This is the Age of Aquarius. Peace prevails—or at least it’s getting there. Cars are built in Mexico with Chinese parts and then sold in Iowa. You can get decent Thai food in rural Maryland. And, by Olympus, the Internet! You can buy new pants without leaving your living room. And the peoples of the earth can converse in this great digital cattle pen!
More amazing still, they do. The result has been a mass confluence of tongues. Words and phrases leap the walls of context and language to take up residence in new discursive lands, where they tend to work ignominious but high-demand jobs. (Sco pa tu manaa, anyone?) Yet most of the linguistic interchange happens between speakers of the same basic language, which, in the case of the Americans, means mostly with the inhabitants of Great Britain.
The Greeks observed strict distinctions of dialect among their literary genres: Epics were written in Ionian, the dialogue of tragedy in Attic but the choral odes in Dorian, and so on. A less rigid but analogous distinction exists in English, which prefers a British tuning in grander contexts and an American one for works of greater immediacy. American is for sports journalism, stand-up comedy, the systems novel, rock music; British is for modernist poetry and serious “realist” novels. The Beatles tuned down; Fitzgerald tuned up. Henry James and T. S. Eliot tuned up so much that they were compelled to go leaping across the pond. (It’s hard not to smile at the memory that Eliot was a son of St. Louis.) The history of American literature can be regarded as the struggle between the spirits of Mark Twain and Henry James, the nativizing impulse and the transatlantic impulse.
In The American Language, his now out-of-print magnum opus, H. L. Mencken briefly laid out the characteristics of our own tongue: “The characters chiefly noted in American English by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of present-day England) for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own materials.”
From this flows the traditional American critique of British English: its sterility of expression, as opposed to the less elevated—even vulgar—but livelier lingo of These States. Mencken observes, “The English, in naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball.” And the critique goes the other way, too: Since the eighteenth century, Britishers have expressed frustration at the tendency for New World formations to arrive back in the metropolis.
But these are differences of tendency rather than geometric divisions. The British do make their own coinages, and some of them take up residence in American mouths. Ben Yagoda, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, has done our nation an invaluable service chronicling the entry of such adoptions; he reports his findings on a blog, Not One-Off Britishisms. He has compiled and expanded upon its greatest hits in an engaging new volume, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English.
It is no surprise, based on the basic characters of the dialects, that the Britishisms in American English that have the most comfortable residency are vivid, usually imagistic metaphors. The agricultural “vet”—the origin is exactly what you’d guess—is a verb whose British use Yagoda dates to 1862. Its widespread American adoption dates only to the early 1990s, when a failed Clinton attorney-general nominee blamed the administration’s “vetters” for her difficulties. The similarly earthy “full of beans,” dating to the 1970s in America, is a Victorian British term of equestrian origins. “Gadget,” of much older use in America, was a useful piece of nautical slang for a thing whose name escaped the speaker in the moment.
Yagoda observes that after the Second World War, when the mix of Allied forces produced a rich confusion of tongues, the most productive period of importation was the Nineties, during the Blairite cultural renaissance of “cool” Britain and the dawn of the Internet. It is in this era that a particular kind of pathological Anglophilia entered American usage—Henry Jamesism, but silly.
It helps to imagine the sort of American who uses Britishisms: a liberal arts or social science degree, usually at least at the master’s level, some sort of white-collar job vaguely associated with education or human resources, talks seriously about television. This person owns at least one item with “Keep Calm and Carry On” or a derivative printed on it. These people think saying shite (a word that gets the full treatment from Yagoda) instead of shit or shitty is culture. They pretend A Bit of Fry & Laurie is actually funny. They may have had a gap year in a flat in London, where they ate biscuits and rode lifts. Sometimes, here in America, they claim that they still do.
Yagoda records this person’s pet usages with admirable equanimity. “Bottom,” “bum,” “arse”: Do these words really clean up a reference to the fundament for mixed company, or do they just make you sound like a character on the ruder sort of children’s show? Is “posh” appreciably better than highfalutin’, tony, or high-rent? This phenomenon demands a new formation: not euphemism, not dysphemism, but paedophemism, talking like a baby. The British, in an admirable display of self-knowledge and humility, actually have a coinage for a person who uses this childish patois: “cockwomble.” I do not feel that this term needs exegesis; we can allow it to be the last word.
There’s no way to stop the flow of language, and as long as the Internet doesn’t kick out, Americans will always be borrowing their words from abroad. But why only look to Britain’s dead star? There are much more lively pleasures on offer—say, for instance, in Indian English. Would you rather say that the county assessed your house at two hundred seventy thousand dollars, or that the county assessed it at “dollars two point seven lakh”? The largest modern prakrits of the subcontinent are ergative-absolutive rather than nominative-accusative; as a result, the Indian bureaucrat’s heroic assaults on English syntax bring startling and novel arrangements. Here also is an American ease with coinages. For example: the versatile “-wallah” formation, endlessly useful in our modern world of gigs, side hustles, and rackets. What if this were applied to American English? Your cousin who is into day-trading becomes a stockwallah; the fellow from your high school who collected and traded sneakers a shoewallah; your humble correspondent an inkwallah. I propose for the Britishizer described above “cockwomble-wallah,” which may be shortened to cockwallah.
And what about the Indian postpositive “sir”? It happily supplies a gap in modern American formality: Fewer and fewer Americans are comfortable in using “Mr. [surname]” outside official contexts, but “Mr. [given name]” is childish, and a bare given name is a hair too familiar. Now in steps “Matthew-sir,” “Nic-sir,” and “Jude-sir.” Vast horizons for loan words are opened to Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. The future is here, not among the people whose recent contributions to the commonwealth of Anglophony include “knob” and “numpty.” Indeed, one of Yagoda’s classic Britishisms originated on the subcontinent: cushy, a word that has become completely natural in American and, indeed, difficult to imagine replacing. This excellent adjective entered the American lexicon after the Second World War, having traveled here on winding paths through Persian, Urdu, and the argot of the Raj. Innovators, take note.
Yagoda argues that there appears to be little chance of full union between the American and British dialects; certain basic usages in each have shown remarkable staying power, even amid the onslaught of digital media and American cultural imperialism. Certain eccentricities have proven difficult to eradicate—the British plural in “drinks cabinet” and “drugs party,” for example. (Yagoda doesn’t get into high linguistics, but the American singular in those contexts is a very old survival: Indo-European always uses the singular in compound nominal formations, which is what these phrases are when you brush away a few centuries of eccentric punctuation practice.) This is comforting; it’s a more interesting world when there are more differences. And one shudders at the thought of the American cockwallahs ascendant.
When Enoch Powell reflected on the essence of Englishness in a speech from 1961, the first item he pointed to was the durability of the English language: Our ancestors “would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring.” That is true, but they might be surprised by some of the developments that have happened since their own time. Yet these are the men who sailed across the ocean and made a home on a new continent; adventure and innovation have always been an essential feature of the language of the Beowulf poet and Shakespeare. I do not think they would have been dismayed at Americanisms; but they would have smiled to know that the teeming womb of royal kings still had some linguistic buns in the oven. Long live the transatlantic.
