THE PRODIGAL TONGUE
The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English
By Lynne Murphy
For reasons known mostly to themselves, my parents brought me up to pronounce “tomato” with a soft “a,” “to-MAH-to,” as if I were Katharine Hepburn, which of course I was not. Eventually, I realized how that sounded in most of the 50 states and called the whole thing off — until I moved to London and walked straight into a conundrum.
It was this: If I used the British “tomahto,” the very word from which I had boldly declared independence, was I cravenly pandering to foreign usage in contravention of my own beliefs? But would “to-MAY-to” sound willfully, brazenly perverse, an aggressive effort to make some sort of tiresome American point to people in restaurants and grocery stores? Such linguistic identity crises are common, Lynne Murphy writes in her delightful new book, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.” It is to all of our benefit that Murphy, an American who is married to a Briton and who teaches linguistics at the University of Sussex, understands the subject as both an academic and an expatriate.
For English speakers in an alien English-speaking country, she writes: “A complex calculation has to be made weighing up the relative advantages of being understood, fitting in, and avoiding mockery versus the definite costs of losing one’s linguistic identity and saying things that sound plainly ridiculous to you.”
“The Prodigal Tongue” addresses not just etymology and usage — who says what and why — but also how history, geography, sociology and psychology have conspired to create, essentially, two different approaches to pronunciation, grammar, diction and spelling. Suspicion lurks in both corners. Americans, it turns out, are afflicted by a “verbal inferiority complex,” meaning that we sometimes think Britons sound smarter than they are, while Britons suffer from “Amerilexophobia,” a snooty dislike of creeping Americanisms. (Britain, she says, is “the worldwide hub of anti-Americanism-ism.”)
Many of us already know and admire Murphy from her sprightly Twitter feed and her excellent blog, “Separated by a Common Language,” both of which reflect her exquisite ear, catholic interests and sly sense of humor. “The Prodigal Tongue” reminds us of the academic underpinnings of her work, the extensive reading she has done and her own highly entertaining preoccupations. Fascinated by the different way Britons and Americans use “please,” for instance, she has co-authored a paper on the subject for the Journal of Politeness Research, a publication to which we should all immediately subscribe.
Murphy’s great love for language radiates from these pages. Adjectives have a “mad beauty,” she writes, and “happen to be my favorite part of speech.” The ways we discuss punctuation, she explains, “offer a neat little laboratory for viewing the possible fates of migrating words.”
Her examples are often funny and always apt. At one point, she discusses American and British approaches to the pesky issue of pronouncing words derived from French. Britons, it emerges, love to abuse Americans for using “entree” to mean main course. Googling “American entree stupid,” to make this point, she gets seven million hits. (It “makes my skin crawl,” one respondent says.)
Are we doomed to be divided by our common language, to insist that our way is right and theirs is wrong, to bristle with indignation because “quite” means something quite different in America than it does in England? No, says Murphy, whose book serves as an open-minded argument for tolerance and understanding.
The linguist Marianne Hundt once described British and American English as partners in a dance. To Murphy, it’s even more than that. “British and American English aren’t dancers,” she explains, “they’re troupes of dancers. Not all of them are wearing their assigned costumes, their choreographer has called in sick and they don’t all share the same sense of rhythm. One of the dancers has a crush on a dancer in the other troupe, and dancers from both troupes have started mimicking each other. Oh my God, some of them have started twerking!”