It seems there's a worry across the pond about 'a virus that's infecting American media these days: Britspeak':
We have become a nation of journalistic copycats, betraying perfectly good American idioms along the way.Matt Welch is unimpressed by the complaint, and so am I. The flow is both ways, for one thing. And who really cares, for another? However, I do draw the line at this:Adding British expressions to your vocabulary, [Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg] says, "makes you sound pragmatic, a little cynical." Smart, in other words. And it's a cottage industry in some quarters.
In major newspapers and in broadcast media, we "send up" instead of "parody"; our thoughts reach a "full stop" instead of merely ending. A correct answer is "spot on" rather than "dead on." And corporate heads get "sacked" instead of "fired."
More widely used are "went missing" and its close relative, "gone missing." Over the last 10 years, the elite American news media have begun to use the phrases willy-nilly, avoiding the perfectly good American "has disappeared" or "is lost."
Perhaps the most popular bit of Britspeak can be found "at the end of the day." New York Times reporters used that phrase instead of our own "in the end" 14 times in 1994 and 33 times last year; in quotes, it showed up 159 times in 2004. If we aren't careful, the sturdy, straightforward "in the end" could once and for all... go missing.'At the end of the day' is just awful on either side of the Atlantic - when all is said and done.