Americanising Australian English.(Language)

IF ONE HAD JUST AWOKEN from the long sleep enjoyed by most of the population in relation to their language, one might confess to being amazed at the infusion of American vocabulary and accents which had taken place. Such a person might say, as a federal minister did in 1998: "It leaves me gobsmacked, to use an Australian expression." Gob (mouth) is of British-Irish origin and has been Australian slang for some time, along with big round sweets called gob-stoppers, but gobsmacked (astounded, flabbergasted) was made in America and is typical of the colour and metaphor that permeate American speech. They don't demolish buildings and shoot people; they tear them down and waste them.

American influence on our English-derived Australian language is hardly new. It is part of American influence on almost every aspect of life, which is periodically noted and resented, as with a series of letters to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1993 under the heading "Are we losing our identity to the USA?"

As a child in the 1940s I read every western I could lay my hands on and quickly practised phrases like "Howdy pardner" and "Put 'era up!" on the family. In the late 1940s my school-mates and I were saying "you guys" well before Guys and Dolls hit stage or screen in Australia.

In his short essay "New Ways in English Life", written in 1959 (and collected in America Observed in 1988), Alistair Cooke observed that the English vocabulary "seems to have succumbed to Americanisms since the war at an unprecedented rate", but also noted the long history of adoptions, including the London Daily News warning seventy years earlier against "an ignoble Americanism"--scientist (!); the substitute of white-collar for black-coated workers; and of raincoats for mackintoshes. In three weeks' travel and reading, Cooke noticed the unprotested use of 300 to 400 words, most of which in England in the 1930s were either not used or used in quotation marks. Having then discovered that half the skits in the Cambridge Footlights Revue were "played in American", Cooke decided that in another quarter-century (1984) "England indeed will be the fifty-first state".

In 1993, reacting to able journalist Peter Smark's article bemoaning American cultural imperialism, I wrote to his paper's editor listing recent American adoptions and echoing Cooke's much earlier opinion that the process of acquisition had accelerated in recent years. The letter brought quite a few responses, generally adding words to the list. Then in 1996 a discussion on language and Americanisms on ABC radio found one chap familiar with signing off out of left field and taking the Fifth (Amendment). The lexicographer Susan Butler knew left field was from baseball but, surprisingly, was unfamiliar with the well-used ballpark figure.

In June 2000 almost twenty letters to the editor in a few days named various American substitutions, including the movies for the pictures, guys for blokes, zero for nought, and--horror--a rugby try described as a touchdown; warned those complaining of galloping Americanisation to avoid Bill Bryson's (very good) Made in America lest they be devastated to find how far the process had gone; and predicted a "homogenised" language of American words and spelling (per favour of Microsoft).

Correspondence to the Times of London just last August took up this last point when a woman from Massachusetts complained that one of the British mystery novels she enjoyed had been "purged of anything that would mark it as having come from England", and argued for the retention of difference which made English from other places so interesting. A British reader confirmed that the Americanisation process included Scots crime writer Ian Rankin's books and regretted the cultural vandalism that deprived readers of "the joy of allowing language to work its magic on intelligence". Both letter writers criticised the publishers who assumed that readers were too stupid to cope with national differences.