Sir, So the growing currency of “fall” instead of “autumn” means that Britain “abandons its own language” (letter, June 9)? But it is the British who abandoned “fall”, long the preferred term of thoroughly British writers such as Ascham (“Spring tyme, Somer, faule”, 1545), Raleigh (“A honey tongue, a heart of gall/ Is fancies spring, but sorrows fall”, 1599), and on through the centuries as recently as Carlyle (“His first child . . . was born there . . . in the fall of that year”, 1851).
Americans did not invent “fall” — we have preserved it since 1607, together with a great number of British words and constructions that the British let slide. It is not uncommon for British people to mistake as American neologisms those features of our language that would have been perfectly familiar to Shakespeare but are no longer known in London. American English is far more continuous than British culture (in the long view, rather than in the present moment alone) than many people suppose. “Fall” is merely one instance of the ways that American usage out-Britishes British.
“Fall”, then, is no alien grey squirrel squeezing out the native British red variety. It is the good old British variety itself, now enjoying a homecoming. If we want to preserve linguistic heritage, we ought to rejoice in America’s success in preserving fine old words that the British have abandoned.
John Talbot
Provo, Utah