Tower and Town, October 2017 (view the full edition)Autumn - Or Is It Fall?Sue Pells confronts her feelings on Americanisms
Having recently been subjected to yet another assault on my senses with a fellow Englishman ‘envisioning’ something or other, it set me thinking about, and lamenting, the extent to which ‘americanisms’ have crept insidiously into our everyday English language. With, sadly, the first signs of autumn slowly creeping in, I thought, happily, that at least we haven’t adopted the term ‘fall’ instead of autumn. I looked it up to see if I could discover where the term ‘fall’ came from. I was surprised to find that it was an English expression.
Before either term was coined, this season was known simply as ‘harvest’. As more people gradually moved from working the land to living in towns, the word ‘harvest’ lost its reference to the time of year and came to refer only to the activity of reaping. It is thought the word ‘autumn’ was borrowed from the old French word ‘automne’ around the 15th or 16th century, and gradually gained on the term ‘harvest’
Although we Brits regard ‘fall’ as an American barbarism, it is in fact an old term for the season originating in England around the 16th century or earlier – and came from ‘fall of the year’ or ‘fall of the leaf’. By the 17th century it took the one-word form, long before the development of American English. Fall and Autumn emerged as the two accepted terms in England. However, the term ‘autumn’ didn’t gain prominence until the 18th century when the term ‘fall’ was eventually considered archaic.
When the British first colonized America they took both forms of the word with them. Over time, the Americans adopted ‘fall’ whereas the English back home stuck to ‘autumn’. By the 19th century ‘fall’ had become an ‘Americanism’
So, I have learned something new, and have corrected my prejudiced view on at least one ‘americanised’ English word. However, I still cannot forgive a bank cashier in the States many years ago when we were cashing travellers’ cheques saying, “Oh, you English are the people who put extra letters in words.”
My blood boiled!Sue Pells |