Rabbit Holes R Us

Norman Mailer: didn’t like “browned off.” Photo by Carl Van Vechten

As I’ve mentioned previously in this space, I write a blog called Not One-Off Britishisms, about British words, expressions, pronunciations — from advert and a proper to yoghurt and zed — that have made their way into American English. When I started the venture, I thought it would last maybe a year. Well it’s now nearly eight years on, I’ve written more than 500 entries and had more than two-million page views, and new NOOBs, as I call them, keep popping up.

Recently, a dependable American NOOBs informant suggested an entry on the imperative Piss off! – a saltier version of “Get lost!” This is distinct from piss off meaning to annoy, which started as U.S. service slang in World War II, and got picked up in Britain by 1989, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang. And it’s also distinct from pissed meaning drunk, which is a Britishism dating from 1810 and has yet to be adopted in the U.S. – hence, a NOOB in waiting.

I determined that my informant was correct about American use of the expression by using a nifty toy for charting demotic language use, which is notoriously hard to research. TweetDeck is, in the words of its Wikipedia entry, “a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts.” Its main feature is letting you set up columns that will display certain categories of tweets — one might be for a list you’ve made of comedians, another for tweets that mention a certain hashtag, a third might be from your friends. I recently discovered its two-year-old “geo-tagging” feature that will display a column of tweets emanating from or near a specified location. Here’s how I set it up:

And here are some of the results:

The first tweeter’s profile identifies him as being from Georgia (perhaps he is visiting the Northeast), the second is from Philadelphia, and the fourth from New Jersey. (The third doesn’t count because he uses piss off  in the other sense.) Pretty cool.

Apropos of pissed off, my informant went on to say, “When did cheesed off become a thing, and where? Wisconsin?”

Good question — and no, the answer isn’t Wisconsin. A little research revealed that the expression, which is a bit milder than pissed off  — more like annoyed or fed up — is yet another Not One-Off Britishism. Green‘s Dictionary of Slang pegs it as originating in World War II Royal Air Force argot, and all the citations are from Britain or Commonwealth countries, for example this from a 1946 Philip Larkin letter: “I sympathise very much with your cheesed-off state.”

The earliest U.S. use I found was a 1983 New York Times quote from the Wisconsin (!) Congressman Les Aspin referring to a heated debate about a nuclear freeze: “Tempers are frayed — the boys are getting cheesed off.” In 2008, in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg referred to “Hillary [Clinton]-supporting women who are still mightily cheesed off that Obama beat their candidate, despite his comparatively short resumé and so on.”

And TweetDeck geo-tagging produced some palpable hits:

Cheesed off led me to its synonym, browned off. It might not surprise you to hear me say that it’s yet another Not One-Off Britishism. Both The Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s trace it to British sources, originating no later than 1938. That was the publication date of James Curtis’s novel They Drive By Night, this line from which both reference works quote: “What the hell had he got to be so browned off about? He ought to be feeling proper chirpy.” But there is evidence of earlier use. The OED quotes Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang (1961) as labeling the expression “Regular Army since ca. 1915; adopted by the RAF ca. 1929.” However, the dictionary sniffs, “pre-1938 printed evidence is lacking.” Green’s quotes a letter written in 1940 by Mrs. Jean Green in Hunsur, Mysore, in India, and published that year in American Speech: “To brown off or to be browned off was first heard by me in Army circles at Aldershot [England] in 1932, and when I came out to India later in the year it was also used in Bangalore. Since then I have used it often, but gave it up a year or two ago, thinking it was overdone and dated.”

Much as one would like to, one cannot take Mrs. Green’s word for it that browned off was used in 1932. I can, however, provide the OED with a pre-1938 use in this line of dialogue from another James Curtis novel, There Ain’t No Justice, published in 1937: “All right, all right, all right, only fer Christ’s sake lay off of me. I’m feeling proper browned off. Be flying off the handle, any minute now.”

As for American adoption, Green’s quotes a Norman Mailer letter from 1948 in which he lumped the expression in with a bunch of euphemisms he had disdain for: “Words liked [sic] browned-off, fouled-up, mother-loving, … spit for shit are the most counterfeit of currencies.” I can antedate that, too. On October 3, 1943, The New York Times published an article by Milton Bracker called “What to Write the Soldier Overseas.” Right at the get-go, Bracker takes up the topic of “Dear John” letters. He notes:

Presumably the American GIs picked it up from their British allies.

Green’s lists a handful of subsequent American uses, the most intriguing of which is a line from Chester Himes’s 1969 novel Blind Man With a Pistol: “By the time the sergeant got to the tenants in the last room he was well browned off.” That intensifier well is a proper Britishism, and I would love to know how it got into the active vocabulary of the Missouri-born, African-American Himes.

But that’s a rabbit hole for another day.