Americanisation of Australian English.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Following publication in your December issue of my article on the Americanising of our language, Dr Ric Bouvier (a retired GP from Melbourne) informed me that hospital casualty departments were renamed emergency departments as a matter of policy, rather than as the direct influence of television's ER. Tight finances prompted the name change (at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne), to divert non-emergency complaints from the emergency department, which could then employ fewer Junior Resident Medical Officers.

However, one lost Americanism is another gained: ambulance officers looking for higher status chose to be called paramedics after an American television show, a word which Dr Bouvier says "does not describe their work and is etymologically unsound". The possessors of hard-earned doctorates will be reminded of the many first-degree dentists and now veterinarians who have appropriated their title.

May I take the opportunity to add two distinct Americanisms from the financial quarter. In the last of his instructive Boyer Lectures, retired head of the Reserve Bank, Ian Macfarlane, referred several times to levverage, and shortly thereafter financial journalist Robert Gottliebsen spoke constantly to the ABC's Geraldine Doogue of levveraging. In Australia we have always had levers (leevers), like the ones Paul Keating was so fond of, which are used, inter alia, for ...