by Ben Blatt
To find out how notable it was, I decided to compare British and American usage of bloke when writers are trying their best to imitate Rowling. I downloaded all Harry Potter stories set in the “Hogwarts Universe” that were of novel length (60,000-plus words) from FanFiction.net. Of these, 144 were by writers who listed their location as Great Britain and 555 were by writers who identified as American.
These are not ordinary writers or ordinary Harry Potter fans. These are people who have written at least 60,000 words—just 20 % shorter than the first Harry Potter book—with the same characters and backdrop of Rowling’s books. These are the diehards among diehards.
Your first instinct might be to think that, if these words are never used by Americans in ordinary speech, then they would not be used in American Harry Potter tributes. But the opposite is true. More American fans of Harry Potter were overindulgent in their use of bloke than British writers.
While just 10 % of the Harry Potter fan fiction by people from Great Britain used bloke more than 3 times per 100,000 words, almost one-fourth of all American written fan fiction did.
One fan, an American, used it at a rate of over 60 times per 100,000 words. That’s twenty times as often as Rowling used it. Despite the fact that bloke is even less common stateside, more Americans were obsessed with using the word than Brits.
The same is true for blimey.
Again, the worst offenders were stateside. One American (different than the bloke fan above) used blimey at a rate of more than 60 times per 100,000 words. American fan fiction used blimey at a higher rate than Rowling and twice as often as British fan fiction.
Though not to the same degree, even Americans used brilliant more. (If you were to look at just uses of Brilliant!, to exclude all uses of brilliant that are not exclamatory, the differential between U.S. and U.K. holds to within 1%.)
Once again the writer who used brilliant the most was an American.
If there is one direct takeaway from this example it’s that American fans who love Harry Potter love acting British—the Britishness of Hogwarts is part of Rowling’s magical world for American readers. Because of the large discrepancies and the size of the sample (89 million words across 699 full-length fan-fiction books), we know these patterns are not random. The easiest way to sound British, or at the least stereotypically British, was to throw in some blimeys or brilliants or blokes.
But this is also a reminder that when comparing a loosely defined group of writers against each other, such as “British writers” versus “American writers,” the group of texts examined is important. Someone who did not have context when looking at these two samples of text might assume that blimey is an American word.
In the example of fan fiction, it’s interesting to note that less stereotypical signatures of British English don’t make it into American writers’ fan fiction. For example, British writers of Harry Potter fan fiction use surely more than three times as much as Americans writers. That’s not surprising, as surely is almost twice as common in the British National Corpus as in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The difference between surely and blimey is that surely doesn’t stick out as over-the-top British. While 40 % of British fan-fiction writers used surely more than Rowling did (10 times per 100,000 words), just 18 % of Americans did.
In situations where no one is trying to imitate British English the results are different. When fan-fiction authors are not trying to emulate British characters the slang disappears from American writers and from British writers. Suzanne Collins, author of the popular young-adult series the Hunger Games, never used blimey or bloke in her trilogy and used brilliant 40 % less than Rowling. In 420 Hunger Games book-length fan fictions no one used the word blimey more than J. K. Rowling’s baseline. Americans no longer overdo the British slang like bloke and brilliant.
And as British slang use declines for Americans, it declines for those who identify as being from Great Britain as well. While 38 % of British Harry Potter fan fiction used brilliant more than Rowling, 13 % of British Hunger Games fan fiction does. And while 10 % of British Harry Potter fan fiction uses bloke more than the Harry Potter author herself, less than 1.5 % of British Hunger Games fan fiction does. Just as American fan-fiction writers delighted in adopting their favorite Britishisms, writers from the U.K. (for the most part) knew when to downplay them. No matter where you’re from, no one imagines Katniss Everdeen having inner monologues where she worries about saving the blokes from District 12.
* * *
We can learn a lot from looking at what writers play up when trying to imitate authors from across the pond. But what differences do we find between American and British vocabularies when writers aren’t focusing on imitating? What happens when they have other things on their mind—like, say, sex?
It turns out that erotica offers a perfect sample of text for comparing the two nations. I downloaded every single sex story from Literotica.com to see what differences we’d find. Based on the author’s stated location, I placed approximately 3,200 stories as being by authors from the United Kingdom and about 15,000 as by Americans. This amounts to 76 million words of pure filth.
For every two times an American used the word brilliant in a sex story, someone from the United Kingdom used it three times. The word surely was used twice as much by writers from the United Kingdom compared to those from America. And for each American use of blimey it was used 12 times by someone from the United Kingdom, while for each one use of bloke by an American it was used more than fifty times by someone from the United Kingdom.
In fact, bloke is one of the most distinct words of British sex stories. On a statistical level it’s not as strong a giveaway as words with alternative spellings like humour, which is seventy-plus times more often used by someone from the U.K. It’s not as distinct as a name like Charley, which is sixty-plus times more often used by someone from the U.K. But once you remove all words that are not proper nouns or cases of alternative spellings, bloke comes out near the top—sandwiched right between knickers and lads.
Here are the others (feel free to let your imagination go wild):
Most Distinctive Words: British vs. American Erotica
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
Comforter
Wanked
Trailer
Knickers
Nightstand
Bloke
Restroom
Lads
Cowboy
Suspender
Semester
Settee
Grade
Shagging
Dr.
Fancied
Motel
Sod
Cops
Bum
Closet
Loo
Railing
Toilets
Downtown
Hugely
Tub
Squashed
Parking
Cope
Scooted
Duvet
Ranch
Sordid
Refrigerator
Pub
Truck
Corridor
Of course, these lists are by definition relative. The numbers do not imply that all American erotica authors are obsessed with trailers. Words in the list above do not have to appear in abundance to be a giveaway of an author’s origin; they just have to appear much more often relative to the texts they are being compared against.
If you break down the results by smaller regions you get different results. While writers from Texas (this is stated author location, not location of the story) use the word trailer, those from New York are a lot more interested in what happens in the subway.
Most Distinctive Words: New York vs. Texan Erotica
TEXAS
NEW YORK
Ranked
Subway
Trailer
Popsicle
Soldiers
Senator
Sergeant
Butthole
Bunk
Museum
Arena
Landlord
Evidently
Sin
Altar
Jacuzzi
Alley
Thrusted
Captain
Shrugs
There are also great discrepancies in the defaults each author uses as their point for comparison. In an American’s world, a typical person around them doesn’t have an “American accent.” They just talk like everyone else, so there’s no need to describe it. I looked at all instances of accent in the collection of tens of thousands of stories to see what type of accents were being described. Not all characters in these stories are paramours, but I think it’s fair to assume a great deal of the accents mentioned were describing one love interest or another. Some accents find their way into more sex stories, out of being a combination of noteworthy and appealing. The most common accents in Literotica follow.
Most Popular Accents in Erotica
1. Southern
2. French
3. British
4. English
5. American
6. Irish
7. Spanish
8. Australian
9. European
Below, I’ve broken the list down by author location. As you would expect, American authors seldom describe their own characters as having an American accent. Likewise for British authors. Yet “American accent” tops the British list, and “British accent” clocks in at second on the American list (right after the sultry Southern drawl).
Most Popular Accents in Erotica by Author Location
AMERICAN AUTHOR
BRITISH AUTHOR
Southern
American
British
English
English
French
French
Irish
European
European
American
Scottish
Italian
Australian
Spanish
Southern
Irish
London
Read Local
How important is home-field advantage for writers? Do American or British authors perform better away from their base?
The other sections in this chapter have focused on writing style, but I was also curious about how authors from different markets are received. If you are trying to write a global bestseller, is it easier for an American to sell in Britain or the other way around? Before we go back to the difference in popularity of American and British authors in different markets, consider the smaller example of Stephen King.
I’ve written about King many times in this book for different reasons. He has authored dozens of bestsellers over the span of decades, which makes him a good target of analysis, and he has also written about writing. Among book lovers, he’s one of the most popular living authors. On Goodreads.com, a social networking site designed to be used by avid readers, he has more “followers” than any other author.
But I will be the first to admit that I also write about Stephen King so often because of my personal bias. Stephen King used to live in Bridgton, Maine, and has used the small town as the backdrop of several stories. The Mist is about the rise of mysterious monsters from a storm over Long Lake in Bridgton. As I write this chapter I am sitting in a house overlooking Long Lake. I picked The Mist out years ago to read for this very reason. For me, there was an added element of fun to read a book set in a location I knew, written by a local author (no matter how global his success is).
King is still a local legend around Bridgton. Thirty-four of King’s fifty-oneI novels take place in Maine. And reading a Stephen King novel in New England makes the book have a local feel even though he’s a mega-author. It’s like rooting for the Boston Red Sox—a massive business that still feels like the local hero.
And the data backs this up. Though he is the most popular author on Goodreads, King loses out to many others on the more populist metric of Facebook fans. As of writing this, King has 4.5 million American fans, but the romance novelist Nicholas Sparks has around 25 % more fans, at 5.8 million. The numbers vary, however, by region and state. In Mississippi and Alabama, Sparks has 75 % more fans than King. In his home state of North Carolina, the The Notebook author has 60 % more fans.
But in King’s home territory of Maine, King is 20 % more popular (measuring by Facebook likes) than Sparks. In neighboring New Hampshire, King edges out Sparks as well.
The differences in state-to-state fandom are minimal compared to the differences from nation to nation. In 2014 Amazon decided to publish a list of “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.” They published one version on their American Amazon.com and a different version on Amazon.co.uk. There were just 21 books that both the American and British list agreed on.
The biggest discrepancy between the lists is easy to spot even just scrolling through. The American list had 69 books written by American authors, while 16 were by authors from the United Kingdom. The British list had 70 books written by people from the United Kingdom and 17 by Americans. By a near identical ratio, the vast majority of books were by authors from the same country as the list maker.
A list published by the London-based Telegraph in 2015 titled “100 Novels Everyone Should Read” featured 43 books by authors from the United Kingdom and just 16 by Americans. American critics Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman put together a list for the American magazine Time called “All-Time 100 Novels.” It featured 59 Americans and just 34 Brits.II
Pop culture has been called by many America’s greatest export, and in Britain 84 %III of the movie market is dominated by American films. It’s obvious that American authors don’t have the same overwhelming market share in Britain as American filmmakers, but are Americans eroding Britain’s preference for its own writers? I decided to take a look at the bestseller lists from each country.
Let’s start with Stephen King, who has achieved international success. He’s had 34 number one New York Times bestsellers. In the same time period he’s seen 19 (as of 2014) number one bestsellers on The Sunday Times list in Britain. While in the States he’s beaten by only James Patterson for the number of number one hits, in the U.K. he’s bested by British authors Catherine Cookson, Terry Pratchett, and Dick Francis.
While King’s success is tempered in Britain, he’s still a huge force. There are only a handful of successful British writers who remain more popular than him in Britain. On the other hand, the same British writers who have more hits than him (Cookson, Pratchett, and Francis) in the U.K. have found much less success stateside. None of those three authors has ever had a number one New York Times hit.
Maybe you don’t think books should be measured by a popularity contest alone, but if they were the Americans are gaining fast. The Sunday Times started publishing their bestseller list in 1974. Each week listed the top ten entries in many categories including Hardback—Fiction. In The Sunday Times’ first year of bestsellers Brits beat out the Americans without a sweat. Looking at just those who were from either nation, 84 % were British to 16 % on the American side in 1974.
Ten years later Americans had inched up to 22 %. In 1984 they had inched up to 27 % and another decade later to 33 %. In 2014, forty years after the list’s first year, Americans were at a ratio of 37 % to British writers’ 63 %.
The fraction of American books reaching the bestseller list has more than doubled in the last forty years. They are still outnumbered, but at 37 % they represent a huge portion of the market—an American invasion.
In the same time, the rate of British bestsellers in America has been falling. In 1974 books by British authors were about 38 % of the New York Times bestseller list. That’s about what American authors are in Britain now. In 2014 British authors made up only 11 % of the list—less than American writers did in Britain in 1974.
Should Brits worry that they are using losing their grasp on the language
they created? Not only are British writers losing huge ground to Americans on their own turf, but in the long-term view they are coming up short overseas.
I caution against using the graphs on the previous page to predict the future, but I suspect that the days of Brits claiming such a huge share of their own market are over and not coming back. The United Kingdom has one-fifth as many people as America, so it is only natural that America did not stay as the nonfactor it was in 1974. But if Sparks vs. King shows us anything, it’s that a full takeover is unlikely. People have a desire to hear stories by people who understand the same places, interests, and conflicts that they do. And if Harry Potter fan fiction shows us anything, people take joy in exploring a distant world. More likely than lasting dominance by either side is the emergence of an equilibrium between the two. In fact, the last few decades seem to bear that out, as the percentage of British fiction in America has bounced back from a low of 3 % in 1994 to 8 % in 2004, and then to 11 % in 2014 (thanks in part to a new world of wizardly blokes).
Are Americans Loud?
British people use the word brilliant often. That’s a stereotype—which the data shows is true. Just as we’ve focused on certain Britishisms in this chapter, there are words and phrases stereotypical of Americans, like “take-out,” “I’m good,” and “heads-up.” These are small quirks in language, but there are also grander stereotypes describing how Americans talk. Take, for instance, the stereotype that Americans are loud. The loud and obnoxious American tourist has become a cliché in Europe. But, looking at literature, could it be true that Americans, in general, are loud?