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INTRODUCTION
According to Marcus Cunliffe, in The Literature of the United States, a chauvinistic delegate to the Continental Congress moved that the new nation drop the use of the English language entirely; William Morris, in Newsbreak (Stackpole, New York, 1975), reports that the more violently anti-British leaders moved to reject English as the national language in favor of Hebrew, until it was pointed out that very few Americans could speak it; and another delegate proposed an amendment providing that the United States retain English and make the British learn Greek!
American claims to the English language are far from being left unanswered. In April 1974, Jacques Chastenet of the Académie française, suggesting Latin as the most suitable official tongue for the European Economic Community, expressed the concern that "English, or more exactly American, might otherwise take over." He characterized "American" as "not a very precise idiom." Frederick Wood's attempt at consolation in his preface to Current English Usage (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1962) might seem even more offensive: "Certain words and constructions have been described as Americanisms. This does not necessarily mean that they are bad English." In "An Open Letter to the Honorable Mrs. Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) On A Very Serious Subject," Evelyn Waugh, discussing the American influence, writes: "... American polite vocabulary is different from ours. ... [It] is pulverized between two stones, refinement and overstatement." Cyril Connolly went pretty far in The Sunday Times (London) of December 11, 1966: "... the American language is in a state of flux based on the survival of the unfittest."
Whatever the relationship may be, and however strongly opinions are voiced, it seems clear that in the jet age, what with the movies (the cinema), TV (the telly), and radio (the wireless still, to many Britons), linguistic parochialism is bound to diminish. In Words in Sheep's Clothing (Hawthorn Books, Inc., New York, 1969), Mario Pei, after referring to the different meanings given to the same word in the two countries, writes: "... In these days of rapid communication and easy interchange, such differences are less important than you would think." The latest edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary includes a fair number of American terms not found in earlier editions: teen-age, paper-back, T-shirt, supermarket, sacred cow, sick joke, and many others. And in their recorded dialogue, published under the title A Common Language, British and American English in 1964 by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, Professors Randolph Quirk of University College, London, and Albert H. Marckwardt, of Princeton University, agreed, according to the Foreword, that "... the two varieties of English have never been so different as people have imagined, and the dominant tendency, for several decades now, has been clearly that of convergence and even greater similarity." And in a similarly optimistic mood, Ronald Mansbridge, manager emeritus of the American branch of the Cambridge University Press, in his foreword to Longitude 30 West (a confidential report to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press by Lord Acton), refers to the two countries as "strongly linked together — let us reject the old joke 'divided' — by the English language."
Welcome or not, the process of convergence is slow, and the differences linger. Herbert R. Mayes, in his London Letter in the Saturday Review of November 14, 1970, wrote: "... There are enough archaisms here to keep an American off balance. ... The British are stubborn. ..." And Suzanne Haire (Lady Haire of Whiteabbey, formerly with the BBC, then living in New York), writing in The New York Times of January 11, 1972, of her "Study of 'American-English' at its source," mentioned the "bizarre misunderstandings [which] can result from expressions which have different meanings on the two sides of the Atlantic." The example she selected was the informal noun tube, meaning subway in Britain and television in the United States.
When we get away from standard English and are faced with the ephemeralness of slang and informal terms, the division widens. In a letter to The Times published July 12, 1974, the literary critic and translator Nicholas Bethell, answering objections to his review of an English translation of The Gulag Archipelago, wrote: "... What I was objecting to was the use of words like 'bums' and 'broads' in a translation. They are too American. 'Yobbos' and 'birds' would be equally inappropriate. They are too British. It is a problem that translators are often faced with, how to render slang without adding confusing overtones. One has to try to find a middle way." To a Briton, a bum is a behind, and a broad a riverwidening. To an American, yobbo (an extension of yob, backslang — reverse spelling — for boy, meaning lout or bum) would be unintelligible, as would bird, in its slang sense, a 'character,' in the sense of an eccentric, as in He's a queer bird!
Whether standard, informal, or slang, and despite the "convergence" theory, the differences are still many and confusing. Bearing a London dateline, Russell Baker's column in The New York Times of September 15, 1970, began: "One of the hardest languages for an American to learn is English," and the language he was referring to was British English. About a year later, Henry Stanhope's review of Welcome to Britain (Whitehall Press, London, 1971) in the September 3, 1971, [London] Times referred to a glossary in the book as going "... some way towards bridging the linguistic gulf, broader than the Atlantic Ocean, which still separates our cultures." And on an arrival a few years ago at Heathrow Airport, London, I picked up a copy of Welcome, a newspaper available without charge to passengers, and read Sylvia Goldberg's article headed "Perils of the Spoken Word," which began: "One thing American visitors to Britain are seldom warned about is the 'language problem,'" and continued with the observation that the "... most mundane negotiation, the simplest attempt at communication with the natives can lead to unutterable confusion."
Whatever the future may hold in store, I have found that many facets of British English are still in need of clarification and interpretation. For despite occasional deletions because the American equivalent has all but taken over, my list of Briticisms has expanded substantially. Briticisms fall into three main categories:
1. Those that are used in both countries to mean different things. Thus, davenport means 'small writing desk' in Britain and 'large sofa' in America. Some words and phrases in this category have diametrically opposite meanings in the two countries. Bomb in Britain is slang for 'dazzling success'; in America it generally means 'dismal flop.' The verb table is an example of the same phenomenon.
2. Those that are not used at all in America, or extremely rarely, like call box and kiosk for 'telephone booth'; hoarding for 'billboard'; dustman for 'garbage man.'
3. Those that are not used (or if used at all, used differently) in America for the simple reason that their referent does not exist there. Examples abound: beefeater; commoner; during hours; Oxbridge. Often these refer to social and cultural institutions and have taken on connotative meanings which may have approximate American counterparts: Chelsea; Bloomsbury; redbrick.
Some terms qualify as Briticisms not because they are exclusively British but because they have a peculiarly British flavor. I lump such terms under the general heading "preferences." For example, if a British girl and an American girl were out shopping together, the British girl, pointing to a shop window, might say, "I'd like to go into that shop and look at that frock," while her friend would more likely say, "I'd like to go into that store and look at that dress." The British girl might have said dress but would not have said store. The American girl might have said shop but would never have said frock. And the person who waited on them would be a saleswoman or salesman to the American girl, but a shop assistant to her British friend. It is all rather delicate and subtle, and these preferences keep shifting. Here is a sample list of mutually intelligible terms which qualify as preferences:
BRITAIN
blunt (e.g., of a pencil)
crash (automobile, train)
engaged (busy)
fancy (verb)
motor-car position (the way things stand)
queer (peculiar)
sea snag (describing a troublesome situation)
tablet trade wager wretched (e.g., of weather,person, luck)
AMERICA
dull collision tied up
1. like 2. suppose automobile situation funny
1. ocean 2. beach trouble, problem, catch, hitch pill business bet awful, terrible
In addition to matters of preference, there is a category that may best be described by the term overlaps, to describe the situation where the British also use the American equivalent, but the Americans do not (or usually do not) use the British equivalent. The British, for example, say both crackers and nutty (meaning 'crazy'), but Americans do not use crackers in that sense. Many American terms are by now used more frequently in Britain than the parallel Briticism, which has become old-fashioned. I have preferred to include such entries, but in such cases, I have mentioned the increasing use of or total takeover by the American equivalent. See, for example, aisle; flicks.
Conversely, Briticisms which may be familiar to many Americans have been included where in my opinion they have not gained sufficient currency in America to be considered naturalized. In years to come, as jets become bigger and faster and the world continues to shrink, many such items will undoubtedly acquire dual citizenship. In this area, too, inclusion was the rule.
Most Briticisms have precise American equivalents, in which case they are given in boldface. Occasionally, however, this has not been possible. This applies to terms with figurative meanings; here we are on the slippery ground of connotations, implicit references, social context, and cultural implications. Many of these are slang and informal expressions that are too closely tied to British social and cultural institutions to have American equivalents, and in such cases it has been our policy not to attempt to invent one, but instead, to refer the reader to a comment providing a definition and illustrations of the uses and connotations of the British term. This policy is also followed in the case of encyclopedic entries, like the Commons; beefeater; Dame. (The phrase see comment in place of an American equivalent refers the reader to the text immediately below the entry.)
On the other hand, there are a good many Briticisms that have close or approximate equivalents in American English. These are cases where the referents may be different, but the connotative meanings, based on the social or cultural backgrounds of the referents, or the referents themselves, may be similar enough to render the parallel terms approximate equivalents. Thus, though the City and Wall Street have different referents, it is reasonable to assume that in most contexts in which a Briton would refer to the City, an American would say Wall Street.
Many terms have "shared senses," meanings common to both countries. The noun note, for instance, can mean 'musical note' (do, re, mi), 'written evidence of debt' (promissory note), 'memorandum' (he made a note of it), 'message' (he passed her a note), and so on. In Britain it has an additional sense that it does not possess in America: a 'piece of paper money' (a one-pound note, a banknote). The American equivalent in that sense is bill (a one-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill). Correspondingly, the word bill has a multiplicity of senses; the beak of a bird, the draft of a proposed law, etc. It would unduly lengthen the discussion to list or refer to all shared meanings. It is therefore to be assumed that in the case of terms with more than one sense, those not dealt with are common to both countries.
It has been difficult to apply precise criteria of inclusion and exclusion. Many slang and informal terms have been included but others omitted because they seemed too ephemeral or too narrowly regional. A roke is a ground fog, but only in Norfolk. In certain parts of Surrey they eat clod and stickin, an unattractive-sounding stew, but if you asked for it outside of that area you would be met with a totally uncomprehending stare. It is well to avoid Lancashiremen and Yorkshiremen who are razat: they're sore at you. In parts of Yorkshire a donkey is a fussock or a fussenock, in Lancashire a bronkus or a pronkus. Such narrowly restricted dialectal terms, though amusing enough, have been reluctantly passed by. In the Appendix section, however, we have included certain lists of localized slang.
Pronunciation has been indicated by reference to common words presumably familiar to the general reader, rather than through the use of phonetic symbols which remain an unbroken code to all but specialists. There is an index of American terms for the benefit of those seeking British equivalents. There are appendices dealing with general aspects of British English, and special glossaries of related terms better presented in that fashion than as separate headwords.
A separate section, "Explanatory Notes," is devoted to instructions for the most efficient use of the book.
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Excerpted from "British English A to Zed"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Eugene Ehrlich and the estate of Norman W. Schur.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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