Cultural Pollution

I've been reading quite a bit of fan fiction recently and it has caused me to ponder cultural pollution. A lot of the stories I have read recently have been for fandoms with a non-American background. In spite of stories being set in the UK and with a cast of characters from the UK, many of these stories are littered with Americanisms, some of which indicate an alarming lack of knowledge about the rest of the world.

I have encountered time and again such terms as 'college' for a university, 'freshmen' for students (of some variety), 'sidewalks' for footpaths, 'trash cans' for rubbish bins, 'cable' for pay television, etc. The ways in which American usage has diverged from the rest of the English speaking world (i.e. the Commonwealth) never ceases to amaze me. That I encounter so many stories in which allegedly British (or Australian, New Zealander, etc) characters utilise the language in ways that I'm not sure they would even understand makes me wonder just how one sided the "pollution" is. Just how much the average American (or more correctly, the average American fan fiction writer) knows about the world outside the USA.

In some cases (such as 'cable', 'trash can' and 'sidewalk') the slips can be forgiven as the authors unfamiliarity with what amounts to foreign usage. In other cases though (especially 'freshmen', 'seniors', etc and 'college') such terms are not just "out of character", they can be plain wrong. In one story, a character described a class at Oxford as being "college freshmen" in spite of the facts that the character probably wouldn't know what 'freshmen' meant in any more than the most general sense and that using the word 'college' in reference to a collegiate university is not only contrary to usage, but so ambiguous as to be wrong.

Is such ignorance endemic to the US? Is the flow of culture so one sided that they do not realise that we speak differently? Perhaps they simply do not care? What ever the case, I find myself agreeing with Jacques Chirac and those like him: measures must be taken to protect other cultures from being overwhelmed. We must not allow our differences in usage, the peculiarities that help to give character to our language, be subsumed by the behemoth that is American English. Our idiosyncrasies, our peculiarities, our divergences are part of what make us who we are, as communities. The world, I feel, would be a sadder place without that variety.

On the other hand, you probably don't agree with me.
:-)