When did insects become bugs? Schools carry out bug hunts, we make bug hotels and people cry out - my daughter included - when there’s a “bug” in the room.

“It’s not a bug, it’s an insect!” I always tell her.

When I was a child the word was never used. Back then, the only bug on the scene was the weird-looking, orange Bond Bug car that fascinated us all, with its wing-like roof. Yes, it was obviously named after an insect, but despite that the word bug was certainly not in common usage.

Bug is one of the many Americanisms that have crept into our language and are now firmly part of it.

I place some of the blame on the Pixar film A Bug’s Life, which came out 18 years ago and propelled the word into the brains of children.

I also cringe at the word guys. My youngest daughter even uses it to describe us, her parents. “Are you guys coming?” she will say. I blame that on American TV shows - she devours Friends and Big Bang Theory, where men are guys.

Similarly, the greeting ‘Hey’ has oozed into our vocabularly. I am constantly reprimanding my daughter for replacing “Hello” with “Hey”. She doesn’t deliver it in the true American sense “Hey!”, because she’s never that excited to see me, saying it instead in a couldn’t care less, deadpan way, without looking me in the eye.

And as yet, she hasn’t stuck two of the most irritating expressions together to form “Hey, you guys!”

One of the most annoying expressions that has made its way across the Atlantic is ‘train station’. Here in the UK a building in which trains arrive and depart is a railway station, always has been and, to my mind, always will be.

York Press:

No trains please, we're British. It's a railway station, says Helen

Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson did not perform their emotional final moments of Brief Encounter in a ‘train station’. It is a horrible, bland term, devoid of the intrigue, excitement and romance associated with the railways. I have yet to hear Michael Portillo utter the words ‘train station’ in his TV series and guide writer George Bradshaw would turn in his grave. But it is widely used by everyone from newsreaders to politicians and TV presenters.

But the Americans can’t fully take the blame - train station is the term used across Europe and it is more likely that we picked it up from there.

What has happened to lorry? Now we all say truck, and when did the chemist’s shop become the pharmacy? It was always the chemist when I was young. Likewise, I hear ‘movie’ used as often as cinema. One of the worst imports, only now taking hold, is playdate - children popping round to each other’s homes or meeting a friend at the park to play. Like ‘sleepover’, it sticks a semi-official tag on something that should not have one. ‘Playdate’ sounds more like the sort of word you’d use in Hugh Hefner’s mansion than one associated with children.

I don’t mind the replacement of hamburger - which we always used when I was young - with burger, but cup cakes? My mum has been making those ‘fairy cakes’ and ‘butterfly buns’ for decades, yet many think they are a new creation.

Of course we must export as many dreadful words and expressions as we buy in - not all will be welcome. I hear ‘chav’, ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘skint’ are all catching on.