 25 million words).
The reason I’mnot too excited about having bollocks as my WotY, despite feeling compelled to have it,is that it joins 2006’s wankeron my list of WotYs, which means that now one third of my UK-to-US WotYs arerather crude. SbaCL continues to secure its place in the list of websitesbanned in schools.
Are Americansreally so crude that all we want is vulgar words from the UK? Absolutely not.But if you’ve ever been around exchange students, you’ll have discovered thatit’s much easier to swear in one’s second language. British vulgarities areperceived as fun and quaint in American English. They are also perceived as funand enjoyable by many British English speakers—swearing is a major Britishpastime.
But it’s not seen as quaint, and the British are more aware ofcontexts in which these words should not be used. As I noted in a previous post, The Advertising Standards Authority's 'Deleting Expletives' [link is pdf] report of 2000 put bollocks as the 8th most offensive word according to the British public. Words lower in the 'severity of offence' list than bollocks include arsehole, twat and shit. Most British people I know would contest that ordering of offensiveness, with bollocks feeling pretty mild these days. But still, it's not something that would easily make its way onto a billboard.
So, theUK-to-US WotY for 2012 is bollocks.In so many ways. There’s still a little time to get a last-minute US-to-UK wordnomination in. I hope to post it tomorrow.
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