Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 7

that they have a number of vulnerable young lives dependent on them, and thus should
think twice before behaving rashly. Appeals to the family are almost always right-wing.
Stalin, a devout moral conservative, spoke with some satisfaction of having millions of
little states at his disposal in the Soviet Union, by which he meant millions of families.
Today, we might add millions of little consumer units. The British buy and sell houses,
while the Americans buy and sell homes. “Home” is a homelier word than “house.” You
go to someone's house in Britain, but to their home in the United States. “Home” to British
ears has vaguely negative connotations. It is a place where you put old people, stray dogs
and orphans.
American English can sometimes sound oddly informal to the British, and at other times
too straitlaced and well upholstered. The United States is the abode of opaque academic
jargon, but also of the raw, racy and in-your-face. It finds it hard to evolve a kind of lan-
guage which is both easy and elegant. It sometimes suspects, wrongly, that to be clear you
have to be plain, and that to be stylish is to be effete. We can appeal to de Tocqueville once
more, who notes that American language is clear and dry, “without the slightest ornament,”
but that it quickly turns pompous and bombastic when its speakers attempt a more poetic
style. When this happens, he remarks, Americans can never say anything simply, which is
true of their pretentious business or academic jargon today. Bombast, one might claim, is
the flipside of an excessive plainness. It is the rhetorical mode of those who are accustomed
to unadorned prose.
There can be an alluring courtesy about American speech, along with a rather portentous
solemnity. Many years ago, a team of students from Yale arrived in England to debate with
a team from Manchester. The Yale captain rose in the debating chamber and announced:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I'm from Yale: Y for Youth, A for Ambition, L for Loyalty, E for
Enterprise.” “Thank Christ he doesn't come from the Massachusetts Institute of Techno-
logy,” an Englishman at the back was heard to mutter. American English is full of edifying,
chivalric, hand-on-heart words like pride, trust, honour, faith, loyalty, service, obligation,
responsibility, our brave men and women in uniform, and so on. In some ways, it is the
language of top-hatted, frock-coated Victorian England.
So the formal and informal sit cheek by jowl in American English. On the one hand,
road signs reading “Wrong Way—Go Back,” “Ped Xing” or “Don't Block the Box” are
more startlingly idiomatic than anything one would find in the stiffer-lipped United King-
dom. Perhaps the British could take a leaf out of the U.S. book in this respect and have
road signs reading “Bloody Great Pothole Somewhere Up Ahead.” (There are, incidentally,
some curiously cowardly road signs in Scotland reading “Beware of Sheep.”) As far as in-
formality goes, American publishers tend to favour chattily colloquial book titles such as
Phobia: How I Learnt to Conquer My Fear of People Who Have Squeaky Voices and Are
Under Five Foot Eight Inches Tall .