American spelling, too, has had more influence on the British than they might
think. Jail rather than goal, burden rather than burthen, clue rather than clew,
wagon rather than wagon, today and tomorrow rather than to-day and
tomorrow, mask rather than masque, reflection rather than reflexion, and forever and onto as single words rather than two have all been nudged on their way towards acceptance by American influence. For most senses of the word
program, the British still use programmer, but when the context is of computers they write program. A similar distinction is increasingly made with disc (the
usual British spelling) and disk for the thing you slot into your home computer.
Although the English kept the u in many words like humor, honor, and color,
they gave it up in several, such as terror, horror, and governor, helped at least
in part by the influence of American books and journals. Confusingly, they
retained it in some forms but abandoned it in others, so that in England you write honor and honorable but honorary and honorarium; color and coloring but coloration; humor but humorist; labor and laborer but laborious. There is no logic to it, and no telling why some words gave up the u and others didn't. For a time it was fashionable to drop the u from honor and humor—Coleridge for one did it—but it didn't catch on.
People don't often appreciate just how much movies and television have
smoothed the differences between British and American English, but half a
century ago the gap was very much wider. In 1922, when Sinclair Lewis's novel
Babbitt was published in Britain it contained a glossary. Words that are
commonplace in Britain now were quite unknown until the advent of talking
pictures—among them grapevine, fan (in the sense of a sports enthusiast),
gimmick, and phoney. As late as 1955, a writer in the Spectator could
misapprehend the expression turn of the century, and take it to mean mid century, when the first half turns into the second. In 1939, the preface to An Anglo- American Interpreter suggested that "an American, if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood." That may be arrant hyperbole, designed to boost sales, but it is probably true that the period up to the Second World War marked the age of the greatest divergence between the two main branches of English.
Even now, there remains great scope for confusion, as evidenced by the true
story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen.
"Oh," she blurted, "but I do my own dusting." It can take years for an American
to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa. In Britain homely is a
flattering expression (equivalent to homey); in America it means "ugly." In
Britain upstairs is the first floor; in America it is the second. In Britain to table a
motion means to put it forward for discussion; in America it means to put it
aside. Presently means "now" in America; in Britain it means "in a little while."
Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression "I'll knock you up in the morning," which means "I'll knock on your door in the morning." To keep your pecker up is an innocuous
expression in Britain (even though, curiously, pecker has the same slang
meaning there), but to be stuffed is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner
party, "I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed," an embarrassing silence will
fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too
will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone's fanny; in England it means
a woman's pudenda.
Other terms are less graphic, but no less confusing. English people bathe wounds but not their babies; they bath their babies.
Whereas an American wishing to get clean would bathe in a bath-tub, an English person would bath in a bath. English people do bathe, but what they mean by that is to go for a swim in the sea. Unless, of course, the water is too cold (as it always is in Britain) in which case they stand in water up to their knees. This is called having a paddle, even though their hands may never touch the water.
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering
circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a
fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we've covered that. To a
foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.
Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in
America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These ambiguities can affect scientists as much as tourists. The British billion, as we have already seen,
has surrendered to the American billion, but for other numbers agreement has
yet to be reached. A decillion in America is a one plus thirty-three zeros.
In Britain it is a one plus sixty zeros. Needless to say, that can make a difference.In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other. That's a very large number indeed. Some are well known on both sides of the Atlantic—lift/elevator, dustbin/garbage can, biscuit/cookie—but many hundreds of others are still liable to befuddle the hapless traveler. Try covering up the right-hand column below and seeing how many of the British terms in the left-hand column you can identify. If you get more than half you either know the country well or have been reading too many English murder mysteries.