by Erin Moore
Today, a new generation is delighting royal watchers worldwide, and giving souvenir makers a renewed revenue stream. The English have a lot to be proud of, having recently celebrated the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Olympics on home soil, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and the birth of a future king. American Anglophilia is at an all-time high, too. You know it when you see it.
It has been more than three decades since my sentimental education at Nana’s knee. After studying nineteenth-century British literature at colleges in America and England, marrying into an English/American family, and realizing the dream of becoming a dual citizen, let me tell you: Living in England really takes the edge off one’s Anglophilia. What I loved before was not England itself, but the idea of England. Now my feelings, while still positive, are more complicated, attached as they are to specific people, experiences, and the circumstances of daily life in London with my husband, Tom, and our young children, Anne and Henry. As a sympathetic soul said to me during my first, rocky transitional year, moving to a new country is jolly hard! An American in England will always feel like a foreigner, and not always entirely admired—or welcome. Which is fair enough. American expatriates are a dime a dozen, particularly in London, and have been for a long time. In Hugh Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, published in 1925, Harkness, an American expat on a train, is told by an Englishman, “If I had my way I’d make the Americans pay a tax, spoiling our country as they do.”
“I am an American,” says Harkness, faintly.
This may come as a surprise to Americans who have been to England on vacation, and spent a couple of madcap weeks seeking out everything they expected to find: legendary politeness and reserve, the much-vaunted stiff upper lip, Beefeaters, ravens, double-decker buses, infallible taxi drivers, Shakespeare, warm beer, pub lunches, and afternoon tea. Check, check, check, and check. Stereotypes confirmed, there is just enough time for a stop at Harrods before heading for Heathrow. Meanwhile, one of my English friends makes a compelling case that the English have more, culturally and temperamentally, in common with the Japanese than they do with Americans. That’s why it is possible to spend months, and even years, as an outsider in the country and never penetrate beneath the surface to how people really live and think, and what their words actually mean. Though as time passes, one does begin to develop an inkling of just how much one doesn’t know, and this actually helps. The similarities in our English can be misleading. It’s the differences that give us direction and help us, finally, to know where we stand.
As late as the nineteenth century, it was feared that the two nations would lose their ability to communicate. Noah Webster predicted American English would one day be as different from the English spoken in England as Swedish and Dutch were from German. Thankfully, this never happened. What developed instead is a keen sibling rivalry. England plays the role of the cool older sister, trying to ignore the fact that pesky little America is now big enough to pin her to the wall.
Given their history, it should surprise no one that Americans were not always so enamored of Britishisms. In the early 1920s, H. L. Mencken sneered at English neologisms and the small class of “Anglomaniacs” who used them. He noted that the majority of Americans regarded everything English as affected, effeminate, and ridiculous. This, long before American moviegoers’ obsession with Hugh Grant and Daniel Craig, though it was the theater that would later supply untraveled Anglophiles with “a steady supply of Briticisms, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation. . . . Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, PA, or Athens, GA, learned how to shake hands, eat soup, greet his friends, enter a drawing-room and pronounce the words path, secretary, melancholy, and necessarily in a manner that was an imitation of some American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what was done in Mayfair.” If this seems an unnecessarily cruel assessment of the origins of Anglophilia, consider the source. Few partisans of American English have been as sure of themselves, or as committed to American individualism, as Mencken.
Believe it or not, there was once a time when British travelers could not praise American English enough. Relatively soon after America was founded, the English language spoken there sounded just archaic enough—free of the neologisms that corrupted that of their countrymen. But it wasn’t long before America had neologisms of its own—such as happify, consociate, and dunderment—that sounded preposterous to English ears. America was too new and too young to pose a threat to their culture and language.
There is little love for an Americanism now. From the time of the first “talkies” (which were often translated for British audiences in the early days of the movie invasion), anxiety about American English’s influence has spread. John Humphrys, venerable presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, admitted that as much as the English like to tell themselves (and, even more, the French) that their language has become the world’s second language, they know that the lingua franca is actually American. Naturally, there is resentment that “our former colony has stolen our crown . . . The language is by rights ‘ours,’ so anything they might do to it is bound to be a debasement.” It’s no wonder that some people still think of the English spoken in England as the mother tongue, and the English spoken in America as its wayward child. But it isn’t true. Today’s English English, like American English, evolved as a dialect from sixteenth-century English, and neither can claim to be closer to the original.
What we are left with is the vanity of small differences, and we are more focused on them than ever. Greater access to travel and international journalism might be expected to cause a flattening-out of such differences in language, but ironically it has only increased our awareness of them. Cross-pollination is largely self-conscious, whether we embrace or avoid it. The American market routinely remakes English-language books and television for American audiences. Harry Potter’s jumpers and biscuits become sweaters and cookies. The Office is remade with American actors (and their American teeth). Publishers and producers claim that they do this to make English exports more accessible. But many Americans resent it, and avidly ferret out the originals. Why would they, if they weren’t seeking entrée to the preoccupations, idiosyncrasies, and oddities of the other culture? Not to mention shamelessly borrowing words to enhance their cultural cachet—call it Masterpiece Theatre syndrome. Shows that survive the move to America more or less intact—like Downton Abbey—do so because they are inextricable from their cultural setting and that is the reason Americans love them so much. (Just as the English love quintessentially American shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.) When will publishers and Hollywood come to realize that the differences are valuable in themselves, and stop tampering with them? We should celebrate them instead, and by “celebrate,” I don’t mean “imitate.”
In this book, I’ll correct some popular misconceptions about both England and America and explain the subtleties that elude the cursory look, or the tourist on a ten-day tour. One of the most important of these is what it means to say England versus Britain or the United Kingdom. Great Britain includes the countries of England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom includes not just Great Britain, but also Northern Ireland. So only someone who is from England—the UK’s largest country, containing 84 percent of its population—is English. Someone who is British might be Scottish, Welsh, Irish (from Northern Ireland), or English. Similarly, Americans, while resigned to being called Yankees by the English, have a narrower definition of the word, and it differs regionally. Southern Americans use Yankee to describe Northerners, and Northerners use it to describe New Englanders—the only Americans who identify themselves as Yankees (for more on this, see Yankee). England and America are diverse countries with a lot of different local accents and dialects, not to mention regional differences in vocabulary, which it would be impossible to do individual justice to. Still, to the extent that it is possible to generalize about them, I’ll be doing just that. Anyone who wou
ld find out the truth has to start somewhere.
I pledge not to play favorites—as is only fair when speaking of siblings. My loyalties, like my language, are transatlantic. I refuse to choose sides—at least not permanently. I also refuse to relinquish my American accent, even if I adopt a few new words and allow my syntax to shift and adapt. Using English spellings still feels wrong, if not exactly treasonous. My father-in-law understands; he retains his English accent almost four decades after moving to America, yet his siblings tease him for what they feel is a thorough defection. A small (American) child once told my mother-in-law, “I’m sorry about Mr. Moore’s disability,” meaning his funny accent, a kind of speech impediment few people had in Tucson, Arizona, in the 1980s. I would say expatriates can’t win, but it isn’t really true. I think we have the best of both worlds.
As a former book editor who specialized in finding and publishing British books for American readers, I know how fruitful cultural tensions can be. I am a passionate and curious reader and observer of the way people talk, and the ways we understand—or misunderstand—one another. This subject is a moving target, and extremely subjective. You are bound to disagree with me at times. My hope is that this book will help Americans and the English communicate better, or at least understand why we don’t.
That’s Not English is for you if you love language enough to argue about it; if you enjoy travel, armchair or otherwise; if you are contemplating a move to England or America; if you consider yourself an Anglophile; or if you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t a similarly great word for English people who love America. (Americanophile feels like a mouthful of nails, and Yankophile sounds truly disreputable.) This is a love letter to two countries that owe each other more than they would like to admit. God bless us, every one.
Quite
In which we find out why Americans really like quite and the English only quite like really.
What harm could an innocent little adverbial modifier do? Look no further for evidence than quite, which has been the cause of confusion, unemployment, heartbreak, and hurt feelings, all because of a subtle—yet vital—distinction that is lost on Americans, to the consternation of the English.
Both nations use quite to mean “completely” or “totally.” This meaning dates to around 1300, and applies when there is no question of degree. If you say a person is “quite nude” or a bottle is “quite empty,” it might sound oddly formal to the American ear, but it will cause no controversy or misunderstanding. Nude is nude. Empty is empty. The trouble begins when quite is used to modify an adjective that is gradable, like “attractive,” “intelligent,” or “friendly.” For, then, the English use quite as a qualifier, whereas Americans press it into service as an emphasizer. In English English, quite means “rather” or “fairly,” and is a subtle way of damning with faint praise. To an American, quite simply means “very,” and amps the adjective. No subtlety there.
Is anyone surprised? The stereotypes of the discerning Brit and the hyperbolic American have as much currency now as they ever did. American adjectives have always gone up to eleven. English visitors to a young America were amazed by the tall language they heard—words like rapscallionly, conbobberation, and helliferocious. Such words seem outlandish today only because of their unfamiliarity. Whether or not they were widely used in the Wild West, they made Americans seem badass. Everyone, not least the milquetoasts back east, wanted to believe in an America that was unleashed and not quite housebroken.
These words beggar awesome, a widely derided modern example of American hyperbole. Once, only God could be awesome. Now even a mediocre burrito qualifies. It wouldn’t be so bad if awesome hadn’t been aggressively exported. A post on urbandictionary.com rings with contempt, describing awesome as “a ‘sticking plaster’ word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary.” Here, sticking plaster is the dead giveaway to the poster’s nationality.
Another Englishman who has come out, bravely and publicly, against awesome is a poet who works in a Los Angeles bookstore (imagine!). John Tottenham’s campaign to stamp out the word awesome (which he told the Daily Mail was “bogus”) extends to an “Anti-Awesome oration” and some snazzy bumper stickers. He devoted an almost American level of enthusiasm to the task before pulling himself up short at having T-shirts made, which would have been taking it too far. He was the one who chose to live in LA, after all. You can’t very well move to the beach and complain about the sand.
American enthusiasm was once an object of admiration. An English novelist named Mrs. Henry De La Pasture was quoted in The New York Times in 1910: “The Americans have been obliged to invent a new verb for which we have no use over here—‘to enthuse.’ Why don’t we enthuse? And why, if we do conjugate this verb in secret, are we so afraid to let it be known? . . . We fear terribly to encourage ourselves or others. The people over there are not afraid. They let themselves go individually and independently over what they like or admire, and pour forth torrents of generous praise which we should shrink from voicing unless we were quite sure that everybody else agreed with us, or unless the object of our admiration had been a long time dead.” The English may detect a note of condescension here, but an American won’t.
Americans overdo, overstate, overenthuse—it has ever been and ever will be. So it’s tempting to make fun of Americans for press-ganging quite, an unassuming qualifier, to their own eager ends. But you’d be wrong. When quite modifies a gradable adjective, the UK usage—not the American—is the deviation. The American use of quite to mean “very” began around 1730, whereas the English sense of quite as a qualifier wasn’t recorded until more than one hundred years later, in 1845. And it has been causing international incidents ever since.
An English author receives an editorial letter from her American editor who “quite” likes her new book. (Insult!)
An American student finds it impossible to get a job in the UK based on the glowing recommendation letters submitted by her professors, whose highest praise is “quite intelligent and hard-working.” (Shock!)
An English houseguest confesses to being “quite hungry” and is served a steak of punishing size by an oblivious American friend. (Horror!) And so it goes.
It doesn’t really matter who started it—the root of this misunderstanding over quite is a difference in the way Americans and the English habitually express themselves. As anthropologist Kate Fox explains in her fascinating book Watching the English, “our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement. Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal,” the English feign indifference. “The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; . . . a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; . . . and an unforgivably stupid misjudgment is ‘not very clever.’” Anything that would warrant streams of superlatives in another culture is pretty much covered by “nice.”
What is an American interlocutor to do? Look no further for advice than Debrett’s, the self-proclaimed “trusted source on British social skills, etiquette and style . . . originally founded as the expert on British aristocracy.” Debrett’s warns against mistaking understatement for underreaction: “read between the lines and you’ll find the missing drama and emotion.”
But how can Americans, renowned for their obtuseness, be expected to read between the lines when the English consider “Quite” a complete sentence? Would it be easier if the English learned to take the American quite with a grain of Maldon salt? Quite.
Middle Class
In which we find a far more stable class hierarchy in England, where class and cash are but loosely linked.
Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is so happily ensconced in the heart of England’s royal family now, so beloved by practically ev
eryone, it would be possible to forget the tabloid nastiness that erupted after her 2007 breakup with Prince William. It was said that the prince broke it off, in part, because of Ms. Middleton’s background—in particular, her mother’s overly obvious glee at the potential match, and Mrs. Middleton’s subroyal behavior, which allegedly included chewing gum and using the word toilet (see Toilet). Snobs reveled in the knowledge that Mrs. Middleton had once worked as a flight attendant, and friends of William’s were said to have intoned “Doors to manual” in Kate’s presence. To his credit, the prince and his aides dismissed these rumors in the strongest terms. But the English media are notoriously prone to public shaming, and the way they interpreted the breakup surely says more about the English fascination with class than it does about Catherine or her solidly middle-class family, in particular her mother, who always appears impeccable.
Class warfare supposedly died out years ago in England. Back in 1997, former Labour MP John Prescott (now Lord Prescott) famously declared, “We’re all middle class now.” But don’t you believe it. As cultural commentator Peter York has said, although “everywhere has a class system . . . it’s our obsession in the sense that race is the American obsession.”
Productivity plummeted in April 2013 when the BBC’s class calculator began making the rounds of social networking sites. The calculator was part of a larger project, the Great British Class Survey. A brainchild of BBC Lab UK, it aimed to find out whether the traditional hierarchy of “working,” “middle,” and “upper” classes still existed and whether or not social class “even matters” in twenty-first-century Britain. They got their answer when five million people logged on to find out where they stood and proceeded to argue over the methodology that had divided the nation into seven distinct classes with new names: Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Traditional Working Class, Emergent Service Workers, and the “Precariat,” the “poorest, most deprived class.”