“It has been common over the last century to see the United States as the dominant cultural exporter, shaping the global palette with blue jeans, rock’n’roll and the American idiom,” said Dennis Duncan in The Washington Post.
Reminding us that the process can also work in the opposite direction, Ben Yagoda’s new book sets out to analyse the “British invasion of American English”. Yagoda, a professor emeritus of English, maintains that for most of the 20th century, the American “appetite for Britishisms” was small. But in the 1990s, this began to change, and British phrases such as “book a table”, “spot-on” and “own goal” increasingly filtered into American usage.
Yagoda attributes this phenomenon to several factors, said Anne Curzan in The Wall Street Journal: they include the popularity of shows such as “The Crown” and “Downton Abbey”, influential celebrities and journalists such as James Corden and Tina Brown, and the “online availability of British periodicals more generally”. Well researched and non-judgemental, Gobsmacked! is the perfect read for “anyone fascinated by language”.
It is also a book that will “make the average Briton proud”, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. As Yagoda charts the often ludicrous British terms that have made inroads into the US – among them “kerfuffle”, “pear-shaped” and “boffin” – it’s hard not to feel a bit patriotic. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on rude words, “the creation and usage of which is one of the few areas in which we remain world class”.
“Gobsmacked!” relies heavily on the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a tool for measuring the “frequency of words across millions of texts online”, and I eventually became “a bit sick of hearing about it”. But such nerdiness is “worth putting up with for the sheer joy of the rest of the book”.
Princeton 288pp £20; The Week Bookshop £17.99