Mea Culpa: Juicy Americanisms add vigour and vitality to the language

John Rentoul addresses questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

An ‘iconic’ biker’s jacket could simply be... a biker’s jacket (Rex)

As The Independent expands its US-based operations, we will find more American expressions in our pages. While we try to maintain British English for our style, spelling defence with a “c”, for example, we do not want to translate every idiom into a British equivalent. This means some British readers will come across phrases with which they are unfamiliar.

Last week we reported: “Mr Trump has made nixing regulations, especially ones put in place by the Obama administration, a top priority during his over three years in office.” John Schluter wrote to say that he was not sure he had seen the verb “nix” before, but he had looked it up. There he found it was imported into English, as a noun, in the late 18th century, from German, a colloquial variant of nichts, “nothing”.

So all is well. It’s a colourful expression, easy to understand, that may gain currency over here. I don’t think it distracts British readers too much from the improbability of President Trump declaring war on what we call red tape (although the legal ribbon is actually pink).