Live and Let Dialect: The Case for American English
I hope my Dad never reads this. Because I’m about to mount a defense of that most British of peeves: what those Bloody Americans™ have done to our wonderful language.
What we call Americanisms are the verbal equivalent of the gray squirrel.
Small but destructive, they’ve stowed away in movies (not films) and tv shows (not programmes, in seasons, not series), and are gnawing their way through the legs of our antique linguistic furniture.
It’s a strange and old-fashioned resentment, but it’s not completely unsurprising. There is an obviousness to American English that feels jarring to the British ear. Instead of Autumn (and the evocative adjective autumnal) Americans say ‘Fall’ because… leaves fall. The pavement at the side of the road is a ‘sidewalk’. Because it’s where you walk. At the side.
‘Why do you care?,’ you ask.
Well — because it’s my job to care about these things. As a British verbal branding specialist living and working in New York, I need to understand and respect these differences. To embrace and integrate them into the way I write and talk. Partly for practical reasons (I’d been saying ‘my tap is broken’ to the building superintendent for an awkward amount of time before ‘faucet’ politely nudged its way into the conversation) but mostly because a large part of my job is helping American brands define how they communicate. With Americans, mostly.
And because, as with any form of prejudice, if we invest the smallest amount of effort into interrogating our assumptions, the whole thing starts to unravel.
Take, for instance, the 'u.'
It’s a colo(u)rful story that probably deserves its own blog, but the upshot is that the English® historically used both interchangeably. Flavor and Flavour. Color and Colour. The American Lexicographer Noah Webster decided that an unsounded vowel was a costly waste of ink, while the English aristocracy felt that universal literacy was an existential threat, so pointless linguistic complication was to be celebrated. Probably. There’s no other reason to spell a word that sounds like ‘Sent-er’ as ‘Cent-re’.1
It drives me insane that Americans use entrée to mean ‘main course,’ when it so obviously means ‘first course’ or ‘starter’; but even that has a story: Only the well-to-do ate five course meals, the working class stopped at a modest three. The second of which was the entrée. A linguistic evolution not without precedent: I’m from a historically working class area of northern England, where the main evening meal is called tea. Which makes no literal sense until you consider that posh people had high tea (a small additional meal of tea, scones, small sandwiches and cakes) at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. But since, in the middle of the afternoon, the working class of Manchester and Newcastle were too busy working in factories to hang out with the 7th Duchess of Bedford, they had one evening meal. And for reasons best known to themselves they called it tea instead of dinner. Perhaps so they could pretend for a moment that they were, to some extent, still active participants in the British way of life2. But whatever the truth of it, the language bifurcated once again.
We want to belong to the pack.
And although the evolution of language isn’t always about class, it sort-of, kind-of, absolutely is. It’s something we do every day: talking up to a college dean or a potential employer, using all our fanciest words so we can project competence and confidence. Or subtly roughing the edges when talking about football 3 (either kind) down the local pub (bar), so nobody thinks that anyone thinks that they believe themselves to be better than the rest. And we do it without thinking at all. It’s a sociolinguistic habit— overt and covert prestige— that’s hard-coded into our nature as social animals. We want to belong to the pack. To declare our identities and shape our relationships through the words we choose and the way we choose to say them (verbal branding in a nutshell).
My point is that American English is just that— English. And a bit of Dutch. And Gaelic. And French, Spanish and Italian. Structures and synonyms. Idioms and ideas. Cultures and tribes. Every expression and mannerism of the posh and the poor thrown together with the wild abandon of a child mixing all the plasticine (Play-doh).
Language is in a constant state of flux and every word we use has a story. A reason to be there. For us to draw hard lines between what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ is pointless and reductive. American English is a dialect. An evolution, not a degradation, and one that — sorry to say — half the time just makes more sense. So I’m reclaiming ‘Americanism’ as a permutation, not a pejorative. And, speaking as a commercial writer, if any new iteration of our mother tongue makes things clearer, simpler and more fun, it will be doing my job for me.
Sorry Dad.
Neil is the Creative Director at Reed Words New York, an international agency making brands and businesses stronger through language. He’s been building brands as a writer and designer for over 20 years, from London to Bahrain to Amsterdam.
He drinks coffee and prefers his toast fully cooked.
1 There is a reason— the English ruling class spoke French as a first language for the better part of 300 years. Hence, also, ‘Autumn’.
2 My grandma would prepare a spread that included all of the above plus a hearty main course for the exact time my granddad arrived home from the Cummins Diesel factory. It wasn’t about pretention— it was about doing things properly.
3 Soccer is our word, Brits. We invented it. Stop making up things to whine about.
Live and Let Dialect: The Case for American English
I hope my Dad never reads this. Because I’m about to mount a defense of that most British of peeves: what those Bloody Americans™ have done to our wonderful language.
What we call Americanisms are the verbal equivalent of the gray squirrel.
Small but destructive, they’ve stowed away in movies (not films) and tv shows (not programmes, in seasons, not series), and are gnawing their way through the legs of our antique linguistic furniture.
It’s a strange and old-fashioned resentment, but it’s not completely unsurprising. There is an obviousness to American English that feels jarring to the British ear. Instead of Autumn (and the evocative adjective autumnal) Americans say ‘Fall’ because… leaves fall. The pavement at the side of the road is a ‘sidewalk’. Because it’s where you walk. At the side.
‘Why do you care?,’ you ask.
Well — because it’s my job to care about these things. As a British verbal branding specialist living and working in New York, I need to understand and respect these differences. To embrace and integrate them into the way I write and talk. Partly for practical reasons (I’d been saying ‘my tap is broken’ to the building superintendent for an awkward amount of time before ‘faucet’ politely nudged its way into the conversation) but mostly because a large part of my job is helping American brands define how they communicate. With Americans, mostly.
And because, as with any form of prejudice, if we invest the smallest amount of effort into interrogating our assumptions, the whole thing starts to unravel.
Take, for instance, the 'u.'
It’s a colo(u)rful story that probably deserves its own blog, but the upshot is that the English® historically used both interchangeably. Flavor and Flavour. Color and Colour. The American Lexicographer Noah Webster decided that an unsounded vowel was a costly waste of ink, while the English aristocracy felt that universal literacy was an existential threat, so pointless linguistic complication was to be celebrated. Probably. There’s no other reason to spell a word that sounds like ‘Sent-er’ as ‘Cent-re’.1
It drives me insane that Americans use entrée to mean ‘main course,’ when it so obviously means ‘first course’ or ‘starter’; but even that has a story: Only the well-to-do ate five course meals, the working class stopped at a modest three. The second of which was the entrée. A linguistic evolution not without precedent: I’m from a historically working class area of northern England, where the main evening meal is called tea. Which makes no literal sense until you consider that posh people had high tea (a small additional meal of tea, scones, small sandwiches and cakes) at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. But since, in the middle of the afternoon, the working class of Manchester and Newcastle were too busy working in factories to hang out with the 7th Duchess of Bedford, they had one evening meal. And for reasons best known to themselves they called it tea instead of dinner. Perhaps so they could pretend for a moment that they were, to some extent, still active participants in the British way of life2. But whatever the truth of it, the language bifurcated once again.
We want to belong to the pack.
And although the evolution of language isn’t always about class, it sort-of, kind-of, absolutely is. It’s something we do every day: talking up to a college dean or a potential employer, using all our fanciest words so we can project competence and confidence. Or subtly roughing the edges when talking about football 3 (either kind) down the local pub (bar), so nobody thinks that anyone thinks that they believe themselves to be better than the rest. And we do it without thinking at all. It’s a sociolinguistic habit— overt and covert prestige— that’s hard-coded into our nature as social animals. We want to belong to the pack. To declare our identities and shape our relationships through the words we choose and the way we choose to say them (verbal branding in a nutshell).
My point is that American English is just that— English. And a bit of Dutch. And Gaelic. And French, Spanish and Italian. Structures and synonyms. Idioms and ideas. Cultures and tribes. Every expression and mannerism of the posh and the poor thrown together with the wild abandon of a child mixing all the plasticine (Play-doh).
Language is in a constant state of flux and every word we use has a story. A reason to be there. For us to draw hard lines between what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ is pointless and reductive. American English is a dialect. An evolution, not a degradation, and one that — sorry to say — half the time just makes more sense. So I’m reclaiming ‘Americanism’ as a permutation, not a pejorative. And, speaking as a commercial writer, if any new iteration of our mother tongue makes things clearer, simpler and more fun, it will be doing my job for me.
Sorry Dad.
Neil is the Creative Director at Reed Words New York, an international agency making brands and businesses stronger through language. He’s been building brands as a writer and designer for over 20 years, from London to Bahrain to Amsterdam.
He drinks coffee and prefers his toast fully cooked.
1 There is a reason— the English ruling class spoke French as a first language for the better part of 300 years. Hence, also, ‘Autumn’.
2 My grandma would prepare a spread that included all of the above plus a hearty main course for the exact time my granddad arrived home from the Cummins Diesel factory. It wasn’t about pretention— it was about doing things properly.
3 Soccer is our word, Brits. We invented it. Stop making up things to whine about.