American Spoken Here : Will the Country That Gave France <i> le Hot Dog</i> Win the Linguistic Battle of Britain?

Short of war, what most foreign nations fear most from America is invasion by our fads and mores.

The French, especially, are horrified by the infiltration of American T-shirts, ice cream sodas and Levi’s, and such Americanisms as le hot dog and le drugstore .

Jim Moore, former chairman of English literature at Mt. San Antonio College, has taken a flat in London for a year, and he writes to point out a few of the Americanisms he has discovered there.

He notes that the English seem to have resolved our common dilemma over which pronoun to use with such words as everyone and everybody .

It used to be simple. We used the generic his . “Everyone got his hat.” With the women’s movement, however, this form became suspect.

We were advised that we must say, “Everyone got his or her hat.” But to many this seemed awkward and redundant. Many of us held out for the generic his , arguing that it stood for either sex. Others argued for their --”Everyone got their hats”--pointing out that everyone means all .

“Everyone . . . their” is natural. Many literate Americans slip into this usage without being aware of it.

“Recalling your stand on everyone / their,” Moore writes, “I thought you’d be happy to know that the mother tongue is on your side. Especially in print, words like everyone , anybody , etc., are unfailingly plural--the agreeing pronoun is always some form of they .”

Of course, the English have always made collectives of such nouns as government, team and Fourth Estate. We are always being informed in the press that the “government are” doing this or that, or that a certain team “are in first place.” This seems sensible to me.

Americans prefer a singular government, so the Fourth Estate is always telling us what the government is up to.

We even consider such nouns as couple singular, though this leads to such absurdities as “the couple was married, then it went on its honeymoon.”

Moore goes on: “It should make you happy to observe two more examples of British linguistic sensibility--the jettisoning of the irrelevant subjunctive and the refusal to become excited about the it’s/its ambiguity.

“In the wake of Chernobyl, fruit and vegetables in the markets carry signs like this: ‘It is urged that fresh produce is washed before eating.’ Note the is instead of the be , which only teachers, formalists, and parliamentarians of certain types could love.”

Obviously Moore has not been in England long. In “Modern English Usage” the sainted H. W. Fowler noted that the form of the subjunctive that Moore finds missing had long since fallen into disuse because of its tone of “dullness and formalism.”

I am more alarmed by Moore’s report on the English disregard for the distinction between its and it’s .

“The its/it’s dilemma has been similarly solved. Use the apostrophe all the time.”

It’s obvious to any schoolchild that it’s is the contraction of it is and has no other use; and that its is the impersonal possessive pronoun. It indicates possession (“The dog ate its collar”) and it has no other use. As for the invasion of other American institutions, Moore sends a column by Peter Freedman, in the Guardian, reporting on his first visit to one of those “multi-screen fast cinemas,” which are replacing the old theater palaces in England as well as here.

Freedman said he went not only “to see the future in action,” but also to “pig out”--to break the Buckinghamshire and all-comers’ record for films seen and junk food eaten in a single day.

He expected to see five or six movies and eat “enough Golden Buttery fresh American popcorn to double your blood-cholesterol level by the early evening feature.”

He gave it up after three movies and snacks of pop corn, Mexican nachos, hot dogs, pecan vanilla New England ice cream and a pack of strawberry licorice Twizzlers.

What he liked best about the experience was that there weren’t any commercials on screen. “There were some slides to the effect that ‘Movies Go Better With Popcorn’ and the like, but there were no moving, talking, time-consuming commercials for lager, jeans, and TSB, the Bank That Likes to Say Yes.”

I don’t know whether the multiple-screen theater comes to England from America or whether they thought it up for themselves. Either way, it’s nothing to be proud of. I consider it one of the worst traits of Americans that we can’t absorb an hour or two of culture without feeding throughout like grazing ungulates.

As the English might say, it’s an abomination.