Do you think it makes you a better person?

Thanks for your comments on my first entry into Blogland and here are a couple of comments on the comments:

Corinne, the phrase that drives you to drink is….’what’ll you have?’

And Pete, Stephen Fry is very ready to correct a person’s usage of the language. Whenever Alun Davies says ‘there are less now’ Stephen pops in with ’it’s fewer’, so for him to say should of is acceptable, or any other bit of vernacular crapular, is rich indeed.

I didn’t expect to be following the theme of language into my second week but it is slightly different because my first grump here is

AMERICANISMS

A BBC newsreader of all people, Bill Turnbull, comes on Strictly Come Dancing It Takes Two (it’s better than the regional news programme and I’m quite warming to the offbeat humour and fashion sense of Claudia Winkelman) and says ‘from the get-go’. Three times.

Vom.

Quite apart from the fact that get-go is an American nonsense word, ‘start’ is easier to say. Oh, but it doesn’t sound cool, does it, and these jumped-up journos have to be celebs these days don’t they (and yes, I know about ‘The Birth of Cool’, of which more later).

And then there’s DJ Chris Evans. Digi-birder quite likes him and so I suffer the Warrington Wazzock’s attempts at sounding young and modern every evening as we go home. Ged oudda here and other inanities. His worst, though, is not confined to him because it’s a creeping trend but Evans is the one I hear most. ‘Hello Chris, how are you?’ says the punter. ‘I’m good’ says CE the WW. No, Evans, you are not good. You abandoned your first wife and child to follow your selfish desire for stardom, you are not good. Good is Desmond Tutu, good is Jane Tomlinson. An enquiry after your well-being is met with ‘I am well’ or ‘I’m coming down with terminal pork-sneeze’ (if only).

 Oh and these kids who go to Uni (slight geographical detour here – vile Australianism, usually accompanied by that bleednawful ridiculous interrogative inflection), visit a sandwich shop and enquire – back to USA here – ‘can I get a ham sandwich, please?’ (that’s emsemmitch in ‘stralian by the way), no you presumptive numpty, you can’t get it, I have to reach behind me you while you stay that side of the counter and when I’ve got it, I will give it to you. And can you get a latté with that, sir? No but I’ll do you a nice one with warm milk and a bit of froth – the standard traditional English effort that doesn’t need a specific identity – but you’ll have to be quick if you want to avoid getting your nice designer t-shirt and underpant nameband stained as it flies towards you without the traditional cup.

Actually, although so many of them are pieces of street talk from semi-literate ghetto-bound US yoof (why would anyone think that sounding like them is laudable?) it’s not all bad. There are some Americanisms that have style and seeped into the language, like cool (well he didn’t invent the word but it certainly applied to Miles Davis – it’s what I do, man) and moron (1912) and I lament the disappearance of the wonderful ‘Right On’ and especially ‘Far Out’ and the fact that the only time you’re likely to encounter ‘You in da groove, Jackson’ is in some black and white film (you won’t catch me saying movie – oh, just slipped out, sorry). Funky is one I don’t really like but it has stood the test of time in music.

 I read a few years ago that the word funky was actually late nineteenth century black American slang for the smell of sex, when I had thought that it was a word for the pall of smoke to be found in the music bars of 1890s New York. One of its several meanings is the smoke cloud but it’s much older by 200 years and the first recorded use of it is a strong smell or stink, from1623, so, unless Captain John Smith learned it from the native Americans, it’s English. Hooray. But it makes you wonder about exactly what went on in those New York clubs underneath all that smoke.

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