Is this anti American

[NotNowPlzz]

I absolutely can't abide some americanisms creeping into everyday speech, particularly...

Takeout
Stay home.. supposed to be stay AT home
Go play... Supposed to be go AND play
And one I use movie, which is meant to be film

Am I being anti American?
YABU for yes
YANBU for no

Language does and should evolve, but that doesn’t mean you have to blindly accept every attempted evolution.

And the appropriation of some words and phrases is cringeworthy. British people using the work ‘awesome’ to describe something as great is disgusting and hurts my ears. It’s best left to the Americans who use it properly.

Also, the appropriation of African American slang is another form of cultural appropriation that seems very unfair.

YANBU I hate how the different nature of British English is just being swamped and overrun with US English.

See also
Reach Out
Going Forward(s)
No distinction between affect and effect
Transportation instead of Transport
Pissed redefined as annoyed not drunk

and a million others.

Most Americans I've met and worked with don't want to speak British English so it's not anti-American to not want to speak like them.

@lazylinguist
Yes I do actually as long as you don’t act on it.
I think as free thinking individuals we are free to like and dislike whatever we wish to.
We should challenge our thoughts maybe but we are completely entitled to them.

No distinction between affect and effect

This distinction is standard in American English.

I think a lot of people use Americanisms accidentally because they don’t know how to spell a word and are spelling it phonetically. Like “realize”, “gray”, “favor” etc. Also, with using words like “addicting” as an adjective, when the correct word is addictive, I think these are mistakes rather than decisions to use “Americanisms”.

I have no issue at all with America or Americans, love the country, had a wonderful time there, but I prefer British English to remain British English, plus it sounds very strange to hear English people call taps “faucets” and pavements “sidewalks”. Likewise it sounds strange to hear American people use words like “bollocks”.

A pet hate of mine is math instead of maths.

Like “realize”

"Ize" endings are not really Americanisms. They are from Greek, predate "ise" in British English, and are preferred by the OED. In fact, the ize ending is known as Oxford spelling.

Who cares? You are allowed to be anti things, y'know, op.

I'm not anti-American. I have 20+ American relatives in my extended family.

I am allowed an opinion as much as the next person. And for those who say that we didn't invent it, why is it called 'English' then? Yes, it has developed over centuries. I know that. Yes it has thousands of words which have roots in other languages (as do most other languages in the world). But it is what is spoken in the British Isles. It is flexible and evolving all the time.

I'm more than happy with regional accents and dialects (I even have one myself) and they all form part of the rich pattern of language spoken in the UK.

What I object to is being told that I'm not allowed to dislike American English taking over and becoming the default pronunciation.

There are some good reasons some.of these shorter phrases are being used by the government and public bodies at the moment.

1. Shorter phrases are easier to remember
2. Shorter phrases work better on multiple social media accounts
3. Many of these shorter phrases translate into Welsh/ Gaelic etc. with greater ease than the longer phrases.

I find the way people from London/SE mispronounce the sound “th” as “f” to be extremely grating

I am Canadian. Years ago, I was an au pair in Europe. Most of my friends were from the UK. One of women in the friendship group really didn’t like me. I assumed it was because I arrived later and was welcomed, by the others. She pronounced the “th” my name as an “f”. I thought she was doing it on purpose to mock me and corrected her, The others explained later that that was simply her dialect. I was horrified, because, although I didn’t much like her either, I would never make fun of someone’s dialect.

Yes I do actually as long as you don’t act on it. I think as free thinking individuals we are free to like and dislike whatever we wish to.

Pretty odd to dislike Americans en masse unless you've met a pretty large proportion of them. And I'd say that going on a site like MN where there are quite a few Americans and openly saying that you're anti-American or that it's fine to be anti-American actually is 'acting on it'.

The sun set on the British Empire decades ago. American English, Indian English, Australian English are co-equal if not dominant forms of the language now depending on where you live. Accept it and move on.

Therein, I think, perhaps lies the rub. . .

I'm American and don't say "stay home" or "go play". If you're hearing those usages in the UK they don't come from here.

The French have tried mightily to maintain linguistic purity. It's a fool's errand.

Pretty odd to dislike Americans en masse unless you've met a pretty large proportion of them. And I'd say that going on a site like MN where there are quite a few Americans and openly saying that you're anti-American or that it's fine to be anti-American actually is 'acting on it'

Well said, thank you @lazylinguist. It's the one thing that really puts me off MN.

Yes it is one of the main strengths of English as a world language is there are no stuffy old grammarians deciding on what words and usages should be 'allowed' or not. French and Spanish both have some old academy controlling their languages.

Speaking of stuffy old grammarians and English not being a prescriptive language and referring back to someone saying that 'can I get' should be 'may I have', the can/may distinction is on its way out and will bite the dust before long.

I agree. And yes English grammar is descriptive not prescriptive.
An awful.lot of people don't seem to get that. Can I get/may I have/could I possibly if you don't mind terribly have/ .....all of these will get you your drink. or whatever it is you want.