Butt out of our vote vocab Uncle Sam!

Is your MP out on the stump in a bellwether constituency, or is he a shoo-in thanks to spin doctors? Either way, MATTHEW ENGEL is enraged by American terms polluting the polls

MAYBE Theresa May is not the shoo-in everyone expected – though perhaps the party machine will help her get through to the grassroots while on the stump in the closing days.

Either way, the spin doctors will keep working, especially if Thursday’s race stays too close to call.

So stand by for the closing blast of British election jargon. Except that none of the words and phrases in italics are British at all. They are American, copycatted straight from US politics – most in the past few years.

Only a few years ago, our politicians never ran for parliament; they just stood. It made the process sound so much gentler, less grasping. Now they all run like hell.

Seven years ago I began a series in The Mail on Sunday entitled Say No To The Get-Go (‘outset, the very beginning’ – Oxford English Dictionary) – get-go perhaps being the most ridiculous of all the words Britain has mindlessly cribbed from America. It drew a phenomenal response from readers.

Only a few weeks before that, David Cameron and Nick Clegg had stood in what journalists insisted on calling the Downing Street rose garden to cement their coalition. Only it wasn’t a rose garden – even if it did have a rose or two. But the White House has a rose garden. So Britain had to have one too.

Since then things have got worse and worse. Instead of minting its own fresh words to add to the English language it invented and once commanded, Britain just steals everything American. Our teenagers (Hi guys!), heavily influenced by Hollywood, endless US TV programmes and the American-dominated internet, do it all the time.

But it’s not just them. Business has been overrun by Americanisms. And broadcasters, journalists, politicians – even judges – and the rest of us are at it too.

What I have discovered, and detailed in my new book, is that this is the culmination of a process going back nearly 200 years.

In the early days the imported words helped spice up a language that was in danger of stultifying. In their brand-new country, Americans were less hidebound and more inventive. They gave us hundreds of new usages our language couldn’t and shouldn’t be without: bark up the wrong tree, bite off more than one can chew, greased lightning, knock in to a cocked hat. And the way all these expressions travelled here provides a fascinating story.

After the Declaration of Independence, Dr Samuel Johnson’s American counterpart Noah Webster was responsible for the differences in spelling that have caused low-level irritation between our countries for the past two centuries. In his Compendious Dictionary Of The English Language in 1806, Webster transposed the endings of -re words to create theater, center and specter.

In the early 19th Century, American technological success gave us words such as radiator and refrigerator – even if we couldn’t afford to buy one at the time. Later, in the early days of Hollywood before the war, the British fell in love with American slang, just as they fell in love with jazz, cocktails and the latest dance crazes.

Languages should always be open to fresh ideas and new expressions. But that’s not what’s happening now. In the 21st Century we hear an American word and we instantly adopt it, while minting very few words of our own.

We no longer know the difference between British English and American English. This is not the Americans’ fault. And the problem is not that their words are stupid or ugly (though some, like get-go, certainly are). It is just that their cultural dominance is such we can hardly help ourselves.

Kids can hardly help but think that color is right and colour wrong.

It is a worldwide problem. American culture dominates the planet and, on this count, there is no competition from the Chinese. For countries where English is not the first language, this is an intractable problem. The French have kittens about it.

For us, it’s a more subtle problem. The British get the benefit of being able to order breakfast in almost any half-decent hotel in the world without ever learning a single word of the local language.

The price is that we no longer have any significant influence on the way English is spoken, even by ourselves. Take the law courts. Fifty years ago, witnesses did not normally testify, they gave evidence. They certainly did not take the stand – there is no bloody stand – they went into the witness box. Unexpected deaths were investigated with a post-mortem not an autopsy. Alimony was long ago replaced by maintenance in English law until TV put it back into popular culture.

And then there is the use of appeal as a transitive verb: to appeal a judgment, rather than appeal against it. By my calculation it takes approximately 0.23 of a second to add that extra against. Isn’t that a small price to pay for a sliver of linguistic independence? Can’t the authorities do something?

In the 1980s, the enterprise culture brought a whole new series of terms. It is not true that all this jargon is dreadful. Some of it has the vivacity of early American: I would love to be invited to an open-kimono session sometime. Nor can there be any objection to blue-sky thinking.

However, I must be proactive and cascade some information. The cliches create a suboptimal mindset, impacting the idea shower, making it cloud-centric and inhibiting granularity. Let me reach out to you and get a handle on this.

If Brexit is to mean anything other than just Brexit, it has to mean Britain taking a pride in itself, and that includes a pride in its own language, and its own linguistic inventiveness.

Let the get-go be gone.

That’s The Way It Crumbles: The American Conquest Of The English Language, by Matthew Engel, is published by Profile Books on June 15, priced £16.99. Offer price £11.89 (30 per cent discount) until June 11. Pre-order at mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.

No 10 has even invented a US-style rose garden We don’t even know we’re talking American