From Bert Vaux, following up on "U.K. vs. U.S. usage in Lee Child", 6/13/2013:
I just finished "The Affair" (quite good) and only noticed one more feature that I think may be a clear Britishism, "in the event" in the particular sense and construction here:
…I figured if the reduced payload let the Humvee hit sixty-five miles an hour I would be in Carter Crossing again at three minutes past ten.
[new chapter]
In the event the big GM diesel gave me a little better than sixty-five miles an hour, and two minutes short of ten o'clock I pulled up and hid the truck in the last of the trees…
Searches for {. in the event ,} turn up 56 hits in COCA, for an overall rate of 0.12 per million words, and 304 hits in the BNC, for an overall rate of 3.16 per million words — more than 26 times as common in the British collection.
In addition, many of the COCA hits are in material written by Brits, e.g.
This selection of early texts consists of proposals for Peter Whitehead's first two short films, The Theft (UK, 1963) and Parallels (UK, 1963) – here called Images. They were written as funding applications submitted to the British Film Institute's (BFI) Experimental Film Fund . In the event , the productions were cofunded by the Slade and Whitehead himself.
There was nothing socialist about state welfare, and socialists were right to fear the specter of a national health service. They continued to fear it, and when years later the Beveridge report appeared, in December 1942, it proved a bestseller but was roundly condemned in a letter by Beatrice Webb, an old Fabian, as a disastrous idea — though fortunately, as she added, very unlikely to be acted on . In the event , Labour was the last of the three British parties to accept a National Health Service, and William Beveridge, whom I knew as a neighbor in his last years, was endlessly bitter about the derision that Labour leaders had once heaped on his ideas.
In 1981, the number of points for a win in England was increased from two to three, a system that now exists throughout the world. It can be shown mathematically that a set of results will produce a home advantage figure that is slightly greater if three points are awarded for a win instead of two. However one of the purposes of introducing the new system was to encourage more positive play by both teams, a fact that itself could affect home advantage . In the event , there has actually been a decline in home advantage in England since 1981 (Table 3), so that it is difficult to make any conclusion regarding the effects of the two different points systems.
Most of the quotes from American writers are in academic materials written by people likely to have been influenced by trans-Atlantic models, and sometimes writing about British events:
Thus this, from Anna Chave, "The Guerrilla Girls' Reckoning", Arts Journal, Summer 2011:
Then the movement was assailed by its own would-be heirs, a rising generation of women wise in the ways of poststructuralist theory, for its putative naivete and susceptibility to essentialism (that feminist in-fighting word to end all in-fighting words) . In the event , the collective's practices were somewhat belated, or indebted to 1970s initiatives — " A lot of the things that the Guerrilla Girls did had been done by feminist groups earlier, but with a different language and a different style, " acknowledged Popova " — not only in their appeals to principles of equality, but also, say, in their gesture of adopting the names of deceased female artists as aliases, a gambit tacitly corroborating feminist art historians' early efforts to rehabilitate forgotten careers.
Or this, from Reuven Frank, "The great coronation war", American Heritage 1993:
The British Broadcasting Company's television coverage of George VI's funeral in February 1952 earned the reluctant approval of Britain's establishment with its decorum and appropriateness and the respectful attention of broadcasting organizations all over the world for its completeness and innovation. The immediate next thought was what " great television " Elizabeth's coronation would be, if one were allowed in . In the event , one was not allowed in. Only the BBC might cover, but it offered to all free access to its pictures. In fact, the mighty contest between the American networks was to be first to show the BBCs pictures.
So it looks like Bert's intuition is right again — this is another small slip of the dialectological ear on Child's part.
In fairness to Child, the (American) character in question was fictionally born in Berlin to an American father and a French mother, and might well have picked up some bits of international English in his travels as a U.S. Army M.P.
↧