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avevale_intelligencerA friend posted a link to an article about Americanisms creeping into British English, and either she or the article writer mentioned "faze" as being one such, meaning to discompose or give pause.
So you can understand why I was fazed when, just the next day, I encountered the word "fazed" in the pages of one writer whom I would imagine would be the very last person to employ a colonial neologism, and employ it, I may say, without comment or even quote marks, just as if it were a real proper English word.
So I went to my trusty OED, and discovered that the word, while marked as a "U.S. transf.", has a pedigree going back at least to 1890, and may indeed be nothing more than a variant form of "feeze," which goes back to about the ninth century, and includes among its definitions "to frighten." In other words, it is a real proper English word, so there. :)
And this, of course, is the point about Americanisms; while many of them may be new coinings or loan-words from other languages (and none the worse for that), many of them started out here and simply fell out of common usage in Britain while remaining alive and well on distant shores.
As I said in the comment there and have said at exhausting length here and in other places, Americanisms in themselves don't bother me in the slightest, any more than local or regional dialects or deliberate assumption of a "folksy" mode of speech or dyslexia or anything else of that sort. I happen to like BBC English myself, but I don't expect everyone else to do the same. What gets my goat, whether it be in America or Australia or the Isle of Man or anywhere English is used, is carelessness in the use of language, and carelessness, I venture to suggest, is something against which we should be wary wherever it may occur. It's human, it's natural, I'm as prone to it as anyone else, but it's not a good thing.
Cries of "snobbery," "fascism," and so on will now doubtless ensue, as they always do. But they will not faze me.
So you can understand why I was fazed when, just the next day, I encountered the word "fazed" in the pages of one writer whom I would imagine would be the very last person to employ a colonial neologism, and employ it, I may say, without comment or even quote marks, just as if it were a real proper English word.
So I went to my trusty OED, and discovered that the word, while marked as a "U.S. transf.", has a pedigree going back at least to 1890, and may indeed be nothing more than a variant form of "feeze," which goes back to about the ninth century, and includes among its definitions "to frighten." In other words, it is a real proper English word, so there. :)
And this, of course, is the point about Americanisms; while many of them may be new coinings or loan-words from other languages (and none the worse for that), many of them started out here and simply fell out of common usage in Britain while remaining alive and well on distant shores.
As I said in the comment there and have said at exhausting length here and in other places, Americanisms in themselves don't bother me in the slightest, any more than local or regional dialects or deliberate assumption of a "folksy" mode of speech or dyslexia or anything else of that sort. I happen to like BBC English myself, but I don't expect everyone else to do the same. What gets my goat, whether it be in America or Australia or the Isle of Man or anywhere English is used, is carelessness in the use of language, and carelessness, I venture to suggest, is something against which we should be wary wherever it may occur. It's human, it's natural, I'm as prone to it as anyone else, but it's not a good thing.
Cries of "snobbery," "fascism," and so on will now doubtless ensue, as they always do. But they will not faze me.
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Date: 2011-07-14 04:34 pm (UTC)I cannot tell you the number of non-US English words that my young friends use -- "bloody" (though common enough in the US south, it was unheard of in Yankeeland until US peeps started watching Brit media), "wanker" and the rest.
My family having come from Dixie, my own language is replete with old British words (and even some still being used). We tend to "reckon" as well as "go yonder" -- I won't even get into Appalachian English, which also has Gaelic mixed in.
We should all just face it -- English is becoming one language, due to the Internet. Neologisms will pop up but soon be absorbed into the general word population.
redaxe, your mom would have nightmares over my usage. lol
I probably have shared this before, but it's a favorite of mine from YT. It interviews numerous Appalachian English speakers, showing some of the old words that crop up (including a last bit of rhyming slang).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU
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Date: 2011-07-15 12:59 pm (UTC)