Americrisis

[davidn]

I had a bit of an internal crisis last night when I realized that I could no longer remember what the British term for "fire station" was. Or rather, whether I ever actually knew it as something different, or if four years of living virtually next door to one in America had overwritten my memory. Naturally, my first point of call for this research was going on to Youtube to look up Fireman Sam to see if it was mentioned in passing anywhere there, and was rather horrified to discover that it had recently been exhumed as another soulless 3D rendering. But it sort of made up for it with the Welsh accents so patently outrageous that I found it difficult to believe that they weren't actively trying to make fun of the country.

I did at least remember that what Americans call "fire trucks" are instead "fire engines" (why? Well... they've got an engine). And before you laugh at that, I know that here, certain classes of them are called "ladders" (because they've got those as well). But that moment of forgetfulness made me suddenly worried about things that used to be very natural to me being forgotten and replaced as I spend more time here.

As guttural techno-metal fusion maniacs Rammstein (approximately) wrote, "Ve're all livink in Amerika" - people in most other countries are exposed to American language and culture right beside their own from birth, so none of it seems as special, remarkable or (as the immigration office used to call me) alien to us. Being thought of as special in a good way was a new experience to me when I entered the country, and while this was a tiny little thing, I don't want that identity to start slipping - I never thought it would take any amount of effort to remember how I grew up talking.

As chance would have it there was an article about this very subject on the BBC News the next morning, which shows that even words that we would think of as perfectly natural had to be invented by America and forcefully introduced to the language a couple of centuries ago. For talking about such an illogically fierce part of inter-Atlantic relations it's very relaxed, glossing over 1776 as "a slight falling out" and staying tactful and balanced throughout - "Britain is a very distinct country from the US. Not better, not worse, different. And long live that difference". Then it goes and ruins it all one sentence later with the bold invitation to "send us examples of your most disliked Americanisms!"

Comments

[kjorteo]

As a lifelong US native, I actually didn't think the truck/engine difference was a US/UK thing--I thought both terms were here and we just used them interchangeably depending on how much we felt like bothering to use the bigger word that day, just like fire station/department, and fireman/-fighter.

[ms-noone.livejournal.com]

After living in CA for almost a year now I'm still hearing new terms that make me laugh.

light pole for lamp post
bounce house for a bouncy castle (they said this on the local news - is it America wide?)

and my most hated Americanism is the word "healthful". They all say in healthful in LA when then mean healthy.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I don't like 'retard' or 'retarded'.

Everywhere is the same though, like in Liverpool used 'Boss' for good, which could be grating. Ireland I hear: 'Sound out' for cool, 'Hello, you well' for just hello, and various others. Some are annoying and some are quite good.

I prefer using 'reception' as opposed to 'Signal' for my mobile. Also baseball terminology is also quite good too, 'in the ball park' etc... I dis agree with the bbc article that people would not know where the baseball phrases would come from.

[rachel-anne.livejournal.com]

I hear you. I get the same terrible moments when I can't remember which is the Canadian and which is the Scottish. And sometimes it goes so far that I can't tell which accent is which because they both sound so normal.

[kjorteo]

Also, that can't be what the guy from Rammstein actually looks like. He's way too... normal-looking, or at least close enough to it that he couldn't possibly be the guy from Rammstein.

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

Fire engine is a very old term, predating petrol engines; it uses the older meaning of 'engine' as basically some sort of machine; therefore a fire engine, in it's original use just meant a machine that fought fires. It wasn't talking about the vehicle, it was talking about the machinery that pumped the water (originally hand-driven, I think). It makes complete sense.

Americanisms?

[(Anonymous)]

Why do British put an 'R' after an 'awe' sound? Why do they say Warshington? Or, Sergio Garciar. Idear instead of idea. The aromar of British peoples' breath is ar trifle foul. President Obamar. The Great Wall of Chinar. Americarn New England folks have the same arffliction.

Americanisms

[(Anonymous)]

Although it seems to me that the greatest differences lie in the spoken language since serious literary English barely differs between the two sides of the Atlantic, I accept that a certain standardisation of English along American lines is inevitable and indeed I would be all in favour of a simplification of spelling going even further than that initiated (and unfortunately left incomplete) by the Founding Fathers of the USA so many years ago, I must admit to disliking some "interlopers" that appear to be an impoverishment/vulgarisation rather than an enrichment of the language wherever it is spoken in the world.
To me there is for instance a difference between "to convince" and "to persuade" but "convince" seems to be supplanting "persuade" in all contexts. I dislike "regular" where we would say "ordinary" or "normal". "Can I get a beer" sounds very impolite and "I'm good" sounds like you are well-behaved.. I dislike the American tendency to put the stress on the first syllable of placenames such as BAGHdad, HONGkong, SINGapore, COPENhagen, TURin etc. etc. Very few British people have direct contact with Americans so much of the responsibility for the huge influx of Americanisms can only be attributed to Hollywood, not to mention our own media as any keen Eastenders viewer/listener will know. What I want to know is what Americans themselves think about the language?

[davidn]

I haven't heard "light pole", instead hearing them just called "street lights"... and I hadn't heard "bounce house" either, but that's quite... sweet :)

[davidn]

Your opening examples definitely seem to be more acceptable in America, compared to Britain where they're still quite offensive - similarly, I remember reading a story about some Nintendo game that had to be hastily updated in the PAL terrorities when they learned that calling the player "super-spastic" for doing badly meant something far worse than what they had intended.

I'm sure I'd heard the baseballisms before I moved to America and had a vague idea of what they meant, but Britain certainly cares far less about the sport than it knows about the associated phrases.

[davidn]

That's actually something else that I've noticed - even the words that I knew and accepted as different aren't used consistently. I knew that Americans spelled the word "Theater" from things like... Dream Theater, and that just looks weird when you spell it with an -re instead (as, while I'm on the subject, does "Iron Saviour"). And yet Boston has a theatre district instead, and a Newton Centre station, and countless other things.

[davidn]

It's certainly the closest I've seen them to looking like actual members of the human race.

[davidn]

Yes, British accents are beginning to sound special to me, now, even though they should still feel... normal.

Re: Americanisms?

[davidn]

I'm not aware of saying "Warshington", "barth" or "ararrdvarrk", but I have heard "idea-r" (from Glasgow, strangely enough). I would say that the longer A sounds different to American ears, the same way that a medium A here sounds closer to an E, but I hear that last example as well and I'm not sure where the different sound comes from. The other way around, I'd previously heard that a facet of British accents you hear here is to remove R sounds and make them closer to "ah", as demonstrated by such laughable attempts at English accents as Liquid Snake, brothaaah.

With President Obama, what I've most noticed is actually the other way around - that Americans give him a long A in the middle, "Obaama", and in Britain he's called "O-ba-ma".

[davidn]

Difference engine, analytical engine, chaos engine... fire engine. That does make sense!

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

What we call a garage they call a carhole

[davidn]

That would be good :) I've thought of just making up terms before, including transposing the words "petrol" and "cheese" a la Mitchell and Webb, just to see if anyone believes them - but I'm not sure they would.

Re: Americanisms

[davidn]

The most often-repeated example I've heard of place names being said like that is "Iraq", which here is pronounced to rhyme with "tie-rack".

I hadn't realized just how... much of a difference there was until I lived here - even now, I keep on discovering new barriers to communication. As I've often said, it somehow feels more different because it's so similar, making you expect things to be... easy. And as much as I don't want them to, when you're surrounded by them, these things take over - I remember I said "I'm good" once to somebody, in front of my dad. Now he mocks me for every Americanism slip I make.

Re: Americanisms?

[kjorteo]

They also drop consonants when they're 'el'ing 'eo'le!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's odd. I tend to find the -re ending to words like that looks more natural than the -er ending.

Has caused many a conflict between me and spell-check. :/

[kjorteo]

In other news, I'm not sure what's more hilarious about that new Fireman Sam clip, the way absolutely nothing happens until they're done explaining in exhaustive detail what they're about to do (it takes just under ten seconds to put out the fire when they actually decide to put it out, but that's only after at least half a minute of talking while generically pointing their hoses at it to seemingly no effect) or the way it is said that that gas canister might EXPLOOUD! (Or I guess the street urchin-voiced kid after it's out is pretty funny, too.)

Re: Americanisms?

[davidn]

Oh, and Dick Van Dyke - it says something that he's remained the benchmark for bad accents in all the years since Mary Poppins...

A who's-worse-fight with British tabloids is always going to be difficult to win - I can't believe that the News of the World was actually disbanded (though I'm sure it's just going to be a rebranding in disguise so nobody responsible is actually dealt with). I imagine they've also covered the latest outrage, when one of them chose to blame a teenager being killed by a falling tree branch on a teacher's strike.

[davidn]

With the exaggerated accents and completely random emphasis on words like KINGGGG prawns, they're so... extraordinarily Welsh that I really can't believe that it wasn't done as a parody.

[davidn]

Well, the -re ending does seem more natural to me in ordinary circumstances because it's what I grew up with - I would naturally write "centre", "spectre", "fibre" and so on. But when they're part of names, the... fact that it's part of a name takes precedence - I'd always write Trauma Center when talking about the game about a trauma centre.

And seeing as you have to learn American to write HTML and everything, it always trips me up when anyone writing a library of some sort decides that their alignment options are going to be left, centre, right and justify.

[kjorteo]

Be glad you're at least not working in a language that has allignment options!

[davidn]

Whenever you have to use libraries written by someone else, you're in that danger! Most languages at least spell the basic things right, but just now I've got to work with a huge freezer management system that has things like getTempratureInCentigrade and getAliqouts. (Not that I knew what an aliquot was either when I started, but when something forces you to spell something consistently, it's difficult to imagine nobody noticed it was spelled wrongly on at least one occasion that they had to type it themselves...)

Re: Americanisms?

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I imagine they've also covered the latest outrage, when one of them chose to blame a teenager being killed by a falling tree branch on a teacher's strike.

And included in their article a quotation from a statement that the parents of the girl made saying that their daughter's death is not because or, or linked to any other event.

And at that point, I thought that that was the worst thing that I'd read about from badly behaved British tabloids.

[pami-zee.livejournal.com]

http://www.sporcle.com/games/ukus_words.php

Good luck!

[davidn]

36 out of 46! I knew that there was another name for Santa Claus but I don't think I've ever used "Father Christmas" myself... perhaps this shows how Americanized things are already. I didn't know what a "box car" or a "mother-in-law" (residence) were and probably wouldn't have called them a "goods van" or "granny flat" either...

I was mystified that there could even be another word for "baked potato"... I'd always thought that jacket potatoes were baked, thereby producing a baked potato. Shows what I know about potatoes. And napkin as "serviette"... well, perhaps, if you live in Kensington.