In Britain, … [a] more common complaint is that British English is generally being tainted by Americanisms. As I have suggested, outrage at American influence was common among Victorian defenders of British English, and its volume increased as first American silent movies and then ‘talkies’ conquered the British picture palace. In a piece for the Daily Express in January 1930, Jameson Thomas wrote that ‘the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted’. This type of complaint was a journalistic staple from the 1920s onward. There were supporters of American words and expressions, such as Frank Dilnot, who described them as ‘like flashes of crystal’ and deemed American English ‘a potent and penetrating instrument, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks’. But among the British the pro-American party has always been small. Neutrality is common enough, but hostility has always made itself loudly felt.
Of the more recent claims that American English is a menace, the most sustained I have come across is Edwin Newman’s 1975 book Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? A distinguished American broadcaster, Newman claimed, ‘The United States may prove to be the death of English, but Britain … plainly wants to be in at the kill.’ Newman’s suggestion that the British are apt to hop aboard every American linguistic fad still earns eager approval. Meanwhile British newspapers routinely dismiss the particular vocabulary of American English with words such as ‘loose’, annoying’, strangling’, obscure’ or insidious’. There are also, so we hear, those pesky American pronunciations: putting the stress on the third syllable of advertisement and the second of detail, saying docile in such a way that it rhymes with fossil, the noticeably different soundes of depot, apricot, tomato, clerk and missile. There are the different spellings, too: ax, plow, color (the Webster legacy). But most repugnant, if you believe the detractors, are the little oddities of American vocabulary: semester, garbage can, cookie, elevator and, perhaps worst of all, math instead of maths. Never mind that buzz saw is more evocative than circular saw. Never mind that many words once condemned as rank Americanisms are now in everyday use in Britain: lengthy, mileage, curvaceous, hindsight. Never mind that there are more of ‘them’ than there are of ‘us’. Never mind that American English is now the most important of English’s many varieties. For, no, the vital thing is to resist and indeed repel the onslaught of Americanisms because they are, you know, wrong, man.
Transcribed by me from pages 274–275 of the delightful and fascinating The Language Wars: A History of Proper English © 2007, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Note that Hitchings is British, and that my copy of this book is an American edition … which was copyedited primarily in the British manner—to wit, the punctuation tends to fall outside the quote marks. Except when Hitchings is quoting a book edited in the American manner. You see all of that in this excerpt, which I have been careful to transcribe as printed.
Tweet: American English or British English? That is the question.
Tweet: Hitchings doesn’t support the language war, he just reports it. 🙂
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