3am In The Morning

When the 3-part finale of the latest series of doctor who aired, a friend of mine complained that Russell T. Davies put the phrase '3am in the morning' in the mouth of a fictional American news anchor. The line of argument was this: Americans don't talk that way, so Davies must be poking fun at Americans.

I was sure I'd heard Real Live Americans using this construction, but couldn't provide any actual examples and began to think that maybe my fandom had clouded my judgment. It bugged me a little, but not quite enough to really go looking for it. I noticed it in natural speech while visiting with family yesterday, but don't have a solid recollection of the details.

But now I've found proof: At the opening of this segment of Friday's installment of Talk of the Nation on NPR, host Ira Flatow uses the exact phrase '3am in the morning'. I'm sure that there's some amount of scripting that goes on in preparing radio programs like Talk of the Nation, but I doubt that it's scripted to that level of detail. And even if it is, it's likely that the person responsible for the scripting is a native speaker of some variety of North American English.

Now, it's entirely possible that Davies was still making fun of Americans, singling out a construction sometimes regarded as annoying. But if so, he's doing it with some degree of subtlety and craft. It's also possible that this construction is present in various varieties of British English as well, and Davies wrote the line because the construction is part of his grammar. I could ask him, but I doubt he'd return my email, since he's rather busy writing and producing really excellent television.