English as she is spoke, buddy...

WHY CAN'T I HELP FEELING SEPARATED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE?

“What are we doing on the weekend?” asks daughter.

“I’m not sure,” I reply. “But it’s at the weekend, not on the weekend.”

She shrugs in that teenage way. “Whatever. It’s just that my friends want to come over to eat candy and watch the new season of Heartstopper. Oh and can we get a take-out for tea?”

“Okay,” I reply wearily. “Yes, they can come round to eat sweets and watch the new series, and yes you may have a takeaway - If you can stop being so….. so…. American!”

Well, honestly. I’m being ridiculous, I know that. It’s nonsensical that I twitch every time she uses a phrase from across the Pond. She’s not swearing, after all, she’s just using different words. So why does it bother me so much?

Maybe I twitch because as a writer, I value words and like them to be used properly, following spelling and grammatical rules. It takes me an age to compose texts because I slavishly insist on appropriate capital letters and refuse to use text-speak abbreviations. I am that person that not only rolls their eyes, but loudly draws attention to misplaced apostrophes or split infinitives or other ‘errors’ that don’t fit my personal standard of ‘correct’ English. I am even sufficiently nerdish to insist that it’s a swimming-pool, with a hyphen, for a swimming pool would be a pool that swims.

But as a writer who loves language, I should also love that English evolves, that it’s a living thing, that words come and go all the time. So what is stopping me embracing my daughter’s – and society’s – increasing use of American English? Honestly? I don’t actually know.

Yes, I’m aware we speak an evolving language. Yes, I’m aware that language tics spread through usage and that my daughter assimilating, for instance, “on Christmas” into her personal lexicon because she watches American TV and social media is fundamentally no different from any ancient explorers (especially British ones) disseminating their language and customs wherever they settled. It’s how language evolution and development works. I’m also, of course, acutely aware that many so-called Americanisms, such as their spelling of color for colour, were actually brought to the New World by the British. When the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, the correct English spelling was color, and all pilgrims who’d taken ill during the voyage had gotten sick. I shudder when my daughter updates her Instagram “stattus”, but that American pronunciation came from the original Latin via 17th century Britain. Trash, a supposed American word my daughter just has to whisper to make me wince, was actually coined by William Shakespeare – who incidentally across his plays also wrote center 10 times but centre only once.

And yet, and yet…. still it irks me. It shouldn’t, for English as spoken by the British is a hotch-potch of the tongues of welcome and unwelcome visitors to our shores down the ages. A couple of thousand years ago these isles’ predominant languages were Celtic, but this all changed when in 55BC the invading Roman forces brought their vulgar Latin (that’s not me being snobby, this time – that’s actually what it’s called) into England and, when they departed half a millennium later, left much of it behind. One reason Celtic languages survive as an intrinsic part of the culture of, say, west Wales, Ireland and the Isle Of Man is because the Romans either struggled to conquer those areas or gave up trying.

However, in England, we then had our Celtic/vulgar Latin language shaped again in the fifth century by the various invading Germanic forces of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, then again by Scandinavians and various Vikings from AD750, the Normans in 1066, and a few hundred years after that, the continental European influences of the Reformation. It turns out, therefore, that English has never actually been English at all. So why my problem with an American infiltration now?

After all, I’m happy to experience French déjà vu, suffer German angst, regret an Italian fiasco, imagine a Latin scenario, enjoy Chinese ketchup and admit to Greek panic – so why do I become all cross over something as trivial as season five of The Crown. (“It’s a series, damn it!”)

I’m not alone in this revolt, of course. Many of us Brits are snooty about the stealthy Stateside dilution of our language. Maybe so many of us are singularly affronted by Americanism because we imperiously think of English as our language that we gave to them, and want them to follow “our” rules. How very colonial. We can dish out linguistic impositions but we can’t take them. It seems when it comes to Americanisms, we’re incapable of doing the British thing and just keeping a stiff upper lip. (Maybe because even this is an Americanism, coined by 19th century US poet Phoebe Cory).

Of course we – that is, I – need to embrace these changes to our language. I obviously know that. If we don’t, we end up like the French, who despite giving us around 7,000 of their words (including souvenir, hotel, restaurant, you know the kind of thing) fiercely protect external infiltration of their own language. So much so, in fact, that a body called L’Academie Francaise regularly bans English words from official French, including in recent years deadline, hashtag, cool and cash. And who wants to be that proscriptive?

I should be, and am proud, that English, by contrast, is a free-for-all, and always has been. Shakespeare is often cited as the greatest exponent of this for the number of new words he coined, and he did indeed invent around 500. But less well known is that many writers invented even more, among them John Milton, whose 650 include lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium, Sir Thomas Moore (anticipate and fact) and Geoffrey Chaucer (bagpipes and universe). Further down the list, Charles Dickens invented 250 words (including boredom and butter-fingers), while Lewis Carroll’s contributions include the splendid chortle. But the point is not that they freely and so prolifically invented these words, but that their English audiences lapped them up – adopted, used and happily spread them. We naturally do this. English evolves freely, all the time, and we should be proud it does.

So I hereby declare I will move on, I will work on overcoming what is searingly obviously my unreasonable aversion to the Americanism of “my” English language. If I really love language as much as I claim, it’s the only thing to do.

So where to begin? Well, I suppose a good place would be by not constantly highlighting and correcting my daughter’s Stateside tics.

That would be a start. I guess.

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