Speaking on the wireless in 1935,
Alistair Cooke declared that “Every Englishman listening to me now unconsciously uses 30 or 40 Americanisms a day”. In 2017, that number is likely closer to three or four hundred, Engel hazards – more
for a teenager, “if they use that many words in a day”.
But how did this happen and why
should we care? After
all, as a nation we’ve been both invaded and invader, and our language is all
the richer for it. Words like bungalow,
bazaar, even Blighty, have their roots
elsewhere. Heck, go far enough back and isn’t it pretty much all just distorted Latin, French or German?
The first American words to make it across the
pond were largely utilitarian –
signifiers for flora and fauna that didn’t exist back in Merrie England. Moose, maize and tobacco were among them.
But there were others, too, that in retrospect might seem laden with
significance – words like plentifulness,
monstrosity and conflagration.
With no means of swift communication or easeful
passage between the two countries, American English merely trickled back into
its source to begin with. But as the balance of
power between Britain and her former colonies shifted, as America ascended to military, economic, cultural and
technological dominance, that trickle swelled
to a torrent, washing away any kind of quality control.
COOKIES and CLOSETS
Throughout the 19th
Century, Engel contends, “the Americanisms that permeated the British language did
so largely on merit, because
they were more expressive, more euphonious, sharper and cleverer than their
British counterparts”. What word-lover could resist the likes of ‘ornery’,
‘boondoggle’ or ‘scuttlebutt’? That long ago ceased to be the case, leaving us
with words and phrases that reek of euphemism – ‘passing’ instead of dying – or
that mock their user with meaninglessness, like the non-existent Rose Garden
that political reporters decided No 10 had to have, just because the White
House has one (it doesn’t exactly have one either, not in the strictest sense,
but that’s a whole other story).
Call me a snob, but there’s also the fact that some American neologisms are just plain ungainly. I recently picked up a
promising new American thriller to find ‘elevator’ used as a verb in the
opening chapter. As in, Ahmed was ‘elevatoring’ towards the top of his
profession in Manhattan.
Nowadays, no
sphere of expression remains untouched. Students talk of campus and semesters. Magistrates, brainwashed
by endless CSI reruns, ask barristers “Will
counsel please approach the bench?” We uncheck boxes in a vain
effort to avoid being inundated with junk mail that, when it arrives regardless, we move to trash.
It’s understandable, of course. Sometimes, American words just seem more glamorous. Who wants to live
in a flat, a word
redolent of damp problems and unidentifiable carpet stains, a word that just
sounds – well, flat – when they could make their home in an apartment instead?
Sometimes that glamour is overlain with bracing egalitarianism – it’s a glamour
untainted by our perennial national hang-up, class.
Take ‘movie’. The word has all the glitz of
Hollywood and none of the intellectual pretensions (or so it might be argued)
of the word ‘film’, which increasingly suggests subtitles
(‘foreign-language film’ is one of the few instances in which the f-word
doesn’t seem interchangeable with its American counterpart – ‘foreign-language
movie’ just sounds odd). Other times they fill
a gap, naming something that British English speakers have been unable to
decide on, as is increasingly the case with ATM, a boring but brief alternative to cash point, cash
machine, hole in the wall. Also to be factored in is what Engel dubs “Britain’s
cultural cringe”, which predisposes us to embrace the foreign.
It’s often pointed out that plenty of these Americanisms were British English to
begin with – we exported them, then imported them back. A commonly made case in point is ‘I guess’, which crops up in Chaucer. When Dr
Johnson compiled his seminal 1755 dictionary, ‘gotten’ was still in use as a past
participle of ‘get’. But as Engel points out, good old English is not good new
English. Moreover, his beef isn’t really to do with authenticity; it’s more to
do with our unthinking complicity. Because it’s not just the cookies and the closets, or even the garbage, it’s the insidiousness of it all.
We’ve already reached the point where most of us can
no longer tell whether a word is an Americanism or not. By 2120, he suggests, American
English will have absorbed the British version entirely. As he puts it, “The child will have eaten its
mother, but only because the mother insisted”. (Continue reading)
