The British (generalization alert here) love to blame America for corrupting their culture. Already the US has inserted trick-or-treating into Halloween and Americanisms into the language.  

Or maybe I should say “we’ve inserted,” since I’m American. And also British, but my language is American, so yeah, if you want someone to blame–and it’s so satisfying to personalize these things–I’m available. My reach isn’t long enough for me to be responsible for even a small part, of that, but accuracy isn’t big in public life these days, so don’t worry about it. Picture me sitting on my couch right now, corrupting the language. 

I am a dangerous person.

But while we’re doing maybes, maybe I should’ve said “the English,” not “the British.” I’ve lived in Britain for more than 17 years and still struggle with what characteristics to file in which national folder. So until clarity whacks me on the head, let’s say it’s the British and wait for someone to correct me. And if I’m wrong, please do. Hearing from people is what makes writing this thing worth the effort.

Semi-relevant photo: The white cliffs of Dover, guarding England against an invasion of foreign words

What Americanisms are we talking about? 

A 2017 article from someplace deep inside Cambridge University (is that authoritative enough for you?) lists the use of guy, was like, and I’m good as having increased considerably. The use of closet (the British for that is wardrobe; you’re welcome), season (for TV shows), and right now had also increased but not as much. Annoying business-speak words and phrases like going forward and touch base showed–mercifully–no clear growth. 

What do I have against American business-speak? Two things: it uses words to say nothing and  it makes me want to throw things at people. But hey, life’s full of these small hazards. We struggle onward.

Less authoritatively, assorted British speakers mention the creepage of stores replacing shops, leaving British English with convenience stores and department stores even though people still talk about going to the shop. As a neighbor explained the difference to me, a store is still where you store things and a shop is where you shop for them. That’s the reason our village shop didn’t end up having the small used book store I wanted to set up. Instead it has a small used book stall, which isn’t a shop because it’s outside, in a weather-proof box, unattended, a bit like those little free libraries that have popped up around the US and Canada and can be found but not as often in other countries.   

I’ll admit to seeing logic in the shop/store distinction, but I still do my own shopping at a store. Or at least I think I do. Other people will have different opinions. 

An Americanism that doesn’t seem to be making much headway but that’s around enough to make a subset of British speakers shudder is the word gotten. To me, it’s such an invisible word that before I moved here I couldn’t have imagined anyone getting emotional about it, but I worked briefly with a purist who objected to my use of gotten, weighting her objections with such heavy doses of right and wrong, educated and ignorant that I created for extra spots to drop gotten into my sentences. 

Purity

To be clear: I’m not saying the British are a nation of disapproving pedants. As far as I know, you’ll find purists in any culture, along with the kind of people who drive them crazy, and there seems to be a balance between the two. In Britain, that means enough people adopt Americanisms to keep the purists satisfyingly upset. It’s hard to guess at the numbers, though. Dictionary-thumpers are over-represented in places where people comment on new and impure words. It’s their natural habitat. They list. They make their arguments. They shake their heads to indicate despair. The opposition? Most of them ignore the arguments and adopt the words they like, which is why no amount of sniping will ever convince a language to stay pure. 

And that, at long last, brings us to the reason why I mention German in my blog title. While I’ve been busy corrupting British English, purists in Germany are blaming the English language–pure users and impure ones alike–for what they call the idiot’s apostrophe.

The what? Well kidlets, I don’t know German, so this is all second hand, but from what I’ve read, the way German tells the world that someone’s in possession of something isn’t to add an apostrophe and an S to the someone, it’s to, ahem, decline the word for that someone. In other words, they change the ending of the word in a more intricate way–one that doesn’t involve apostrophes.

But Anglecisms have been creeping into German for some time and now the Council for German Orthography has decreed that as of 2025 it will be acceptable to use an apostrophe. Small businesses are already doing it, giving the world Andi’s Imbiss (Andi’s restaurant) and Kim’s Kiosk. And purists are having fits. One argued that relaxing the rules makes German more complicated by saying several different things can be correct at once. 

Can more than one thing be correct at once? Umm, I’d say so. It depends on time, place, and circumstance, but it’s not out of the question. 

Is this the beginning of the end of the German language? Possibly. If it is, will that destroy the world as we know it? Probably. Forget our overheating planet. Forget genocide and the rise of fascism. The end of the world is being brought to us courtesy of the humble apostrophe.