Taking the mickey, etc.

[mmcirvin]

Tim Kenny (loved him as Spongebob) is worried about Britishisms invading American English as used by journalists. Kevin Drum points out that if this kind of purist whinging whining is tiresome when the French do it, it's tiresome when Americans do it too.

(This is actually more analogous to the complaints by people elsewhere in the English-speaking world about American idioms invading their vernacular. I've noticed that a significant fraction of the time, these complaints are about usages that are not really American; the speaker just assumes they're American because they sound stupid.)

One poster in the ensuing comment thread points out that the gradual emergence of a global English probably has less to do with pretension than with the Internet. I'd concur. I know that many words and expressions I once found unfathomable now don't sound odd at all after one and a half decades of typing back and forth with British, Irish, Australian and New Zealander Internet users (and native speakers of other languages who learned a non-American English idiom in school). And some of them have undoubtedly slipped into my own language.

Comments

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

Cor blimey! This bloke doesn't know what he's talking about.

Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

One of the greatest struggles in the adventure of English (small A or large A) is that between American English and British English. But, international English may trump them all.

Native speakers, for example, may talk about or discuss something. Foreign speakers may discuss about something.

Nigerian English is apparently so distinctive, that legitimate Nigerians find it practically impossible to use e-mail anymore, as anti-spam programs can smell them a mile away.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

A friend recently complained about journalists using 'grey' instead of 'gray' as an affectation. I had no idea that 'grey' was a primarily English spelling. In my mind, for some reason, 'grey' is slightly darker than 'gray'.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha, you're one of the "grey and gray are different colors" camp. I wonder if they all agree on which one is darker.

I always thought of them as equally valid variant spellings of the same word, with the word "grey" having slightly posh overtones, possibly because on some level I thought of it as a Britishism.

[darius.livejournal.com]

To me, grey is more silvery and gray is muddier. I have this sort of mild synaesthesia when reading and the words look different that way. I'd guess the associations came out of sources like Tolkien with Gandalf the Grey.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, is it "whinging" or "whingeing"? "Whinging" gets more Google hits by about a factor of 2, but many of those are either (a) from the US, where the term is mostly considered foreign, or (b) references to the "Little Whinging, Surrey" address of the Dursleys in the Harry Potter books.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Correction: "whinging" gets about four times as many, of which approximately half are in the phrase "Little Whinging". This is assuming that Google hit numbers are accurate.

[sneakums.livejournal.com]

"Whinging" looks more right to me (or, to put it another way, less wrong) and so I write it that way.