"Truss is a Conservative. She’s 47 years old, and has been an MP for 12 years and a Cabinet minister for eight..."

"... serving under three prime ministers. Her current gig is foreign secretary, meaning she’s also the country’s point person for post-Brexit EU relations — so if you’re reading this in Brussels, you may already be rolling your eyes at this turn of events. She starts work Tuesday as Johnson exits stage left, knife wounds still healing. Truss is married to accountant Hugh O’Leary, with whom she has two daughters. The incoming U.K. leader was born in Oxford, and grew up in Scotland and then Leeds, in the north of England, attending a school she later accused of setting 'low expectations' for its pupils. She also had a spell in Canada before belatedly settling into the tried-and-tested route to Westminster — a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University."

From "Everything you wanted to know about Liz Truss but were too afraid to ask/Swot up on Britain’s incoming prime minister as Boris Johnson heads for the exit." 

That's in Politico, the European edition, where I learned a new expression: "swot up." 

The OED identifies it as slang. It means "To work hard at one's studies; to ‘bone up.’" I'll still be saying "bone up," but I like knowing this word, which is not related to "SWOT analysis," but to "sweat" — pronounced with a Scottish accent. Originally, it was a noun, describing the person who works hard. As a  verb, it goes back to 1860. The usage with "up" is traced back to 1913.

Do any Americans use this expression? My test was to check the NYT archive. I found exactly one appearance of "swot up," in "Whodunit Most Musical by a Musician Most Literary," a 2011 article about a British musician/author:

“My world is a slightly icky world of broken strings and percentages and money that’s supposed to be paid in advance but isn’t,” [Wesley Stace] said. “I wanted to write purely about music, and I found it helpful to set it in a blank space in the past and address all the tiny little details.” He added that although his mother is a singing teacher and one of his sisters is an opera singer, he really doesn’t know much about classical music and had to “swot up” in the library. “Novel writing is a little about fooling people,” he explained.