Americanisms...is it just me that finds them irritating?

Tiddlywinks

pollyanna24 wrote: »

What do they call a bin then? Just wondered cos I don't know.

"Trash" or "trash can".

pollyanna24

Thanks for that. Guess I'll just stick to my English words then. Haha.

victor2

I worked for an American company in the Middle East for a number of years and the office staff were a mix of predominantly Americans and Brits.
One day, one of the American women happened to say that she'd been riding her bike at the weekend and now her fanny was really sore. There was a mixture of disbelief and amusement (from those who knew what she meant!) amongst the Brits and bewilderment amongst the Americans at our reactions. For some reason it came down to me to explain to the lady in question how Brits interpreted what she said. She was mortified but we had a good laugh afterwards. :rotfl:

GlynD

As much as I hate Americanisms there's nothing I can do about them going into general speech and I even find myself using them from time to time. Not half as bad as British people trying to speak like Jamaicans though - now that really grinds my gears! :mad:

lostinrates

BitterAndTwisted wrote: »

Biscuits and gravy. Where the gravy is actually a white sauce with crumbled sausage meat in it. Blech! But not nearly as blech as grits. That stuff should be banned, especially when it has melted butter in it.

Strangely enough they also have normal gravy made from meat juices but that's never eaten with American biscuits, which are really scones to us.

Another strangeness was chopped, mixed vegetables in lemon jelly (Jello) served as an accompaniment to a main course. Wherever that came from needs to go straight back there.

Jello salad. It's crazy but fabulous. Have to admit, I find dessert as salad weirdly hilarious) thinks like mayonnaise in otherwise entirely fruit salads also both intrigue and horrify me in a delicious way. But then so do some British things.....chip sandwiches, or crisp ones. Chips with curry sauce that looks and smells horrid.

I also like biscuits and gravy:o but never cook it. Ever.

fawd1

The only thing that gets me is the way so many of them, most notably George W Bush (and there are Brits that are now following this), who cannot pronounce the word nuclear, and pronounce it nucular instead. It was always my view, that if you can't pronounce the name of the weapon, then you shouldn't be in charge of it.

Lou67

Nah, doesn't bother me at all. America has a huge influence on this country whether we like it or not, what with the film stars and tv stars and tv programmes and pop stars and rock stars etc from over there.

jeddentad

Tiddlywinks wrote: »

'Feds' instead of 'police' as an example.

that's a bit of a funny one. I've never heard an American use feds to refer to the normal police. When we (Americans, I'm an ex-pat) say Feds, we mean the FBI. (though another ex-pat will probably correct me now! )

Confused the heck out of me the first time I heard someone refer to the cops as the feds.

lostinrates

Voyager2002 wrote: »

On the whole I agree...

The point is that we need precise language in order to think clearly, and most Americanisms are a lot vaguer than the English terms they replace. So we are losing some of the power of our language, and that makes us increasingly vulnerable to dishonest politicians, advertisers and so on.

Whenever someone uses one of these terms to me I always fail to understand, and perhaps look them in the eye and ask "Did you mean to say...?" and use the correct English term. Quite often there will be two or three slightly different ways of saying it in English, illustrating very clearly the loss in precision that comes with the adoption of Americanisms.

I can think of a specific example where the inverse is the case, colour phenotypes expression is now becoming useful in understanding of genetics in animal science.

One that excites a lot of American friends of mine is 'healthy' food as used here as opposed to 'healthful' as nothing cooked that we might be eating is itself that healthy after being cooked, chewed and digested its just not what it used to be.

Toto

What drives me insane is hearing youngsters speaking as if they came from Jamaica. Obviously if they actually did originate in the west indies it's fine, but the majority of them couldn't even tell you what accent they are trying to emulate never mind where in the world it came from.

Sorry, that has absolutely nothing to do with the original question did it?