"There, I guess King George will be able to read that"
John Hancock, after signing the Declaration of Independence
Friday 4 July
It
would be remiss of me, on this most Independent of days, not to put in
a word for our American cousins. However, since overt (and,
frankly, embarrassing) sincerity doesn't befit an Englishman, I'm going
to have a light-hearted rant about The Western Shores instead.
Especially since joining the ship, I have been forced to admit
that the stereotype of naïvete
and arrogance, although strongly present in some notable exceptions, is
not an accurate portrayal of the American peoples. The biggest
problem, clichéd though it may be, is that we are separated by a
common language. One learns to be tolerant of all manner of
strange cultural querks in those from other countries, but Americans
get a hard time from we English merely because, at first glance, one
might be forgiven for thinking we share a language. This is not
the case. We share a language with Australia. In actual
fact, there may be just as many words and phrases common to the US and
the UK as there are to us and the Aussies, but the basic similarities
in culture - particularly the peculiar
it-really-helps-if-you-grew-up-with-this sense of humour I have spoken
about before - are all there. We listen to Americans and
something in our brain is tempted to say "they're trying to speak my
language, and they're getting it wrong". Even the Germans accept
that Swiss German is a different language. And yet we arrogantly
assume that, just because they use the convenient word 'English' to
describe it, that American is just a wrong form of English. Or,
rather, as they would have me say, that American English is just a wrong form of British
English.
It's not America's fault that they can travel through 6
time zones and still not cross a different country. The hour's
train-ride to the airport costs us more than a flight to
Europe, and how many of us can speak French or German or
Spanish? A little tip for you English who might at some point
wish to win favour with an American - keep reminding yourselves that
they really do speak a different language, and hail from a different
culture, and treat them as foreigners as opposed to Britishers who live
thousands of miles from home and still haven't managed to master our
peculiar culture and speech. Australia, that great land of
criminals and entrepreneurs (and don't go insulting any by assuming
they descend from the latter), loves our Queen more than we do
ourselves, and clings to a culture quite astonishingly close to ours
despite the distance. America, on the other hand, has sweat blood
to
gain its independence from us, on this very day 232 years ago, so let's
not keep pretending and hoping that they secretly still want to be
British at heart, and
embrace the fact that they are a separate and distinct nation.
And next time an American says or does something you don't
understand, instead of trying to correct them, why don't you humbly ask
for a translation?
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Anthony's Blog