Get thee to a nunnery

A few years ago, I played around with a short story featuring two British characters. When I was done, I showed it to a guy I know who lives in England, and asked how I'd done with the dialect. He said that it was pretty accurate, except that they sounded Victorian. I puzzled over that for a while, I've watched quite a bit of British television and movies, and I thought I had made the idiom correct. Then it occurred to me: with the exception of Harry Potter, all of the English literature I've read was either Victorian, or set in that era. Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, et al.

It's been said often enough to become trite that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." Alongside it is a quote I saw in an Orson Scott Card book (I don't know if it was his or if he borrowed it) that went "English-speakers are the only people who can't read Shakespeare in their native language." He was writing his works about 500 years ago, and that makes me wonder about the future evolution of our language. I haven't been able to decide if the explosion of world-wide communications in my lifetime has caused the rate of change in this language to speed up or slow down. That's probably something best left to linguistic experts, but I get the feeling that opinions on the matter are probably divided and will be for some time to come. I guess I'll wait till I'm 60, go back and watch stuff from when I was a kid, and see how archaic it sounds.

But going back to British-English versus American-English, I haven't had many chances to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone from across the pond, which is a bit of a shame. I can only think of one time when I had several conversations with anyone from England, and I can only think of one time when he said something that confused me. There's probably others, but I only remember the one. We were talking about something, I can't remember what, and he asked me if I was talking about "the Pakis." I asked for clarification, and he explained that he was talking about Pakistanis. From the way he had said it, I took the word for a racial slur, and found out later that it is. My knowledge of world relations is woefully small, I had no idea that there was enough emnity between England and Pakistan for there to be a nasty way to refer to them.

On a similar note, I have an on-line friend who lives in Norway, but learned English somewhere along the way. I have no idea how he sounds when he speaks English, but he writes rather well. I assume he must have learned English from British sources, as he uses words like "bloody" occasionally. There were a few times I decided to test how good his English was by engaging in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness in an attempt to catch him up. Funnily enough, the one time I did get him to ask for clarification was unintended. We were discussing weight loss, and I told him about the time I dropped 15 pounds when I stopped drinking pop. There was a slight pause (if such can even be registered in IM format), followed by "pop?" Who knew that all I had to do to confuse the guy was slip into colloquialism?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights