Amglish: Two Nations Divided by a Common Language

Bibliography

Introduction

An anonymous social commentator once observed: If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American.

Mildly amusing, but not quite as keenly observed, or as accurate a statement as it might first appear – even to the most jaded cynic. The great detective, Sherlock Holmes, would never have permitted such a sloppy piece of deduction if he had been trying to trace the nationality of a monolingual murderer. For in truth, the cutting remark could just as easily be attributed to a Brit. I know, because I am one. A Brit, that is.

Let my say it right up front, in case this introduction gives the wrong impression: I love America and I love Americans. I visited the United States regularly on business for 15 years before my career brought me to work in New York and eventually to a home in Connecticut. So even before l lived here, I thought I knew the place pretty well – and I probably did in comparison to the British family that just visits Walt Disney World every three or four years. But living in America for a period longer than an average holiday, quickly brings the realization that it truly is a different planet.

Why do I say this?

America is vast. And so are many of its citizens. There is nowhere on the face of the earth where you will see such fitness fanaticism and yet, at the same time, where you will see so many grossly obese people. Nowhere on earth where you will find so many diet plans or such copious nutrition advice and, at the same time, nowhere on earth where restaurant servings are so enormous. An average single platter at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant would easily serve a family of three in most other developed nations.

There is no place in the world where you will see more improbably large-breasted women, because there is also no place on earth where God’s work has been so regularly augmented by mere mortals.

And for a land that has one of the highest percentage of churchgoers – folk who allegedly revere the perfection of God’s work – there is no western (predominantly Christian) country that so routinely feels compelled to surgically alter the male penis through non-religious circumcision. Obviously God is great with trees and oceans, but he still has a bit to learn about the breast and the penis … and nose … and teeth … and stomach … and buttocks … and hair. But more about various bodyparts in Chapter 11.

And talking of religion: in the company of John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Isaac Hayes and many others, you can suspend all sense of irony and disbelief by worshiping with some of the strangest religious sects on the planet, but at the same time, people in many States would think it Godless if you wanted to marry your cousin (something that is considered perfectly permissible in most other western countries – and certainly not a Biblical taboo).

In this beguiling land, few people seem to think it strange that you can die fighting for your country as a teenager, but you can’t drink alcohol until you are 21. Although, I have yet to meet an American who didn’t cheerfully confess the many ways they found as teenagers to break this particular law.

There is nowhere where you will hear more talk about energy conservation and nowhere where the over-large personal trucks suck down fuel faster. There is nowhere where you will hear more talk of freedom and few places where you will face such ponderous bureaucracy and in-your-face Government … at so many levels.

There is nowhere where you will hear louder voices for the rule of law and nowhere where you will find more guns in legal public ownership. Nowhere where you will hear more strident calls for consumer protection and nowhere where you will be assailed by so many advertisements for products of dubious proberty or by as many false offers. Example: "This is a limited time offer. Call within the next 30 minutes and get a free [insert anything here] … but wait, if you promise to tell a friend we’ll double your order."

And talking of advertising: there is nowhere with a bigger choice of television programs and nowhere where you will see less content per hour – because of the sheer weight of commercials.

There is nowhere on earth where you will see more notices disclaiming liability (even warnings on cups that the coffee contained therein may be hot) and at the same time, no country on earth with as many lawyers suing all those purveyors of coffee whose warnings were not sufficiently alarmist to stop careless customers getting burned anyway. It’s the land of free choice – but the land where someone else must be to blame if you choose to spill a hot drink in your lap … while you are driving and holding a mobile phone to your ear.

Yes, it really is the Land of the Free – as long as you are happy to conform to a fairly narrow definition of freedom. You can subscribe to see penetrative sex on your cable television service (which you can’t do in the UK); but on regular television, a sunbather’s nipple would be blurred out if the Travel Channel was reporting from the Costa Del Sol. In contrast, a terrestrial television nipple would be perfectly acceptable in the UK and across all of western Europe.

In the United States you have the freedom to spend your money gambling on a zero-skill state lottery, but if you want to bet on a simple card game, you had better be in Las Vegas or Atlantic City – or on a cruise liner in international waters.

Americans are free to campaign against cruel and unusual punishment in other countries, but in the United States it is considered perfectly acceptable to keep a convicted killer in a cell for 20 years and finally fry them in a device that would have been coveted by the Inquisition. Or you can gas them … or hang them … or inject them full of chemicals … or even put them in front of a firing squad … or do all those things simultaneously. Okay, you can’t do all those things simultaneously. Black humor. Oh, sorry: potentially politically incorrect use of black. Which is my clumsy way of illustrating that there is nowhere where you will find such paranoia about political sensitivity in language, but at the same time nowhere where you will hear the n-word used so often in entertainment.

Which, in turn, reminds me to mention that there is nowhere in the English-speaking world where you will hear so many euphemisms in everyday speech. You can go to a bathroom where this no bath; or a restroom where – arguably – there is nowhere you can rest. If a member of the armed forces is killed by someone from their own side, then they were sent to their maker via the altogether more acceptable method known as friendly fire. If innocent bystanders are killed in a conflict, their deaths are explained by the more benign-sounding, collateral damage. And, if you commit a bad crime, you won’t necessarily be sent to prison – instead, you might go to a seemingly less daunting place known as a correctional facility.

As a citizen of the United States of America, you are free to be the most patriotic nation on earth and to vigorously promote religious tolerance. But while a Jew can celebrate Hannukah, a Christian had better be wary about celebrating Christmas. While no-one would dare to suggest changing the names of symbols of non-Christian worship, the Christmas festival is deemed to be so inflammatory that its very name cannot be mentioned at Holiday time. Happy Hannukah is an appreciated greeting to a Jew, but Happy Christmas may even make a Christian wince.

The irreverent adult cartoon, South Park, with masterful irony, uses every form of blasphemy against images of Jesus Christ, but is banned by its commissioning cable TV channel, Comedy Central, from showing any image of the Prophet Mohamed.

While the United States often takes on the role of being the world’s police service, the average television world news bulletin will only cover stories in the world about … the United States (or where the United States is currently fighting). However, if you really want to find out what’s happening in the world, the same country that brought you the The National Enquirer also still brings you The New York Times and a few other quality newspapers.

Americans are free to travel the world, but most will not: less than a quarter of adult Americans hold passports. That figure varies by city, but even in New York the figure is only 38% and in Washington DC, 27%.

To the average American, flying from one State to another is close enough to experiencing international travel as makes no difference. And of course, in some respects, they are right. It takes much longer to fly from New York to Los Angeles than from London to Paris; or London to Frankfurt; or London to Stockholm; or London to Milan. And, of course, there is that little matter of having the distinct (and sadly sometimes correct) impression that flying outside the safety of the 50 states exposes US citizens to all sorts of people who simply want to have the opportunity of killing Americans.

Contrasts and anomalies also abound in sport. Let us not even mention the famous World Series that is anything but. Well, on the other hand, maybe it is. For the majority of Americans, teams in the Baseball World Series come from the only world that they will ever experience: the United States of America.

All of which is to confirm what I said earlier: the United States of America is a planet in its own right. As such, it is as insular and unique as the Earth is compared to Mars. It has its own culture; its own (uniquely complex) legal system; its own traditions; its own food and … its own language.

And that brings me to the purpose of this book: To show (hopefully in an accessible way) how the English language and culture of America diverged from the English language and culture of the English. And how, no matter how hard any country tries to resist, Planet Earth will eventually end up with one world language – a form of English uniquely fashioned by its most active guardians and developers: the Americans.

Welcome to Amglish: Two nations divided by a common language.

1

The Nucular Option

During the reign of George II (that’s George W. Bush), the English speaking world outside of the United States of America believed it was reasonably safe from the threat of nuclear holocaust.

Some traced their new feeling of security back to the ending of the Cold War after the Reagan/Thatcher era. Yes, of course, there was still the manifest threat of terrorism, but dirty bombs aside, at the start of the 21st Century, there were very few people who felt the need to construct nuclear survival shelters in their basements.

Some of the more spiritually-minded attributed this new feeling of security to the Hubble Space Telescope. They reasoned that because Hubble had revealed a universe far older, deeper and more wonderfully mysterious than anyone had ever previously imagined, then the creator simply wouldn’t allow we miserable earthlings to blow our habitat to bits without – at the very least – a Host of Angels being sent to Earth like a galactic police squad to restore order.

There was an even larger body of opinion that credited the Chinese for our feeling of safety from nuclear Armageddon. After the fall of the Soviet empire, many thought that the main emerging nuclear threat came from communist China. But three things persuaded the Chinese that they could save their money and spend it on something other than a Soviet-style nuclear stockpile.

First, the Brits gave up Hong Kong without a murmur and in great shape, leaving China with a third and even more internationally-minded economic powerhouse to rival their existing jewels: Beijing and Shanghai.

Second, they quickly realized that as they were inevitably going to become the world’s largest trading nation, they didn’t need to kill lots of foreigners to gain control of the planet’s economy – it was going to devolve to them anyway. So letting it happen by peaceful means meant that they wouldn’t have to spend billions on rebuilding wasted infrastructure.

The third and probably most powerful reason why the Chinese grew to understand that they were now the future socio-economic hub of the world was the fact they were ready to run the 2008 Olympics a clear six months before the Greeks were ready to hold the 2004 Olympics.

No, the real reason why we English speakers who are not American assumed we were safe, for the time being, was because the President of the most powerful nation on the planet, couldn’t say the word nuclear – preferring instead, nucular.

In other words, if George W. Bush had suffered a serious mental disorder and had accidentally ordered the unleashing of America’s arsenal on some undeserving nation (or France), Armageddon would never have happened. Sure, George would be on the emergency phone yelling orders, but most of us believed his generals probably wouldn’t understand what a nucular weapon was.

Sorry Mr. President, we don’t have any of those new-cue-ler gizmos.

It was obvious that George’s articulate wife, Laura, found this, if not slightly embarrassing, at least a little quirky. A part of George’s folksy charm. In fact she even made a joke of it at the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. She told the astonished audience, George and I are complete opposites — I’m quiet, he’s talkative, I’m introverted, he’s extroverted, I can pronounce nuclear.

Although her gentle put-down of the leader of the free world was light-hearted, you couldn’t help imagining that behind the scenes, Laura was constantly trying to coach him: One more time. Try this dear: think of it as two words. NEW CLEAR, NEW CLEAR. Now George, your turn. NEW CLEAR.

Uhhh … Okay Laura honey … uhhh … Nnnnn … Nnnnn … NEW … uhhh … NEW-CUE-LER.

It was only after I had lived in the United States for a while that I realized a shocking truth about the role of the President: I had never really understood how powerless he is. After the terrible destruction of Hurricane Katrina, people from other countries were incredulous that the President didn’t do this, or didn’t do that. But in fact, the split of power between the Federal and State Government systems means that the President can do very little himself without the consent and agreement of many branches of government at all levels and even across the political spectrum. Riding roughshod over the quasi-independence of any of the 50 States – by sending troops in uninvited for example – would almost certainly cause far greater political controversy at home than riding roughshod over some hapless third world country.

Even much of his party’s legislation needs a supermajority of 60% (not a simple old-fashioned one-man-one-vote 51%) to get through. And then there is the filibuster – a device the Brits got rid of years ago by importing a devastating French killing machine and turning it into a metaphorical, but equally devastating parliamentary device called … a guillotine.

In simple terms, if the legislator speaking on a particular subject does not stop talking within a certain time, the guillotine comes down, cuts off the offender’s tongue and then a vote is forced. A simple vote, by the way. Not, an up or down vote as US political-speak would have it. But then again, why use one word when four will do?

However, as Commander-In-Chief of the US Armed Forces, the one thing the President can do fairly easy is the one thing that most other countries find fairly scary: wage war. Not unilaterally declare war without the approval of Congress, but this is a moot point. Congress simply has to approve the use of force. The Vietnam business wasn’t a declared war, but I don’t hear anyone referring to it as the Vietnam Incident or the Vietnam Misunderstanding.

So given the hypothetical fact that the President could have ordered the launch of hundreds of ICBMs (ICBM’s in American-English – an American-English plural of an abbreviation would generally require an apostrophe), the fact that George Bush couldn’t say the name of the weapon that might have destroyed the planet was some small comfort to us foreigners. In fact, it was one of the very few times that non-American-English speakers were grateful that Americans do speak a very different English language than the rest of us.

So imagine my surprise – horror even – when I found that President Bush’s folksy pronunciation is now listed as an official US English alternative by no less an authority than American dictionary company, Merriam-Webster. They defend their decision by stating that the Bush Jr. pronunciation has been found: in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, US cabinet members, and at least one US president and one vice president. While most common in the US, these pronunciations have also been heard from British and Canadian speakers.

Who am I to argue? In fact the pronunciation has actually been attributed on occasions to, not one, but five US Presidents in addition to George W. Bush. And no, one of them wasn’t George’s father, Herbert W. Bush. If he ever pronounced the word like his son, history does not appear to have recorded it.

But sources do claim that Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have all used what we will hereinafter refer to as, the nucular option. And it is, by the way, the favored pronunciation of that notable authority, Homer Simpson (who should know what he’s talking about considering he works at Springfield’s local nuclear, sorry, nucular power station).

It would be misleading to infer that the nucular option is restricted to American leaders: apparently even former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has been noticed to use it. Not that this surprises me a great deal. Actually Blair knows perfectly well how to pronounce the word properly, but he was obviously being sickeningly polite to his friend George by trying to confer some (small – make that, very small) legitimacy on the variant.

To be fair to George W. Bush, public speaking is rarely easy – particularly for a politician. The ability to be spontaneously articulate (as opposed to scriptedly-articulate) is a skill possessed by very few people. It is far, far worse when your articulate prose also has to be politically acceptable and has to stand the scrutiny of a thousand journalists eagerly awaiting your every slip; or desperate to confer their own meaning on something that you never intended.

Having been occasionally required to speak in public myself, I am only too aware that the pen is mightier than the tongue. Or, more accurately, the revisionist brilliance of the word processing program is more reliable than the processing power of the average human brain when you require it to connect politically-correct, analysis-proof inner monologue to the vocal chords. As Descartes might have put it if he had been President of the United States (unlikely, as he was French): I think, therefore I blurt.

It is not surprising that politicians and captains of industry are often accused of using politician-speak for that is exactly the speech pattern that they are forced to adopt. To survive.

Of course, skilled exponents of the art make it less obvious than less-skilled exponents of the art. However, it is an inescapable fact that the whole point of speaking in public is to appear to say wise things when in fact you never actually say anything of real substance at all. Quite simply, the more substance in a speech, the more it can be ripped apart. Saying something will annoy someone. Saying nothing will annoy fewer people. Notice I said fewer people not zero people. Sometimes a politician could just stand there with his mouth firmly closed and he would still annoy some people by thought transfer alone. Actually, certain politicians can annoy me by saying nothing, even without the thought transfer component.

When former British Prime Minister, Harold McMillan, was asked what he believed was the most difficult thing about running the country, he said in his cut-glass, upper-crust English accent: Events my dear boy, events.

Translation: zero events equals zero hassle. As soon as you have to comment on an event, then you encounter difficulty – and probably create an event. Which is why you so often hear politicians hesitate, stumble and make throat-clearing noises while they search for the appropriate words. You can clearly hear them dig verbal holes and then twist and turn in the mud while they look for the verbal shovel to dig themselves out of the mess their loose tongues created in the first place.

As a politician or celebrity, the greater the event, the more likely you are to be interviewed by a journalist and the more likely that your words will be (accidentally, carelessly or wilfully) misinterpreted or distorted, either on the spot or at a later time – particularly when political analysts paid to fill television time set about dissecting some piece of verbal trivia with surgical intricacy.

All of which explains why George W. Bush (and many others) hesitate a lot as if they are grasping for words. It’s not that they don’t know any, (well, not always) it’s just that their brains are fully occupied selecting what they hope are appropriate words – one-by-one; immediately processing and testing them against what they want to say; and analysing how their uttered sentence might be twisted or misunderstood.

Which goes a long way to explaining why sometimes what a politician says, is understood by hardly anybody. And, in fact, arguably when this happens, they have succeeded rather than failed. The more an audience understands what you have said, the more material it has to pick over. To put it into pictures, the buzzard that finds a meaty corpse in the desert spends more time picking the flesh off the bones than the buzzard that finds a virtually clean, dry skeleton. Who said that? I did.

And it explains why a perfectly innocent response to a question can end up like the following example from Tampa, Florida on February 4th 2005, when George Bush was trying to explain his plan to save the American Social Security system:

Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled.

You said it, George. Or, to put it another way, congratulations – you succeeded in saying nothing, so fewer people will pick holes in what you said. Your only major mistake was uttering the last two sentences – it was a sign of weakness to suggest that even you had not understood what you said. If you has just stopped before saying, Does that make any sense to you? then at least half your audience would have applauded your clarity.

And in case you think this is a cheap shot against a President who became well known for his misunderestimation (sic) of the English language, let me say straight away that arguably he was no less intelligible than his ally across the Atlantic, UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

As I hinted earlier, Mr. Blair’s adoption of the weak pronunciation of nuclear – the nucular option – did not come as a surprise to me. In fact, Mr. Blair not only found it difficult to use standard English pronunciations (often substituting the letter u for the letter i so, for example, limit would become limutt) but some would say Mr. Blair did not speak English at all. For while George Bush had almost a folksy honesty about his speech, Blair was clearly a master of Politician’s English (more cynically known as Orwellian Newspeak). Why did this make him less intelligble than George Bush? Simply because misunderestimation is much easier to translate than Newspeak – unless you take the view that Newspeak usually means the direct opposite of what is actually said; in which case, interpretation becomes easy.

To hammer home the point that this book is not about British-English being right and American-English being wrong, I will play my trump card to prove that George Bush is a veritable Professor of English compared to some of his British counterparts.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Britain’s John Prescott – Deputy Prime Minister under Tony Blair.

This will sound incredible to American readers, but believe me, John Prescott is a politician who made J. Danforth Quayle (I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change) sound like he should have been the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University.

Prescott is a pugnacious bulldog of a man; a man who always gives the impression that he knows what is best for you and that you should do what he says (rather than do what he does). A man so finger-waggingly righteous that the country errupted with a collective cheer when he was forced to eventually admit that he had been cheating on his wife with a secretary. In fact he gave a whole new meaning to political liaison by liaising with his secretary in a hotel room while his wife waited in the hotel lobby. Prescott was obviously a great admirer of the HR policies of Bill Jefferson (BJ) Clinton, although I don’t believe that even the legendary Bill succeeded in getting Hillary to wait downstairs while Monica helped him conduct affairs of State in a hotel bedroom. Bill was plainly an amateur compared to Prescott.

Putting the British Deputy Prime Minister’s lamentable staff relations aside, I am not saying that John Prescott was incapable of speaking plain English when he was in office – it just didn’t happen very often. However, one notable exception was when he was asked by a journalist why he had taken a chauffeur-driven limo on a 300 yard trip from his hotel to the Labour Party Conference in 1999. Mr. Prescott, who pompously lectured the rest of us about energy conservation while enjoying the use of not one but two Jaguar cars, snarled: There were security reasons and my wife doesn’t like having her hair blown about. Any more stupid questions?

Bearing in mind that John Prescott, during the 2001 British General Election – and in full glare of the television cameras – punched a man who threw an egg at him, it was probably wise that the journalist decided that he did not have any more stupid questions.

I am trying to imagine what the American press and public would have thought if, during an election campaign, Dick Cheney had launched a physical attack on someone who threw food at him. On second thoughts, maybe it would have improved his popularity ratings. For a brief moment, that is exactly what it did for John Prescott.

Ironically, long before Prescott launched this radical new tactic for winning hearts and minds, he was often described by the British media as Thumper to Tony Blair’s Bambi. Say what you like about Tony, but Bambi Blair never thumped any voters. Maybe he just kept this card up his sleeve for the moment when he really felt he needed a boost in the opinion polls.

Although his 1999 verbal outburst was, on this occasion, colorful rather than ambiguous, more often than not Mr. Prescott found himself to be one of the all-time favorite targets of an organization known as the Plain English Campaign. One of the Prescott quotes they enjoyed in 2002 was when the Deputy Prime Minister was reporting to Parliament on the situation in Afghanistan. To get the full effect, you really need to read it out loud, without pausing – just as he delivered it:

"The objectives remain the same and indeed that has been made clear by the