Profs & Pints DC: How to Speak British

Profs and Pints DC presents: “How to Speak British,” a crash course on bantering, yammering, waffling and otherwise carrying on like someone across the pond, with Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, author of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, and editor of the Not One-off Britishisms blog.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-speak-british .]

The British love to complain the English language is being destroyed by words and phrases imported from America, from “French fries” to “cookies” to “Awesome, man.” But what about the influence going the other way?

Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century, with “cheeky,” “go missing,” “easy peasy,” “spot-on,” “kerfuffle,” and scores of other common British terms routinely popping up in print and conversations.

Join author and language commentator Ben Yagoda as he explains how it’s all taken place in a talk that will drawing from both traditional sources like the Oxford English Dictionary and new tools like Google Books Ngram Viewer and take into account influences such as the Spice Girls and Peppa Pig.

Yagoda will look at terms taken from British forces during the World Wars (think “cushy” and “boffins”), insults and curses (”wanker” comes to mind), sports terms, and words related to food and beverages. He’ll also explore the American adoption of British spellings, pronunciations, and grammar, as well as cases where Americans have misconstrued British expressions (changing “can’t be arsed” to “can’t be asked”).

He'll also discuss how Americans have adopted faux-British usages, like spelling “adviser” as “advisor” and pronouncing divisive as “divissive.”

Finally, he’ll offer you guidance on just how many Britishisms an American can safely adopt without coming off like an arse. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Spice Girls’ bus from the film Spice World. ( Photo by Razzladazzla / Wikimedia Commons.)