English Now
English is thriving. It is spoken by hundreds of millions of people as their first language. Yet even this imposing number pales in comparison to the growing global total of those who employ English as a lingua franca in trade, travel and tourism. The language is growing in another sense too, as new words and expressions are added daily.
Three or four new words and phrases make their debut in English every day. This phenomenon will only be intensified by modern modes of communication like blogging, texting and tweeting, all of which have greatly accelerated and broadened the spread of information. It is impossible to keep up with this profusion of new words. Indeed, some terms are so specialized that they will never appear in regular dictionaries. Every branch of science and technology, every area of human activity involving processes that are unfamiliar to most people (from aromatherapy to UFOlogy), generates its own language and develops its own variations on existing terms. One chemical dictionary, for example, contains the names of almost half a million compounds.
Non-specialist terms may never make the dictionary for a quite different reason: they are too ephemeral, the linguistic equivalent of those insects that live for a few days. By contrast, a few terms – a very few – might stick around for a century or two. It may be almost impossible to work out why certain words are successful and others are not. It is less difficult to work out their origins, although not always straightforward. And it is relatively easy to answer the question: what makes a word dictionary-worthy?
Dedicated Followers of Fashion
For a new word, getting into a mainstream dictionary is a badge of respectability, like being given the keys to the house. This is because dictionaries tend to be regarded as the repositories of everything that is official and approved about language. As far as definitions are concerned, dictionaries ought to have the last word, if only because there is no one and nothing else to turn to. But no dictionary – or rather no dictionary editor – passes judgement on a new word, in the sense of giving it some sort of moral green light. What he or she has to decide is whether a word justifies inclusion because it is widely used and/or has staying power. Once the decision has been made, the job is not finished because the word has to be defined and its history accounted for.
As examples of the problems of origin and definition which make the lexicographer’s job so tricky, take the British term chav and the worldwide phrase credit crunch. These expressions from the early 21st century have staying power and already figure in dictionaries. The sources of chav, a highly derogatory term for an uncouth person, are disputed. It may be a dialect term akin to the Liverpudlian/Mancunian usage ‘scally’, or it may be related to a Romany (gypsy) expression. Its use is contentious, the snobbish equivalent of the US ‘white trash’ according to one commentator. Whatever its origins or its acceptability, chav is a word with a life of its own, as can be seen in tabloid headlines (From chip-shop chav to catwalk queen) or upmarket spin-offs like uber-chav, a bizarre combination of a German prefix and English slang.
Credit crunch may appear relatively straightforward by contrast. It fits at least one rule for the formation of new expressions, that of memorability (because of its alliteration, like baby boomer or free fall). Yet is it really all new? The colloquial use of crunch to signify a ‘crisis’, as in when it comes to the crunch or crunch time, long pre-dates the late 20th century. It is attributed to Winston Churchill in a newspaper article written shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and may come from a decade earlier. One of the dictionary editor’s main tasks is to pin down the first recorded use as precisely as possible.
Even when a word seems to qualify for dictionary inclusion, editors may differ. For instance, the American term yadda yadda yadda, equating roughly to yackety-yak or blah blah blah, was considered to have enough durability by one lexicographer to make it into his edition of a mid-1990s US dictionary but was rejected by another on the grounds that it was disappearing from use. Incidentally, the roots of yadda yadda yadda are also in dispute, with some attributing it to a 1960s routine by the comedian Lenny Bruce and others placing it much earlier, in the 1930s.
In these circumstances, being enshrined in the cold white pages of a dictionary looks both like an accolade and the final stages of a process. Yet the fortunes of a word may change even after it has received the dictionary’s blessing. More than a few entries will turn curious or dated or even laughable as the years pass. Funky, groovy, far out and with it all appear in contemporary dictionaries but it is hard to imagine anyone using them now without a touch of irony.
Other expressions are here to stay. As an example of a newish piece of phrase-making, take quantum leap. Deriving from the highly specialized realm of quantum mechanics, it did not surface in everyday English until the later part of the 20th century when it tended at first to be used in business-speak rather than routine conversation. Like seismic shift and the more recent step-change (deriving from electronics), quantum leap suggests an abrupt departure from a previously established pattern, a change that is revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
It is not easy to say why such scientific terms establish themselves in everyday English and so become eligible for inclusion in standard dictionaries. Presumably, part of the answer is that people use them because they like the sound of them. To refer to a change as seismic or quantum has a more dramatic or authoritative ring than talking about a ‘great’ change, or a ‘revolutionary’ one. Scientific accuracy certainly isn’t involved, since a quantum leap may actually be very small. However, the job of a dictionary is not to judge the appropriateness of particular terms nor to answer the (probably unanswerable) question of why some words and expressions carve themselves a niche in English. It is to record the meaning, and secondarily to provide other pieces of information like the etymology and pronunciation of the word.
Finally, it should be remembered that, when it comes to new words, dictionaries are followers of fashion and not makers of usage. Even though the latest editions will highlight their ‘new’ words and phrases to show how up-to-date they are, mainstream dictionaries are conservative by nature. Even so, they may not please all linguistic conservatives. For instance, some people object to the use of disinterested to mean ‘bored by’ and want it to keep its older sense of ‘impartial’. But many more people are happy to use disinterested in the ‘bored by’ sense, and so that now appears in dictionaries too. The word minuscule is now more frequently found incorrectly spelled as ‘miniscule’ than in its right form, probably because of the ‘mini-’ association. If this variant spelling persists and becomes the established preference of the great majority, then that too will eventually end up in the dictionary as a variant spelling.
Where Do New Words Come From?
There are several ways in which words may be created but they are not likely to be made up from scratch. A ‘new’ word will only be part-new. Some component of it will be recognizable to its users. If it were not, then it would not be understood.
The simplest way to create a new term is by affixation, in which a modification is added to the beginning or end of a word. Prefixes such as un-, dis-, re- and bi-, and suffixes like -ful, -less, -headed and -like have been part of English for centuries. The process continues. The prefix super- can be attached to almost anything that needs a boost, from supermarket to super-fast to superspy. The suffix -lite started out as an advertisers’ version of ‘light’ to refer to calories or alcohol content. Now it is used about anything that is either easy to absorb or is a (probably unsatisfactory) imitation of an original. A free newspaper is called London Lite. The attachment of Lite to a politician’s name is a shorthand way not of disparaging him but a rival or successor (Blair Lite, Bush Lite). Even more popular, the suffix -gate, from the 1970s Watergate scandal, has shown extraordinary staying power.
Slightly more complex is the creation of a compound term in which each part is capable of standing alone (unlike re- or -less) but whose combination produces something new. These compounds number in the tens of thousands and usually operate as nouns or adjectives: barcode, draft-dodger, blue-sky thinking, punch line, policy wonk, fixed-penalty, free-range, user-friendly, hit-and-miss. Verb examples include: air-freight, jump start, panic buy, second-guess, skydive. English is particularly suited to this compound formation, and it is one of the principal ways in which the language grows.
Portmanteau terms are created when two existing words are not so much decorously joined together, as in the examples above, but forcibly pushed into partnership. In the process, some part of each term will be lost: brunch (breakfast + lunch), gazunder (gazump + under), infomercial (information + commercial), motel (motor + hotel), Spanglish (Spanish + English), staycation (staying put + vacation).
‘New’ words may also be formed by simply chopping bits off old ones and turning them into new parts of speech. By a process known as back-formation, nouns and occasionally adjectives are the usual sources for a fresh verb: burgle is a back-formation from burglar, enthuse from enthusiasm, escalate from escalator, laze from lazy. Sometimes a word that was one part of speech will be used as another without any change at all: so nouns such as handbag, impact, message, progress and task have all been given the job of verbs. Even the noun verb has been used as a verb (‘I see you’re verbing again’) to describe the process.
Words join the ranks of English by other routes, however. In particular there are three areas where it could be claimed that a word is genuinely new rather than being cobbled together out of pre-existing components. These are borrowings from other languages, abbreviations and acronyms, and the use of eponyms.
Foreign Words and Borrowings
English has always been enriched by ‘foreign’ words and phrases. The language was created and enlarged by outsiders, from the Romans to the Angles and the Saxons to the Normans. When the invasions ceased, and Britain began to be first a trading and then an imperial power, it imported thousands of terms from around the globe whether they were originally French or Hindi, Spanish or American Indian. These are now so thoroughly embedded in English that it would take a specialist to say where they came from. How many people are aware that bungalow comes from Hindi while patio is Spanish and veranda ultimately from Portuguese? But there are other words and phrases that still wear their foreignness like a badge, not yet at home but growing in popularity.
The German term Schadenfreude (‘pleasure in the misfortunes of others’) is a good example of a word that expresses a concept for which there is no direct equivalent in English. On the other hand, tsunami is needlessly supplanting ‘tidal wave’. At the slangy end of the scale, there is the Italian-by-origin and genuinely useful bimbo. Once such a term feels at home, it spawns spin-offs like bimbette and himbo, a process that is a sure sign of the vitality of the original expression and a demonstration of our real need for it.
English even imports prefixes and suffixes from outside. For example, the German -fest (= gathering, celebration) can be tacked onto a variety of terms: filmfest, talkfest, campfest. Also popular are the Spanish-sounding -ista (fashionista, recessionista), and -thon, deriving from the Greek marathon but in itself meaningless (talkathon, readathon). More rarefied are three little German nouns/adjectives that function as prefixes and denote respectively something authentic, fake or very old: echt, ersatz and ur. If an actor is said to have echt (genuine) star quality, she is on her way to success and is unlikely to be content with ersatz (substitute) designer products. She may even be an ur-feminist (ur = original, archetypal).
There is also a humorous application of terms from other languages. The French moi? is used in this way. There is a range of no- or nothing-words from other languages which may be spoken either humorously or for emphasis: nix from the German nicht, nada from Spanish, nyet from Russian, as well as the slangy zip and zilch, whose origins are unknown. The odd colloquial expression may be employed in imitation of another language: cheapo, no problemo (even though the Spanish for ‘problem’ is actually problema).
Different languages are deployed in different fields, and the words used in English may reflect popular conceptions about the culture from which they spring. French was historically the language of diplomacy, of détente and démarche, but it is just as traditionally the language of sex and romance as in billet doux or cinq à sept, the time between afternoon and evening for lovers’ rendezvous. Latin, functional and precise, provides us with many of the abbreviations we still use (e.g., i.e., etc.). From Spanish comes a handful of self-assertively ‘masculine’ terms like macho and cojones (= testicles = balls = courage). German gives us complicated concepts like Weltschmerz (‘sadness at the state of the world’) while Italy offers up dolce far niente (literally ‘sweet doing nothing’ and so the ‘pleasure of idleness’).
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Abbreviations exist partly to speed up writing and occasionally speech. They are multiplying so fast that a recent dictionary of all forms of abbreviation contains over half a million entries. The great majority are for specialist use. Anyone in an organization is likely to be familiar with abbreviations to do with work procedures, job titles, even the parts of a building, that would not be understood by outsiders. This illustrates another key function of specialist abbreviations – to create a sense of ‘insider’ familiarity.
Abbreviations in general use are shortened forms of a word (Dr, Mrs, St, Rd) which are not always meant to be said aloud, while an acronym is a combination of letters each of which stands for something and which are then run together to make a pronounceable word. Again, they can be general: AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome); specialist: CAD (computer-aided design); or somewhere in between: POTUS (President of the United States). Some acronyms are so established as words that most people are unaware that they are abbreviations: radar (radio detection and ranging), scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).
Other sorts of abbreviation take part of a word or words and become so routine that it would be odd to refer to them in full except in the most formal circumstances: fridge, phone, pram, bus. Texting and e-mails are responsible for a plethora of abbreviations designed to be read rather than said aloud, like LOL (laughs out loud), IMHO (in my humble opinion), FAQ (frequently asked questions). Some English abbreviations achieve worldwide currency even among those who have little or no knowledge of the language. AIDS is one example while the BBC is another, and among the British the latter is often shortened further to the ‘Beeb’. The abbreviation E.T. was good enough for a film title and so was the less familiar S.W.A.T., at least in the US (it stands for Special Weapons and Tactics).
Other abbreviations do double or triple duty and only the context will make clear which is meant: ETA is ‘estimated time of arrival’ but also the Basque separatist organization in northern Spain. Upper-case PC stands for Police Constable or Political Correctness while its lower-case form (pc) means personal computer. The terms making up acronyms in particular may be chosen to create a word that fits their function. In Britain, the police information database is known as HOLMES (Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System). The pop artist Andy Warhol (1928–87) was shot and seriously wounded in 1968 by a woman who wrote a manifesto for an organization calling itself SCUM or the Society for Cutting up Men.
Eponymous Words
Eponyms form a category of words that are authentically fresh to the English language from the moment they are coined. This is because they are expressions that derive from people (and occasionally places) and describe a process or an object, a quality or an attitude. Since the expression is wholly dependent on the fame or inventiveness of the person responsible for it, the word would not exist without its originator. Occasionally, such a term may become so familiar that we forget there really was a Braille (Louis Braille, 1809–52) who invented the reading-by-touch method for the blind or a Biro (Lászlo Biró, 1899–1985) who created the ballpoint pen.
Eponyms go beyond physical inventions. The 40th US president Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) had an entire economic system named after him in Reaganomics, as did the genuine economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who gave us Keynesianism. Eponyms can also be drawn from places. Oxbridge, describing the type of education provided by Oxford and Cambridge Universities, is sometimes used as shorthand for ‘privileged’, or ‘élitist’. Ruritanian derives from the imaginary mid-European country created by Anthony Hope (1863–1933) in the novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and means ‘colourful and intriguing’ or simply ‘make-believe’.
Eponyms, whether nouns or adjectives, are often selective. Politicians are pleased to be called Churchillian and may go out of their way to court the comparison, as the term alludes only to Churchill’s inspirational leadership, not to his hobby of brick-laying or his notorious bouts of depression. Eponymous descriptions can also be contradictory or ambiguous. Writers are called Dickensian if they throw a grotesque character or two into the mix, but the expression is just as frequently used to describe a grimy, real-life scene (one of ‘Dickensian squalor’) while, paradoxically, it may also mean ‘sentimental’ or conjure up an image of a cosy, old-fashioned Christmas. Political epithets such as Thatcherite or Blairite or Bushite taken from world statesmen (interesting that these distinctive figures all have that snappy ‘-ite’ suffix) are common, at least while the leader is in power, but only the tone or context will indicate approval and disapproval.
Eponyms therefore qualify as genuine additions to the language. Sometimes they apply to something which is authentically new, like braille or the biro. Most of the time, though, eponymous terms are applied to things already in existence. There would be jealousy within families if Sigmund Freud had never come up with the Oedipus Complex, just as there would be suspense films if Alfred Hitchcock had never been born, but the eponym pins down the subject in ways that expressions like ‘jealousy’ or ‘suspense’ don’t quite manage.
Slang and Jargon
Of all the sources of fresh words into English – whether borrowings from other languages or abbreviations, and so on – the most vigorous and unfailing are slang and jargon. These two related linguistic forms are vital and inescapable parts of language. On the linguistic spectrum, slang lies on the far side of language termed ‘colloquial’ or ‘conversational’. On the same spectrum, colloquial English is itself beyond the band known as ‘formal’. But language is never fixed. Yesterday’s slang may be welcomed with open arms into the standard language of today. Mob was once objected to as a slang or vulgar usage because it was a shortened version of the Latin mobile vulgus (roughly, an ‘excitable crowd’), rather as ad for advertisement would be rejected in today’s formal English use.
Jargon is more upmarket than slang. It describes the language used by a particular group, often one associated with a trade or profession. Jargon is related to slang in that it cannot naturally be used in many situations, unlike standard English, and also in that it will frequently be baffling to outsiders. In general, jargon isn’t as vigorous or attractive as slang and it lacks slang’s potential to cause offence, but these two forms of English have enough similarities to be treated under the same heading here.
The slang that consists of routine and familiar words is widely accessible although its use will be governed by people’s preferences and the context for speaking or writing it. An illustration from British English: nick has a formal dictionary definition as a small notch but is widely understood – and much more widely used – in at least three different slang senses, as a noun (prison) and as a verb with two definitions (to arrest, to steal). But nick in these latter senses would never be written or spoken in a formal situation, for example by a policeman giving evidence in court, and there are quite a few people who would avoid using nick in any slang sense at all. In the same way, the many slang terms for money whether in general or in specific amounts – bread, dosh, dough, moolah, quid, fiver, tenner, buck, greenback – would usually be avoided in formal contexts.
What one might call general or popular slang is in this respect like swear-words (themselves a form of slang, being unofficial, not respectable and so on). Everybody is familiar with the standard swear-words but many people either avoid using them at all or use them in specific company or situations.
The other type of slang is more private, almost privileged, and shades into jargon. It marks out its users as members of a group, whether by age, ethnic grouping, profession, interests and so on. It has a function other than simple communication. Since it can be fully understood only by those who fall into the same group, it marks out the boundaries of that group and effectively deters others from entering. No one over a certain age would be likely to follow a conversation among teenagers with the same degree of understanding, not to say enjoyment, as those taking part in it. Similarly, if an outsider was allowed to wander into a circle of chattering lawyers or soldiers or surfers who were talking about their specialism (law, war, surfing), then that person would probably be at a loss to understand. The gist of the conversation might be clear but the details would remain elusive because of the slang or jargon involved.
Talking Shop and Sounding Cool
Slang and jargon derive from several sources and come in different styles, from technical to casual. The most significant from the linguistic point of view are those that filter into general usage. Four sources can be highlighted.
1 Slang deriving from criminal or quasi-legal activity has always been popular. Films and books glamorize criminal-related slang today just as Elizabethan guides to thieves’ cant did 400 years ago. Crime buffs will know from Raymond Chandler’s private-eye novels that gat is US slang for gun and also that its heyday was the 1940s, since when it has been replaced by terms such as piece or heat. Of all forms of slang, ‘thieves’ jargon’ is arguably the most exciting because it seems to provide a glimpse of a closed and dangerous world. Drug-dealing and drug-taking have also spawned hundreds of expressions, a few of which like pot or crack or shoot up have entered mainstream English.
2 Almost every trade, job, profession or vocation has an armoury of specialist terms employed by those working on the inside but baffling, even incomprehensible, to those who aren’t in the know. For example, in Royal Navy submarine jargon, it might be simple enough for the outsider to deduce that a fish is a torpedo but the same outsider would be thrown by the expression lose the bubble, meaning to lose track either literally or metaphorically (because when the bubble on the inclinometer in a submarine disappears control of the vessel has been lost).
The world of those who work with computers, or more specifically those who make, sell and repair them, is full of jargon. As is that of doctors or politicians. Or, to a lesser extent, teachers and bus drivers. Sometimes the words of a particular specialism will break free and get into general English. You can be totally ignorant of how computers work and still talk about software, surfing and firewalls.
There is also a type of professional jargon which, while not closed to the outsider, remains quite hard to understand. The terms found in sports reporting can be tricky if you don’t know the rules of the game. More markedly, the language deployed in business or financial journalism often comes near to a kind of coded speech which is only to be readily understood by initiates. Such language, formal and enclosed, may seem a very long way from slang but – like slang conversation – it employs shorthand expressions (dead-cat bounce, leveraging, white knight) and abbreviations (FSA, RPI, NASDAQ) which are familiar to insiders but would need a few sentences of explanation to the financial innocent.
3 Rhyming slang is most commonly associated with Cockneys and London’s East End. It is formed by taking a phrase which rhymes with the word that is being given the slang treatment, and then using that phrase instead. Almost everyone recognizes that trouble and strife means wife, that apples and pears are stairs and whistle and flute a suit or that to have a butcher’s is to have a look (butcher’s hook = look) while porkies (pork pies) are lies. This is colourful, tourist-friendly slang. One of the distinctive features of rhyming slang is the use of proper names so that Adam and Eve equals believe while a Mars Bar is a scar.
There’s a cheekiness and irreverence about the use of some names which fits the traditional Cockney image and which is part of the point of the expression. Doris Day stands for ‘gay’ while British DJ Pete Tong figures in It’s all gone Pete Tong meaning It’s all gone a bit wrong. The phrase was sufficiently familiar to be used as the title of a 2004 British film about a DJ in Ibiza. Celebrity couple David and Victoria Beckham reputedly do double duty in rhyming slang with Posh and Becks standing for sex while the reverse Becks and Posh equals nosh (itself a slang term for food, from Yiddish). Colourful as they are, it seems unlikely that all or many of these recent coinages come from the East End, just as it’s unlikely that very many people use them regularly in everyday speech. Even so, they make for linguistic variety.
4 The most influential slang, whether in the United States, Britain or other English-speaking countries, consists in terms either coined or made popular in African-American usage. From bling bling to the blues, from chill to cool to hot, from the nitty gritty to rock’n’roll to tell it like it is, these are words and phrases that have made themselves at home in English, and even infiltrated other languages such as French. They give their users – which is to say, most of us – ‘street cred’, another slang term. Although these expressions may sound contemporary, some go back a long way. Terms such as hip, square and groovy are defined in the Hepster’s Dictionary of 1938 while a piece with the title ‘Memphis Blues’ was written in 1910. The origins of other terms are disputed or lost in time. This is not surprising, given the obscured and neglected history of the black forced settlement in America.
Popular or ‘hip’ as black slang is, it is not standard English, and so is much more likely to be used in speech rather than written down, at least in a formal context. It preserves a touch of its ‘outsider’ status, one reason why it is popular with young white speakers. These are wannabes, a term that as recently as the 1980s applied to black people who wanted to be white, but now operates in reverse in addition to describing those who want to be just about anything or anybody glamorous.
Advertisers and others were quick enough to catch on, when it became safe to do so. Whassup? from black English was an inescapable catchphrase for promoting a beer brand in the early 2000s. Irregular ‘hip-hop’ spellings have become almost standard if a youthful audience is targeted, as in films like Antz or Boyz N the Hood or any X-treme sport on television. Slang goes mainstream.
The Allure of America
The engine of global English is the United States. The fact that the language is still widely used in countries such as India and Malaysia is a legacy of Britain’s colonial past. But the reason that citizens of other, expanding nations such as China and Brazil wish to learn English is a testament to the power of the United States, whether industrial, commercial or cultural. Relations between British English and the American variety have often been strained and sometimes close to abusive, at least on the British side. Now a kind of truce exists.
The linguistic influence is largely one-way. The days when American writers and politicians would look uneasily towards the mother country for linguistic approval died out around the time of Independence. The dominance of America in world culture today means that its form of English is likely to be the one that prevails. There is little that is conscious or deliberate about this, whether on the part of the linguistic exporters (the US) or from the importers’ side. It is a process that is gradual, small-scale, undramatic. When someone says they are meeting a friend at the train station (rather than the railway station) they are using an American formula, just as when they say ‘We’re running out of gas’. President Truman famously had a sign on his desk in the 1940s announcing ‘The buck stops here’, referring to the ‘buck’ used to mark the dealer in a card-game and indicating that responsibility for everything ultimately lay with the occupant of the White House. Yet the phrase has been used for years in British English.
There used to be hostility towards the Americanization of British English. Indeed, in the 19th century and earlier there was a distinct disdain in Britain for all things American. In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Charles Dickens drew on his own experience of visiting the country to produce a satirical portrait of a rowdy, bombastic culture in which lofty rhetoric was often at odds with reality. He has one of his characters remark: ‘They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they can’t help taking liberties with her.’ Describing the violence that follows an election Dickens comments: ‘[T]he friends of the disappointed candidate had found it necessary to assert the great principles of the Purity of Election and Freedom of Opinion by breaking a few legs and arms, and furthermore pursuing one obnoxious gentleman through the streets with the design of slitting his nose.’
But at the same time Dickens noted the almost boundless self-confidence of the country (‘What are the Great United States for, sir,’ pursued the General, ‘if not for the regeneration of man?’). Nevertheless, Martin Chuzzlewit does not have a very happy time in the United States and almost dies of fever in a god-forsaken spot that goes by the ironic name of Eden. The novel caused considerable offence on its publication in America.
The same mixture of snobbery, condemnation and envy continued through the 19th century and even into the late 20th century. In Mother Tongue (1990), Bill Bryson quotes a member of the House of Lords saying in a 1978 debate: ‘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.’
This hidebound attitude hasn’t entirely disappeared but it is far less prevalent than it used to be. The truth is that the vigour, inventiveness and reach of American English have been enormously enriching factors in the health of the language on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world. There is an old story that German was proposed as the official language of the United States at the time of its Independence. The story is apocryphal and, in any case, America has no official language laid down by law. But had the German legend been true or had the dominant earlier settlers of the country not been of English-speaking stock – in others words if, through some historical circumstance, North Americans were today speaking some other language – then this story of English would be a very different one in its later chapters.
Of all the western European countries that held extensive imperial possessions in their heyday – Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, even Germany – there is only one that has gone on to find its language willingly employed right around the globe long after their respective empires crumbled or were dismantled. That this should be so is not on account of the intrinsic convenience or ease of speaking English and only partly because of the very wide extent of the British Empire but largely because of the pre-eminence of the US.
‘Two Nations Divided by a Common Language’
Is it possible to discuss the difference between British and American English without introducing the famous remark about ‘two nations divided by a common language’? Obviously not. The paradoxical comment has been attributed to a range of wits but it embodies a truth. Although speaking the same language, a British visitor to the United States could be struck by hundreds of linguistic differences. The same goes for an American visitor to Britain.
These differences of diction, spelling and punctuation are, individually, small. To take a random sample: in Britain, you write (a letter) to your sister, in America you write your sister. On New York’s Broadway you would go to the theater, possibly making your journey by subway and completing it with a short stroll on the sidewalk, while on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue it’s the theatre you would be visiting after a tube trip and a walk on the pavement. In US written English it is correct practice to follow a colon with a capital letter, in British English with a lower-case one, as in the second sentence of this paragraph.
In the US, the ‘s’ in verbs like civilise is replaced by ‘z’ – pronounced ‘zed’ by the British and ‘zee’ by Americans (the ‘z’ form of verbs is also used by some British publishers, such as Oxford University Press and the publisher of this book). Standard American pronunciation of fertile rhymes with turtle, while for the British the stress falls on the last syllable, to rhyme with isle. In Britain faggot was once a bundle of sticks and is still a type of meatball while in the US it’s a piece of abusive and homophobic slang. A hooker for a British sports fan is a player in rugby football (someone whose job it is to ‘hook’ the ball) while for an American the word indicates a prostitute (deriving either from the name of a Civil War general or, more probably, from a district of Manhattan). And so on . . .
Yes, these differences are slight, sometimes detectable only by the geeks (US slang) and anoraks (British slang) of language, but collectively they suggest the considerable gap that exists in the two countries either side of the ‘pond’. And, incidentally the ‘pond’ description of the Atlantic, sometimes the ‘big pond’ or the ‘herring pond’, is a definitively American term.
Some differences between British and American English
Spelling
Suffixes: the tendency is for simplification, with the US form of word-endings sometimes discarding redundant letters and in general having a spelling which is closer to the way the word is sounded.
Examples, with the British usage first, include:
-ce/-se: defence/defense; *licence/license; offence/offense; *practice/practise
(*British noun spelling, verb is spelled with an ‘s’; US spelling is ‘s’ for both noun and verb)
-ise/-ize: civilise/civilize; colonise/colonize; harmonise/harmonize; organise/organize; realise/realize; recognise/recognize
-our/-or: behaviour/behavior; colour/color; harbour/harbor; honour/honor; humour/humor; labour/labor; neighbour/neighbor; odour/odor
-re/-er: accoutrements/accouterments; calibre/caliber; centre/center; fibre/fiber; litre/liter; sabre/saber; spectre/specter; sombre/somber
Simplification of diphthongs (ae, oe) by removal of first letter
anaemic/anemic; anaesthetic/anesthetic; encyclopaedia/encyclopedia; foetus/fetus; leukaemia/leukemia; mediaeval/medieval; oesophagus/esophagus; paediatrics/pediatrics
Double or single ‘l’
British English frequently doubles an ‘l’ where US English sticks to the single consonant:
counsellor/counselor; dialling/dialing; initialling/initialing; marvellous/marvelous; modelling/modeling; signalled/signaled; travelled/traveled
But the reverse also applies, with US English doubling the ‘l’:
distil/distill; enrol/enroll; skilful/skillful; wilful/willful
Omission of hyphens
American English tends to use fewer hyphens in compound words, particularly when those words are of US coinage:
anti-tax/antitax; long-time/longtime; non-violent/nonviolent; one-time/onetime; pre-teen/preteen
General spelling variants
aluminium/aluminum; axe/ax; cheque/check; grey/gray; sceptic/skeptic; storey/story (in building); vice/vise (workshop tool)
Word and phrase differences
A very small selection of the well-known and the more curious includes:
autumn/fall; braces/suspenders; car park/parking lot; condom/rubber; curtains/drapes; estate agent/realtor; tap/faucet; ground floor/first floor; full stop/period; mobile/cell (phone); nappy/diaper; prostitute/hooker; public school/private school; trousers/pants
KEYWORD
Watergate
Watergate is a Middle English word describing a gate opening onto water or a place through which water traffic passes, but it is much more familiar as a shorthand term for the US political scandal which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. An attempted burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the riverside Watergate building in Washington DC was linked to the 1972 campaign to re-elect Nixon, although it was the subsequent cover-up rather than the break-in itself that caused his downfall. The Watergate effect was so dramatic and far-reaching that the suffix -gate has been added ever since to any scandal, particularly if it threatens the reputation of a public figure, and use of the term has even spread to non-English-speaking countries like Germany and Greece. The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (2004) lists over a hundred ‘-gate’ expressions. Most are quickly forgotten and some are absurd. The Hoagie-gate ‘scandal’ in Philadelphia, for example, resulted from fans’ displeasure at not being able to bring food into a sports stadium (hoagie = filled baguette).