CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Not so long ago there was a billboard at the Hogarth roundabout on the way to the airport that had some parents in the area in a swivet. It read “Roger More” and was an advertisement for a brand of condoms. Most Americans probably thought it was a misprint and that someone had inexplicably left out the second o in the last name of the British actor who once played James Bond.

That’s because the term “roger” is nothing but a name in the United States, while in England it’s a slang expression for having sex. Condoms, however, are not also known as rubbers, as they are in America. Rubbers are the things we call erasers.

I actually know a good bit of this. I have long taken a great satisfaction in the fact that I speak English. Real English, not the tongue Americans speak. I have virtually no facility with languages—my schoolgirl French just barely enables me to get laundry sent out or a sweater purchased and paid for in Paris. But as a young reader, little by little I began to assemble a vocabulary that bore no relationship to that used by the average American child. I am proud to say that I scarcely ever used it in conversation, although occasionally I would try to use Englishisms in my writing, and my teachers would underline an exclamation like “Bollocks!” or the description of someone as “daft” and write in the margin, “What are you trying to say here?” (One old nun, I remember, once wrote, “You can read Dickens without trying to be Dickens.” As if being Dickens was even possible!)

It was a useful bit of self-education, because all of my translation had to be done from context. What precisely were elevenses, and how did they differ from tea? How was tea different from high tea, if at all? What were O levels, and how did one attain a first at Oxford or Cambridge? If fags were cigarettes and pissed was drunk, what did vulgar Brits call it when they had to urinate or wanted to mock homosexuals? A nice piece of fish—plaice, usually, which seemed to be flounder—was lovely. A day in the country was brilliant. Bonk meant having sex, too, and knickers were underpants; before I tumbled to this, I was constantly perplexed by the state in which various English heroines found themselves in the bedroom, as though they were ready to play golf before bed.

Americans don’t use Englishisms much, although, from time to time, you do pass an American bar actually named “Ye Olde English Pub.” This extends to other products and services; recently an American catalog company featured a Portobello coat, Carnaby boots, and a Savile tee shirt, the last particularly puzzling given the legendary tailoring of Savile Row suits. What could a Savile tee shirt possibly look like? Lapels? Handsewn seams and darts?

Of course, the problem with appropriating the English language from books rather than overheard life was that much of it was antiquated. Or, perhaps in some cases, invented. When Waugh describes how his madcap partygoers “all got into two taxicabs and drove across Berkeley Square—which looked less than Arlenish in the rain,” is he using a common piece of slang, one that came and went with the Charleston, or one he simply invented? In Georgette Heyer’s popular Regency novels, there is a really lovely piece of slang: People are always warning their friends “not to make a cake out of yourself,” which obviously means not to behave foolishly. But it’s a piece of slang that is apparently as dead and buried as George III; no contemporary English man or woman I’ve asked had ever heard it, except for one pleasant professor who had a passing familiarity with antiquated language. (On the other hand, “he’s a bit wet,” English for “he’s kind of a geek,” is alive and well and as alluring a turn of phrase as I’ve ever encountered in real life.)

During all those years of reading A Christmas Carol, we were never entirely sure what was meant when Fezziwig, in the midst of a dance in which he and his wife were “top couple,’’ was said with great admiration to have “cut.” In fact the word itself is in quotations, as though even in Dickens’s time it was too slangy to stand alone. Since the description continues, “cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs,” the five of us have decided that what Fezziwig does is what we call a split.

But until recently we had no idea why the boy Scrooge asks to buy the prize turkey for the Cratchit family after his spiritual resurrection replies, “Walk-ER!” Even on my English trips, I got no more than a puzzled look. (“That sounds very much like one of those cockney phrases Americans insert in films,” one English editor said dryly.) My son and I were therefore enormously chuffed to discover in the Ackroyd book that the word was a piece of street slang that “lasted three or four months only” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and therefore was probably a remnant of Dickens’s boyhood. “It was used by young women to deter an admirer, by young boys mocking a drunk, or to anyone impeding the way,” Ackroyd writes. Mystery solved. (And another wonderful turn of phrase added: “What a shocking bad hat!” contemporaneous with Walk-ER and aimed at anyone of really singular appearance.)

Not only is this no longer the language of London, but English is in some ways no longer the language of London. One study showed that more than three hundred languages are now spoken in the city’s schools, from Bengali, Punjabi, and Urdu to Cantonese and Jamaican patois. (“Babelians,” Zadie Smith calls them in her novel of the new immigrant London, White Teeth.) And American slang and usage has become such a consistent presence, not only because of visitors but because of exported rap music and sitcoms, that the lines between argots are relatively porous. While once we were warned to ask for the bill, not the check, and to order a sweet, not dessert, almost no wait staff in a London restaurant looks twice if you ask the American way.

This does not work both ways, however; one English visitor told of the general hilarity that ensued when she ordered pasta in a New York restaurant, pasta being pronounced in England in a way that more or less rhymes with “master.” Nevertheless, there are certainly times when the English treat their American cousins like subverbal idiots; perhaps the concierge did not realize he was leaning slightly forward and raising his voice appreciably when he told me about the theater tickets he’d acquired for us: “They are located in the stalls. Stalls. What you call the or-che-stra.” It was all I could do not to reply, “I know what the stalls are. I’ve read Trollope and Ngaio Marsh!”

On the other hand, the poor man had probably had his own language trials, judging by the performance one night in Piccadilly Circus by a group of drunken American men in Union Jack tee shirts who were having what they considered an uproarious conversation that seemed to consist entirely of the expressions “cheerio” and “bloody.” Of course, one of them also felt moved to quote from Wayne’s World about Piccadilly Circus: “What a shitty circus! Where’re all the tigers and clowns?”

The other problem with learning language from books is that literature frequently reflects an exaggerated form of normal dialogue. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, for instance, have a hyperannuated adolescent voice that bears homage to, but doesn’t always mirror exactly, the footloose orphan of the nineteenth century or the disenchanted prep school boy of the twentieth. Surely the Pickwickians speak like a series of playlets—not surprising given Dickens’s affinity for the theater—not like actual human beings.

In fact, while I had managed to wend my way through various novels, had come to understand what it meant when Rumpole’s father-in-law referred to the Old Bailey as “not exactly the SW1 of the legal profession,” I was not really prepared to use these locutions in real life. And I was certain I had no idea how to pronounce many of the words I had learned to recognize with my eyes: How in the world did you actually say Cholmondeley or Gloucestershire? It remains a source of shame to me that through much of my girlhood I pronounced the name of the river that runs famously through London with the “th” fully articulated and a long a after. “Thames,” one of my high-school teachers finally said, “rhymes with gems.” As a reader, English place-names had become what Russian surnames had always been: something to register with the mind and the eye but never to venture with the tongue.

These concerns, too, were put off because I never actually visited London, until I hired as a nanny for our firstborn (the very selfsame writer mentioned above) a Mancunian woman, late the manager of a rock-and-roll band. (Until I met Kay, I would have thought a Mancunian was a person who came from some exotic foreign land, not someone who came from Manchester.) Early on we got into a frustrating rondelay about whether my son had any vests or jumpers. Eventually it became clear that Kay was referring to what I knew as undershirts and sweaters, and I showed her where they had been packed away after the baby shower. Over time sometimes I called them vests, and sometimes she called them undershirts. (Once there was a contretemps over a “dummy,” which turned out to be a term that had never crossed my field of vision during my reading. This was a pacifier. I don’t believe in them.) Eventually we even developed some conversational Englishisms around the house; for example, when one evening my husband felt moved to tell Kay that he found completely unintelligible her Mancunian accent—which, in his defense, even some Londoners find challenging—she replied, “Sod off, Gerry.” This became a term of art around the house for months to come, despite the fact that my Lonely Planet British Phrasebook informs me that its origins are in the word “sodomy.” But the explanation continues, “Most British people who use this term don’t mean anything sexually menacing by it…you may consider yourself insulted, but not too much.”

The fact that there exists a British phrasebook to, in its words, “avoid embarrassing British–U.S. differences” says a great deal about the language chasm between the two. It’s been often remarked upon, and sometimes it goes both ways, although most of the time the Americans are the philistines. The Irish writer John Connolly, for example, has decided for whatever reason to set his suspense novels in various parts of the United States. (It’s probably the same impulse that has led Californian Elizabeth George to write a series of books about a titled inspector for Scotland Yard.) But Connolly blew it in a small way in a recent novel when his American hero put on a pair of trainers, a term of art for sneakers that few people in Maine or Louisiana would ever have heard of. On the other hand, one editor at a British publishing house was trying to see that one of her American writers made it across the pond successfully and wasn’t sure there wasn’t a glitch in a manuscript she’d gotten. “How would you describe chicken-fried steak?” she asked. (Yuck.)

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed to a whole raft of wits. Such is the quip about America and England being two countries divided by a common language. Churchill, I was told definitively by one student of modern history. Shaw, said an inveterate reader. But a quotations dictionary has it as Oscar Wilde (“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”) and another Bertrand Russell (“It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language.”) I feel quite chuffed about being able to speak English English until I actually do it. Then I find myself in Southwark, pronouncing (or mispronouncing) the w, and find myself thinking of Wilde. Or Russell. Or Churchill. Or whomever it may have been.

Oscar Wilde during his tour of the United States and Canada in 1882