The current controversy over those large black plastic bags which have been heavily taxed has highlighted the fact that, in adopting new vocabulary, we choose American English over British English. Even the British English words and expressions that we have used for years are now being replaced by Americanisms.

How is it happening? People in the street take their lead from people at the top: organisations, governments, and the continuous pushing of the media. Words and expressions get fed into the language used in everyday talk, and eventually they force out others that may have existed previously.

We see this with Maltese all the time: the word it-ticer has replaced the perfectly appropriate and wholly Maltese l-ghalliem, for example, and while it may be marked down as an error in examinations, almost everybody uses it in colloquial speech. Nor is it a snobbism, but the very opposite – in fact, the lower you go down the social scale, the more often you will find it used. Ticer is now a Maltese word.

When I wrote in protest against the tripling of the price of paraffin to the consumer, the considerable feedback I got included one or two remarks to the effect that the correct word is ‘kerosene’. I pointed out that officialdom can call it kerosene until they go hoarse, but that will not make it correct if they are using British English as opposed to American English. Kerosene and paraffin are not different products, but the same product in different languages.

I directed my would-be correctors to the nearest dictionary, which indicates clearly that ‘kerosene’ is American English for paraffin. Paraffin is British English. They are the same product. The Americans call petrol ‘gasoline’, but we haven’t felt an urge to do the same (yet). A few years ago, everybody used the word ‘paraffin’, until the British influence was very much dissipated to the point of disappearance, and suddenly something called ‘kerosene’ was being offered for sale.

I have to remark, though, that the only people I have heard use this word are officials of government. Everyone else continues to say ‘paraffin’. In Maltese, it was mistakenly corrupted into pitrolju doubtless from ‘petrol’, which is an entirely different product. The problem of how to differentiate between paraffin and petrol, in Maltese, was solved simply by using the English word for the latter, with confusion of vowels and liquid consonants to result in pitrol and pitlor. So paraffin it is. You can leave the word ‘kerosene’ to government officials and paraffin hawkers.

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Now we have ‘garbage bags’. They are all over the newspapers. They have even entered the Maltese language. When I ask for boroz ghaz-zibel in unfamiliar supermarkets, I am asked rhetorically: Garbigg begz? I shrug, and say Yes, wondering whether in some other aisle there might not be a ticer bulk-buying garbigg begs to beat the iko-tex, in between calculating whether she can afford that week’s ‘kerosene’.

When those black plastic bags first came on the market here, saving us from the daily muck of lining the dustbin with newspapers and putting it outside to be emptied by the rubbish collectors, we called them ‘dustbin liners’, because that is precisely what they are. I was still calling them dustbin liners until fairly recently, when I was finally overwhelmed by the influence of a household in which the other four members had long since succumbed to the all-pervasive influence of America, and unquestioningly called them ‘garbage bags’.

It had started some time before that, when I realised that shop assistants, with the passing of the years, no longer understood what I meant when I asked for ‘dustbin liners’ in English. So I would have to ask for them in Maltese: garbigg begs, not boroz ghaz-zibel. And now it is everywhere, and nobody says ‘dustbin liners’ anymore. The other day, my mother called to discuss the tax, and to remark that one of my sisters had stockpiled 10 years’ supply of ‘garbage bags’ at Sisa (narrowly escaping a TV news crew who might otherwise have filmed her haul), and even she called them ‘garbage bags’. She had always called them dustbin liners before. One does not even notice that one’s vocabulary is changing; it happens insidiously.

The odd thing is that nobody in Malta says ‘garbage’. Those who speak English say ‘rubbish’ – the word favoured in British English – and those who speak Maltese say iz-zibel, the correct Maltese word. We do not say ‘garbage bin’ as the Americans do, either – or ‘garbage can’, which is Australian English.

We use British English, and say ‘dustbin’. When speaking Maltese, we used to say il-landa taz-zibel, which is the expression I knew when I was growing up. Now this has been pushed out by a new Maltese word, dahstbin, with a very long ‘aah’ sound. We also say ‘rubbish collectors’ when we speak in English, and the wonderfully truncated taz-zibel when we speak Maltese.

So where in heaven’s name did the ‘garbage bags’ come from? Given our preferred terminology in related areas, they should be ‘dustbin bags’ or ‘rubbish bags’. I think I will stick to my irritatingly fustian ways, and call them precisely that. When I go to strange supermarkets, I will be really annoying and ask for the boroz ghaz-zibel – even if I end up as a one-woman fight against the disintegration of both languages.

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I moved out of my parents’ house long after it ceased to be necessary to line dustbins with newspapers before placing rubbish in them. In those early days, the new rubbish bags were sold with little paper-coated twists of wire to seal the top. But that does not mean to say that I did not observe (without participation) the daily dustbin chore as I was growing up.

Newspapers were saved in a little pile in the downstairs lavatory, the dustbin would be thickly lined with them, food scraps and the minimal packaging of those days would be scraped into it, and then it would be taken outside to the doorstep by my father as he left for work early in the morning. (Taking out the rubbish is a man’s job in traditional western European culture, and it is one tradition that I still respect.)

The rubbish truck would then come by, causing as much confusion as possible in the street, with the rubbish-collectors ringing various doorbells to see who had parked a car on the same corner outside our house every day, rendering the truck unable to turn. Occasionally, there would be the sound of a truck grinding against a car and an even greater outbreak of chaos.

The dustbins would be clattered and banged and thrown and dumped any which way, usually sideways so that they would roll down the street. The lids would be cast to the side and never be replaced on the bin. On windy days, flying dustbins (they were made of plastic by then – usually orange as this was the 1970s) would bounce against cars and then have to be retrieved from the middle of the road.

When the custom began of gathering the dustbins of an entire street at a single corner, by an advance party of rubbish-collectors, so that the truck would only have to make one stop, things became even messier – because, you see, the dustbins were not returned to their doorsteps, but would be dumped in a heap on the corner. So every morning, one householder would throw a blue fit about the corner meeting for dustbins on her doorstep, and the other householders would throw similar fits about having to go down the road to pick up their bins and hunt around for the missing lids.

And at that time, before there was awareness about such matters, the place was teeming with stray dogs which would knock over the full bins and scavenge around in the filth, spreading it all over the pavement. There were no street cleaners either, this being Sliema in the 1970s, and Sliema having been designated a punishment zone by Mintoff’s government.

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Incidentally, that is the proper use of the word ‘scavenge’. The men who collect our rubbish every morning are not scavengers, a word that sets my teeth on edge when I hear it used in this context. They are not scavenging about for rubbish in the way that, say, the residents of favelas do in Brazilian landfills. They are only collecting it. They are rubbish collectors, collecting bags in which rubbish has been placed.

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Do you notice the vital ingredient in the recipe for the 1970s rubbish collection system? Well, you would if you are not the Ta’ Xbiex local council, which recently popped a note through the letterbox of my office, instructing all Ta’ Xbiex residents to put out their rubbish between 10am and noon ONLY (underlined).

I scribbled a note on the circular, pointing out that in the modern world, most houses are empty between 10am and noon, and that the council appears to pre-suppose the existence of a stay-at-home wife in every dwelling who, moreover, is prepared to delay the start of her excursions to 10am every morning, so as to put out the rubbish before leaving. And then I did not send it. Coward.

Yes, that vital ingredient is the housewife, ready and waiting to bring the dustbin back inside. When I was growing up, almost each and every house in Milner Street had a woman at home during the day.

The advent of the commercial dustbin liner (the ‘rubbish bag’) effectively eliminated the need to put out a dustbin and so freed women from the need to wait around to bring the dustbin back inside. This freedom was short-lived and has now been eliminated by council diktats on putting out rubbish in the middle of the day, which is even more inconvenient than having to wait around to bring in the bin. All such diktats should be ignored, or at the very least protested against as being incompatible with a way of life in which all members of a household are out at work or school at that time of day.

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Garbage bags are essential commodities, given that putting out the bin is no longer an option. Though they should be taxed, to persuade people to use fewer of them (and this in turn persuades them towards another viable objective – cutting down on the waste they generate) the tax should not lead to prohibitive pricing. People have to use these bags. Biodegradable bags, which are weak, are an alternative only for those with small bins and little waste. The government has gone overboard in the wrong direction with this one.