I was dismayed to learn the other day, that my all-time favourite George Bernard Shaw quote may not in fact have been uttered by him.
Nevertheless, even the misquotation that Britain and the United States are two countries divided by a common language, will ring true with any British Expat who has tried to make their new Home in America.
There are hundreds and probably thousands of words that are different or embody a changed meaning or intent.
British people coming to America often assume that they've picked up everything they need to know about American English from a lifetime of consuming American movies and television.
There is, undeniably, a huge advantage Britons have over other migrants, just by speaking a variant of the same language. It is also astonishing how much British English has itself become Americanised.
Forty years ago it would have been difficult to find a British person alive who pronounced the word secretary in any way other than the short, clipped sec-rit-tree. These days, that sounds old-fashioned to many people in the U.K as the American sec-reh-tar-ee has taken full root. Mind you in Britain forty years ago, no-one said "hi" and few people knew what a teenager was.
In these globalised days American slang takes only a few months to cross the Atlantic, such as the 90's fad of adding "not"on the end of sentences, or saying "I'm like" as a substitute for "I thought" or "I said" which has regrettably survived well into the new Millennium on both sides of the Atlantic.
Perhaps it is because of the every day prevalence of American English in Britain that few British Expats realise what a linguistic minefield they are entering when they cross over that big moat.
The very worst attitude to adopt when arriving on these shores, is what the veteran transatlantic broadcaster Alasdair Cooke once referred to as immediately deciding that "....Americans are British people gone wrong."
There is a long and inglorious history of British sneering at the way Americans speak, often based on ignorant assumptions.
Now of course, we all have our own beefs about American pronunciations. I wince every time I hear the American president say noo-coo-ler for nuclear. I've never quite worked out why some Americans say eye-talians for Italians. (Does this mean the country is called eye-taly?) And I feel like inflicting a great deal of real physical pain on someone when I hear, even seasoned American sports broadcasters, call the tennis championship Wimble-ton or even more horribly Wimple-ton - as if the d in Wimbledon is somehow invisible.
But for every one of these ear-sores, we are equal opportunity manglers of American English. Brits routinely mispronounce relatively simple American place names such as Michigan, Houston and Arkansas. And despite pleas from the performer herself, the British adamantly refuse to pronounce Dionne Warwick's name the way it is pronounced in America - literally war-wick.
In fact, there is a great body of historical evidence that American English is much closer to historical English in England, than the version that is spoken today in modern day Britain.
It may come as a surprise to the sneerers to learn that words such as fall, for autumn, mad for angry, trash for rubbish and scores of other Amercanisms all come from Elizabethan England. Many linguists believe that the accent Shakespeare's plays would have been performed in would have sounded nothing like the classic renditions we've heard by Gielgud or Olivier. These linguists believe that the accent typically heard in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, would had a distinct twang that we would associate today with the west country. A little bit more like, shock of shocks, the American accent.
Indeed, Gielgud and Olivier spoke what we know in Britain as received or BBC English. This is now largely acknowledged to be an upper-class Victorian affectation. It nevertheless became the standard English of public schools and was rammed into the consciousness of the British people with the advent of BBC radio in the 1920s. While it may have created some sort of standard out of a chaotic collection of wildly differing regional dialects, it is an artificial, almost worthless creation that has almost no historical value in the understanding of the way English was spoken.
So if we accept that those early settlers in America took with them some of the vocabulary and sound of historic England, it's still amazing that the language survived the onslaught of
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