Separated by a Common Language

It’s almost 80 years since the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw remarked that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.

And having just completed my first novel, with characters that straddle both countries, I can testify that it is probably more apposite now than it was four decades ago.

I first came across this linguistic chasm when, as health and medical correspondent for a UK evening newspaper, I travelled with a group of children and their parents to a specialist clinic for child brain development in Philadelphia.

At the end of a long day, one of the American clinicians kindly gave one family and me a lift (a ride in the US) in their car to our motel on the outskirts of the city. As the car was about to pull away, the child’s father gesticulated to the driver and shouted: “Excuse me …we’ve left our little boy’s trolley in your boot.”

It was a comment met by utter bewilderment by the driver who wound down the window and said: “You’ve done what?...left your son’s toy bus in my shoe?”

As the father recovered the item from the car, the driver smiled and said: “You mean that you’d left his pushchair in the trunk!”

That was merely homourous/humorous(spellings, too, can be different in the two nations) but there are also times when the choice of wrong word can trigger consternation and alarm.

Once, on a trip with my wife in New England, we returned to our hotel where we were confronted by a mouse scuttling around the skirting board in the bedroom.

I informed the manager and told him it has disappeared either under the bed or into the bathroom and I had spent several minutes looking for it, using my torch.

The manager looked horrified. Sternly he warned: “I’m sorry sir, but you cannot use a torch in this hotel. It is against the law.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, showing him my small, battery-operated torch.

“My apologies, sir. You mean you used a flashlight. I thought you were walking around with an open flame,” he said. Phew... I could have been arrested!

As far as I know, none of the characters in my novel was in danger of breaking the law because of the wrong choice of word but I did, for example, have to be careful that the New Yorkers walked along the sidewalk and drove along the freeway whereas in England they used the pavement and drove down the motorway.

One young couple in the book left New York in the fall but when they arrived in London enjoyed the rich colours/colors of an English autumn.

Before spending a week a Paris, one character informs her daughter in the US she was going on vacation but on her return is asked by her English travelling/traveling companion if she enjoyed her holiday. Vive la difference as they say in France.

On visits to restaurants in New York, diners are asked what they would like for their entrée (their main course) whereas in the UK and France they are invited to choose an entrée (as a starter or appetiser/appetizer).

When shopping in department stores in the US, they travel between floors either on the moving staircases or in the elevators but in the UK they use the escalators or lifts.

They are all correct, depending on which side of the Pond you happen to be, but some, I would suggest, are more accurate descriptions than others. Escalators suggests that they only go up (as in to escalate) so moving staircases is more precise. Likewise, sidewalk is more accurate than pavement – the latter being any paved surface.

However, I cannot get to grips with the choice in the US of the word yard – as in back yard or front yard – to describe what in Britain is a garden, typically a little oasis of greenery and flowers. But in the US they still have gardeners to tend to their yards and not yardeners – a word that ironically rhymes with gardeners but which simply does not exist.

Yard seems to be derived from the Old English word for an enclosure geard so it is very easy to see how it could have evolved as either garden or yard.

In the UK a yard is an austere grassless enclosure as in a stockyard for animals, brickyard, shipyard a prison exercise yard or the grim, bricked and paved pocket-sized yards at the back of the old back-to-back terraced houses and tenements flats.

Gardens do exist in the US – as in the United States Botanical Garden, the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the Portland Japanese Garden – but they are all large manicured and managed open spaces visitors. The general public have to be content to sit out or barbecue in their back or front yards.

Mr. Shaw was right. Strange thing the English language.