The Mother Tongue (28 page)

Putting aside the consideration that without America's contribution English today would enjoy a global importance about on a par with Portuguese, it is not too much to say that this attitude is unworthy of the British. It is at any rate an arresting irony that the more dismissive they grow of American usages, the more lavishly they borrow them—to the extent of taking phrases that have no literal meaning in British English. People in Britain talk about doing something on a shoestring even though the word there is
shoelace.
They talk about the 64,000-dollar question, looking like a million bucks, having a megabucks salary, stepping on the gas (when they fuel their cars with petrol), and taking a raincheck even though probably not one Briton in a hundred knows what a raincheck is. They have even quietly modified their grammar and idiom to fit the American model. Ernest Gowers, in the revised edition of
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
noted that under the influence of American usage the British had begun to change
aim at doing
into
aim to do, haven't got
to
don't have,
begun using
in
instead of
for
in phrases like “the first time in years,” and started for the first time using
begin to
with a negative, as in “This doesn't begin to make sense.” And these changes go on. Just in the last decade or so,
truck
has begun driving out
lorry. Airplane
is more and more replacing
aeroplane.
The American sense of billion (1,000,000,000) has almost completely routed the British sense (1,000,000,000,000).

American spelling, too, has had more influence on the British than they might think.
Jail
rather than
gaol, burden
rather than
burthen, clue
rather than
clew, wagon
rather than
waggon, today
and
tomorrow
rather than
to-day
and
to-morrow, mask
rather than
masque, reflection
rather than
reflexion,
and
forever
and
onto
as single words rather than two have all been nudged on their way toward acceptance by American influence. For most senses of the word
program,
the British still use
programme,
but when the context is of computers they write
program.
A similar distinction is increasingly made with
disc
(the usual British spelling) and
disk
for the thing you slot into your home computer.

Although the English kept the
u
in many words like
humour, honour,
and
colour,
they gave it up in several, such as
terrour, horrour,
and
governour,
helped at least in part by the influence of American books and journals. Confusingly, they retained it in some forms but abandoned it in others, so that in England you write
honour
and
honourable
but
honorary
and
honorarium; colour
and
colouring
but
coloration; humour
but
humorist; labour
and
labourer
but
laborious.
There is no logic to it, and no telling why some words gave up the
u
and others didn't. For a time it was fashionable to drop the
u
from honor and humor—Coleridge for one did it—but it didn't catch on.

People don't often appreciate just how much movies and television have smoothed the differences between British and American English, but half a century ago the gap was very much wider. In 1922, when Sinclair Lewis's novel
Babbitt
was published in Britain it contained a glossary. Words that are commonplace in Britain now were quite unknown until the advent of talking pictures—among them
grapevine, fan
(in the sense of a sports enthusiast),
gimmick,
and
phoney.
As late as 1955, a writer in the
Spectator
could misapprehend the expression
turn of the century,
and take it to mean midcentury, when the first half turns into the second. In 1939, the preface to
An Anglo-American Interpreter
suggested that “an American, if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood” [quoted in
Our Language,
page 169]. That may be arrant hyperbole, designed to boost sales, but it is probably true that the period up to the Second World War marked the age of the greatest divergence between the two main branches of English.

Even now, there remains great scope for confusion, as evidenced by the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen. “Oh,” she blurted, “but I do my own dusting.” It can take years for an American to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa. In Britain
homely
is a flattering expression (equivalent to
homey
); in America it means “ugly.” In Britain
upstairs
is the first floor; in America it is the second. In Britain
to table a motion
means to put it forward for discussion; in America it means to put it aside.
Presently
means “now” in America; in Britain it means “in a little while.” Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression “I'll knock you up in the morning,” which means “I'll knock on your door in the morning.”
To keep your pecker up
is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously,
pecker
has the same slang meaning there), but
to be stuffed
is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, “I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed,” an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone's fanny; in England it means a woman's pudenda.

Other terms are less graphic, but no less confusing. English people bathe wounds but not their babies; they
bath
their babies. Whereas an American wishing to get clean would bathe in a bathtub, an English person would bath in a bath. English people do bathe, but what they mean by that is to go for a swim in the sea. Unless, of course, the water is too cold (as it always is in Britain) in which case they stand in water up to their knees. This is called having a paddle, even though their hands may never touch the water.

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These ambiguities can affect scientists as much as tourists. The British billion, as we have already seen, has surrendered to the American billion, but for other numbers agreement has yet to be reached. A decillion in America is a one plus thirty-three zeros. In Britain it is a one plus sixty zeros. Needless to say, that can make a difference.

In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other. That's a very large number indeed. Some are well known on both sides of the Atlantic—
lift/elevator, dustbin/garbage can, biscuit/cookie
—but many hundreds of others are still liable to befuddle the hapless traveler. Try covering up the right-hand column below and seeing how many of the British terms in the left-hand column you can identify. If you get more than half you either know the country well or have been reading too many English murder mysteries.

*
 “At the time when the United States split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that independence should be linguistically acknowledged by the use of a different language from that of Britain” [The Use of English, page 3].

*
 Smith also wanted traffic lights to be called stop-and-goes and brainwave to be replaced by mindfall, among many other equally fanciful neologisms, but these never caught on.

12.

English as a World Language

I
n Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples, according to the London
Observer,
there is a sports shop called Snoopy's Dribbling. (The name becomes fractionally less alarming when you know that
dribbling
is the European term for moving a soccer ball down the field), while in Brussels there is a men's clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city it had a sign saying:
SWEAT
—690
FRANCS
. (Closer inspection revealed this to be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk or Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), eat some chocolate called Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam Munsingwear.

In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, a largely Muslim city seemingly as remote from English-speaking culture as any place in Europe, you can find graffiti saying
HEAVY
METAL
IS
LAW
! and
HOOLIGAN
KINGS
OF
THE
NORTH
! In the Europa Hotel in the same city, you will find this message on every door: “Guests should announce the abandonment of theirs rooms before 12 o'clock, emptying the room at the latest until 14 o'clock, for the use of the room before 5 at the arrival or after the 16 o'clock at the departure, will be billed as one night more.” Is that clear? In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word
stop
exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.

I bring this up here to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when, as often happens, the messages don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser that says: “Mr. Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr. Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation.” On the bottom of the eraser is a further message: “We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth.” It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan
I
FEEL
COKE
&
SOUND
SPECIAL
. A correspondent of
The Economist
spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said:
O
.
D
.
ON
BOURGEOISIE
MILK
BOY
MILK
. A shopping bag carried a picture of dancing elephants above the legend:
ELEPHANT
FAMILY
ARE
HAPPY
WITH
US
.
THEIR
HUMMING
MAKES
US
FEEL
HAPPY
. Some of these items betray a distinct, and yet somehow comforting, lack of geographical precision. A shopping bag showing yachts on a blue sea had the message
SWITZERLAND
:
SEASIDE
CITY
. A range of products manufactured by a company called Cream Soda all used to bear the splendidly vacuous message “Too fast to live, too young to happy.” Then some spoilsport informed the company of its error and the second half of the message was changed to “too young to die.” What is perhaps most worrying is that these meaningless phrases on clothing are invading the English-speaking world. I recently saw in a London store a jacket with bold lettering that said:
RODEO
—100%
BOYS
FOR
ATOMIC
ATLAS
. The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?