See ya, poppet
The difficulties of writing dialogue for characters who share an idiom foreign to the writer – specifically, UKnians writing Yank and Yanks writing UKnian.
[I]t’s fairly common for British writers to create ostensibly American characters who give themselves away in dialogue. The writer need not even be British, necessarily: Lionel Shriver is an American writer who has lived in the U.K. for many years. Her most recent novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” imagines a financial apocalypse set entirely in the United States, albeit in the future. All of the major characters are American. And yet a father assures his son that a set of silverware “could come in useful.” A woman signs off a telephone conversation with her sister by deploying a British term of endearment: “Bye, puppet.”
Wot? The British term of endearment is “poppet,” not “puppet.” Puppet is just weird. Maybe Shriver’s character was accusing her sister of being a mindless automaton.
A woman tells a child, “You’re a bit young to send into the fields. I could be done for violating child labor laws.” (The lingering Britishisms are especially curious because other aspects of the text and dialogue are Americanized—even the novel’s British edition uses “z” rather than “s” in words like “apologize” and “publicized.”)
“My publishers think I have become some kind of linguistic moron,” Shriver told me. “In truth, I am one of the better sources for what is and is not British or American usage.”
And modest, too.
(It’s odd to be uncertain about that phrase – it’s really not American usage. It’s not ambiguous.)
The inverse situation—American-created British characters with off-sounding diction—appears to be less prevalent, everyone agreed, perhaps because many American writers are too unfamiliar with, or intimidated by, British usage and slang to even try. (They may also have less occasion to do so.) Shriver, in any case, has been criticized from this direction as well: some British reviewers of her novel “The Post-Birthday World,” from 2007, attacked the Cockney slang of one of its characters—a charge Shriver labels “ludicrous.”
There’s that modesty again. Wouldn’t they be more likely to know than she is?
Viner happens to be married to an American professor of linguistics, Lynne Murphy, who teaches at the University of Sussex and writes a blog called Separated by a Common Language. Next year, she will publish a book, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.” Novelists, Murphy told me, tend to put their energy into crafting things that a character would say—it’s a less intuitive exercise to try and weed out what a character wouldn’t say. “It’s like trying to prove a negative,” she said.
MyaR (who comments here and is a linguist) tells me Murphy’s blog is excellent.
What’s more, making an extra effort to perfect American dialogue may have risks, Hornby suggested. “Paying American characters special attention can backfire—you spend too much time shoehorning words like ‘sidewalk’ and ‘diaper’ into places where they don’t properly belong, just to show you’re thinking about it,” he explained.
Baby carriage. Dish soap. Trunk. Faucet.
‘Faucet’? Versus… ‘spigot’?
Also, as a speaker of American English (and practically nothing else), “could come in useful” sounds a little odd to me but not outright alien. Should it? (“Could come in handy” would be a more natural phrasing there, certainly, but not automatic.)
And it can be difficult even when you are American – I was writing a Texas character into one of my novels, and even after spending five years in Texas, had to go back and make him sound more like “Texan”. One thing I learned while in Texas is that over the top Texas-style talk seems to be an affectation of a certain type of well-educated, upper crust Texas, such as those in the oil industry. It’s to mark them as Texan, which is probably why it sounds so affected. So I had to work a bit to get this guy into that mode, because I wrote him like the Texans I knew, who were almost all college professors and graduate students, and don’t talk in such a ridiculous manner.
As a Brit who’s lived in the US for going on 9 years now, I’m much better at the American idiom than I used to be, although many British constructions remain. The result is a bit peculiar. To my Brit friends I sound weird, my accent hasn’t really changed but I use elevator not lift, or TV instead of telly. American words, Geordie accent. It’s a winning combination! :-D
It makes my collaborators laugh when I send them a paper and they’re baffled by “whilst” and other such words they consider archaic or pretentious. They’re used to me by now, so they just gently change the offending word or sentence structure with a smiley face comment.
It’s actually useful in the other direction, explaining to Brits what an American means by certain things might not be what they think. A good example is “momentarily”, which Americans use to mean “soon” but Brits often interpret as “for a short period of time”. But I would never be so enamored of my own genius that I would think I knew how to speak “American” better than an actual born and bred person.
I have to disagree with the point about Americans writing British characters. They might have enough sense to steer clear of the slang, but there are differences in sentence construction and emphasis. I’ve read several novels with this exact problem, there’s nothing grammatically wrong per se but it just doesn’t read authentic to a native born Brit.
Jeff – faucet versus tap.
Hoovering – that one struck me as amusing when I first heard it. I shared a room with a British woman in college, and had read enough British lit that I could understand what she meant when she wanted to use the lift, or lift the bonnet. Many of our other friends would look lost when she said “meet at the lift”, so I sort of served as translator, but I could definitely find myself lost at times. I did know what she meant when she said “knickers” or “nappy”, but sometimes I would have to say “huh”? And she did the same with me. It gave us some very funny moments, because we both had a good sense of humor about our “common” language.
In one of our classes, the instructor had us introduce ourselves with something interesting that could help him remember us; one of the students announced that she had spent six months in England, so she could speak “the Queen’s English”. When it came around to my friend, she just smiled, and said that she actually could speak “the Queen’s English”. A quiet slapdown to a rather snobbish young woman who had the habit of letting all of us know that she was wealthier and had more style and class than we did (it was the first time in my life I was in a group of people where I fit in and the wealthy snob was the outsider, since I grew up in a rich, snobbish town that thought it was just disgraceful that my dad raised pigs, and that we actually ate because he raised vegetables and pigs).
Maybe the apocalypse triggered a wave of English refugees. Or it destroyed film archives so that the only shows left to watch were East Enders and The Bill. Or maybe dialects converged pre-apocalypse because of the internet.
We can handwave the dialect in “Mandibles” because it’s in the future. But historical fiction and period drama! Don’t get me started!
My bugbear is anachronistic idiom, accents and affectations. Like the film “The Notebook”. Ryan Gosling plays a WW2 soldier as a 2000s quirky stereotype. Then James Garner plays the same character (in anachronistic order) like he was actually born in the 1920s. Couldn’t watch it. Too grating.
I was watching a period drama just the other day and saw 1950s Australians discussing “hook-ups”. They were also “pissed off”, we didn’t borrow that until the 1980s. Even now “pissed” can cause slight confusion. Angry or drunk…
I also hate it when historical-laconic-Aussie-in-the-war stereotypes have 2010s laconic-Aussie accents and mannerisms. And get “pissed off”. I’ve met real laconic Aussie’s who went to the war. My grandfather is one. He doesn’t and didn’t behave or speak like 2010s heartthrob.
Sea Monster (great nym!) – we were watching some sort of historical fiction recently and I know that several of the things they said are current, but were not common back in the day…surely a few minutes with Google could fix that?
I have written one play that does use anachronisms like that, but it is truly deliberate, because it is a satirical comedy, and I do it knowing that these conversations would not be accurate (for instance, no one spoke modern English back in the classical period; it didn’t exist yet!). Most of these are just cases of someone too lazy to do the research – or worse, someone who doesn’t get it right because they want to make sure the audience will recognize what the character is doing or saying without having to think.
Some writers have a refined understanding on crafting characters and what they say: Hilary Mantel, whose works I’ve never read but whose lectures give pleasure (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/guide). The conversations of characters in Anne Michael’s The Winter Vault can make the reader (at least this reader) uncomfortable eavesdropping on intimacies.
Other writers write subversively engaging the reader, risk of holding one’s breath: Arundhati Roy (an interesting upbringing) on the Naxalites.
I have edited English translations of novels where the translator was a Brit who assured everyone that the translation was thoroughly Americanized. You could tell right away that the translator didn’t quite get American English.
I have a very funny email somewhere from a former colleague, an elderly Cambridge-educated ex-spy, in which he patiently explains that yes, ‘faucet is a word’…’vache is also a word. It’s just not an English word.’ He used to enjoy going through my writing to identify Americanisms; he did train me out of ‘gotten’.
We Brits tend to be eye-rollingly priggish about perceived Americanisms. The hilarious part is that many were in common use in Britain at one time and we stopped using them and America didn’t. So when we tut at these new-fangled American words for stuff we’re being even more idiotic than everyone else is thinking.
One thing that does annoy me, though, and I’m really not sure why, is when British authors use common American English words that we just don’t use much here. “Trash” and “garbage” are (for some reason) common examples. Are they doing this to make the writing more comfortable for American readers? If so, that’s really patronising. Is it something their editors tell them to do?
I think it’s the fact that it’s just so pointless that annoys me. As though Americans are incapable of translating the one true English into their filthy hybrid ;)
@Sea Monster:
It’s definitely older than that. I spent the majority of the 70s being pissed off and explaining my condition to everyone within range. Perhaps it was a regional thing.
@Claire:
My accent is an unholy mixture of North Yorkshire, Geordie and Teesside. I have a seriously difficult time being understood in America and especially – for some reason – in Canada. People just stare at me as if their brains can’t process the sounds my mouth is making as even words, let alone English ones. I’m always tempted to talk like Dick Van Dyke because we all know that’s how Americans think we talk and maybe they’ll finally understand me.
Oh, and yeah, “puppet”? WTF?
“Poppet” is not an endearing term, though. I think it comes from the obvious reference to a child’s doll and is – needless to say – almost exclusively used to refer to women or to men with whom the speaker has a familiar, infantile sort of relationship. A parent might call their male child “poppet”, for example, but otherwise, it is a condescending term of supposed endearment for women. Thankfully, it’s no longer very common. At least, I haven’t heard it used since my grandmother died.
She didn’t call me “poppet” though. She called *my brother* “poppet”. Now you see where all this rage comes from.