That's Not English (2 page)

T
he idea that England and America are two countries separated by a common language is variously attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Regardless of who said it, this ubiquitous line trivializes the problem. I’ve known Americans who made entire careers in the Middle East on a few lines of Arabic and conducted affairs in Paris without enough French to fill an éclair. So why do Americans, who arrive in England with an entire language in common, have such a hard time fitting in? And why do English people, who once set up homes in every far-flung outpost of their empire, find America so foreign?

What underlies the seemingly superficial differences between English and American English are deep and historic cultural divisions, not easily bridged. An American who moves to England is like Wile E. Coyote running over a cliff into thin air. It isn’t a problem until he notices something is missing, and that
something is the ground under his feet. An unscientific survey has shown that it takes about six months for an average expatriate to plummet into the ravine.

Eight years after moving to London from New York, I’m still having Wile E. Coyote moments. English people get a kick out of Americans cheering their children on at the playground because they would only say “Good job” with reference to a child’s bowel movement. Americans are similarly bemused when the English shout “Well done!” because to them that’s nothing but an unsophisticated way to order meat. Americans are wary of anything described as a “scheme” because in American English the word has nefarious connotations, whereas the English will talk about their “retirement schemes” or their “payment schemes” without guile. An American friend of mine got a huge unintentional laugh at her company’s London office when she said, “I really have to get my fanny into the gym!” (If you don’t know what’s so funny about that, check
Mufti
.) You don’t even have to stray into scatological or sexual realms to cause offense. Saying “couch” (or worse, “settee”) instead of “sofa” is a class-baiting crime in some English households, but the only way to find this out is to trespass on the delicate sensibility. This particular social minefield does not exist for the American, who is allowed to bumble along in ignorance. But ignorance is not always bliss, as every expat learns.

The English abroad in America are less prone to such gaffes, since they have been exposed to American vocabulary and pronunciation through television, films, commercials, and other cultural exports for most of their lives. But landing in America can be overwhelming nonetheless. It isn’t just that Americans make certain assumptions about the English character; it’s also
that having your own assumptions about Americans constantly confronted and challenged can be exhausting at first. We underestimate the culture shock involved when traveling between English-speaking countries at our peril. Once the novelty wears off, homesickness hits hard and fast. You can take nothing for granted.

England and the United States exist in mutual admiration and antagonism. This tension won’t go away anytime soon, and it’s regularly stoked. The BBC was inundated with suggestions after asking the public to submit their most reviled Americanisms.
The New York Times
reported Americans, in contrast, to be “Barmy over Britishisms.” The differences in our language are most telling when it comes to vocabulary, which opens the door to a deeper exploration of how we think and who we are. The same word can have divergent, even opposite, meanings in England and America (
quite
,
proper
,
middle-class
). Some words exist in one English and not the other (
mufti
,
bespoke
,
dude
). There are words lionized by one country and reviled by the other (
whilst
,
awesome
,
shall
) and words that have connotations in one country that they lack in the other (
sorry
,
smart
,
ginger
). There are words that just sound
veddy
,
veddy
English, that Americans are more and more tempted to borrow willy-nilly, even when they don’t always know what they are getting into (
bloody
,
shag
,
bugger
,
cheers
,
gobsmacked
).

These differences may charm, annoy, or obsess English speakers, but one thing is sure: They mark us wherever we go. And that is a good thing. Differences in language contribute to individual and cultural identity. They are interesting, valuable, and fun in themselves, but they are also the blazes on the trail. If you ignore or fail to understand them, you might as well be
speaking a different language. You’ll certainly feel lost in the wilderness. This book is a guide to English and American cultural differences, through the lens of language: the words we use that say the most about us, and why. It is a cultural history in miniature, and an expatriate’s survival guide—from the United Kingdom, to the United States, and back again.

Joe Queenan once wrote that “Anglophilia, like pornography, is one of those things that are hard to describe but you know when you see them.” I’ve always been one of
those
Americans. It runs in families. My nana gave me a pop-up book about the royal family and told me stories about her family’s time in the Cotswolds while my grandfather enjoyed what had to be one of the cushiest postings of his air force career. At the age of five, I dragged my mother out of bed for a predawn viewing of Princess Diana’s wedding. I still remember the nightdress I wore for the occasion. Mom was the one who woke me sixteen years later with the terrible news from Paris. For a certain cohort of American women, unlikely or silly or embarrassing as it may seem, these events were childhood’s bookends. A hopeful and credulous part of us, awakened while watching Princess Diana’s walk down the aisle, died a little during her funeral cortege.

Today, a new generation is delighting royal watchers worldwide, and giving souvenir makers a renewed revenue stream. The English have a lot to be proud of, having recently celebrated the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Olympics on home soil, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and the birth of a future king. American Anglophilia is at an all-time high, too. You know it when you see it.

It has been more than three decades since my sentimental education at Nana’s knee. After studying nineteenth-century
British literature at colleges in America and England, marrying into an English/American family, and realizing the dream of becoming a dual citizen, let me tell you: Living in England really takes the edge off one’s Anglophilia. What I loved before was not England itself, but the
idea
of England. Now my feelings, while still positive, are more complicated, attached as they are to specific people, experiences, and the circumstances of daily life in London with my husband, Tom, and our young children, Anne and Henry. As a sympathetic soul said to me during my first, rocky transitional year, moving to a new country is
jolly hard
! An American in England will always feel like a foreigner, and not always entirely admired—or welcome. Which is fair enough. American expatriates are a dime a dozen, particularly in London, and have been for a long time. In Hugh Walpole’s
Portrait of a Man with Red Hair
, published in 1925, Harkness, an American expat on a train, is told by an Englishman, “If I had my way I’d make the Americans pay a tax, spoiling our country as they do.”

“
I
am an American,” says Harkness, faintly.

This may come as a surprise to Americans who have been to England on vacation, and spent a couple of madcap weeks seeking out everything they expected to find: legendary politeness and reserve, the much-vaunted stiff upper lip, Beefeaters, ravens, double-decker buses, infallible taxi drivers, Shakespeare, warm beer, pub lunches, and afternoon tea. Check, check, check, and check. Stereotypes confirmed, there is just enough time for a stop at Harrods before heading for Heathrow. Meanwhile, one of my English friends makes a compelling case that the English have more, culturally and temperamentally, in common with the Japanese than they do with Americans. That’s why it is possible to spend months, and even years, as an outsider in the country and
never penetrate beneath the surface to how people really live and think, and what their words actually mean. Though as time passes, one does begin to develop an inkling of just how much one doesn’t know, and this actually helps. The similarities in our English can be misleading. It’s the differences that give us direction and help us, finally, to know where we stand.

As late as the nineteenth century, it was feared that the two nations would lose their ability to communicate. Noah Webster predicted American English would one day be as different from the English spoken in England as Swedish and Dutch were from German. Thankfully, this never happened. What developed instead is a keen sibling rivalry. England plays the role of the cool older sister, trying to ignore the fact that pesky little America is now big enough to pin her to the wall.

Given their history, it should surprise no one that Americans were not always so enamored of Britishisms. In the early 1920s, H. L. Mencken sneered at English neologisms and the small class of “Anglomaniacs” who used them. He noted that the majority of Americans regarded everything English as affected, effeminate, and ridiculous. This, long before American moviegoers’ obsession with Hugh Grant and Daniel Craig, though it was the theater that would later supply untraveled Anglophiles with “a steady supply of Briticisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. . . . Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, PA, or Athens, GA, learned how to shake hands, eat soup, greet his friends, enter a drawing-room and pronounce the words
path
,
secretary
,
melancholy
, and
necessarily
in a manner that was an imitation of some American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what was done in Mayfair.” If this seems an unnecessarily cruel
assessment of the origins of Anglophilia, consider the source. Few partisans of American English have been as sure of themselves, or as committed to American individualism, as Mencken.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when British travelers could not praise American English enough. Relatively soon after America was founded, the English language spoken there sounded just archaic enough—free of the neologisms that corrupted that of their countrymen. But it wasn’t long before America had neologisms of its own—such as
happify
,
consociate
, and
dunderment
—that sounded preposterous to English ears. America was too new and too young to pose a threat to their culture and language.

There is little love for an Americanism now. From the time of the first “talkies” (which were often translated for British audiences in the early days of the movie invasion), anxiety about American English’s influence has spread. John Humphrys, venerable presenter of BBC Radio 4’s
Today
program, admitted that as much as the English like to tell themselves (and, even more, the French) that their language has become the world’s second language, they know that the lingua franca is actually American. Naturally, there is resentment that “our former colony has stolen our crown . . . The language is by rights ‘ours,’ so anything they might do to it is bound to be a debasement.” It’s no wonder that some people still think of the English spoken in England as the mother tongue, and the English spoken in America as its wayward child. But it isn’t true. Today’s English English, like American English, evolved as a dialect from sixteenth-century English, and neither can claim to be closer to the original.

What we are left with is the vanity of small differences, and we are more focused on them than ever. Greater access to travel
and international journalism might be expected to cause a flattening-out of such differences in language, but ironically it has only increased our awareness of them. Cross-pollination is largely self-conscious, whether we embrace or avoid it. The American market routinely remakes English-language books and television for American audiences. Harry Potter’s jumpers and biscuits become sweaters and cookies.
The Office
is remade with American actors (and their American teeth). Publishers and producers claim that they do this to make English exports more accessible. But many Americans resent it, and avidly ferret out the originals. Why would they, if they weren’t seeking entrée to the preoccupations, idiosyncrasies, and oddities of the other culture? Not to mention shamelessly borrowing words to enhance their cultural cachet—call it
Masterpiece Theatre
syndrome. Shows that survive the move to America more or less intact—like
Downton Abbey
—do so because they are inextricable from their cultural setting and that is the reason Americans love them so much. (Just as the English love quintessentially American shows like
The Wire
and
Breaking Bad
.) When will publishers and Hollywood come to realize that the differences are valuable in themselves, and stop tampering with them? We should celebrate them instead, and by “celebrate,” I don’t mean “imitate.”

In this book, I’ll correct some popular misconceptions about both England and America and explain the subtleties that elude the cursory look, or the tourist on a ten-day tour. One of the most important of these is what it means to say
England
versus
Britain
or
the United Kingdom
. Great Britain includes the countries of England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom includes not just Great Britain, but also Northern
Ireland. So only someone who is from England—the UK’s largest country, containing 84 percent of its population—is English. Someone who is British might be Scottish, Welsh, Irish (from Northern Ireland), or English. Similarly, Americans, while resigned to being called Yankees by the English, have a narrower definition of the word, and it differs regionally. Southern Americans use
Yankee
to describe Northerners, and Northerners use it to describe New Englanders—the only Americans who identify
themselves
as Yankees (for more on this, see
Yankee
). England and America are diverse countries with a lot of different local accents and dialects, not to mention regional differences in vocabulary, which it would be impossible to do individual justice to. Still, to the extent that it is possible to generalize about them, I’ll be doing just that. Anyone who would find out the truth has to start somewhere.