Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 January 2008

Dot Wordsworth on the Americanisms creeping into British English

issue 26 January 2008

It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like avian influenza’, but my husband tells me that bird flu is a virus and viruses don’t grow in petri dishes.

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