Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [37]
During all those years of reading A Christmas Carol, we were never entirely sure what was meant when Fezziwig, in the midst of a dance in which he and his wife were “top couple,’’ was said with great admiration to have “cut.” In fact the word itself is in quotations, as though even in Dickens’s time it was too slangy to stand alone. Since the description continues, “cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs,” the five of us have decided that what Fezziwig does is what we call a split.
But until recently we had no idea why the boy Scrooge asks to buy the prize turkey for the Cratchit family after his spiritual resurrection replies, “Walk-ER!” Even on my English trips, I got no more than a puzzled look. (“That sounds very much like one of those cockney phrases Americans insert in films,” one English editor said dryly.) My son and I were therefore enormously chuffed to discover in the Ackroyd book that the word was a piece of street slang that “lasted three or four months only” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and therefore was probably a remnant of Dickens’s boyhood. “It was used by young women to deter an admirer, by young boys mocking a drunk, or to anyone impeding the way,” Ackroyd writes. Mystery solved. (And another wonderful turn of phrase added: “What a shocking bad hat!” contemporaneous with Walk-ER and aimed at anyone of really singular appearance.)
Not only is this no longer the language of London, but English is in some ways no longer the language of London. One study showed that more than three hundred languages are now spoken in the city’s schools, from Bengali, Punjabi, and Urdu to Cantonese and Jamaican patois. (“Babelians,” Zadie Smith calls them in her novel of the new immigrant London, White Teeth.) And American slang and usage has become such a consistent presence, not only because of visitors but because of exported rap music and sitcoms, that the lines between argots are relatively porous. While once we were warned to ask for the bill, not the check, and to order a sweet, not dessert, almost no wait staff in a London restaurant looks twice if you ask the American way.
This does not work both ways, however; one English visitor told of the general hilarity that ensued when she ordered pasta in a New York restaurant, pasta being pronounced in England in a way that more or less rhymes with “master.” Nevertheless, there are certainly times when the English treat their American cousins like subverbal idiots; perhaps the concierge did not realize he was leaning slightly forward and raising his voice appreciably when he told me about the theater tickets he’d acquired for us: “They are located in the stalls. Stalls. What you call the or-che-stra.” It was all I could do not to reply, “I know what the stalls are. I’ve read Trollope and Ngaio Marsh!”
On the other hand, the poor man had probably had his own language trials, judging by the performance one night in Piccadilly Circus by a group of drunken American men in Union Jack tee shirts who were having what they considered an uproarious conversation that seemed to consist entirely of the expressions “cheerio” and “bloody.” Of course, one of them also felt moved to quote from Wayne’s World about Piccadilly Circus: “What a shitty circus! Where