[Charles Martel]

The British have little room to criticize us, given their love of using proper nouns without articles ("got cramp" and "in hospital" are but two examples of this offensive habit).

They really embrace that "rhyming slang" pestilence, too. As language butchery goes, that's a veritable Jack the Ripper.

[HIDEK6]

The British have little room to criticize us, given their love of using proper nouns without articles ("got cramp" and "in hospital" ...)

Your examples are common nouns.

[Nea Wood]

I’ve noticed that, too, that Brits say “in hospital.” But we say “in school.”

[Fiji Hill]

The British have little room to criticize us, given their love of using proper nouns without articles ("got cramp" and "in hospital" are but two examples of this offensive habit).

Several years ago, I read an article by Lord Conesford, a British writer, entitled "You Americans are Murdering the Language" which was published in Saturday Review of Literature in 1957. One of his beefs about American English was our use of "hospitalize"--he asked whether a patient who left the hospital to go home was "homized."

He also objected to the verbs "to package" and "to pre-package" and asked why we didn't simply use the verb "to pack" to describe the process of wrapping things up and putting them into packages. I figure that whatever his profession, the right and honorable Lord was not a librarian, or else he would have realized that "to package" and "to pre-package" are narrower terms which aid in the storage and retrieval of information.