"...Come, let's be friends. " He offered his hand. She put hers into it for a moment, then quickly took it away. He noted that it was very cold. " I must be going, " she said, keeping her self-control with difficulty, " Aunt Francesca will miss me. " " Thank you for coming -- and for bringing the violin. " " You 're welcome . Good-bye. " " Good-bye, Silver Girl. I hope you'll be happy. "

Aijmer, Karen. 1996. Conversational routines in English: convention and creativity. London: Longman.

London: Longman. Edmondson, Willis, and Julianne House. 1981. Let's talk and talk about it: a pedagogic interactional grammar of English . Munich: Urban & Swarzenberg.

. Munich: Urban & Swarzenberg. Schneider, Klaus P. 2005. No problem, you're welcome, anytime: responding to thanks in Ireland, England and the USA. In Anne Barron and Klaus P. Schneider (eds.), Pragmatics in Irish English. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.

I did two potentially (probably orig. AmE as adjective)things recently: I was interviewed for a famous (in one country) radio (BrE)/(AmE)and I (BrE)and saw. Potentially fun, and mostly fun, but not without worry and embarrassment.Let's start with the (orig. AmE). I've done a few such things, and in the past I have prepared. I asked producers 'is there anything you can predict I'll be asked?' and I made notes of things I thought would come up. Then the interviewer never wants to talk about what the producer said they would want to talk about, and I think "Why did I bother to prepare?"This time, it was all very mysterious. The producer contacted me, and I only knew which broadcaster he worked for. He didn't tell me which show/programme it was for, nor who the interviewer was, just that it was going to be about the flow of words between US and UK. The mystery may have had something to do with the fact that the segment was being prepared as a surprise for another radio (BrE) presenter . But I just went with the mystery. I asked no questions other than where and when to show up and I did no preparation because it's so often wasted.What I should have done,was to make a list of common topics on the blog (the Words of the Year, the things that have got the most comments, etc.) so that it would be available to inspire me. This is what I did not do. I just showed up at the BBC Sussex studios, put on my headphones, and(more AmE)/(AmE & BrE)someone in another city.And the first thing the interviewer said was "Quick! List Americanisms that have become common in British English!" Dear Reader, I could have said, I could have said, I could have said Can I get a.... I could have said many, many, many things. But I choked. I said various things that have been in BrE so long that no one alive reali{s/z}es they're American, like. I saidrepeatedly. And then I said, when used as a response toThe interviewer was taken with that one.Fast-forward a few days and I'm watching The Imitation Game , being slightly bothered by words and phrases coming out of characters' mouths that I don't think would have come out of wartime British mouths. But then Alan Turing/Benedict Cumberbatch saysin response to, and I think:Then I looked for my (more BrE in this use) bag , to get out a pen to write myself a note to look it up later. Then I couldn't find my bag under the seat. Then I spent the rest of the (more BrE than AmE)wondering if I'd left my bag in the café ( AmE) restroom/(BrE) toilet . Which is to say, I have no idea who won the war because my mind was elsewhere for the rest of the (orig. AmE)Isan Americanism?One thing I can say for sure is that it's a recent-ism. (I'm talking only here about the response-to-thanks usage, which is different from its use in other contexts: welcomings, offers and invitations, e.g..) The OED's first example of it as a response tocomes from 1907, then not another till 1960. All of these are British, but the OED can't always be trusted on this matter because it is based in the UK and historically got most of its materials from the UK. This is mostly a spoken phrase, so it could have had a nice life somewhere else before anyone at the OED noticed it.Looking at the Corpus of Historical American English , the firstas response tois from a 1909 story by Myrtle Reed:We're stuck with fictional uses because people weren't going around recording actual conversation quite yet, but certainly the 1907 British and 1909 American fictional uses must be reflecting something that was already going on in the spoken language. What's weird is that there's no particular evidence here of one place being first. At that point in our history, after independence but before wars and mass media brought us together, you'd think that linguistic innovations would be locatable in one place or the other. So here's a hypothesis: maybe the Irish started it and we were all following their cue.Why did I think it was American, despite this lack of evidence?(A) because I knew it was recent.(B) because someone might've proposed it to me as an Americanism at some point, and I was recalling that.(C) because you hear it more in AmE than BrE.Reading around a bit on the topic now, I'm interested to see that several researchers (all cited in Schneider 2005) have found thatand thatlikeor. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that in Britain thank you/thanks is often used for purposes other than thanking , or maybe it doesn't. (It depends on how the research was done--and I don't have access to all of it at the moment.)Karen Aijmer's 1996 bookmakes this point about English speakers not always responding to thanks, but has a footnote "But note the high frequency ofin American English" (p. 78). Edmondson and House (1981:167) proposed thatshould be labeled as 'formal' in British English, "but definitely not in American, where this token is much more common".I may be on to something with the Irish suggestion. After all, there were a lot (millions) of Irish people in the US by 1900. Looking online for equivalents ofin Irish, I find, which seems to literally mean 'you're welcome'. One commenter thinks that might be an anglicism. But maybe it's the other way (a)round : maybeis an Irishism in English (to use the technical term, a, or). I don't have the means to check this, but maybe an Irish speaker among(st) you does?Furthermore, in Schneider's study of present-day responses to thanks (using a discourse completion task ), the Irish use a lot moreresponses than the English do. Not as many as the Americans, but still:(And let's just pause to note that the most common English response was the Americanism.)So, I'm not sure ifis an Americanism or if its use in the Great Britain today is the effect of Americani{s/z}ation. I'm not feeling too bad about my panic-saying of it to the interviewer because, well, it is a much more American thing to say than British thing to say. And maybe it'll be edited out anyway. Please, let it be edited out anyway.(I'll update this with news of the mysterious interview once it's been broadcast.)