Old World, New World
Bill Bryson
The
following is an excerpt from Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue: English and
How It Got That Way" (1990)
Found on pages 179-190 of "About Language" Roberts and Turgeon (Eds).
The first
American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language-a
time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary
activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was
also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104
pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth
in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather
than runneth. Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying
out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have
preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as gotten.
The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe
their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved
inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or
explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and
caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the
Dutch Jan Kees ("John Cheese"). The
suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a
Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the
historical evidence
is slight. Often the new immigrants borrowed
Indian terms, though these could take some swallowing since the Indian
languages, particularly those of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American
English, Our Own Words, an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian
had to devise the word kummogkodonattootummooetiteaonganunnonash
for the phrase "our question." In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to
translate as "You fish on that side, we'll fish on this side, and nobody
will fish in the middle." Not surprisingly, such words were usually
shortened and modified. The English-sounding hickory was whittled out of
the Indian pawcohiccora. Raugraoughcun was hacked into raccoon and isquonterquashes into squash. Hoochinoo, the name of an Indian tribe noted for its homemade liquor, produced hooch.
Some idea of the bewilderments of Indian orthography are
indicated by the fact that Chippewa and Ojibway are
different names for the same tribe as interpreted by different people at
different times. Sometimes words went through many transformations before they
sat comfortably on the English-speaking tongue. Manhattan has been
variously recorded as Manhates, Manthanes, Manhatones, Manhatesen, Manhattae, and at
least half a dozen others. Even the simple word Iowa, according
to Dohan, has been recorded with sixty-four spellings. Despite the difficulties
of rendering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for the names of
more than half our states and for countless thousands of rivers, lakes, and
towns. Yet we borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian words for
everyday objects-among them canoe, raccoon, hammock, and tobacco.
From the early Spanish settlers, by contrast, we took more than 500
words-though many of these, it must be said, were Indian terms adopted by the
Spaniards. Among them: rodeo, bronco, buffalo, avocado, mustang, burro,
fiesta, coyote, mesquite, canyon, and buckaroo. Buckaroo was directly
adapted from the Spanish vaquero (a cowboy) and thus must originally
have been pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Many borrowings
are more accurately described as Mexican than Spanish since they did not exist
in Spain, among them stampede, hoosegow, and cafeteria. Hoosegow and jug (for jail) were both taken from the Mexican-Spanish juzgado, which,
despite the spelling, was pronounced more or less as "hoosegow."
Sometimes it took a while for the pronunciation to catch up with the spelling. Rancher,
a term borrowed from the Spanish rancho, was originally pronounced
in the Mexican fashion, which made it something much closer to
"ranker."
From the French, too, we borrowed liberally, taking the names for Indian
tribes, territories, rivers, and other geographical features, sometimes
preserving the pronunciation (Sioux, Mackinac) and sometimes not (Illinois,
Detroit, Des Plaines, Beloit). We took other words from the French, but often
knocked them about in a way that made them look distinctively American, as when
we turned gaufre into gopher and chaudiere into chowder.
Other New World words borrowed from the French were prairie and
dime.
Oftentimes words reach us by the most improbable and circuitous routes.
The word for the American currency, dollar, is a corruption of Joachimsthaler, named
for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded use of the word in English was in
1553, spelled daler, and for the next two centuries it was applied by
the English to various continental currencies. Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson,
in Notes on a Money Unit for the United States, plumped for dollar as
the name of the national currency on the ground that "the [Spanish] dollar
is a known coin and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people."
That may be its first recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the
people the term had already been in use for some time. At all events, Jefferson had his way: In 1785 the dollar was adopted as America's currency, though it was not until 1794 that the
first dollars rolled off the presses. That much we know, but what we don't know
is where the dollar sign ($) comes from. "The most plausible
account," according to Mario Pei, "is that
it represents the first and last letters of the
Spanish pesos, written one over the other." It is an attractive theory but
for the one obvious deficiency that the dollar sign doesn't look anything like
a p superimposed on an s.
Perhaps even more improbable is how America came to be named in the first place. The name is
taken from Americus Vespucius, a Latinized form of Amerigo Vespucci. A
semiobscure Italian navigator who lived from 1454 to 1512, Vespucci made four
voyages to the New World though without ever once seeing North America. A contemporary mapmaker wrongly thought Vespucci
discovered the whole of the continent and, in the most literal way, put his
name on the map. When he learned of his error, the mapmaker, one Martin Waldesmiiller, took the name off, but by then it had stuck.
Vespucci himself preferred the name Mundus Novus, "New World."
In addition to borrowing hundreds of words, the Mundus Novians (far better word!) devised many hundreds of their
own. The pattern was to take two already existing English words and combine
them in new ways: bullfrog, eggplant, grasshopper,
rattlesnake, mockingbird, catfish. Sometimes, however, words from the Old World were employed to describe different but similar articles in the New.
So beech, walnut, laurel, partridge, robin, oriole, hemlock and even pond
(which in England is an artificial lake) all describe different things
in the two continents.
Settlers moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe
features of their new outsized continent-mesa, butte, bluff, and so
on-but also outsized words that reflected their zestful, virile,
wildcat-wrassling, hell-for-leather approach to life. These expressions were,
to put it mildly, often colorful, and a surprising number of them have
survived: hornswoggle, cattywampus, rambunctious, absquatulate, to move like
greased lightning, to kick the bucket, to be in cahoots with, to root hog or
die. Others have faded away: monstracious, teetotaciously,
helliferocious, conbobberation, obflisticate, and many others of equal
exuberance.
Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential
Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguably America's single
greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically
versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective ("Lunch was O.K."),
verb ("Can you O.K. this for me?"), noun ("I need your O.K. on
this"), interjection ("O.K., I hear you"), and adverb ("We
did O.K."). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent
("Shall we go?" "O.K."), to great enthusiasm
("O.K.!"), to lukewarm endorsement ("The party was O.K."),
to a more or less meaningless filler of space ("O.K., may
I have your attention please?").
It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all
English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the
world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed
spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure
that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The
many theories break down into three main camps:
1. It comes from someone's or something's initials-a Sac Indian chief
called Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President
Martin Van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall
crackers, which were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these
theories the initials were stamped or scribbled on documents or
crates and gradually came to be synonymous with quality or reliability.
2. It is adapted from some foreign or English dialect word or place name,
such as the Finnish oikea, the Haitian Aux
Cayes (the source of a particularly prized brand
of rum), or the Choctaw okeh. President Woodrow Wilson apparently so
liked the Choctaw theory that he insisted on spelling the word okeh.
3. It is a contraction of the expression "011 korrect," often
said to be the spelling used by the semiliterate seventh President, Andrew Jackson.
This third theory, seemingly the
most implausible, is in fact very possibly the correct one-though without
involving Andrew Jackson and with a bit of theory one thrown in for good
measure. According to Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, who spent years tracking down the derivation of
O.K., a fashion developed among young wits of Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional
illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for "011 wright," O.K. for "011 korrect," K.Y. for
"know yuse," and so on. O.K. first appeared
in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Had
that been it, the expression would no doubt have died an early death, but
coincidentally in 1840 Martin Van Buren, known as Old Kinderhook from his
hometown in upstate New York, was running for reelection as president, and an
organization founded to help his campaign was given the name the Democratic
O.K. Club. O.K. became a rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great
haste established itself as a word throughout the country. This may have been
small comfort to Van Buren, who lost the election to William Henry Harrison,
who had the no-less-snappy slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."
Although the residents of the New World began
perforce to use
new words almost from the first day they
stepped ashore, it isn't at all clear when they began pronouncing them in a
distinctively American way. No one can say when the American accent first
arose-or why it evolved quite as it did. As early as 1791, Dr. David Ramsay,
one of the first American historians, noted in his History of the
American Revolution that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which
he attributed to the fact that people from allover Britain were thrown together
in America where they "dropped the peculiarities of their several
provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them
all."
But that is not to suggest that they sounded very much like Americans of
today. According to Robert Burchfield, George Washington probably sounded as
British as Lord North. On the other hand, Lord North probably sounded more
American than would any British minister today. North would, for instance, have
given necessary its full value. He would have pronounced path and
bath in the American way. He would have given r's
their full value in words like cart and horse. And he would
have used many words that later fell out of use in England but were preserved. in the New World.
The same would be true of the soldiers on the battlefield, who would,
according to Burchfield, have spoken identically "except in minor
particularities." [The English Language, page 36] Soldiers from
both sides would have tended not to say join and poison as we
do today, but something closer to "jine"
and "pison." Speak and tea would
have sounded to modem ears more like "spake" and "tay," certain
and merchant more like "sartin" and "marchant."
It has been said many times that hostility towards Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War was such that America seriously considered adopting another language. The story
has been repeated many times, even by as eminent an authority as Professor
Randolph Quirk of Oxford, * but it appears to be without foundation. Someone may
have made such a proposal. At this remove we cannot be certain. But what we
can say with confidence is that if such a proposal was made it appears not to
have stimulated any widespread public debate, which would seem distinctly odd
in a matter of such moment. We also know that the Founding Fathers were so
little exercised by the question of an official language for the United States that they made not one mention of it in the
Constitution. So it seems evident that such a proposal was not treated
seriously, if indeed it ever existed.
What is certain is that many people, including
both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, expected American English to evolve
into a separate language over time. Benjamin Franklin, casting an uneasy eye at
the Germans in his native Pennsylvania, feared that America would fragment into a variety of speech communities.
But neither of these things happened. It is worth looking at why they did not.
Until about 1840 America received no more than about 20,000 immigrants a year,
mostly from two places: Africa in the form of slaves and the British Isles. Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more
than one million. Then suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval elsewhere, America's immigration became a flood. In the second half of
the nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the
pace quickened further in the early years of the twentieth century. In just
four years at its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million
Italians, a million Austro-Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens
of thousands of other people from scores of other places. At the turn of the
century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the
world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak
of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German
only.
Often, naturally, these people settled in enclaves. John Russell Bartlett
noted that it was possible to cross Oneida County, New
York, and hear
nothing but Welsh. Probably the most famous of these enclaves – certainly the most
enduring – was that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania
Dutch. (The name is a corruption of
Deutsch, or German.) Some 300,000 people in America still use Pennsylvania
Dutch as their first language, and perhaps twice as many more can speak it, The large number is accounted for no doubt by
the extraordinary insularity of most
Amish, many of whom even now shun cars, tractors, electricity, and the other
refinements of modem life. Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of
institutionalized broken English, arising from adapting English words to German
syntax and idiom. Probably the best known of their expressions is "Outen
the light" for put out the light. Among others:
Nice day, say not? -Nice day, isn't it?
What's the matter of him? -What's the matter with him?
It's going to give rain. -It's going to rain.
Come in and eat yourself. -Come
and have something to eat.
It wonders me where it could be. -I wonder where it could be.
Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also have a tendency to speak with
semi-Germanic accents-saying "chorge" for George, "britches"
for bridges, and "tolt" for told. Remarkably, many of
them still have trouble, despite more than two centuries in America, with "v" and "th" sounds, saying
"wisit" for visit and "ziss" for this. But
two things should be borne in mind. First, Pennsylvania Dutch is an anomaly,
nurtured by the extreme isolation from modem life of its speakers. And second,
it is an English dialect. That is significant.
Throughout the last century, and often into this one, it was easy to find
isolated speech communities throughout much of America: Norwegians in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Swedes in Nebraska, Germans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and many others. It was natural to suppose that the
existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues,
rather as in Europe, or at the very least result in widely divergent
dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its prevailing immigrant group.
But of course nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the very opposite was the
case. Instead of becoming more divergent, people over the bulk of the American
mainland continued to evince a more or less uniform speech. Why should that be?
There were three main reasons. First, the continuous movement of people
back and forth across the continent militated against the formation of
permanent regionalisms. Americans enjoyed social mobility long before
sociologists thought up the term. Second, the intermingling of people from
diverse backgrounds worked in favor of homogeneity. Third, and above all,
social pressures and the desire for a common national identity encouraged
people to settle on a single way of speaking.
People who didn't blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They
were given names that denigrated their backgrounds: wop from the Italian
guappo (a strutting fellow), kraut (from the supposed German
fondness for sauerkraut), rid (for Yiddish
speakers), dago from the Spanish Diego, kike (from the -ki and
-fry endings
on many Jewish names), bohunk from
Bohemian-Hungarian, micks and paddies for the Irish. . . . The
usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely
assimilated-to the point of being unable to speak their parents' language.
Occasionally physical isolation, as with the Cajuns in Louisiana or the Gullah speakers on the Sea Islands off the East Coast, enabled people to be more resistant to change. It has often been said that if you want to
hear what the speech of Elizabethan England sounded like, you should go to the
hills of Appalachia or the Ozarks, where you can find isolated
communities of people still speaking the English of Shakespeare. To be sure,
many of the words and expressions that we think of today as
"hillbilly" words-a feared, tetchy, consarn it, yo urn (for yours),
hisn (for his), et (for ate), sassy (for
saucy), jined (for joined), and scores of others-do indeed
reflect the speech of Elizabethan London. But much the same claim could be made
for the modem-day speech of Boston
or Charleston or indeed almost anywhere else. After all, every
person in American uses a great many expressions and pronunciations familiar to
Shakespeare but which have since died out in England-gotten, fall (for
the season), the short a of bath and path, and so on. The
mountain regions may possess a somewhat greater abundance of archaic
expressions and pronunciations because of their relative isolation, but to
imply that the speech there is a near replica of the speech of Elizabethan
England is taking it too far. Apart from anything else, most of the mountain
areas weren't settled for a century or more after Elizabeth's death. H. L. Mencken traced this belief to an early
authority, one A. J. Ellis, and then plunged the dagger in with the conclusion
that "Ellis was densely ignorant of the history of the English settlements
in America, and ascribed to them a cultural isolation that never
existed." Still, it is easy to find the belief, or something very like it,
repeated in many books.
It is certainly true to say that America in general preserved many dozens of words that would
otherwise almost certainly have been lost to English. The best noted, perhaps,
is gotten, which to most Britons is the quaintest of Americanisms. It is
now so unused in Britain that many Britons have to have the distinction
between got and gotten explained to them-they use got for
both--even though they make exactly the same distinction with forgot and
forgotten. Gotten also survives in England in one or two phrases, notably "ill-gotten
gains." Sick likewise underwent a profound change of sense in Britain that was not carried over to America. Shakespeare uses it in the modem American sense in Henry
V ("He is very sick, and would to bed"), but in Britain the word has come to take on the much more specific
sense of being nauseated. Even so, the broader original sense survives in a
large number of expressions in Britain, such as sick bay, sick note, in
sickness and in health, to be off sick (that is, to stay at home from work
or school because of illness), sickbed, homesick, and lovesick. Conversely,
the British often use ill where Americans would only use injured, as
in newspaper accounts describing the victim of a train crash as being
"seriously ill in hospital"
Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died
in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress
as a verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense
of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression), deck
of cards (the English now say pack), slim in the sense of small (as
in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy, trash
for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for pig, mayhem,
magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the expression I
guess. Many of these words have reestablished themselves in England, so much so that most Britons would be astonished to
learn that they had ever fallen out of use there. Maybe was described in
the original Oxford English Dictionary in this century as "archaic
and dialectal." Quit in the sense of resigning had similarly died
out in Britain. To leaf
through a book was first recorded in Britain in 1613, but then fell out of use there and was
reintroduced from America, as was frame-up, which the Oxford English
Dictionary in 1901 termed obsolete, little realizing that it would soon be
reintroduced to its native land in a thousand gangster movies.
America also introduced many words and expressions that never
existed in Britain but which have for the most part settled comfortably
into domestic life there. Among these words and phrases are-and this really is
a bare sampling-commuter, bedrock, snag, striptease, cold spell, gimmick,
baby-sitter, lengthy, sag, soggy, teenager, telephone, typewriter, radio, to
cut no ice, to butt in, to side-track, hangover, to make good (to be successful),fudge,
publicity, joyride, bucket shop, blizzard, stunt, law-abiding, department
store, notify, advocate (as a verb), currency (for money), to
park, to rattle (in the sense of to unnerve or unsettle), hindsight,
beeline, raincoat, scrawny, take a backseat, cloudburst, graveyard, know-how,
to register (as in a hotel), to shut down, to fill the bill, to hold
down (as in keep), to hold up (as in rob), to bank on, to stay
put, to be stung (cheated), and even stiff upper lip. In a rather
more roundabout way, so to speak, the word roundabout, their term for
traffic circles, is of American origin. More precisely, it was a term invented
by Logan Pearsall Smith, an American living in England, who was one of the members in the 1920s of the BBC
Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This lofty panel had the job of deciding
questions of pronunciation, usage, and even vocabulary for the BBC: Before
Smith came along, traffic circles in Britain were called gyratory circuses. *
Of course, the traffic has not been entirely one way. Apart from the
several thousand words that the British endowed Americans with in the first
place, they have since the colonial exodus also given the world smog,
weekend, gadget, miniskirt, radar, brain drain, and gay in the sense
of homosexual. Even so, there is no denying that the great bulk of words
introduced into the English language over the last two centuries has traveled from west to east. And precious little thanks
we get. Almost from the beginning of the colonial experience it has been a
common assumption in Britain that a word or turn of phrase is inferior simply by
dint of its being American-bred. In dismissing the "vile and barbarous
word talented," Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that "most of
these pieces of slang come from America." That clearly was ground enough to detest them.
In point of fact, I am very pleased to tell you, talented
was a British coinage, first used in 1422. Something of the spirit of the
age was captured in Samuel Johnson's observation in 1769 that Americans were
"a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them
short of hanging." [Quoted by Pyles, in Words
and Ways of American English, page 106] A reviewer of Thomas Jefferson's Notes
on the State of Virginia (1787) entreated Jefferson to say what he would about the British character, but "0 spare,
we beseech you, our mother-tongue." Another, noting his use of the word belittle,
remarked: "It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part
all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr.
Jefferson!" [Quoted by Pyles, Words
and Ways of American English, page 17] Jefferson also coined the word Anglophobia; little wonder.
As often as not, these sneerers showed themselves to be not only
gratuitously offensive but also etymologically underinformed because the
objects of their animus were invariably British in origin. Johnson disparaged glee,
jeopardy, and smolder, little realizing that they had existed in England for centuries. To antagonize, coined by John
Quincy Adams, was strenuously attacked. So was progress as a verb, even
though it had been used by both Bacon and Shakespeare. Scientist was
called "an ignoble Americanism" and "a cheap and vulgar product
of trans-Atlantic slang."
Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this
caviling-perhaps most surprisingly Benjamin Franklin. When the Scottish
philosopher David Hume criticized some of his Americanisms, Franklin meekly
replied: "I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some
unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate and the colonize.
. . I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and
for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the
least obscure is a fault; The unshakable too, tho
clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already
possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally
wrong. . . . I hope with you, that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard,
and I believe it will be so." And yet he went right on introducing words: eventuate,
demoralize, constitutionality. This servility persisted for a long time
among some people. William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the leading
journalists of the nineteenth century in America, refused to allow such useful words as lengthy and
presidential into his paper simply because they had been dismissed as
Americanisms a century earlier. Jefferson, more heroically, lamented the British tendency to raise "a hue and cry at every word he [Samuel Johnson]
has not licensed."
The position has little improved with time. To this day you can find
authorities in Britain attacking such vile "Americanisms" as maximize,
minimize, and input, quite unaware that the first two were coined by
Jeremy Bentham more than a century ago and the last
appeared more than 600 years ago in Wycliffe's translation of the Bible. Loan
as a verb (rather than lend) is often criticized as an Americanism,
when in fact it was first used in England a full eight centuries ago. The
stylebook of the Times of London sniffily instructs its
staff members that "normalcy should be left to the Americans who coined
it. The English [italics mine] is normality." In point of fact normalcy
is a British coinage. As Baugh and Cable put it, "The English attitude
toward Americanisms is still quite frankly hostile."
Indeed, it occasionally touches new peaks of smugness. In 1930, a
Conservative member of Parliament, calling for a quota on the number of
American films allowed into Britain, said: "The words and accent are perfectly
disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on
our language." [Quoted by Norman Moss in What's the Difference, page
12] More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the
members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the
earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what is."
(We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless,
nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of
British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted
status simply because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before
between a monarch and an orange seller.)
Even when they have not been actively hostile, the British have often
struck an aloof, not to say fantastical, attitude to the adoption of American
words. In The King's English (1931), the Fowler brothers, usually
paragons of common sense in matters linguistic, take the curious and decidedly
patronizing view that although there is nothing wrong with American English,
and that it is even capable of evincing occasional flashes of genius, it is
nonetheless a foreign tongue and should be treated as such. "The English
and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are
better apart than mixed." They particularly cautioned against using three
vulgar Americanisms: placate, transpire, and antagonize.
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 offor in phrases like "the flfSt 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 instead of 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 towards 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. . . . 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.
British American
cot baby's crib
cotton (for sewing) thread
courgette zucchini
to skive to loaf
candy floss cotton candy
full stop (punctuation) period
inverted commas quotation marks
berk idiot, boor
joiner skilled carpenter
knackered worn out
numbered plate license plate
Old Bill policeman
scarper run away
to chivvy to hurry along
subway pedestrian underpass
pantechnicon furniture removal truck
flyover vehicle overpass
leading article newspaper editorial
fruit machine one-armed bandit
smalls ladies' underwear
coach long-distance bus
spiv petty thief
to grizzle to whine
to hump to carry a heavy
load
