There is a scene in the 1999 British romcom Notting Hill that nicely illustrates the point of Gobsmacked!, a jolly account of “the British invasion of American English”. In it, Hugh Grant, a fully fledged adult, tries to scale a fence to impress Julia Roberts, and slipping, he exclaims “whoops-a-daisy!” As Britons know, “whoops-a-daisy” is a perfectly reasonable locution for an adult man to use, but it causes Roberts, an American, to bend double laughing. As it happens, “whoops-a-daisy” isn’t included in Gobsmacked!, but its collation of so many other ludicrous British terms – “kerfuffle,” “pear-shaped”, “boffin” – that have made inroads into the US will make the average Briton proud.
Ben Yagoda’s lexicon is a spin-off from his popular blog Not One-Off Britishisms, an unwieldy title for a fun experiment in which the professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware tracks British usages in the US. Like all popular books about language, Gobsmacked! does several things at once: it offers a lot of “fancy that!” facts about the origin of popular words and phrases. (Did you know the word “cushy” derives from Persian and Urdu, and was a military term popularised by British soldiers during the first world war?) It also gives the broader historical context of why certain phrases took off at certain times. (A combination of Geri Halliwell and a single episode of South Park is blamed for the introduction of the pejorative “ginger” to the American lexicon – which Pagoda records Ed Sheeran among others lamenting.) Above all, though, it provides a starting point for pedantic language nerds to argue over the specific meaning and provenance of words (the section on “posh” is divine).
