The Prodigal Tongue

The Love–Hate Relationship Between British and American English

Lynne Murphy

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786072702
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

‘The first and perhaps only book on the relative merits of American and British English that is dominated by facts and analysis rather than nationalistic prejudice. For all its scholarship, this is also a funny and rollicking read.’

The Economist, Books of the Year

Only an American would call autumn fall or refer to a perfectly good pavement as a sidewalk… Not so, says Lynne Murphy. The English invented sidewalk in the seventeenth century and in 1693 John Dryden wrote the line, ‘Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.’

Perhaps we don’t know our own language quite as well as we thought.

Murphy, an American linguist in Britain, dissects the myths surrounding British and American English in a laugh-out-loud exploration of how language works and where it's going.

‌1

The Queen’s English, Corrupted

If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is!

Baron Somers, in the House of Lords (1979)1

Americans are ruining the English language. I know this because people go out of their way to tell me so. I am a magnet for such comments – an American who dares to teach English Language and Linguistics at a British university and who has the chutzpah to write about American and British language differences on the internet. But you don’t need me to tell you about the wrecking ball that is American English – the talking heads of Britain have been pointing it out for years. English is under attack from American words that are “mindless” (the Mail on Sunday),2 “ugly and pointless” (BBC Magazine),3 “infectious, destructive and virulent” (the Daily Mail).4 American words “infect, invade, and pollute” (The Times).5 Even Prince Charles has assessed the situation, warning that American English is “very corrupting”.6

Perhaps you had thought someone or something else was causing English’s demise. Maybe it’s inarticulate young people, bent on creating a future English that consists of little more than strings of so like kinda this and stuff. Or is technology responsible? BBC journalist John Humphrys likens text-messagers to Genghis Khan; they are vandals who are “pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary”.7 Business jargon is another likely suspect. Don Watson, in his book Gobbledygook, argues that management-speak expressions “sterilise the language and kill imagination and clarity”.8 In fact, the plain-language promoters at Clarity International blame business jargon for the financial crisis of 2008 – the language of banking had become so meaningless that customers could not understand the risks they were signing up for.9

But look closer and you may decide that all these dangers to English are just symptoms of a linguistic malady whose ground zero is the United States. For instance, if young people are ruining the Queen’s English, should we blame them, or blame America? The United States invented 20th-century childhood, which continues to shape culture worldwide in the 21st century. The seen-but-not-heard Victorian girls and boys of Britain have been replaced by the American inventions of the teenager and the tween. Children born in Essex or Edinburgh or Aberystwyth live part of their lives in a virtual America, home of hip-hop, Disney princesses, caped superheroes, and fast food. The situation is bad enough that in 2007 the British media regulator Ofcom (the equivalent of the US Federal Communications Commission) called for a national debate on the proliferation of American children’s television on British screens. “We don’t want our children growing up with American accents”, proclaimed former BBC Play School presenter Baroness Floella Benjamin.10 It may be too late. British young people, like their American counterparts are, like, ending their statements as if they were, like, questions?

And the youthful English speakers are not all that young anymore. As Oscar Wilde observed: “The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.”11 More than a hundred years after Wilde’s quip, the lines between childhood and adulthood have become blurred by adults’ refusal to put away childish things, with the US leading the way. The American invention of the word kidult underscores the point. In kidulthood, grown-up speech becomes more casual: no one wants to be called Mister or ma’am. We feel free to mumble our gonnas and lemmes. And everything is awesome.

Technology and business are similar stealth American invasions into global English. American technology spills foreignisms throughout the anglophonic world. We talk of uploads, of microwaving food, of personal computers. The technologies crossed oceans and so did the words. Microsoft Word asks British users to set the font “color”. Facebook teaches us to unfriend people and unlike things, then puts a grumpy red line under perfectly good English spellings like practise with an s and travelled with double l. This increasingly technologized, globalized world brings us business jargon, the language of optimism and obfuscation. Surely going forward, reaching out and leveraging our real-time client synergy is the fault of go-getting, pop-psychologizing American suits.

We can actually quantify the horror that American English arouses. After using a thesaurus in order to find adjectives meaning ‘good’, ‘useful’, ‘bad’, and ‘useless’, I searched the internet for the phrase a(n) _____ Americanism, inserting the synonyms into the blank. I’m happy to report that on that particular day the worldwide web knew of 227 lovely Americanisms, 73 apt ones, and even 5 elegant ones. But the top six not-so-flattering adjectives are slightly more numerous. (I’ve lived in England long enough to have mastered the ironic understatement.)

That’s nearly thirty times as many not-so-flattering adjectives as flattering ones, just looking at the top six. After the top six, the flattering list stops, but the not-so-flattering one goes on. And on.

American English – the language of my childhood, my dear mom and dad, the teachers who introduced me to Shakespeare; the language of Sesame Street, Barack Obama, Maya Angelou, and Mark Twain – is Linguistic Public Enemy Number 1 in much of the English-speaking world. So far we’ve seen it described as a pollution, a disease, a destructive force, an aesthetic horror. The repetition of these refrains in my adopted country makes it difficult for me to maintain a stereotype that Americans hold dear: that the British are a polite and intelligent people.

Is American English really a disease that infects other languages, particularly the mother tongue of England? Or are we seeing the influence of linguistic hypochondriacs, diagnosing idiocy and destruction where there is none? Are Americanisms evil pollutants that disintegrate minds? Or do th...

Table of contents

• 1 • The Queen’s English, Corrupted
• 2 • The Wrong End of the Bumbershoot: Stereotypes and Getting Things Wrong
• 3 • Separated by a Common Language?
• 4 • America: Saving the English Language Since 1607
• 5 • More American, More Ænglisc?
• 6 • Logical Nonsense
• 7 • Lost in Translation
• 8 • The Standard Bearers
• 9 • The Prognosis
• 10 • Beyond Britain and America
• Notes
• References
• The Quizzes
• Quiz Answers
• Acknowledgements