Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [38]
The other problem with learning language from books is that literature frequently reflects an exaggerated form of normal dialogue. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, for instance, have a hyperannuated adolescent voice that bears homage to, but doesn’t always mirror exactly, the footloose orphan of the nineteenth century or the disenchanted prep school boy of the twentieth. Surely the Pickwickians speak like a series of playlets—not surprising given Dickens’s affinity for the theater—not like actual human beings.
In fact, while I had managed to wend my way through various novels, had come to understand what it meant when Rumpole’s father-in-law referred to the Old Bailey as “not exactly the SW1 of the legal profession,” I was not really prepared to use these locutions in real life. And I was certain I had no idea how to pronounce many of the words I had learned to recognize with my eyes: How in the world did you actually say Cholmondeley or Gloucestershire? It remains a source of shame to me that through much of my girlhood I pronounced the name of the river that runs famously through London with the “th” fully articulated and a long a after. “Thames,” one of my high-school teachers finally said, “rhymes with gems.” As a reader, English place-names had become what Russian surnames had always been: something to register with the mind and the eye but never to venture with the tongue.
These concerns, too, were put off because I never actually visited London, until I hired as a nanny for our firstborn (the very selfsame writer mentioned above) a Mancunian woman, late the manager of a rock-and-roll band. (Until I met Kay, I would have thought a Mancunian was a person who came from some exotic foreign land, not someone who came from Manchester.) Early on we got into a frustrating rondelay about whether my son had any vests or jumpers. Eventually it became clear that Kay was referring to what I knew as undershirts and sweaters, and I showed her where they had been packed away after the baby shower. Over time sometimes I called them vests, and sometimes she called them undershirts. (Once there was a contretemps over a “dummy,” which turned out to be a term that had never crossed my field of vision during my reading. This was a pacifier. I don’t believe in them.) Eventually we even developed some conversational Englishisms around the house; for example, when one evening my husband felt moved to tell Kay that he found completely unintelligible her Mancunian accent—which, in his defense, even some Londoners find challenging—she replied, “Sod off, Gerry.” This became a term of art around the house for months to come, despite the fact that my Lonely Planet British Phrasebook informs me that its origins are in the word “sodomy.” But the explanation continues, “Most British people who use this term don’t mean anything sexually menacing by it…you may consider yourself insulted, but not too much.”
The fact that there exists a British phrasebook to, in its words, “avoid embarrassing British–U.S. differences” says a great deal about the language chasm between the two. It’s been often remarked upon, and sometimes it goes both ways, although most of the time the Americans are the philistines. The Irish writer John Connolly, for example, has decided for whatever reason to set his suspense novels in various parts of the United States. (It’s probably the same impulse that has led Californian Elizabeth George to write a series of books about a titled inspector for Scotland Yard.) But Connolly blew it in a small way in a recent novel when his American hero put on a pair of trainers, a term of art for sneakers that few people in Maine or Louisiana would ever have heard of. On the other hand, one editor at a British publishing house was trying to see that one of her American writers made it across the pond successfully and wasn’t sure there wasn’t a glitch in a manuscript she’d gotten. “How would you describe chicken-fried steak?” she asked. (Yuck.)
You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed