It seems some of our British cousins across the pond do not appreciate the American contributions to the English language, which they have dubbed "Americanisms."
Unlike French, which has a body (L'Academie Francaise) that rules on whether specific words make the cut of officially being part of the French language, English is like Wikipedia; it takes contributions from anyone. But some people don't like this. Apparently it is very demeaning to the English language to use the word "lengthy." Why? I don't know. John Adams & Benjamin Franklin thought it was a cool new word to use back in the 18th century, but some dude over at the BBC sees it as part of the loss of British English's "integrity."
Dueling columns, one from BBC News which layed out complaints & asked readers to send in "their least favourite Americanisms" as well as a rebuttal pointing out flaws in the Brits' complaints over at The Economist, have over the past week or so discussed the issue. Imagine the immigration debate in this country, but instead of the issue being about people, the fight was over how words were affecting "cultural identity" (and sadly, every so often, we have our own version of this when some Tea Party asshole decides it's time to push for English as the "official" language again).
This also gets into something I've wanted to write about for a while; the influence of American pop-culture globally.
As some you probably already know, there are spelling differences between American & British English. This is largely credited to Noah Webster (of Webster's Dictionary) having the good sense to spell words the way they sound. Yeah, some American high-rises might use "Centre" in their name, but this is usually a landlord trying to justify the inflated rent by making the building look a little bit more "fancy."
There are also usage differences, with some having problems when American terms venture across the Atlantic.
From Matthew Engel for BBC News:
Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.
All of these words we use without a second thought were not normally part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.
The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time. The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile... The alarming part is that this is starting to show in the language we speak in Britain. American usages no longer swim to our shores as single spies, as "reliable" and "talented" did. They come in battalions... In the course of my own lifetime, countless routine British usages have either been superseded or are being challenged by their American equivalents. We no longer watch a film, we go to the movies. We increasingly have trucks not lorries. A hike is now a wage or price rise not a walk in the country.
Ugly and pointless new usages appear in the media and drift into everyday conversation:
- Faze, as in "it doesn't faze me"
- Hospitalize, which really is a vile word
- Wrench for spanner
- Elevator for lift
- Rookies for newcomers, who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.
- Guy, less and less the centrepiece of the ancient British festival of 5 November - or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.
- And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of firing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outrage. And it is just that.
Over at
The Atlantic Wire, they point out that this is a pretty regular complaint in the British press & from Engel in particular, who basically wrote the
same column last year for the
Daily Mail. In that piece, Engel claimed there was a "
need to distinguish between the normal give-and-take of linguistic development and being overrun - through our own negligence and ignorance - by rampant cultural imperialism."
The BBC followed up on Engel's column by asking readers to send in examples of "Americanisms." However, the Language Log has pointed out that four of the five words that Engel begins his BBC column with are of British origin, not American. Also, The Economist has noted all of the facts that get in the way of the Americanisms' rant.
In the following blockquote, the BBC's reader complaints are in bold & The Economist's rebuttal is italicized next to 'em.
To "wait on" instead of "wait for" when you're not a waiter - once read a friend's comment about being in a station waiting on a train. Yes, to "wait on" also means to be a waiter, but writers from Chaucer to Milton to George Eliot used "to wait on" in various senses including "to observe", "to lie in wait for", "to await" and more.
Is "physicality" a real word? Yes, first noted in a book published in London in 1827.
Transportation. What's wrong with transport? Nothing. What's wrong with transportation? Brits prefer "to orientate oneself", Americans prefer "to orient oneself". Not worse, just different.
What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder. It is the original past participle, from old Norse getenn, now obsolete in English English, but surviving in America. Participial "got" is the newcomer.
"I'm good" for "I'm well". That'll do for a start. That'll do what? Linking verbs including "am" take adjectives, not adverbs. "I'm healthy," not "I'm healthily." There's nothing wrong with "I'm well", since "well" is also an adjective, but nothing wrong with "I'm good" either.
"Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I've not noticed it over here yet. The OED cites six hundred years of British usage of "oftentimes", including the King James Version and Wordsworth.
This entire issue touches on the power of American culture.
Without going into its entire history, the spread of English as a dominant world language is due mostly to two things; a British Empire the sun once never sat on, and the superpower status of the United States after World War II.
Given the position of the United States during the 20th century & the start of the 21st, as well as the popularity of American movies, music, TV shows, consumer products, etc. during that time, things like Mickey Mouse & Coca-Cola became global symbols of Americana and spread with other American trends, memes, and tropes throughout the world. It's always interesting to see how all of this is ultimately assimilated into foreign cultures (for example; Japanese hip hop or the western influences in South Korea's K-Pop).
Of course, not everyone has been happy about this. Europeans & others from time to time have bristled at American imports, seeing them as if they were Borg cubes coming in to assimilate the entire population. Critics argue the purity of their "cultural identity" is threatened, and accuse the United States of "cultural imperialism." However, the very idea of "purity" (a word that's historically been fraught with problems when used in the context of race, ethnicity and nationality) is contrary to what I think makes American culture great. About as absurd as the idea of "The purity of the English language," as has been noted in a famous internet meme attributed to James Nicoll.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
For a while now I've wanted to write a diary about American culture & global influence, but the problem I usually run into is that "
American Culture" is not exactly easy to define, since to be an "
American" can mean a great many things. We are not a single monolithic culture. We are an amalgam of many, many different cultures that come together (
whether in a melting pot or salad bowl) to form a collective identity. A collective identity that is constantly changing, evolving and growing.
Basically E pluribus unum; "Out of many, one."
Richard Pells argues that as a nation of immigrants from the 19th to the 21st century, the United States has been a recipient as much as an exporter of global culture. Indeed, the influence of immigrants on the United States explains why its culture has been so popular for so long in so many places. American culture has spread throughout the world because it has incorporated foreign styles and ideas. What Americans have done more successfully and creatively than their competitors overseas, is in repackaging the cultural products we received from abroad and then retransmiting them to the rest of the world. That is why a global mass culture has come to be identified, however simplistically, with the United States. This argument suggests that the United States was the first sight for cultural imperialism and is just "repackaging" all that was promoted or "artificially injected" here, and is distributing it out to other countries.
In the end, Pells argues, American mass culture has not transformed the world into a replica of the United States, instead, America's dependence on foreign cultures has made the United States a replica of the world.