British and American letter writers to the Financial Times have spent the past few weeks scrapping over whether “one-time” is a better phrase than “one-off”, how far cricket metaphors travel and whether “backstop” comes from baseball or from the older English game of rounders.
One UK correspondent expressed irritation over the Americans who would have said “the past several weeks” rather than the “past few” in sentences such as the one above.
A sub-theme was the infiltration of American and British words into each other’s speech and how bad this was. When Brits use American words, their more fastidious compatriots take it as evidence of declining standards, while Americans see those who adopt Britishisms as pretentious and snobbish.
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