That's Not English

by Erin Moore

  Americans have been accused, with some justification, of being more Victorian than the Victorians. In fact, Noah Webster’s purified Bible, in which he substituted euphemisms for words he judged potentially “offensive to delicacy,” predated Queen Victoria’s coronation. On Webster’s watch, fornication became lewdness, piss became excretions, and stink was replaced by odious. Americans never want to offend. There’s a mania for putting the best face on everything, and avoiding the inelegant. It’s all terribly middle-class.

  Bizarrely, this is where toilet prejudice began in England. The upper and lower classes historically had little use for euphemisms. As landowners or tenant farmers, they were in constant contact with birth, death, and excrement. At least in theory. It was the striving middle, in their desire to disassociate from the working class, who started prettying up their language by using French words like toilette, which the upper class cannot abide.

  As Philip Thody explains in Don’t Do It! A Dictionary of the Forbidden, “The landed aristocracy shares with its tenants a suspicion of foreign habits which is reflected in its preference for Anglo-Saxon over Latin terms. Members of the English upper class say chop and not cutlet . . . jam and not preserves, pudding and not dessert . . .” Upper-class avoidance of supposedly refined language has created many linguistic taboos. Thus toilet, which would seem to be about as direct and uneuphemistic as any word can be, came into use as an affectation of the petty bourgeoisie and is still seen that way. The affected have ever been the objects of scorn and ridicule (like the snobbish, status-obsessed Hyacinth Bucket—pronounced Bouquet—on the BBC series Keeping Up Appearances).

  It is hard to believe that antipathy to toilet lingers when many class markers in language have gone the way of the dodo, and every public convenience in England has a sign saying TOILET in one-thousand-point type. Maybe that’s part of the problem. It makes toilet seem all the more common, and those who say it even more so. In her book The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British, Sarah Lyall avers that toilet is considered by many “a virtual profanity, the biggest class marker of all.” She quotes a woman who told the Guardian writer Jonathan Margolis, “I’d rather my children said fuck than toilet.”

  The English find American linguistic hedges rather droll—especially bathroom when used for public conveniences because, as they love to point out, “There is no bath in there!”—but they have their own in loo and lavatory. Lavatory comes straight from the Christian church, and refers to the ritual washing of the celebrant’s hands at the offertory. You can’t get much cleaner than that. Going to the “lavatory” is one of the humorously incongruous things Monty Python’s singing lumberjack does, along with poncing around the shops every Wednesday, having “buttered scones for tea,” and cross-dressing.

  If you are an anxious American who wishes neither to offend nor come across as common, lavatory is considered unimpeachable. It is the restroom of English English. The origins of loo are unknown but vaguely, possibly French. This doesn’t make it suspect, exactly, but it’s less formal—the word to use at someone’s house if you don’t already know where you’re going. Of course, if you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, you know what word you can use.

  Cheers

  In which we find out why Queen Victoria said, “Give my people plenty of beer, good beer, and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them.”

  Pubs have occupied a privileged place in English social life since Anglo-Saxon times, and although their number peaked in 1869, and many have closed in recent years, there are still more than fifty-seven thousand pubs in Britain. In his prewar love letter to pubs, The Local, Maurice Gorham explains one of the reasons pubs are so beloved, and why they endure. “Every pub is somebody’s local, and every one has its regulars . . . You see them ensconced in the corner by the partition, deep in conversation with the landlady when you come in . . . The real regular is one of the family. . . . As a regular myself, I have heard more about the affairs of licensed houses than I know about any of my friends . . . Nothing much is demanded of the regular except to come regularly and show himself interested in the pub’s affairs. He need not even drink very much.”

  Practically every town, every neighborhood, in England has a pub fitting this description, which will bring to the American mind nothing so much as reruns of Cheers, a thirty-year-old television show that took place in an idealized local bar “where everybody knows your name.” America has no analogue to the pub—at least not as a national institution. Americans romanticize English pubs because they tend to drink in anonymous sports bars and chain restaurants with wall-mounted televisions, rather than fireplaces or polished wooden bars, as their focal points. Those lucky enough to have a charming local of their own don’t take it for granted, as much of the country makes do with TGI Fridays and Chili’s. (Although, to be fair, I haven’t yet found a pub snack that can compare to Chili’s Boneless Buffalo Wings.)

  Although Americans and the English have different drinking customs and habits, cheers has been used as a toast in both countries for nearly a century. It comes from the Old French chiere, meaning face. Cheer later came to mean an expression or mood, and later a good mood. In England by the mid-1970s, cheers had become a colloquial synonym for thanks. Cheers has been used that way by the English ever since, and is a remarkably flexible word. It is, for one thing, a great class leveler: Practically everyone says it, and it is appropriate to say to anyone (with the possible exception of the queen, and yet the younger royals surely use it). Cheers can also mean good-bye and is the simplest thing to say at the end of any small transaction, not just at the pub but at the newsagent, getting out of a taxi, or when someone has done you a small favor. It’s as friendly and warm as the pub itself.

  Perhaps because of pubs, social life in England revolves around drinking to a greater extent than it does in America. English journalist Lucy Foster, who undertook a month of sobriety as an assignment for Stylist magazine, said, “There’s a rule of thumb within my friendship group . . . that you can’t trust people who don’t drink . . . They’re questionable. They have issues, dark secrets, or a health agenda.” Alcohol’s great appeal is that it “makes you talk and it makes you share, and it makes you feel good, if only for a little while.” After her harrowing account of her teetotal January, and skeptical interviews with a recovering alcoholic and a man who is sober for religious reasons, a box titled “The Sober Truth” asks, ominously, “After four weeks without a drop of alcohol, how do Lucy’s relationships fare?” (The short answer: Poorly.)

  There has been a lot of hand-wringing over binge drinking in the UK in recent years, for good reason. An American friend who has lived in both countries summed it up: “The public health definition of ‘binge drinking’ in the USA is something like ‘having five drinks at one sitting.’ In the UK it’s something like ‘remaining intoxicated for 48 straight hours.’” Like most exaggerations, it contains a grain of truth: In the United States, five or more drinks in one sitting is considered a binge. In the UK, you’re looking at an eight-drink minimum. In his book The English Pub, Peter Haydon includes a telling bit of doggerel: “Not drunk is he who from the floor / Can rise again and still drink more. / But drunk is he who prostrate lies / Without the power to drink or rise.” But anxiety about drink has never dampened enthusiasm for the pub.

  Two prints by William Hogarth, Beer Street and Gin Lane, published in 1751, tell a story that has changed little in the past two and a half centuries. Hogarth made the prints in support of a campaign directed against gin drinking among London’s poor. Beer Street is a wholesome scene that celebrates the virtues of England’s traditional drink. The subjects of this print are the well-fed, industrious, and prosperous middle class. Gin Lane is an altogether different place. The subjects of this print are malnourished and debauched. A carpenter sells his tools to buy gin. A mother drops her baby over a railing. A body is crammed into a coffin. The message is that drinking is not bad in itself; i
t’s excessive drinking, especially by the lower classes, that is the problem. In 1751, the aim was to stop sales of small amounts of cheap and highly intoxicating gin in local shops, to make it less accessible. There has been talk of instituting a per-unit minimum price to limit consumption of the alcohol available in supermarkets, with their ubiquitous three-for-two offers.

  Irresponsible drinking costs the UK taxpayer twenty-one billion pounds per year if you count extra police presence and medical bills. The British Medical Association estimates that nearly a quarter of the population drinks to excess. The most convincing argument against minimum pricing is that it amounts to a tax on the poor, when it is the higher-income groups, undeterred by the price of a decent pinot, that have seen the largest rises in alcohol consumption.

  American consumption rivals that of the English, and causes the same kinds of social problems. But America is a much more religious country and there is shame associated with most pleasurable activities, especially drinking. Although Prohibition was repealed in 1933, some local communities opted to keep its strict regulations against public drinking in place, with the result that today there are still more than two hundred dry counties in America, and many more that are partially dry. Most of these counties are located in a single swath of the Bible Belt, but there are outliers. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan all have strict enough laws in most of their counties to qualify as partially dry, and even in liberal New England, deep in the heart of Cheever country, where WASP reserve requires some dousing of its own, there are still dry towns.

  America has always been more conservative and less relaxed than England when it comes to drinking. In 1832, Frances Trollope (mother of Anthony) came to America to seek her fortune and ended up writing a book about American manners instead. She wrote, “We [English] are by no means so gay as our lively neighbours on the other side of the channel, but, compared with Americans, we are whirligigs and tetotums [spinning tops]; everyday is a holyday, and every night a festival.” American attitudes to drinking vary by region. Whereas in Brooklyn a two-year-old’s birthday party could be held at a beer garden, eyebrows might go up in Albany, and in some cities you’d actually be breaking the law. Many Americans avoid drinking for health reasons, without the same stigma that this carries in England. And as much as Californians, for example, love their local wine, they have to be careful not to run afoul of ever-stricter drunk driving laws. On the other hand, drive-through liquor stores were certainly an American invention, and are dotted all around the South, near some of the same areas where regulations are most stringent. Americans are conflicted drinkers, to say the least.

  Prohibitionists once advocated punishments for drinkers, including giving them poisoned alcoholic beverages, banishing them to concentration camps in the Aleutian Islands, branding, whipping, sterilizing, and even executing them. Is it any wonder that, fewer than one hundred years later, American attitudes to drinking have not recovered? What would the purists say if they knew that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written to the tune of an old drinking song?

  This is why Americans envy English pubs. Pubs are safe and friendly places where everyone is made to feel welcome. You can have lunch, bring your kids (at least during the day). Visiting Americans might find the mixed drinks a bit stingy, due to strict standardization of measures (twenty-five to thirty-five milliliters is the maximum legal serving of spirits), but one could argue this is a public service, given the well-documented perils of gin. The beer is much more interesting anyway. For their part, the English in America might be surprised by the quality of American beer. Craft breweries are proliferating and giving the drinking public options beyond the very cold, very bland national brands in cans. They would be less impressed by the mixed drinks served in American bars, heavily iced and inevitably containing straws, which no English person over the age of five would be caught dead using.

  Where does this leave cheers? Perhaps because of visits to England, or the influence of English novels, television, and journalism, Americans have begun to adopt the “thanks/good-bye” meaning of late. As one American said, “I enjoy hearing [cheers] instead of the worn out ‘later’ or ‘see ya later.’ Like it or not, the Yanks and the Brits are cousins, and that’s that. Cheers!” Needless to say, not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

  An English banker living in New York groused, “I’m getting sick of my clients saying cheers to me. Americans say cheers like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, with too much enthusiasm. It must be delivered laconically.” Delivery does count. The English say “Chis” out of the sides of their mouths when they mean thank you or good-bye. Americans do not pick up on this, and say cheers the same—toothily, hitting the r a bit hard and implying an exclamation point—whether they mean it as a toast or a casual good-bye. Some Americans are just as irritated by their compatriots’ appropriation of cheers. One ranted, “Why is everyone saying cheers these days? . . . I am going to start saying . . . ‘Did I just have a drink and not know it?’”

  The backlash against Americans who borrow cheers may seem churlish, but it wouldn’t surprise a linguist. As M. Lynne Murphy wrote in her blog, “Separated by a Common Language,” “If you’re using words from a different place that you don’t have ‘birth rights’ to, you’re seen as ‘inauthentic’ in the use of those words . . . as aspiring to be associated with a group of people who may not always be positively stereotyped in the culture you’re in—and those stereotypes rub off on your word usage . . . So, taking on American words is seen as ‘sloppy’ and ‘lazy’ in the UK. Taking on British words is seen as ‘snobby’ and ‘pretentious’ in the US.”

  There is only one way this could end: Cheers.

  Knackered

  In which our children arrive to collectively lobotomize us.

  Even if you had no idea what knackered meant, you couldn’t miss it in context: “I’m absolutely knackered.” It is English slang for “exhausted,” and it usually comes with a certain sag of the shoulders and a little stagger in the voice. There is a particularly English way of saying it, too. Whereas an American might over-egg the r—thus sounding far too perky to be knackered—the English elide it. It’s pronounced nnakk-uhd: slow on the first syllable, swallowing the second.

  But exhausted doesn’t quite capture the full sense of knackered. The knacker’s yard is, literally, an abattoir for horses that have outlived their ability to stand, run, and carry. The Oxford English Dictionary puts an even finer point on it with this definition of the verb to knacker: “to kill; to castrate; usu. in weakened sense, to exhaust, to wear out.” The examples that follow are of athletes and soldiers. But in my experience, “I’m knackered” is the new parents’ refrain.

  Becoming a parent in an adopted country is one of the best assimilation exercises there is. The shared experiences of pregnancy and early parenthood give you the opportunity to meet, and get to know, people with whom you may have had little in common before you popped your sprogs. (That’s English English for before your babies arrived.) You end up on maternity wards, in baby classes and playgroups and Internet chat rooms, with people whose vocabulary for this phase of life is entirely foreign. You can’t help but learn almost as many new words as your bub (baby).

  First you are initiated into the medical system, with its acronyms and quirks. In England the NHS (National Health Service) assures every pregnant woman a good basic standard of care in a public hospital, free of charge (or at least covered by taxes). Beyond that, the NHS provides each woman with extra care as needed. In practice this means that if you have a problem, you get all the attention you need; otherwise, very little indeed. Anyone experiencing an uncomplicated pregnancy under the NHS feels lucky, if a bit neglected. The standard number of ultrasounds for an NHS pregnancy is two—not the half dozen that a well-insured American would expect. But on the other hand, everyone gets two. No one is left out of prenatal care entirely, which still happens in America. And even the best-insured Americans do not walk out of
the hospital postdelivery owing nothing. During my entire NHS pregnancy and birth, I was asked to pay a grand total of £2.50. That was for the printout of my second ultrasound. Those who want more personalized care can choose to see a private doctor and deliver in a private hospital. It will cost you or your insurance company about £15,000—about the same, or a bit less, than the average cost in the United States.

  After the NHS, the most important acronym for English parents is the NCT (National Childbirth Trust). This organization operates as a charity with two main purposes: to advocate for parents’ rights and interests, and to educate new parents. Its bias toward natural, drug-free birth is not entirely uncontroversial—some feel the NCT presents too rosy a picture of what childbirth is actually like, and joke that the acronym really stands for Natural Childbirth Trust. It’s hippy-dippy, warm, and welcoming—“crunchy” in a way that wouldn’t be out of place in Park Slope or Portland, but isn’t usually associated with England.

  Still, joining the NCT and taking their antenatal (prenatal) classes is a rite of passage for thousands of English parents. The greatest benefit may be community. It is not unusual for tight bonds to form within NCT antenatal groups, lasting long after the maternity leave (usually six months to a year in England) is over and even sometimes after the children have left home. The NCT introduced me to the charmingly old-fashioned custom of bringing cake to each new friend’s family as the babies were born, and my NCT group spent so much time together that any of the parents could pick up and comfort any of the others’ babies, as if we were one big family. It was a fascinating experience of permeable or nonexistent boundaries that lasted about a year, until the last of us had returned to work.