Do you speak American?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Until a very short time ago, trains stopped at railway stations. Now almost everyone under 30 refers to these places as 'train stations'. Why?

I think they have picked it up from American TV programmes. This is very strange for anybody who knows about America. There, they do indeed refer to 'train stations'. But they hardly ever use them. In fact I remember spending a large chunk of the afternoon in a medium-sized Massachusetts town, trying to locate the station.

Nobody knew where it was, and some even doubted that there was one. Not surprising, really. When I finally discovered the place, with the aid of the Oldest Inhabitant and also by listening out for locomotive hooters, it was a bleak, platformless shed in a slightly menacing industrial suburb, presumably chosen deliberately to discourage anyone from having anything to do with rail travel.

The train - which called there only three times a week - was three hours late, and my timetable said it was necessary to stand in the middle of the tracks to flag it down as it approached. Which I did with growing alarm as it didn't seem to be slowing down and was whistling frantically at me, its giant headlight glaring.

As it happened, it was all worth it and I wasn't run over. The guard, or what the Americans call the conductor, kindly explained to me that they had recently changed the rules and there had been no need for me to stand and wave, which was why they were hooting at me.

And the trip was the beginning of a long love-affair with the sighing, wheezing, broken down but wonderful trains of North America which is not over yet and has carried me from the Columbia River Gorge to the mouth of the Mississippi, across the great plains, through the Rockies and past a forest of flowering cactus. But I still call them railway stations, not train stations. Why is it that watching TV can change a person's language so easily?

Comments

[Drew Cansfield]

Dear Mr Hitchens,
please help!!
Why does everything in today`s media have to be "amazing"? On TV every other word is "Amazing"
Please start a campaign to stop this nonesense. Thankyou
Drew Cansfield.

[Portsmouth Pete]

I have been losing my hearing since an accident just after my 21st birthday... 35 years ago.
I am far from being biased, or a xenophobe.
I always enjoy visiting my friends in Romania... because they speak proper and correct English. I have no trouble hearing and understanding them.
However, many people in Britain are difficult to understand. These people tend to speak one of two languages, Hollywood or Caribbean.
That does not include the multitude of foreigners living here who cannot speak English at all.
It is really the British and their inability to speak their own Queen's English properly, that annoys me.
Many foreigners speak better English than most native Brits.

[Mick Grantham]

What about "right now". It is a fact that Americans cannot utter a sentence without adding "right now". My brain hurts.

[Joseph Schultz]

My dearest English cousins: I have to use the english word train the english word station. I have no complaints sitting here in Pennsylvania USA. Thank You England for giving me a way to communicate with the world.

[David]

It truly is staggering the amount of phrases used in everyday conversation in other English-speaking countries which have their roots in America. I've heard several people use the phrase "right now" when they mean "immediately" or "right this minute". This is perhaps the biggest example I can think of. I blame American junk like "Friends" (perhaps the only thing that has me switching stations more often than updates on Wayne Rooney's foot) and the disgusting, though brilliantly acted and unfortunately realistic, "The Sopranos". It is still true, in fact more so than ever, that, as in my youth, America and all of its cultural output forces our traditional cultures (in my case, Irish) to sink like a stone. On a broader level, these things, simple though they are, are immeasurably powerful and in my view destructive. When I attended crowded masses as a boy, the other youngsters would pay not one bit of notice to what the priest was saying, and then hurry home to gather round the TV and watch things like "The A-Team" and "The Simpsons." Perhaps America, great in so many other ways, has wrought more cultural damage on the UK and Ireland than even the best attempts of our own beloved liberals.

[Kevin Peat]

It is strange to be able to view a whole evening's TV only to realise later that most of it has been in a foreign language (American). We use the term Super Power to describe America, but really they are more like an empire in denial.

No offence to American contributors intended.

[Mark Simpson]

It must be the same reason why Peter used the term soccer instead of football?

[Edward Gibson]

I agree. From even the hardiest of fogy-ish TV presenters these days one hears 'go for it', 'makeover', 'tell me about it', 'ohmygod!', 'it's just so not fashionable...' and a host of others irritations. Linguistic cross-fertilization is nothing new - I remember my parents, some thirty years ago, apologizing for laughing when I too lapsed into using 'train station' instead of 'railway station' - but things are out of hand. England, like Australia, takes its cultural cues almost exclusively from the United States these days. And this, Peter, I regret to say, includes using phrases as sentences, as in...

"The train - which called there only three times a week - was three hours late, and my timetable said it was necessary to stand in the middle of the tracks to flag it down as it approached. Which I did with growing alarm as it didn't seem to be slowing down and was whistling frantically at me, its giant headlight glaring."

[Dallas Nash]

http://www.slfp.com/UnionStation.html

Click on this link for details of the magnicent St. Louis Grand Union Station, designed in 1894 and now an admittedly attractive and upmarket shoppping mall on the lines of Covent Garden.

And if you want to catch a train?

You walk down the line for a couple of hundred metres to an unlovely portacabin affair which is what passes for the railway station now.

As we say in South Africa - Ag shame!

[Verity]

Kerry d'Souza - We've imported loads of Hindi words - bungalow, pajamas, cot, juggernaut (Jaganath),thug, chinz, curry, dungaree - as well as looting words from everywhere else, including America and Australia. I notice there are a lot of Britishisms used on American blogs these days - so it's a two-way street. That is what is so beguiling about English: the melange gives us the biggest and richest language in the world, which is why everyone wants to speak it. We have a carpetbagger approach to words.

And there are the French, stuck in their narrow little rut, being told which new words the Academie has approved for use. I recall the French government tried to stop the use of the word email as being too foreign. They tried to make people use the word 'couriel' instead. Nobody did.

[nick kennerley]

Now that article really was a "bonkers Hitchens" classic,
what next?
"Why oh why do our police officers no longer wear size 14 boots?"

[Kerry D'Souza]

Dear Mr. Hitchens

I regularly read and enjoy your column in the MoS (and mostly agree with your viewpoints!) However I feel that you are unjustly discrediting the English language and the absorbsion of 'Americanisms' into the language.

English is (and will always be) a living language. A living language evolves with the times and incorporates new words and expressions as they come about. What was considered slang 50 years ago has now become part of the formal English language. For example the word 'guru' has been incorporated into modern English usage and was originally (30 years ago) a Hindi word.

It is not just Americanisms which change our language, but a whole host of words and expressions from other cultures.

Would you prefer that English was a 'dead' language (like Latin) which failed to evolve and move with the times? Would you prefer that English people speak in Shakespearian tounges. Then should language STOP evolving & why should it stop now?

The Americanism 'Train Station' is more grammatically precise than the English 'Railway Station'. Trains come to a standstill at stations (are stationary) but railways don't!! Unless you live in St. Leonards as I do!

[John Salkeld]

I agree with you Peter, it always annoys me when people refer to a Railway Station as a Train Station. I also find it very annoying, when people are asked how they are, reply "I'm good". Presumably they are stating that they are not evil. Television is the great brainwashing medium, absorbing the same images day in and day out has to have some effect. TV subtly imposes politically correct, liberal attitudes on us all... if we allow it to.

[Loco Motive]

Huw Morgan's got you Peter - get out of that one!
But regarding Des Brittains comment, whilst I agree with new building, what about the beautiful old-fashioned railway stations of Britain? York for instance? My father has a fantastic photograph of that station but I don't suppose Peter could post it here, however, I guess you're familiar with that station, are you not Peter? And hang on, didn't you say something about modern architecture??

[J Shaw]

Perhaps "Train" has caught on so easily simply because it's one syllable, and this quicker to say than is "Railway."

[J Allison]

As usual you are the hypocrite, complaining about the Americanisation of our language while the paper you write for is adopting the American way of printing the date, June 4th!!!!

[Huw Morgan]

I understand it must be frustrating to hear the English language changing, but not all changes are negative. Had English not evolved we would still be speaking the language found in Shakespeare's plays. "Train station" isn't that bad either, what do you catch at this station? A train. What do you catch at a "Bus Station", a bus, it isn't called a "road station". A "Petrol Station" is where you get petrol, that too, in theory could be called a "road station" but it would be preposterous. At least "Train Station" makes sense, even if it is an Americanism.

[John Richards]

The train system in America is Sovietized in a way that even the Soviets would never have dreamed of. I am certain that trains in Romania, perhaps even Somalia, are better run. However, I should point out that there would be no transcontinental train service at all if the State had not taken it over. There was no market for it after the beginning of mass air travel. Don't forget how huge the US is, geographically. It took days to cross the country on a train, whereas it can be done in hours on a plane. On the other hand, there is no accounting for our American taste for road travel.

[Verity]

Mr Stott and Mr Broughton - It's a two-way street. Americans also adopt a lot of our catchphrases and slang. We in the Anglosphere are thieving magpies. We hear a bright new word or phrase and we want it. Now! Unlike countries with more formal language structures, like, oh, France springs to mind, that try to keep anything new out and preserve the language in amber, English grows and thrives by the tremendous inventiveness of its users.

Where did the unusual usage, "Good on ya, mate!" come from? Oz. Thus spelt because the Australians started spelling it thus as shorthand and we had all adopted it by the end of the following week. A new, smart-sounding usage from the US State Dept, or Hollywood and it is being routinely used in Indian newspapers a few days later. Snap! Incorporated! We have the liveliest language in the world, and by far the largest.

Colin Broughton, I understand your concerns but this disgarding of the present for something new is the price we pay for having such a huge range of words to use. The young and ignorant who adopt American phrases because they think they sound rather smart (these are almost inevitably people who have never been to the United States) are a tiny minority. And the old words don't go away We're still talking the language of Shakespeare, after all.

[Colin Broughton]

The Americanisation of English English has been going for as long as I can recall. (I am now elderly, or what we now refer to in the American fashion, which often combines euphemism with a multiplication of syllables, as a 'senior cititizen'.

This country, far more than most,is dominated by America economically, politically and, especially, culturally. It is likely therefore that the Amaricanisation of the way we speak will continue indefinitely. We do not have to rejoice in this manifestation of our subservience, however.

The process is greatly hastened by the news media, in my opinion. News Reporters, for example, were almost exclusively responsible for the replacement of the British, 'in the street'for an address, by the American 'on the street.' They were using the American expression on TV long before anyone else.

There is no advantage whatever in this change, which is purely gratuitous and used by the reporters to seem 'with it.' ie not British.

Colin Broughton

[Mike James]

For those of you interested in the topics discussed here can I signpost you to Bill Bryson's excellent 'Made in America'. It's about the development of American English and the history of the USA with a chapter all about the great American railways.

[Verity]

While I agree with Andrew Platt in his complaint about the vaccuous facility with which TV watchers adopt Americanisms, (I also think said Americanisms grate in an English/ wannabee American accent) what irritates me is, it points to these people having never been instilled with an instinct for their national language.

On the other hand, I really don't mind the to-ing and fro-ing of words; the Americans, after all, took our entire language with them not long after the Shakespearean age. I think it lovely that they have, unwittingly, simply through usage, preserved some lovely words now lost to the English. Fall was used for autumn during Shakespearese's time. It still is in the United States.

The word gotten has been preserved, too. We shortened it, inexplicably, considering that we still say forgotten. The Americans still use the whole word. Americans are equally magpie-like (as is the entire Anglosphere).

[Des Brittain]

What about the beautiful old fashioned American railway stations? I love them. Big and spacious with stylish old wooden benches. They are grand places so different from our main stations that nowadays resemble cluttered shopping malls.

[Loco Motive]

Peter you're just showing off again. I'd join you in being nostalgic about trains, Watch with Mother, Trumpton and Camberwick Green if I wasn't trying so hard to press button 'B' and get my money back!

[Grant]

Eric Adam is like many "Red State" Americans: he votes for a conservative president and then doesn't seem to realise that the president then acts in a totally non-conservative way. Bush has ignored the US constitution, increased government spending and supported mass immigration. What's conservative about that?