I wonder why Americans are so coy about using the word toilet. After all, it is something that everyone, including the king, has need for several times every single day (and more frequently in the night, too, as we get older).
I am also less than enamoured with the creeping in of obligate instead of oblige - it sounds very ugly to me - and the general trend of turning nouns into verbs. Also, why go get instead of go and get? I've never liked that one, either. Another thing I have noticed is that when a book is translated from another language into English for the UK, it is as literal a translation as possible, retaining the flavour of the original country, which is most interesting. I assume this happens with other European countries as well. The translator makes the correct assumption that we are adult enough to understand the differences and, indeed, enjoy a little taste of a foreign country without having to leave our armchairs. It is not uncommon for translations aimed at the US market to transpose the setting to one that could be set in any US state. I read one a while ago that was written by a Scandinavian author and translated by an American (l should make it clear, here, that l am not for one minute deriding the excellent skills of the translator), and it could just as easily have been Osloville, Ohio, rather than Oslo, Norway. I would not have been surprised if there were a scene where someone was goofing off in a locker room. This detracted from the story for me and, surely, American readers are as intelligent as readers from anywhere else and would enjoy reading about the culture and mores of another country if they were allowed to.
My final bugbear, though, comes from our Aussie cousins. It is the abbreviation uni for university, which has been ubiquitous here for at least twenty years. I blame the Australian soaps that were popular at the time, but I still refuse to say uni on principle. It is university to me the bitter end for me.
