The new British invasion
One of my regular weekly listens is The Coffee Klatch presented by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse of Inequality Media.
Bob’s and Heather’s are two of the few voices of sanity I hear coming across the Atlantic from a country where the head of state wants to Make America Grate Again (or something like it. Ed.) when he’s not on the golf course.
However, what has surprised me in the last two weeks is Mr Reich’s increasingly regular use of British English vocabulary.
Yesterday, for instance, he used the rude and informal term shite to describe one of the authoritarian Trump regime’s latest outrages, whilst the week before he defined another as bonkers.
We’ll return to bonkers later.
However, it seems your ‘umble scribe is not the only one to have noticed British English. Yesterday’s Guardian drew attention to the increasing use of British English terms in the USA, particularly amongst the young.
It states:
The most common was bonkers, meaning “absurd”, which was applied to topics from politics to sports to internet trends, according to the language learning platform Babbel.
The rest of the Top Ten Briticisms are:
- Amongst, rather than “among”;
- Queue, as opposed to “line”;
- Wonky;
- Cheeky;
- Snarky;
- Cheers, in the context of thanking someone;
- Keen, i.e. enthusiastic;
- Maths instead math; and finally
- Nil.
The piece notes that this phenomenon is partly fuelled by British musicians such as Charli xcx, as well as newspapers such as the Grauniad creating US editions, as well as general “global culturization“.
However, if your correspondent were to pick holes in the piece, it would be with the following assertion:
In addition to the list of words, researchers examined the demographics of the speakers. They found that the use of “bonkers” is most common among gen Z, whose members accounted for 77% of uses in the database. People aged 66 and older didn’t use it at all. Meanwhile, 90% of “bonkers” speakers were women, and 97% lived in urban areas.
Mr Reich, like your ‘umble scribe, is over 66 and therefore incapable of using vocabulary such as bonkers according to the academic researchers quoted.
In case Mr Reich happens to read this, corrections and clarifications can be submitted to the paper should you so wish. 
In 1948 an old Etonian then living of the Scottish island of Jura wrote a novel about future authoritarian dystopia.
Kindly step forward with no style at all one James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman. Ed.), inexplicably made vice-president of the United States by the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump.