Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 14

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 lex-
ically 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 call-
ing itself the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, a title which contains one
word too many.
Perhaps the real threat to freedom of speech in the United States is not one to freedom but
to speech. Perhaps the nation will end up free to say anything it likes while being incapable
of saying it. Nor is logical precision a strength of American students. Many of them have
had their brains severely addled by an overdose of media. Perhaps they should all have a
compulsory first year in which they learn nothing but how to think and speak straight, rid-
ding themselves of the language of texting as a clinic purges its patients of cocaine. Despite
all this, no more generous, open-minded and enthusiastic group of students can be found
in the world. American students tend to be courteous, responsive, cooperative, eager to ac-
quire ideas and ready to criticise anything whatsoever, not least themselves. They are also
the last group of students on the planet who are prepared to speak up in class.
Irony
I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that included a few mild touches of irony,
only to be informed by a startled journalist on the paper that irony was unacceptable in its
columns. One should be as wary of writing for a journal which bans irony as one should
for one which seeks to ban immigrants. There are English journals, by contrast, in which
the use of irony is almost as compulsory as the use of commas. Pieces can be sent back for
being insufficiently insincere.
It is a mistake to think that Americans do not understand irony. Yet though they may re-
spond to it, they rarely initiate it. They also occasionally blunt its edge by too blatantly sar-