Something Borrowed, Something British
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Alex Williams of The
New York Times thinks America Is on a slippery slope to sounding like the
Brits.
Though my daughter loves the language spouted by her mentor
at UCLA and I have been amused by some
idioms and colloquialisms I've run into over the decades (like
"ladder" for a "run" in one's nylons), I can't say I've
much noticed.
As proof of this dangerous tendency to copy language that's
not understood by any but Americans immersed in our language from the Brits (or
worse!, language that shouldn't be adopted), Alex cites:
·
Daniel Gross, an American journalist, who calls
Mitt Romney a "bumbling toff."
·
American sci-fi author John Calzi who calls the
iPad "a lovely piece of kit.
·
And the use of "fortnight," which I
never consider British other than that almost all of the "American"
language came from those islands over there near the English Channel.
Williams, in fact, blames New Yorkers for most of these
Britishisms and then proceeds to use a whole lot of them—tongue-in-cheek in the
British fashion, I'm supposing. They include relatively obnoxious ones like
"crikey." But words like "flat" for apartment and
"mobile" for cell phone and "holiday" for vacation are
hardly new. A "flat" was a "flat" when I lived in New York
in something like…oh, forget it. You don't need to know. And though rarely used
these ways, we have used "mobile" for "cell phone" and
"holiday" for a little vacation for at least a few decades. There are
some advantages to being old. It's easy for us to place things in their
appropriate decade.
Williams quotes one American editor of the Oxford Dictionary
as saying using Britishisms are only "suitable" when there is no
American English equivalent, like the word "'twee" for stuff that
smacks of Britishness like Laura Ashley dresses. He cautions against using it
on the way to the "loo," because he thinks that is "just being
pretentious."
Crikey, I'm thinking. Does one have to use a word that most
Americans couldn't interpret before being considered "pretentious?" And
isn't it awfully British to consider one darn fun word "suitable"
when another is just plain "annoying."
I've been speaking English so
long I can't be anything but grateful that we "borrowed" it or that
they "lent" it to us back in the early days of Plymouth and
Jamestown. Besides,I think "'twee" sounds very Alice-in-Wonderlandish.
And I'm wondering where we'd be—how much poorer Disney would be—if we hadn't
borrowed that masterpiece along with Peter Pan and Alice's literary cousins.
I think most Americans would
say, "the cat has been out of the bag for some time and it's way too late
to coax it back in."
Carolyn
Howard-Johnson is the multi award-winning author of The Frugal Editor (http://budurl.com/TheFrugalEditor)
and Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips
for Writers: The Ultimate Frugal Booklet for Avoiding Word Trippers and
Crafting Gatekeeper-Perfect Copy (http://budurl.com/WordtrippsPB).
Learn more about her fiction, poetry, and HowToDoItFrugally series of books for
writers and retailers at http://HowToDoItFrugally.com.
