“What kind of word is ‘gotten’? It makes me shudder.”This isn’t ‘Disgruntled, Tunbridge Wells’ but Julie Marrs, Warrington, lamenting the state of Americanised English in BBC Magazine. She was only one amongst a flood of responses mocking the American use of the English language as brainless, formless or artless. This is bullshit.
Serious criticism of language is an important and potentially dangerous business. It should be carried out with the utmost care and precision by linguists and assorted academic types. However, the majority of the objections raised in the BBC Magazine were thought up by a crowd of jumped-up rent-a-grumps, the sort of bargain-bin David Mitchell that probably sleeps with their copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
In fact one of the most commonly demonised ‘Americanisms’, the humble suffix ‘–ize’, has its origins in English usage, and is even recommended by Henry Watson Fowler, the guardian of so-called proper English. The Times Literary Supplement is also complicit in the use of the offensive suffix. If it’s good enough for the TLS, it’s hard to see how it could be the object of such self-righteous hatred for so many pompous pedants. And sadly for Julie Marrs, ‘gotten’ is a Middle English word whose usage in English dates back further than ‘got’.
The justification for this kind of thing actually lies in something far deeper and more widespread – a hatred and fear of American culture. It’s a common complaint amongst both bellicose conservatives and anti-imperialist lefties – “we’re all so Americanised”. Our culture is no longer our own; it is dominated by the dollar, it responds to the inexorable gravity of Hollywood, it succumbs to the empty hubris of MTV, and it debases itself before the idols of McDonalds, Jersey Shore and News Corp. British culture has been subsumed by a great tidal wave of all that is crass, all that is flashy and all that is American. Such apocalyptic imagery may be laughable, but it is no exaggeration to say that many feel that a culture that is distinctively British has been destroyed and replaced with something that is distinctively American.
Again – bullshit. Recent years have seen both a reawakening of traditional British identity and an opening up to international cultural influences. British culture is now represented both in its slightly twee and clichéd forms (Mumford and Sons, Downton Abbey and other such gentrified stuff) and more genuinely modern forms (Laura Marling, the films of Ben Wheatley, the novels of Julian Barnes etc). However, when it comes to what we actually consume, it’s no longer the case that we are all plugged into the unholy machine that is Hollywood. American culture is but one course in the smorgasbord of culture from which we now take our pick.
Our literary fiction comes from everywhere from Beijing to Abuja, our crime fiction is Swedish, our favourite TV shows are Danish, we eat everything from falafel and humus, to sushi or burritos and our music can be anything from K-pop to Grime. Our culture has been opened up to outside influences. This doesn’t amount to a loss of our own culture – it means that we are able to sample things we would not have been able to try in an isolated Britain. It’s analogous to the idea of gains from trade in economics. Anyone who feels that they couldn’t possibly experience ‘British’ culture in this world betrays either a lack of confidence in that culture (the option is still open, so they would clearly rather do something else) or a kind of overbearing prescriptivism (demanding that everyone adhere to your version of culture is a trait that infuriating Tories and infuriating hipsters share).
The identification of America as the ‘big bad’ which has perpetrated cultural demolition on a global scale is, as we can see, manifestly false. It is, however, the duty of any imperial superpower to take upon itself the hatred and moralistic demagoguery of the rest of the world. Perhaps those in the US who bemoan their falling stature in the world should take comfort in the fact that their nation can still inspire such vehement hatred in otherwise reasonable arenas.
