Think before you speak

We are all mimics.  I’ve even found myself saying “Oh, my God!” (though not, fortunately, “OMG”), which should be uttered only by very young women.  No, that’s not being sexist.

Thus I can’t blame new graduates with cloth ears for the deteriorating quality of 20th century historical TV scripts, any more than I can blame young actresses playing posh girls in Victorian dramas for saying “yee-ew” instead of “you” – they get everything else right but they haven’t noticed the contemporary minor vowel shift.

However, I can blame the producers for not employing old fogeys like me to give the scripts a once-over.  They’re as meticulous as you could reasonably expect over dress, décor, the skyline – even things I know a bit about, like cars.  (The cars are in period; the choice of car is good – the staid old banker in a Rover 75, maybe, the flash young executive in a Zephyr, the struggling dad in a Hillman Minx.)

But the US invasion ­– which has been going on for a couple of hundred years but has recently shifted up a gear (see, they say “shifted”, not “changed”) – is now swamping English stories set in the 1950s and the 1980s alike.

Car terms I notice especially: gear lever / gear shift; change gear / shift gear (American “shift” serves as noun and verb; bonnet / hood; hood / top (“hood” is now confusing); mudguard or wing / fender; windscreen / windshield; boot / trunk.  The English usage is disappearing, as with racing car / racecar, aeroplane / airplane.  As streaming and smartphone replace reading.

More glaring are all those extraneous American prepositions that (to transition between my themes) park up after words.  Inside of or outside of your house.  Listen up.  Up what?  Now I’ve mentioned it, please collect examples.

And alien to me are the prepositions that have vanished before verbs.  Write your Congressman, just as you used to write to your MP.  Appeal instead of appeal against your lengthy sentence.  The English usage is lost, the US sometimes vague.  Appeal for mercy. 

To get back where I started.  I’m told that only incorrigible pedants notice these things, but I think viewers are better than that – they would notice, albeit subconsciously, that in-period language was being used correctly, would absorb the feel of it and profit.  After all, we appreciate the odd expression that the scriptwriters have researched and casually dropped in – usually appropriately – and we pick up on the sound of the background music or cunning use of light or camera angle or whatever, even without analysing it.

Everyone tries hard to get the music right.  To widen the argument, when I argue the same for precision in language (or beauty or balance) I am told by modern linguists that language changes and we should accept it without question.  Is that a fair summary?  But polish matters.  If it matters that you hit the right note in a song, it matters equally in speech.  I fear I may wish to return to the topic.  I feel the need to, as they say now, push back (just as in the past I used to want to retaliate).