Don't Americans realise that the English they speak and spell is a poor copy of the original?

There was a discussion on th eraduio about this only the other morning, and it revealed the excuse that some Americanisms are only early British English is not really so. They come back East as a American English.

I don't worry about how the Americans spell or pronounce words themselves, but I find it disheartening that their cultural and commercial hegemony is flattening every other form of English, including that of the British. I suspect some of this is encouraged by an apparent, modern trend to reject properly understanding even quite simple words, even in UK English, as in ("revert [i]back[/i]"? "Meet / consult* [i]with[/i]"?). A similar ignorance is in over-using suffices: the drive to perform an act is not its "motiv[i]ation[/i]" but its "motive". Motivation as such is a more general term for self-encouragement.

Consequently, some Americanisms are imported without even comprehension, and used merely because they are American; perhaps the speaker thinks their nativity confers some sort of sophistication; but blind emulating shows only ovine thought.




A classic example is the 10-exponent set, "million", "billion" and "trillion".

They were coined to describe their arithmetical nature by exponent:
1M = 1000^2; = 1 000 000
1B = 1M^2 (or squared) as shown by the "bi" prefix ("bi" means 2); so = 10^12 = 1 Million Million
1T = 1M^3, (or cubed) as shown by "tri" (which means 3); hence = 10^18 = 1 Million Million Million.

They were not arbitrary labels for arbitrary numbers, as they have become since, for some reason or no, the American language threw away the link between number and word for the latter two, so losing their elegant real meanings. Sadly, thanks to the US commercial bulldozer and other nations being besotted with US culture, politicians, businesses and journalists in the UK and elsewhere copied them blindly. I doubt half of them now could even comprehend the etymologies, their logical and very simple arithmetical definitions.


When I hear some British political pundit waffling about "stepping up to the plate" I have no idea what this baseball term really means either genuinely or metaphorically, I refuse to use to use it anyway; but also doubt the pundit knows its meaning either.

Nor will I catch a train at a "train station", call anyone irrespective of sex and age, "guy", describe a 100-year anniversary as "centennial" or use "formulas" when calculating something.

I have even heard queues on the British trunk-road "motorways" - their original, UK name - described as "gridlock". That shows immediately the speaker fawns over the USA without bothering to understand its language.


Language has always evolved, but in a natural way, often to describe something newly-invented, such as "railway locomotive" or "transistor". New words also arrive in any country from overseas, often to describe an object or concept new to the importing country, like "spaghetti" or "curry":

[i]The Life of Brian[/i] or not, one thing the Romans did do for us was introduce the [i]aqueduct[/i] (lit. "water channel") for public water-supplies; and though the Roman Empire collapsed 2 millennia ago, the term is still used in civil-engineering as coined; as is the word "duct" on its own.

Similarly, "drag racing" (which I used to follow) is an American invention and keeps its American name to reflect its origin: it had no equivalent elsewhere at the time; though the modern form is not on the town's public "drag" or thoroughfare, but on a proper race-track. (The nearest in the UK was the early-1960s "café racing" by bikers; insane circular-trip motorbike time-trials starting at a biker's café, and ending either back there, or in hospital. Or the mortuary.)


Nowadays the evolution is being enforced by ignorance of and lack of any respect for, words and their definitions; by commercial and political pressure, and by mere fashion. GM Lexicon perhaps.



*[i]Consult[/i]. Its true meaning is to seek advice or reasoned opinion. It's now all too often abused by local-government officers and property-developers, wrongly, not to seek and act upon the public's advice and opinions on a planned development, but to tell the public the intention!