Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Prodigal Tongue
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Murphy, M. Lynne
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/
CITY: Brighton
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES: BOOKS ARE WRITTEN UNDER THE NAME M. LYNNE MURPHY–DP
PERSONAL
Married; children: a daughter.
EDUCATION:University of Massachusetts–Amherst, B.A.; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, A.M., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, linguist, and educator. Taught in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand and at Baylor University, Waco, TX, both c. 1990s; then University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, England, beginning 2000, professor of linguistics.
AWARDS:National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, 2016.
WRITINGS
Author of the blog Separated by a Common Language.
SIDELIGHTS
M. Lynne Murphy, also known as Lynne Murphy, is a linguistics professor. Murphy also has an alter ego called Lynneguist who writes the Separated by a Common Language blog, which discusses differences between American and British English. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award, Murphy grew up in western New York state and taught in South Africa and Texas before moving for a teaching post at the University of Sussex in Great Britain. In addition to American and British English, her research focuses on communication, dictionaries, intercultural communication, language, lexicon, linguistic theory, linguistics, politeness, and vocabulary.
Murphy is the author of several books focusing on her academic interests. In her book titled The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English, Murphy examine the British and American strands of the English language and how speakers of each language view each other. In the process, she also retails how the shared English language works. In addressing the attitudes of British versus American English speakers, Murphy points out that American have an inferiority complex about their use of the English language while the British think their use of English language is under attack.
“A big part of what I’m trying to communicate … is that the assumptions underlying those attitudes are often just wrong,” Murphy noted in an interview with Welcome to Literary Ashland website contributor Ed Battistella, adding: “The English spoken in Britain is no older than the English spoken in America, in that they both started with the same people on a certain island.” In the interview, Murphy pointed out that certain elements of the English merely developed differently in the United States as opposed to Great Britain. “The English now spoken in England is not ‘original English,'” Murphy told Battistlla, adding: “It’s just ‘sedentary English.'”
Murphy coined the word “amerilexicophobia” for the distaste that the the British often display for American English. “I’ve coined a number of words relating to the British media’s treatment of American English, because a lot of that treatment seems to be pathological in nature,” Murphy told Welcome to Literary Ashland website contributor Battistella, adding: “Amerilexicosis is the most extreme form of the disease, marked by paranoia and ‘delusions of America.'”
Murphy writes that in many ways American English grammar and punctuation seems to stay closer to tradition than British English. “If she had gone only this far, Murphy’s book would have been just another addition to the ‘divided by a common language’ library of British-American moans and quirks,” wrote Financial Times Online contributor Michael Skapinker, adding: “But what lifts The Prodigal Tongue is Murphy’s deep learning, lightly worn, in linguistics and linguistic history.”
As an example, Financial Times Online contributor Skapinker points to Murphy’s discussion of the American usage of the past participle “gotten.” In the process, Murphy discusses the subjunctive moods and their disappearance and reappearance in American English. According to Murphy, America’s return to the use of “gotten” stemmed from Americans becoming more interested in American writers and speakers of English and ultimately no longer considering its use to be vulgar in writing.
In the final analysis Murphy writes that the differences between American and British English are really not significant, as evidenced by their mutual ability to understand books and movies created either in America or Great Britain. “English is full of inconsistencies and pitfalls, and no single set of standards is necessarily superior,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted about Murphy’s overall thesis in The Prodigal Tongue, calling the book an “entertaining work” and noting Murphy’s “delightfully sardonic style.” A Publishers Weekly ontriutor remarked: “The book’s momentum comes from Murphy’s witty presentation, but its real power comes from its commitment to inquiry.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of The Prodigal Tongue, p. 180.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (March 23, 2018), Michael Skapinker, “The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy — the Language of Shakespeare.”
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (March 24, 2018), Brian Maye, review of The Prodigal Tongue.
Separated by a Common Language blog, https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/ (June 24, 2018), author information.
University of Sussex website, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ (June 24, 2018), author faculty profile.
Welcome to Literary Ashland, http://literaryashland.org/ (April 11, 2018), Ed Battistella, “An Interview with Lynne Murphy, author of The Prodigal Tongue.”
About Lynneguist
Hi, I’m Lynne Murphy, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex.
Since 2006, my alter ego Lynneguist has used this blog to explore the often subtle differences in American and British English. At first this was a distraction from the linguistic research I do at my day job, but increasingly my professional work has been inspired by the topics here.
In 2016, I was a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, preparing a general-audience book on British and American Englishes for Penguin USA and Oneworld (UK). It's scheduled for publication in Spring 2018, under the title The Prodigal Tongue (with different subtitles for the US and UK releases).
My story so far: I grew up in western New York state and studied linguistics at the Universities of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). My first two academic posts were in South Africa and Texas in the 1990s.
In 2000, I moved to Brighton, England to work at Sussex University. Since then, I have married a Londoner, acquired a British passport, and become a parent. My daughter (b. 2007) is referred to here as “Grover”, in some effort to protect her privacy.
Getting in touch…
The comments section on each blog post is possibly the best part of it. Please join the conversation! The comments policy is here.
Please use my lynneguist email address for blog-related business
For university-related business, please use my university email address.
Follow @lynneguist on Twitter for the UK/US “Difference of the Day” and lots of observations and links about US-UK language and culture.
“Like” Lynneguist on Facebook for more links and fun stuff.
Prof M.Lynne Murphy
Post: Professor of Linguistics (English)
Other posts: Director of Teaching and Learning (School of English)
Location: ARTS B B348
Email: M.L.Murphy@sussex.ac.uk
Telephone numbers
Internal: 8844
UK: 01273 678844
International: +44 1273 678844
Research expertise:
American English, British English, Communication, Dictionaries, English, Inter-cultural Communication, Intercultural communication, Language, Lexicon, Linguistic Theory, Linguistics, Politeness, Vocabulary
download vCard
download vCard to your mobile
Biography
I hold a B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and an A.M. (master of arts) and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
After leaving Illinois, I held academic posts at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and Baylor University (Texas), before moving to England and the University of Sussex in January 2000.
In my spare time I write a blog on the differences between American and British Englishes, Separated by a Common Language, and a slighter one about lexical relations called Who Shall Remain Antonymous.
In 2016, I was a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.The resulting book, The Prodigal Tongue: the love-hate relationship between British and American English, will be released in spring 2018 by Penguin USA and Oneworld (UK).
I am very happy to consider applications for doctoral study in my areas of research interest. Please see my Research page for further information.
Role
I am Professor of Linguistics and Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of English. My job incorporates research, teaching and administration.
An Interview with Lynne Murphy, author of THE PRODIGAL TONGUE
Posted on April 11, 2018 by Ed Battistella
Email, RSS Follow
Lynne Murphy is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex. She grew up in New York state, she studied Linguistics at the Universities of Massachusetts and Illinois, and has taught in South Africa and Texas. Since 2000, she has lived in Brighton, England, where she now has an English husband and English daughter. She blogs as Lynneguist at the award-winning blog Separated by a Common Language and in 2016 she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Murphy is the author of several books, including Lexical meaning (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, 2010) and Semantic relations and the lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Her most recent book, released this spring in the US and UK, is The Prodigal Tongue: the love-hate relationship between American and British English.
Publishers Weekly calls The Prodigal Tongue “thoughtful, funny, and approachable” with a “commitment to inquiry.”
You can follow lynneguist on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lynneguist
Ed Battistella: I’m really enjoying The Prodigal Tongue. You’ve coined the term Amerilexicosis. What is that?
Lynne Murphy: Thanks, Ed! I’ve coined a number of words relating to the British media’s treatment of American English, because a lot of that treatment seems to be pathological in nature. Amerilexicosis is the most extreme form of the disease, marked by paranoia and “delusions of America”. You see that when British people blame Americans for the now-popular British pronunciation of controversy as conTROVersy or when they think “It’s a big ask” is an import from US business culture. In reality the pronunciation is 100% British and big ask is an Australianism, but that hasn’t stopped some English people from pointing at them and saying “Look! The Americans are taking over our language and ruining it!”
EB: Do the British have a linguistic superiority complex? Or does the US have a bit of an inferiority complex, language-wise?
LM: They both can be true—and they feed each other. There’s a tendency for British (especially English) people to view standard British English as “the real thing” and to see the parts of American English that differ as “mistakes” or “non-standard”. But Americans don’t tend to see the British differences as mistakes, and they often assume that if it’s said in England, it must be proper. Americans often admire British English, and that helps stoke the British feeling that their English is the best one.
A big part of what I’m trying to communicate through The Prodigal Tongue is that the assumptions underlying those attitudes are often just wrong. The English spoken in Britain is no older than the English spoken in America, in that they both started with the same people on a certain island. The differences we see in Britain and the US aren’t there because a new English sprouted up in the colonies, but because the language forked and developed in different ways in different places. The English now spoken in England is not “original English”. It’s just “sedentary English”.
EB: Does language mean different things emotionally to the average Brit versus the average American?
LM: We probably have to be careful here when talking about “the average Brit”—since not all Britons are English and the English have a different relationship to the language than the Scots or Welsh do. The thing that’s hard for Americans to really understand is how much accent matters in Britain and how much accent is intertwined with social class—and even what social class means in the British context. I mean, Americans have accents and they belong to socioeconomic classes, of course. And we know some accents are discriminated against in America. But most Americans just do not have the kind of accent–class sensitivity that comes naturally in England, where the highest-status accent has its own name: Received Pronunciation. It even has a nickname: RP.
Americans seem to get more exercised about grammatical things and punctuation and the like. Perhaps not the average American, but those who have reason to think about language. When I get a new follower on Twitter and I see they’ve written “Team Oxford Comma” in their bio, I can be pretty sure it’s an American. The style guides, like the Chicago Manual of Style or Associated Press Stylebook, are huge in comparison to their modern UK counterparts. National Grammar Day is an American invention—and so forth. In some places where Americans use hard-and-fast rules about grammar, British writers and editors are more willing to say “see what sounds right in the context”.
Which is to say, Americans are more willing to be told what to do grammar-wise (and to then tell others what to do). That sounds kind of subservient to the rules, which you might not think of as an American characteristic. But it is! And I think it comes from a really democratic urge. If the rules of grammar are written down, they can be the same for everybody and everybody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and learn those rules. The British way relies on having an “ear” for the language—something that you’re not taught and that not everyone can be expected to do well. I talk about this a lot in the book—that for Americans, English is a tool that anyone can learn to use well (if they try hard enough). In England, though everybody uses English, there is a sense that not everyone is expected to be able to really master it—it’s not so clearly seen as a teachable skill. Though I think this difference goes way back to the start of the United States, it’s probably been strengthened by the fact that most Americans have not-so-long-ago ancestors who had to learn English as a second language.
EB: As an American living and working in England do you find people commenting on your speech? What do they say?
LM: When you’re an American in England, Americanness becomes your main identifying characteristic and personality trait. I’m not “that red-headed woman” or “that professor from the university”, I’m “that American woman”. These days, I tend to get comments like “Your accent is rather soft”—because I often hit my t’s in words like butter and my vowels have moved in the direction of the people around me. (I’ll never be mistaken for English in England—though I’ve had people in the States think I’m British.) But a big part of the reason those vowels have moved is because I was mocked for my Great Lakes vowels when I first moved here. So, when I say box in England, it’s a bit more like “bawks” now, rather than my native “bahks”.
People do tend to assume that anything unfamiliar that comes out of my mouth must be an Americanism—so often I have to explain, “no, that’s just a Lynneism”.
EB: A lot of the differences you discuss are very subtle and go beyond the usual biscuit-and-cookies sort of thing. Can you give us a couple of examples of the complexity of linguistic differences?
LM: Well, even the biscuit-cookie thing is complex, because the British now use the word cookie, but they don’t use it like Americans do. Many Brits make a distinction between biscuits (which are the cookies they’re used to eating—they’re always crunchy) and cookies, which are the big soft, round ones you can buy in the mall, plus Oreos and anything with chocolate chips—that is, the specific recipes that have been imported from the US. When I make cookies out of my Betty Crocker cookbook, my English friends don’t recognize them as cookies. They compliment me on my “little cakes”. Their meaning of cookie just doesn’t extend as far as the American one does.
I have a lot of food examples in the book, I could talk about them for days. But to try to give you something different, there’s middle class—which in American has the feeling of ‘normal, just like everybody else’, whereas in Britain middle class often connotes something more like ‘well off’ and even ‘pretentious’.
And then there are the differences in how we use polite words. The way Americans use excuse me before cutting in front of someone can sound really pushy in England, because there it’s usually used after the sin, not before it. The English use please twice as much as Americans do, because they mostly use it when making very small requests. Adding please to little requests in American can make the speaker sound impatient or like they’re pleading. So in ordering in a restaurant, for example, Americans tend not to use it. They say things like I’d like the salad where Brits often order in a way that sounds (to an American ear) like asking permission: Can I have a salad, please? In new work that I’m doing with my colleague Rachele De Felice, we’re looking at thanking and we’re finding that Americans thank a lot more than British folk do. We’re wondering if that sometimes does the work that Brits would do with please. To give one example, if you put a plate of cookies in front of me and said “Would you like one?” I might Americanly say “Yes, thanks.” But the Brit would almost certainly say “Yes, please.”
EB: You also have a terrific blog, Separated by a Common Tongue. Did the book emerge from the blog?
LM: I’d say the blog gave me the opportunity to write the book. I started the blog as a hobby, to satisfy my lexicographical desire to write down the words and meanings I was learning in England. As the blog became more popular, I started talking about the subject in a lot of public venues. I gave a talk called How America Saved the English Language to a lot of English audiences. It provided the outline of the first six chapters of the book.
When I started writing the blog, my professional research was more about how vocabulary is organized in the mind. I was researching things like how children learn which words are opposites. This is to say, I was not a sociolinguist or a language historian. But as I wrote the blog, I wanted to learn more about the hows and whys behind the differences, and so I learned a lot about it. And then I had enough for a book that really looks at the issues, rather than just listing differences.
EB: Are there some Briticisms that play better in the US than others? And vice versa?
LM: Depends on what you mean by ‘play better’. Americans are acquiring Briticisms all the time and not always knowing it. For instance, people who disappear go missing now. That was an import from Britain about 20 years ago, but I don’t think most Americans knew it was British at the time. It just slipped in. Similarly Americans now take gap years, they vet candidates, they’re gutted when those candidates don’t win, and I just today read a Facebook status from an American friend having a lie-in. Do Americans know these came over from Britain? I’d say most don’t. So they play well with American English. (I have to recommend Ben Yagoda’s blog Not One-Off Britishisms here. He is keeping track of Briticisms that are sneaking into US journalism.)
But if by “play better” you mean that Americans enjoy these words as Briticisms, my sense is that Americans love British words that sound a bit silly to them. I’ve been watching The Good Place and there are a number of points where British English is gently mocked as silly and incomprehensible. My colleague Justyna Robinson and I are currently doing some research into how British English is stereotyped in American culture and I’ll be including some Good Place material in that!
In the UK direction, there are the Americanisms that aren’t noticed and just slide in and get used, then there are the ones that are noticed and they usually have someone complaining about them until they’ve been around long enough that they just feel like English. I love it when British people complain about the American use of reach out and they say “Why do we need this Americanism? Why can’t we just stay with contact?” And I get to reply “Well, why would you want that Americanism?” because the verb to contact came over from the US in the 1930s. (Incidentally, I hate reach out too. But I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to make that point about contact!)
I have a project in development where I look at how British people continue phrases like “As the Americans say…” or “This is what the Americans call…”. These crop up a lot in British media and politics, and they’re often expressions with roots in metaphor. Whether they’re actually things that Americans say is another matter. Sometimes they’re not, but they reveal a bit about what the British sense of “Americanness” is. So it might be said that colorful American metaphors go down well.
EB: I imagine that some difference between British and American are dialect sensitive —and that some differences pertain to some British speech but not others. Is that the case?
LM: Absolutely. It’s pretty much impossible to compare accents on an international scale because two accents in Britain might have less in common with each other than they have with one accent from the US. And it’s important for Americans to note that Brits will get very annoyed if you’re heard talking about someone having a “British accent”, especially since most Americans use it synonymously with “English accent”, ignoring that there are other countries in Britain. (I’ll pause to note here that English people conflate “English” and “British” a lot too, but that they tend to notice that conflation more when Americans do it!)
At the level of spelling, it’s easy to make the international comparisons. For vocabulary and grammar, you have to be a little careful.
EB: Can you enlighten us on the pronunciation of “h”?
LM: You mean the name of the letter? The usual in Britain, like in the US, is to call it “aitch”. But in the UK, it’s increasingly called “haitch”, which is a fairly common pronunciation in Ireland and may have some class connotations in England — that is, haitch is often heard as a bit down-market. Some might say it that way because they are hypercorrecting—they want not to be dropping their h’s, since h-dropping has been a marker of lower-class speech since the 1800s. So they add an extra h just to be sure. (The British did the same with herb—starting to pronounce its h in the 19th century.) But haitch also might stem from the sense that almost all the other letters have names that start with their sound. So why shouldn’t H? All I know is: my 10-year-old says haitch a lot, but she also sometimes catches herself doing it and corrects to “aitch”. I think it must be a matter of discussion in her school.
EB: Are you working on another book?
LM: At the moment, I’m trying to get some smaller projects into press. But I do tend to have book-sized ideas, and I’ve got two book proposals burbling in my head. The problem now is choosing between them.
Cover of the UK edition
EB: Thanks for talking with us. I love The Prodigal Tongue. But I notice that the UK and US editions have different covers. What’s up with that?
LM: It has two different publishers, so they get to have their own way with it, and publishers have firm ideas about what will work in their markets cover-wise. I think they know what they’re doing, because both my husband and I have had books with different covers in the US and UK, and our American friends tell us that the US covers are better, and our British friends tell us the UK covers are better.
I insisted that the subtitle differ by country: that American should come first in America and British in Britain. It was a nice idea, but it’s made talking about the book a bit more difficult when I’m speaking with international audiences!
It’s been great talking with you, Ed. Thanks!
6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1528153102025 1/2
Print Marked Items
Murphy, Lynne: THE PRODIGAL
TONGUE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Murphy, Lynne THE PRODIGAL TONGUE Penguin (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-14-
313110-6
What is it about Americans' way with words that makes Brits so angry? An American linguistics professor
attempts to find out.
Murphy (Linguistics/Univ. of Sussex), who lives in Britain and writes the blog Separated by a Common
Language, hears frequent complaints "about the wrecking ball that is American English." In this book, she
tries to understand how it became "Linguistic Public Enemy Number 1" and explains the phenomenon she
calls amerilexicosis, "a pathologically unhinged reaction to American English." As the author notes, many
American phrases that proponents of British English detest come from Britain. The earliest uses of "might
of," considered an American monstrosity, "have been found in letters sent in England in the 1770s." Murphy
covers all the greatest linguistic hits--e.g., the -or/-our divide in words like "color"--but she tends to
generalize: not every American or Brit speaks as she describes. Some of her examples, even in the service
of legitimate points, leave room for debate. The author defends the supposedly American practice of turning
nouns into verbs by writing, "people are tasked with doing things because that's shorter than giving
someone the task of doing something." One might respectfully argue that "he asked me to clean my room"
is shorter and better than "I've been tasked with cleaning my room." But perhaps that speaks to Murphy's
thesis: English is full of inconsistencies and pitfalls, and no single set of standards is necessarily superior.
This is an entertaining work that defends English's so-called Americanization, and the author has a
delightfully sardonic style, as when she tells Brits, "Americans call your football soccer because you taught
them to....Soccer came from the full name of the game, association football. The word comes from England.
You should be proud of it. There, that feels better."
A passionate defense (or is it defence?) of the "fantastically flexible medium" that is English.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Murphy, Lynne: THE PRODIGAL TONGUE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e73b56e7.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248052
6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1528153102025 2/2
The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate
Relationship Between American and
British English
Publishers Weekly.
265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p180.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English
Lynne Murphy. Penguin, $17 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-14-313110-6
Murphy, an American linguistics professor, longtime U.K. resident, and creator of the Separated by a
Common Language blog, continues her investigation of the unique relationship between British and
American English in this thoughtful, funny, and approachable book. Murphy frames the divide in terms of
illness: the British are pathologically afflicted by "Amerilexicosis" (obsessive vitriol toward Americanisms
in British English), while Americans neurotically suffer from "AVIC" (American verbal inferiority
complex). Murphy uses the drama of these opposing anxieties to draw attention to grammatical minutiae
and spelling differences and to explain esoteric linguistic concepts such as prototypes in terms of how bacon
doesn't refer to the same thing in the U.S. and the U.K. because "the set of properties that makes something
supremely bacon-y" is different in each place. She also shares surprising factual tidbits--Oxford University
Press's British and American dictionary databases only overlap in 78% of their definitions--and revealing
cultural divergences--saying ate as et is considered standard pronunciation in the U.K. but is often thought
of as a trait of backwoods accents in the U.S. The book's momentum comes from Murphy's witty
presentation, but its real power comes from its commitment to inquiry and its profound belief that
"communication involves a million little acts of faith." Agent: Daniel Conway, DHH Literary Agency.
(Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English." Publishers
Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 180. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116565/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42ff9579.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116565
The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy — the language of Shakespeare
American English is truer to tradition than the British like to think
Michael Skapinker MARCH 23, 2018 Print this page3
Lynne Murphy has a British spouse, British citizenship and a British job — as professor of linguistics at Sussex university. But she is a US citizen too, who grew up in New York state, which makes her just the person for Brits to complain to about Americans ruining the language. In The Prodigal Tongue, her witty and erudite account of the relationship between these two anglophone tribes, she culls some insults from British newspapers: “mindless”, “ugly and pointless”, “infectious, destructive and virulent”. Prince Charles called American English “very corrupting”.
Murphy concedes that American management-speak can be irritating. But Brits who dislike “singing from the same hymn sheet”, “360 degree thinking”, “flag it up” and “across the piece” should know that these all started in the UK. Similarly, purists who carp about grammatical solecisms such as “try and find” instead of “try to find” should refer to a 2007 study which found that Brits use “try and” 71 per cent of the time in speech and 24 per cent in writing, compared with Americans who used it only 24 per cent of the time in speech and 5 per cent in writing.
American English, in both grammar and pronunciation, often hugs tradition more closely than many British varieties do. The American sounding of the final “r” in river, for example, is closer to the pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time than in much of England today, where the sounded “r” after a vowel has disappeared, although it remains in Scottish speech. Americans, to the irritation of many Brits, still use the past participle “gotten” and more frequently employ the subjunctive — “I suggest he pull up his socks” rather than the “pulls up” that is now common in the UK.
If she had gone only this far, Murphy’s book would have been just another addition to the “divided by a common language” library of British-American moans and quirks. But what lifts The Prodigal Tongue is Murphy’s deep learning, lightly worn, in linguistics and linguistic history. She provides fascinating evidence, for example, that Americans did not retain “gotten” and the subjunctive mood. They lost them and then brought them back.
In 1909, Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist, wrote that “gotten” had gone out of use in the US. The New Yorker still prefers “have got”. “And yet, here in the 21st century, I’ve got over it sounds fairly ungrammatical to American ears,” Murphy writes.
Why did the US return to “gotten”? Because Americans stopped looking across the Atlantic at British use and turned westward instead, to their own writers and English speakers. “Archaisms like gotten, which had been considered ‘too vulgar’ for formal publication, started sounding less bad to more people.”
So too with the subjunctive. In 1906, the Fowler brothers, in their style guide The King’s English, pronounced the subjunctive “almost meaningless to Englishmen”. In the US, it started to reappear in the mid to late-1800s. By 1991, a study found that the subjunctive appeared in context in published American English about 80 per cent of the time. “This return of the subjunctive is one of the most startling things to happen to English in centuries,” Murphy writes.
Why did it come back? Murphy is unsure, but offers some theories. The subjunctive appears in the Bible and Americans, more religious than Brits, started using it. Or possibly German and Italian immigrants to the US carried over the subjunctive from their own languages. Or perhaps Americans had used the subjunctive all along, but had avoided it in published work in deference to British style — a deference now roughly cast aside.
Having stoked UK-US rivalry, Murphy draws on her dual nationality to point out that the two English versions do not actually differ that much. In spite of the odd misunderstanding, the two countries have no difficulty with each other’s books and movies.
She points to the UK newspaper columnists (Oliver Kamm of The Times and me) who have extolled the benefits of having a mutually comprehensible language to export to the world. Now that we have so successfully done so, Murphy observes that the language today belongs to the hundreds of millions on every continent who speak it mostly to each other and who find native speakers, whether British or American, an unwelcome, verbose and often incomprehensible intrusion.
The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between British and American English, by Lynne Murphy, Oneworld, RRP£16.99/ Penguin, RRP$17, 368 pages
Michael Skapinker is an FT columnist
Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy
Browser review
Queen Elizabeth with US president Barack Obama on May 24th, 2011 in London, England. In the Prodigal Tongue, Lynne Murphy explores the relationship between British and American English. Photograph: Getty Images
Queen Elizabeth with US president Barack Obama on May 24th, 2011 in London, England. In the Prodigal Tongue, Lynne Murphy explores the relationship between British and American English. Photograph: Getty Images
Brian Maye
Sat, Mar 24, 2018, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Mar 24, 2018, 00:00
The subtitle is “the love-hate relationship between British- and American-English”. Conservative linguists on this side of the pond tend to bemoan the “damage” American-English is doing the language.
Lynne Murphy coins the term “amerilexicophobia” for this distaste (the fear is based on the belief that it’s taking over) and shows that is based on very shaky ground. Her “Lynneguist’s Law” (she’s fond of neologisms) states: “Any list of seven ‘Americanisms’ or ‘Britishisms’, not compiled by a trained lexicographer, will contain nonsense” and she proves this contention with many – and surprising – examples.
While the work is certainly scholarly (Murphy is a professor of linguistics) and probes the minutiae of grammar, spelling, phonetics etc., the engaging, thoughtful and humorous approach makes for a readable and informative experience.
English is full of inconsistencies and pitfalls and to claim superiority is foolish. It’s also a “fantastically flexible medium” to be enjoyed rather than fretted over.
Sat, Mar 24, 2018, 00:00