Jonathan Raban writes:
For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one's own and full of pitfalls and 'false friends'. The word nature, for instance, means something different here - so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase 'He makes his home in ...').
I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.
In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.
Comments
There are cases where the American lexicon differs from the British (e.g. fall vs autumn), and where the meaning of the word differs, sometimes potentially embarassingly. However, from the examples given I infer that he claiming that even when the denotation of words is conserved between American and British usages the connotations have diverged. (On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if an extravert's concept of a friend differed from an introvert's more than an American's did from a Scotsman's.) For a more obvious example, concepts of race differ between the two nations.
Posted by: alias Ernest Major | November 11, 2009 7:35 AM
This is a statistics blog, why are you blogging about this!!!!11!!
Anyway, you say tomato, I say tomato. Oh, wait, that doesn't work in print.
OK, to answer your question: I have worked, spoken, had beers, taught, and seminar'ed with numerous British colleagues specifically about issues of nature, race, class, and stuff and we were all using the words the same way.
Jello is different. What we Americans call "Jello" the Brits call "Jelly" and what we call "Jelly" they call "Jam" and what we call "Jam" they call "Preserves."
I once ended up on a field expedition to Southern Africa with 60 boxes of what Americans call Jello and a lot of peanut butter but no way to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Because of this problem.
Posted by: Greg Laden | November 11, 2009 8:02 AM
I'm a Brit, have lived in the US for the past 15 years and ave a US-born wife (and children!). The previous commentators make (accurate) comments about cases where either words are simply different (fall vs autumn; trunk vs boot; the meaning of 'jumper' and so on) but I agree with Greg that the examples cited by Raban - nature, home, and so on - have congruent meanings to speakers from both countries.
Posted by: Ewan | November 11, 2009 9:17 AM
I'm also British, and lived/worked in the States for a while. I read Raban's point as being anthropological: while the two countries are still close enough that words can be matched 1:1 with reasonable accuracy, there are still some significant differences in connotations. Community does get used in different ways, and the American concept of nature does seem a lot more rooted in the national parks and high-flying rhetoric about the formerly untamed wilderness compared to the British hedgerow-level view. And of course tradition means radically different things, given the two countries' histories: in the UK the traditional is far more quaint and fusty than the US's slightly defensive attitude to some of its more recently created traditions.
Posted by: James | November 11, 2009 9:43 AM
I'm British, and I've lived here in the US for about three years, and I don't get this. Maybe there are subtle differences between the average meaning of home, but I think these are pretty subtle - there's much more within country variation than between. My wife (who is German, but who also lived in the UK) thinks that the British definition of friend differs from the German - many people I consider friends, she might say are merely acquaintances. (But German also doesn't have a word for 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' other than friend).
My hunch about community is that Americans have a more fixed idea about their membership of a community, and feel more a part of it (or like they could feel more a part of it). Partly that's reinforced by things like much higher levels of church attendance, which encourages something like voluntary activity.
In Britain, nature is somewhere you go to let your dog go off leash [as I now say], in America, at least the bits I know of, that's a no-no.
But I don't recall ever misunderstanding, or being misunderstood (even in emphasis). Unlike the more obvious words (like petrol, pavement, rocket [the salad vegetable], bonnet [of car], spanner).
Posted by: Jeremy | November 11, 2009 10:07 AM
Yes, yes, it is a prime candidate for Pseuds Corner. :-)
Posted by: Chris Dornan | November 11, 2009 11:01 AM
This seems to be a case of a newspaper columnist needing to come up with some many words for a newspaper column.
The one real difference I can think of has to do with class. "Middle Class" in American English translates to something more like "Working Class" in British English. What the British mean by "Middle Class" are more what Americans would call "Upper Middle Class" or "Professionals".
Because of this difference alot of political and social commentatary just doesn't translate well between the two countries.
Posted by: Ed | November 11, 2009 12:51 PM
Half my life born in the UK, latter half in the States. I still get confused about some things and some spellings.
The first week I was here, I needed to stock up on office supplies. So I went into a store that sold office stuff (surprisingly called a Stationary Store - I thought most stores stayed still?) and asked the lady at the counter if they sold rubbers. She gave me a haughty glance and said "not here we don't, sir!". I managed to find what I wanted and that they are called "Erasers" here, but she refused to tell me why "Rubbers" was a no-no.
Cookies. Crackers. Biscuits. Chocolate Eclairs (name right, looks right, but custard inside? Yech!). Can't get proper English Cooking Apples for my Apple Crumble Pie so it never tastes quite right. The flour is a different ratio too. The list goes on ...
Posted by: Gray Gaffer | November 11, 2009 3:59 PM
Born in England, grew up in Canada, so I have a foot in both camps. Tire center, tire centre, tyre centre... where would you see each of those signs?
No-one uses fortnight this side of the Atlantic, but we pretty well all know what it means.
Seems to me the Brits tend to use brand names as generic names more than North Americans, except kleenex.
As they say, a common language divides us.
Posted by: Rod | November 11, 2009 5:19 PM
There is definitely a difference in the way "nature" is approached. For instance, nature-stuff, like trees, are not considered to be "owned" in British property law in the same way they are "owned" under US property law. The presumption in the US is that if a tree is on your land you can cut it down, but the presumption in England, as I've recently heard in one lecture I attended (and the guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about but correct me if I'm wrong) is the opposite ... you don't posses the right to cut down the tree just because you feel like it.
But these conceptions of nature, while different, to not boil down to a difference in the definition of the word "nature" or its proximate meaning.
Posted by: Greg Laden | November 11, 2009 6:38 PM
I live in England; I can cut down any tree in my garden except the two that are explicitly protected by the City Council ("Tree Protection Order", I think). This illiberal system arrived, I guess, about 20 years ago, under pressure from tree-huggers.
Posted by: dearieme | November 11, 2009 8:56 PM
I'm not sure I agree with Raban, but I think it's perfectly clear what he's saying. He is asserting that for each of those words the connotations in one culture differ slightly from the connotations in the other, and thus he is implying they have started down the path of developing different meanings.
This is clear by his reference to "false friends" which is a common term for words in different languages which are clearly related cognates but don't have the same meaning. But false friends come in varying degrees of falsity. Looking at French-English pairs, you can find several where the meaning is clearly different (eg, physicien, éventuel), several where the meaning is distinctly different but the current French meaning is recognizable in semi-preserved historical meaning in English (eg, terrible, trouble), several where the primary French meaning corresponds with a secondary meaning in English (eg, argument, confidence), several where the meanings still overlap quite a bit but the main connotation is different (eg, important, simple), and several where the words are still pretty much the same but there is a different emphasis in typical usage (eg, liaison, genre).
The point is, this is a gradual process. A word doesn't wake up one day and suddenly have a completely different meaning. So if you're clinging to a simplified view that words either "mean the same thing" or "don't mean the same thing", you're not going to get the concept.
That said, I don't think Raban has made his case. It's a legitimate linguistic argument to make, that the words are beginning to diverge in meaning, but I wonder if he's really just observing different cultural attitudes. I mean, the word "tea" doesn't have different meaning for British and Americans, but we may have different attitudes toward it that will cause us to speak of it differently. Likewise for class, tradition, home, and community.
Posted by: mdl | November 15, 2009 2:25 AM
Yank here. My most disconcerting moment of language confusion was in the breakfast room of a nice hotel in London. I came downstairs, helped myself to the buffet breakfast, and took a seat at a table. The waiter came to me, asked my room number, and then asked me what my Christian Name was. I suppose he was just checking that I really was the person registered in the room I was charging the breakfast to. Of course, to him it meant what we Americans call a "first name." I had never heard the phrase before. I was flabbergasted. So I said to the waiter - I do not have a Christian name. Do I need to be Christian to eat here?
He looked very puzzled.
Posted by: David | November 15, 2009 4:51 PM