Mark Easton is the BBC home affairs editor. He spent some of his childhood in Winchester, apparently, not Wisconsin. And his job seems unlikely to offer extensive travel opportunities to the United States.
Yet the other night he referred to ‘specialty shops’ (note the missing i) on the Ten O’Clock News. The rest of his report must have been drowned out by the screaming and spluttering of thousands of Mail on Sunday readers, who share my horror at the way British English is being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mindless Americanisms.
My article in last week’s Review (Say No To The Get-Go) brought forth a huge response, almost all of it supportive. Most gratifyingly, very few of the emails began: ‘Hi Matthew.’
Taking liberties: Have Brits lost their grasp on the difference between our form of English and America's?
I believe language thrives on give and take, but with the United States it is all take. Americans rarely hear any of our words, let alone adopt them.
But we are so overwhelmed by everything American that the British have lost their grasp on the difference between our form of English and theirs. This is the reality of cultural imperialism.
More...
* Say no to the get-go! Americanisms swamping English, so wake up and smell the coffee
Easton was not even speaking good American. ‘Specialty stores’ would be far more normal in the United States.
‘Speciality’ (with the i) is a lovely word, full of rolling syllables. His version is the kind of usage that comes out of the mid-Atlantic and needs to be dropped back there, from a great height.
And there is a great deal of other useless baggage that needs to be dumped along with it. You offered hundreds more examples.
Top of the long hate-list was probably ‘Can I get a coffee?’ (and these days it probably would be an overpriced, overmarketed American coffee rather than a nice cup of tea).
‘Can I get a coffee?’ was top of the hate list
The answer, says Louisa C., is no ‘. . . unless you are planning to clamber over the counter and start fiddling with the steam spouts’.
It was closely followed by ‘I’m good’ as opposed to ‘I’m very well, thank you’. This phrase is even more infuriating when used as an alternative to ‘No, thanks’, in declining a second helping.
‘I just want to yell, “NO, you are NOT good – you might be really, really BAD,” ’ wailed Patsy Holden.
Other leading hates include ‘snuck’ as the past tense of ‘sneak’ and ‘dove’ as the past tense of ‘dive’; driver’s license instead of driving licence; overly rather than over; autopsy for post-mortem; burglarized instead of burgled; filling out forms instead of filling them in; fries for chips; chips for crisps; and food to go as opposed to take away.
There is also period instead of full stop; and of course ‘Hi, guys’, guys in this case being of either sex. These last two usages are associated with Tony Blair, which seems to redouble the irritation factor.
Not everyone suffers in silence. Martin Levin of London E4, says he keeps emailing Radio 2 to remind them there is no k in ‘schedule’, as does Keith Rodgerson, whose verbal enemies list is so long he can’t have time for much else other than letters of complaint.
Let battle commence: A war of words has been declared between the British form of the English language and Americanisms
It includes airplane for aeroplane, pharmacist for chemist, advisory for warning, and calling McDonalds a restaurant, which is a related but subtly different complaint.
The land is also full of ‘gotten’ haters – understandable because it is an extremely ugly word. This is a complex area, though, in that it was formerly used in Scotland and can be found in the works of Sir Walter Scott.
However, it was described as ‘archaic and affected’ in 1926, so has no business making a comeback.
And there is widespread loathing of the verbalisation of nouns: incentivizing and all that rot. David Barton of Kent says he used to work for an American company that decided to ‘sunset’ a department.
In sport, Bob Carr winces when his team suffer an American ‘loss’ far more than when they go down to an English defeat.
Wayne Bryant says that, if he were still playing competitive sport and was told ‘you’re ON the team ON the weekend’, he would refuse to turn up. Gordon Spalding adds ‘Can we touch base?’ to the collection of ludicrous baseball metaphors.
There is a simple answer to this. There should be a blanket ban on references to baseball in British conversation unless the perpetrator can explain the infield fly rule, which makes the lbw law look a doddle.
There is a more general solution: a growing understanding that Britain has a language of its own.
It may or may not be better than American, but it’s different and it’s ours, part of what makes us distinctive. People do care. It’s time for those with some responsibility for the language to start caring, too.
Tuesday 8 June 2010
Say no to the get-go! Americanisms swamping English, so wake up and smell the coffee. Matthew Engel
The following article appeared in The Mail on Sunday and beautifully describes some of the awful mis-uses of the English language. I make no apologies for reproducing this wonderful piece of work.
It happened early this month, shortly after the first cuckoo. I heard it, I swear I heard it. The first get-go of spring. It was on the BBC Breakfast programme on May 11: a presenter was wittering, and distinctly said that something-or-other had been clear 'from the get-go'.
From the what?
Actually, I know all about the get-go or, worse still, the git-go. It's an ugly Americanism, meaning 'from the start' or 'from the off'. It adds nothing to Britain's language but it's here now, like the grey squirrel, destined to drive out native species and ravage the linguistic ecosystem.
Empire State Building in New York
The British have been borrowing words from America for at least two centuries
We have to be realistic: languages grow. The success of English comes from its adaptability and the British have been borrowing words from America for at least two centuries.
Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated.
In 1832, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fulminating about the 'vile and barbarous' new adjective that had just arrived in London. The word was 'talented'. It sounds innocuous enough to our ears, as do 'reliable', 'influential' and 'lengthy', which all inspired loathing when they first crossed the Atlantic.
But the process gathered speed with the arrival of cinema and television in the 20th Century. And in the 21st it seems unstoppable. The U.S.-dominated computer industry, with its 'licenses', 'colors' and 'favorites' is one culprit. That ties in with mobile phones that keep 'dialing' numbers that are always 'busy'.
My dictionary (a mere 12 years old) defines 'geek' as an American circus freak or, in Australia, 'a good long look'. We needed a word to describe someone obsessively interested in computer technology. It seems a shame there was never any chance of coining one ourselves.
Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life.
Enlarge Engel's terrible ten
Yet no one seems to care. The stern old type of English teacher has died out and many newspapers cannot now afford 'Prodnoses', the last-line-of-defence sub-editors who used to guard the language with a thick pencil.
Sometimes, the language can be improved by the imports. The British would never be able even to define the deficit had we not adopted the American billion (a thousand million) to replace our old hardly used billion (a million million).
I accept that estate agents find it easier to sell fancy apartments rather than boring old flats. And it's right that our few non-passenger trains should carry freight not goods, because that's a more accurate description of the contents.
But the process is non-selective and almost wholly one-way. And it works very strangely. Almost all the parts of a car have different names in America, yet there is no sign of hood replacing bonnet, or the trunk supplanting the boot.
Meanwhile, the most improbable areas of activity are terminally infected. Take the law. Ask any lawyer and they will explain: witnesses in British courts do not testify, they give evidence; nor do they 'take the stand' to do this, they go into the witness box. They do things the American way in media reports of court cases, though - day after day.
We are witnessing a transatlantic takeover in politics as well. This month, Britain acquired a National Security Council. Last year, it gained a Supreme Court. There is talk that the House of Lords will be renamed the Senate.
It also used to be understood that, while American politicians 'ran' for office, British politicians always 'stood'. I liked that: it implied a pleasing reticence. Now in Britain both words are used interchangeably and in this month's General Election candidates stood and ran at the same time. No wonder they kept falling flat on their faces.
Then take sport, where Britain's national tastes are totally different from those of the Americans. I happen to belong to the .0001 per cent (approx) of the British population who count as baseball fans. This makes it even more offensive to me when politicians parrot phrases such as 'three strikes and you're out' although they haven't got the foggiest idea what it means.
Technical baseball terms are everywhere. We constantly hear about people 'stepping up to the plate'. For some weird reason, cricket coaches are especially fond of this one. And ideas keep coming from the baseball position of 'left field'. Wouldn't silly mid-on be more appropriate?
And so, hi guys, hel-LO, wake up and smell the coffee. We need to distinguish between the normal give-and-take of linguistic development and being overrun - through our own negligence and ignorance - by rampant cultural imperialism.
We are all guilty. In the weeks after 9/11 (or 11/9, as I prefer to call it), British journalists, and I was one of them, solemnly reported that the planes had been hijacked by men waving box-cutters, even though no one in Britain knew what a box-cutter was. Very few of us bothered to explain that these were what we have always called Stanley knives.
But it is time to fight back. The battle is almost uncertainly unwinnable but I am convinced there are millions of intelligent Britons out there who wince as often as I do every time they hear a witless Americanism introduced into British discourse.
Stand up and say you care. Feel free to write with your favourite horrors. Come out of the closet. Or better still, the cupboard.
Matthew Engel is a columnist on the Financial Times. Send your pet hate Americanisms to englishincrisis@gmail.com.
It happened early this month, shortly after the first cuckoo. I heard it, I swear I heard it. The first get-go of spring. It was on the BBC Breakfast programme on May 11: a presenter was wittering, and distinctly said that something-or-other had been clear 'from the get-go'.
From the what?
Actually, I know all about the get-go or, worse still, the git-go. It's an ugly Americanism, meaning 'from the start' or 'from the off'. It adds nothing to Britain's language but it's here now, like the grey squirrel, destined to drive out native species and ravage the linguistic ecosystem.
Empire State Building in New York
The British have been borrowing words from America for at least two centuries
We have to be realistic: languages grow. The success of English comes from its adaptability and the British have been borrowing words from America for at least two centuries.
Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated.
In 1832, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fulminating about the 'vile and barbarous' new adjective that had just arrived in London. The word was 'talented'. It sounds innocuous enough to our ears, as do 'reliable', 'influential' and 'lengthy', which all inspired loathing when they first crossed the Atlantic.
But the process gathered speed with the arrival of cinema and television in the 20th Century. And in the 21st it seems unstoppable. The U.S.-dominated computer industry, with its 'licenses', 'colors' and 'favorites' is one culprit. That ties in with mobile phones that keep 'dialing' numbers that are always 'busy'.
My dictionary (a mere 12 years old) defines 'geek' as an American circus freak or, in Australia, 'a good long look'. We needed a word to describe someone obsessively interested in computer technology. It seems a shame there was never any chance of coining one ourselves.
Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life.
Enlarge Engel's terrible ten
Yet no one seems to care. The stern old type of English teacher has died out and many newspapers cannot now afford 'Prodnoses', the last-line-of-defence sub-editors who used to guard the language with a thick pencil.
Sometimes, the language can be improved by the imports. The British would never be able even to define the deficit had we not adopted the American billion (a thousand million) to replace our old hardly used billion (a million million).
I accept that estate agents find it easier to sell fancy apartments rather than boring old flats. And it's right that our few non-passenger trains should carry freight not goods, because that's a more accurate description of the contents.
But the process is non-selective and almost wholly one-way. And it works very strangely. Almost all the parts of a car have different names in America, yet there is no sign of hood replacing bonnet, or the trunk supplanting the boot.
Meanwhile, the most improbable areas of activity are terminally infected. Take the law. Ask any lawyer and they will explain: witnesses in British courts do not testify, they give evidence; nor do they 'take the stand' to do this, they go into the witness box. They do things the American way in media reports of court cases, though - day after day.
We are witnessing a transatlantic takeover in politics as well. This month, Britain acquired a National Security Council. Last year, it gained a Supreme Court. There is talk that the House of Lords will be renamed the Senate.
It also used to be understood that, while American politicians 'ran' for office, British politicians always 'stood'. I liked that: it implied a pleasing reticence. Now in Britain both words are used interchangeably and in this month's General Election candidates stood and ran at the same time. No wonder they kept falling flat on their faces.
Then take sport, where Britain's national tastes are totally different from those of the Americans. I happen to belong to the .0001 per cent (approx) of the British population who count as baseball fans. This makes it even more offensive to me when politicians parrot phrases such as 'three strikes and you're out' although they haven't got the foggiest idea what it means.
Technical baseball terms are everywhere. We constantly hear about people 'stepping up to the plate'. For some weird reason, cricket coaches are especially fond of this one. And ideas keep coming from the baseball position of 'left field'. Wouldn't silly mid-on be more appropriate?
And so, hi guys, hel-LO, wake up and smell the coffee. We need to distinguish between the normal give-and-take of linguistic development and being overrun - through our own negligence and ignorance - by rampant cultural imperialism.
We are all guilty. In the weeks after 9/11 (or 11/9, as I prefer to call it), British journalists, and I was one of them, solemnly reported that the planes had been hijacked by men waving box-cutters, even though no one in Britain knew what a box-cutter was. Very few of us bothered to explain that these were what we have always called Stanley knives.
But it is time to fight back. The battle is almost uncertainly unwinnable but I am convinced there are millions of intelligent Britons out there who wince as often as I do every time they hear a witless Americanism introduced into British discourse.
Stand up and say you care. Feel free to write with your favourite horrors. Come out of the closet. Or better still, the cupboard.
Matthew Engel is a columnist on the Financial Times. Send your pet hate Americanisms to englishincrisis@gmail.com.
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