When did people start....

[SkyBubble]

Also "tad bit"

There is no such thing as "a tad bit." There is a tad, or there is a bit.

A tchuch, a smidgen, a teeny bit, etc.

 

[SkyBubble]

I've seen three sites within a quick two-minute search (yeah, I know, just because it's on the internet doesn't necessarily make it true) that say it's common in the Northeast, but they also take it down to mostly New York, and the article I've linked from Dictionary.com also adds New Jersey.

"On Line" vs. "In Line"

The Jersey suburbs might as well be New York.

 

[BeechLeaf]

Edited next day to add the source. (I assumed it would be on the picture somewhere.) This is from the wonderful webcomic Questionable Content.

 

[MelissaBaby]

View attachment 2601380

That was friggin' cunning', chummy.

 

[XerXesXu]

Any other recent language evolutions you can think of? Oh! "take a meeting" instead of "have a meeting."

'solve' for 'explain/understand' e.g. 'Can you solve Catholic girls?'

'the receipts' for evidence.

 

[TheLobster]

'solve' used as a noun (like 'ask'), because 'solution' is apparently too convoluted. Also 'spend' (also noun) to mean 'budget', though this is probably still mostly corporate jargon.

L and W for failure and success respectively, and especially 'take the L' for admitting failure, is a relatively recent bit of internet-speak that I kinda like.

 

[MelissaBaby]

"Whole entire"

Knock that shit off.

 

[yowser]

Is that a mutation of the Mainah version, or just the long-standing British/Australian usage beginning to show up in the USA?

"Wicked" as an adjective to mean "awesome"/"cool"/etc. has been common in UK/Aus English since at least the 1980s; I was familiar with it long before I ever heard the intensifier version.

By 2000 it was mainstream enough that a particularly obnoxious van rental company adopted it for their name (Wicked Campers) and it shows up as a Ron Weasley catchphrase in the Harry Potter movies from 2001 onwards. (I don't think it's in the books?)

By now I expect it's something that would mark me as an old fogey trying to sound cool.

I know we're in 'spoken' English territory, not literature, but here's a comparison between American and British (I assume google includes the Commonwealth) use of 'wicked.'

American

British

 

[Carnevil9]

Waiting "on line" is definitely a New York thing. I know lots of New Yorkers, and they all say it. Even Seinfeld says it a lot in his show from the nineties, so it's by no means a new thing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I know we're in 'spoken' English territory, not literature, but here's a comparison between American and British (I assume google includes the Commonwealth) use of 'wicked.'

American

British

The difficulty with applying those results to this conversation is that the two uses we're talking about are going to be swamped by "wicked" = "evil". For the earlier years, most of what those charts are showing is whether somebody published a Bible edition that year (KJV uses "wicked" 494 times) along with other religious content.

We can get a bit of information about its use as an intensifier by restricting the start year to 1900 and trying something like "wicked fast" which is likely to be using it as an intensifier:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...t=1900&year_end=2022&corpus=en-US&smoothing=0

In British English it finds nothing at all.

In American English it flatlines for most of the 20th century, then has some blips from the mid-1980s, a short-lived spike in 1996 and then what looks like a more gradual increase from 2000 on.

Checkimg that content in Google Books, there's one false positive (referring to "their wicked fast") but it looks like most of those hits are the Maine-style intensifier use we've been discussing, e.g. "wicked fast" computers and balls. Oddly, some of the Google Books hits are from before 1984 in years where the graph shows nothing. I suspect Google might be adjusting the data a bit, perhaps trying to avoid false positives from mis-dated/mis-scanned books by changing small counts to zero.

But I'm not sure how to single out the UK-style use of "wicked" to mean "great"/"amazing". Any ideas?

 

[BeechLeaf]

A preposition after it distinguishes 'it was wicked' (adjective) from 'it was wicked fast' (adverb), at the cost of losing most of the examples. If you Ngram for 'wicked to', 'wicked for', 'wicked of', you get upticks from 2000 to 2020, but I can't think of anything really decisive that would get us a better picture.

 

[Britva415]

"Whole entire"

Knock that shit off.

People started that a long time ago. Probably my whole entire life, probably even more!

 

[Writer61]

It's a British thing.


But if you think about it, in some cases you are literally standing ON a line painted on the floor.

Not quite to my British ears.

I don't reognise it in the sense of waiting in turn. "In a line" or "In a queue" sound right to me.

The closest that I recognise is "standing on a picket line" (a form of industrial action).

 

[Lector77]

And in Maine:

"You in the line, bub?"

"Ayuh, been standin' heah a wicked long bit. Just tryin' to get my chaw and a couple of nips."

"What's the dolgum hold up?"

"This old dubber turned in his scratch offs for new ones, then scratched them off and now he's turnin' them in."

"Ain't that a pisser."

“An the wustovit? He's a flatlanduh, mebbe even a masshole.”

“Naw, from the looks of 'im I' swayuh 'ees from Waldoboro, likely crawled outta the trash bin at Moody's.”

 

[TheLobster]

"Whole entire"

Knock that shit off.

This is the single solitary complaint I’ve ever heard uttered about it.

 

[Lector77]

I'd dispute that. My theory is that half the local population of OOB (Old Orchard Beach, for those not blessed to be New Englanders) was fathered by tourists from Quebec.

And the other 84% were from Southie.

 

[StillStunned]

My current pet peeve is how every headline in UK media joins to pieces of information with "as". Just now I saw one along the lines of "Oil passes 100 dollars as fights break out at petrol stations." One a few days ago was "Airline goes bust as planes grounded."

This makes it seem like the first clause describes the effect of a cause described in the second clause, even though the cause and effect are the other way around. Why not just use a comma? Why not learn to write headlines properly? Why not think about what you're writing?

Like I said, a pet peeve.

 

[Britva415]

My current pet peeve is how every headline in UK media joins to pieces of information with "as". Just now I saw one along the lines of "Oil passes 100 dollars as fights break out at petrol stations." One a few days ago was "Airline goes bust as planes grounded."

This makes it seem like the first clause describes the effect of a cause described in the second clause, even though the cause and effect are the other way around. Why not just use a comma? Why not learn to write headlines properly? Why not think about what you're writing?

Like I said, a pet peeve.

Hey, at least it isn't the dreaded "as... as..." without the second part.

I'm talking about when people begin to use the "as modifier noun as adjective" construction, like "as much noise as possible" or "as many pieces as needed" in a sentence long enough to make them totally forget to include the "as possible" or "as needed" part.

I started noticing this in the last few years, and it's everywhere all of a sudden. I swear I hear it more than I hear the correct usage.

Just a recent example, "We have to do as much fundraising to put us over the top."

As much as what? This wasn't a scenario where the "as what" part is something which was already previously said and can be elided on that basis. I'm talking about when someone basically says something as dumb.

As dumb as what?

Exactly.

 

[Britva415]

lol, I take it that you hear people do this too.

 

[StillStunned]

View attachment 2601821

lol, I take it that you hear people do this too.

We should start a separate thread: "How do people piss me off? Let me count the ways."

 

[old_prof]

We should start a separate thread: "How do people piss me off? Let me count the ways."

Just be warned that some among us could take that as a todo list...

 

[TheLobster]

My current pet peeve is how every headline in UK media joins to pieces of information with "as".

“Amid(st)” is probably the most egregious headline connective, at least in the American media. I’ve seen it used to link completely unrelated events, just to create a subtle, unstated impression that they are somehow connected.

“Climate change fears surge amidst global decline in piracy”