As British demonstrators were organizing for yesterday's anti-Bush protests, the right-wing Daily Mail warned that if they damaged the relationship with America, they would damage Britain as well. "This is our closest and most reliable ally," the paper said," tied to us by a shared commitment to freedom, by a common language and a common history, not to mention immensely important trade links."

The references to a common language are de rigueur whenever Britons are defending the "special relationship," a phrase that they use a lot more than we do. But historically speaking, it was the special relationship that created the common language, rather than the other way round.

It wasn't inevitable that the two nations would think of themselves as speaking the same language -- people often distinguish separate languages with varieties that are no more distinct than British and American are, like Dutch and Afrikaans or Norwegian and Danish. In fact, in the decades following the American Revolution, people like Adams and Jefferson argued that Americans should break off their linguistic ties with England, just as they had thrown off its political yoke. Not that we were about to switch to speaking Greek or German, but over the course of time American would become a language "distinct from the rest of the world," as Noah Webster put it. And to make the point symbolically, Webster went about altering American orthography so that Americans and Englishmen would wind up up writing "honor" in different ways.

It wasn't until fifty or sixty years later that the English and Americans somewhat grudgingly decided to maintain their linguistic union, like a couple that goes through a trial separation and then decides to stick it out. That realization no doubt reflected the pull of a common literary and political heritage.1 But it also owed a lot to the neurotic dependencies that can bind families more closely than mere history does. If England and America didn't think of themselves as speaking the same language, the English couldn't accuse us of mangling it, and we wouldn't have the satisfaction of knowing how much our cheeky linguistic high jinks annoyed those stiff grown-ups back in the parlor.

The British have always had a high time portraying Americans as backwoods buffoons who spout a mixture of slang, malaprops, and bloated pomposities. For them, America was the source of all linguistic corruption, in something like the way that we think of California today. In 1869, the English critic G. F. Graham accused Americans of taking liberties with the language. "''Slick', 'spry', and 'boss' are not English words, and we may pretty confidently expect that they will never become English." 2

That has been the dominant note in British commentaries on American English ever since -- a mixture of affectionate condescension, ridicule, and occasionally genuine bile, particularly when relations between the two countries were strained. While the Civil War was raging in 1864, the Dean of Canturbury wrote: "Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen's English has undergone at the hands of the Americans… and then compare the character and history of the nation -- its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man…; and its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world." 3

True, the British have usually overdrawn their depictions of American speech --- Dickens rendered it so broadly in his American Notes that Emerson felt obliged to complain that "no such conversations ever occur in this country in real life." 4 But if no American actually talks like those caricatures, George Bush comes pretty close. British critics of Bush and his policies may make a point of saying that their beef is with the president and not the country. But it's certainly convenient that Bush fits the negative stereotype of Americans so neatly -- he's a self-made straw man.

The London Sunday Times, which has been supportive of Bush, recently asked 2000 Britons which characteristics they most associate with the U.S. president. The largest proportion said he was "a danger to world peace," but that was followed closely by the adjectives "stupid" and "incoherent." And in the Times of London last week, the conservative columnist Matthew Parris observed not entirely approvingly that these days any English comic can get a laugh with a joke that depicts Bush as "a loud, bumptious, ignorant, crass, narrow-minded, conspiring, lethal zealot." As Parris notes, "The trouble with Bush jokes is that they are really about Americans."

Of course, a lot of people on this side of the pond think of Bush as an America joke, too. That's the price we Americans pay for the special relationship -- we all have a little introjected Englishman perched on our shoulder, clucking his tongue at our ignorance and faulty grammar. And it can be embarrassing to see the flesh-and-blood embodiment of those defects sharing a platform with Tony Blair.

But nowadays Americans seem to be making less fun of Bush's linguistic derelictions, whichever side they're on. Before the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war, the president's supporters could make light of his gaffes as harmless foibles. Now even that concession seems to undercut their efforts to drape a Churchillian mantle over the man and his language. An article in National Review goes so far as to describe him as "speaking with Churchillian clarity." I doubt whether even the Daily Mail would have ventured that description for a British audience.

Bush's language has become a less important issue for his American critics, too. Not that they don't still regard him an ignorant bumpkin (or worse, a pseudo-bumpkin) who embarrasses the country, but now they're concerned that he's making America look bad in much more dangerous ways. That anger has nothing to do with the fact that Bush doesn't talk like Tony Blair -- or for that matter, that Tony Blair does.

Notes:

1. The English came to the same realization -- by 1862, Anthony Trollope could write: "An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Molière. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture." Return

2. It was around then that British critics began to use the phrase "President's English" in a mocking way. When an American news dispatch announced in 1864 that General Grant was going home to "recuperate," using the verb in a new, intransitive sense, a writer in Punch asked "How can people who call themselves members of the Anglo-Saxon family use such language? … you who owe allegiance to Her Majesty, and are in duty bound to maintain the purity of the Queen's English; consider all such English as 'Recuperate' President's English, spurious, base, villainous: pray you, avoid it." Return

3. Cf a 1927 article in the New Statesman which denounced the depredations that America was working on the language, with its hybrid population "of which only a small minority are even racially Anglo-Saxons… [F]or all serious lovers of the English tongue, it is America that is the only dangerous enemy." Return

4. You can get a sense of the tone of these parodies from Punch's version of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "We've done it, gentlemen. Bully for us. Cowhided the Copperheads considerable. Non nobis, of course, but I reckon we have had a hand in the glory, some... Rebellion is a wicked thing, gentlemen, an awful wicked thing, and the mere nomenclating therof would make my hair stand on end, if it could be more standonender than it is." Return