The New York Times had noted that umbrellas were key elements in caricaturing the British prime minister: “Mr. Investigating why Americans associate the Americanism bumbershoot with Britishness, Yagoda traced the misapprehension as far back as 1939, when the word was only a few decades old. Similarly, the American writers of the sitcom Frasier had their English character Daphne endorse the British bumbershoot myth:ĭaphne: Oh, isn’t that nice, well at least someone appreciates my mother tongue. Morris dancing may be an English folk tradition, but the songwriters were American and so was the bumbershoo.
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You might recall hearing it, minus the last consonant, in the Morris-dancing scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, set in Edwardian England:īut you’d better never bother with me ol’ bamboo. Yagoda immediately faced a comment storm from Britons asking, “What on earth is a bumbershoot?” Why indeed would British people know bumbershoot, an early twentieth-century American slang term meaning ‘umbrella’? Yet in the collective American imagination, bumbershoot has become British. Why have we adopted laddish while we didn’t adopt telly or bumbershoot? ( One-off is one of those Britishisms.) Reflecting on his role as a one-man linguistic border patrol, Yagoda wrote a piece for the online magazine Slate, wondering:
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Since 2011, University of Delaware professor Ben Yagoda has been writing Not One-Off Britishisms, a blog that tracks British turns of phrase that are infiltrating American media.