American or British expression?

[tavia_d]

Hello everybody.

I stumbled by an expression in my beta work:

I need some glue, paper, string, and all that jazz to make a kite.

I was wondering is the expression in red is American or British. I think it's more American. I'm brit-picking so I should tell the author to change it if in BrE is not used so much. Right?

Comments

[lilacsigil]

The part that sounds weird to me is "some"..."all that jazz". Qualifying glue, paper and string makes it sound odd. It should be "glue, paper, string and all that jazz". It's very old-fashioned but not necessarily American.

[lil_shepherd]

"All that jazz" is very old fashioned in the UK, even to someone of my (baby boomer) generation. However, though it probably originated in the States, it is not now specifically American. I also agree that the sentence does not need the 'some'.

Not sure what the modern equivalent would be in this case.

"and other stuff" maybe.

[gillo]

Agreed about 'some'. I might suggest 'and that sort of stuff' perhaps? Or 'all that crap' for a fairly young speaker. (my kids, in their 20s, say that.)

[tavia_d]

The phrase I gave is not from the fic. I just copied it from the internet just to clarify the usage of the expression.
Thank you everyone for your comments. They are very helpful.

[syntinen_laulu]

Just for completeness, I'll add that the phrase is or used to be quite commonplace in Australia also, so any British or Antipodean speaker over the age of 50 or so would naturally use it.