Authors: Bill Bryson
Although the English kept the u in many words like
humour,
honour,
and
colour,
they gave it up in several, such as
terrour,
horrour,
and
governour,
helped at least in part by the influence of
THE MOTHER TONGUE
American books and journals. Confusingly, they retained it in some forms but abandoned it in others, so that in England you write
honour
and
honourable
but
honorary
and
honorarium; colour
and
colouring
but
coloration; humour
but
humorist; labour
and
la-
bourer
but
laborious.
There is no logic to it, and no telling why some words gave up the u and others didn't. For a time it was fashionable to drop the u from honor and humor—Coleridge for one did it—but it didn't catch on.
People don't often appreciate just how much movies and televi-sion have smoothed the differences between British and American English, but half a century ago the gap was very much wider. In
1922,
when Sinclair Lewis's novel
Babbitt
was published in Britain it contained a glossary. Words that are commonplace in Britain now were quite unknown until the advent of talking pictures—among them
grapevine, fan (in
the sense of a sports enthusiast),
gimmick,
and
phoney.
As late as 1955, a writer in the
Spectator
could misapprehend the expression turn
of the century,
and take it to mean midcentury, when the first half turns into the second. In 1939, the preface to An
Anglo-American Interpreter
suggested that
"an American, if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood." [Quoted in
Our Language,
page 169] That may be arrant hyperbole, designed to boost sales, but it is probably true that the period up to the Second World War marked the age of the greatest divergence between the two main branches of English.
Even now, there remains great scope for confusion, as evi-denced by the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen. "Oh," she blurted, "but I do my own dusting." It can take years for an American to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa. In Britain
homely
is a flattering expression (equivalent to
homey);
in America it means "ugly." In Britain
upstairs
is the first floor; in America it is the second. In Britain
to table a motion
means to put it forward for discussion; in America it means to put it aside.
Presently
means "now" in America; in Britain it means
"in a little while." Sometimes these can cause considerable em-
OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD
barrassment, most famously with the British expression "I'll knock you up in the morning," which means "I'll knock on your door in the morning."
To keep your pecker up
is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously,
pecker
has the same slang meaning there), but
to be stuffed
is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, "I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed," an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone's fanny; in England it means a woman's pudenda.
Other terms are less graphic, but no less confusing. English people bathe wounds but not their babies; they
bath
their babies.
Whereas an American wishing to get clean would bathe in a bath-tub, an English person would bath in a bath. English people do bathe, but what they mean by that is to go for a swim in the sea.
Unless, of course, the water is too cold (as it always is in Britain) in which case they stand in water up to their knees. This is called having a paddle, even though their hands may never touch the water.
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of be-wildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem some-times as if we are being intentionally contrary. Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These ambiguities can affect scientists as much as tourists. The British billion, as we have already seen, has surrendered to the Amer-ican billion, but for other numbers agreement has yet to be reached. A decillion in America is a one plus thirty-three zeros.
In Britain it is a one plus sixty zeros. Needless to say, that can make a difference.
In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other. That's a very large number indeed. Some are well known on both sides of the
Atlantic—lift/elevator, dustbin/
garbage can, biscuit/cookie—but
many hundreds of others are still liable to befuddle the hapless traveler. Try covering up the right-hand column below and seeing how many of the British terms in
THE MOTHER TONGUE
the left-hand column you can identify. If you get more than half you either know the country well or have been reading too many English murder mysteries.
British
American
cot
baby's crib
cotton (for sewing)
thread
courgette
zucchini
to skive
to loaf
candy floss
cotton candy
full stop (punctuation)
period
inverted commas
quotation marks
berk
idiot, boor
joiner
skilled carpenter
knackered
worn out
number plate
license plate
Old Bill
policeman
scarper
run away
to chivvy
to hurry along
subway
pedestrian underpass
pantechnicon
furniture removal truck
flyover
vehicle overpass
leading article
newspaper editorial
fruit machine
one-armed bandit
smalls
ladies' underwear
coach
long-distance bus
spiv
petty thief
to grizzle
to whine
to hump
to carry a heavy load
12.
ENGLISH AS A
WORLD LANGUAGE
I N HONG KONG YOU CAN FIND A PLACE
called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples, according to the Lon-don
Observer,
there is a sports shop called Snoopy's Dribbling.
(The name becomes fractionally less alarming when you know that
dribbling
is the European term for moving a soccer ball down the field), while in Brussels there is a men's clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city it had a sign saying: SWEAT-690 FRANCS. (Closer inspection revealed this to be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk or Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), eat some chocolate called Hand-Maid Queer- Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam Munsingwear.
In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, a largely Muslim city seemingly as re-mote from English-speaking culture as any place in Europe, you can find graffiti saying HEAVY METAL IS LAW! and HOOLIGAN KINGS
OF THE NORTH! In the Europa Hotel in the same city, you will find this message on every door: "Guests should announce the aban-donment of theirs rooms before 1z o'clock, emptying the room at the latest until 1 4 o'clock, for the use of the room before 5 at the arrival or after the 16 o'clock at the departure, will be billed as one night more." Is that clear? In Yugoslavia they speak five languages.
In not one of them does the word
stop
exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.
I bring this up here to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when,
as
often happens, the messages don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser which says: "Mr. Friendly Quality
THE MOTHER TONGuE
Eraser. Mr. Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation." On the bottom of the eraser is a further message: "We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth." It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the siogan
FEEL COKE & SOUND SPECIAL.
A correspondent of
The Economist
spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said:
O.D. ON BOURGEOISIE MILK
BOY
MILK. A shopping bag carried a picture of dancing elephants above the legend:
ELEPHANT FAMILY ARE HAPPY WITH US. THEIR
HUMMING MAKES US FEEL HAPPY.
Some of these items betray a distinct, and yet somehow comforting, lack of geographical preci-sion. A shopping bag showing yachts on a blue sea had the message
SWITZERLAND: SEASIDE CITY.
A range of products manufactured by a company called Cream Soda all used to bear the splendidly vacuous message "Too fast to live, too young to happy." Then some spoilsport informed the company of its error and the second half of the message was changed to "too young to die." What is perhaps most worrying is that these meaningless phrases on clothing are invading the English-speaking world. I recently saw in a London store a jacket with bold lettering that said:
RODEO-100% BOYS FOR
ATOMIC ATLAS.
The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?
So how many people in the world speak English? That's hard to say. We're not even sure how many native speakers there are.
Different authorities put the number of people who speak English as a first language at anywhere between 30o million and 40o mil-lion. That may seem sloppily imprecise, but there are some sound reasons for the vagueness. In the first place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking countries in the world and adding up their populations. America alone has forty million peo-ple who don't speak English—about the same as the number of people in England who
do
speak English.
Then there is the even thornier problem of deciding whether a person is speaking English or something that is
like
English but is really a quite separate language. This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the world, such as Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, and Neo-Melanesian (sometimes called Tok Pisin), spoken
ENGLISH AS A
WORLD
LANGUAGE
in Papua New Guinea. According to Dr. Loreto Todd of Leeds University in England, the world has sixty-one such creoles spoken by up to zoo million people—enough to make the number of En-glish speakers soar,
if
you consider them English speakers.
A second and rather harsher problem is deciding whether a person speaks English or simply
thinks
he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the Italian city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most gloriously baroque and impenetrable En-glish prose, lavishly garnished with misspellings, unexpected hy-phenations, and twisted grammar. A brief extract: "The integrity and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due to the factors constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the country, the difficulty od
[sici
com-munications, the very concentric pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the force of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even." It goes on like that for a dozen pages. There is scarcely a sentence that makes even momentary sense. I daresay that if all the people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up their hands, this author's arms would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he can fairly be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot.
So there are obvious problems in trying to put a figure to the number of English speakers in the world. Most estimates put the number of native speakers at about 3,3o million, as compared with 26o million for Spanish, 150 million for Portuguese, and a little over loo million for French. Of course, sheer numbers mean little.
Mandarin Chinese, or Guoyo, spoken by some 750 million people, has twice as many speakers as any other language in the world, but see how far that will get you in Rome or Rochester. No other language than English is spoken as an official language in more countries—forty-four, as against twenty-seven for French and twenty for Spanish—and none is spoken over a wider area of the globe. English is used as an official language in countries with a population of about i.6 billion, roughly a third of the world total.
Of course, nothing like that number of people speak it—in India, for instance, it is spoken by no more than 40 or 5o million people
THE MOTHER TONGUE
out of a total population of loo million—but it is still used compe-tently as a second language by perhaps as many as 40o million people globally.
Without any doubt, English is the most important language in the world, and it is not hard to find impressive statistics to prove it.
"Two thirds of all scientific papers are published in English," says
The Economist.
"Nearly half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in English," says
The Story of English.
"More than seventy percent of the world's mail is written and addressed in English," says Lincoln Barnett in
The Treasure of Our Tongue."
It is easy to let such impressive figures run away with us.
The Story
of English
notes that the main television networks of the United States, Britain, and Canada enjoy audiences that "regularly exceed one hundred million." Since the population of the United Kingdom is 56 million and that of Canada only a little over 25 million, that claim would seem to be exaggerated. So too almost certainly is the same book's claim that "in total there are probably more than a billion speakers of English, at least a quarter of the world's popu-lation."