Internet bring American English to the UK and Euros

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Daniel Hannen:

The Internet – much to the consternation of Euro-integrationists – is drawing the English-speaking peoples into a common conversation. And a good thing, too: it was always fatuous to pretend that geographical proximity was more important than history or sentiment, blood or speech. Where the EU is united by government decree, the Anglosphere is united by organic ties, by language and law, by shared habits of thought.

Here, though, is a question, posed to mark the centenary of the Commonwealth. Is the common online dialogue also leading to a more direct harmonization of the English language? This blog, in a typical week, attracts 80,000 readers from the UK, 30,000 from the US and 10,000 from elsewhere, mainly from other Anglosphere nations: a proportion that is fairly representative of British websites. In consequence, British bloggers and readers are far more familiar with the American Weltanschauung. But are we also starting to write like Americans? Is the combination of the Internet and US-designed spell-check programmes (or programs) hastening the Americanization of British English?

We all have our personal bêtes noires. Damian Thompson, the Blogs Editor, deplores the increasingly common use of double spacing. Others rage at the use of upper case letters after colons. My own particular bugbear is the employment of American sporting metaphors (“stepping up to the plate”, “getting to first base” etc). I mean, we invented practically every team game on Earth: it seems perverse in the extreme to plunder the vocabulary of one of the very few we don’t play.

Then again, there is quite a lot of evidence that baseball was, in fact, invented in England: it’s mentioned in one of Jane Austen’s novels, for example. Which only goes to show how difficult it is to disentangle our idioms, to identify an expression that has genuinely evolved in North America without roots in the mother country.

Take “I guess”, in the American sense of “I suppose”. One occasionally hears the phrase used that way in Britain, but always with the aura of a foreign import, like “sure”, to mean “yes”. But here’s the thing: go back to Chaucer, and you will find “I gesse” used exactly as the cousins now use it. You will, likewise, still hear “gotten” in parts of Lancashire and even, in some Dorset and Somerset villages, “fall” to mean autumn.

Now “fall”, on any measure, is far prettier than “autumn”. It is descriptive and, like the names of the other three seasons, it is of Anglo-Saxon origin. I should be very happy to see it return and displace the French interloper.

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Ther eis much more.

I read the British papers regularly and find many of their idioms strange. I usually describe them as "Brit speak." Some are very useful. I like the "not fit for purpose" to describe a program or a machine that does not work. Hannen usually communicates well. He first came to my attention in a speech before the EU Parliament.

In a recent column he also took on the sick rhetoric of the left in this country.

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