Daily Mail article on Americanisms ruining the English language

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1282449/Americanisms-swamping-English-wake-smell-coffee.html

I thought this was hilarious.  'Do the math'   The comments are worth a read, too.  Do people really get annoyed with people saying 'hi'?

My favorite part of this, though, is that he'll cop to being a baseball fan!  Surely he should be writing articles about how cricket is a real sport and baseball is juvenile, blah blah blah.

I also was amused by the idea that 'no one in Britain knew what a box-cutter was.'  I dunno, the name is pretty self-explanatory, I'm sure a few people managed to figure it out..

This actually reminds me of when I was living in London and I'd unthinkingly say to my friends 'Hey guys' or 'That's awesome' or something similar.  Cue the 'That's awesome, mannnn' in overdone approximations of an American accent.   

I don't think he can be serious, and I feel he's wrong about the boxcutter/Stanley knife thing. As far as I knew, British people generally mean one thing by "Stanley knife" - a particular type of replaceable-blade knife, made by Stanley, and another by box cutter - a plastic bodied segmented blade thing.

To me, this is a Stanley knife



This is a box cutter

Yeah, I feel that it is partly tongue in cheek, but it kind of has that hysterical overreacting Daily Mail tone   His englishincrisis@gmail.com email address amused me.

Re: 'come out of the closet,' my then-boyfriend told me he felt that the word 'closet' was only used in UK English for that expression..  I can't bring myself to use the word cupboard for closet, it just makes me think of food.

He should just come up to Northumberland. I can assure him that NO ONE sounds remotely American where I live (well, besides me and the other yankees that may be lurking about).

I agree with Jewlz...I've never heard any "Americanisms" around here.  My English friends have even been known to ask me what some kind of American slang means when hearing it in movies (yep...I said movies, not films) so I don't agree with the writer's concept of movies having any influence on the language here (would be fun to hear a bunch of British people walking around saying "Dude, where's my car?" though).  Guess it depends on where you live though...maybe some other parts of the UK have adapted more of the "American language".  A lot of people around here still speak Tyke (even young peeps) so I really can't see a mass conversion to Americanisms anytime soon.

I don't think I noticed Americanisms, but that's because I'm an American, so it doesn't sound weird to me. It made me laugh when he talked about using baseball terminology to describe something. Again, I never would have picked up on this being weird, but it's funny to think about a British person having no idea what 'stepping up to the plate' would mean.

Also, my Irish husband had no idea what a box cutter was until he read in this article that it's a Stanley knife. He basically thought a box cutter was like a large bolt cutter. Now he understands how the terrorists could take it on a plane!

I'm trying to think of the right American terminology for wiping that wierd half smile off his smug face.  

I have been in the UK for seven years- one of my pet peeves is people correcting my pronunciation of things like my daughter's name.  "This is my daughter, Hannah".   "Oh, you mean Hah-nah".   
Um, okay, first of all, did you not know what I meant and secondly, how rude- I would never correct someone's pronunciation of their child's name. 

I have been in the UK for seven years- one of my pet peeves is people correcting my pronunciation of things like my daughter's name.  "This is my daughter, Hannah".   "Oh, you mean Hah-nah".   

I am puzzling over this. All the Brits I know or have known called Hannah and/or their families pronounce the name to rhyme (approximately) with tanner, manna, spanner, planner etc. Are you saying that you pronounce your daughter's name this way, but rude Brits tell you to say it some other way? (if so, could you describe this more fully?) These people wouldn't be folks with strong regional accents, would they?

I have been in the UK for seven years- one of my pet peeves is people correcting my pronunciation of things like my daughter's name.  "This is my daughter, Hannah".   "Oh, you mean Hah-nah".   
Um, okay, first of all, did you not know what I meant and secondly, how rude- I would never correct someone's pronunciation of their child's name. 

I get the same thing with my own name...very frequently...and it is annoying.  My name is Shannon (Sha-nin) and I get that "OH, you mean Shah-nun".  I think it's because As are often pronounced differently between Americans and Brits.  We tend to just say a whereas Brits seem to pronounce it as ah. 

I get the same thing with my own name...very frequently...and it is annoying.  My name is Shannon (Sha-nin) and I get that "OH, you mean Shah-nun".  I think it's because As are often pronounced differently between Americans and Brits.  We tend to just say a whereas Brits seem to pronounce it as ah. 

Yeah, I think it's just a case of differences in pronunciation of the vowels. It actually may not always be the case that they are correcting you, but just simply repeating the name the way that they are used to saying/hearing it, for their own clarification.

For example, if a customer comes up to me at work and asks for Zov-ear-ax, I will repeat it back to them, saying it the way I pronounce it: 'Zov-ire-ax? It's just over here.' - I'm not trying to correct them, it's just that it feels weird to me to say it the other way (similarly with aqueous cream... some people say ache-we-ous and others say ack-we-ous).

My name often gets pronounced differently in the US compared to the UK. My name is Kirsten, which is pronounced 'Kur-sten' in the UK, but is often 'Kier-sten' in the US. However, I have had a few Americans ask me how I say my name, so that they can pronounce it the way I'm used to .

More than once I have had Americans "correcting" my pronunciation of 'pasta'...

I agree with this...

It actually may not always be the case that they are correcting you, but just simply repeating the name the way that they are used to saying/hearing it, for their own clarification.

(similarly with aqueous cream... some people say ache-we-ous and others say ack-we-ous).

I say ack-we-ous not least because of Italian "acqua" and Latin "aqua"

Funny! The comments are hilarious. I like the woman getting up in arms about the Americanism "on the weekend". Is snobbishness really not a mere stereotype of the Brits, but a reality? I mean, I'm at school, in the office, on the bus... these are all the same. How is "at the weekend" better than how we say it?  Yes, very logical, that! I understand Brits being annoyed with Americanisms creeping in (not that I'd have any idea it was happening) as the language reflects politics and Britain's rather subordinate relationship to the US politically and culturally. And I find some of the current speech modes among US newscasters and thong-wearing college students nearly as horrifying as the hideous glottal stops of my London neighbors, not to mention the dreadful use of the third-person plural for collective nouns. But after six years in London (which I'm leaving, goodbye!) I don't think Americanisms have rooted anywhere nearly as much as the paranoid writer and commenters seem to think, and oddly enough I've seen British idioms I didn't know before moving here used on the internet, like spot on and one-off, which I'm pretty sure come from this side of the pond.

Yeah, the British pronunciation of "pasta" sounds really weird to me, though I'd never correct it. I did once ask a friend why Brits say "taco" the way they do. I mean, why use the long a or whatever it's called for pretty much everything and then say taco with an American style mispronunciation?

I say "taco" to rhyme with "tobacco"... is this OK? By the way, the notion that Britain is "subordinate" to the US "culturally and politically" is one that many Brits (and some others) would find kind of annoying, and its expression somewhere between tactless and just plain rude... Culturally? Really? (is that meant to be a joke?)

Tremula, sorry, that did sound tacky. Of course Britain has great culture, and subordinate is probably not the right word. But I'd like some word to describe what it means when most of the movies and so much of the TV and literature and music are American in a country that shares the same language, really, and which may not separate cultural production as definitively as happens in non-English speaking countries. There is a British style, and I'm a huge, huge fan of classic British rock which drew on American influences and made something even better. I'm on an internet forum, so I'm using words I probably wouldn't with my British friends. Politically I'll withdraw!

I don't know whether you should rhyme taco with tobacco because I don't know how you say tobacco... I say taco with a more or less Spanish accent, which is how most Americans say it. Maybe it rhymes with "tall". I reckon I say tobacco with an American accent, like the "a" rhymes with how I'd say "had". To me they don't rhyme.