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Using the correct (English-language) words has always been central for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry during 23 years at The BBC and 41 years in journalism, but now comes a new book which is challenging negative notions of linguistic transfer such as so-called ‘Americanisation’.
I must admit I HATE ‘Americanisation’ of words.
I always spell ‘COLOUR’ with a ‘U’, and use ‘DEFENCE’ not ‘DEFENSE’.
The BBC (where I worked for many years), once asked people in the UK to send in the Americanisms that annoyed them most and the corporation was flooded with thousands of entries.
Among the most annoying phrases were apparently “24/7”, “deplane” and “touch base”.
Matthew Engel, a writer who had kicked off the conversation with an article on unwanted Americanisms, even turned the idea into a book called “That’s the Way It Crumbles”, in 2017.
The furore (which Americans would call a FUROR) seemed to die down a bit, but in September Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph (DT) revived it with a column and book about Americanisms.
Mr Heffer bemoaned the use of American words, but even he conceded that Brits were, in fact, “willingly adopting” them, especially through two routes associated with America: digital technology and “corporatespeak”.
Perhaps, though, I am wrong – and I certainly don’t want to be associated with the likes of Mr Heffer.
Linguistic exchange is ancient, and a language is constantly evolving anyway – it is NEVER frozen, so maybe the increasing influence of American words is part of this process.
Ben Yagoda, emeritus professor of English at the University of Delaware (UoD) certainly seems to think so.
In the book “Gobsmacked!” he describes the transfer of phrases which went the other way.
For example Britishisms like “it’s early days” and “gone missing” took hold in America in the 1980s and 2000s, respectively.
So perhaps I am COLORED by a snobbish attitude to Americanisms, and there is really no DEFENSE for it…
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when words were always chosen carefully) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now. ‘Defence’ with an ‘S’ is used, but only because it was put through an American spell-checker by the publisher.
‘Gobsmacked!’ By Ben Yagoda, is from Princeton University Press, priced at $24.95 and £20.
Tomorrow – more word controversies, and how it’s been revealed that the Queen absurdly believes that certain things should not be used – in particular ‘fish knife’.
Terms of endearment (Wordplay part three), comes soon where Phil notes how special terms are often used by the media to entice the audience, and now this is underlined by new phrases emerging today to describe certain countries.
