Please advice about how to understand Novels better!:(

@hartfire If you are talking of novels written in the English language, there will be differences between American and British.

Three examples from your own message, and showing British English angles:


I am of similar age to you and recollect hardly anyone ever using years old in speech, and rarely in writing. I wonder if this elision is a British-ism that is gaining ground in the USA.



British motorists look for "parking places / spaces" or "somewhere to park"; and the word "park" on its own is used to mean the place with grass and trees. The ground dedicated to vehicles is a "car-park". Related perhaps, yard and garden have quite distinct meanings in British use: many homes have a back garden cultivated in some way, but might also have a small yard - a paved area usually adjacent to the back door. A smaller home within a town might have only a small rear yard.




That is an American domestic political opinion I cannot judge. In the UK, hence in British writing and speaking, both phrases are often used rather interchangeably, with no party-political fear or favour except perhaps in mere detail. I think the technical term was always "climate change" with "global warming" coined to be easier for politicians, journalists and the general public to comprehend; though one might argue that the latter is the cause of the former..


This is on top of vocabulary differences anyway. For examples - Londoners fly to New York by aeroplane (though far more likely will say, simply 'plane) and view the city from what the locals call the sidewalks, separated from the the road by a curb. While the New Yorkers visit London by airplane and walk along the pavements edged by the kerb. ("Curb" in UK English means "to stop, to limit, or to slow") And so on..

Though the visiting New Yorker might find public transport around Britain easier thanks to a growing replacement of railway station by the Americanism train station! If his accommodation is a tent he uses a camp-site, not a camp-ground.


One aspect of Americanese that has crossed the Atlantic Eastwards, is the clumsy flummery used by business people. They replace senior titles like Managing Director, Finance [etc.] Director with Chief ******* Officer; and use a very peculiar prose style. Some of that might be from NASA and the US military, who use very tortuous phrases to say very simple things. ("You are good to go". No, just "Go". Or "It suffered an unscheduled mid-air dissasembly". No it didn't: "Something failed and it blew up".)


I do agree with your point though.

It would be just as true for English speakers trying to learn other languages. We are taught the formal language, not the slang and colloquialisms. Nor the curious words or phrases that reflect social aspects and have no direct translations.

@ArishMell Well put on all points. :)

I write from Australia.
In my childhood, we were about 90% British in origin and still took our leads from mostly England, but also Scotland and Ireland.
Our population is now 51% of British descent, 3% Aboriginal, and the rest a polyglot lot from almost every nation on the planet.
In the meantime, the influence of the USA has infiltrated everywhere; a cultural hegemony created by TV, news moguls, the ANZUS treaty, four US defense facilities on our soil, commercial investments, advertising, social media and publishers like Amazon. It has definitely shifted our language. I see us as having mostly become less articulate, less able to say exactly what we mean.

@hartfire That American hegemony is affecting the UK too, and many other countries though to a lightly lesser extent by language-barriers.

Some years ago I met a Briton who teaches English in a Swedish business school. He said so many non-English speakers you hear from around the world have American biases to their accents, and use American spellings, because they hear and see and hear so much US-made material.

@ArishMell Yes, I've noticed.
It seems also that American spelling, grammar, pronunciation and idiot are also taught at school level throughout Europe. Americanisations are now standard in many scientific research papers. It seems on its way to becoming an international standard.
I mourn the change. I'm very attached to the beauty, subtlety and precision of British English.

@hartfire It is very sad - driven purely by US commerce (including entertainments and the IT trade) and politics.

A lot of business managers now talk American too, at least at work. Those pretentious "Chief xxxx Officer" titles for directors, and the vacuous waffle summed up by "mission statements", are signs of that.


Another came from my own employer when it was working towards gaining ISO9001 accreditation. This included writing formal instructions for all our administrative and technical processes, using a supplied "Word"-document template.

The important introductory details would have occupied one page. Instead the document had about ten pages of mostly nothing useful, with headings like "scope" and "metrics", then an Appendix. We were told to ignore "metrics" - no-one knew what they were anyway. Two or three pages were blank except for central legends, "This page is left intentionally blank" - no-one knew why.

The important material, i.e. the instructions, were merely the "Appendix"!

Apparently, the managers had found this ridiculous template in some American business-college text-book or other.


One aspect of the American language is that it ignores etymology, sometimes with very odd results. Two examples:

- To an American, someone with a wrongful attraction to children is a pedophile. The word is paedophile: ped means feet as in pedal, pedestrian, etc; paed means child, as in paediatrics. (The roots are Greek.)

- . A science teacher told me that American geologists have ordered that the geological time called the Cainozoic be spelled "Cenozoic" - but that reverses the meaning. Cainozoic, he explained to me, means roughly "full of, or rich in, life"; Cenozoic means "devoid of life".


Another is the inability to pronounce middle syllables of long words - "aluminum" for "aluminium". Even the UK's National Health Service has picked up the Americanism "specialty" for "speciality".



Decades ago, in the Cold War, the USSR called the USA "imperialists" and "hegemonists". That was hypocritical of the Kremlin to say the least, but it had a point with the hegemony, if only culturally.

@ArishMell I love your grasp of language. How refreshing!