The Britishisation of American English

[Camy]

Finally, we're winning the battle!

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!"

Read the rest

[The Pecman]

No, I've heard Americans say "spot on" before. It's not that wacky. In fact, I have quite a few friends who say, "oh, bloody hell." (My suspicion is that they got it from the Harry Potter novels.)

I have seen awful cases where British writers try to write American dialogue scenes and fail miserably. The Dude will recall a story a few years back where a UK writer attempted to do just that, setting a story in some un-named California town, and at one point, one of his (American) characters referred to "Father Christmas." I sent the author a very polite email, telling him how I enjoyed the story, that I thought it was very well-written and entertaining, but was bothered by that one bit. He went absolutely ballistic on me and chewed me up one side and down the other, insisting that Americans do sometimes refer to Santa as "Father Christmas."

Kris Kringle, Santa, Santa Claus, and Old Saint Nick are all fine. Father Christmas... nah-uh. One little slip can be the downfall in the tenuous link between readers believing in your characters, and not believing.

[FreeThinker]

Britishisation should be spelled with a "zed".

[FreeThinker]

I know from personal experience what Pecman is talking about, though in the other direction. In "The Acolyte's Tale" in my Canterbury stories, one of my characters is a boy with an American father who married an English girl while studying at Oxford. He lived in Oxford until he was eleven before coming to America when his father becomes rector of an Episcopal church in "Canturbury." I received probably a dozen emails from British readers correcting the terms and speech patterns Anthony would have used. I should have made a greater effort in researching how he would speak. Unfortunately, this was before Awesome Dude and my access to British friends who could advise me. Apparently, watching Masterpiece Theatre hadn't been a good enough lesson for me in "English English."

[Cole Parker]

Britishisation should be spelled with a "zed".

Well, it depends on what country it's being written in! Zeds don't get used nearly as much there than here. They must be storing up the surplus in old warehouses somewhere.

C

[JamesSavik]

I enjoy my time here with my mates... good blokes, the entire lot of them.

[Paul_and_Paco]

My appologies to our neighbors across the pond, but I have found that most Americans use Brittishisms when they want to sound pompous and haughty, usually delivered with head held back, nose in the air. So, I expect our UK friends do the same, when they want to sound tacky or trashy.

For myself, I like all words, no matter who thought them up... except "Spotted Dick", just cannot seem to get that one into a conversation.

[Camy]

There's no denying a well made spotted dick is sublimely delicious.

[Cole Parker]

Paul: Try this:

Man, what a rush, showering with all those seniors. I spotted dick more than I ever saw before! Heaven!"

Or:

The lockerroom was full that day. While dressing he spotted dick here, there and everywhere.

C

[Lugnutz]

British folks are odd. Calling a car hood a bonnet and the trunk a boot.

[FreeThinker]

Several years ago, I was doing research for a Canadian character in one of my stories and found in the Wikipedia article about Canadian English that newspapers and style guides in Canada are starting to move back toward British rules and conventions and away from American patterns, such as adding the "u" in French words that would end in "or" in America (colour, labour, etc.) and adding a double consonant at the end of words when adding a suffix ("travelled" as opposed to the American "traveled.")

[EleCivil]

When I was a kid, my mom would use "Bloody" as an intensifier, and occasionally "Zounds!" when she was mad. Being a rather sheltered kid, imagine my surprise when I used those words at school and everyone started looking at me strangely. (Do Englishmen even say "Zounds", anymore?)

I think it's an effect of the shrinking of the world through multimedia. We all hear each other on television, radio, youtube, voice chat, etc, so we absorb each other's dialects and vernacular without realizing it. Americans watch English films and vice-versa. Harry Potter alone led to kids sitting through a good 16 hours of English immersion. This will only get more common as our daily environments expand beyond our physical borders.

[Cole Parker]

Perhaps some Englander will correct me, but I thought 'bloody' was a very bad word indeed, equivalent to our 'f' word. I don't hear or see it as much any more. Have Englanders adopted our 'f' word? I do seem to see it used more by the overseas crowd.

As for me, all these English terms go right over my head, much as an open bumbershoot would. Bank Holidays. Estates. Building Associations. M and D and A highways. Pediments and corpuscles and such. Rollicking bollocks, all of 'em.

C

[FreeThinker]

I was so gobsmacked when I heard about shagging that I went barking mad while eating bangers. And, darn it, I wanted to be the first one to talk about spotted dick!

[Camy]

Perhaps some Englander will correct me, but I thought 'bloody' was a very bad word indeed, equivalent to our 'f' word.

I assume, Cole, that you're not German, and by 'Englander' you mean English sort/type/chap/bod, or even wench.

Anyway, bloody is very mild. Fucking is pretty much accepted as an informal, if vulgar, intensifier: fucking hell! (when you drop a brick on your toe), or, what a fucking nuisance. It's the C word that's really baaaad! And yet you can imbue it with such malevolence that it's well worth keeping up your sleeve for a rainy day. Umm, 'scuse the French.

[The Pecman]

When I was a kid, my mom would use "Bloody" as an intensifier, and occasionally "Zounds!" when she was mad. Being a rather sheltered kid, imagine my surprise when I used those words at school and everyone started looking at me strangely. (Do Englishmen even say "Zounds", anymore?)

My grandmother said that, too, on occasion -- and she was brought up in Savannah, Georgia. Another favorite was "my stars." I've never heard anybody else use phrases like this, except in movies.

I think it's an effect of the shrinking of the world through multimedia. We all hear each other on television, radio, youtube, voice chat, etc, so we absorb each other's dialects and vernacular without realizing it. Americans watch English films and vice-versa. Harry Potter alone led to kids sitting through a good 16 hours of English immersion. This will only get more common as our daily environments expand beyond our physical borders.

Noted fantasy writer Harlan Ellison calls this "The World Turning into Ventura Boulevard" (referring to one of the main drags in the San Fernando Valley here in LA). Everything is becoming homogenized into one thing: one style of speaking, one language, the same fast food, the same habits, the same music, the same movies, the same culture. It's kind of sad, because that means small towns, even other countries, won't be able to retain their own unique identities the way they used to in days gone by. In a way, it's good, because it unites everybody with common sensibilities; in another, it's bad, because it's a lot more dull and boring.

[colinian]

Camy didn't fully answer Cole's question. Saying 'bloody' is equivalent to saying 'damned' without generating a mother's irritation.

Colin

[Chris James]

Goodness, the language difference just became personal.

I had a reader point the finger at a line in my story (Seasons, Chapter11) because he could not understand when I had a character say: "I resemble that remark."

What? You don't have Three Stooges across the pond? Curly is one of the foremost intellectual minds in American film, our version of Mr. Bean...and we all know how that turned out.

[Nick Deverill]

There is a BBC list of the ten worst words to use, and as a former employee of theirs, I can confirm the "c" word tops it. Misspelt by current standards, it occurs more than once in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Both London and Oxford had "Grope c word" lanes and yes they were where prostitutes plied their trade.

Really though, the Victorians created the modern definition of a rude word. At that time, the word was more applied to the rustic or rural meaning and as such, nice descriptive Anglo-Saxon words were in common usage by, for want of a better term, the less educated. So the words became rude ones. Then of course some animal names needed changing as part of them was a rude word, 'Whitearse' being what we now call the "Wheat ear". Said bird has nothing to do with wheat, no more observable ears than any other bird, but does have a white bottom.

[Cole Parker]

What in the world is a Wheat ear?

C

[Camy]

What in the world is a Wheat ear?

C

A small songbird of northern America and Eurasia having a distinctive white rump.

[Cole Parker]

I think I like the Whiteass name better! Of course, the English would call it Whitearse because they have a few extra r's in their zed warehouse they need to get rid of.

C

[Nick Deverill]

One of these:

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/w/wheatear/index.aspx

[Cole Parker]

Now wonder I don't know them. They never left England!

C

[colinian]

But... but... the ear isn't white and the butt is! It should be called the Whitebutt.

Colin