Shaw thing

I've been trying hard, in best scientific style, to not just look for confirming instances of my stereotypes and cliches regarding America. After all, it's an enormous place, and as I'm told with wearying regularity, Miami is very different from the rest. This post, though, amounts to a long endorsement of the George Bernard Shaw commonplace about the US and the UK being two nations divided by a common language.

It's easy to trot off a list of words, mostly nouns, which have different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I cooked a meal the other day involving aubergine, courgette, and coriander; after a conversation with my housemate about what I was making, I wondered if I could have possibly made anything (palatable) with more ingredients whose name we disagreed about. But the linguistic divisions go deeper than individual words. It's a lot to do with rhetorical forms, inculcated call-and-response routines, and differences in tone.

A few examples to illustrate that obtuse little list. During a class discussion on rhetorical figures of speech recently, litotes was mentioned. The (English) lecturer and I had no difficulty
in dashing off a long list of examples - 'not so bad', 'none too shabby', 'no big deal', and so on and so on. The American students were still struggling slightly with how the trope was supposed to work. The idea of asserting something by uttering its negation just seemed completely alien to them; the rhetorical form isn't part of American speech.

By 'inculcated call-and-response' routines, I mean the kind of everyday conversation-oiling exchanges that you can spell out in advance; greetings are a good example. I've still not got used to being asked 'what's going on?' as a form of 'hello'; my mind starts scrabbling around for a literal answer, whilst an American has some non-literal, non-committal answer instantly ready that gets the conversation going. By contrast, when I, in typical English style, greet someone by saying 'Y'alright?', or similar, they often look slightly surprised... 'yeah, I'm fine, why, do I look ill or something?'.

As for differences in tone, well, I think this might be the origin of the canard about Americans not getting irony. Most do, at least in print. But they often fail to notice every instance of irony in my speech, because (it seems) they don't recognise the contexts, intonations, and sentence-forms that indicate that I'm not being serious. This isn't just to do with me; I've noticed the same thing happen with other English people, in person or on film or TV. It's as if the tone, the tenor, of English-English discourse is more allusive, less direct, more replete with extra unspoken meaning and opportunities for irony.

So what of all this? Two consequences occur to me, one personal, one more general. The personal aspect is that, without (heaven forfend) adopting an American accent or vocabulary, the tone and content of my talk is changing slightly. I've been making a more or less conscious effort to not use much slang or dialect words, since I'm tired of having to explain them; but additionally, without deliberately trying, I seem to be using more direct forms of speech, fewer distinctively English non-literal phrases, less irony and so forth. I'll have to watch that I don't become excessively bland by the time I leave.

The general consequence is rather speculative, but worth thinking about. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis says, roughly, that the thought of a population sharing a language is shaped at least partially by the nature of that language. A lot of people accept the converse, too; i.e., that the thoughts of a population are reflected in their language. So it's interesting to wonder about the American preference for direct speech, its origins (perhaps in 'plain-speaking' pilgrims?), and the way in which it may have shaped the country's self-image and behaviour. I also wonder, listening to the apparently vacuous pronouncements of the presidential candidates, if the things they say are in fact replete with meaning for an American, meaning that's lost on me as an outsider; that is, whether the words and phrases ('dreams', 'hopes', etc) just don't have the same resonance in the English mind.

I don't suppose that's the case all the time, mind. When Miami city commissioner (cf councillor) Marc Sarnoff says of the assault rifles he's trying to crack down on that they're 'designed to kill with lethal force', I'm pretty sure that he's talking thoughtless rubbish, whatever language he thinks he's speaking.