A step in the wrong direction

I've just read an article including the phrase 'step foot' instead of 'set foot' - another insidious Americanism creeping into British English no doubt.

I don't know why this grates so much with me because I understand that linguistic usage evolves over time, but every time I encounter it I flinch. It's the same with 'undoubtably', starting every answer with 'so' and using 'is is', as in 'the thing is, is that he doesn't listen'. Grrr!

I hope I'm not being a pendant in this respect - I'm not knowledgeable enough for that - but I know what I like and what I don't. I like many new usages and find some Americanisms refreshingly pithy and succinct. I'm also no grammarian (grammar wasn't 'big' in the 'sixties, even in grammar schools) so I couldn't have told you that 'set' is a transitive verb, I had to look it up - or Google it, in modern parlance. 

It's estimated that William Shakespeare coined around two thousand neologisms - new words or phrases - that we commonly use today. The Elizabethan and Jacobean eras saw rapid development in the English language, following the Great Vowel Shift of the 14th to 16th centuries. In 1569 John Hart published his Orthographie in a vain attempt to devise a new phonetic alphabet the better to encapsulate changes which meant spelling - standardised by the printing press - no longer reflected pronunciation. He failed, leaving us with the hotchpotch we have today, where kn is pronounced n, gh f, gn n and u is sometimes pronounced ooh (eg* butcher) and other times uh (eg sum - although this only applies in southern England ) etc*. How any foreigner masters English is quite beyond me!

At around the same time English made its transatlantic crossing to America, where some usages were retained which were eventually abandoned in the Old Country. A few have become 'boomerang' words, making a return journey across the ocean centuries later, for example 'gotten', only retained in Britain in the term 'ill-gotten' but now widely used by British youngsters in place of 'got' (although we were encouraged at school to avoid 'got' and use 'have' wherever possible). Sometimes I wish I could turn back the tide but I appreciate that that [?] is an impossibility.

Hell, even King Canute knew it was a hopeless task.

*NB: Americans also retain 'old-fashioned' punctuations such as e.g. and etc. (and N.B. come to think of it) which we Brits have largely abandoned.

Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell by Gabe Henry is published by Dey Street Books (£21.16).

Update 29/04/25: London Evening Standard: "smoke bellowing". Somehow, I doubt it.

Popular posts from this blog

A knight's tale - creative non-fiction

England - 1088 'What's a king without a kingdom?' 'A man, sire. And a man fights for what's his.' The king had been thinking aloud and the thirteen year-old lad's unexpected reply to his rhetorical question caught him off-guard. It was a bold response but, rather than being angered, he felt chastened by it. It was profound coming from one so young and junior in his service though prompted, he knew, by genuine love and loyalty rather than impertinence.  At a moment of grave peril so early in his new reign he valued candour, a commodity in short supply at court. He had followed his father, the Conqueror, as King William II less than a year earlier and now faced widespread rebellion. At such a time he could ill afford self-pity, much less self-doubt. He blamed himself for allowing a brief moment of self-indulgence in front of his page.  Since receiving the devastating news at Eastertide of his brother Robert's challenge the lad had been his closest companio...
Read more

2024 - a year to forget?*

As we approach the end of another rollercoaster year of 'natural' and manmade disasters, I'm taking a moment to look back - and forward. Janus, the two-faced Roman god, gave his name to the month of January, a time for both reflection and anticipation. But as I find myself unexpectedly housebound with a bout of 'flu - or it could be Covid but who has a lateral flow test kit lying around these days? - I'm self-isolating for the remainder of December. Fortuitously, this gives me some time to ponder the existential ' quo vadis ?' questions now rather than waiting until the New Year. I can always have another bite of the glacé cherry then, of course, so these are just some preliminary musings, though with so much hanging in the balance - Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, a second Trump presidency - my observations at this stage can't really be anything more than prefatory. Let's start with the unfolding situation in Syria, the outcome of which could prove to be piv...
Read more

Straw men

Donald Trump has a downer on paper straws: "they don't work, bring back plastic". Well, it's good to see that the President of the United States has his eye on the little details that make such a difference to us all. I had vowed, wherever possible, to ignore the ramblings of this deranged megalomaniac, on the basis that if we all stopped reacting to him he might just go away.  We know he's a shameless attention-seeker but the wider the gap gets between pledges and delivery, the more likely it is that the American people will lose faith. Zeus may have thundered from Mount Olympus but once people stopped believing in him he simply faded into irrelevance. If only real life were like that. It pains me to say this, and perhaps I'll regret doing so, but, for all the performative bluster, he does sometimes hit on an important issue, though usually for the wrong reasons and drawing the wrong conclusions from it. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and simply be...
Read more