Things have gotten out of hand

You’ve doubtless spotted the Americanism in the title above. And fair enough, for the past 400 years or so, Americans have claimed sole ownership of ‘gotten’ in a glaring exercise of cultural appropriation.

I used it deliberately, strictly to make a point. The question is, why do our MPs use it, along with other Americanisms? What point are they making, if any?

It’s true that Churchill’s famous quip about two nations divided by a common language sounds dated these days. The increasing globalisation and growing dominance of US media, especially television, opened the floodgates and Americanisms rushed in.

The issue has a personal resonance with me. The US was my first Anglophone country and, when I lived there, neither my accent nor choice of words branded me as an outlander. More interesting, Penelope, a native Devonian, also adopted many American usages if not the American accent.

The US was the first Anglophone country where she lived as an adult, having left England at 17 to attend the Paris Conservatoire, spent the next 10 years in France and then moved straight to New York, to find herself on a collision course with me.

When Penelope first took me over to England, to introduce me to her parents, she promised her mother she’d touch base with her the moment we got back. “You’ll do what?”, asked my future mother-in-law, genuinely perplexed by the baseball idiom.

Shortly thereafter we moved to London, and I was worried about my job prospects. In those days I made my living as an advertising copywriter, and ads are always written in the language of their audience. Hence my portfolio was idiosyncratically American, and I feared potential British employers would laugh me out of the profession.

I needn’t have worried. As it turned out, my American experience earned a feather in my cap, not a kick up my backside. London admen loved everything American: cars, clothes, ads and of course the idiom. They’d say things like “Don’t make a federal case out of it” or “I’ll take the fifth on that” even though Britain has neither a federal government nor a system of constitutional amendments.

To me, the effect was jarring. Those working class Englishmen (and, in the UK, advertising is the same social hoist for working class Britons as basketball is for black Americans) sounded incongruous. American phrases just don’t have the same ring to them when the aitches are dropped.

My accent soon followed my shift across the Atlantic without any special effort on my part: pronunciation is mostly imitative, and I picked up the educated accent of my family and friends. Getting rid of American usages, on the other hand, did take some work, and even now the odd Americanism creeps into my speech. When I’m aware of this I chase it away for aesthetic reasons: stylistic integrity matters.

Also, by adopting the language of the English educated classes, I’ve also adopted their innocuous snobbery, part of which is rejecting, and even sneering at, American words and phrases. Cultural supremacy also comes into this: educated Englishmen see themselves as the Greeks to Americans’ Romans – our culture remains primary, even if we’re no longer the global power the US is.

However, there’s nothing especially wrong with Americanisms as such. English, after all, welcomes geographical variety, with this small island boasting some 50 major dialects (five in London alone) and uncountable minor ones. Two Englishmen from adjacent counties sometimes have more trouble understanding each other than either has understanding Americans.

For all the profusion of American TV shows, hilarious misunderstandings do sometimes happen, especially when the same word means different things in the two countries. The slang word ‘fanny’, for example, stands for the geometrically opposite body parts to an American and a Briton, which may lead to strained pauses in conversation.

This, however, is rare, and by itself there is nothing too pernicious about the American lexical colonisation. Yet nothing in such matters is ever by itself. Subtext is more important than text.

It’s with this understanding in mind that I reacted to the news that over the past 25 years the use of 100 common Americanisms in Parliament has risen 40 per cent. One routinely hears our representatives committing verbal treason by saying things like ‘gotten’, ‘get it for free’, ‘reach out’ in the meaning of getting in touch by phone, ‘to leverage’ along with other unsightly examples of nouns turned into verbs, and so on.

What’s telling here isn’t that MPs do that, but why. Part of the reason is that they make a point of slipping Americanisms into their speech because that’s how their constituents talk. Gone are the times when our MPs came from the higher social strata than most voters. Ours is the age of the common man, and that mathematically average individual is more culturally tyrannical than the princes of yesteryear ever were.

And common men everywhere are intuitively attracted to the United States, the first country in history where that type assumed primacy, the first country constitutionally dedicated to the advancement of the common man.

This is noticeable everywhere in Europe, but especially, for obvious reasons, in Britain. Ordinary people feel the kind of kinship with America that they don’t feel with the ‘toffs’ at home. Class means nothing in America, they think, and it doesn’t matter that they are mistaken. Perception, as Marshall McLuhan taught, is reality.

(This sounds vaguely Platonic, but I doubt McLuhan was guided by Athenian idealism. He was specifically talking about manipulating the common man through mass media. Outside that worthy pursuit, only reality is reality – that’s where Aristotle surpassed his teacher.)

That’s why lower-class Britons reach out (in the correct sense of the expression) tropistically for Americanisms. These act as membership badges on their lapels.

However, even these days few MPs are genuinely lower class, and anyway the most prolific user of Americanisms in Parliament is Dave Cameron who is distantly related to the royal family. Of course, he and his colleagues are likely to succumb to prolier-than-thou attitudes as a way of ingratiating themselves to the electorate. That much is par for the course.

However, it’s not just American usages but also American politics that exerts a special pull. Most of our politicians are ignorant about British statehood, the unique nature of our ancient constitution. They are familiar with the outer details well enough, but the underlying existential spirit escapes them.

They see nothing wrong with an American-like system supplanting our indigenous institutions because they see them, correctly, as something partly designed for but not by the common man. It’s not just Labour MPs of whom nothing else can be expected, but even many Tories who pin a target to those institutions that have no counterpart in the US.

In the past couple of decades, for example, we’ve got an abomination called the Supreme Court in a gesture of obscene obeisance. Tony Blair, the most subversive PM ever, although Starmer may still usurp that distinction, even tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor that dates back to the Norman Conquest at least.

He failed then, having realised that our constitution couldn’t withstand such a barbaric onslaught, but his likeminded saboteurs will come again. Meanwhile, they are all campaigning for driving the few remaining hereditary peers out of the House of Lords. Instead they want to have two elective chambers, just like you know who. There’s even talk of replacing the Lords with a Senate not only in essence but also in name.

That changes things dramatically. Instead of dealing with something innocuous if aesthetically objectionable (Americanisms penetrating from TV) and merely political tricks (catering to the electorate), we are looking at something downright evil: an attempt to destroy history’s most successful and enduring constitution so as to strengthen and perpetuate the government by those unfit to govern.

Thought I’d get this off my chest. Y’all have a nice day now, you hear?