American 'English'

A piece on the BBC website today by Harold Evans, inspires the following thoughts.

I disagree with his statement that there are '250 million Americans speaking English'. Few literate people would subscribe to the notion that the language spoken in the US is English. I suppose the furthest I'd be prepared to go down that road would be to concede the existence of American English, as distinct from UK English - a distinction that seems to exist in the world of computer software.

There should, I feel, be no objection to the introduction of new words into the language from the US, once they have become widely used here. However, another and altogether more pernicious phenomenon is the changing of pronunciations of established English words in imported US usages. In many cases this takes the form of a shift of the emphasis in a word, with the outcome that the resulting pronunciation serves to obscure the meaning. A good example of this is the word kilometre. This word belongs in a 'suite' of nouns representing the metric units of length, all of which were, from the time of their adoption into the language, pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable - eg KILometre, CENTimetre, MILLimetre. A couple of decades ago the Americanism kilOmetre (with the emhasis on the second syllable) started to creep into use over here. Unfortunately, this lifts the word out of its semantic context and dumps it unceremoniously into the company of, for example, thermOmeter, hydrOmeter, anemOmeter etc all of which are measuring devices not lengths (the irony is the existence of the perfectly legitimate mileOmeter!). Other examples are conTROVersy for CONtroversy, REsearch for reSEARCH etc

I fully accept all the assertions that English is a living language and that usage, rather than a set of ancient rules, should determine its content. However, I also believe that pronunciation should serve to illuminate, not to obscure meaning. If you'd never heard of a kilometre, how would you construe its meaning, hearing the pronunciation kil-O-metre? Is it, for example, something used by terrorists to determine the efficacy of a bombing campaign?

People will readily adopt these unfortunate Americanisms if they are exposed to them by the broadcast media. It's the responsibility of the BBC as the public service broadcaster in the UK, to uphold standards, and to proceed with extreme caution in exposing the public to neologisms, where their adoption into common usage will obscure meaning or otherwise damage the rich texture of the English language. Sadly it is not a responsibility to which the BBC accords any priority or importance.