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A review by bioniclib
The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy
4.0
I’m afraid I waited too long after reading this book to write the review. I had started it but realized it was getting out of hand. Sooooo, before too much more time passed, I thought it best to just toss up what I have.
The first part of the book focuses on establishing the difference
“A famous quip holds that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. On that basis, American should be a separate language from English. Not only do the two countries have separate armed forces, they’ve fought wars against each other. Still, though people first used American as a language name in the 18th century, it hasn’t stuck.” (loc. 467)
So a new term was needed. Fortunately, a linguist was at hand!
“I have squashed together national and dialects to form nationlects, my own special term for what American English and British English (and South African English and so forth) are.” (loc. 475)
Later on, she gives an example of how a Nation’s values shapes its nationalect. The American West and the bloody Manifest Destiny that came from it, went a long way towards establishing the Meritocracy and the individualism that America stresses.
“The frontier may be lawless, but frontierspeople are hearty pioneers. Not having a master has never been a bad thing for Americans, and so Americans have created a passel of positive words for people who battle the frontier, including trailblazer, groundbreaker, and pathfinder. Negative-tinged business expressions deride those who don’t have that independent spirit, for example groupthink and drink the Kool-Aid (alluding to the 1978 mass suicide by the Peoples Temple cult).” (loc. 1065)
This period of history coined words a-plenty. But that doesn’t always mean the word’s, um, meaning, stayed the same. The following example makes me wonder if Goose should have been the hero of Top Gun. Geese can, after all, fly.
“Maverick originally referred to an unbranded calf, but came to mean an unorthodox, independent-minded person.” (loc. 1056)
But I’ve always struggled with the emphasis on individual achievement this country values. I’ve seen the collective good, the interdependency, that Eastern Cultures exhibit, primarily through my reading about Buddhism. Turns out I needn’t go so far to see a culture that doesn’t always see individualism as good thing:
“That frontier values are not shared transatlantically can also be seen in the British use of cowboy (as in cowboy builder) to mean a ‘person without qualifications who competes against established traders or operators, providing shoddy goods or services’ (OED).” (loc 1067)
We can even move forward to the present century and the way the two countries report news to see a more subtle difference:
“The American sources make the fact of Prince’s death the topic of the sentence. Information about who Prince was and what he did lies between the commas, as bonus information. Age at time of death is considered important enough to deserve its own sentence. The British obituaries prioritize the information about who Prince was or what he did. They mention death and age in relative clauses, set off by commas. American obituaries are written as news (of a death); information about the deceased is given as context for the story. The British ones are written as eulogies, with facts about the death added as asides. When British news sources report deaths, they often say the person has sadly died. That’s something I may never get used to. Americans expect newspapers to sound more emotionally detached.” (loc. 1414)
There’s much more to the book, but I think I’ll leave you just one more note; on euphemisms:
“As a result, bathroom became more directly associated with smelly bodily functions, and so it can seem less than genteel, pushing Americans to use euphemisms for that euphemism, such as restroom and powder room. This is an example of what psycholinguist Steven Pinker calls “the euphemism treadmill”; pleasant words for unpleasant things become tainted by the unpleasantness of the thing, and therefore need to be replaced regularly.” (loc. 923)
The first part of the book focuses on establishing the difference
“A famous quip holds that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. On that basis, American should be a separate language from English. Not only do the two countries have separate armed forces, they’ve fought wars against each other. Still, though people first used American as a language name in the 18th century, it hasn’t stuck.” (loc. 467)
So a new term was needed. Fortunately, a linguist was at hand!
“I have squashed together national and dialects to form nationlects, my own special term for what American English and British English (and South African English and so forth) are.” (loc. 475)
Later on, she gives an example of how a Nation’s values shapes its nationalect. The American West and the bloody Manifest Destiny that came from it, went a long way towards establishing the Meritocracy and the individualism that America stresses.
“The frontier may be lawless, but frontierspeople are hearty pioneers. Not having a master has never been a bad thing for Americans, and so Americans have created a passel of positive words for people who battle the frontier, including trailblazer, groundbreaker, and pathfinder. Negative-tinged business expressions deride those who don’t have that independent spirit, for example groupthink and drink the Kool-Aid (alluding to the 1978 mass suicide by the Peoples Temple cult).” (loc. 1065)
This period of history coined words a-plenty. But that doesn’t always mean the word’s, um, meaning, stayed the same. The following example makes me wonder if Goose should have been the hero of Top Gun. Geese can, after all, fly.
“Maverick originally referred to an unbranded calf, but came to mean an unorthodox, independent-minded person.” (loc. 1056)
But I’ve always struggled with the emphasis on individual achievement this country values. I’ve seen the collective good, the interdependency, that Eastern Cultures exhibit, primarily through my reading about Buddhism. Turns out I needn’t go so far to see a culture that doesn’t always see individualism as good thing:
“That frontier values are not shared transatlantically can also be seen in the British use of cowboy (as in cowboy builder) to mean a ‘person without qualifications who competes against established traders or operators, providing shoddy goods or services’ (OED).” (loc 1067)
We can even move forward to the present century and the way the two countries report news to see a more subtle difference:
“The American sources make the fact of Prince’s death the topic of the sentence. Information about who Prince was and what he did lies between the commas, as bonus information. Age at time of death is considered important enough to deserve its own sentence. The British obituaries prioritize the information about who Prince was or what he did. They mention death and age in relative clauses, set off by commas. American obituaries are written as news (of a death); information about the deceased is given as context for the story. The British ones are written as eulogies, with facts about the death added as asides. When British news sources report deaths, they often say the person has sadly died. That’s something I may never get used to. Americans expect newspapers to sound more emotionally detached.” (loc. 1414)
There’s much more to the book, but I think I’ll leave you just one more note; on euphemisms:
“As a result, bathroom became more directly associated with smelly bodily functions, and so it can seem less than genteel, pushing Americans to use euphemisms for that euphemism, such as restroom and powder room. This is an example of what psycholinguist Steven Pinker calls “the euphemism treadmill”; pleasant words for unpleasant things become tainted by the unpleasantness of the thing, and therefore need to be replaced regularly.” (loc. 923)