Commencement

There was a character in an old American musical comedy – I'm thinking aloud far from the books, but I think it was 'Anything Goes', the Cole Porter/Ethel Merman triumph of the mid Thirties. This character was an Englishman travelling on a transatlantic ship and, conforming to the cliché of the day, he a silly-ass, upper-crust Englishman bubbling with benevolence and asininity, I should guess.

Now, the younger members of the class may have to reach back in their minds to picture such a character who was created certainly as long ago as 1865. He was the focus of amusement in a play called 'Our English Cousin' which was the play Abraham Lincoln was chuckling over several seconds before he was fatally shot. 

In our time, the actor who turned this character into gold was Terry Thomas, but he's by no means the last of the breed. Essentially, he's the character played by Robert Morley in the television advertisements he does over here to coax Americans into going to Britain. You'd think by now that Americans would have long ago replaced this stereotype with some more modern and familiar and real type. How about Mr Callaghan or George Best or David Niven or Jack Jones? 

Well the sad truth is that, in times of confusion especially people like to cling to stereotypes, the simpler, the more unchanging, the better. And of those four modern types I've mentioned, I'll bet that David Niven – whose public personality is a kind of shrewd parody of the old-time, typical Englishman – David Niven is the only one most Americans would know. People are always very hazy about types that don't fit their preconceptions. 

Well, the character I first thought of, the Wodehouse character in the 1930s musical comedy, caused a lot of dependable laughter in American audiences by his habit of carrying a little notebook and putting down in it American expressions he heard that were second nature to Americans but, to him, were very pungent and original and quaint. This habit is by no means dead, though the notebook may be a mental notebook. Only a year or two ago, my wife, talking with an old Englishman about some common acquaintance, said, 'Well, I must say he comes on rather strong.' The Englishman went into ecstasy. 'Comes on rather strong!' he crooned. 'What a smashing expression!' 

And to be entirely truthful, I must confess that 40-odd years ago, when I arrived in this strange land, my notebook was not mental. It was six inches by three and I never lost an opportunity of scribbling down these curious idioms – but only when I was back in my own rooms. I came across this browned-off little notebook the other day and the first thing that struck me was how many of the quaint Americanisms I noted have passed so noiselessly into regular English that at least two generations of English people would hotly deny that they're Americanisms at all. This, by the way, has been the history of Americanisms that passed over, since the early 17th century. You may be itching for examples. 

All right! How about this note. Americans say, 'I don't have any' where we would say, 'I haven't got any'. Also, Americans ask for beef 'rare' instead of 'underdone'. They call a skittle alley a bowling alley. A tin is a can, as in canned fruit. And so on. I also put down then expressions that didn't exist in England, in British English, because we didn't have – sorry! – we hadn't got the things they described. For instance, I put down with an exclamation mark, 'Parking meter!' And with another exclamation mark, I noticed such barbarous oddities as 'paper towels', 'paper napkins', and later on, I suppose, I would have fastened on the weird expression 'supermarket'. Such a horror as a pizza parlour was way in the future. 

But I noticed one or two words that were in every day use 40 years ago that seem to have expired. This always applies to the simple, slang terms of praise and abuse. Robert Benchley wrote a piece at about that time lamenting the sad state, as he saw it, of American dramatic criticism. 'It's gotten so,' he wrote, 'that any new play is one of two things, it's either swell or lousy.' Well, both these words are long dead here but they crossed the Atlantic and linger on among tottering Englishmen who enjoy picking up the latest Americanisms in the flush of their youth. 

And since I'm nursing a slight cold at the moment, I remember how, in the early 1930s, no American ever seemed to have a cold or the flu. He had the gripe and when he had it he felt logy. Both these words have vanished without trace. Americans now mutter something about having a virus, though they'd probably be alarmed to know that a virus is by no means a bacterium, but a smaller organism mainly of nucleic acid in protein coat existing only in living cells. There! I presume that the English still catch colds and when they have troubles with their sinuses, complain about catarrh which, in my time, covered everything from a deviated septum to double pneumonia or a brain tumour. 

As my first winter went along, I notice now that the entries grew fewer. I came to accept the vernacular I heard all around me and, I suppose, adopted much of it without knowing it. But when the spring came, I find one entry which does not seem to justify three exclamation marks. It's the simple word 'commencement'. Under the elms of the Yale campus, all the talk was of, 'What are you doing at commencement? Are your parents coming up for commencement? We intend to go on a big bender the night after commencement.' By the way, whatever happened to 'bender?' I think my revulsion against this simple word was due to my having been brought up as a student of English literature by the late, and I still insist, great, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Well, 'Q' was murder on any student who used Latinisms where he could use English. If you wanted to show off by saying that some writer was circumlocutory, he would cross it out and put 'roundabout'. He abominated 'commence'. You wrote 'start' or 'begin'. Hence my pedantic horror at hearing the word 'commencement'. 

It's used everywhere in America – there's no other word – for the graduating exercises of a college. It is, or it was, in England called 'Degree Day' though I'm told that 'commencement' is creeping in on the craven principle that an Americanism is somehow more chic than the usual word. Hence, I regret to say 'old folks' even in Britain have turned into 'senior citizens' and when the time comes for me to shuffle off to the old folks' home, the people who run such things, usually hair-styled young men in crested blazers, they try to soften the humiliation by welcoming you to the Sun City or the Whispering Pines – wait for it! – senior citizens' retirement community. 

Well, at commencement, as we say, the graduating class, as we say, troops through the leafy campus and will receive scrolls attesting their excellence in scholarship or today the fact that they can spell or know just about the difference between a noun and a verb. At the head of the procession will be the president of the university or college, several other pedagogues like the deans of various faculties and they'll be walking severally, side by side, with a few greybeards or ageing bluestockings, distinguished men and women, who are about to receive honorary degrees. 

This week there must be a couple of thousand universities and colleges in this country that have invited and will receive magnificos as various as a Cabinet officer, an abstract painter, a retired soldier, a packaged bread tycoon or the inventor of a strapless bra. I, myself, was dazzled a year or two ago, to get several invitations of this sort but I made some excuse and declined because, long ago, when I asked my guru, Mr H. L. Mencken, 'Why this abundance of honorary degrees?' He said, 'No man worth his salt will ever take a degree he didn't work for. Honorary degrees are fit only for chiropractors, real estate agents and Presidents of the United States.' 

Well, old H. L. was wrong. Not wrong, perhaps, just exercising one of his favourite impulses which was to be funny and downright at the expense of actual accuracy. 

The fact is that among all the droning speeches that will produce a great moaning sound over American campuses this week, there are always two or three that will not only be wildly quoted but could signal to the world outside America a stirring change in American policy. Presidents especially take their pick from a swarm of invitations and decide to use their chore as commencement speaker at one particular place to deliver what they always call a 'major' speech on foreign or domestic affairs. I still wait hopefully for the president who'll announce that at some commencement or other he's going to deliver a 'minor' speech. 

It was at a little known college in the Deep South, 31 years ago, that the then under-secretary of state, Dean Acheson, made a commencement speech in which he floated a trial balloon that was to affect the future of Europe profoundly. He proposed a giant American effort to bring American money and material aid to help, as he put it, 'restore the fabric of European life after its devastation in the Second War'. Since nobody shot down this trial balloon, secretary of state George Marshall expanded the proposals and put them into a commencement speech at Harvard a week or so later. On the Harvard campus in June 1947, the Marshall Plan was born. 

Well, last week we heard two speeches that could come to affect the lives of all of us. One was a warning to the Russians given by President Carter on commencement day at his old college, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. And the other was a skinning denunciation of Western civilisation and America, in particular, delivered at the Harvard commencement by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

In the manner of Captain Poldark, I shall leave you holding on to the cliff with your fingernails. Next week, to the rescue!

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.