Rebecca McQuillan: Hey guys, do you think we could all stop talking American?

The British habit of cloning American dialogue seems to have reached new heights. Is lockdown the explanation? Months in social isolation bingeing on Netflix, Disney Plus and Hollywood films appear to have had the effect of a full immersion language course. Some of us seem to be living and breathing American English.

The process of assimilating new influences into British language may be long-standing, and linguists may argue that British English is robust enough to cope, but when Scottish people start saying “you do the math”, it’s no wonder that retired civil servants growl like the Incredible Hulk.

It’s not the fault of Americans. They’re not actively trying to ram their aphorisms down our throats; we’re unthinkingly parroting them.

And that’s not all we’re doing. According to a survey by Tesco in November, 13m people in the UK now celebrate Thanksgiving, including more than half who have no family connection to the US or any obvious reason to mark this uniquely American festival. Thirteen million is rather hard to believe, but even if it’s half that you can see why Tesco would be giving thanks. (Please be aware that this article contains high levels of curmudgeonliness.)

This mimicry of Thanksgiving is not in the least bit surprising given how the Scottish tradition of guising has already been swallowed up by trick-or-treating.

Remember guising? It involved dressing as anything you liked, from spacemen to singing nuns as well as witches and ghosts, and children traditionally performed skits, recited poems or sang songs. Now, everyone dresses in ghoulish costumes and sometimes you don’t even get a perfunctory joke. A cultural loss to Scotland, if you ask me.

Most of this is down to our sheer level of exposure to American culture, but starry-eyed admiration for the US also comes into it and no one is more slavishly devoted than the Johnson government. Number 10’s cringey apeing of the White House, with a new flag-festooned briefing room, is well known, but did you know that the Home Office also now has a director general of homeland security?

“Homeland” – who uses that term? No one here in the UK. In fact, ironically, hardly anyone in America used to say it either. The term “homeland security” was first adopted by George W Bush. He spoke of “strengthening the homeland” after September 11. There was unease about it because many commentators thought it sounded un-American and Jewish figures pointed out that “heimat” (homeland) was used by the Nazis. But the US government persisted with it and then it acquired some glamour thanks to the Showtime spy thriller Homeland.

To British ears it sounds quintessentially American, so the adoption of the term by the Home Office reeks of transatlantic hero-worship as well as a desire, perhaps, to appeal to a similar conservative audience as Bush was aiming for.

On the basis that diversity is preferable to uniformity, it’s frustrating to see Americanisms supplant equally good or more suitable British terms, but particularly so when the new terms are adopted in a bovine spirit of uncritical imitation.

According to American-born linguist Lynne Murphy, we British folks have been getting our panties in a knot about Americanisms for centuries. For her money, this grumpiness is driven by prejudice and fear. As early as 1756, Samuel Johnson found “the trace of corruption” in the language of an American book, and by the mid-19th century, leaving a “u” out of “favour” was considered in polite British society to be an abomination on a par with trousers for ladies.

By 1897, Mark Twain observed with glee that the growing size and might of the United States meant “English” was now anything but, writing: “There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of shares!”

Well, he was undeniably right about that. And fair’s fair, there are plenty of Americanisms in use here that are helpful and describe things we didn’t previously have words for, like “teenager” and “commuter”, or too pithy not to use, like “OK”.

But isn’t it reasonable to feel a certain sense of loss when British words are supplanted with Americanisms that are no better and sometimes worse? How is “I’m good” better than “I’m well”? “I’m good”, for grammatical purists, is like fingernails on a blackboard.

How does “season” improve on series? How is “cookie” better than biscuit, or “vacation” than holiday, or “normalcy” than normality? How does “hire” improve on employ, as if workers had the same status as objects like cars or marquees? “Adding -ation to “transport”: why would anyone do that (including Americans)? As for British radio announcers saying a film is “out January six”, just grrrrrrr.

Linguists argue that we need to chill out. Murphy says: “What if, instead of worrying about the ‘ruination’ of English by young people, jargonistas or Americans, we celebrated English for being robust enough to allow such growth and variety?”

Many words we consider American, she points out, like “oftentimes” or “faucet” or “closet”, are actually old English, and have been kept alive in the US after they’ve died out here.

She’s right that language continually evolves and that objectors like me are inconsistent, adopting some phrases without complaint while baulking at others.

And yes, I do like to have a good whinge, as occasional readers may have noticed. But implying this concern is baseless downplays the extent to which one form of the language is losing out to the other. British terms don’t crowd out American terms in the US in the way that American terms impact British English. The United States is a superpower and nowhere more than in its cultural reach. The loss of British phrases and traditions simply because they’re being drowned out by the blare of American TV, is, in short, a shame

It causes a lot of frustration. Microsoft Word has a habit of defaulting to American English. At any given moment, someone with a British or Australian accent is cursing their computer because “favour” keeps correcting to “favor” even though they reset the damn thing only yesterday. Have they gone mad with prejudice and fear? Or are they just fed up that they can’t express their own form of English?

These are very much first world problems, you might point out, and you’d be right. They’re only words. There is no malicious intent in any of this and there are undeniably far more important things to worry about. Perhaps you’re heading home for Christmas and can do without the bah-humbug spirit in the season of goodwill. Perhaps you simply aren’t petty enough to get riled by American phrases, even glib, ungrammatical ones.

Hell, me either. Who gives a rat’s ass. Now you drive safe.

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