Across the Pond (3 page)

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.

“Miracle” is another term excessively bandied about in the States, a country in which it is hard to fall into a few inches of water and clamber instantly out again without someone branding your survival miraculous. The United States is also crammed with heroes from coast to coast, some of them having attained that title on the slimmest of pretexts, whereas the British are for the most part as embarrassed by heroism as they are by histrionic outbursts of emotion. They would not suppose that it was heroic, as opposed to tragic, to die by having an aircraft slam into your office. Nor are all soldiers who fall in battle heroes. Some of them are, while others are perpetrators of war crimes and should be arraigned rather than applauded. Americans also tend to be rather obsessive about role models, which nobody else on the planet seems to be. It goes with their admiration for the idea of leadership. There are plenty of us who would much rather follow, preferably a long way behind.

If I have included “America” in the list of words more common in the United States than Britain, it is not for the obvious reason that Americans, like anyone else, are bound to mention their country quite a lot. It is rather that they use the word America (as in “Good Morning, America!”, “a very fine American,” “my fellow Americans,” “The American people,” “proudly serving America’s families since 1953” and so on) a lot more than the Swiss talk about Switzerland or the Greeks about Greece. I once saw a television programme about Peru in which an army officer exhorted his soldiers: “Men, always remember that you are Peruvians.” This sounds funny, rather like saying: “Always remember that you are hairdressers,” or “Never forget that you are shoplifters,” since the word “Peruvian” does not carry any especially exalted implications, at least for non-Peruvians.

The phrase “a very fine American” is revealing in this respect. It is not quite the same as speaking of a very fine Sri Lankan. “America” is a term of approbation, not just a description. It is a moral word as much as a geographical one. The very word “America” implies certain cherished values, so that phrases like “American values” or “a very fine American” are almost tautologies. “A very fine American” is a distinguished example of a noble species, whereas a very fine Sri Lankan is an outstanding individual who happens to come from Sri Lanka. It is suitable that the national symbol of the United States is the eagle. In Wales, it is the leek.

Accents

Americans often speak of the British accent, which is in fact as mythical as the mermaid. There are English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish forms of speech, but no British one. Strictly speaking, even an English accent is something of a misnomer. It generally refers to so-called Standard English, which only a small minority of the English actually speak and so is scarcely much of a standard. Truly genteel people have their own strangulated idiom of Standard English, which sounds as though they are speaking with a hot potato in their mouths. In this kind of speech, “I’m rarely tarred” means not that you are infrequently coated with a sticky black substance, but that you are really tired. Prince Charles speaks in this style, while the BBC speaks regular Standard English (though even this is on the wane). Outside the middle and upper classes, the British tend to speak with the accent of their region. In fact, Standard English was once a regional accent itself.

As far as detecting accents goes, a good many Britons would be able to distinguish between a Texan and a New Yorker, but not many Americans could tell the difference between a Geordie (from north-east England) and a Brummie (from Birmingham). They might also be unaware that a Londoner can find someone from Glasgow almost as unintelligible as he would find a Bulgarian. A Dane and a Norwegian, each speaking his or her own language, might understand each other better.

However indifferently Americans may sometimes speak English, the British can always go one better. “Fortuitously” in Britain has come to mean “fortunately,” “refute” is used for “rebut,” and to beg a question is to raise one. The British now use the word “literally” when they don’t mean it literally at all, as in “I literally fell through the floor with amazement.” Anything that is about to happen must be marked by a “potentially,” as in “She may potentially be charged with an offence.” Things are not done every day, but “on a daily basis.”

Abuse

Americans, however, are more concerned than the British by another kind of speech, namely, abusive language. Hawthorne’s scarlet letter no longer stands for adultery. What used to be argumentative is now abusive or insensitive. It is insensitive to raise your voice, vigorously dissent, display images of emaciated African children, or criticise the conduct of a nation in the presence of someone who supports it. In a society which finds the negative and discomforting hard to handle, anything which disturbs one’s serenity can be nullified by being consigned to the category of abuse. Birds which sing too loudly at dawn are abusive, aggressively violating one’s aural spaces. People who wear bright scarlet shirts are being visually abusive. They might even be at risk of being sued, or at least of being forced to buy you a pair of shades. Gutters which drip water on one’s head are guilty of abuse, as are pieces of grit that are negligent enough to lodge in one’s eye. They, too, may be at risk of being taken to court. Floors which refuse to stop swaying when one is drunk can be indicted for criminal irresponsibility.