March 2011
It is with a heavy heart that I have to report that I have finally cowed to international pressure.
For years now, mainly in my business life, I have been the strongest advocate of "British English". My stiff British upper lip has stood firm on the shores of Europe as the Americans, across the gulf of space, with their minds immeasurably smaller than ours, regarded this land with envious eyes and slowly, but surely, drew their plans against us.
Erm, ok, I may have managed to mix Richard Burton and HG Wells up there a bit and added in a sprinkling of my own, hazy quotation recall - but one thing remains certain...
...our favourite (sorry, favorite) cousins with their "zees" and their Americanisms but, strangely, not their U's, are coming. In fact, they have come, passed us by and are now stomping across mainland Europe without a simple "Do you mind if...?" or "Could we possibly ..?"
British English has given way to "American English"
It used to annoy the bloody hell out of me when Microsft's so-called "British English" spell-checker still insisted on spelling certain words with the American spelling rather than the accepted English spelling - "liason", for example.
Whenever we received a new document, brochure or whatever, from our US corporate department, we would firstly have to change the page size from "Letter" to "A4" and then scour the document changing "Z's" to "S's" and adding "U's" back in and then change "er's" to "re's" (e.g.: Specialize to Specialise, Color to Colour, Center to Centre, Fiber to Fibre, etc.).
Our American colleagues were always aghast at the amount of time and effort we spent making these changes and printing entirely new documents, brochures & web content which were, to them, virtually indistinguishable from what they had sent us.
They could not understand that, to an English audience, these just "looked" American. Even the photographs of people in the brochures "looked" American and on many occasions, we had to change the photograph to a more "European" looking photo. And, I don't mean we changed them to blokes in pin-stripe suits with a bowler hat and a brolly - but just subtle changes.
But now, in the same way that I rarely wear a tie at work these days (and look like an old fart if I do), I have accepted that because most of what I produce in English will be read by a European audience for whom English is their second language and American English is their accepted version, that I too should write in American English.
Yesterday, for the first time, I agreed to re-write an Article using American English so that it would be more acceptable to my European audience.
Sometimes I think a lot of American English words are just made up but, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his 1998 book "Made in America" "An Informal History of the English Language in America" many words are English words that have just gone out of fashion here. "Gotten" being one example. They just sound strange to us and we wrongly presume they are made up.
However, there are a few classics that are made up. Many attributed to "Dubya" as the Americans affectionately call George W. Bush. Here are some of my favourites:
"for the embetterment of mankind"
"Governor Bush will not stand for the subsidation of failure"
"They misunderestimated me"
"Governor Bush will not stand for the subsidation of failure"
"They misunderestimated me"
Maybe it's progress, maybe it's the demize of another small part of Britishness, but I for one shall mourn the rize of the zee.