That's Not English (5 page)

In which the English creative class appears to take over the American media, bringing new slang with it.

E
very so often, a word comes along that means just what it sounds like. It may not be onomatopoetic, but even if you’ve never heard it before, you instantly get the idea.
Gobsmacked
is such a word. It means, figuratively, to be flabbergasted, amazed, or astounded. Literally, it means to be smacked in the mouth, as in the song “Gobsmacked” by Chumbawamba (“Outside the pub / Smack you in the gob / Get four long years / in Wormwood Scrubs”).

Gob
has been slang for
mouth
in the north of England since the late 1500s. There are few adjectives that make you look the way you feel quite like
gobsmacked
. People who say it have to drop their jaws twice, like large-mouthed bass. You can’t use it insincerely; it conveys a certain authenticity. Highly descriptive and
irresistible to many, it is popular as a business name: GobsmackedMedia, Gobsmacked Records, Gobsmack.tv. It is also a nail polish color (charcoal grey with flecks of glitter from Butter London) and, perhaps most appropriately, a brand of sports mouth guards. It’s truth in advertising, mate. Wear it so you don’t lose your teeth when you get smacked in the you-know-where.

Not everyone approves of
gobsmacked
. It is a word some associate with cheap tabloid newspapers and oiks from the north. In
The
Dictionary of Disagreeable English
, Robert Hartwell Fiske criticizes it as “one of the least attractive words in the English language today.” Those who dislike it often come across as a bit priggish and sour. If there is something indelicate about this back-formation, Americans don’t care. They are too busy using it every chance they get. But how did
gobsmacked
go from a semi-obscure regionalism in northern England and Scotland in the 1950s, not showing up in the OED until 1987, to international ubiquity?

The word has been common parlance on English TV shows like
Coronation Street
, England’s longest-running soap, for decades. Through television, it spread to southern England, where most of the English media are based.
Gobsmacked
began to appear in print around 1985 (according to the
OED
, first in
The
Guardian
), and its spread through the UK was soon complete. But this Britishism had yet to take Manhattan. Some commentators date Americans’ increasing use of
gobsmacked
to Susan Boyle’s star turn on
Britain’s Got Talent
in 2009. The self-described “cat lady” from Scotland wiped the smug smirk off Simon Cowell’s face with her pitch-perfect performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from
Les Misérables
. Her performance went viral, and she described herself as “gobsmacked” in dozens of
interviews in the days that followed. Still, I believe there is more to the story.

England and America have always traded slang. When America was young, and Anglophobia was strong, Americans resented any incursion. There was a drive to distance American from British English. Noah Webster’s 1806
Compendious Dictionary of the English Language
(the predecessor to his more authoritative and complete 1828
American Dictionary of the English Language
) was America’s first. It was a political document, an attempt to enshrine American independence through language, and to introduce uniform spellings for the first time. Webster’s essay “On the Education of Youth in America” left no one in doubt of his position:

Americans, unshackle your minds, and act like independent beings. You have been children long enough, subject to the control and subservient to the interest of a haughty parent. You have now an interest of your own . . . an empire to raise and support by your exertions, and a national character to establish and extend by your wisdom and virtues. To effect these great objects, it is necessary to frame a liberal plan of policy, and build it on a broad system of education. Before this system can be formed and embraced, the Americans must
believe
, and
act
from the belief, that it is dishonorable to waste life in mimicking the follies of other nations and basking in the sunshine of foreign glory.

Webster’s
American Spelling Book
, also known as the “Blue Backed Speller,” was one of America’s earliest bestselling books, providing American children with a moral and academic
education for more than 160 years and reinforcing the spelling reforms (
colour
became
color
,
theatre
became
theater
,
oesophagus
became
esophagus
, etc.) that are among the most lasting aspects of Webster’s legacy. America’s beloved spelling bees are another, taking place at every level from the smallest classroom in the remotest corner of the country to the national contest, which is televised. Americans have a history of being territorial about their language, and it continues today, though England’s slang is the least of their worries. Now that Americans have established their national character, they find English slang charming, if always a little pretentious, regardless of a word’s original class connotations in England. Americans still love to think of themselves as uncorrupted by such things, but Ben Yagoda, an author and professor of English at the University of Delaware, tracks the progress of NOOBs (Not One-Off Britishisms)—traditionally British expressions that have been widely adopted in the United States—and he never runs out of material.

Meanwhile, in England, one sees articles with headlines like “Top Ten Most Annoying Americanisms.” Matthew Engel, in a BBC article titled “Why Do Some Americanisms Irritate People?,” neatly captured the anxiety over American influence with a militaristic metaphor: “What the world is speaking—even on levels more sophisticated than basic Globish—is not necessarily our English. According to the
Oxford Guide to World English
, ‘American English has a global role at the beginning of the 21st Century comparable to that of British English at the start of the 20th.’ The alarming part is that this is starting to show in the language we speak in Britain. American usages no longer swim to our shores as single spies, as ‘reliable’ and ‘talented’ did. They come in battalions.”

So eager are the bashers of Americanisms that Americans are often unjustly blamed for neologisms that actually emanated from the other side of the Atlantic. For example, it’s easy to find an English or a French person who enjoys eating eggs and pancakes at eleven thirty in the morning, but it’s hard to find one who will countenance the word
brunch
(or worse:
le brunch
). Yet
brunch
did not originate in America. An Englishman, Guy Beringer, coined this portmanteau word back in 1896. Surprisingly, the concept of the all-you-can-drink brunch was
not
invented by the English, but was an American innovation. No one in England has yet complained about the spread of this concept to their shores.

The English used to complain bitterly (and some still do) about the steady encroachment of Americanisms into their language via television, film, and advertising. But one could argue that these days, the crossover is about equal. This is because of the preponderance of English journalists, editors, and television producers who have infiltrated America at the highest levels of their professions.

The current CEO of
The
New York Times
and the editor of the New York
Daily News
are English. So are the presidents of ABC and NBC News and the editors of American
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan
. Reality television is dominated by a few British producers, like Mark Burnett (
Survivor
,
The Apprentice
,
The Voice
) and Simon Cowell (
The X Factor
,
American Idol
). Tina Brown, Piers Morgan, and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others, have had an undeniable influence on highbrow American pop culture. Although England’s population is one-sixth the size of the United States’, it supports more than a dozen national newspapers. (America has only three, and many would argue that
USA Today
hardly counts.) “The British news media market is a brutal and competitive crucible; it breeds frankness, excellence and a fair amount of excess. In that context, American journalism’s historical values of objectivity and fairness seem quaint.” For proof, look no further than the difference between the BBC’s aggressive—even combative—interview style versus the more subdued NPR approach. English journalists have a tendency to go for the jugular, and Americans find it refreshing. For now. Is it any wonder that English slang has become incredibly fashionable? Noah Webster would be gobsmacked.

In which America and England are shown to be among the world’s fattest countries, despite their apparent dedication to fitness.

A
s countries with obesity rates of 34 percent and 25 percent, respectively, the United States and the United Kingdom might be supposed to be less than obsessed with fitness. But the sad truth is that two of the top five fat-ass nations worldwide have fitness industries worth more than thirty-two billion dollars combined. About half of adults in England and America “take exercise,” as the English say, making it sound like doctor’s orders. (And in many cases, it is.) But some people actually
really
enjoy it. And it’s those people I’m going to talk about here, since I’m sure they are sick of hearing how slothful their nations are when they are out there lacing up their sneakers—for fun—every day.

In England, sneakers or running shoes are called
trainers
. A fact I am never allowed to forget, because my four-year-old is bilingual. The other day I heard her say to a friend, “I am putting on my trainers. My mummy calls them
sneakers
, because she is American.” (At least she has stopped correcting my English to my face, which is the last thing I want to hear when we’re trying to get out the door in the morning.) In America, trainers are private fitness instructors who bludgeon you into shape with your consent. England has private fitness coaches, too, though most people who can afford them are still more likely to spend on a good bottle of wine or a haircut than an hour in the gym.

Gyms are less popular in England than they are in America. Although, as Emma Sinclair wrote in the
Telegraph
, some American boutique gyms are moving into the English market with “responsive customer service . . . and faultless facilities that create customer loyalty and . . . leave a wake of grey UK gyms in their trail.” Not all the gyms in England are gray and uninspiring, but many of them do feel like a time warp to 1998. Step aerobics is still a going concern. SoulCycle arrived in London in 2014—eight years after it first caught on in New York. Ballet barre classes and Pilates are still a bit rarefied, and haven’t reached saturation point in gyms around the country. CrossFit is gaining in reputation, but it will take years to build the following it enjoys in America. When I first moved to London, a Google search for “yoga London” turned up fewer than five dedicated studios. The small New Hampshire town where my in-laws live has seven.

Americans are very faddish about exercise—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the American obsession with fitness is fairly new. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that strenuous exercise
became something ordinary people—not just “health nuts”—did. It’s telling that Americans often speak of exercise in terms that other cultures reserve for their spiritual practices. They flock to exercise “gurus” who promise enlightenment along with a high calorie burn. They are “religious” about their workouts. Some fitness classes or instructors acquire a “cultlike” following and are spoken of with reverence not usually accorded to people who get paid by the hour. Americans love their gyms—and not just because extreme weather and unwalkable suburbs make outside exercise difficult in many places. They are joiners and appreciate the social aspects of a shared workout experience.

The English are more likely to head outside for their exercise. Whether they love or hate it, outdoor exercise is a huge part of childhood in England. While schools in America are canceling recess and dropping their PE programs, English schools are fanatical about games, and about getting children outside in all weather. A rhyme often repeated to young children in shorts, as their knees turn blue, is “Whether the weather be fine, Or whether the weather be not / Whether the weather be cold, Or whether the weather be hot / We’ll weather the weather / Whatever the weather / Whether we like it or not!” There is pride in stoicism when it comes to outdoor exercise—it’s one of the last vestiges of the English stiff upper lip. Even if it has been raining for three consecutive days and the playing fields are knee-deep in mud, the football (soccer) practice won’t be canceled. It would be a bad precedent to set. When would the lads ever play? Parents huddle on the sidelines with flasks of tea (maybe something stronger) and wait it out.

As adults, the English remain far more willing than Americans to exercise in the muck. Witness the popularity of British
Military Fitness—the UK’s ubiquitous outdoor fitness classes: “the best way to get fitter, faster, stronger and have fun whilst doing so.” (Am I the only one who finds the priggish “whilst” hilarious in this context?) Any day of the year, in parks across the country you will see people in multicolored bibs—blue for beginners, red for intermediates, and green for advanced—huffing and puffing through press-ups (push-ups), burpees, and shuttle runs, while being shouted at by buff former soldiers. America has “boot camp” style workouts, too, but they usually take place inside temperature-controlled gyms.

Fit or not, most people in England share a love of their unspoiled countryside. Green Belt legislation has restricted urban sprawl, so that within minutes by car or train of any town or city (even London) one can reach—instead of strip malls and big-box stores as far as the eye can see—unbroken stretches of walkable land. Even where homes and farms exist, rights of way—paths where members of the public have a legal right to pass—are protected. The Ordnance Survey, which maintains the definitive record of every geographical feature in Great Britain, publishes 650 different maps of every corner of the country. Although customizable maps are available free on their website www.ordnance survey.co.uk, they still sell around 2.5 million paper maps each year—a testament to England’s devotion to country walking.

Combining this love of the countryside with a certain masochistic pleasure is the sport of fell running, or trail running, which originated in the mountainous regions of northern England. Basically, it is running straight up and down mountains. In an interview with the
Telegraph
, Richard Askwith, author of
Feet in the Clouds: A Tale of Fell-Running and Obsession
, said the sport “reconnects you with the most basic of your instincts:
the survival instinct, for example. Running down a rocky mountain at speed is dangerous, but that is what is so attractive: the chance to throw off the caution most of us live with most of the time and feel free again.” Askwith completed the Bob Graham Round, a fell run comprising ascents and descents of forty-two peaks, in twenty-four hours—a distance of seventy miles and total climbs of twenty-seven thousand feet, saying that “there would be no sense of satisfaction without the pain.” He considers himself an amateur, by the way.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Tough Mudder races were invented by two Englishmen—Will Dean and Guy Livingstone. Their first races were held in America, where it took them just three years to find one million people willing to leave their gyms behind, if only for a day, and put themselves through their punishing, British Special Forces–designed obstacle courses, which are ten to twelve miles long and include freezing swims (the “arctic enema”), narrow pipes full of mud (the “boa constrictor”), and electric shocks, in case the course isn’t harrowing enough. The races have since expanded internationally, including to England. Participants get the satisfaction of a race completed, but they also raise money for veterans charities.

The English are far more willing to take on a physical challenge if they have a charity fund-raising goal in mind. I have never met an English person who planned to run a marathon, jump out of an airplane, or take part in a 150-mile footrace through the Sahara Desert in one-hundred-degree heat without first asking friends and family to pony up for a cause. There is a sense that taking on a grueling training schedule is rather selfish and solipsistic and that one needs to offset that somehow. Needless to say, pushy slogans and lifestyle branding are not
their thing. Americans also raise money for charity by performing feats of athletic prowess, but they are more ego-driven and likely to see training for such events as virtuous in itself.

For a sense of how much individualism and self-actualization motivates Americans, look no further than the US Army’s recent recruitment slogans. For years it was “Be all that
you
can be”—emphasizing the individual over the group, even though there are not many jobs more communal and team-oriented than being a soldier. Recent army slogans have taken the theme even further: “An army of one” and “Defy expectations.” The British Army’s slogan, “Be the best,” doesn’t address the individual at all, and the Royal Navy’s is simply “This team works.” The desire to do something like run a marathon purely for the sake of achieving a “personal best” time or proving to themselves that they can do it doesn’t embarrass Americans. Neither does being told by a clothing company to “Do one thing every day that scares you!” For the English, listening to an American talk about his health and fitness regimen just might qualify.