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Don't talk garbage!...or why American words are mangling our English
By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 01:40, 30 May 2012 | UPDATED: 07:31, 30 May 2012
The most delicate tool ever invented is the English language. It is endlessly rich, subtle, mellifluous and diverse — a
vast mechanism built from 220,000 words, perfectly formed components that work together like jewelled cogs.
To wreck that mechanism deliberately — and to teach our children to do the same — would be worse than obscene.
But that is what is happening.
A survey of 74,000 short stories written by British children has revealed that Americanisms are destroying traditional
British words.
Like the grey squirrels that were introduced into the UK from the U.S. 130 years ago — and have almost wiped out
our indigenous (and much lovelier) red squirrels — American words are infectious, destructive and virulent. And they
are taking over.
American words are designed to be easy to use. They are simple to say and spell. They combine nouns and verbs,
labels and instructions, so that they are convenient to pick up and apply. A country of immigrants, speaking a
dissonant babel of Yiddish, Italian, Gaelic, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Polish and Russian, needed a common tongue.
Take sidewalk, for instance: it refers to that part of a road (the side) reserved for pedestrians (who walk). Two simple
words are compounded to replace a third, pavement.
Yet pavement is a wonderful word, a fragment of old French that resonates with the ringing blows of medieval
craftsmen as they laid a stone floor — pavire is the Latin word for beating or ramming down. Why must we in Britain
discard a beautiful, meaningful word, and replace it with a Frankenstein creation?
American-English is a compound language — a language in kit form. Any word can perform any function. Listen to
the jargon of a burger-flipper at fast-food restaurant: ‘Welcome to the drivethru,’ ‘What’s your order?’ ‘Do you want
fries with that?’ ‘I’ve actioned it,’ ‘Have a nice day.’
Drivethru might be the worst of all possible words. It takes a verb and a preposition, and screws them together
(Americans love doing that: walkup, stopover, hangout). Then it mangles the spelling.
Finally, it applies this hideous, mongrel expression to a place where the food isn’t fit for dogs.
In English, you can order your food, but food isn’t an order; you can fry potatoes, but they’ll be chips, not fries; you
can take action and see action, but you can’t simply action anything.
The findings of the survey, by the Oxford University Press, revealed yesterday that British children no longer know
the difference between real English and its half-delinquent American cousin.
U.S. English is sometimes called globish, bundling ‘global’ and ‘English’ into one concept. And as we know, some
Americans have a rare ability to bundle all kinds of words together.
George W. Bush was capable of saying: ‘They misunderestimated me,’ and ‘Is our children learning?’ This was a
president who treated English the way a horde of squatters treat a stately home — barging in, kicking holes in the
walls, and generally leaving it in a foul mess.
Of course, language is not a fixed thing that must not be tampered with. It has been evolving for 1,500 years, and in
that time English has absorbed the vocabularies and grammars of half the world, as traders, invaders and refugees
brought new words and ways of speaking to these shores.
Don't talk garbage!...or why American words are mangling our English
By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 01:40, 30 May 2012 | UPDATED: 07:31, 30 May 2012
The most delicate tool ever invented is the English language. It is endlessly rich, subtle, mellifluous and diverse — a
vast mechanism built from 220,000 words, perfectly formed components that work together like jewelled cogs.
To wreck that mechanism deliberately — and to teach our children to do the same — would be worse than obscene.
But that is what is happening.
A survey of 74,000 short stories written by British children has revealed that Americanisms are destroying traditional
British words.
Like the grey squirrels that were introduced into the UK from the U.S. 130 years ago — and have almost wiped out
our indigenous (and much lovelier) red squirrels — American words are infectious, destructive and virulent. And they
are taking over.
American words are designed to be easy to use. They are simple to say and spell. They combine nouns and verbs,
labels and instructions, so that they are convenient to pick up and apply. A country of immigrants, speaking a
dissonant babel of Yiddish, Italian, Gaelic, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Polish and Russian, needed a common tongue.
Take sidewalk, for instance: it refers to that part of a road (the side) reserved for pedestrians (who walk). Two simple
words are compounded to replace a third, pavement.
Yet pavement is a wonderful word, a fragment of old French that resonates with the ringing blows of medieval
craftsmen as they laid a stone floor — pavire is the Latin word for beating or ramming down. Why must we in Britain
discard a beautiful, meaningful word, and replace it with a Frankenstein creation?
American-English is a compound language — a language in kit form. Any word can perform any function. Listen to
the jargon of a burger-flipper at fast-food restaurant: ‘Welcome to the drivethru,’ ‘What’s your order?’ ‘Do you want
fries with that?’ ‘I’ve actioned it,’ ‘Have a nice day.’
Drivethru might be the worst of all possible words. It takes a verb and a preposition, and screws them together
(Americans love doing that: walkup, stopover, hangout). Then it mangles the spelling.
Finally, it applies this hideous, mongrel expression to a place where the food isn’t fit for dogs.
In English, you can order your food, but food isn’t an order; you can fry potatoes, but they’ll be chips, not fries; you
can take action and see action, but you can’t simply action anything.
The findings of the survey, by the Oxford University Press, revealed yesterday that British children no longer know
the difference between real English and its half-delinquent American cousin.
U.S. English is sometimes called globish, bundling ‘global’ and ‘English’ into one concept. And as we know, some
Americans have a rare ability to bundle all kinds of words together.
George W. Bush was capable of saying: ‘They misunderestimated me,’ and ‘Is our children learning?’ This was a
president who treated English the way a horde of squatters treat a stately home — barging in, kicking holes in the
walls, and generally leaving it in a foul mess.
Of course, language is not a fixed thing that must not be tampered with. It has been evolving for 1,500 years, and in
that time English has absorbed the vocabularies and grammars of half the world, as traders, invaders and refugees
brought new words and ways of speaking to these shores.
