fLEXICOLOGY

f LEXICOLOGY

or, How to Speak English in England:

An irreverent introductory lesson.

A Norwegian friend visits.  Flights from Bergen to Cambridge are relatively short and inexpensive.  We’re having beers at a pub overlooking the River Cam.  Out there, on the river, the punts are hopelessly self-guided.  They are more like floating cigar-shaped billiard balls, crashing into one another, than the genteel watercraft of a bye-gone age.  It is easy to suspect that most of the punters have been drinking.  Indeed, many raise a bottle in greeting as they pass beneath our windowed roost.  Most of them are tourists.  Nearly all attempt to ward-off inevitable collisions with the waving of hands and a Babel of words, spoken in nearly every imaginable tongue, roughly meaning watch out and turn now, you senseless idiot.  Contemplating these failures of navigation and communication can generate conversation that runs as deep as the River Cam.  This afternoon, however, it is just good fun.

Back inside, my Norwegian friend is holding forth.  Her English is perfectly accented.  She loves to talk.  And, she relishes engaging people.  One of our party, an American, compares her to the turret of a Bradley tank.  She’s become the center of our attentions, and, fires-off with striking accuracy at each individual’s interests.  We are an international party: Norwegians and Americans; English and Scots; a Dane; a Canadian; and an Australian.  English is our common language.  And, what strikes me about her English is that it is accented differently and perfectly for each person to whom she speaks.  When speaking to the Englishmen, she speaks flawless British English with a beautifully cultured accent.  A Norwegian who masters English can be expected to speak English with a British accent, as the availability of British TV and radio is prevalent across Europe.  Even so, she directs spot-on Midwestern American English to the Americans.  And, when she speaks to the Dane, who learned his English in Ireland, it is his Danish-accented Irish English that she is using.  I can barely understand a word of its tick-broke; the thick brogue of his airs (i.e., his Rs) roiling like water over a rapid.  And, her English, the Scots remark, is perfectly Glaswegian.  One of them is so astonished that he address her as “lass”, before telling her that her sweet tongue is as “surprising as, though much more delightful than a Glasgow kiss”.  This is the Scot who plays rugby with the take-no-prisoners spirit of a Klingon.  Who knew that he had rough poetry within him?  Another of the Scots — the one who has been rendering the Dane’s English into British English for me — explains that a Glasgow kiss is a headbutt.  Our Norwegian friend, meanwhile, has gone on to demonstrate her command of the Canadian and Aussie accents in their colloquial English.

We are so amazed that the conversation lingers not simply on her — turning from her tales of new motherhood — but on her speaking abilities.  “You Americans,” she says to the fellow across the table from her, “you can finish reciting a paragraph in the time it takes a Briton to recite a sentence.”  I suspect that she is exaggerating a tad, but there’s a kernel of truth to it.  “You speak English like the French speak French.  Fast.”  Consider that Americans “while” away their time, whilst amongst Britons the world moves at a different pace.  Even in our indecision, Americans “um” and Britons “erm” — though both words are pronounced in exactly the same way, the British require an extra letter.  And, it is true that American English sometimes swallows whole syllables with the intake of the breath needed to speak; and, that it prefers contractions, like I’m or there’s, as if words need to quicken their pace for time is fleeting, or, as if for every moment describing the action an action was wasted.  Odd then that Americans love to tell stories.

Here, my thoughts were diverted.  One of my grade-school grammar teachers preferred the word allision to contraction.  Contractions are what women have before childbirth, my mother would explain, attempting to clarify my teacher’s choice of word.  As my teacher was a woman — indeed, as all of my grammar teachers had been women, my mother’s clarification only lead me to wonder what grammar and childbirth had in common.  The puzzle of contractions in the English language remained an enigma for some time thereafter.  “An allision is a collision between a moving vessel and a stationary object.”  Thomas J. Shoenbaum wrote in his Admiralty and maritime law (4th edition — St.  Paul, MN : West Publishing Co., 2004).  That’s American English.  Like the actions of punters lacking common skills, language, sometimes even common sense, it is the product of so many immigrants — and, apparently, child bearing women — screaming to be heard.

British English has the patience to be heard as to be understood amidst the cacophony of languages that is neighbouring Europe.  The Norwegian turns to the most proper of the Englishmen in our company.  “British English,” she says, polishing every consonant, then pausing for emphasis, . . . “British English pronounces ever syllable, distinctly and clearly.”  It’s a right fine posh accent she’s usin’, indeed.  And, there’s the rub.  I’ve heard more English accents alone among the native English than I’ve heard across the whole of North America.  She is, it seems to me, nonetheless right to say that there is a cadence in the oratory of an Englishman’s English that is wholly different from, or, at least slower than the cadence of American and Canadian English.

Certainly, it might be said, some British English sounds, like that of the letter /a/, are drawn out as no one would draw them in the Americas.  . . . Except, perhaps, in the heart of Boston, or, as a Southern Belle — who must wait for her hoop skirt to catch up — must speak them.  My high-school music teacher, a mannerly woman from Dothan, Alabama, was a human metronome.  She would count out the beat of the music: “Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.”  [The face of George Washington is on the Quwah-tah, the USA's twenty-five cent coin.]  For a northerner, Dothan was as back-woods as you could ever hope to be.  Yet, my music teacher’s Quwah-tah is a direct relation to the upper-crust English mother, calling out to her children playing rough-and-tumble beneath the summer sun: “Children, wah-tah?  Wah-tah anyone?”

These two words, quarter and water, are wonderful examples of the syllabic rhythms of the British, or shall I say the English accent.  They make subtly apparent what may be the most profound difference between North American English and English English.  It’s all about Location, Location, Location as any (real) estate agent will tell you.  It’s about where one places stress within a word.  Stressing a letter, as my captivating Norwegian friend claims, can change more than the music of a language.  If we were speaking Turkish, stressing or elongating the /a/ sound would change the word sat (/sawt/) into saat (/saw-aht/), and, the meaning from sell to hour.  . . . Elongation would put time on our hands.  But, English is not Turkish.  Meaning does not change, not necessarily.  Active listening is required, nonetheless, to ensure understanding.  — You can axe me, anything! Here’s a simple example from increasingly-used American English that the casual British listener might presume to be evidence of a truly violent US culture.  Of course, you may ask me anything.

While Britons quwah-tah their wah-tah, North Americans usually quart-er their watt-er.  There’s something oddly appropriate about quarts to water.  It’s almost electric!  So, how much does the placement of stress suggest the character of a people?  Consider the following examples, current in British English.  They stress the letters “er” in such a way as to give them a long /a/ sound.

At the 2011 Brit Awards, a London rapper by the name of Tinie Tempah — as in, that’s one small temper and one large talent for mankind — was nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  The name telegraphs the up-bound beat of Tempah’s rap on subjects as rosy as a love of tea.  Who’s a tempest in a little tea-pot, eh?  In this United Kingdom, there is none of the big bad-tempered rap of those United States as anyone having voted for Plan B will attest.  Plan B, of course, was another British rapper also nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  At the age of 27 — as of anyone over the age of twenty-five, he’s considered a geezer.  That’s a rap gee-zah, as in, The pyramids at Giza were built by some old Egyptian.  I suppose that we might think of Plan B as a gee-zah rap-pah, but that could easily be taken to refer to the day old news-pay-pah in which a take-away meal of fish-and-chips is sometimes wrapped.  He may be old-ah, but there’s nothing fishy about Plan B.

Myself, I prefer the more dangerous and racy examples that litter the language from A and Z, from adult to zebra.  These examples are more about the placement of stress within a word than upon a particular letter or letter combination.

The common definition of geezer is adult.  For speakers of English-accented English, the word, adult, remains close to its Latin roots.  An adult, is the sum of its Latin parts: ad and ult — as if an addition of ultimates, meaning someone of advanced age.  Now, for added emphasis, speak the word as if it were two words, giving equal emphasis to both: ad [breathe] ult.  With its added emphasis, ult should sound like the German word “alt”, meaning “old”.  An adult is someone not just old but someone very old.  For speakers of American-accented English, the word, adult, offers the possibility of less erudite, but perhaps more nuanced meaning.  An American divides the word not at “ad” but at “a” rendering the spoken word as /a/ + /dult/.  Now, just for fun, swallow the /u/ sound.  Say it with me: a dolt.  I’m not saying that most Americans are dullards compared with the British.  But, that meaning might be taken without careful, contextual listening.

I am reminded, here, of a former employee who told me that I should write such things in the presence of the irony-face emoticon —   ;-)   — to signal my perverse sense of humour.  I love the fact that “dolt” enters modern English as a noun having formed from a past participle.  The word dolt is akin the British English “learnt” or, as it is spelled in American English, “learned”.  ”Dolt”, one presumes of American English, might be spelled, “dolled”, as in, Perchance, when I am old and grey, and batty as a three dollar bill, I may doll myself up and stroll down the street: “Lolly too dum day!”  What’s that?  You’re too young to remember the Burl Ives song of that title, “Lolly too dum day!”  Dolt, originally spelled “dulte”, meant made dull.  One would not doll-up but, rather, dull-down.  I digress.

By the way, or, by way of continued digression, a “nine pound note” is the British idiomatic equivalent of the “three dollar bill” of American idiom.  At today’s exchange rate, £9 is roughly equivalent to $14 US or $14 Canadian, or even $14 Australian.  Quite a bit more than $3, eh.  It’s nice to be valued.  But, almost everything is more expensive in the UK, or, "more dear" as they say here.

At the far end of the English alphabet, zebras may be more colourful than they might at first appear.  I’ll spare you the etymology of zebras.  Let’s get straight to the hunt.  The British have “Zeb Rahs” … as in Zebulon sounds like a lion defending a kill.  How odd, to hear a horse-like creature roar!  The American, meanwhile, has “Ze Bras” … say it as if a fictional Frenchman, say Inspector Clouseau, perusing a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, ou là là.  I imagine a horse photographed wearing a bra for a two-page spread in the Sunday Times’ fashion section.  Until, I remind myself that “bra” is French for “arm”.  So, I redraw the image.  Eh voilà, a Centaur.  That’s much better than playing on the American stereotype, to suggest that a zebra is a horse bearing arms.  An AK-47, perhaps.  Wild zebra use their stripes to conceal themselves, while zebra in zoos have been shaken down for the public’s protection.  As if to confound the matter all the more, I’m unable to remove my mother’s colourful description of her bra as her “gun holsters” from my brain.  So, a zebra is a horse hiding a weapon in its bra!  This much — I apologize, especially to my feminist readers — has been nurture, not nature.  On second thought, perhaps we should stick to the bra alone.  Make love, not war.

Back in the pub, my Norwegian friend announces to no one in particular that she has to “use the head”.  No sooner than she’s spoken these words, she excuses herself for their use.  The phrasing she’s chosen is out of character with stories about motherhood and banter about what it means to find herself an adult buying kiddie lit filled with pictures of talking zebras doing housework.  She has been a salty dog, in recent years, who has spent almost as much time at sea in the company of rough men as she has spent on land.  She corrects herself, asking, “Will you excuse me?  I have to use the loo.” Perhaps because she is speaking to all of us, for the first time we hear her speak English using a Norwegian accent.

Each of us has been in the United Kingdom long enough to know what she means by the word loo  (that's "restroom" in polite American parlance).  Those of us who speak French as well as English even take the word back to its archaic French, lieux d’aisance, literally, places of ease, long since replaced in Paris by the British English invader: WC —Winston Churchill’s quaint water-closet.  But, her accent rounds the word lovingly with her lips.  And, to some of us, it sounds as though she’s incongruously invited them to join the mile-high club of lovers using the lavatories for sex on a long-distance flight, albeit here at sea level.  It is the Scots who are taken aback.  In some parts of Scotland, the word loo survives as a shortened version of the English word “love”.

Give me a moment here.  I need to savour the thoughts swelling with the intonation of loov and, perchance, the war-weary Frenchman who is speaking it.  He had been sent to Scotland, in 1545 during the War of the Rough Wooing, to help the Scots resist the advances of an English king’s drive to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland through arranged marriage.  Pity the poor French lad.  As he spoke the word to a Scottish lass, he couldn’t help but think of his own king, ensconced in the Louvre, then a royal palace, and, of other places far away in his beloved France.

The old Scots loo survives in the new world’s children’s song, “Skip to My Lou”.  It uses slang to tell the tale of a young lad who has lost his partner to another man.  He encourages her to return and to skip to his lou . . . to skip to his love, the beat of his heart, or, else to free him to find himself another love.  Why is it always the men who get hurt?  I should be clear, perhaps, for English readers - skip : that's archaic British English — still used in the States, meaning a sort of hopping walk.  It is not what American's would call a "dumpster", though I am sure that a dumpster of love, a skip for love's refuse has charm all its own.

It is a good thing that my Norwegian friend is not a man.  She might have confounded us with the word “urinal”.  A urinal, for the sake of clarification, is a kind of passive bidet (/bee-day/) that hangs vertically on a loo wall and that serves a slightly dissimilar purpose.  My father, a plumber, thought that I’d gone soft the first time he heard me use the word bidet.  To him, the observation that you’re not likely to find a bee day in the country just didn’t seem to make much sense.  Bees are more likely to have country days than days in the city.  My bidet was his bid-ette.  My English friends, hearing talk of bid-ettes, might conjure the image of a bouncy blonde calling out, Place your bets now.  Place your bets, beside a casino’s craps table.  Oh, my father did love the craps!

That diversion into the world of the bidet was for my amusement.  I’ve used the time to humour myself, hearing each of you say the word “urinal” as though there’s nothing funny about it.  To illustrate the humour, I want to take you to a men’s room in the international airport at Kingston, Jamaica.  Now, there are dee smahl Jam-ay-kahns, and there are dee tahl Jam-ay-kahns.  This loo was made to serve both of them: dee smahl and dee tahl.  The loo had two urinals.  One urinal at its base hung less than 1 metre or about 2.5 feet off the floor, while the next urinal at its base hung more than 1.5 metres or about 5 feet off the floor.  A man of average height would have to make this cruel choice: to pee, he could either kneel or jump.  A spliff might have helped one to see the music in the joint.  But, if you took the grout-lines of the tile on the wall as music’s staff lines, it was easy to see the two urinals as musical notes.  If we’d then asked two men — one American, the other English — to sing the notes, to sound the word “urinal”, we would have heard two very different notes.  The American would have sung to the Englishman: ♫ you’re in all ♫.  And, the Englishman of our little, two-man opera might have taken offence.  So, in response, the Englishman might have criticized the American singing, ♫ your eye in all ♫.

I pause here to get it out of my system.  I am reminded of the schoolboy humour with which an American teases out the pronunciation of “Uranus”, the name of the seventh planet from the Sun.  But, Uranus has other, and, quite different business in the loo.  The American would naturally croon, your-an-us, as offering an Appalachian homage to partnership: you and us.  In this instance, however, the schoolboy prefers the British pronunciation, your-anus.  In the mouth of the schoolboy, it’s as sophomoric as a “Your Mama’s so big” joke.  But, no British astronomer will hesitate to confirm that Uranus is the seventh planet from our sun.

[I pity the poor ESL — English as a Second Language — learners who may have been pointed to this essay as a means of testing their English.  Many are now wondering if they haven’t stumbled into a Tardis of science-fiction rather than an essay on speaking English.  This is not about speaking English as much as it is about having fun with the language.]

I first heard the word, urinal, with its British accent in Birmingham, after landing on a trans-Atlantic flight.  I hadn’t been able to sleep on the red-eye coming over.  I was groggy and had been searching the baggage hall for my luggage.  Not finding my bag, the possibility had just dawned on me that it may have flown to Birmingham, Alabama rather than with me to England.  And, now, the bag-check receipt was confirming it, when a perturbed voice beside me suggested, got to use your eye in all, son? As I looked up, I thought, Well, that’s cheeky of you, now, isn’t it.  Kick a man when he’s down.  The speaker was a man walking away; his young son, dancing a jig beside him as they made their escape.  It was rude, I thought, to criticize and then just turn your back on further discussion.

Since our Norwegian friend went to the loo, our table has fallen silent, like the open-mouthed balloon released by a party several tables over and that now lay scuppered between our glasses.  None of us would ever be the life of any party —   ;-).  Outside, there’s a commotion.  Two lads are running what we’ll later learn to be the “First Annual Cam Underwater Bicycle Race”.  The River Cam, as it turns out, is not that terribly deep.  I’m afraid that one or both of the riders may be speared by the punters’ poles.  I need to contain the thought for fear that I might leap out of the window to save them proactively from their certain fate, or, to save me from mine: boredom.  But, just then one of the Englishmen continues our language lesson.

He’s been asked about his up-coming travels.  First, he’s off to visit his wife’s family in Poland, before flying off to a lecture at Michigan State University in the USA.  Po-Land, he says, as if he were referring to the Land of the Po.  His pronunciation is actually rather faithful to the Polish, polanie (/po-lan-yah/), the word meaning “field” from which Poland is likely derived.  Incidentally, Po is the Polish word for “about” or “of the”.  So Po-Land might as well be an odd graft of Polish and English, appropriately taken to mean “of the land”.  The North Americans are more used to hearing Pole-Land — a land of pole-makers, no doubt.  Pole is another Polish word meaning “land”, albeit a slightly different, more generalized type of land than is meant by polanie.

It’s the Englishman’s pronunciation of Michigan that pulls the wheels off of the acoustic go-cart.  To North American ears, it is the equivalent of poking a stick into a turning bicycle wheel.  Mitch Egan, I hear the Englishman say.  Where is Mitch Egan State University?  This is the /ch/ of the English “church” rather than the softer /sh/ of the French fur traders who worshiped in the wilds of Michigan and borrowed the name from the native Ojibwe people.  It’s similar to the name of the French tyre (tire) company, Michelin.  Here in England, a country that prefers the French word “flambeau” to the older Middle English “torch”, the proximity of England to France is for naught.  The English, who incidentally have reserved the word “torch” to mean “flashlight”, know the Michelin Man as Mr. Mitch E. Lan.  Given this glottal stop mid-word, Michelin has the sound of a flat tyre, going thumpity thump in British English.

The penchant of British English for men’s names doesn’t end with Mitch Egan and Mitch E. Lan.  Mr. Nick On is a Nikon camera man for example.  At those prices, I once overheard a middle-aged woman in an electronics store remark, I dare say he will nick on, right out of me pocketbook!  Nick, in common British parlance, means to steal, you see.  It’s been my experience that, in the world of cameras, however, you get what you pay for.  A North American photographer might say, It was a nigh con.  I just couldn’t buy that camera.  I’d have to buy a whole new set of lenses as my Canon lenses just will not fit this camera.  Fortunately, “nigh con” is now rather archaic American English, meaning “to be nearly taken in”.  Meanwhile, in its corporate offices in Japan, Nikon — pronounced /knee con/ — actually means a feeling of extreme gratitude, even for the smallest things in life, like Thank God, we didn’t build a car and market it as a Nova in Puerto Rico, where “no va” means “it does not go”.

I’m beginning to wonder if our Norwegian friend will ever return from the loo.  It’s possible that she’s gone outside, to teach the punters a thing or two.  Let a real salty dog tell you, she might say, a thing or two.