American Idioms Have Gone Missing

One of Peter De Vries's comic novels has a character who accumulates Briticisms. As I recall, he orders shrimp cocktail as a "starter," refers to a friend "called" James (instead of "named" -- that's a subtle one), and fills his car with "petrol" for the ride home. Eventually, he winds up in hospital.

De Vries's conceit, delicious as it was, was an exaggeration. Generally a Yank can get away with at most one such locution in his or her active vocabulary, for example the person I know who likes to refer to his time "at university," the university in question being a large land-grant institution. Any more than that and he would be laughed out the door, like the professor who habitually shows up at faculty meetings in a bespoke suit, Turnbull and Asser shirt, and Liberty of London tie, done in a Windsor knot.

Lately, however, the American press has become that professor. What set the ball rolling, I believe, was use of the verb phrase "to go missing" to mean "disappear," as in a person or object that at one moment is available and visible and subsequently is nowhere to be found. "Disappear" doesn't perfectly convey this idea -- it has too much of a Siegfried and Roy, presto-chango connotation -- but, along with its slightly more melodramatic counterpart, "vanish," it had to do the job for a long time. "Go missing" is better, but it was resisted, probably for the very reason that it sounds so British. Along with variants "went missing" and "gone missing," it appeared in The New York Times not at all in 1983, and only twice in 1993.

In 2001, however, the formulation was employed 24 times. The reason was a major national story about a person who went missing: Chandra Levy. And that year was the tipping point. In 2003, the Times had precisely 50 "go missings," and today even writers for USA Today and People use it with a straight face.

David Letterman recently made fun of Oprah Winfrey's saying that she couldn't appear on his show because she was "on holiday" -- what was wrong, he wondered, with "vacation"? A friend has taken to saying, "I'll ring you" instead of "phone you" or "call you up." From various sources, I have heard repeated uses of "sack" (fire), "row" (argument), and "chat up" (talk to, usually in a flirtatious way). Briticisms all: Together they constitute a cultural equivalent of De Vries's poseur.

I'm afraid I can't resist the inevitable conclusion, so here goes: Briticisms have passed their sell-by date, and the odor (or should I say odour) is getting a bit rank.

Ben Yagoda is a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and the author, most recently, of The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, published this month by HarperCollins.