An aside about language use

It’s been a while since I posted one of these ‘asides’ about language. Time for one now.

First, a couple of usages that I think are American rather than British English. We’ve recently been watching a rather cumbersome dystopian/sci-fi series on Netflix called Silo. In one episode a character confesses shamefacedly to his mother that he was asked by the protagonist of the series, Juliette, to help her unveil the lies being told to the community in the silo by their leaders. He said he couldn’t, he was his mother’s only carer. He admits this was a lie, an act of cowardice. He goes on to say something along the lines of:

‘I wish I WOULD’VE SAID something different’.

In British English I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t use that modal structure; we’d say ‘I wish I HAD SAID something different’ – because there’s no doubt about this assertion. The use of ‘would’ve’ implies some weird kind of uncertainty or possibility in the future, not the past.

Another usage that I think was American involves expressions including ‘no matter…’ without being followed, as is usual in British English, by ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, etc. Here in Britain then we’d say ‘no matter what it costs’ or ‘what the cost’; in America they drop the word following ‘matter’ (usually an adverb or pronoun of some sort, I think; my memory of grammatical terms isn’t what it used to be). So that would become ‘no matter the cost’. This sounds a bit odd or disjointed to my English ears.

I googled it, and AI came up with this explanation:

In American English, ‘no matter the (something)’ means ‘regardless of’. It shows that a specific condition does not change the outcome. ‘No matter the weather, we will hike’ means we will hike even if it rains.

As is the way with evolving language, it’s started to appear in the media here in England. I came across examples on the Guardian newspaper website recently, but unfortunately neglected to make a note of the exact sentences, but it was a similar structure to the American ‘no matter the X’.

That’s not intended to be a criticism of the ‘our language is deteriorating’ type, just an observation of an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Language changes all the time, no matter what we might think about it…

One final comment: a couple of days ago on the BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news there was an item about the corporation’s financial squeeze and accompanying problems. This was because, said the presenter, Sarah Montague [something like]:

‘The number of people who have stopped paying the TV licence fee has dropped’.

Perhaps I should explain for overseas readers that here in the UK everyone who accesses BBC broadcast TV services, including online, must buy an annually renewable licence, which costs this year, I believe, £180.

Montague then introduced the programme’s media correspondent, who repeated this expression almost word for word. She went on to give the numbers involved, which was something along the lines of ‘in 2023 there were 25 million licence fee payers, and in ’25-26 it was 23 million’.

That is, the number of people who have stopped paying the licence fee has RISEN, not ‘dropped’; it’s the number of people who are still paying the fee that has fallen.

Ok, I daresay I’m sounding like a pedantic language maven here, but this is surely just careless inaccuracy, not natural language change in action.

I’d be interested to know what others think about the points made above.