Originally drafted in October 2008 and published in summary form on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph
Sir, I've been reading an online article published in your columns on the Lambeth Conference, and even within your conservative pages, I find, indeed unexpectedly, source for linguistic disappointment.
Though it is nothing new, British English is being colonised by features of American English which seem to me probably to be generated by pressure from immigrants to the US
Whereas we used to be accustomed to 'deliver a lecture', 'make a speech', 'celebrate a mass', 'grant an interview' and so on, those and other collocations are now each being, as the cliché has it, dumbed down, or rounded down to present but one verbal common denominator, i.e., 'give a lecture', 'give a speech' and most lamentably 'give a mass' as the BBC apparently understood it when reporting one of the activities in which Benedict XVI was generously busying himself while in Lourdes.
Your once religious, now religion, correspondent Martin Beckford informed us on 18 July 2008 in his article ‘Anglican Communion: More than one in four bishops to boycott Lambeth Conference’ that one Gene Robinson was ‘giving a sermon at St Mary's Church, Putney’. Hitherto it had been my unquestioning and simple belief that the clergy preached or delivered sermons.
Post-modernism stresses national, group and individual identity as one defining mark of our era, so why do our television and newspaper journalists so readily capitulate to a form of English other than their own? Why are they eager to sacrifice some of the aesthetically pleasing and defining elements of our form? Change cannot be resisted in language and is necessary, but why the headlong iconoclasm? Perhaps we may soon read or hear of a woman ‘giving a baby’, thereby to fall in with the term ‘give birth’, and thus avoid that moribund but still taxing word ‘deliver’.
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