by Erin Moore
For most people, the preference for one brand or snack over another comes down to childhood tastes and the memories associated with them. The English may never become converts to Hershey’s chocolate, and Americans may never embrace Marmite. But Americans might want to make a habit of moreish. I promise not to make fun of anyone borrowing this Britishism—as long as you save some M&M’s for me.
Mufti
In which we find out why the English love uniforms so much.
Mama, that girl has a red cardigan! And that one, and that one . . .” I explain why most of the children in our neighborhood always seem to be wearing the same outfit: It is their school uniform. My three-year-old looks quizzical. “But what’s ‘uniform’?” As we keep walking toward Edgware Road—past the children in their red jackets and cardigans; past the policemen in their helmets and the street cleaners in yellow reflective vests; past the grocery store where the workers all wear green smocks; past the shisha cafés where women in hijab sit drinking tea—I realize that almost everyone is wearing a uniform. Around here, you need a word to describe the state of not being in uniform. And the English have one: mufti.
Mufti has been the slang term for plain clothes in the British Army for more than two hundred years. Army officers, in their downtime, often wore dressing gowns, smoking caps, and slippers that resembled the traditional dress of a Muslim cleric. A mufti is an expert in Islamic law who is entitled to rule on religious matters, for example issuing a fatwa. This is an odd juxtaposition, to say the least, but mufti is just one of many words the English borrowed from India. A comprehensive list can be found in Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson: Being a Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (1886). Other Hobson-Jobson words include khaki, pyjamas, veranda, loot, pukka (genuine), shampoo, doolally (crazy), and jungle.
Many Hobson-Jobson words are used by Americans, too, often without any idea of their history. Hobson-Jobson’s authors spent fourteen years compiling their book, and, as Kate Teltscher notes in her introduction to the latest edition, they were in close correspondence with James Murray, the editor of the ten-volume New English Dictionary (later to be renamed the Oxford English Dictionary). Many of Yule and Burnell’s definitions went straight into Murray’s masterwork, with the result that there are around five hundred citations of Hobson-Jobson in today’s OED. So transformed has English been by these loaned words from India that it is possible to make a game of it, as two characters (Flora Crewe, an English poet, and Nirad Das, an Indian artist) do in Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink.
FLORA: While having tiffin on the veranda of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pajamas looking like a coolie.
DAS: I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug escaped from the choky and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.
FLORA: I went doolally at the durbar and was sent back to Blighty in a dooley feeling rather dikki with a cup of char and a chit for a chotapeg.
DAS: Yes, and the burra sahib who looked so pukka in his topee sent a coolie to the memsahib—
FLORA: No, no. You can’t have memsahib and sahib, that’s cheating—and anyway I’ve already said coolie.
DAS: I concede, Miss Crewe. You are the Hobson-Jobson champion.
This exchange sounds so much like a quiz show on NPR or BBC Radio 4 that you’d almost expect Peter Sagal or Sandi Toksvig to interrupt them with a scripted joke and points to the winner.
One who is in mufti is assumed to be at ease, but I have observed that English people often seem more at ease in their uniforms. This could be because absolutely no one does uniforms quite like the English, and it starts from early childhood. More than 90 percent of English children wear uniforms to school from age four, and there is broad agreement, crossing political party lines as well as class lines, that uniforms are a good idea. Reasons the English cite for their approval of uniforms include improving discipline and focus, and leveling class distinctions.
Fewer than a quarter of American schools have uniform policies. Those that do are mostly private, or concentrated in larger cities. But uniform policies have been on the rise, subject to heated debate in the United States since the late ’90s, when President Clinton suggested that American schools adopt uniforms to improve students’ concentration and cut down on conflict and competition over dress. Not everyone agrees that the problems in American schools can be solved so easily. An American social scientist, David Brunsma, who has studied the subject extensively, concluded that instituting uniform policies did not have any significant impact on student attendance or achievement, but was more “analogous to cleaning and brightly painting a deteriorating building.”
Americans are less comfortable with the idea of uniforms than the English, and when objecting to them, they often invoke the ideal of defending individual rights to expression. If Americans are so into their individuality, the English might wonder, then why are they so often seen wearing similar jeans and T-shirts? Why does individuality so often translate to informality, even slovenliness? Why do American tourists, who must have heard how much it rains in England, never seem to carry proper raincoats but instead wear disposable plastic ponchos with flimsy hoods, resembling packs of used Kleenex wafting around London in their “fanny packs”? (The English find this locution hilarious because fanny is slang for vagina, which they astonishingly will also call a woman’s front bottom—though this at least sounds less confrontational than America’s vajayjay. Reference will also be made, even in medical settings, to the back passage, which makes the anus sound like the hallway of a gracious country house—at any rate, somewhere you would be welcome to enter only if you were quite friendly with the family. Incidentally, the English call fanny packs “bum bags,” but they hardly ever wear them.) It would seem that Americans, having spent their childhoods in mufti, grow up to adopt a kind of uniform, at least when traveling. But growing up in uniform is certainly no guarantee of one’s future sartorial sense.
Too much uniform-wearing can have consequences. Those who are indifferent to clothes end up confused about how to dress themselves in mufti. I have a friend whose husband borrows her socks without compunction—they’re the right color, so what’s the difference? Some English women, perhaps in reaction to being made to wear pinafores—or worse, plus fours—well into their adolescence, throw modesty to the wind when they at last gain control of their closets. At the first sign of spring, acres of sunburned cleavage and fake-baked legs are revealed, prompting fashion police to decree: “Legs or tits out—not both!” Even covering up can be fraught with peril. Although the weather often warrants wearing black opaque tights year-round, they do look out of place in July. And one fashion blogger quipped, while watching the royal wedding, that England ought to have a Ministry of Silly Hats. The peach potty seat Princess Beatrice perched on her head was surely an attention-grabber, but even a cursory look at HELLO! magazine in summer would show it was not wholly unrepresentative of what you’d see at a society wedding or Ladies’ Day at Ascot. This kind of audacity is one of my favorite things about England. Where an American might play it safe and go for “appropriate,” the English are bold with their fashion.
Those who are not indifferent to clothes move on from their natty uniforms to become some of the most flamboyant and imaginative dressers around. There is a brand of confidence that comes from knowing the rules well enough to flout them. English men, in particular, can be peacocks, fond of hats, uproariously patterned waistcoats (pronounced “weskits”), silk socks, and even the occasional ascot (“askit,” please, as if you had to ask it). The American analogue is the exception that proves the rule: the New England preppy. American men who grow up wearing prep school uniforms become the most likely to wear red trousers or needlepoint belts with whale motifs in adult life. Still, the preppy’s pink-and-g
reen plumage has a youthful, carefree, and casual spirit about it, and it’s primarily an off-duty look.
In England, one can still buy shirts with detachable collars, a style that was invented in America by a housewife who wanted to cut down on her laundry but now is seen as foppish and retro in the extreme. Speaking of foppish and retro, I recently ran into a friend who was carrying a tall cardboard box. He told me he was on his way to drop off his top hat for refurbishment. This did not seem to be a euphemism for anything. It was, he informed me, the best of his top hats. He owns two more: a collapsible one that fits under his seat at the opera, and a “casual” one for outdoor events where he might be sprayed with champagne when someone’s horse, or boat, wins. He was frankly put out at the prospect of doing without it for any amount of time. One could not make this up. But believe me, if there is any place this would still be happening in 2015, it is England.
We arrive at Anne’s nursery, where most of the mothers are wearing near-identical skinny jeans, neutral cashmere sweaters, ballet flats, and long scarves, wrapped twice. When mufti itself becomes a uniform, we are right back where we started.
Gobsmacked
In which the English creative class appears to take over the American media, bringing new slang with it.
Every so often, a word comes along that means just what it sounds like. It may not be onomatopoetic, but even if you’ve never heard it before, you instantly get the idea. Gobsmacked is such a word. It means, figuratively, to be flabbergasted, amazed, or astounded. Literally, it means to be smacked in the mouth, as in the song “Gobsmacked” by Chumbawamba (“Outside the pub / Smack you in the gob / Get four long years / in Wormwood Scrubs”).
Gob has been slang for mouth in the north of England since the late 1500s. There are few adjectives that make you look the way you feel quite like gobsmacked. People who say it have to drop their jaws twice, like large-mouthed bass. You can’t use it insincerely; it conveys a certain authenticity. Highly descriptive and irresistible to many, it is popular as a business name: GobsmackedMedia, Gobsmacked Records, Gobsmack.tv. It is also a nail polish color (charcoal grey with flecks of glitter from Butter London) and, perhaps most appropriately, a brand of sports mouth guards. It’s truth in advertising, mate. Wear it so you don’t lose your teeth when you get smacked in the you-know-where.
Not everyone approves of gobsmacked. It is a word some associate with cheap tabloid newspapers and oiks from the north. In The Dictionary of Disagreeable English, Robert Hartwell Fiske criticizes it as “one of the least attractive words in the English language today.” Those who dislike it often come across as a bit priggish and sour. If there is something indelicate about this back-formation, Americans don’t care. They are too busy using it every chance they get. But how did gobsmacked go from a semi-obscure regionalism in northern England and Scotland in the 1950s, not showing up in the OED until 1987, to international ubiquity?
The word has been common parlance on English TV shows like Coronation Street, England’s longest-running soap, for decades. Through television, it spread to southern England, where most of the English media are based. Gobsmacked began to appear in print around 1985 (according to the OED, first in The Guardian), and its spread through the UK was soon complete. But this Britishism had yet to take Manhattan. Some commentators date Americans’ increasing use of gobsmacked to Susan Boyle’s star turn on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. The self-described “cat lady” from Scotland wiped the smug smirk off Simon Cowell’s face with her pitch-perfect performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. Her performance went viral, and she described herself as “gobsmacked” in dozens of interviews in the days that followed. Still, I believe there is more to the story.
England and America have always traded slang. When America was young, and Anglophobia was strong, Americans resented any incursion. There was a drive to distance American from British English. Noah Webster’s 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (the predecessor to his more authoritative and complete 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language) was America’s first. It was a political document, an attempt to enshrine American independence through language, and to introduce uniform spellings for the first time. Webster’s essay “On the Education of Youth in America” left no one in doubt of his position:
Americans, unshackle your minds, and act like independent beings. You have been children long enough, subject to the control and subservient to the interest of a haughty parent. You have now an interest of your own . . . an empire to raise and support by your exertions, and a national character to establish and extend by your wisdom and virtues. To effect these great objects, it is necessary to frame a liberal plan of policy, and build it on a broad system of education. Before this system can be formed and embraced, the Americans must believe, and act from the belief, that it is dishonorable to waste life in mimicking the follies of other nations and basking in the sunshine of foreign glory.
Webster’s American Spelling Book, also known as the “Blue Backed Speller,” was one of America’s earliest bestselling books, providing American children with a moral and academic education for more than 160 years and reinforcing the spelling reforms (colour became color, theatre became theater, oesophagus became esophagus, etc.) that are among the most lasting aspects of Webster’s legacy. America’s beloved spelling bees are another, taking place at every level from the smallest classroom in the remotest corner of the country to the national contest, which is televised. Americans have a history of being territorial about their language, and it continues today, though England’s slang is the least of their worries. Now that Americans have established their national character, they find English slang charming, if always a little pretentious, regardless of a word’s original class connotations in England. Americans still love to think of themselves as uncorrupted by such things, but Ben Yagoda, an author and professor of English at the University of Delaware, tracks the progress of NOOBs (Not One-Off Britishisms)—traditionally British expressions that have been widely adopted in the United States—and he never runs out of material.
Meanwhile, in England, one sees articles with headlines like “Top Ten Most Annoying Americanisms.” Matthew Engel, in a BBC article titled “Why Do Some Americanisms Irritate People?,” neatly captured the anxiety over American influence with a militaristic metaphor: “What the world is speaking—even on levels more sophisticated than basic Globish—is not necessarily our English. According to the Oxford Guide to World English, ‘American English has a global role at the beginning of the 21st Century comparable to that of British English at the start of the 20th.’ The alarming part is that this is starting to show in the language we speak in Britain. American usages no longer swim to our shores as single spies, as ‘reliable’ and ‘talented’ did. They come in battalions.”
So eager are the bashers of Americanisms that Americans are often unjustly blamed for neologisms that actually emanated from the other side of the Atlantic. For example, it’s easy to find an English or a French person who enjoys eating eggs and pancakes at eleven thirty in the morning, but it’s hard to find one who will countenance the word brunch (or worse: le brunch). Yet brunch did not originate in America. An Englishman, Guy Beringer, coined this portmanteau word back in 1896. Surprisingly, the concept of the all-you-can-drink brunch was not invented by the English, but was an American innovation. No one in England has yet complained about the spread of this concept to their shores.
The English used to complain bitterly (and some still do) about the steady encroachment of Americanisms into their language via television, film, and advertising. But one could argue that these days, the crossover is about equal. This is because of the preponderance of English journalists, editors, and television producers who have infiltrated America at the highest levels of their professions.
The current CEO of The New York Times and the editor of the New York Daily News are English. So are the presidents of ABC and NBC News and the edito
rs of American Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Reality television is dominated by a few British producers, like Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice) and Simon Cowell (The X Factor, American Idol). Tina Brown, Piers Morgan, and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others, have had an undeniable influence on highbrow American pop culture. Although England’s population is one-sixth the size of the United States’, it supports more than a dozen national newspapers. (America has only three, and many would argue that USA Today hardly counts.) “The British news media market is a brutal and competitive crucible; it breeds frankness, excellence and a fair amount of excess. In that context, American journalism’s historical values of objectivity and fairness seem quaint.” For proof, look no further than the difference between the BBC’s aggressive—even combative—interview style versus the more subdued NPR approach. English journalists have a tendency to go for the jugular, and Americans find it refreshing. For now. Is it any wonder that English slang has become incredibly fashionable? Noah Webster would be gobsmacked.