The Mother Tongue (39 page)

In the late 1940s, the London
Daily Mail
ran an article discussing American expressions that would be “positively incomprehensible” to the average English person. These included
commuter, seafood, rare
as applied to meat,
mean
in the sense of nasty,
dumb
in the sense of stupid,
intern, dirt road,
and
living room.
Putting aside the consideration that the
Daily Mail
must have had a very low opinion of its readers to conclude that they could not surmise the meaning of
seafood
and
dirt road
even if they hadn't heard them before, the simple fact is that all those terms are now known throughout Britain and several of them—
seafood, commuter, rare meat
—are now established as the invariable words for those items. There will no doubt always be a substantial pool of words that will be largely unshared by the two countries. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the pool is growing. As the
Daily Mail
example shows, what happens is that the unfamiliar words tend to become familiar over time and then are replaced by other new words.

The suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches in the way that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian seems to me to ignore the very obvious consideration that communications have advanced a trifle in the intervening period. Movies, television, books, magazines, record albums, business contacts, tourism—all these are powerfully binding influences. At the time of writing, a television viewer in Britain could in a single evening watch
Neighbours,
an Australian soap opera,
Cheers,
an American comedy set in Boston, and
EastEnders,
a British program set among cockneys in London. All of these bring into people's homes in one evening a variety of vocabulary, accents, and other linguistic influences that they would have been unlikely to experience in a single lifetime just two generations ago. If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should be not that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.

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