The Americanisms that annoy me most are the ones that are quite illogical.
When the obvious progression for a date is day, month, year, why do the Americans and an increasing number of Australians think there is any logic to naming the month first followed by the day?
Another increasingly common term that I assume is American since it is quite illogical is the way people describe relative sizes or numbers.
If a child is three years old and her mother is thirty, it makes sense to say that the mother is ten times older than the child. It also makes sense to say that the child is one tenth the age of her mother.
What makes no sense at all is to say that the child is ten times younger than her mother. It is a mathematical impossibility. If the mother is thirty, then then times that age is three hundred. How can the child be three hundred years younger than the mother?
If one town has a population of 3,000 a town of 1,000 is now commonly described as being three times smaller. Three time 3,000 is 9,000. How could the smaller town have 9,000 fewer inhabitants than the larger one.
A certain number of Americanisms seem to be inevitable, but surely we can at least avoid the ones that make no sense!
