Interesting article on the BBC website:
British people are used to the stream of Americanisms entering the language. But some are worse than others, argues Matthew Engel.
I have had a lengthy career in journalism. I hope that's because editors have found me reliable. I have worked with many talented colleagues. Sometimes I get invited to parties and meet influential people. Overall, I've had a tremendous time.
Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.
All of these words we use without a second thought were never part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.
The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time.
The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile.
4 comments:
Bloody colonials! :)
Wish I could use the word "reliable" for my washing machine, but sadly it's a piece of junk.
It must be because I'm a foreigner, but I don't think I used these words that much...
Didn't the same thing happen when good ol' Guillaume le Conquerant pummeled King Harold with his merry band of Normans? Whoooollllle lotta Frenchy words got mixed up with the Anglo-Saxon of the day. "Language purists" certainly have an uphill battle, trying to keep their native tongues from "disintegrating."
So you're saying this is an inevitable consequence of American cultural imperialism?
Well, yes probably.
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