The Times has an entertaining column on Saturdays in which it fields complaints made by its readers about its manner of expression (as distinct from purely factual errors).  Not infrequently, the complaints relate to the use of American terms in place of English ones.

This week’s crop includes a complaint, from a High Court judge no less, reported thus:

“Must we behave as though we are American? … ‘Mr Nadir took the witness stand’ could so easily have read ‘Mr Nadir went into the witness box’, and been accurate too.”

The Times accepted the rebuke, as it should. Quite apart from anything else, the original report made it sound as if Asil Nadir had compounded the alleged offences which brought him to court with the additional crime of nicking the fixtures and fittings, calling up a picture of him dragging a heavy piece of furniture along the echoing corridors of the Old Bailey.

There was a double offence here, of course – even if one were to accept that witnesses have stands like cakes and hats do, the verb “take” has thirteen different meanings in my dictionary, none of them a synonym for “went into” or “stood in”. You can take a wallet, a bus, a walk or a shower; you can take offence, a liberty, an oath or a look; you can take in, take off, take up, take away or take out; you can even take a stand – but not a witness stand, not in English, anyway.

American representations of courtrooms in films and on television are probably to blame for this sloppy appropriation into English of foreign-language expressions and foreign customs. Another common one is the pictures of those sweet little mallets which American judges use when they want to attract attention to themselves.  I think that the gavel as visual cliché has at last disappeared from UK-facing marketing literature – it took about 20 years for US software marketing departments to realise that our judges rely on a steely eye rather than an auctioneer’s prop to get attention.

The Times has worse Americanisms than that to root out. I recently came across in its pages the adverbial use of “likely”, as in “it will likely rain”, which is as ghastly a misuse of language as one will find anywhere.

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