“Miracle” is another term excessively bandied about in the States, a country in which it is hard to fall into a few inches of water and clamber instantly out again without someone branding your survival miraculous. The United States is also crammed with heroes from coast to coast, some of them having attained that title on the slimmest of pretexts, whereas the British are for the most part as embarrassed by heroism as they are by histrionic outbursts of emotion. They would not suppose that it was heroic, as opposed to tragic, to die by having an aircraft slam into your office. Nor are all soldiers who fall in battle heroes. Some of them are, while others are perpetrators of war crimes and should be arraigned rather than applauded. Americans also tend to be rather obsessive about role models, which nobody else on the planet seems to be. It goes with their admiration for the idea of leadership. There are plenty of us who would much rather follow, preferably a long way behind.
If I have included “America” in the list of words more common in the United States than Britain, it is not for the obvious reason that Americans, like anyone else, are bound to mention their country quite a lot. It is rather that they use the word America (as in “Good Morning, America!”, “a very fine American,” “my fellow Americans,” “The American people,” “proudly serving America’s families since 1953” and so on) a lot more than the Swiss talk about Switzerland or the Greeks about Greece. I once saw a television programme about Peru in which an army officer exhorted his soldiers: “Men, always remember that you are Peruvians.” This sounds funny, rather like saying: “Always remember that you are hairdressers,” or “Never forget that you are shoplifters,” since the word “Peruvian” does not carry any especially exalted implications, at least for non-Peruvians.
The phrase “a very fine American” is revealing in this respect. It is not quite the same as speaking of a very fine Sri Lankan. “America” is a term of approbation, not just a description. It is a moral word as much as a geographical one. The very word “America” implies certain cherished values, so that phrases like “American values” or “a very fine American” are almost tautologies. “A very fine American” is a distinguished example of a noble species, whereas a very fine Sri Lankan is an outstanding individual who happens to come from Sri Lanka. It is suitable that the national symbol of the United States is the eagle. In Wales, it is the leek.
Accents
Americans often speak of the British accent, which is in fact as mythical as the mermaid. There are English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish forms of speech, but no British one. Strictly speaking, even an English accent is something of a misnomer. It generally refers to so-called Standard English, which only a small minority of the English actually speak and so is scarcely much of a standard. Truly genteel people have their own strangulated idiom of Standard English, which sounds as though they are speaking with a hot potato in their mouths. In this kind of speech, “I’m rarely tarred” means not that you are infrequently coated with a sticky black substance, but that you are really tired. Prince Charles speaks in this style, while the BBC speaks regular Standard English (though even this is on the wane). Outside the middle and upper classes, the British tend to speak with the accent of their region. In fact, Standard English was once a regional accent itself.
As far as detecting accents goes, a good many Britons would be able to distinguish between a Texan and a New Yorker, but not many Americans could tell the difference between a Geordie (from north-east England) and a Brummie (from Birmingham). They might also be unaware that a Londoner can find someone from Glasgow almost as unintelligible as he would find a Bulgarian. A Dane and a Norwegian, each speaking his or her own language, might understand each other better.
However indifferently Americans may sometimes speak English, the British can always go one better. “Fortuitously” in Britain has come to mean “fortunately,” “refute” is used for “rebut,” and to beg a question is to raise one. The British now use the word “literally” when they don’t mean it literally at all, as in “I literally fell through the floor with amazement.” Anything that is about to happen must be marked by a “potentially,” as in “She may potentially be charged with an offence.” Things are not done every day, but “on a daily basis.”
Abuse
Americans, however, are more concerned than the British by another kind of speech, namely, abusive language. Hawthorne’s scarlet letter no longer stands for adultery. What used to be argumentative is now abusive or insensitive. It is insensitive to raise your voice, vigorously dissent, display images of emaciated African children, or criticise the conduct of a nation in the presence of someone who supports it. In a society which finds the negative and discomforting hard to handle, anything which disturbs one’s serenity can be nullified by being consigned to the category of abuse. Birds which sing too loudly at dawn are abusive, aggressively violating one’s aural spaces. People who wear bright scarlet shirts are being visually abusive. They might even be at risk of being sued, or at least of being forced to buy you a pair of shades. Gutters which drip water on one’s head are guilty of abuse, as are pieces of grit that are negligent enough to lodge in one’s eye. They, too, may be at risk of being taken to court. Floors which refuse to stop swaying when one is drunk can be indicted for criminal irresponsibility.
To tell someone that their beliefs are a lot of rubbish is most certainly considered insensitive, even though it is an essential part of the democratic process. The idea that one should respect other people’s beliefs simply because they are other people’s beliefs is plainly absurd. It is like claiming that one should admire the cut of people’s trousers simply because they are people’s trousers. If my beliefs are arrant nonsense, I expect you to have the decency to tell me so. It would help if you did not call me a slimy little rat in the process, but it is not indispensable. Do those who urge respect for the creed of Rastafarians extend a similar welcome to the doctrines of the Moonies? Is the belief that men after death will get to rule their own universe, but women will not, to be greeted with reverence simply because it is held by Mormons? Can nothing be said to be plainly ridiculous as long as it is touted by a minority? What about those American Evangelical sects who are preparing to film the Second Coming, and engage in intricate technical debates about where best to set up the cameras?
Tolerance does not mean respecting viewpoints simply because they are viewpoints. It means accepting that ideas which make you feel sick in your stomach should be granted as much of a hearing as those that send an erotic tingle down your spine, provided such views do not put others at risk, and provided you have done your damnedest to argue their advocates out of their fatuous or obnoxious opinions. Otherwise you are simply buying your tolerance on the cheap. Dismissing whatever one finds offensive as “abuse” is a distinctly American brand of intolerance.
Volume
Americans, unlike Europeans, are generally said to be loud. In fact, the volume in Europe is gradually turned up as you sink southwards from Sweden to Sicily. Dockers in Naples and sailors in Athens can sound as though they are bawling murderous insults at each other when they are actually just inquiring tenderly after each other’s children. In the days when their telephone technology was poor, the Chinese used to bellow so loudly down the receiver that they could probably have heard each other without the aid of it. There are also national differences when it comes to noise in general. If some European countries are quieter places than the States, it is partly because the use of sirens and flashing lights by emergency vehicles, except when absolutely necessary, is considered anti-social. It is true that “absolutely necessary” may include dashing back to base, all sirens blaring, when the news comes over the radio that your lunch is getting cold. Generally speaking, however, the air of most European cities is not permanently rent by the shriekings and wailings of the emergency services. On the other hand, British towns are besieged at night by the sound of brawling drunks far more than their law-abiding U.S. counterparts. Many of these places in America are ghost tow
ns after dusk, lacking as they do all notion of a night life. They pay for their tranquillity in the coin of a deep-seated dullness.
Americans can indeed be loud. Most American men have a “Yoo-hoo!” buried somewhere inside them. But the loudness is a matter of timbre as well as volume. There is a particular kind of American voice, common to both men and women, which is peculiarly piercing and resonant, so that whole conversations conducted in normal tones are audible from a couple of hundred yards away without the slightest strain on the speaker’s part. People with voices like this might be usefully employed as human foghorns, stationed around the coast to warn shipping of treacherous rocks. They are also, however, especially suited to TV news networks. Whereas European television journalists address their audiences in normal conversational tones, American reporters are clearly selected for the bat-like shrillness or stentorian loudness of their delivery. Even when they are standing in the middle of a tranquil Indiana corn field, they sound as though they are trying to make themselves heard through a tornado. The truth is that they are actually trying to make themselves heard in noisy American living rooms, and that if they fail to grab the viewer’s attention, so will the advertisements. In this sense, there is a connection between pitch and the profit motive. One may contrast these tones with the soothing, earnest, measured, concerned, deep-throated voice of U.S. public broadcasting. There is a liberal-Democratic American voice as well as a right-wing Republican one.
Language and the Irish
When it comes to verbal matters, there are particular pitfalls lying in wait for Americans who visit Ireland. Many of them may be unaware that though Northern Ireland is officially part of Britain, it is not part of Great Britain. It is, however, part of the United Kingdom, just to compound the confusion. Many Irish republicans find the term “Northern Ireland” objectionable, since it seems to legitimate the political status quo. They might speak of “the six counties” instead (or the “sick counties,” as the Irish novelist Flann O’Brien has it). Some people in Northern Ireland regard themselves as British, some as Irish, and some as both. Some of those who see themselves as British would regard the Irish Catholic population in the North as being as much alien interlopers in their land as Kenyans or Cambodians.
Most of the Irish do not regard themselves as part of the British Isles, since most of Ireland is no longer British. Apart from “these islands,” however, there is no convenient phrase to describe the two places as a whole. Since most of Ireland is not part of Britain, it would be both offensive and incorrect in Ireland to refer to Britain as “the mainland,” though Northern Unionists would use the phrase. It would be as unacceptable as New Zealanders calling Australia the mainland. For Irish republicans, calling the Northern Irish city of Derry Londonderry would be as heinous an offence as calling Native Americans redskins.
American tourists should know that there is a Northern Ireland but not a southern one. The term “southern Ireland” is rarely used by the Irish themselves, since they regard themselves simply as Irish, and perhaps because it implies acceptance of the partition of the country. (Though Dublin has now in fact officially accepted it.) “Ireland” or “the Irish Republic” will do instead—though to compound the complications, some Irish republicans would reserve the latter phrase for a nation which does not yet exist, namely, an Ireland completely independent of Britain. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sees itself as deriving its authority from a future it has yet to create. In any case, some bits of so-called southern Ireland are geographically to the north of some bits of Northern Ireland. The preposterous word “Eire” should be avoided at all costs, for reasons too tedious to recount. It is probably best to forget about these geopolitical puzzles and simply enjoy the scenery.
The Irish language, incidentally, is called Irish, not Gaelic, since the latter term covers a whole family of languages. To say you speak Gaelic would be a bit like an Englishman saying he spoke Indo-European. Extensive brain surgery is required in order to learn Irish. The language most Irish people speak is known as Hiberno-English, and includes such imaginative terms of abuse as “gobshite” and “fecking.” The latter word, overseas visitors will be surprised to hear, is not a sanitised version of a somewhat stronger oath. The Irish version of that is “fugghan,” repeated by some of the population every six seconds or so except during the more solemn parts of the Mass.
There are, then, a number of linguistic and geopolitical traps in Ireland to catch the unwary. But the same could be said of the United States. Why do its inhabitants call themselves Americans? Why are Mexicans and Canadians not Americans as well? Isn’t this rather like the Chinese being allowed to call themselves Asians, but not Indians or Koreans? Is a certain land grabbing built into the very way its citizens designate themselves? I was once treated to a fine example of U.S. linguistic imperialism when an American editor changed the phrase The Times, which I had written in a reference to the London newspaper of that name, to The London Times. My efforts to point out that there is no such periodical were dismally ineffective. According to U.S. journalistic practice, so I was advised, The Times of London is indeed called The London Times, even though it is not. It is up to the United States to decide what the names of other people’s newspapers are. One can imagine other such alterations. “We know your prime minister is actually called David Cameron, but we like to call him Billy Badger.” “Your correspondent spent an interesting afternoon in Popesville, known to the natives as Vatican City.” “After viewing the Finger, or the Eiffel Tower as the inhabitants quaintly call it, we spent an instructive morning strolling around Main Street, known to the locals as the Champs Elysées.”
This is not as improbable as it sounds. The American golfer Bubba Watson once caused an uproar in France by announcing that he had seen “that big tower” (the Eiffel Tower), the “building starting with a L” (the Louvre), and “this arch I drove around in a circle” (the Arc de Triomphe). He later excused his ignorance on the grounds that he “wasn’t a history major.” Perhaps he had trouble distinguishing history from geography. He also declared that he felt “uncomfortable” (indispensable American word) with being criticised for these faux pas.
At a Loss for Words
There is a great tradition of American writing, epitomised in the modern age by the burnished masterpieces of Saul Bellow, in which a luminous poetry is plucked from the prose of everyday life, and the patois of hucksters and dockers invested with epic grandeur. Such writing, at once mundane and magnificent, transcends the commonplace without leaving it behind. It preserves the feel and texture of everyday existence while disclosing a depth within it. Behind this literary heritage, as behind so much in the United States, lies the culture of Puritanism, with its conviction that daily life is the arena of salvation and damnation. The everyday is the place where the most momentous questions are to be confronted. It is a belief that lends itself naturally to the novel.
There have been too many tales of literary decline, too many premature obituary notices for the novel, too much traditionalist nostalgia for a golden age of letters. Even so, it is hard not to feel that the culture of the word has taken something of a nose dive in today’s United States. The same is true of Britain, though to a lesser degree. There is a British television show in which panellists engage in superbly witty exchanges and surreal flights of comic fantasy without a single word being scripted. On American TV, by contrast, it is impossible to say “Hey!” or “Wow!” without the aid of an autocue. Hamlet’s dying words were “Absent thee from felicity awhile/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story. . . . The rest is silence.” Steve Jobs’s last words were “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!” Perhaps he did not do quite as much for human communication as his fans imagine. Some U.S. academics deliver their papers at conferences as though they are translating from the Sanskrit as they go along. Columns in up-market British newspapers can be intricate and inventive, whereas equivalent pieces in the States tend to be sparse, thinly textured and lexically challenged. An
editorial in a British newspaper can be a literary tour de force, which is hardly ever true across the Atlantic. Some of the most revered national commentators in the United States write a basic, colourless, crudely utilitarian prose. No decent piece of writing simply tells it like it is, without a sensual delight in the way of telling it.
Generally speaking, American students are a delight to teach. Yet they are not always able to voice a coherent English sentence, even at graduate level. Some of them are easy to mistake for Turks or Albanians who have only just arrived in the country, and are still struggling with the language. Only later does one realise that they grew up in Boston. They tend to tie themselves up in great chains of unwieldy syntax, overlain with a liberal layer of jargon. Dishevelled syntax is true of both genders, but jargon is confined largely to the men. This is part of the painful demise of the spoken word in the United States. Another sign of linguistic decline is the existence of an organisation known as Scientology, a name which is in fact a tautology. It means the knowledge of knowledge. Names, however, are not always rigorously logical. It is only quite recently that a London hospital stopped calling itself the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, a title which contains one word too many.
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