Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 8

On the other hand, American English can have a rather quaint, earnestly Victorian ring
to it, as in “I appreciate your patience, sir, and will make a commitment to you,” which
was once said to me by an American student. In Britain, this would probably be taken as
sardonic. People in Britain do not say “I appreciate it.” They simply mutter something shy
and unintelligible. Perhaps it was this kind of formal language de Tocqueville had in mind
when he remarked that Americans expatiate rather than talk, speaking to you (as Queen
Victoria famously complained of Gladstone) as though they are addressing a public meet-
ing. The States may be technologically advanced, but its speech can be charmingly elabor-
ate and old-fashioned. As a country, it is both archaic and avant-garde. Some of its beliefs
are only a couple of hundred years old, whereas others date back to the first century AD.
Americans tend to lapse into the present tense when speaking of past events much more
than the British do, as in “I'm in the kitchen and there's this tremendous bang and I dive
under the table.” Perhaps this reflects a present-oriented society. “There's this tremendous
bang” is also typically American; the British would probably say “ a tremendous bang.”
“He flunked math,” or “No determination on that question has been achieved at this mo-
ment in time,” are almost as foreign-sounding in Glasgow or Brighton as Sieg Heil or la
plume de ma tante . British people use the word “dream,” of course, but nowhere is it as
current as in the United States, except among psychoanalysts. “My hopes and dreams” trips
off the American tongue as glibly as the dreary clichés “at the end of the day” and “over
the moon” issue from British lips. “Dream” in anti-idealist Britain is more likely to mean
illusion than vision. In America, by contrast, the word comes accompanied by a mistiness
of the eyes and the distant sound of swooping violins.
“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, where-
as 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 her-
oes. 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 leader-
ship. 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 men-
tion their country quite a lot. It is rather that they use the word America (as in “Good Morn-
ing, 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