There's nothing wrong with Americanisms: it's management-speak that is the enemy of English

Cupcakes? Or fairy-cakes? Who cares?

A study of children’s writing by the Oxford University Press suggests that our language is being Americanised. Of course English as spoken here and as spoken in the USA have always played off each other – understandably – and the influence of American films and, in the case of children and adolescents, American comics has been noticed for a long time. Orwell was writing about it in the 1930s. Sometimes of course what is regarded – with disapproval? – as American usage turns out to be something once usual in English as spoken or written here. One example is the American habit of saying “I guess” where we might say “I think”. To anyone who objects to this, you should quote Chaucer, who used “I guess” in the American style.

The examples of Americanisation culled by the researchers from OUP look pretty thin. Children apparently now write about cupcakes rather than fairy-cakes. Well, apart from the fact that cupcakes (or cup-cakes, as Chambers English Dictionary has it) are nothing new, I don’t think they are the same as fairy-cakes, which, as I remember, are little sponge-cakes which have a butter-cream topping with a slice of sponge inserted in it at an angle.

If children write about a “tuxedo” rather than a “dinner jacket” (and presumably think of a DJ as a disc-jockey rather than a garment), one may concede that this is an example of an American usage replacing a British one, and the only surprise is that they should be writing about the article of clothing in the first place. Actually I think some of us would reserve the word “tuxedo” – more commonly “tux” – for a white dinner jacket. It comes incidentally from “a fashionable club at Tuxedo Park in New York".

Again one may concede that writing “sidewalk” rather than “pavement” represents the adoption of an American usage – though surely an unobjectionable one – but some of the other examples they give are not really American at all. A “garbage truck” may be an American term, but “garbage” as an alternative to “rubbish” or “refuse” is not exclusively American, any more than “truck” for “lorry” is, even if more common in the States.

Chambers English Dictionary is a good guide, because Chambers has always taken an interest in American English. The 1872 edition included an eight-page appendix of Americanisms, printed in small type, three columns to the page. Nowadays it notes “U.S.” or “esp. U.S.”, if a word is more commonly found in American rather than English usage. However, quite often you find “dial.” – that is, dialect – “and U.S.”. This suggests that a word found in some British dialect has been carried across the Atlantic and become standard usage there. This is the case with “snuck”, used as the past tense of “sneak”, and cited by the OUP researchers as an example of American infiltration. It would be equally true to say the word has been repatriated.

Two other examples they offer as “smart” in the sense of “clever” and “cranky” meaning “irritable”. I should have thought that “smart” has always been used in this sense here, as in “smarty”, “smart-alec” and “smarty-pants”, while Chambers offers “cross” as one of the meanings of “cranky”.

Be that as it may, there is nothing that should worry us about this sort of American infiltration of the language. Not only is a colloquial Americanism likely to be lively, useful and agreeable; it is often an English word or expression that has fallen out of use here and is now restored to us.

The American language we really should guard against is the management-speak promoted by business schools to baffle outsiders. Unfortunately this has been seized on so enthusiastically by bankers, businessmen and bureaucrats here that we don’t question its origins. Colloquial American is splendidly alive; management-speak is an abomination, an offence against the first purpose of language, which is to communicate meaning.