When I left the United States for London a few weeks ago, I promised myself two things. First, I wouldn't return with an affected British accent, an ambiguously metro Euro−wardrobe or a haughty attitude about how everything works better in the United Kingdom. It doesn't, by the way.
Second, and more important, I promised that if I continued writing a column, I would refrain from using the public space as a serialized diary until I make British friends to vent to. Thus, you have my word — no life lessons or experiences abroad; I'll stick to the words.
That said, sometimes the best time to notice the intricacies of your language is when you leave home. Or better yet, when you go to one where everything is the same, just different.
It may seem insignificant that Britons drive on the wrong side of the road, drink legally at 18, speak somewhat differently and don't know who Helen Keller is (fact). But it's actually the minutiae that constitute cultural differences and can lead to major letdowns like getting hit on the road, celebrating a very anti−climactic 21st birthday and even the lack of an entire genre of jokes.
It's a fact: We are different. Here in England, trousers are pants, pants are underpants, and when you get it wrong, everybody snickers like a five−year−old. That doesn't sound like America, does it?
So how did we end up so different?
The answer is that most of the things we deem distinctively American actually come from the good old motherland. Brits may laugh when we talk about our "pants," but "pants" is actually an old, if slangy, abbreviation for the word "pantaloon," meaning, well, pants.
And the American accent those Brits love to hold over our heads actually comes from their country as well. Even the "rhotic r" — a fully pronounced "r" preceding a consonant, rather than one that's cut off (think the American versus the British way of saying "wanker") — is not originally very American at all.
Several hundred years ago, well before any English was spoken in the Americas, British accents sounded, to some degree, like the accents we now have in the States. The accent only reached the Western Hemisphere when colonists from regions like Scotland, Ireland and western and northern England — still rhotic today — brought their "American" accents across the pond with them.
That's not to say that back then the whole of Great Britain spoke like we do. The predecessors of America's New England hailed from Britain's southeast, where the non−rhotic accent we generally associate with England was the norm. And the regions the British colonists settled in, America's Northeast and South, still have hints of non−rhotic accents.
So when a Bostonian tells you that he "parked his car in Harvard Yard," notoriously without annunciated r's and with a couple of added h's, he's actually demonstrating the long−lasting tradition of the oldest version of American English.
That's right, Medford's got class.
The strange case of American spelling took a different route. You see, after the colonies gained independence, they started getting all indie about it. Not taxing their tea was no longer good enough; they wanted lingual distinction from Britain too.
Their hero? A man named Noah Webster. Webster decided that messing with British spellings would solidify our individuality as Americans, so he went to town on traditional British spellings, mainly chopping off word endings, doubled letters, and the mysteriously missing u's from colour, flavour and so on. Somehow, Americans ran with it, and thus was born our very own official "American Spelling Book" and, later, Webster's Dictionary.
We may be using a somewhat made−up language, but at least we're patriotic. As for Britain, they can shove the Oxford English Dictionary up their non−rhotic arse.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
