Meh, never mind.

"My Bad" - still bad.

Some of those single words you mention are ok though.

but a fair few.

We should face it: it's another language entirely.

Misplaced apostrophes are a twat, though. ;-)

...and I don't think our commentators should be saying "come on, baby".

are actually archaic English English. For instance, guy comes from Guy Fawkes. For obvious reasons, in English it originally meant a weirdo bloke. But since the 5th Nov context was unimportant in the US it mutated to just meaning a bloke.

I use "and you can take that to the bank" all the time. Not sure everyone knows what it means, but I love it.

All Americanisms are wrong, period.

likable? innit?

...on University Challenge recently, in maybe three rounds hence three appearances. In the introductory bit where people say, 'Hi, I'm Dave and I'm studying for a degree in blahblahblah' this guy would always say 'Hi, I'm (whoever) and I'm a gruduate student in etc etc'

Even worse than this pompous sounding phrase itself (none of his colleagues or anyone else on UC ever say the UK equivalent - that they're an under-graduate in something), his accent - somewhere in that region of America known as 'Lloyd Grossman' - made it come out as "graaadyewt stooooodent".

I don't quite know why this annoyed me so much, but there it is...

'How do you like them apples?'

say things like, "I've been worrying 24/7!" - it just sounds wrong and makes me want to laugh. I'm from Wigan, by the way, so I'm not having a go.

BBC TV presenters - even Jezza Vine - have started to use phrases such as, "it seems like a no-brainer", which makes them sound irritating.

In short, there are quite a lot of Americanisms that work well in everyday conversation, but I think that the 6 o' clock news isn't really the place for them.

....have been too long in America. They start using "gotten" insread of "got".

Make it stop. (Don't know if it originates from across The Pond, but it seems to be everywhere right now).

and dislike others. An American colleague used the phrase "tough noogies" the other day. Once I looked it up, I rather liked it.

Sports, management and marketing speak are typically the ones I don't like. Interlock seems to be doing the rounds here at the moment. At least people have stopped socialising ideas.

...people saying 'I believe I've got the skill-set to take this forward' when, in fact, what they're trying to say is 'Can I have a go?'

As it says in the article linked to in the original post:

Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.

All of these words we use without a second thought were never part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.

The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time.

The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile.

The English language changes. Always has; always will.

Meaning, it's ready for use. As in "the Project Defniition for the Widget 5 upgrade is now shrinkwrapped"

As recently imparted by a well known I.T pifflemonger of my acquaintance.

Not sure if it's American. The loon in question is from Daventry, but we work for the Yankee dollar, so he probably picked it up Stateside.

I think I hear Mrs Cues telling me my tea and Jaffa cakes are shrinkwrapped.

annoying if you view language as some kind of museum piece.

I don't.

I'm bored of these kind of articles. They're variations on the same theme of myopic, tired and hackneyed arguments that blame America or use it as a yardstick for measuring how our (English)lives have been supposedly diminished. It's self-delusional and self-defeatist.

To use an Americanism, we really need to "get over ourselves" and stop viewing the value of who we are simply in terms of the achievements of the past or in comparison to the relative influence of another culture.

People seem to forget that America is different and has a different culture in the same way that China or France are different and have different cultures. Its' language is simply part of that cultural influence and our evolving language reflects that influence, as it does so today with its roots in Latin, French, German and Arabic.

Or to put it another way: why is the word rookie any more or less "annoying" than the word abacus or gazebo?

with French, German, Italian words etc. is that one can often be accused of being pretentious, when the sole intent is to express nuance (whoops!) or trying to avoid using more words where one will do.

More their indiscriminate use by us Limeys, usually in an attempt to project themselves as somehow hipper, cooler, more informed or on top of the game than the rest of us.

Nothing new though. Me old mum told me that during the war Glasgow was awash with folk from Springburn and the Gorbals who were "carrying a torch" for a "big cheese" who spent to long in "Gin Joints" drinking "hooch" but weren't going to be anyones "Fall guy"

(Well, not exactly, but she did say lots of folk used to talk funny once the GI's got here...)

Here's another example of the 'We're all going to the linguistic dogs' kind of article that appears on the BBC webiste with wearying regularity:

Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales.

Sound terrible, doesn't it? Here are the opening two paragraphs:

An online entrepreneur says that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for internet businesses.

Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.

But, wait: let's look at Mr Duncombe's "research":

He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.

"If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes"

That's not exactly rigorous research is it? Where's Ben Goldacre when you need him...?

...Tom Shippey, who was the last occupant of the academic chair JRR Tolkien occupied at Leeds University (and who, by happy coincidence, is the foremost scholar/apologist for his forebear's works), often points out with a stoic regret that the academic discipline which embraces etymology - Philology - is no longer taught anywhere in the English speaking world.

The discipline was born with the Brothers Grimm's ground breaking work on the German language and its roots in the early 19th century (of which their collection of fairy tales was but a fragment, yet now all that's commonly remembered). It thrived throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th, coinciding with the decades of work it took to get the first edition OED together (Tolkien himself worked on several of the 'W's in the early '20s).

The roots of words can be fascinating. Shippey points out that one of Tolkien's earliest, now utterly forgotten, journal papers was on one single word which appears only once in Old English: Sigelhwearaland. No one quite knew how to translate this, glossing it as 'Ethiopia', but Tolkien believed that - in containing elements of language that were associated with soot, fire, darkness etc - it hinted at a primitive belief system involving fire demons lurking on the borders of then-known geography. This was the stuff he excelled at (his 'ents' in the Lord Of The Rings having been inspired by another obscure Old English word which implied a belief in ancient giants). It's not too far a leap to see the inspiration for his balrogs in all this - creating something to fill in an apparent gap in surviving knowledge.

Curiosity: it's what makes us human...

In my smoking days, I once asked a scowling Homeboy, in downtown Manhattan, if he knew where I could pick up some fags. It was midnight, and I was leaning on the wall outside a karaoke bar. Thankfully, he burst out laughing.

but the one that drives me up the wall is the phrase "that was so fun"
or "did you watch the game today it was so fun"...grrrr....and the use of the word "awesome" to describe anything that was...well... well..remotely "fun" Arrrgh!1

by Bill Bryson

Highly recommended if you want to know more about how American English and British English have developed and diversified.

This thread is just so like awesome dude!

This can't be good.

I've adopted a lot of these. Most all of them,in fact. Which is OK, because I live here.

But I enunciate them in a hybrid Naarwich/Embra/Hampshire brogue. I'm going to sound real dumb when I visit home again.

Who was it that started referring to the "tricky sophomore album"?

Can't blame America for people over here picking up on baseball analogies and pompous business speak. That reflects merely on the speakers' gullibility/impressionability/inadequacy.

However, it's hard to forgive the Americans for spoiling the perfectly good word presently, or indeed any non-American using it to mean at present.

Oh, and going forward continues to be a tear-your-hair-outer, every single time, from anyone.

American TV, listen to American music, watch American films. Our language develops and changes because we hear influences all around us and the world keeps turning, it's a no brainer guys.

In American English the past tense of "fit" appears to be not "fitted" but, er "fit".

As in "he joined the band a year ago and he fit right in".

This one has always puzzled me.

I have just hear a colleague on the 'phone repeatedly saying that she 'reached out to' various colleagues/associates.

She probably means that she contacted them or asked for their assistance, but being a consultant she probably feels that she has to lapse into their lingua franca.

If she was a NY cop, under duress, trying to find her informant, this would be all well and good, but under normal circumstances it sounds rather contrived.

Sports

Fry pan

Grrrrr

use the expression 'Bang To Rights'. Seems a bit odd coming from 'across the pond', but somehow it has found its way into scripts.

However, they don't currently follow this up with 'You stitched me up like a kipper, Guv'!

Highly annoying. "We hope to medal in the 400m.." "We will be lateralizing that.."

... and I don't get my knickers in a twist, or even my panties in a bunch over these linguistic differences anymore. It is what it is.

When words & expressions sound different sometimes 'different' is perceived as 'wrong.' I had a hard time getting used to saying "zee" instead of "zed" and felt like a bit of a pillock at first. I still have to ask for a glass of "wharr-der" in restaurants instead of a glass of "war-ter" otherwise they have no idea what I'm saying. I still feel like a bit of a pillock over that one.

But with time the Americanisms have become the norm and it's some of the Britishisms that sound odd to me now.

Know what I mean? Alright, cheers then.

"Off of". I can take pretty much all of them in my stride, but man, does that one suck ass

We've moaned about "can I get" before. But on Friday night I was manning the barbie at the school summer fair and after the 10th person addressed me with a "can I get a hot dog and a burger" I smiled sweetly and said "well, I'll get it for you. Would you like onions?".

I was listening to UK radio news the other day and the presenter mentioned some poor boy who was employed to mark an area at sea."Poor lad must be shivering" I thought. "I wonder if his name's Bob?"
Then it hit me they were talking about a buoy. Had it been US radio news their exaggerated "boooo-ey" pronunciation would have eliminated any ambiguity and saved me rehashing that crap "Bob" joke...

'Monetise' all of this ?

(Someone spare me)

I was reading this story today about Cameron and Hackgate, and it mentioned Eton, and referred to it as a "public" school. But I thought Eton was a rich, elite, exclusive private school? Why do you call a private school "public"? And do you call public schools (meaning state, tax-supported ones) "private"?

I'm confused. And sorry if this is a dumb question. It's just that in the U.S., a private school is one financed privately and a public school is one financed publicly.

I used to think this was clear-cut:

N.America - Truck
UK - Lorry

But then along comes Neil Young with Don't Let It Bring You Down which contains the line

"Old man lying by the side of the road with the lorries rolling by"

They're not "ramps" they're SLIP ROADS

It took my many years of reading American novels etc to realise it just meant "fringe". Great word.

Does it grate with anyone else when BBC news reporters say 'kil-OM-etres' rather than 'KIL-ometres'? I'm reasonably happy to hear, for instance, James T Kirk put the stress on the middle syllable, but it just sounds wrong from a British speaker. (Mind you, no-one says 'kil-OG-rams'.)

Moving slightly off-topic, no-one seems to say HOM-age any more. It's always hom-ARGE, even in a non-film context.

God, I sound old.

As spoken by four times as many people as Americans.

People don't die, they expire.

You down move, you shift.

You don't have left overs, you have a balance.

It's not round the back, it's at the backside.

Your company isn't reputable, it's reputed... reputed to be what???

Together with the fact many (esp. southern Indians) appear to have been named from a victorian child names book Indian English is far more entertaining that American English.

I've noticed the increasing use recently of the word 'so' when an interviewee answers a question. The common approach used to be 'well' as a precursor to an explanation etc, but 'so' seems that much more definite, brooking no further questions. There are claims that this all began in Silicon Valley and Microsoft in particular.

An example for NPR in the US :

“So it’s, I think, the fifth largest in the nation. So, but now that’s the population in general. So there are sort of two, there are two things that are circumstantial.”

Ever so slightly annoying.

So, here's more on this :

http://anand.ly/articles/so-pushes-to-the-head-of-the-line

Is that so?
Nah, Face Value.

As used by Mojo to describe just about every artist's second album. Instead of just calling it their second album. Presume they were going for the American market.