Boozy brunch and taking the piss: Is American English finally giving in?

3 hours ago 2

Opinion

October 11, 2025 — 5.30am

If I had a boozy brunch every time you despaired about the American impact on English, I’d need a new liver. Get-go for outset. My bad for sorry. Alternate for alternative. The laments are 24/7, forever assuming the tide is one way, while the US vocab is impermeable – period.

The tide, however, is switching. Yes, the language flow is chucking a U-ey on the turnpike, as Ben Yagoda measures in Gobsmacked – The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024). A professor emeritus of English, Yagoda has been hosting NOOBs since 2011, a blog dedicated to Not Once-Off Britishisms bobbing up in the States.

US President Donald Trump and King Charles speak their respective versions of English at Windsor Castle last month.

Boozy and brunch, say, amongst my opening remarks, are now familiar to Floridians. Along with amongst and veg, peckish and pear-shaped, dodgy and scrounge. The trend was first seen in the colonial hangover of reckon and come a cropper – the dialect of The Beverly Hillbillies – and later boosted by the lexical exchange of World War II, furthered by the postwar appeal of tonier words like swimsuit, swank, master bedroom, even mummy as a posher option.

Small beer in the big picture – or nickel and dime to any US readers. Though the 1990s have tipped the scales, the Anglomania of Spice Girls redoubling the legacy of Stones and Beatles. Then you have the TV impact of Doctor Who and Ab Fab, the stream of expat hosts like John Oliver and James Corden, embedded journos such as Tina Brown, Anna Wintour and Christopher Hitchens, all aboard the Hogwarts Express.

Consequently, Yagoda found words like queue joining the long line of Britishisms pervading his continent. What began as a French coinage, inherited by Brits, is now adorning US checkout signs, as well as the Netflix cache of “Movies in your queue”.

Canadian comic Mike Myers, with British parents, has been an undercover Anglophile in plain sight, throwing cheeky, bum and shag like ticker-tape on Madison Avenue. Ernest Hemingway fell for shite after meeting James Joyce, and now the variant dwells in Vermont. Australian slang, via Bluey and our Hollywood invasion, has injected cuppa, bloody, bloke, no worries, lose the plot and have a go.

A coffee, say, is not a phrase you’d hear in most diners, as staff there would offer some coffee, or a cup of coffee.

Call it karma, perhaps. As for every pissed (meaning angry) that’s diluted our own drunken synonym, there’s now the UK offshoot of “taking the piss” that’s snuck into Uncle Sam’s glossary, a phrase prominently planted by Keira Knightley on a 2013 CBS chatshow, and later nurtured by Anthony Bourdain.

Subtle stuff too. A coffee, say, is not a phrase you’d hear in most diners, as staff there would offer some coffee, or a cup of coffee – not a coffee, as we’d typically say. Likewise, the US plural we see in scrambled eggs, or Legos, or sports (the newspaper segment) has been eroded by our singular bias, just us we try to resist the American inroads of pant and math.

Scenario (with its inner ah-sound) and grey (with its more ashen e) have also been logged by Yagoda, plus the gradual eclipse of holiday over vacation. Boffin over expert. True, we may have succumbed to no-brainer and deplane, touch base and heads-up, but pause next time you’re tempted to bewail threepeat in a news story. Take heart in knowing there’s a peckish Yank across the ditch who’s booking a table for brunch. Maybe a coffee.

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