English language problems

The British newspaper I used to work for is good enough, for old time's sake, to airmail me its daily edition so that once I've ploughed through the New York Times and gathered why New York City is bankrupt, I can then plough through the English paper and bone up on why Britain is broke.

I've just done this and I've come on an amusing piece by Mr Stanley Reynolds whom I always turn to because he's a Cooke in reverse – an American who's settled in England – and he seems to have as much trouble explaining America to Britons at arms' length as I have at long distance. 

Mr Reynolds suffers from a speech defect which is peculiar to expatriates. You might call it, and I have no doubt the neurologists will, fractured, cross-cultural idiom or vernacular intercept. Please don’t be put off by this high-sounding gobbledegook – well, there I go right now, to people who are echoing 'high-sounding what?' I'd have to explain how the word 'gobbledegook' came about and that would mean telling you about a dead congressman named Maury Maverick and that would mean explaining the origin of the word 'maverick' which is fascinating in itself but will get us nowhere with Mr Reynolds. 

He is a man brought up on baseball and, in petulant moments in his new homeland, he finds himself reverting to vivid baseball idiom which has passed into the American language for situations having nothing to do with baseball except that they recall quickly and vividly, if you know baseball, various sorts of emotional frustration. This transfer to life situations of an idiom rooted in a game is common enough in all languages. Englishmen contemplating some tricky problem in their business or private life will say (or they used to) 'Looks like a pretty sticky wicket!' Now baseball, I don't know why, has fed into American speech many more expressions which are used, and fairly accurately, by people who never played baseball but through long practice sense the particular emotion they express. 

I remember my own first encounter with a baseball idiom and how it threw me. I'd just arrived at Yale, made a few friends quickly, and one of them was a Texan who never smiled. It took quite some time, by the way, for me to see in him one of the drollest characters I've ever known because he not only didn't signal a joke, he looked almost miserable after making it. And one football weekend, he met a girl and he took an instant shine to her. Like most Texans, he was extremely courteous and gallant in a very low-key way and maybe... maybe that was his trouble, because after a big date with her in New York, when he returned to Newhaven he looked more woebegone than ever. 

'How d'you make out, Bill?' we asked him. He shook his head, 'Never got to first base.' I'd had no idea that his tenderness for this girl entailed teaching her baseball and I had a picture of him lobbing a ball to her and lobbing a ball and she missing it and galumphing off to first base and reaching it long after she'd been run out, so to speak. I was instructed later that in any human situation in which you fail before you've started, you never got to first base. 

Mr Reynolds is at once lucky and cursed by liking cricket too, so he flatters himself every now and then, after he's blurted out a baseball idiom, that he can make all clear by translating it into cricket terms. The trouble here is that the emotional situations in cricket are, shall we say, not quite so fraught or cynical as they are in baseball and so they don't always cover the same agonies of the human condition. 

Here's a fair example of the sort of ordeal Mr Reynolds can get himself into. He's talking about the blank look that appears on the faces of Britons after he's dropped a baseball metaphor. What really puts the glaze in their eyes, he says, is when I cannot think of any appropriate cricketing translation for the baseball metaphor and have to explain the original in a verbal footnote. 'Take two and hit to right!' I say. And then he stomps off into the bog of his explanation. And that simply means that the first two pitches – er..., that's like, er..., two deliveries – come down so the batsman can tell what the ball's doing and then swing on the next one and hit out to right field. 'What,' the Englishman will say, 'is a right field?' Mr Reynolds lets off a deep sigh. Then there follows 20 minutes of drawing diagrams of a baseball diamond (that's the shape of the pitch) on the back of a beer mat, or coaster and, when it's all over, my eyes are glazed as well. 

I bleed for Mr Reynolds because I've been there myself. When I was filming America with a British crew there came a time when I had to say a little speech to camera, I've forgotten what now but I was saying something about an historical character like: 'During his lifetime this suspicion was only a rumour but since his death it's been proved to a fare-thee-well'. The take went perfectly, the director was satisfied, we were about to move on. And then the sound recorder/recordist came up to me with a wrinkled brow and said, 'Proved to a fare-thee-well, whatever does it mean?' I said, 'Er.. well, it means a... it means er... er... proved completely.' 'Why didn’t you say so?' he said. The director suggested 'proved beyond a peradventure', but that would have given me a Victorian air that I wasn't exactly aiming for. 

It may comfort Mr Reynolds to know that you can get into deep trouble without calling on baseball idioms or the other sources of American vernacular, like ranching (it's a cinch), mining (pay dirt), pool (behind the 8 ball). The simplest English words that you'd think would carry no English/American differences can plunge the reader, or in my case the listener, into the very mire of incomprehension that you're trying to drag him out of. Politics is riddled with such deceptive simplicities. 

I often read in one English paper about some Washington politician described as Mr So-and-so from Texas, which would mean he's a congressman, when in fact he's Senator So-and-so. The House means in Britain the national legislature. In America, the House is the House of Representatives, a sitting convention of regional lobbyists. The more accurate equivalent of a national body, the House of Commons, is the Senate, right? And take such a word as 'city', New York City, the City of London – no confusion there, certainly. Well, there certainly is or was a few weeks ago a howling confusion in the mind of one of America's most distinguished, you might say mental, broadcasters. 

I guess most of you must remember the hullabaloo by Mr Eric Sevareid when he broadcast a doom-laden talk about the dire condition of Britain. Mr Sevareid is the guru in residence to the Columbia Broadcasting System and when the nightly half-hour news broadcast is nearly over, he's in the habit of making three- or four-minute commentaries or little sermons on the significance of some item that we've just heard about. 

Mr Sevareid is a thoughtful and pungent talker and he most decidedly is no Anglophobe. His talk on what he called the un-governability of Britain did not, so far as I can gather, cause the stir over here that it did with you. In fact I've not met anybody who heard it but I happened to be in London the day after he gave it and The Times reproduced the whole script to the extent, I believe, of five short columns on the front page. Mr Wilson, you may remember, came back from Geneva or Moscow or wherever and dignified Mr Sevareid's elegy by discounting it as a typical bit of doom and gloom gossip picked up on the cocktail circuit. Well, in the middle of his jeremiad, Mr Sevareid got off this simple sentence: 'The City of London is financially broke'. 

Two days later, a letter appeared in The Times correspondence columns from the Director of the Committee on Invisible exports, and let's not translate that! In it, Mr Clarke, the DCI himself, reprinted a cable he'd sent to Mr Sevareid and this is what it said: 'You are quoted here as saying that the City of London is financially broke. If correctly quoted, this is rubbish as you should remember from your pleasant stay here. The City of London is the name of the financial centre of Britain, like Wall Street. Its foreign earnings have doubled in the past five years and are bigger than New York's, it is the centre of the worlds euro-dollar market, has the largest international insurance market, the largest international commodity market, the world's leading bullion centre, the biggest shipping and air freight market and boasts more international security quotations than any other centre. It also has more American banks than New York. Why not ask them why they are here?' End of caning. 'Perhaps,' Mr Clarke wondered mischievously and correctly, 'Mr Sevareid meant the GLC', which if Sevareid is as sharp as I think he is, he'll say, 'Of course! That's what I meant!' 

So, as the humble lesson for the day, we might remember from now on that the City of London equals, in American, Wall Street. Now Wall Street is not broke though a few months ago it did begin to get that sinking feeling. But New York City! That is a quite different entity. New York City is broke and the recently disclosed figures, though complicated, are horrendous. In the best of times, New York City has an annual budget – this year it's proposed at $12.8 billion – that's higher than not most American cities but most American states. 

This year the mayor has announced that the city has a gap or deficit of $641 million and if somebody doesn't come through with that amount, the mayor has warned that he will have to reduce underground train service, close hospitals, lay off another 38,000 city workers and perform other cruelties that could set off a chain reaction of panic, not only here but in other cities in a similar plight. He can get the money from two sources, from a stiff tax bill passed by the New York State legislature up in Albany or from loans from the commercial banks. But the legislature won't pass the bill unless the mayor promises appalling economies and the banks won't lend the money at bearable rates of interest unless the legislature passes the bill. 

I guess if we were in England or perhaps Spain, we'd have to say that the mayor is on the horns of a dilemma. As it is, I can only report the general feeling that the mayor will never get to first base. In fact between the banks and the legislature, he already has two strikes against him. By 1 July, I shouldn't wonder, New York City will wind up behind the 8 ball.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.