It is widely believed that it was George Bernard Shaw who came up with the famous quote that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”. Given that George shuffled off his mortal coil in 1950, it’s fair to say that he was ahead of his time and also completely right. I was reminded of this when hearing an item on the radio about today being Record Store Day. Because no one in England calls a Record Shop a Record Store. Record Stores are what you find across the pond in USA, USA, USA. Today is Record Shop Day.
There’s an excellent explainer here on the BBC website which explains, obviously, what is effectively the evolutionary destruction of the English language and I’m afraid we are all complicit in it.
Who hasn’t used the expression “It is what it is” or “touched base” with someone? How often have you “reached out to” someone or fretted about the “expiration date” of an item that appears to have been lying around in the fridge for perhaps too long?
I blame business people for much of this because so-called business-speak AKA corporate jargon has poisoned our vocabulary. Here are loads of examples, essentially gobbledegook and, frankly, bullshit. Everything is ‘awesome’, we are all ‘smashing it’ and everything is ‘amazing’. It really irritates me, ‘period’.
It’s the words that are dying that concerns me. I use the word ‘marvellous’ pretty well all the time, as Clint Eastwood did in one of his Dirty Harry films (not movies), but it’s dying, as are the words ‘cheerio’ and ‘fortnight’. At its current rate of progress, if you can call this progress, by 2120 the English language we use today will be totally dead. We’ll be using the ‘gas station’, watching the new ‘season’ of a TV show we like and ending sentences with ‘already’, as in ‘would you just stop doing that already?’
Worse for me, as an internationally read blogger, I am using many of these Americanised words already. A quick glance at any of my blogs will reveal that I’ve been caught up in it to, but some terms and words still drive me mad.
My current pet hate is the term ‘co-workers’. When someone shares a fucking stupid and unfunny meme on social media – can you sense my anger, yet? – you know they’ve found an American version when there is a reference to ‘co-workers’ and not plain old ‘colleagues’. Do people actually say this, as in, ‘Give me a moment, madam. I shall check with one of my co-workers.’ As soon as they do with me, even if I am mid way through ordering my regular ‘Americano’ – sorry, medium black coffee – I will be ‘outta there’. I’ll probably go to a McDonalds ‘restaurant’, instead.
I’m pretty sure the old adage ‘what starts in America usually ends up here’ is highly accurate. Fast food, trick or treat and black friday to name but three. And so many of our very worst TV shows emanated in the former land of the free.
Now excuse me because in ‘a half hour’ I have to order a ‘take out’ before I head to the ‘train station’. It will cost a lot of money – ‘you do the math’ – but that’s ‘my bad’. See? I do it all the time, even when I am putting out the ‘garbage’. George Bernard Shaw was right. Americanism is the new ‘normalcy’. See you at Record Shop Day.
