A common language?

Long ago, when I returned to this country for good and started out as a reporter for the London Times, of tender memory, I did what all new correspondents do as a duty. I took out a subscription to the New York Times. I knew that IT, THEY at least, would write very much the same sort of English as THE Times.

I was very naive in those days and though I was aware that Americans had invented some racy slang and had the odd habit of calling a motorcar an automobile and a lift, an elevator, I imagined that the great body of the language would be recognisably the same in both countries. 

The first misgiving sprouted when on the wall by the entrance of our block of flats, which I was learning to call an apartment house, I saw a little wooden plaque with a sign printed in gold letters – it was no makeshift job, it was plainly there for keeps – it said, 'No solicitors allowed'. There was a puzzle! What did the Americans have against lawyers? I'd just learned that a majority of the members of Congress were or had been lawyers. The doorman explained it to me. In the United States a solicitor is a beggar. So what was a solicitor in my language? I found out that he was an attorney, as distinct from a trial lawyer which is the American name for a barrister. 

When I came, which I did quickly, to have to write news reports, I found myself confronted every morning with words and phrases and sometimes whole sentences that were undoubtedly printed in English but made absolutely no sense. An early headline read, 'Mayor Scores Controller' – gibberish. 

Luckily, I had at my elbow, or rather as a junior I was on call at his elbow, an old and infinitely tolerant American who was then the New York correspondent of The Times and who, every weekend, set me goggling in awe as he sat down to write his weekly economic and financial piece in a language which to this day I only faintly understand. He explained to me that 'Mayor Scores Controller' meant that the mayor was angry at – had denounced, if you like – the city controller, the man who takes care of the city budget. 

And then I found that there was always somebody being in-dict-ed, or as I learnt to say, indicted. Well, obviously down the years I have become bilingual and am only too eager to help any lady in distress who's looking for a draper's shop to buy a reel of cotton. I tell her to look out for a dry goods store and ask for a spool of thread. And so on, and on, and on. 

Well today all the old traps and many new ones are still there for any new arrival who thinks he/she can soon pick up the language of politics and government, worst of all, of sports. This week a headline said, 'Mayor Koch Announces Radio John Hour' – a john is, among other homely things, a man who patronises prostitutes. The mayor reacting to criticism of the police which say they arrest the girls but let the customers go scot-free, he proposes from now on to have the city-owned radio station regularly broadcast the names of johns. This will no doubt come to be known as a 'first strike deterrent'. 

I will not bore you with the almost incomprehensible lingo of the federal government, most of all the Pentagon, even when its officers are not being verbose but simply using the language of their trade. Mr Brown, the Secretary of Defense, was down at the American naval base of Guantanamo in Cuba the other day, making a public show, on the president's orders, of, as they say in the officers' mess, 'beefing up the hardware'. Mr Brown said the increased strength of the forces down there and the new military exercises they'd be performing – these are American forces and this is all meant to impress the Russians more than the Cubans – he said, in a memorable sentence, 'What we are doing are preventive reminders which increase the down strike capability'. Just think of that. 

However, I've strayed off into jargon. I'll stray back again into the perfectly straightforward language which describes what's going on in some American specialty, sport, most of all. I first arrived in the United States at about this time of year when the World Series was being played – the annual play-off, best of seven games, between the two top baseball teams for the national championship. Baseball has a language all its own as exotic and incomprehensible to a newcomer as the language of American railroads. 

Well now the first game of the present joust between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Baltimore Orioles was rained out so the New York Times had to make do with two pages, only 12 columns, of speculation about the coming games and the tactics that the managers would employ. The Times had a run-down of the players and their capabilities. Listen – Al Bumbry batted 285 this season and led in stolen bases with 37 in 49 tries. Kiko Garcia, the regular shortstop in place of Belanger with whom he occasionally platoons. John Lowenstein played five different positions, one opening game with pinch hit three one homer. Enrique Romo has wide assortment of pitches from sinkers to screwballs. 

One player, you'll be relieved to hear, felt happy about the rain which changed his team manager's tactics. The manager of the Orioles had decided to alternate his team's strongest pitchers but for profound reasons you and I will never fathom, he thought when the rains came he would try Martinez in the fourth game. Martinez, a 24-year-old Nicaraguan said, 'The rain makes me feel good, I want to pitch in the series. I was feeling bad when he told me yesterday he was going with a three-man rotation. He wanted to go with the lefties and I agree. Still, I felt really bad.' 

If this strange but perfectly intelligent language defeats you, you're no more bewildered than I was when I came to write about these things. In something akin to despair, after trying to write about Congress and New York City government and baseball, I sought aid and comfort from an old Baltimore newspaper man. He said, 'Wait a while! You may find this country baffling and exasperating and outrageous and sometimes delightful, but one thing you can be sure of, you'll never be bored.' He was right. 

Within two days I found myself on Fifth Avenue standing with a vast crowd outside a hotel for most of 13 hours waiting to see if a young man perched high on the ledge of the top floor was going to jump or not. He did. End of story. Then I got in on the trial of a local political leader, a very famous, gentle, kindly man who distributed goods and goodies to the poor and who turned out to be the essential working link between organised crime and the courts – I mean actual judges, one or two of whom were soon living on the wrong side of the bars. And I must say that this week if you stayed on your toes, there was never a dull moment. 

I went down to the United Nations on Tuesday to keep a long-promised date, a luncheon talk to the Association of International Civil Servants –that's the old boys' and old girls' club, former members of the UN secretariat. Turning up First Avenue, the traffic was one enormous tangle of machines and I told the cab driver I'd get out and walk. As I came nearer there were great crowds hemmed in behind barricades and lines of ambulances and flashing police cars and an army of cops. I approached the barricade and a young, amiable cop approached me. 'Yes, sir,' he said, 'what's on your mind?' 

I thought there was no point in confusing him with long-winded details about international associations of this and that, I looked him in the eye and said, 'Well, I'm the guest at lunch of the secretariat.' He said, with simple Shakespearian emphasis, 'You not going to be nobody's guest today buddy! There's not a soul in the building, in any building.' He says, 'They've been out of there for an hour or more.' I asked him what was up and he looked up in the sky and said, 'Ooh I don't know, we've been told to stand by.' 

For the first time in the 34-year-old history of the United Nations, the entire household, so to speak, 7,000 officers, clerks, officials, delegates, cooks, kitchen boys, the lot, had been evacuated. On the street the rumours flew. Some nut had hired a plane and threatened to bomb the United Nations. Well, it came out he was the unlikeliest-looking nut – a bearded, trim, rather elegant, well-spoken 61-year-old – an American who lives in Australia. Of all terrorists, an author, a disgruntled author. He has published a book. He objects to the publisher's editing of what he took to be the best parts. He thinks they're not promoting his book. He thinks publishers inveigle authors into rip-offs. 

Well, so far he sounds like just about every author I know, if I may speak frankly, it's getting rather late to stop me. I, as an author, tend to avoid other authors. What snobbery is this? Well, the truth is, I like to talk about books, old and new and I find I do this most agreeably with a friend who's a banker. And his explanation of this phenomenon is nothing but the truth. 'Bankers', he once said to me, 'talk mainly about Chinese jade or Italian painting or Balzac. Authors talk mainly about royalties and residuals.' Certainly every author I run into, including sometimes myself, complains that the publisher is not printing enough of the first edition, is not advertising the book as it deserves. 

Authors are grouches and they found their arch grouch in 61-year-old Robert Baudin with his little red, white and blue Cessna. He had no evil intentions towards the United Nations. All he meant to do was to buzz his publisher's office which lies hard by the United Nations. He wanted, he said, simply to 'jolt' the publishing trade. 'I may get a little time in jail', he said, 'but it was worth it.' 

So, what else is new and un-boring? Last weekend I played golf in hot, sticky weather. Monday I swam with my wife in Peconic Bay. Next day she was in Vermont making a snowman with her grandsons. As for New York in the splendid golden fall, I’m at the moment watching the snow slashing down like stair rods. How about the sunny South? Latest report, West Virginia, two feet of snow, no schools. 

Even the weather in this country joins in the American game of alternating deceitful blandness with screaming melodrama. As the man said, 'Never a dull moment.'

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.