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Six Americanisms we should adopt into British English

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Although I’m renowned among my friends as a language pedant, I know that pedantry has its limits, and can be taken too far. For example, I fully accept the following facts about language:

1. Languages have different dialects, which are each as valid for their own speakers as any other

2. Language changes over time

So I hope it’s not too shocking to reveal that I’m perfectly comfortable with the existence of a dialect called “American English” with different pronunciations and vocabulary.

I’m even comfortable with some influence and exchange between American and British. It was absolutely right, for example, that we British standardised to the short scale and accepted that a “billion” is a thousand million – though it would be nice if the Americans, in return, would stop being idiots and convert to an internally consistent date notation system.

However, I think it will probably surprise many people to learn that there are a few Americanisms which I actually think are better than their British equivalents, and which I’d be happy to see adopted as standard British English.

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A general theory of India

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The standard travel writer’s summary of India is that it’s a mixture of medieval and modern. But it’s not. That’s a lazy, historically illiterate cliche, which is at the same time both too harsh and too generous.

It’s too harsh, because even the most archaic values and standards of Indian society are superior to those of European medieval society. A much more appropriate comparison would be to our “early modern” period: the 1500s-1700s.

It’s also too generous, in assuming that India has any modern element mixed in. Just because it has 21st century technology, doesn’t mean that it has any 21st century values. Its society is not just partly early modern: it’s entirely early modern.

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Shakespeare’s Grand Theme in Merry Wives and Timon

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I’ve come to the opinion, over the course of my personal Shakespearean odyssey, that there is a central theme running through all of Shakespeare’s work. This Grand Theme has three strands – madness, acting/pretending, and clowns/fools – which seem separate but are actually different aspects of one idea.

Shakespeare’s core obsession is with the boundary between reality and unreality. He probes and plays with this distinction using the three strands of the Grand Theme as his tools:

  • madness – when a character is mistaken about what’s real and unreal
  • theatre and pretence – a deliberate inversion or blurring of the two
  • clowns and licensed fools – those characters who are able to use their feigned (or genuine?) status as madmen to skewer the pretensions and facades of others

The fool, in Shakespeare’s hands, is more than just the crossover between the other strands: it’s the central point around which the rest of his explorations of fiction and illusion revolve. Sometimes, Shakespeare goes so far down the rabbit hole, it seems that no character ever says anything which is straightforwardly true and honest. Everyone is either mistaken, losing their mind, lying or acting in some way. Except, that is, the fool, a sort of embodied double negative, who through madness is able to see the truth, and speak it freely.

Each new play that I read now, I analyse in terms of these three aspects. There’s a risk here of confirmation bias: by looking for these things, I might spot them where they’re only minor elements, or even over-interpret and see themes which aren’t there, thereby imagining my theory is proved. I’ve tried to remain wary of tenuous interpretations, and ready to criticise myself when I’m stretching the theory too far. But so far, even with plays that I’ve thought might break the pattern, I’ve found an abundance of madness, pretence and foolery at the heart of the story.

The two most recent plays I’ve seen are good examples. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a slapstick comedy about adultery, and Timon of Athens is a tragedy about wealth and loyalty. Neither seemed likely vessels for exploring the Grand Theme, but that’s exactly what they are:

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10 words that Shakespeare uses in ways you don’t expect

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Over the last year and a half, I’ve gone on a bit of a Shakespeare bender, as a result of my New Year Resolutions in 2014 and 2015 to read and see six plays each year.

Shakespearean language is difficult. Aside from Shakespeare’s lyrical, convoluted style and invented words, there has been so much language change between early modern English, understood by Shakespeare’s audiences around 1590-1610, and modern English, spoken today, that the two dialects often seem to have limited mutual intelligibility.

The more I read and hear of Shakespeare’s language, the more familiar and understandable it becomes. It’s relatively easy to pick up the meaning of archaic terms like fain and wot: after just a few readings or hearings they slip naturally into your vocabulary and cause no more problems.

But what’s much harder is when Shakespeare uses words which are common and familiar in modern English, but had a different meaning in early modern English. It’s very tricky to override the familiar meaning and hear it as the intended meaning; however hard I try to dislodge it, the modern meaning obstinately intrudes into Shakespeare’s text.

Here are the ten words which have caused me the most dissonance between their Shakespearean and modern meanings:

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