One of my favourite ports of call when I am surfing is Rasmenia, a blog which is consistently interesting and entertaining. I always enjoy it, and if she doesn’t post something new after a few days I get impatient. “Come on, girl,” I mutter, “Off your derriere and get typing!” But of course she is living la vie en rose in Paris and is often too busy flitting from bistro to brasserie, from one pavement café to another night spot, and she can’t be expected to drop everything for her readers. I know I wouldn’t!
Anyway, I was very pleased to see that yesterday she offered us an amusing insight into “American English” if there is such a thing. Well, yes, of course there is. It is, as she rightly says, a dialect: one which is more identified by vocabulary than by grammar or syntax. Whenever the subject comes up, someone is bound to quote George Bernard Shaw’s tired old comment that Britain and America are two nations separated by a common language. That may actually have been quite witty when he said it, but of course it’s completely wrong. As was the prediction made in the first half of the 20th century by several people who should have known better, that in time the two Englishes would eventually differ so much from each other that Americans and Brits would end up speaking two completely different languages. That might have happened if no one had ever crossed the Atlantic, and there had been no records, radio, films or television. But as it is, English usages on both sides of the Atlantic (and elsewhere) have had a constant effect on each other.
In Britain we might not talk about elevators, garbage, gasoline, baby carriages or oatmeal (sticking with lifts, rubbish, petrol, prams and porridge instead) but we do know what they mean, and if we hear those terms used in a movie (or film, as we say) we are not struck dumb in incomprehension. I mean, gosh, it is actually possible to see en entire American TV show without having to reach for one’s American-British dictionary!
It used to be that most of the vocabulary moved in one direction: America to Britain. That was due to two big influences, namely Hollywood and World War Two, when millions of US servicemen were stationed in Britain. Now, I notice, words are moving east to west. A few examples come to mind immediately, such as the use of the word queue, and I frequently see cell phones referred to as mobiles. I have even come across (I blush as I type) the word wanker being bandied about in American TV shows, and not just by British characters. My American wife, who is as Anglophile as it is possible to be, often points British usage out to me when I would otherwise not have noticed. The expression “gone missing” is apparently a newish import (mind you, she insists that one best selling American writer’s tendency to use British terms in his writing is nothing more than mindless affectation). I even see British style spellings creeping in here and there, especially in the names of buildings, apartment complexes etc. Harbour, for example, and Centre.
So when a French person asked Rasmenia if she, as an American, had had trouble understanding the natives when she visited England, he was missing the point completely. There is only one English – we just tweak it differently.
Sometimes in ways that defy explanation. In Britain, letters and parcels are carried by the Royal Mail, but everyone talks about “the post” while in America the body responsible is the U.S. Postal Service, but everyone refers to it as “the mail”. All very strange.
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