That's Not English (10 page)

In which a word typifying American ease is revealed to have had more urbane origins.

A
mericans are divided over whether they love or hate what they perceive to be the superior refinement—or the finicky preciousness—of the English. Those who
are
attracted to all things English usually cite the “British accent” as one of the reasons for their Anglophilia. The accent they are thinking of is the one they associate with the BBC and costume dramas, like
Downton Abbey
. This clipped and carefully enunciated accent is known as
received pronunciation
(RP), and it is the English corollary of America’s General American accent, otherwise known as “newscaster English.”

Any American or English person knows that his country’s “ideal” accent is not the norm. Even the BBC has stopped insisting on RP. Charlotte Green, once voted the “most attractive
female voice on national radio,” says her diction means that she is now an outcast at the BBC; she took voluntary redundancy from her job as a newsreader in 2013, saying, “Received pronunciation, or accent-less accent, is on the wane. The BBC’s days of employing people who sound like me are more or less over.” Each country contains a hodgepodge of regional accents that may be hard for an outsider to tell apart. Yet it’s fair to say that the rhythm and tone of all English accents (maybe even all British accents) sound more like one another, to the American ear, than they sound like his own—which is why he lumps them together. You wouldn’t expect an English person to be able to tell a Pennsylvania accent from a Baltimore one. The English are just as apt to generalize about “the American accent” as Americans are to generalize about British accents. Interestingly, they associate an American accent with success in business. Khalid Aziz, a communications specialist, surveyed British business directors and found that 47 percent of them considered executives with American accents more successful than their own countrymen.

Americans think that all English people sound posh, and they won’t let the English forget it. Those who spend a lot of time in America, especially British expats, aren’t thrilled about the constant compliments they get about their accents, and some find them intrusive. There are more than sixty-six thousand members of a Facebook page called “I hate the way Americans think us English people all speak dead posh.” (
Dead
can be used in English English to mean “completely,” as it is here.)

In England, accent is a strong indicator of one’s place in the class hierarchy. Many people grow up feeling self-conscious of what their accents reveal about them, whether they are posh or not, and compliments can make them feel a bit uncomfortable.
Americans, imagine you were driving a Honda Civic and people kept praising it as if it were a Rolls-Royce. It’s no wonder the English sometimes wrinkle their noses. American flattery comes too easily for the naturally skeptical English to respect. And here is the truth: The average English person is no more polished or refined than the average American. The impression of refinement is often nothing more than distance, plus unfamiliarity.

That doesn’t mean that English expats are annoyed by the perks that come with some Americans’ misapprehension. They are happy for people to assume they are intelligent, sophisticated, and authoritative, and for members of the opposite sex to swoon over them. Americans sometimes have occasion to question the qualities they have ascribed to such people. Journalist Vicky Ward recently reported in the
Financial Times
that when the architect Norman Foster, having taken four years to produce his plans for a renovation of the New York Public Library’s main branch on Forty-Second Street, unveiled a design that critic Michael Kimmelman described as having “the elegance of a suburban mall,” a rival architect confided “that some trustees had begun to feel, too late, that they had been seduced by Lord Foster’s ‘British accent.’”

The English are constantly exposed to a variety of American accents and vocabulary through television and movies. Americans’ less-enunciated accents, and tendency to speak louder than the English are used to, make them sound brash, confident, and a little sloppy. American slang contributes to this impression, cutting across socioeconomic and gender lines far more than English slang, which is stratified. For example, to the English middle and upper classes, something they like will be “brilliant,” and if they agree with something you say, they may do so by saying
“Quite.” A working-class person from London or Essex, seeking agreement, will use the question tag “innit” at the end of a sentence, in the same way an American might say “amIright?” It is harder to tell Americans’ social class from the words they use, and as a result Americans of all classes can sound similarly unrefined.

There is no word that typifies this phenomenon more thoroughly than
dude
.
Dude
is a word that—no matter how often they are exposed to it—the English will not adopt. It is one of the most American-sounding words there is. And the story of
dude
is also the story of how American slang can become universal and classless in a way that is hard to imagine happening in England.

Ironically, this aggressively casual word that, in today’s American English, might refer to a person of either sex, originated as a way to describe a dandy or a “swell.” The
OED
dates it to New York in 1883 as “a name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, and very particular about what is aesthetically ‘good form.’” This later extended to the meaning implied by “dude ranch”: “a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S., especially one who spends his holidays on a ranch.” A dude was an East Coast city slicker who didn’t fit in on the West Coast. But it only took about thirty years for the word to shed these pejorative implications and become, primarily through Black English vernacular, a generally approving term for a man, “a guy.”

By the 1960s and ’70s,
dude
had cut across racial lines, appearing in movies like
Easy Rider
and songs including David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” which made a one-hit wonder of
the band Mott the Hoople.
Dude
then faded from prominence, perhaps considered a bit of a relic, though it remained in constant use among Californians, stoners, surfers, and suburban Valley girls. Sean Penn’s character in the film
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, Jeff Spicoli, typified this use of
dude
. And who could forget the masterpiece of cinema that was
Dude, Where’s My Car?

The moment that
dude
broke out and acquired its current cultural significance was 1998, when Jeff Bridges played a character known as “the Dude” in the Coen Brothers film
The Big Lebowski
. The Dude hangs around in his bathrobe, drinking White Russians. His habitual occupations? “Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback . . . I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or, uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.” The movie became a cult hit and the word itself achieved ubiquity. As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the
New York Observer
, “Outside of those sad figures who cloister themselves off from the pleasures of pop culture, ‘dude’ is not just a part of the language—dude is a whole discourse.”

Dude
today encapsulates a very casual orientation to life. Jeff Bridges’s character has spawned a book,
The Dude and the Zen Master
, a collaboration between Bridges and Buddhist teacher Bernie Glassman;
The Dudespaper: A Lifestyle Magazine for the Deeply Casual
; and even a religion, Dudeism—“a belief system that teaches us that the universe wants us to take it easy” since “getting all worked up over nothing goes profoundly against the laws of nature, psychology, sociology, bowling and several tropical countries.” This is a nice antidote to the hard-driving, ambitious side of American culture: If you get tired of
working hard and playing hard, it promises, ultimately it is possible to just “abide” like the Dude.

As Rosenbaum points out, the word
dude
has also become “a way of bringing a conscious unsophistication—an ironical unsophistication, an unsophistication in quotation marks, a sophisticated unsophistication—to an appreciation of popular culture.” In my experience, friends of non-American nationality (English, German, French) use
dude
almost exclusively in this way—poking gentle fun at Americans, while taking advantage of the utility of the word. But I think that most Americans who say it aren’t being ironic at all. Some of them are aware that this makes them sound unsophisticated, and seek to break their dependence on
dude
.

On the website IsItNormal.com, a young woman wrote in to say she felt she overused the word: “i can’t help it. i say it to my mom. i say it to inanimate objects. i call my boyfriend dude instead of babe or love or even his real name. i’ve even had somebody yell DUUUUDE in the hallway and turned around on cue. is this normal?” [
sic
] She got a range of responses, many of which suggested she was not alone in her Tourette’s-like repetition of
dude
. One person wrote, “If u really need to stop, example for a job?, just use an elastic around your wrist and snap it everytime and make sure it hurts that way saying it = pain to your brain, it will catch on overtime.” [
sic
] Someone else (employing another near-universal American slang word) wrote: “im 25 and still have this problem it sucks. Like totally dude, we need to let that word die.” And another said, “OMG DUDE SAMEZZZZ.” [
sic
—no, really!] Has American addiction to
dude
reached the point where we need a twelve-step program? (Dude, that sounds way too ambitious.)

It’s no wonder Americans hear intelligence and refinement in English voices: It is as much about the words they are
not
using as the ones they use. But in the end I think the most authentic thing to do—no matter what your country of origin—is to own and celebrate your native accent and vocabulary. In other words, chill out, dude. It’s okay to sound, like, totally
American.

In which an expat finds that her frustration with English reserve is not always justified.

S
hortly after moving to London from New York, I began keeping notes about signs, customs, and words that seemed strange to me. I wanted to keep track of first impressions that, within months, would be difficult to recall. Luckily, no one was keeping track of the strange first impressions I myself was making. Some of my early misunderstandings had an audience of one—my husband, Tom.

Over dinner, soon after beginning work in the London offices of the same companies we’d worked for in New York, we were discussing some of the differences between our New York and London colleagues. In New York, people would send their juniors out for coffee (the more complicated the order, the better) to put them in their place. In London, there was a lot of
nonhierarchical tea-fetching from a communal kitchen. In New York, people dressed up more to go to work and took little time off. Everyone seemed to work through the weekend. In London, no one talked about how hard they were working and “face time” seemed less important. The New Yorkers had been more status-conscious, but friendlier. The Londoners were edgier and quieter—almost disconcertingly so.

Yet I had managed to glean some details about the lives of my coworkers. For one thing, I told Tom, whereas in New York about 10 percent of my coworkers were gay, in London it must be approaching 60 percent. “Really?” he asked—because even for publishing, that seemed like a lot. “Yes,” I said. “Hardly anyone in my office wears a wedding band, and they are always talking about their ‘partners’ and children. My office must be the most liberal in London.” Tom thought I was right that my office was probably the most liberal in London, but he was pretty sure my percentages were off. Because, he explained, in England, unlike in America,
partner
isn’t a code word for “same-sex partner.” This is a common misapprehension among newly emigrated Americans, and one that we can all laugh about later. A friend of mine spent weeks at her kids’ new playgroup before figuring out that most of the other kids did not “have two mommies.”

Americans come by this mistake honestly. Although people are getting married older these days, in the United States people tend to assume that most committed relationships are headed for marriage. Regardless of age, the infantilizing
boyfriend
and
girlfriend
apply until the pretentious
fiancé/fiancée
are supplanted by the cozy
husband
and
wife
. A Pew poll taken in 2010 showed that 61 percent of American adults who have never been
married want to be; only 12 percent do not. A poll of high school seniors taken in 2006 showed that 81 percent of them expected to get married, and 90 percent of those expected to stay married to the same person for life. Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies families and public policy, maintains that in America “you don’t see the same pattern of long unmarried relationships you see in Scandinavia, France or Britain . . . In the United States marriage is how we do stable families.”

Americans may be big proponents of marriage, but with the third-highest divorce rate in the world, it doesn’t mean they are any better at commitment than other nationalities (with the exception of #1, the Maldives, and #2, Belarus). One thing Americans have had a hard time committing to is the idea of universal marriage rights. Until recently, the best a gay or lesbian couple could hope for was
partner
. Opponents of gay marriage have long feared that extending marriage rights to all Americans would undermine the beloved institution. But, as E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in
The
Washington Post
, the opposite seems to be happening, as “steadily increasing numbers of Americans have come to believe that gay people are not social revolutionaries looking to alter the nature of marriage.” Rather, they simply want to be “part of an institution that is already open to their straight fellow citizens.” In more and more states, this dream is coming true.

In England, by contrast, marriage isn’t considered quite so necessary. Since December 2005, it has been possible for same-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships, which confer most of the same rights and responsibilities as marriage, without the name. Heterosexual couples are less likely to marry than their
counterparts in America, even when they choose to have children. Fifty-two percent of people in a survey by YouGov said that marrying was “not important, provided that parents were in a committed relationship.” Only 27 percent took the view that couples should be married before having children. So in England, it makes sense that the first definition of
partner
in
Macmillan
is “someone who you live with and have a sexual relationship with,” whereas in America it is “one of two or more people who own a company and share its profits and losses.”

I have noticed that even married people in England will use
partner
rather than
husband
or
wife
.
Macmillan
corroborates this: “In British English, you can say
partner
to refer to a person who is the husband or wife of someone, or to refer to a person who someone is living with and having a sexual relationship with, without being married to them. This avoids mentioning the person’s status or sex. In American English, some people only use
partner
about unmarried people, and many others only use it about gay men or women.” This note is set apart in a special box under the headline “Words that avoid giving offence.” Which kind of nails it. I had been so busy being a nosy American that this elegant subtlety had almost passed me by.

It is always tempting to make generalizations: for example that Americans are so
open
because they will volunteer personal information to relative strangers, and the English are so
reserved
because they won’t. But you have to take it case by case. And in the case of
partner
, it’s the English who are more open—if not about the details of their private lives, then to the possibilities of other people’s. Not to start with an assumption based on the word someone uses—or anything else—is very high-level humanity indeed. The nongendered
partner
leaves something to
the imagination—something at which the English excel—so it allows people to choose how much to reveal. Because it really isn’t anyone’s business whether you and your partner are married, or what gender he or she is.

Of course, not everyone is using
partner
to be inclusive in England any more than Americans are using
husband
and
wife
to be
ex
clusive. Some people aren’t consciously choosing, but simply using the word that is most familiar. But many who choose to use
partner
like what it implies: a relationship between equals. As American blogger Jonny Scaramanga explains, “Equality is something I can get behind. I don’t have a wife who depends on me. I have an equal. I have a partner.”

In England and Wales, same-sex marriages now have the blessing of the Parliament and the queen, and civil partners have the option of converting their unions to marriages. In America, some states have approved same-sex marriage and, with the younger generation of voters overwhelmingly in favor, equal rights to marriage will soon spread. Where will that leave
partner
? Will American gay and lesbian couples, after their long battle for the right to be husbands and wives, choose to use those words to describe themselves? Will English married couples continue to describe themselves as “partners”? And how will anyone know what to call anyone else while we all figure it out? Steven Petrow, author of
Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners
, has a suggestion. We ought to listen “to how a couple introduces or refers to each other . . . Then follow their lead by using their preferred terminology.” What a radical
idea.