Across the Pond Read online

  I once rang an American colleague and reached his voice mail, which announced: “Hi, this is Mike and Marie. We do not reply to silly questions.” Perhaps they had been besieged by callers asking them how many triangular pink objects they had in the house, or how much it cost to rent a lawn mower in Kuala Lumpur. Later I realised he had said “survey questions.” Americans who are asked by immigration officers to state the purpose of their visit on arriving in the United Kingdom should be advised that some American pronunciations of “tourism” can sound quite like “terrorism.” In fact, the public speeches of George W. Bush seemed to many of the British to be constantly warning against the evils of tourism. Since Bush was scarcely the most cosmopolitan president to grace the White House, this might have reflected his true opinion. Perhaps he was running the words “tourism” and “terrorism” together for reasons of economy. There can also be problems when travelling from Europe to America, since prospective visitors to the United States are now required to complete a form declaring whether they have ever been involved in committing genocide. It would be interesting to note the official response to “Can’t remember” or “Not for quite a while.”

  The British and the Americans, George Bernard Shaw famously observed, are divided by the same language. As one who belonged to neither nation, he could be dispassionate about the matter. In fact, the differences can be exaggerated. It is true, as the old song has it, that Americans say “tomato” and the British say “tomahto,” but nobody in Britain says “potahto.” However, many Americans incorrectly pronounce the name “Edinburgh” to rhyme with “Marlboro.” This is particularly confusing, since the British pronounce the word “Marlborough” in a way that rhymes with the correct pronunciation of “Edinburgh.” British and American types of English sound alike but are also different, which is true of the two cultures as a whole. Their ways are both strange and similar to each other, a condition that Freud knew as the uncanny. It is uncanny to see something which looks familiar in outlandish guise, or to see what is foreign as though it were routine.

  Every now and then, an American will reveal by a casual word or gesture that he or she is more alien than you imagined. This is rather like those science fiction movies in which the extraterrestrials appear in convincing human guise, but betray by some well-nigh imperceptible blunder—a word slightly mispronounced, a coffee cup held at a bizarre angle, a tiny drop of green blood—that they are not what they seem. At this point, a sinisterly dissonant chord will be heard on the soundtrack. In the same way, Americans can appear convincingly human to the British, only to reveal in a casual aside that they do not know how to boil an egg, brew a pot of tea, or understand the meaning of the word “fortnight.” Their true otherness then flashes out in all its mind-numbing horror.

  Everyone knows that when a British schoolteacher asks his boys to get out their rubbers, he is inviting them to have their erasers ready to hand, not about to give them a lesson in contraception. British people who live in flats do not set up home in burst tires. The word “bum” in Britain means buttocks, not vagrant. Americans might be interested to hear that when a British friend tells them he is going to bum a fag, he means that he is about to cadge a cigarette. An Englishman who gets through twenty fags a day is not necessarily a promiscuous homosexual. To say “I’ll call you Wednesday” in British English does not mean that I shall telephone you on Wednesday, but that I shall refer to you by the name Wednesday, even if your actual name happens to be Roger or Roberta. In British English, braces keep your trousers up as well as keeping your teeth straight.

  Keywords

  Not all Americans know that the following words and phrases are fairly distinctive to their own brand of English: weird, awesome, reach out to, feel comfortable with, have a hard time, big time, way too much, miracle, dream, buy into, gross, closure, impact (as a transitive verb), heal, like, flunk, scary, facility, structure, blown away, I appreciate it, zero in, kind of, issue (for problem), focused, respected, determine, freaking, roil, America, momentarily, at this time, barf, kids, meet with, share with, number one, craft (as a verb), family, hacked off, bottom line, out there, bunch, totally, hero, excited, garner, aggressive (used positively), off of, empower.

  Some of these terms (“weird,” for example) have migrated to some extent into British English, as American speech tends to do. Another obvious example is the word “like,” repeated every four seconds or so by young Americans, and now increasingly by other English speakers as well. It is rumoured that you can now find tombstones in the States reading: “To Our Beloved Son, Brother and Like Husband.” There are also proposals to modernise certain time-worn slogans to “In Like God We Trust” and “My Country Like ’Tis of Thee.” There will no doubt soon be headlines in The Washington Post reading: “I Was Like ‘Oh My God!’ Says President of Harvard.” The pathologically compulsive use of the word “like” has much to do with a postmodern aversion to dogmatism. “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly autocratic, whereas “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds suitably tentative and non-doctrinaire. “Totally” is another potentially contagious Americanism, as in “Is my husband dead, doctor?” “Totally.”

  Even though some of the words I have listed have infiltrated the speech of other English-speaking nations, most of them are still a lot more common in the USA than in the UK, and some of them are scarcely to be heard outside the States at all. If the word “awesome” were banned from American speech, airplanes would fall from the skies, cars would lurch wildly off freeways, elevators would shudder to a halt between floors, and goldfish would commit suicide by leaping despairingly from their bowls. Yet other speakers of English use it very little, if at all. The British do not commonly say “meet with,” “reach out to,” “stay focused,” or “your respected college” (which sounds slightly unctuous to non-American ears). They do not zero in, craft a proposal, desire golden hamsters to be empowered, have a hard time understanding something, ask to be given a break, or tackle a situation aggressively, unless by the latter they mean taking a machine gun to it. Using the word “aggressive” to mean admirably robust, a speech habit which does not reflect particularly well on American culture, sounds almost as odd to the British as complimenting someone on being as ugly as sin. The American use of the word “scary” instead of “frightening” or “alarming” sounds childish to British ears, as though one were to talk about one’s bottie rather than one’s buttocks. To call someone “driven” is a compliment in the States but a criticism in Britain.

  “Empower” is a peculiarly American word, and despite being much overused has its virtues. Without really intending to, it challenges the familiar liberal misconception that power is a bad thing. On the contrary, power is an excellent thing, as long as it is exercised by the right people for the right reasons. Only those who have enough of the stuff already can afford to be so disparaging about it. Power is not always oppressive, as some leftists seem to imagine, any more than authority is always to be resisted. There are beneficial forms of power as well as malign ones. There is the authority of those who are seasoned in the fight for justice, as well as the authority that ejects you from a restaurant for not wearing a tie.

  Most speakers of British English do not say “a bunch of air,” speak of money as the bottom line, or seek closure. “At this time” is not used to mean right now. Things are ascertained, not determined. The British say “It must be,” whereas Americans tend to say “It has to be.” You can feel comfortable with something in Britain, but nothing like as often as in America. You would not generally say “We feel comfortable using this taxi company,” any more than you would ask someone whether they felt comfortable with the idea of being scourged till the blood ran down their thighs. Your actions may influence a situation, but they cannot impact it, just as you can protest against a ruling but not protest it. To do something momentarily in Britain is to do it for a few moments only, not to do it very soon. This is why it sounds curious to British ears to speak of momentarily cutting
your head off, or momentarily ploughing your way through War and Peace.

  Americans say “Excuse me” when they accidentally get in your way, whereas the British say “Sorry.” They reserve “Excuse me” for either trying to squeeze past someone, or buttonholing a stranger on the street. One knows one is back in the United Kingdom when everyone is constantly saying “sorry” for no reason whatsoever. When a friend of mine is asked by a waiter what he would like to order, he cannot help starting his answer with the word “sorry,” as though he is distraught at putting the restaurant to the trouble of relieving him of his money. If someone slams rudely into you in London, you say “sorry.” No doubt the British will soon be apologising for being stabbed in the street.

  What you say in Britain when you don’t hear what someone says depends on your social class. The working class say “Aye?”, the lower middle class “Pardon?”, the middle class “Sorry?” and the upper class “What?” Lower-middle-class people whisper furtively in public, the middle classes speak at normal volume, and the upper classes bray. It belongs to upper-class self-assurance to assume that you have the right to say what you like as loudly as you like, rather as noblemen once had the right to hang revolting peasants or deflower their brides on their wedding night. One is thus forced to overhear the conversation of the well-bred, though these days in Britain plenty of people are only too glad to hear what you are saying. Strangers who used to try to conceal the fact that they were eavesdropping on you have stopped pretending and just shamelessly listen in, occasionally with their hand cupped to their ear. No doubt they will soon be asking you irritably to speak up. Similarly, there was a time when the people at the next table to you in a restaurant used to pretend that they were not staring inquisitively at your food when it arrived. Nowadays they are more likely to stroll over to your table and peer open-mouthed over your shoulder. They might even take photographs of your meal on their cell phone and send them to their friends.

  Nobody in Britain zeroes in or stays focused. Though they occasionally get excited, the word is less common than it is in the States, where people quite often say things like “It’s fun, it’s exciting, I love it.” Enthusiasm in Britain is regarded as mildly vulgar. In the seventeenth century, it was thought to be responsible for the beheading of a king. This is why the British do not usually say “I love it,” unless they are talking about pie and chips or seeing their boss fall down a manhole. Americans, however, are embarrassingly spendthrift in their use of the word “love.” One of my children once attended a junior high school in the American Midwest, where the principal would come on the public address system at the end of each school day with a grim list of warnings and prohibitions, rounded off with a cheery “And don’t forget—we love ya!” It wouldn’t happen at Eton. (The right-wing geography master at the school used to gaze out of the classroom window at the first appearance of a snowflake and sneer to the students “Global warming, huh?”) “Love” in British English is a word to be wheeled out only on special occasions, rather like “genitalia,” “prosopopoeia,” or “you unspeakable little shit.” One can contrast this with the wisdom of the American self-help guru Joe Vitale, who recommends increasing one’s business by looking over one’s mailing list and “loving each name.”

  All the same, there is much to be admired in the emotional frankness and directness of Americans. At the very least, it saves a lot of tedious conversational spadework, a phrase used by a character in P. G. Wodehouse when he realises that the person to whom he is speaking does not understand the word “pig.” At best, it belongs with Americans’ warmth and honesty. It is this honesty which leads some Americans to regard the British as devious and hypocritical, even when they are being nothing of the kind. To be reserved is not necessarily to be two-faced. Americans sometimes suspect that the British are being deceitful when they are really just being quiet, or that they are craftily concealing their thoughts when they haven’t an idea in their heads.

  In Britain, you do not generally buy into an idea. That Americans buy into ideas and proposals all the time suggests just how much the life of the mind is modelled on the stock market. A bathroom in Britain is not a facility, nor is a building a structure. The proud phrase “World’s tallest structure” sounds faintly comic to British ears. The British sometimes speak of children as “kids,” but they would rarely do so in a newspaper headline or TV news report. This would be almost as inappropriate as the president publicly declaring that China sucks, or a physician talking to you about your ass. The same applies to “guys” or “cops,” terms which few British television journalists would use on camera, but which they might employ when it was turned off. The British use the rather beautiful word “children” far more often than Americans do, who tend to prefer the ugly, demeaning monosyllable “kids.” It is surprising that a nation so scrupulous about political correctness should be content to regard its offspring as small smelly goats. Perhaps portraits of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus should be renamed “Madonna and Kid.” Clinics could specialise in kid psychology. Wordsworth’s line “The Child is Father of the Man” could be rewritten as “The Kid is Old Man of the Guy.”

  I include “family” in the list of typical American words not because Europeans spring miraculously from their own loins and are ignorant of any such institution, but because the term is more central to American discourse than it is elsewhere. It is used much more often in advertisements and political speeches than it is in Europe. A British politician would not typically refer to “Britain’s families,” whereas the phrase “America’s families” crops up regularly in the States. To mention people’s families is among other things to remind them that they have a number of vulnerable young lives dependent on them, and thus should think twice before behaving rashly. Appeals to the family are almost always right-wing. Stalin, a devout moral conservative, spoke with some satisfaction of having millions of little states at his disposal in the Soviet Union, by which he meant millions of families. Today, we might add millions of little consumer units. The British buy and sell houses, while the Americans buy and sell homes. “Home” is a homelier word than “house.” You go to someone’s house in Britain, but to their home in the United States. “Home” to British ears has vaguely negative connotations. It is a place where you put old people, stray dogs and orphans.

  American English can sometimes sound oddly informal to the British, and at other times too straitlaced and well upholstered. The United States is the abode of opaque academic jargon, but also of the raw, racy and in-your-face. It finds it hard to evolve a kind of language which is both easy and elegant. It sometimes suspects, wrongly, that to be clear you have to be plain, and that to be stylish is to be effete. We can appeal to de Tocqueville once more, who notes that American language is clear and dry, “without the slightest ornament,” but that it quickly turns pompous and bombastic when its speakers attempt a more poetic style. When this happens, he remarks, Americans can never say anything simply, which is true of their pretentious business or academic jargon today. Bombast, one might claim, is the flipside of an excessive plainness. It is the rhetorical mode of those who are accustomed to unadorned prose.

  There can be an alluring courtesy about American speech, along with a rather portentous solemnity. Many years ago, a team of students from Yale arrived in England to debate with a team from Manchester. The Yale captain rose in the debating chamber and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m from Yale: Y for Youth, A for Ambition, L for Loyalty, E for Enterprise.” “Thank Christ he doesn’t come from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” an Englishman at the back was heard to mutter. American English is full of edifying, chivalric, hand-on-heart words like pride, trust, honour, faith, loyalty, service, obligation, responsibility, our brave men and women in uniform, and so on. In some ways, it is the language of top-hatted, frock-coated Victorian England.

  So the formal and informal sit cheek by jowl in American English. On the one hand, road signs reading “Wrong Way—Go Back,” �
��Ped Xing” or “Don’t Block the Box” are more startlingly idiomatic than anything one would find in the stiffer-lipped United Kingdom. Perhaps the British could take a leaf out of the U.S. book in this respect and have road signs reading “Bloody Great Pothole Somewhere Up Ahead.” (There are, incidentally, some curiously cowardly road signs in Scotland reading “Beware of Sheep.”) As far as informality goes, American publishers tend to favour chattily colloquial book titles such as Phobia: How I Learnt to Conquer My Fear of People Who Have Squeaky Voices and Are Under Five Foot Eight Inches Tall.

  On the other hand, American English can have a rather quaint, earnestly Victorian ring to it, as in “I appreciate your patience, sir, and will make a commitment to you,” which was once said to me by an American student. In Britain, this would probably be taken as sardonic. People in Britain do not say “I appreciate it.” They simply mutter something shy and unintelligible. Perhaps it was this kind of formal language de Tocqueville had in mind when he remarked that Americans expatiate rather than talk, speaking to you (as Queen Victoria famously complained of Gladstone) as though they are addressing a public meeting. The States may be technologically advanced, but its speech can be charmingly elaborate and old-fashioned. As a country, it is both archaic and avant-garde. Some of its beliefs are only a couple of hundred years old, whereas others date back to the first century AD.

  Americans tend to lapse into the present tense when speaking of past events much more than the British do, as in “I’m in the kitchen and there’s this tremendous bang and I dive under the table.” Perhaps this reflects a present-oriented society. “There’s this tremendous bang” is also typically American; the British would probably say “a tremendous bang.” “He flunked math,” or “No determination on that question has been achieved at this moment in time,” are almost as foreign-sounding in Glasgow or Brighton as Sieg Heil or la plume de ma tante. British people use the word “dream,” of course, but nowhere is it as current as in the United States, except among psychoanalysts. “My hopes and dreams” trips off the American tongue as glibly as the dreary clichés “at the end of the day” and “over the moon” issue from British lips. “Dream” in anti-idealist Britain is more likely to mean illusion than vision. In America, by contrast, the word comes accompanied by a mistiness of the eyes and the distant sound of swooping violins.