British V American English – Vive la Différence!

While the economies of the world stagger and weave their way from one near-death experience to the next and the Syrian government murders its own people in cold blood, there are those who shun such trivialities and instead go for the throat of the issue that really concerns us: the very serious matter of the invasion of the English language by a veritable cargo ship’s worth of despicable Americanisms. Yes America, that’s right, it’s all your fault, you and your bloody awful ability to make films that people want to see, to write books people want to read, and to produce music people want to listen to. Oh, yes, and both Microsoft and Apple are also to blame to this hideous emasculation of our once beautiful rose of a language by producing technology we’d all be lost without.

Some of you may have noticed the sterling work done to repel this invasion through the BBC’s website, which seems to have set the ball rolling with an article by Matthew Engel, a British journalist who has lived in the USA long enough to have a good understanding of both versions of the language. His article in turn spawned a list of 50 words or phrases from other Brits that they loath and hate. Funnily enough, many of these turned out not to be Americanism at all, but are actually British, albeit ones that fell off our lexiconic book shelves some decades or centuries ago.
Which means the complainers have been shown to be ignorant of their own language’s history. Having been discovered, I hope they shut up once and forever, but I’ve a feeling this attitude will rear its ugly little head every time some meat-beater over here feels like doing a spot of Yankee bashing.
This nonsense has been going on for the last few weeks or so (actually decades as I’m sure we all know all too well) and has produced a deluge of words in newspapers and on the internet on both sides of the Atlantic arguing against the invasion, denying it actually exists or advising those that have gotten their knickers in a twist to “get over it”, the latter advice mainly coming from the USA – and justifiably so.
I’m firmly in the latter camp, and while there are a few Americanisms that drag a rasp/file across my ears (e.g., ‘listen up people’ (talking to those gathered around you in the 3rd person is, to my sensitive soul, dehumanising) and ‘creatives’ when speaking about people whose job involves creativity, thus reducing them to some species other than human), I’ve always enjoyed and been thrilled by the vast majority of the ones I’ve come across through comics, films, literature and popular music. Think Marvel, think Mickey Spillane, think Clint Eastwood, think the Blues etc, etc. The imagery that pours out of these stories and characters paints a far more vivid and exciting (especially to those of us far, far away) picture of what’s going on than much of what we produce in the UK. And whilst we’ve produced numerous brilliantly written films and books etc, we’re still twisting and spinning on a noose of Jane Eyre etc. Weirdly enough, some of us can’t get into that stuff at all, it’s like trying to eat a thorn bush: the only time it becomes palatable is when the BBC drags it into the modern world and produces something as exquisite as Pride and Prejudice.
In fact I’ve always been very impressed by the average American’s ability to come up with such beautiful and bizarre ways of describing anything, to the extent that I think it must be taught at school, so ingrained is the ability to conjure them out of nowhere. I wish we in the UK were half as adept at doing it: maybe if we were, we wouldn’t keep stealing them from the USA. A small thing to consider here is also the fact that people are complaining about other people’s ability to be creative – and that is always a BAD thing: we should be encouraging people to be as creative as possible.
Language is not just words, it is colour, it is emotion; it can call up memories and feelings and be used to produce imagery that goes far beyond symbols of language on a page or a screen. How much more picturesque is ‘I’m outta here’ or ‘I’m history’ than ‘I’m leaving’? And how about the phrase ‘rock and roll’? Three little words that sum up at least one generation’s music, if not everything else from Elvis and Little Richard onwards. How about to ‘spank the plank’, which not only is a must-say phrase for any serious guitar soloist tosser-offer, but it can be used with the ladies when one wants to bring a light sprinkling of sexual innuendo into the conversation without being too obvious. Without a grafting of these, British English would be drowning in the Luddite mud instead of blossoming with new roses of its own. Nor would we have that all-time Bee Gees classic Jive Talking.
I’m also immensely happy with the American desire to simplify language, through spelling and abbreviation. Although ’24/7′ isn’t a phrase I use, it does sum the idea of ‘all day, every day’ very neatly indeed. And why not ‘gray’ instead of ‘grey’; why not ‘program’ instead of ‘programme’?
In my daytime job I write about how software is used (try and stay awake perlease…) for a British business with an American office and American clients, not to mention clients worldwide whose second language is English, and often as not, American English. We decided a few years ago to allow our staff to use whatever version of the language they prefer. So far the business hasn’t gone to the dogs or down the tubes, and even more amazingly, we can still understand each other’s writing!
That said, I almost always use the British spellings because a) I’ve been doing that for a very long time, and b) words are history, they tell the story of people, so when I use a particular word I am reminded about its own history, the language that it came from to English (e.g., French, German, Latin) and the people that brought it with them. Call me a sentimental old fool of you like, but I enjoy knowing where a word comes from both geographically and historically, and that I can use the same words that the Romans or Greeks used, albeit on an ad hoc basis.
Of course there’s hardly any giant of the British popular music scene that either doesn’t or hasn’t used Americanisms in their writing. All of the early Blues band did it for sure, as did most of those that followed. And they did it because they liked the sounds these new words and phrases made, they liked the otherness of the sounds they were stealing, they liked that it made them seem more cosmopolitan at a time when most people hardly left their home towns except to go to and paddle in the cold, grey waters of the north sea and the English Channel. (Yes, it is ours; it’s definitely not French, though we do allow it to wash up on their shores a couple of times a day.)
I myself was guilty of saying ‘far out’ a lot in the early days of my musical apprenticeship, though it was years before someone explained to me what it actually meant. I used it to say that I thought something was very good, out of the ordinary, and still do. But it doesn’t just say that something is better than average; it sums up a feeling I have about that thing too.
As Britain headed out of the whirligig of the ’60s and into the ’70s, our singers went one step further and started changing their accents into something that became known as ‘mid-Atlantic’; the sound of two accents caught up in the waves that swirl back and forth between our shores that was/is acceptable and understandable by fans on both sides.
So it’s not so much that American English has been sneakily pervading British English (by brainwashing our lazy youth – according to people who are older, but not wiser – though they should definitely know better) at all. It’s more like the British have been sucking and licking the words and sounds out of American’s cultural mouth as both sides got it together and snogged and tongued their way into an everlasting and mutually gratifying relationship.
I’m sure that anyone in the USA could provide me with a million other examples of great American literature, but for me Cormac McCarthy stands head and shoulders above all living writers of English. And I don’t think there’s any danger that anyone in Britain would say that his work isn’t of the highest order, despite the fact that it’s rammed full of Americanisms.
American culture and computing dominates and powers most of the modern world, so it’s hardly surprising that everyone’s using the American words and phrases that they’ve read and sung, or have acquired through using technology when studying or carrying out their work or communicating by phone in some way. The British should be bloody grateful that the USA does, because if they didn’t, then we might have to learn French or German or Chinese – and we all know how freeking lazy (not to mention scared) the Brits are about learning another language!