Just a Little Different

I can’t help but wonder why it seems many Americans, myself included, are enchanted by British speech.

There’s no question that there is a certain lilt—an accent, if you will—a very different melody than typical American English that can be quite charming. And partly I think it’s the words and the way they are used. American English seems to have all the same words as British English, but they don’t always mean quite the same things: cookie vs. biscuit, (potato) chip vs. crisp, (French) fries vs. chips, etc.

It might be that these two things in combination give an American listener the impression that a foreign language is being spoken that they can nevertheless understand: recognizable words being used in sometimes unconventional ways with an accent that sounds at once both eminently suitable and yet exotic.

If this idea is taken too far, however, we run into problems like Shakespeare’s plays. Most of us like to think we understand exactly what is being said, but about 10-15% of the words Shakespeare (whoever they were) used in their plays have fallen out of use or simply changed meanings over time. One of my favorite lines (from Hamlet) is, “As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief.” I used to think that this was a fantastic way of telling someone I was going to be fast and funny, but ‘wit’ here really means intelligence. Since Shakespeare’s time, the qualities of being intelligent and clever overlapped with being humorous enough that ‘witty’ came to mean ‘funny’ to most people, a phenomenon known as semantic drift.

“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” is another good example. Juliet isn’t calling out to Romeo because she can’t see him and doesn’t know where he is (he’s standing directly under her damn window!), she is lamenting that he is a Romeo in that whiney teenage sort of way, by asking whyyyyy must he be a Romeo, because, y’know, families.

But a modernized version of Shakespeare’s English is just different enough to entice us, invite us in and make us feel almost at home, even though we’re just visiting.