That's Not English - Britishisms, Americanisms, and What Our English Says About Us

Zusatztext “As many of us know! straddling the Atlantic can be quite uncomfortable—and it doesn’t help that the word ‘quite’ doesn’t always mean what you think it means.  This is a brilliant guide to the revealing differences between two branches of English….As an English person I will say! ‘Oh! jolly well done!’ but I’d like to add ‘Good job!’” –From the foreword by Lynne Truss! author of Eats! Shoots & Leaves   “I’m mad about this book! I don’t mean ‘angry’  in the American sense! but Britishly ‘enthusiastic! gobsmacked.’ Much has been written about the language barrier between Britspeak and Americanspeak! but! more than any other explorer! Erin Moore puts a human face on the subject.” –Richard Lederer! author of Anguished English   “The ocean that divides England and America is awash with linguistic wreckage and cultural tumult. But Erin Moore’s study of these infested waters is serene! assured and hugely entertaining. They should hand her book out at border control.”  –Simon Garfield! author of Just My Type   “Moore manages to create a text that is eminently readable! clever (in the sincerely-intended American sense) and thought-provoking! gently breaking down some of the cultural stereotyping that plagues both Americans and British.”  — Publishers Weekly Informationen zum Autor Erin Moore grew up in Key West! Florida! and is a graduate of Harvard who also attended King’s College! London. She lives in London. Foreword Reading Erin Moore’s book, I suddenly realised a great truth. I was raised bilingual. Not that my Londoner parents took any pains in this department, but they were the first generation to have TV, and they considered it such a blessing to mankind that they never considered (for a single second) the option of switching it off. There were four things I absorbed about television from an early age:    • You never switch it off.    • American films are superior to British films.    • Jumping up and down in front of the television to get parental attention is just childish and will be ignored.    • American television is better than British television. Thus I grew up watching Bilko and My Three Sons and I Love Lucy and Dennis the Menace . And I was happy. The dialogue wasn’t so hard to understand, after all—once you knew that “candy” meant sweets, that “sidewalk” meant pavement, and that children said “Gee” at the start of every sentence. True, nothing in the sunny home lives of the Americans on television related to my own experience. We had no picket fence; we had no gigantic refrigerator; we had a markedly different climate. But theirs was self-evidently the pleasant reality, ours but the bathetic and murky shadow. No wonder I grew up believing that Americans were the only standard by which to measure one’s own inadequacies. At the age of seven, I was reading a fairy story about a banished king and his daughter in which the king exclaimed, “Have we not blue blood in our veins?” and I went to my mum (who was watching television) and tugged her arm. “Mum,” I said, “what colour blood have Americans got?” This bilingualism was an illusion, of course. I did not speak American. The first time a waitress barked, “Links or patties?” at me in a real American diner, I was so confused that I wanted to cry. “I just want a sausage,” I said lamely. Similarly, Erin Moore, before she came to live in England, believed she was a great Anglophile. Based in New York, she edited books written by British authors; she visited England frequently; she had British-born in-laws. However, nothing had prepared her for the day-to-day cultural chasms of misunderstanding that tiresomely divide the British English–speaker from the American. As this book so beautifully reveals, it’s not just the vocabulary that is different: First, the vocabulary is symptomatic of much more; se...

Product details

• Authors: Erin Moore, Erin/ Truss Moore, Lynne Truss
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 14.04.2015, delayed
• EAN: 9781592408856
• ISBN: 978-1-59240-885-6
• No. of pages: 240
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics