This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode.
Patrick Cox: You know what’s bonkers? Americans using the word ‘bonkers.’ I thought of ‘bonkers’ as one of those words with its own geography and borders, something that if you use it in America, you’d be met with blank stares. But actually bonkers made it to the United States long before I ever did. In the mid 20th century, bonkers escaped Britain snuck onto some kind of linguistic container ship and crossed the Atlantic. And for several decades now, Americans have been saying it as naturally as they say a word like dude. In fact, they often say them together. “Oh, dude, that’s bonkers.”
Clip of man saying “Oh dude that’s bonkers.”
Patrick Cox: He said it! You’ll have to forgive me. But I am relieved to report that not all Britishisms have been so lovingly embraced by Americans. And vice versa, for that matter. Consider the word, ‘conkers.’ I just thought that it might have had legs in the US, if only as a ‘bonkers’ rhyming partner. But no, it just didn’t happen for ‘conkers.’ And I, for one, am happy about that. I’m not even going to tell you what it means. I’m gonna just keep it a secret, Vive la difference, to borrow a phrase from, you know, some other language.
From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, I’m Patrick Cox. And this is Subtitle: stories about languages and the people who speak them. In this episode, you say aluminum. Whether you travel west or east across the Atlantic, English is a foreign language. One note before we start, I put out a version of this episode in 2018, which means that — math credit alert — you have to add five every time there’s a reference to years if you’re listening in 2023. If you’re listening later than that, you’re on your own. Here goes.
Patrick Cox: Phil Viner is British, his wife Lynne is American.
Phil Viner: So we met in England.
Patrick Cox: That was 16 years ago. Like all couples, their communication hasn’t always been smooth. They can get stuck even on what we might think of as the simplest of words,
Phil Viner: I’ll ask a question. And Lynne will say, “Sure.” Which to me means, “I couldn’t care less.” I just hear it as a “No.” Whereas…
Lynne Murphy: I see it as a “Yes,” and it’s taken as, “Oh, I’m really unenthusiastic about that.”
Patrick Cox: Sort of like mildly sarcastic?
Lynn Murphy: Or just resigned maybe.
Patrick Cox: Like a shrug?
Phil Viner: Yeah, exactly. It’s like it’s a linguistic shrug. And I do find it annoying.
Lynne Murphy: I mean, to me, what sure means is, “Well, I hadn’t had that idea. But that sounds fine to me.” But, you know, Phil will second-guess that every time I say it.
Patrick Cox: I imagine that comes up quite often is actually.
Phil Viner and Lynne Murphy: It actually does!
Patrick Cox: Lynne and Phil live in Brighton on the south coast of England. They have just-about-to-turn 11-year-old daughter Arden.
Patrick Cox: Okay, Arden, here’s the question that everybody asks you if you do a BBC interview, at the beginning. They say, “What did you have for breakfast today?”
Arden: I had a bagel.
Patrick Cox: So American! There was I expecting to hear beans on toast or something.
Phil Viner: And what was in your bagel?
Arden: Egg
Phil Viner: Fried egg bagel with ketchup.
Lynne Murphy: Which I think is an abomination.
Patrick Cox: Yeah, that is a bit of an abomination.
Phil Viner: Oh Come on!
Patrick Cox: Separated by a common condiment! Do you think your mum sounds less American than other Americans that you may have met?
Arden: Not really.
Lynne Murphy: You think I sound really American?
Arden: No. You sound sort of both at the same time. So you don’t sound any less American but you still sound a bit English as well.
Lynne Murphy: Okay, so I’m 150%.
Arden: Pretty much.
Patrick Cox: Who is this 150% American-slash-English wonder woman? She’s a linguist, of course, Lynne Murphy is a linguistics professor. She also writes a blog called Separated by a Common Language. And this year, her book came out. It’s called The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English. It’s the best piece of writing on that subject that I’ve ever read. And I’m not alone in thinking that judging by the reviews. So now, I’m guessing you know why I wanted to hear from the rest of Lynne’s family, why I asked Lynne if she’d bring Phil and Arden with her to talk to me, and why Lynne said, “Sure.” And so it was that Phil and Arden and Lynne told me their stories of being in a family that separated by a common tongue. The American part of the family is more than Lynne, of course. It’s all her American relatives too, who she and Phil and Arden visit nearly every year.
Phil Viner: I’ve had so many times where I’ve been in restaurants in the States, and I’ve ordered a glass of water and got nothing. And the waitress has turned to whoever I’m with and asked them to translate. And they’ve just gone, (in an American accent), “Water.” And maybe when I’m with Lynne, I’m even a little bit more English-y. I used to get tired, I had a lovely accent all the time when I was in the States. And that’s shifted now and I really miss it. So I think I’m probably particularly English around Americans.
Patrick Cox: I’ve had the opposite thing with ‘water,’ where I was actually waiting tables when I first went to the United States. And so I was the server going up to the table and asking them if they wanted to start with some (British accented) water. And again, I would just get these quizzical looks. And so that was the very, very first word that I learned to pronounce in American English.
Lynne Murphy: It’s a big one. I mean, I’ve done a whole blog post on it, because it’s the one that everybody reports having trouble with. And I had the experience myself when we were in the States in April, and I went to a place and asked for some water. And I had to repeat myself three times. And every time I did it — because I’m so used to making myself clearer — by sounding more English, I just kept saying (British accented) “Water! Water!” And it just got me further and further in the hole until I realized I was doing it backwards and needed to say (American accented) “Water.”
Patrick Cox: It just seems to be one of those words that phonetically unlike so many other words that where we can work out what it is that the other person is saying — we all speak the same language — but that particular word somehow…
Lynne Murphy: It’s only the “w” that’s the same sound. And it seems to have a different sort of rhythm to it.
Patrick Cox: Almost everyone who’s crossed the pond at one point or another has had a ‘water’ moment, it seems. It’s a first contact moment for a lot of us, But Lynne’s was a little different. She actually had her own first contact word soon after she moved to Britain 18 years ago.
Lynne Murphy: I remember early on being mocked in Scrabble club, about how I said box and asked for somebody to pass the box. And they thought that was hilarious and said (American accented) “Box, box!” back at me. So I started saying something more like (British accented) “box.” And then of course you have to learn a lot of vocabulary. And so the vocabulary of education in particular is something that I had to learn for work.
Patrick Cox: Because by this time, you had become a linguist?
Lynne Murphy: I had been a linguist for ages. And so yeah, I came here to a job as a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Sussex.
Patrick Cox: That must have me Oh, who knows if it changes how you speak, but it certainly changes your relationship to how you speak.
Lynne Murphy: I think because I work on words, I notice the words. I don’t always notice the accent things. I haven’t got that good an ear. So it’s only when people mock me for something I’ve said that I start to sort of adjust it a little bit. When I when I hear myself talking especially in a situation like this when I’m speaking formally. On the radio, I can hear all sorts of things that I’m doing that are not particularly American. And I’m sure that all the English people listening or British people listening will hear all the things that I’m doing that are not British.
Patrick Cox: Why don’t we turn it around to the British people listening immediately next to you? Phil and Arden, what do you hear when you hear your mom now and how has it changed over time?
Phil Viner: Do you think it’s changed?
Arden: Well, not since I remember.
Lynne Murphy: You do say I have a radio voice though, right? And my lecturing voice.
Arden: My mum has a normal voice, a speaking voice and speaking laugh and a normal laugh. And she goes between the two whenever she speaks in public or something.
Patrick Cox: So how does it change?
Arden: It goes a bit higher and a bit more (makes a high-pitched sound).
Patrick Cox: Just a quick interruption here to tell you about the Subtitle newsletter. Did you know that we’ll pop something into your inbox, if you sign up, every two or three weeks? It’s a quick and fun read. There are language-themed stories that are in the news. You’ll see what’s coming up in future podcasts, you’ll hear about other podcasts that we’re listening to and we think you’ll like. And there’s some goofy lingo stuff as well. You can sign up here.
Patrick Cox: Okay, so the word differences, the things that Lynne does notice that she says, There are dozens of examples of these in her book — and even more on her blog. These are words and phrases that don’t quite mean what you think they mean once you cross the Atlantic. And the most fun ones are the ones that have just that little nuance of difference, either in what the word means, or how it’s used. Or sometimes, who uses it. Like the word reckon. In Britain, we use reckon a lot. I reckon, Donald Trump’s going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Sorry, that’s a bit of a distraction. Anyway, ‘I reckon,’ roughly translates to ‘I guess,’ or ‘I figure,’ ‘I think it’s possible that.’ Something like that, a mild opinion. But it’s not quite the same in the US. The meaning in American English is pretty similar. It’s more a question of who actually says it.
Movie clip: “I reckon it’s pretty good to me. I like the way you talk.”
Patrick Cox: It’s considered a bit hick, even a bit old fashioned. Like, sophisticated urbanites — actually forget the word sophisticated, just urbanites don’t really say it. I realize that unconsciously when I’m in the US, I’ve stopped saying, ‘I reckon.’ Here’s another expression that’s confoundingly different: ‘middle class.’
Phil Viner: I think it’s a minefield
Patrick Cox: Phil’s been a regular visitor to the US even before he met Lynne. But he still doesn’t fully understand how and when Americans use ‘middle class.’
Phil Viner: It really isn’t the same as the middle class I know from Britain.
Patrick Cox: Yeah, I mean, middle class in the United States seems something that politicians use an awful lot. I mean, Bill Clinton used it constantly.
Bill Clinton: I propose a middle class Bill of Rights,
Patrick Cox: It seems to be sort of just this aspirational state.
Lynne Murphy: In America, you’d be sort of ashamed not to call yourself middle class. You know, if you call yourself anything else, you’d be self conscious about it. Whereas in Britain, if you call yourself middle class, you have to be very self conscious about it. It’s not a badge of honor. It’s a badge of mild embarrassment.
TV clip: “Those girls taught me all about what it means to be middle class. Flat whites. Smashed avocado on toast. ‘We’re looking for a really pale rosé.’”
Phil Viner: And it can be an insult in some places. You can attack somebody by saying that they’re middle class, especially if they’ve come from somewhere deeply working class. It can be that they’ve betrayed their roots in some ways.
Lynne Murphy: So Americans might think when I say it’s embarrassing to call yourself middle class, Americans might think it’s embarrassing because it’s too low. But no, it’s too high in Britain. To call yourself middle classes is to put on airs.
Patrick Cox: This kind of thing is Lynne’s bread and butter, if that works in both countries. And yes, she’s written about bread and butter. See her blog post on bacon sandwiches. It’s hilarious. Lynne at her very best passing out the verbal differences while simultaneously taking shots of British cuisine. Actually, the bacon sandwich is a good example of a decades-long trend, the Americanization of British English. When I was a kid, no one in the UK had heard of a BLT. Now it’s everywhere. Do Brits like to point this kind of thing out to Lynne, I ask her. Do they Brit-splain her?
Lynne Murphy : Yeah, I mean, when people first meet me, they’ll you know find out that I work on American and British English and they’ll say, “Oh, but of course American is taking over.” And then they get a bit of a lecture from me, and then they don’t do that again. So those who know me well or have been following me on social media for a while know that for most things, the better reaction is to ask a question, rather than to tell me how it is, because how people think it is often not how it is. I’ve talked to a couple of times on the radio with Matthew Engel who’s written a book about how he feels that American English is overtaking British English and how British culture is being lost.
Matthew Engel: And quite clearly, as the decades go by British English is becoming more like American English.
Lynne Murphy: We have our arguments on-air, and I bring up my facts and he stays steady in his position. And you know, I can’t blame him for that. He’s got a book to sell that says the opposite of what my book says. So he can’t really be be convinced.
Matthew Engel: I know that there are some British words that managed to make it into East Coast universities. Out in Trump country, these words are making very little impact. Whereas here, we know that American is being picked up all over the place. It is a huge torrent of them coming in all the time, because of the place we occupy, in relation to America.
Patrick Cox: And is that sort of representative of how the British view this? Is this a widespread belief that is sort of unmovable?
Lynne Murphy: It’s unmovable for those who don’t want to be moved. So you’ve got the situation where people want to believe that they are somehow victimized by language. They don’t like seeing language change, and there’s a convenient people to blame for that. And so if they want to continue to be blaming in that way, then they won’t listen to the facts. But you know, there are some things that we could say British English and American English are becoming more alike on. But there are a lot more that we’re not necessarily becoming more alike on. And so you can pick your facts and consider the situation any way you like if you’re being selective about those facts. And if you need to cling on to that idea that Britain is somehow under threat.
Patrick Cox: There’s a certain type of Brit who feels attacked from all sides these days. From Europe: “Let’s get out of the EU and go it alone.” And from America: “First, they swiped the language from us. Now they’re forcing us to use their bastardized version of it.” Okay, okay, that’s the cartoon version. But it really does shock me when I go back to Britain — which I do a lot — it shocks me how many people are drawn to those kinds of views. And here’s a fact that they often fall back on, a real fact. British and American English are really getting closer in some ways. But as a fact, it’s useless without context. And the context is that it’s not just American and British English that are getting closer in certain pockets of the language. That’s actually happening with most versions of English, certainly English dialects,
Lynne Murphy: It’s inevitable in the modern world that we’re going to come together and speak together more and influence each other more. And so what’s happened in England and in Britain more generally, is that very local dialects are being lost because of train lines. And because of mass communications. Because people commute now and marry people from the city nearby rather than from their own village. So that kind of movement is going to mean that the small dialect differences sort of all congeal. And so what we’ve got now more is more regional dialects. And where we see change in Britain, it’s usually radiating from London. It’s usually things like the word ‘back end,’ which used to be the northern word for the autumn. It’s pretty much unknown now, but in 1950, it was how most people in the North called that season. So even though you’ve got people complaining about Americans, saying, “Spring forward, fall back,” as a mnemonic for the time change, and British people use that now too. It’s not ‘fall’ it’s overtaken Britain, it’s ‘autumn,’ it’s the London word. And so a lot of the fears about Americanization I think are a little bit misplaced. It’s sort of Londonization of Britain that’s happened more drastically. I look at that and I look at how the media is concentrated in London in the UK. That’s also where all of these scare stories of American English overtaking British English are coming from. It does sort of feel like, “Hey, look over there. It’s the Americanisms, it’s not us. It’s not the BBC. It’s not the people in charge of education. It’s the Americans, it’s them doing it.”
Patrick Cox: So remember, Brits: Don’t point the finger at Americans, it’s not always their fault. Hmm, sometimes it is.
Arden: Every time someone American tries to do an English accent to me, it just sounds really, really posh. And I get bit annoyed about that, because I don’t think it’s very fair to generalize English people as posh.
Patrick Cox: That is so true. So do the Americans try on their British accents to you when you go and visit? Cousins and people?
Arden: Only if they start hearing an English accent from me loads.
Lynne Murphy: Do they sometimes ask you to say certain words?
Arden: Yes. Yeah.
Patrick Cox: Which ones?
Lynne Murphy: ‘Water’ might have been one of them?
Arden: Yeah, a lot of my relatives tried to get me to say ‘water’ in an American accent. It’s quite annoying.
Patrick Cox: Annoying, maybe, but it’s not really going to go away. If you’re surrounded by people who don’t speak the same way as you, you’re gonna hear about it. And over time, you might even change. But still, I’ve been in this country nearly three decades. Do I sound American? Only here and there. Kind of the same with Lynne in Britain.
Lynne Murphy: When Arden was two-and-a-half, she said to me, “You say (American accent) ‘bath,’ and Daddy says (British accent) ‘bath.’ And I said, “What are you going to say?” And she said, (British accent) “‘bath’”. And I thought, “Why in the world do they call it the mother tongue?” Because I get nothing as the mother here. She’s going to speak the English of the English. It’s very clear that I am the odd one out in our milieu. She’s got grandparents with a different accent from mine. She’s got a dad with a different accent from mine. She’s got teachers and friends with different accents to mine. I’m the odd one out, I’m not the one to be imitated.
Arden: Except when we go to America, it’s a bit embarrassing being told my accent’s cute all the time.
Patrick Cox: I know the feeling.
Lynne Murphy: Yeah. Are the people who say I could just listen to you all day, you think and not taking a word I’m saying?
Patrick Cox: Or people who tell me. I don’t know about your reporting. I mean, it may be okay, but I just like listening to you.
Lynne Murphy: Gee, thanks.
Patrick Cox: Lynne Murphy, Phil Viner and their daughter Arden. It may be five years since we had that conversation but Lynne assures me the family’s linguistic differences are still the subject of debate. Here’s what she told me in an email: “We recently had a two-against-one argument about language. And we’ve all completely forgotten what it was about. So we’re trying to remember. We’ll let you know if we find it, or have another argument soon.” This sounds remarkably like the dynamic in my home. Two Americans, one Brit having arguments about points of language that at the time seem like a big deal, but not a big deal enough to actually remember. Which means that you can have the same argument again a week later.
The title of Lynne Murphy’s book is The Prodigal Tongue. Do yourself a favor and read it. There you are. That’s my recommendation. Now for yours. If you like what you heard in this or any other episode of Subtitle, please give us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Reviews — you’ve heard this before but it’s true — reviews really help they get the word out. Thank you.
Allison Shao manages Subtitle’s newsletter and social media. Special thanks to Nina Porzuki and Tina Tobey. Subtitle is a member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective. We’re a group of independent podcasters who tell stories about stuff we value but don’t fully understand. Things like the visual arts, future technology and water. Yeah, that word again — really, there’s a podcast about water. I’ll tell you about that one some other time. Right now. I’m going to tell you about another Hub & Spoke podcast called Out There, which explores big questions through intimate outdoors stories: A story about a flood and what happens when we’re scared in the wrong moments; a story about the revelations from a night spent in the California desert; a story about an adult learning to swim. See, this podcast is about water too! You cannot escape that word. It’s Out There, hosted by Willow Belden.
That’s it for this time we’ll be back with more lingo nonsense in a couple of weeks. See you then.