by Bill Bryson
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, babysitter, lengthy, sag, soggy, teenager, telephone, typewriter, radio, to cut no ice, to butt in, to sidetrack, 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 “O 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 it 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 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.
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
number 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
* “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
In 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.