So it can come as a shock to Britons to learn that their words and expressions have been worming their way into the American lexicon just as much, it would appear, as the other way around. I date the run-up (that’s an alternate meaning of run-up: “increase”) in Britishisms to the early 1990s, and it’s surely significant that this was when such journalists as Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens moved to the US or consolidated their prominence there. The chattering classes – another useful Britishism – have a persistent desire for ostensibly clever ways to say stuff. They have borrowed from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, teen culture, African American vernacular, sports and hip-hop, and they increasingly borrow from Britain.
Here are some of my favourite examples.
“The informal dining among foodie friends gradually evolved into what it is today,” says Unterman. “Al likes to spread the word on things culinary and Chinese and has spent a lifetime doing that. Our original group just brought on more hungry friends.” They’ve met at more than two dozen restaurants and even traveled together to Vancouver to search for the best xiao long bao.
Many members of the unofficial “club” are in their 70s; the newest addition to the group is also its oldest member, 91-year-old Fern Smith. The fact that she is a former U.S. District Court judge — not someone who has professionally opined on food — is no matter. “She ate everything at our last dinner,” Cheng says. “That was the test.” (Not present is Cheng’s son, who is 41 and the youngest Insatiable.)
I’m no artist, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line.
A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward climb would be learning, acquiring, becoming; the trip back down would be a sloughing off.
Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, asks a simple, devastating question: What would you do if someone told you how and when you would die?
That’s exactly what happens to the passengers on an otherwise unremarkable flight between Hobart and Sydney in Australia. A woman stands up, and then walks down the aisle, pointing to people, reeling off an age and a cause of death. A workplace accident at 43. Drowning at 7. Cardiac arrest at 91.
Well, Anush Kapadia pulls off what wasn’t supposed to be possible: a book on money that is at once meticulous, all-encompassing, lucid and timely. It is also accessibly readable, though it will probably be too condensed for those who do not theorise money for a living.