Mind Your Language

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But for a twist of fate I could have been born American. If my grandparents, who had sailed from Italy, had found decent pasta on Ellis Island they would probably have stayed. As it was, they took one look at the cuisine and rushed back to the docks eighty years ago, taking the first boat out and landing in Glasgow where the local haggis pizza and deep fried Mars bars won them over.

Recently I was in Chicago coaching the executives of a chocolate company, which was handy as I love chocolate and I love Americans too. Any nation that can take a sporting event in which no other country takes part and call it The World Series has got to be impossibly self centred, have loads of chutzpah or simply enjoy a great sense of humour. And that’s humour with a “u” by the way.

Writing this blog means I receive many emails from all around the world, but the Stateside ones usually just tell me off for my spelling. If you have a word processor package and the spell check slips from UK English to American English you’ll know just how different the two languages are. You say tomato, I say marinara.

The fact that the Americans have different spellings from us in Britain is due to a guy named Noah Webster who, in 1828, decided that English was just too posh for him as it was descended from Greek and Latin. Noah hadn’t much time for the classical languages having probably majored in Media Studies and I.T. so, like a spelling World Series, he decided to devise English that was solely American.

His dictionary, bound in Moroccan leather, became hugely popular in America but was ignored by the rest of the world till Hollywood intervened as Hope and Crosby journeyed to Africa with Dorothy Lamour singing one of the worst lyrics in movie history. “Like Webster’s dictionary we’re Morocco bound”.

Noah wanted to plough through the English language with his spelling plow and weed out the U in “colour”, “harbour”, “humour” and “favour”. He moved the actual sound of the words to centre, sorry center, stage and you know I think he was absolutely right. What’s wrong with spelling words in the way they are pronounced? It seems to me that Webster simplified things, unlike Hillary Clinton who coined the word misspeak which has five too many letters as it simply means “lie”.

So where I have problems with the language is not with the spellings. It’s the words. In the UK we travel upwards in high rise buildings using lifts. In The States they’re known as elevators while “lifts” are things Hollywood stars wear in their shoes. Here, bathrooms are rooms with baths in and often separate from the toilet, but over there when they ask for the bathroom the mean the loo. If you’ve ever had to clean difficult stains from your bath after an American visitor has left, you now know why.

In the UK we hold our trousers up with braces but over the water it’s suspenders which hold up your pants. When you think that to Brits suspenders are garter belts for ladies stockings and that pants are underwear, you have the recipe for total confusion and a few face slaps too.

George Bernard Shaw said that we are two nations separated by a common language, and he was obviously right. When I was a student, I worked in a Glasgow hotel as a waiter and night porter. One job was to ring the rooms to wake guests, but our head receptionist, Norma, had worked in a smaller hotel where waking someone in the morning involved knocking on their door. She used to ask people on checking in when they wanted “knocking up” in the morning. Every nationality understood her except for our American friends for whom getting “knocked up” means something completely different. They thought that hotels offering this level of personal service were going a bit beyond their remit.

I love the fact that America has the Statue of Liberty inscription vowing to shield “your poor, your huddled masses, and your celebrities you no longer want.” It’s solely down to their charity that we were able to offload Sarah Ferguson and Paul Burrell who both now make fortunes selling tat in malls and on shopping TV, saving them the indignity of holding garage sales here and getting rocks thrown at them.

They’ve also, graciously, taken to their bosom Naomi Campbell, a woman more unbalanced than a three wheeled Jeep but who could clean up the scary market next Halloween. Seeing her back here from her American home this week, and getting arrested for spitting at policemen as she was arrested on a plane, graphically shows why we should be grateful that The States has such compassion. We now just have to persuade them to take Andrew Lloyd Webber.

So you won’t find me having a go at America even though they have a go at me for my English spelling. Whether I’m doing business in New York, lying by a pool in Florida, or visiting relatives in California, I feel at home and I’m always grateful to be there.

Unfortunately I’ve come to realise, or realize as Webster would say, that you can’t have everything. Their chocolate sucks.