Urban transportation? Send that editor to the colonies

No sooner is Colin's back turned than a rogue journalist uses a superfluous four-syllable word that leaves him, if not "gobsmacked", at least "taking it on the chin".

No sooner was my back turned than it happened. There was no malice, nor even a desire to tease. But there it was, perched above some thoughts from France in my East/West column elsewhere this newspaper. For an article about once again getting around on foot, someone had chosen the headline: "Walking: the alternative mode of urban transportation". In other words, my colleague had used a four-syllable word, transportation, even though the first two syllables of the same word would have sufficed.

When people come from all over the world to work together, it is natural that their use of language should differ. It is one thing to declare that you intend to publish a newspaper with British English as the means of expression; it is another to police that choice every minute of the day when, among your talented, conscientious recruits, are people from a world of elevators and sidewalks; diapers and comfort stations; and railroads and airplanes.

At the wordreference.com website, I found a brief discussion in which one contributor reported that while both transportation and transport would be understood in his part of the north-western United States, transport would be considered unusual. So transport would hardly ever be used, though I should add, in recognition that Americans can also be economical with syllables, that even transportation was apparently less common than transit.

Naturally, I would always use transport unless I wished to discuss penalties British judges once imposed on criminals, or needed to pass through an airport on my way from and to other places. But these variations reinforce the view, usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that Britain and America are countries divided by a common language. From each side of the ocean that offers a natural boundary for this division flows a constant stream of words and phrases capable of amusing or confusing the other.

Writing entertainingly on some of these differences, the International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, who was born in Britain, mentions a tendency to use English vernacular developed by an American friend, Vincent Katz, while studying at Oxford. So Katz, a poet, now says he is knackered to indicate that he is very tired indeed. Although he felt uncomfortable the first time he said "loo", he also knew enough by then to realise that if he asked for a bathroom, everyone would assume he wanted to take a bath or shower.

He was still taken aback, however, when a friend said "crumbs" as an exclamation of surprise. Even so, Katz came to reject criticism by fellow Americans that the British were cold; he found instead "endless expressions of warmth" in the ways we communicate. Depressingly, Cohen feels the world's lingua franca has become bad English, though he does welcome not only Barack Obama's own high standards of expression but his ability to communicate with those lesser equipped to use the language, even the American version of it.

Warm or cold, many Britons do retain a sense of fair play. My former colleague Toby Harnden, who has lived in the US for some years, followed up a list of annoying Americans on his blog with 10 "Britishisms" he found equally irritating. These included "take a pew" when inviting someone to sit; "with all due respect", often a prelude to an insult showing little or no respect; "gobsmacked" to mean stunned into silence; and "ah, bless" as a patronising or ironic way of saying "isn't that sweet?".

Some British readers will insist that they would never use any of these expressions or talk about being "knackered" or in need of the "loo". But their numbers may be diminishing, just as there may now be few Americans for whom "awesome" is not an entirely natural adjective for anything reasonably impressive. As for transportation, I have taken it on the chin; worse things happen at sea - are they Britishisms? As my friend and occasional critic Bill Taylor would say: "The sky over Abu Dhabi has not, I'm sure, fallen."

Colin Randall is a contributing editor to The National and can be contacted at [e-mail]