That's Not English (3 page)

I pledge not to play favorites—as is only fair when speaking of siblings. My loyalties, like my language, are transatlantic. I refuse to choose sides—at least not permanently. I also refuse to relinquish my American accent, even if I adopt a few new words and allow my syntax to shift and adapt. Using English spellings still feels wrong, if not exactly treasonous. My father-in-law understands; he retains his English accent almost four decades after moving to America, yet his siblings tease him for what they feel is a thorough defection. A small (American) child once told my mother-in-law, “I’m sorry about Mr. Moore’s disability,” meaning his funny accent, a kind of speech impediment few people had in Tucson, Arizona, in the 1980s. I would say expatriates can’t win, but it isn’t really true. I think we have the best of both worlds.

As a former book editor who specialized in finding and publishing British books for American readers, I know how
fruitful cultural tensions can be. I am a passionate and curious reader and observer of the way people talk, and the ways we understand—or misunderstand—one another. This subject is a moving target, and extremely subjective. You are bound to disagree with me at times. My hope is that this book will help Americans and the English communicate better, or at least understand why we don’t.

That’s Not English
is for you if you love language enough to argue about it; if you enjoy travel, armchair or otherwise; if you are contemplating a move to England or America; if you consider yourself an Anglophile; or if you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t a similarly great word for English people who love America. (
Americanophile
feels like a mouthful of nails, and
Yankophile
sounds truly disreputable.) This is a love letter to two countries that owe each other more than they would like to admit. God bless us, every one.

In which we find out why Americans really like
quite
and the English only quite like
really
.

W
hat harm could an innocent little adverbial modifier do? Look no further for evidence than
quite
, which has been the cause of confusion, unemployment, heartbreak, and hurt feelings, all because of a subtle—yet vital—distinction that is lost on Americans, to the consternation of the English.

Both nations use
quite
to mean “completely” or “totally.” This meaning dates to around 1300, and applies when there is no question of degree. If you say a person is “quite nude” or a bottle is “quite empty,” it might sound oddly formal to the American ear, but it will cause no controversy or misunderstanding. Nude is nude. Empty is empty. The trouble begins when
quite
is used to modify an adjective that is gradable, like “attractive,” “intelligent,” or “friendly.” For, then, the English use
quite
as a qualifier,
whereas Americans press it into service as an emphasizer. In English English,
quite
means “rather” or “fairly,” and is a subtle way of damning with faint praise. To an American,
quite
simply means “very,” and amps the adjective. No subtlety there.

Is anyone surprised? The stereotypes of the discerning Brit and the hyperbolic American have as much currency now as they ever did. American adjectives have always gone up to eleven. English visitors to a young America were amazed by the tall language they heard—words like
rapscallionly
,
conbobberation
, and
helliferocious
. Such words seem outlandish today only because of their unfamiliarity. Whether or not they were widely used in the Wild West, they made Americans seem badass. Everyone, not least the milquetoasts back east, wanted to believe in an America that was unleashed and not quite housebroken.

These words beggar
awesome
, a widely derided modern example of American hyperbole. Once, only God could be awesome. Now even a mediocre burrito qualifies. It wouldn’t be so bad if
awesome
hadn’t been aggressively exported. A post on urbandictionary.com rings with contempt, describing
awesome
as “a ‘sticking plaster’ word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary.” Here,
sticking plaster
is the dead giveaway to the poster’s nationality.

Another Englishman who has come out, bravely and publicly, against
awesome
is a poet who works in a Los Angeles bookstore (imagine!). John Tottenham’s campaign to stamp out the word
awesome
(which he told the
Daily Mail
was “bogus”) extends to an “Anti-Awesome oration” and some snazzy bumper stickers. He devoted an almost American level of enthusiasm to the task before pulling himself up short at having T-shirts made, which would have been taking it too far. He was the one who
chose to live in LA, after all. You can’t very well move to the beach and complain about the sand.

American enthusiasm was once an object of admiration. An English novelist named Mrs. Henry De La Pasture was quoted in
The
New York Times
in 1910: “The Americans have been obliged to invent a new verb for which we have no use over here—‘to enthuse.’ Why don’t we enthuse? And why, if we do conjugate this verb in secret, are we so afraid to let it be known? . . . We fear terribly to encourage ourselves or others. The people over there are not afraid. They let themselves go individually and independently over what they like or admire, and pour forth torrents of generous praise which we should shrink from voicing unless we were quite sure that everybody else agreed with us, or unless the object of our admiration had been a long time dead.” The English may detect a note of condescension here, but an American won’t.

Americans overdo, overstate, overenthuse—it has ever been and ever will be. So it’s tempting to make fun of Americans for press-ganging
quite
, an unassuming qualifier, to their own eager ends. But you’d be wrong. When
quite
modifies a gradable adjective, the UK usage—not the American—is the deviation. The American use of
quite
to mean “very” began around 1730, whereas the English sense of
quite
as a qualifier wasn’t recorded until more than one hundred years later, in 1845. And it has been causing international incidents ever since.

An English author receives an editorial letter from her American editor who “quite” likes her new book. (Insult!)

An American student finds it impossible to get a job in the UK based on the glowing recommendation letters submitted by her professors, whose highest praise is “quite intelligent and hard-working.” (Shock!)

An English houseguest confesses to being “quite hungry” and is served a steak of punishing size by an oblivious American friend. (Horror!) And so it goes.

It doesn’t really matter who started it—the root of this misunderstanding over
quite
is a difference in the way Americans and the English habitually express themselves. As anthropologist Kate Fox explains in her fascinating book
Watching the English
, “our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement. Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal,” the English feign indifference. “The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; . . . a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; . . . and an unforgivably stupid misjudgment is ‘not very clever.’” Anything that would warrant streams of superlatives in another culture is pretty much covered by “nice.”

What is an American interlocutor to do? Look no further for advice than Debrett’s, the self-proclaimed “trusted source on British social skills, etiquette and style . . . originally founded as the expert on British aristocracy.” Debrett’s warns against mistaking understatement for underreaction: “read between the lines and you’ll find the missing drama and emotion.”

But how can Americans, renowned for their obtuseness, be expected to read between the lines when the English consider “Quite” a complete sentence? Would it be easier if the English learned to take the American
quite
with a grain of Maldon salt? Quite.

In which we find a far more stable class hierarchy in England, where class and cash are but loosely linked.

C
atherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is so happily ensconced in the heart of England’s royal family now, so beloved by practically everyone, it would be possible to forget the tabloid nastiness that erupted after her 2007 breakup with Prince William. It was said that the prince broke it off, in part, because of Ms. Middleton’s background—in particular, her mother’s overly obvious glee at the potential match, and Mrs. Middleton’s subroyal behavior, which allegedly included chewing gum and using the word
toilet
(see
Toilet
). Snobs reveled in the knowledge that Mrs. Middleton had once worked as a flight attendant, and friends of William’s were said to have intoned “Doors to manual” in Kate’s presence. To his credit, the prince and his aides dismissed these rumors in the
strongest terms. But the English media are notoriously prone to public shaming, and the way they interpreted the breakup surely says more about the English fascination with class than it does about Catherine or her solidly middle-class family, in particular her mother, who always appears impeccable.

Class warfare supposedly died out years ago in England. Back in 1997, former Labour MP John Prescott (now Lord Prescott) famously declared, “We’re all middle class now.” But don’t you believe it. As cultural commentator Peter York has said, although “everywhere has a class system . . . it’s our obsession in the sense that race is the American obsession.”

Productivity plummeted in April 2013 when the BBC’s class calculator began making the rounds of social networking sites. The calculator was part of a larger project, the Great British Class Survey. A brainchild of BBC Lab UK, it aimed to find out whether the traditional hierarchy of “working,” “middle,” and “upper” classes still existed and whether or not social class “even matters” in twenty-first-century Britain. They got their answer when five million people logged on to find out where they stood and proceeded to argue over the methodology that had divided the nation into seven distinct classes with new names: Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Traditional Working Class, Emergent Service Workers, and the “Precariat,” the “poorest, most deprived class.”

The class calculator released to the public (although apparently derived from research conducted privately with much longer questionnaires) based its scores on only five questions. The first three were measures of cold, hard cash: income, renting vs. owning a home (and of what value), and amount of savings. The final two questions in the class calculator—preferred leisure
activities and the variety of professions within one’s social circle—were not weighted heavily enough to counteract the influence of the crass cash-flow questions. This was controversial because the English consider how
much
money one has a weak indicator of class—how it was acquired and what one chooses to do with it matter far more. I experimented by giving identical answers for the “friends” and “culture” questions, varying only my answers to the financial questions, and was assessed at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum: first “Elite” and then “Emergent Service Worker.” So it’s easy to see why the class calculator was considered a blunt instrument by many.

A majority of both Americans and English people describe themselves as middle-class. However, as we have seen, just because they use the same words doesn’t mean that Americans and the English are thinking the same way. In America, the middle class is more an economic category than a state of mind, and membership in it is not predicated on as many complicated and specific class markers. Where Americans shop, what they buy, and how they entertain themselves are only mild predictors of whether they will identify as middle-class. The same is not true in England, where membership in the middle class is more dependent upon being the product of specific types of families and schools, and the shared tastes that one develops as a result.

The artist Grayson Perry, in his documentary
All
in the Best Possible Taste
, divided the English middle class into two tribes with different preoccupations. Both tribes are defined by their consumption, but whereas one is more about shopping and identifying with known brands (clothing, cars), the other defines itself by education and ideas, primarily consuming culture
(performances, exhibits). Members of both tribes share a similar anxiety about appearances and the desire, above all, to be appropriate and “get it right.” In short, both branches of the middle class care deeply what others think and are liable to try too hard—and to disagree strenuously about what signifiers mark the middle.

In my experience these tribes are far from distinct. Both culture and commerce have a place in the middle-class heart, as do peremptory judgments about how others might choose to spend their time and money. But American and English attitudes toward the middle class are very different. In brief, the English middle class likes to make fun of itself, and comes in for a lot of mocking, both good-natured and otherwise, from other classes. In England, making fun of the middles is a national sport. Americans are far more serious—and sentimental—about their middle class. Why? It all comes down to social mobility and self-consciousness.

There is less social mobility in England, so the middle class is more stable and secure from generation to generation. It is seen by outsiders as quite privileged—and possibly more than a little bit smug. Because of this, its members are far less worried about losing their place in society than they are about drawing the enmity of other classes. The middle needs approval to enjoy the spoils of its position (Barbour jackets, cottages in the country, organic produce boxes, fancy cheeses, Range Rovers—aka Chelsea tractors—Farrow & Ball’s twenty shades of white paint, and the like), so they mustn’t ruin it for themselves by boasting or appearing to strive, but instead make themselves as charming and likable as possible. In England, this is achieved through self-deprecation—jokes at one’s
own expense. Sharp-eyed observers have noted that at one extreme, this self-deprecation can become boastful, as it shows one is so comfortable, so confident, that one can choose to appear less so. The delicate art of the humble-brag was made for the English middle class.

In England, mocking the middle is a way to distance yourself from it while still enjoying its comforts. Friends of mine who are indisputably among the elite in England, whether by virtue of hard work, birth, or both, are fond of doing down
(disparaging) the middle class as if from a lower point on the socioeconomic ladder. It takes on a pejorative ring. “That’s so middle-class,” they’ll snort—meaning boring, bourgeois, predictable, uncool. As one man wrote before taking the BBC class quiz: “If I’m middle class, I’ll fill a 4 x 4 with organic pesto and drown myself.” The English can afford to be lighthearted about their middle class, knowing all the while they form the backbone of the country, providing political and economic stability. As David Boyle pointed out in
The
Guardian
, “Without the middle classes there is no hope for the poor either . . . The alternative to a thriving middle class is a new tyranny by the few who own everything.” As an American reading this, I felt a queasy sense of recognition. Many Americans fear that this is exactly the direction the US economy is taking, and their fears seem justified.

In America, where there is no proscription against hustle, and birth to a certain kind of family is no guarantee, people aspire very earnestly to join the middle class, and those on the inside actively fear falling out. This is a real possibility. According to a recent survey by Pew, the number of Americans self-identifying as lower-class or lower-middle-class increased by 25
percent between 2008 and 2012. The greatest increase was among the young. Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, having come of age in a recession, were far more likely to place themselves in the lower brackets. Three-quarters of Americans said that it was harder to advance than it had been a decade ago, and parents no longer believed that their children would grow up to live better than they did.

These anxieties are central to life in America now. The middle class is the country’s largest political interest group, and politicians both liberal and conservative constantly appeal to it, defining it even more broadly than demographers would—beyond a mere income category. The term
middle class
has become symbolic of aspiration itself. During the last presidential election, in a campaign stop in Parma, Ohio, President Obama made it clear that his personal definition included the poor: “I want to say . . . that when I talk about the middle class, I’m also talking about poor folks that are doing the right thing and trying to get to the middle class. The middle class is also an attitude. It’s not just about income, it’s about knowing what’s important . . . your values and being responsible and looking after each other and giving back.” It is essential that an American politician appear as middle-class as possible, and bring as many voters into that circle as he or she can, because belonging to the middle class is the
right thing
to aspire to.

In England, politicians have a difficult balancing act. They, too, must appeal to the middle-class majority, but they must do it while trying not to appear too middle-class themselves. They would risk alienating not only working-class voters, but also many in the middle who roll their eyes at inherited privilege even as they enjoy it themselves. Because in England,
membership in the Establishment carries not only positive connotations, like working hard, wanting the best for one’s children, and stretching culturally, but also uneasy ones, like the possibility of the better-off conspiring against the worse. Lawrence James, in
The Middle Class: A History
, gives evidence that audible trappings of status have lapsed. Politicians who have been to private school and “Oxbridge” (Oxford or Cambridge universities) typically hide their posh accents to avoid charges of condescension because “in public life it is now a handicap to sound even remotely like Bertie Wooster.” The last fifty years have seen the rise of not only Margaret Thatcher, who never let anyone forget she was a greengrocer’s daughter, but Ted “Grocer” Heath and John Major—the first prime minister not to have attended college (or, as the English say, “gone to university”). In fact, David Cameron is the first Tory
toff
(member of the upper class) England has elected prime minister in a generation.

In England, because class is so much more than an income category, it usually takes more than one generation for a family to achieve true class mobility. A family might earn enough to place them in the middle, but lingering working-class accents and tastes can be a sign that their roots—and refusal to put on airs that would be seen through anyway—are a source of pride. The desire of members of the English middle class to appear less posh has even given rise to “mockney”—a fake Cockney accent used by middles to downplay their origins and borrow some working-class cred. Tom Heyden, a twenty-five-year-old university graduate from a London suburb, writing in response to the class calculator, admitted most of his school friends did this. “I went to a private school. It wasn’t the type of school with
Downton Abbey
accents. Many of the kids talked more like the crack
dealers from gritty dramas.” You aren’t supposed to believe these put-on accents, but you are supposed to buy into the de facto rejection of certain
naff
(silly) attributes of the middle class, like caring about accents.

I think it’s safe to say that Americans on a similar class journey take on the trappings of the middle class as soon as possible, and with fewer negative social consequences. It helps that these days, although regional distinctions persist in American accents, class distinctions have largely disappeared. (No one in New York today speaks like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the quintessential New York aristocrat of the early twentieth century.) The middle class in America has historically taken its role as the backbone of the country and the keeper of its ideals very seriously. Yet the middle is shrinking. The fluidity of social mobility in the United States is like a roller coaster—exhilarating when you’re up, and nauseating when you’re down. But the reason the middle class is beloved—not mocked—by those within and without, is that hope springs eternal. If you’re down today, you could be up tomorrow. As James Fallows wrote in the
National Journal
, “Because I’m middle class, I have something in common with my neighbors and fellow citizens. The United States has been at its best politically and economically when we have viewed other members of society as ‘us’ rather than ‘them.’”

This explains why Americans have always loved Kate Middleton so much, while England was busy resisting her charms until the moment it became clear she was the chosen one. Americans can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want a middle-class commoner—one of
us
rather than one of
them
—for a queen. Interestingly, though, many English women of similar age and
class to the Duchess of Cambridge would admit to having, at least once, imagined filling her shoes. “It could have been any one of us,” said an English friend, sounding, for one unguarded moment, like a little girl in a princess dress—or an American. Kate had America at “hello” because, let’s face it: It’s hard to think of a more stylish way to fall out of the middle
class.