Welcome back, Scooby Gang, and welcome in, if this is your first visit. Following yesterday’s look at the first half of the BBC’s reader-solicited list of Americanisms, let’s continue our item-by-item analysis of British psyche and American lingo... (apologies if the list is all bunched-up without spaces between the items (like in Part One); I do space them out but Blogger seems to eat the spaces).
26. This is an old one too, and the OED calls it a “North American term for burgle”. Burgle being the standard British English.
27. Yes, I have to say, of all the things on this list, this is probably the one I dislike most. If wanting to drive a silver knife through the heart of the person that first popularised it can be attributed to ‘dislike’.
28. Eh, it’s a fun one. I think (don’t quote me on this though), that it’s an Anglicisation of a European – maybe French? – word. Like ‘croissandwhich’ or something. Any thoughts on this, people?
29. I think the problem here, Ami, is that fortnightly is, or at least was, an exclusively British word. I remember when I lived in Florida in the nineties that people there would always remark on it when we talked about the differences between the two languages.
30. To clarify: alternate = occur in turn repeatedly; change repeatedly between two contrasting conditions (e.g. ‘alternate work with rest’). Alternative = available as another possibility or choice. But note that the OED says, “The adjective alternate is sometimes used in palce of alternate, especially in American English.” In fact, there’s a whole side bar under alternative on the etymology and usage of these two, so perhaps it’s more complicated than just an American/British dust-up.
31. Yes, very American. Also very old, so I wonder why some of these terms are apparently ‘only just’ making it into popular British English?
32. Also annoying. A lot of these stupid things like this, 33 and 35 are typical Neutral Speak, which really only serve to obfuscate and confuse. I find a lot of English translation agencies are using this kind of bullshit because it appeals to the intrinsically English passive-aggressive nature. I.e., their passivity about paying my invoices makes me aggressive...
33.Verb-into-noun nonsense. See Part One for details.
34. Perhaps a little pedantic, but it’s a fair point and shows how mistakes can happen in understanding between people speaking a common language, or thereabouts.
35. See 32. Hulk get mad, Hulk reach out and crush your tiny head!
36. Sounds odd to me, but it ever was ‘math’ for them and ‘Maths’ for us. There’s a similar thing with ‘Lego’, which for most Brits and probably quite a few Europeans, is an uncountable noun, whereas for Americans it’s always ‘Legos’. The math I can understand, the Legos make me cry.
37. Well, usually in Britain you wouldn’t specify it at all, or if you had to you’d say ‘normal’ instead of ‘regular’. But I guess this has come across with the plague of chain take-away coffee shops.
38. Meh, I grew up with expiry, but expiration is fine too.
39. An old joke, the Americanos saying ‘Scotch’ and the Limeys saying ‘That’s a drink.’ Ho ho, yawn. Makes me wonder how the popular English idiom ‘Scotch mist’ (meaning ‘nothing at all’) came about. Could it be that the English are as mis-informed as the Americans? :O
40. I suspect that it’s a peculiarly Southern phrasing, but how it made through passport control at Atlanta International to land in Luton undetected is beyond me.
41. A specific type of phrasing used by inner city, urban gangster types perhaps? Sounds sort of ‘yo yo’ doesn’t it?
42. Silly thing to be saying in British English, where it’s either a measurement of time or a biological interlude.
43. Now that sounds like ‘net speak to me. I think I probably would die a thousand deaths if I heard someone say it in a serious context on the TV or radio though.
44. Well.... It always used to be (in British English anyway), that ‘ series’ referred both to the programme as a whole, from the first to the last episode ever, and also to just the current year’s production of it. The Americanism here is ‘season’ in reference to the individual years’ productions of it, most likely from the fact that you’d get a spring ‘season’ of episodes as well as an autumn season of episodes. This has become dominant in the last ten years as DVDs have become cheaper and cheaper, leading to boxsets of entire ‘runs’ of programmes (or ‘shows’). Marketing and technology combined to fill our inboxes with adverts for Season One of the hit show! etc etc.
45. Well, John from Leicester, issue has always had this meaning in British English too, it’s just that it’s not the dominant form. I suspect this was one of the early ‘PC’ words that came out of all that American New Left stuff in the 1970s. They do like their polite euphemisms over there.
46. No that’s just crazy.
47. noun-to-verb. Aaaarrrggghhhhh!!!!!!
48. Jonesy makes the point better than I could, and what a good point it is too.
49. No no, see, this is a Yiddishism more than an Americanism, and there’s nothing wrong with that, my life already.
50. Another point well made, and an illustration of how, in the hurry to truncate and clarify, we end up changing our meaning completely.
Well, that’s the whole list. As a final thought, I’d like to point out that although everyone of course has the right to be annoyed any and everything (especially on the Internet), I’m not sure that it’s worth getting upset about most of these 50 things. In fact, I had some brilliant, philosophical point to make about this, which I though-up in the car on the way home from collecting the kids from school today. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), I’ve since forgotten it.
Oh well, it is what it is and it ain’t what it ain’t. That’s all folks!
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