by Erin Moore
In England, accent is a strong indicator of one’s place in the class hierarchy. Many people grow up feeling self-conscious of what their accents reveal about them, whether they are posh or not, and compliments can make them feel a bit uncomfortable. Americans, imagine you were driving a Honda Civic and people kept praising it as if it were a Rolls-Royce. It’s no wonder the English sometimes wrinkle their noses. American flattery comes too easily for the naturally skeptical English to respect. And here is the truth: The average English person is no more polished or refined than the average American. The impression of refinement is often nothing more than distance, plus unfamiliarity.
That doesn’t mean that English expats are annoyed by the perks that come with some Americans’ misapprehension. They are happy for people to assume they are intelligent, sophisticated, and authoritative, and for members of the opposite sex to swoon over them. Americans sometimes have occasion to question the qualities they have ascribed to such people. Journalist Vicky Ward recently reported in the Financial Times that when the architect Norman Foster, having taken four years to produce his plans for a renovation of the New York Public Library’s main branch on Forty-Second Street, unveiled a design that critic Michael Kimmelman described as having “the elegance of a suburban mall,” a rival architect confided “that some trustees had begun to feel, too late, that they had been seduced by Lord Foster’s ‘British accent.’”
The English are constantly exposed to a variety of American accents and vocabulary through television and movies. Americans’ less-enunciated accents, and tendency to speak louder than the English are used to, make them sound brash, confident, and a little sloppy. American slang contributes to this impression, cutting across socioeconomic and gender lines far more than English slang, which is stratified. For example, to the English middle and upper classes, something they like will be “brilliant,” and if they agree with something you say, they may do so by saying “Quite.” A working-class person from London or Essex, seeking agreement, will use the question tag “innit” at the end of a sentence, in the same way an American might say “amIright?” It is harder to tell Americans’ social class from the words they use, and as a result Americans of all classes can sound similarly unrefined.
There is no word that typifies this phenomenon more thoroughly than dude. Dude is a word that—no matter how often they are exposed to it—the English will not adopt. It is one of the most American-sounding words there is. And the story of dude is also the story of how American slang can become universal and classless in a way that is hard to imagine happening in England.
Ironically, this aggressively casual word that, in today’s American English, might refer to a person of either sex, originated as a way to describe a dandy or a “swell.” The OED dates it to New York in 1883 as “a name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, and very particular about what is aesthetically ‘good form.’” This later extended to the meaning implied by “dude ranch”: “a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S., especially one who spends his holidays on a ranch.” A dude was an East Coast city slicker who didn’t fit in on the West Coast. But it only took about thirty years for the word to shed these pejorative implications and become, primarily through Black English vernacular, a generally approving term for a man, “a guy.”
By the 1960s and ’70s, dude had cut across racial lines, appearing in movies like Easy Rider and songs including David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” which made a one-hit wonder of the band Mott the Hoople. Dude then faded from prominence, perhaps considered a bit of a relic, though it remained in constant use among Californians, stoners, surfers, and suburban Valley girls. Sean Penn’s character in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jeff Spicoli, typified this use of dude. And who could forget the masterpiece of cinema that was Dude, Where’s My Car?
The moment that dude broke out and acquired its current cultural significance was 1998, when Jeff Bridges played a character known as “the Dude” in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. The Dude hangs around in his bathrobe, drinking White Russians. His habitual occupations? “Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback . . . I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or, uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.” The movie became a cult hit and the word itself achieved ubiquity. As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer, “Outside of those sad figures who cloister themselves off from the pleasures of pop culture, ‘dude’ is not just a part of the language—dude is a whole discourse.”
Dude today encapsulates a very casual orientation to life. Jeff Bridges’s character has spawned a book, The Dude and the Zen Master, a collaboration between Bridges and Buddhist teacher Bernie Glassman; The Dudespaper: A Lifestyle Magazine for the Deeply Casual; and even a religion, Dudeism—“a belief system that teaches us that the universe wants us to take it easy” since “getting all worked up over nothing goes profoundly against the laws of nature, psychology, sociology, bowling and several tropical countries.” This is a nice antidote to the hard-driving, ambitious side of American culture: If you get tired of working hard and playing hard, it promises, ultimately it is possible to just “abide” like the Dude.
As Rosenbaum points out, the word dude has also become “a way of bringing a conscious unsophistication—an ironical unsophistication, an unsophistication in quotation marks, a sophisticated unsophistication—to an appreciation of popular culture.” In my experience, friends of non-American nationality (English, German, French) use dude almost exclusively in this way—poking gentle fun at Americans, while taking advantage of the utility of the word. But I think that most Americans who say it aren’t being ironic at all. Some of them are aware that this makes them sound unsophisticated, and seek to break their dependence on dude.
On the website IsItNormal.com, a young woman wrote in to say she felt she overused the word: “i can’t help it. i say it to my mom. i say it to inanimate objects. i call my boyfriend dude instead of babe or love or even his real name. i’ve even had somebody yell DUUUUDE in the hallway and turned around on cue. is this normal?” [sic] She got a range of responses, many of which suggested she was not alone in her Tourette’s-like repetition of dude. One person wrote, “If u really need to stop, example for a job?, just use an elastic around your wrist and snap it everytime and make sure it hurts that way saying it = pain to your brain, it will catch on overtime.” [sic] Someone else (employing another near-universal American slang word) wrote: “im 25 and still have this problem it sucks. Like totally dude, we need to let that word die.” And another said, “OMG DUDE SAMEZZZZ.” [sic—no, really!] Has American addiction to dude reached the point where we need a twelve-step program? (Dude, that sounds way too ambitious.)
It’s no wonder Americans hear intelligence and refinement in English voices: It is as much about the words they are not using as the ones they use. But in the end I think the most authentic thing to do—no matter what your country of origin—is to own and celebrate your native accent and vocabulary. In other words, chill out, dude. It’s okay to sound, like, totally American.
Partner
In which an expat finds that her frustration with English reserve is not always justified.
Shortly after moving to London from New York, I began keeping notes about signs, customs, and words that seemed strange to me. I wanted to keep track of first impressions that, within months, would be difficult to recall. Luckily, no one was keeping track of the strange first impressions I myself was making. Some of my early misunderstandings had an audience of one—my husband, Tom.
Over dinner, soon after beginning work in the London offices of the same companies we’d worked for in New York, we were discussing some of the differences between our New York and London colleagues. In New York, people would send their juniors out for coffee (the more complicated the order, th
e better) to put them in their place. In London, there was a lot of nonhierarchical tea-fetching from a communal kitchen. In New York, people dressed up more to go to work and took little time off. Everyone seemed to work through the weekend. In London, no one talked about how hard they were working and “face time” seemed less important. The New Yorkers had been more status-conscious, but friendlier. The Londoners were edgier and quieter—almost disconcertingly so.
Yet I had managed to glean some details about the lives of my coworkers. For one thing, I told Tom, whereas in New York about 10 percent of my coworkers were gay, in London it must be approaching 60 percent. “Really?” he asked—because even for publishing, that seemed like a lot. “Yes,” I said. “Hardly anyone in my office wears a wedding band, and they are always talking about their ‘partners’ and children. My office must be the most liberal in London.” Tom thought I was right that my office was probably the most liberal in London, but he was pretty sure my percentages were off. Because, he explained, in England, unlike in America, partner isn’t a code word for “same-sex partner.” This is a common misapprehension among newly emigrated Americans, and one that we can all laugh about later. A friend of mine spent weeks at her kids’ new playgroup before figuring out that most of the other kids did not “have two mommies.”
Americans come by this mistake honestly. Although people are getting married older these days, in the United States people tend to assume that most committed relationships are headed for marriage. Regardless of age, the infantilizing boyfriend and girlfriend apply until the pretentious fiancé/fiancée are supplanted by the cozy husband and wife. A Pew poll taken in 2010 showed that 61 percent of American adults who have never been married want to be; only 12 percent do not. A poll of high school seniors taken in 2006 showed that 81 percent of them expected to get married, and 90 percent of those expected to stay married to the same person for life. Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies families and public policy, maintains that in America “you don’t see the same pattern of long unmarried relationships you see in Scandinavia, France or Britain . . . In the United States marriage is how we do stable families.”
Americans may be big proponents of marriage, but with the third-highest divorce rate in the world, it doesn’t mean they are any better at commitment than other nationalities (with the exception of #1, the Maldives, and #2, Belarus). One thing Americans have had a hard time committing to is the idea of universal marriage rights. Until recently, the best a gay or lesbian couple could hope for was partner. Opponents of gay marriage have long feared that extending marriage rights to all Americans would undermine the beloved institution. But, as E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in The Washington Post, the opposite seems to be happening, as “steadily increasing numbers of Americans have come to believe that gay people are not social revolutionaries looking to alter the nature of marriage.” Rather, they simply want to be “part of an institution that is already open to their straight fellow citizens.” In more and more states, this dream is coming true.
In England, by contrast, marriage isn’t considered quite so necessary. Since December 2005, it has been possible for same-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships, which confer most of the same rights and responsibilities as marriage, without the name. Heterosexual couples are less likely to marry than their counterparts in America, even when they choose to have children. Fifty-two percent of people in a survey by YouGov said that marrying was “not important, provided that parents were in a committed relationship.” Only 27 percent took the view that couples should be married before having children. So in England, it makes sense that the first definition of partner in Macmillan is “someone who you live with and have a sexual relationship with,” whereas in America it is “one of two or more people who own a company and share its profits and losses.”
I have noticed that even married people in England will use partner rather than husband or wife. Macmillan corroborates this: “In British English, you can say partner to refer to a person who is the husband or wife of someone, or to refer to a person who someone is living with and having a sexual relationship with, without being married to them. This avoids mentioning the person’s status or sex. In American English, some people only use partner about unmarried people, and many others only use it about gay men or women.” This note is set apart in a special box under the headline “Words that avoid giving offence.” Which kind of nails it. I had been so busy being a nosy American that this elegant subtlety had almost passed me by.
It is always tempting to make generalizations: for example that Americans are so open because they will volunteer personal information to relative strangers, and the English are so reserved because they won’t. But you have to take it case by case. And in the case of partner, it’s the English who are more open—if not about the details of their private lives, then to the possibilities of other people’s. Not to start with an assumption based on the word someone uses—or anything else—is very high-level humanity indeed. The nongendered partner leaves something to the imagination—something at which the English excel—so it allows people to choose how much to reveal. Because it really isn’t anyone’s business whether you and your partner are married, or what gender he or she is.
Of course, not everyone is using partner to be inclusive in England any more than Americans are using husband and wife to be exclusive. Some people aren’t consciously choosing, but simply using the word that is most familiar. But many who choose to use partner like what it implies: a relationship between equals. As American blogger Jonny Scaramanga explains, “Equality is something I can get behind. I don’t have a wife who depends on me. I have an equal. I have a partner.”
In England and Wales, same-sex marriages now have the blessing of the Parliament and the queen, and civil partners have the option of converting their unions to marriages. In America, some states have approved same-sex marriage and, with the younger generation of voters overwhelmingly in favor, equal rights to marriage will soon spread. Where will that leave partner? Will American gay and lesbian couples, after their long battle for the right to be husbands and wives, choose to use those words to describe themselves? Will English married couples continue to describe themselves as “partners”? And how will anyone know what to call anyone else while we all figure it out? Steven Petrow, author of Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners, has a suggestion. We ought to listen “to how a couple introduces or refers to each other . . . Then follow their lead by using their preferred terminology.” What a radical idea.
Proper
In which we learn that people—and things—can be proper without being pretentious.
Sometimes we’re so busy looking for what we expect to find that we miss what’s actually there. In some ways, Americans and the English are more similar than they think. For example, both nationalities have a preoccupation with authenticity, and they don’t like pretension. These are characteristics we would do well to understand—and appreciate—about each other. The English have a way of describing something that is genuine, bona fide, and thoroughly of its kind: proper. (“Fursty Ferret is a proper ale.”) English people get a kick out of things being “proper.” “Proper!” can even stand as a full-fledged compliment. Proper can also be used subversively, as an intensifier to a derogatory statement (“Proper rude, isn’t she!”) or, even more informally, as a synonym for correctly (“He never learned to drive proper.”)
This definition, while not entirely unknown, is not the primary one in America. If an American hears “a proper cup of tea,” he is apt to picture a pinkie-lifting exercise in etiquette—not the strong and hot brew this phrase calls to the English mind. All the most common American uses of the word proper are about conforming to convention, being respectable and appropriate, formal and sedate. When Americans call something proper they are thinking refined, virtuous, boring. Being proper means likely having to pretend to be something one isn’t. Being genuine, or “real,” is far more desirable in A
merican society than being proper. What Americans might not realize is that when the English say proper, genuine and real is precisely what they mean.
For an example of what proper means to the English, look no further than the first meal of the day. A proper breakfast is the full English, otherwise known as the fry-up or the Full Monty. It dates to the Victorian era and, though they may not eat it every day, everyone agrees on what it is: sausage, bacon, fried eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, baked beans, and fried bread. It is usually served with ketchup and HP sauce (a sweet and vinegary “brown sauce,” so named because its inventor heard that it was being served in a restaurant at the Houses of Parliament). Now that’s proper.
The English Breakfast Society (“Support the Tradition, Share the Love” #FryUp) claims that in the 1950s, half the nation started their day on the full English, and while it especially appealed to those who worked in industrial jobs, the meal is essentially classless—something rare in England, as you may have gathered. There are many regional variations on the porky aspect of the breakfast. In the North there will be black pudding (a sausage made with pigs’ blood, pork, and a filler like bread crumbs or rusk), and in Devon and Cornwall, white pudding (similar to black pudding, but without the blood). Each region of England is known for a particular type of sausage. The Cumberland is spiced with pepper; the Gloucester contains Gloucester Old Spot pork and sage; the Yorkshire includes cayenne, nutmeg, white pepper, and mace; and the Lincolnshire sage and thyme. I could go on, but the point is that there is a consensus on what is “proper” when it comes to breakfast in England—even if the full English is widely regarded as hangover food today.
It’s not the Industrial Revolution anymore, after all, and few people want to go sit at a desk after eating approximately 1,550 calories—78 percent of an adult woman’s requirement for the day, as Jamie Oliver’s website helpfully informs us. If you want a lighter version, a health-drink company called Fuel, founded by a former tank commander in the British Army and an extreme-sports enthusiast, offers a liquid fry-up combining the flavors of bacon, sausage, poached egg, fried tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, toast, salt and pepper, and brown sauce. It’s only 230 calories, and it packs twenty grams of protein (assuming you can keep it down). Apparently scientists had to test five hundred flavor combinations before they hit on this winner—pity the tasters of the 499 rejected shakes. If that doesn’t hit the spot, other foods the English eat for breakfast—that don’t fall under the heading of the full English but are nevertheless considered “proper”—include kippers (smoked herring), kedgeree (a dish of smoked haddock and hard-boiled eggs with rice, cream, and curry powder, topped with parsley), and kidneys on toast. I never noticed before that these breakfasts are all brought to you by the letter K. Luckily, it is no longer true, as W. Somerset Maugham once said, that to eat well in England one must have breakfast three times a day.