News American English becoming more British

[leviramsey]

BBC"]

There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too.

"Spot on - it's just ludicrous!" snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on."

"Will do - I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine," he adds.

And don't get him started on the chattering classes - its overtones of a distinctly British class system make him quiver.

But not everyone shares his revulsion at the drip, drip, drip of Britishisms - to use an American term - crossing the Atlantic.

"I enjoy seeing them," says Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, and author of the forthcoming book, How to Not Write Bad.

"It's like a birdwatcher. If I find an American saying one, it makes my day!"

Last year Yagoda set up a blog dedicated to spotting the use of British terms in American English.

So far he has found more than 150 - from cheeky to chat-up via sell-by date, and the long game - an expression which appears to date back to 1856, and comes not from golf or chess, but the card game whist. President Barack Obama has used it in at least one speech.

Yagoda notices changes in pronunciation too - for example his students sometimes use "that sort of London glottal stop", dropping the T in words like "important" or "Manhattan".

Ginger

The use of ginger in the US to describe red hair took off with publication of the first Harry Potter book in 1998, says Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster. Unlike in the UK, there is no anti-ginger prejudice in the US, she says - Americans think of warm, comforting things like gingerbread.

Sell-by date

Americans use "expiration date" for the British sell-by date - the date by which supermarket food must be sold. But sell-by date is increasingly used in the US in a figurative sense. Eg "That idea is well past its sell-by date."

Go missing

This came to the fore in the US when intern Chandra Levy "disappeared", says Ben Yagoda. Go missing was widely used, he says, because it felt more nuanced. In his view, British terms can "really serve a purpose" when there is no exact equivalent in American English.

Chat up

The use of chat up to refer to flirtatious conversation really began to take off in the 1990s, says Kory Stamper. Often you can't pinpoint why a word or phrase gets picked up, she says. Chat up is a good example of a Britishism that has "snuck in on cat's feet".

Kory Stamper, Associate Editor for Merriam-Webster, whose dictionaries are used by many American publishers and news organisations, agrees that more and more British words are entering the American vocabulary.

Stamper is one of the powerful few who get to choose which words are included in the dictionary, as well as writing their definitions.

One new entrant into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2012 was gastropub (a gentrified pub serving good food), which was first used, according to Kory Stamper, in London's Evening Standard newspaper in 1996, and was first registered on American shores in 2000.

"The British pub is a very different critter from an American bar," she says, but bars with good beer and food are springing up in many cities in the US, and the British term is sometimes used to describe them.

Twee (excessively dainty or cute) is another "word of the moment", says Stamper, as is metrosexual (a well-groomed and fashion-conscious heterosexual man) which "took off like wildfire", after it was used in the American TV series Queer Eye. There was even a backlash against it - a sure sign, she says, that the word had "absolutely made its way into the American vernacular".

There has also been "a huge up-tick", says Stamper, in the use of ginger as a way of describing someone with red hair.

She sees this as clearly tied to the publication in the US of the first Harry Potter book. Dozens of words and phrases were changed for the American market, but ginger slipped through, as did snog (meaning "to kiss amorously") - though that has not proved so popular.

We are not seeing a radical change to the American language, says Jesse Sheidlower, American editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary - rather a "very small, but noticeable" trend.

Bill Kretzschmar, professor of English at the University of Georgia, makes a similar point - that while the spike in use of some British terms may look dramatic, it is often because they are rising from a very low base. Most are used "very infrequently", he says.

And it is not so much the masses who use these terms, says Geoffrey Nunberg, as the educated elite. Journalists and other media types, like advertising agencies, are the worst offenders, in his view.

"The words trickle down rather than trickle up," he says.

"It sounds trendy - another borrowing we could use without - to use a British term. It just sounds kind of Transatlantic."

But the line between trendy and plain pretentious is a fine one, says Sheidlower.

Anyone who says bespoke - as Americans sometimes do when referring to a custom-made suit or a bicycle - is just "showing off".

But some British terms can be useful, says Sheidlower, and fill in a gap where there is no direct equivalent in American English - he cites one-off (something which is done, or made, or which happens only once) as an example.

To go missing is another useful term, says Ben Yagoda, as it is more nuanced, conveying a greater sense of uncertainty than the standard "to disappear". Its use climbed significantly in 2001, with the high-profile case of the missing intern Chandra Levy.

British TV shows like Top Gear, Dr Who, and Downton Abbey may be another reason more British words are slipping in, says Yagoda, as well as the popularity (and easy access via the internet) of British news sources, such as The Guardian, The Economist, The Daily Mail - and the BBC.

Yagoda also points to a number of British journalists who have risen to influential positions in the US, including Tina Brown - who has worked as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek - and Anna Wintour, editor in chief of American Vogue.

"English for everybody is becoming more international, every day that passes," says Bill Kretzschmar who is also editor in chief of the Linguistics Atlas Project, which tracks spoken English.

The use of university, rather than college or school, for example, may well be used by Americans to make sure they are understood outside the country.

The same thing might be influencing a trend that Yagoda has spotted for Americans to use the day, month, year format for dates - 26/9/12 rather than 9/26/12.

There is not so much an "on and off switch" between versions of English, says Kretzschmar, but more of a continuum - with the same words in existence in different places, but just used at different frequencies.

Some words, often the more formal ones, were once common on both sides of the Atlantic, but dropped out of American English usage while remaining popular in Britain, says Yagoda - amongst (instead of among), trousers (instead of pants), and fortnight (two weeks) are examples.

And some words which Brits regard as typically American - including "candy", "the fall", and "diaper" - were originally British, but dropped out of usage in Britain between about 1850 and the early 1900s, says Kory Stamper.

"America has always welcomed words from all over," she says.

"If it doesn't look conspicuously foreign, I don't think anyone questions - it's just English at that point."

The word gormless (the best American equivalent is probably "clueless") is on the rise in the US, for example, says Stamper, but no-one thinks of it as a British word. For some reason it sounds Southern to many American ears.

There would have been no difference between British and American English when the founding fathers first crossed the Atlantic. It took time for the two to go their separate ways - a process given a jolt by Noah Webster, who published the first dictionary of American English in 1806, 30 years after the Declaration of Independence.

Webster introduced the distinctive American spellings of words like "honour" (honor), "colour" (color), "defence" (defense), and "centre" (center), as well as including specifically American words like "skunk" and "chowder".

"He wanted very much for this budding new nation to have its own language," says Kory Stamper, whose Merriam-Webster dictionary is the modern-day version of Webster's work.

"If [we were] not British, but American, we needed to have an American language as well."

These days, the "balance of payments" language-wise is very much skewed the other way - with Americanisms used far more in Britain than the other way round, says Nunberg.

And though a few people do take umbrage at the use of British words in American English, they are in the minority, says Sheidlower.

"In the UK, the use of Americanisms is seen as a sign that culture is going to hell."

"But Americans think all British people are posh, so - aside from things that are fairly pretentious - no-one would mind."

I'm a septic tank and all I can say is bollocks to that. I've been analysing this for a while and I can't recognise any Briticisms colouring the language over here.

[coda]

Good news! I've mentioned on here that I've been kinda pissed at Americanisms entering the language over here.

[Meath_Villan]

Spot on .....Innit Bruv

[The_Rev]

I dont get people who hate Americanisms. It's alright for us to impose our language on well over a billion people globally, but if somebody dares utter a phrase in that language that didnt orignate here it's some kind of heinous crime?

[maqroll]

I think as the world has shrunk and cultures have become so intertwined, it's inevitable that an exchange of vernacular will occur amongst English speaking peoples. Language is always evolving, and I find it all thoroughly fascinating.

[leviramsey]

I think as the world has shrunk and cultures have become so intertwined, it's inevitable that an exchange of vernacular will occur amongst English speaking peoples. Language is always evolving, and I find it all thoroughly fascinating.

Exactly.

Thanks especially to the Internet, I suspect that English, especially written, will converge on some sort of hybrid of the various dialects.

[Awol]

I'm a septic tank and all I can say is bollocks to that. I've been analysing this for a while and I can't recognise any Briticisms colouring the language over here.

I laughed.

[AVFCforever1991]

Sometimes I use American-up my words on this board, even though I'm English.

Color

[AVFC_Hitz]

Americanisms I can stomach. It's the spelling of words the 'American' way that irks me.

People that write program (when not talking about computer related things) instead of programme and the such. I've no problem however with the phrases that we use. It's a common language so we can't start barling when we hear something come back at us. Just yesterday I used 'give me a ball park figure'.

Like The İzzard said. ''You say 'erb, we say herb because there's a **** H in it''

[dAVe80]

I think as the world has shrunk and cultures have become so intertwined, it's inevitable that an exchange of vernacular will occur amongst English speaking peoples. Language is always evolving, and I find it all thoroughly fascinating.

Tru dat.

[legov]

Americanisms I can stomach. It's the spelling of words the 'American' way that irks me.

Why?

[AVFC_Hitz]

Americanisms I can stomach. It's the spelling of words the 'American' way that irks me.

Why?

I can't really lend a true argument to point it just irks me. I think it's more to do with the taking of the word, re-spelling it and then people taking it up.

[The_Rev]

But most of the American spellings make much more sense phonically because they decided to do away with the legacy bullshit we have when words were introduced to our language from French. Language is always evolving.

[darrenm]

Americanisms I can stomach. It's the spelling of words the 'American' way that irks me.

Why?

I can't really lend a true argument to point it just irks me. I think it's more to do with the taking of the word, re-spelling it and then people taking it up.

Same here. Like I said elsewhere, I'll take anything but the -ized, even if phonetically it is closer.

[darrenm]

Language becomes language because people use it. Where there is a gap in language, like the free market, a word will appear to fill the gap.

Performant, for example. When writing IT literature sometimes you _have_ to use it. It's not a word because it's not in the dictionary. But soon it will be because it's a neologism.

But I'll go to my grave fighting the loss of contractions.

[villaajax]

Jag-yew-er!

I just wanted to get that in there...

[snowychap]

...I'll take anything but the -ized...

I'll leave that to Levi as he kicked off the thread.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Nuc-U-lar.

Where the extra U come from?

Anyway, I like how language evolves, but from an aesthetic point of view Oxford English looks nicer on a page.

[RunRickyRun]

'Seasons' (as opposed to 'series') is one that irks me. Fine if you are discussing American TV shows but not British ones.

BBC4 (of all places) used it the other night - (something like) "British comedy, 'The Comedians' ran for 11 seasons in the 70s"

[leviramsey]

Americanisms I can stomach. It's the spelling of words the 'American' way that irks me.

Why?

I can't really lend a true argument to point it just irks me. I think it's more to do with the taking of the word, re-spelling it and then people taking it up.

Same here. Like I said elsewhere, I'll take anything but the -ized, even if phonetically it is closer.

Oxford recognises that -ize is correct:

British English using -ize is known as Oxford spelling and is used in publications of the Oxford University Press, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It can be identified using the registered IANA language tag en-GB-oed. The OED lists the -ise form separately, as "a frequent spelling of -IZE", and refuses to list the -ise spellings even as alternatives in the individual entries for words such as realize. It firmly deprecates using -ise for words of Greek origin, saying, "[T]he suffix...whatever the element to which it is added, is in its origin the Greek -ιζειν, Latin -izāre; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling in -iser should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic". It says "some have used the spelling -ise in English, as in French, for all these words, and some prefer -ise in words formed in French or English from Latin elements, retaining -ize for those of Greek composition". Noah Webster rejected -ise for the same reasons. Henry Watson Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage quotes the OED and recommends the -ize- spelling. Horace Hart in Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford also recommended -ize.

The Cambridge University Press, on the other hand, has long preferred -ise and many reference works, including the Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, prefer -ise.

Perhaps as a reaction to the ascendancy of American spelling, the -ize spelling is often seen in the UK as an Americanism, and -ise is more commonly used in UK mass media and newspapers, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Economist. Meanwhile, -ize is used in many British-based academic publications, such as Nature, the Biochemical Journal and The Times Literary Supplement.

(mind, there's a number of cases where -ise isn't incorrect)

In the British National Corpus, the ratio of -ise to -ize is only about 60/40.