Moving House.

Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms discusses a phrase I was familiar with but didn’t realize was making inroads over here:

I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…’”

I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness.

The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were both written by Thomas Hardy, the first in an 1888 short story called “Waiting Supper”: “Side by side as they had lived in his day here were they now. They had moved house in mass.” (Incidentally, the OED defines the word “wait,” as Hardy used it in the story’s title, as “To postpone (a meal) in expectation of the arrival of someone. colloquial.” It has four citations, all English, from 1788 to 1861. From an 1836 Charles Dickens letter: “I hope and trust you did not wait dinner for me.” The only time I’ve ever encountered it, till now, is from my wife, born in Massachusetts, where a lot of Britishisms, like “rubbish,” linger.)

But “move house” had been in circulation for at least three decades before Hardy’s story–probably well over three decades.

Click through for the antedates (which are always fun); I normally have no objection to Yanks picking up shiny bits of Britspeak, but this one is (in my opinion) dumb: “moving” is short and punchy, “moving house” is long and dull.