Keep out bad EuroEnglish

More than once while getting news from a British or Irish source, we've noticed a tendency for the word "spend" to be used as a noun. For instance, references to the government's level of spend. Shouldn't that be spending? We suspect there is a tendency on the other side of the Atlantic to think of corruptions of the Queen's English as originating in the US but this looks like a case of the opposite, because we were newly horrified while flicking through the dead tree version of the NYT to see an ad for PeopleSoft make its pitch to managers of company "spend." Here's PeopleSoft's website making the same awful usage

PeopleSoft Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) connects suppliers to your enterprise in real time to control all categories of spend

As far as we can tell, PeopleSoft is an American company, so we can't trace where exactly this Severely Abusive Rendering of Spend (SARS) originated. But we're on the case.