Letters | The English tongue

Professor Henry Higgins, aka Rex Harrison in the 1960s musical, My Fair Lady, lamented Eliza Doolittle’s dreadful English, opining that “She should be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!” The same fate should be mandatory for politicians and journalists who cannot resist the intrusion of Americanisms into our daily dialogue. Following my recent rant about the current predilection for the non-word “unalived” that’s replacing the cogent “dead,” “died,” “deceased,” “killed,” “slain” and others that include the gangsters’ “bumped off,” imagine my shock when reading inThe Witnessthat John Steenhuisen had “expensed the cost” of goods using his DA credit card. What happened to “paid for” or simply “bought?” Do we need these concocted words to prove how educated, street-wise and erudite these superior beings are?

When did it become proper to say that someone has “gotten bit by a dog” instead of “has got bitten by a dog?” Why does everyone “get it” rather than understand or grasp it? How sad to hear “I get that…” used endlessly. These things infiltrate our everyday conversations and become almost normal, except that they’re so awful. So, at the end of the day, at this moment in time, the bottom line is that English is no longer English, watered down and adulterated by the Hollywood brigade.