I wasn’t paying complete attention to the BBC TV weather forecaster, because I was finishing my first novel, which took me six months to complete. I hope to start reading my second novel very soon.
As I wasn’t really listening to the lady weather forecaster, I thought she’d mentioned a gecko in the middle of informing the nation about cloud cover.
So, naturally, such an odd-sounding comment made me put down my book and press rewind on my remote control so I could watch again properly.
What she’d actually said was as odd as referencing the small carnivorous reptile that’s found on every continent except for Antarctica. Referring to the following day’s weather she said, “It will be dry from the get-go!”
Get go!?
The lady was working for the BBC not some local TV station in the American mid-West! What’s wrong with saying “From first thing in the morning”? or even the more descriptively poetic “As a pink dawn rises slowly in the east…”?
‘Get go’ is yet another unwanted American expression that slowly filtered into our language courtesy of TV presenters who think dropping ‘Get go’ into conversations makes them sound ‘hip’ or ‘cool’. It doesn’t.
We already have plenty of our own words that have been doing the job of ‘Get go’ more than adequately for centuries, like ‘From the start’, ‘From the very beginning’ or even ‘Right from the off’.
Saying someone should be ‘Called out’ is another Americanism that newspapers and social media use instead of suggesting a politician or other public figure needs reprimanding for making a mistake and told never to do it again.
What the media seems unaware of is, to ‘Call someone out’ dates back to the days of the Wild West when a trigger-happy cowboy would stand in the middle of a dusty street and ‘Call out’ whoever it was he was challenging to a gunfight (such as a professional gambler who cheated him at cards, a rival gunslinger he needs to settle a score with or the town sheriff).
We need to be vigilant and make sure no more Americanism’s creep into our language.
Have a nice day!