Matthew Engel urges us to hang tough against Americanisms in this entertaining history of linguistic imperialism I worked for a few years in my 20s at the literary quarterly _Granta_. The magazine had been a very English institution, based in Cambridge, until it was successfully hijacked by a bullish and bearded American graduate student, Bill Buford, who had arrived at the university via Louisiana and California to help edit Shakespeare, and was looking for an excuse to stay on. I became his deputy. As a former linebacker in American college football, Buford was not always the easiest man to argue with, but when it came to questions of written style the British contingent in the office attempted to mount occasional rearguard actions. Mostly, we followed English linguistic conventions and spelling in the magazine, but on a few issues Buford was entirely intransigent. One of these, our Rorke’s Drift, was the word “aeroplane”. Every time it cropped up in a story – which was quite often since _Granta_ became famous for reinventing “travel writing” – Buford would score it out fiercely, and replace it with the American “airplane” in blunt pencil. Debates over this stubborn incongruity in the mouths of English writers were long and heated, and often carried on into the pub next to the office. Buford’s argument was that the ancient Greek prefix cast a typical British snobbery over what was essentially a thrusting American invention. He scoffed at our effete defences and, as editor, always prevailed. Continue reading...
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