British English for American Readers: A Dictionary of the Language, Customs, and Places of British Life and Literature (review)

REVIEWS British Englishfor American Readers: A Dictionary ofthe Language, Customs, andPlaces ofBritish Life andLiterature. David Grote. Westport CT: Greenwood. 1992. xv + 709 pp. $85.00 U.S. The dictionary format is a popular one for reference works ofvarious types. David Grote's British Englkh for American Readers, despite its title, is a book about life in England organized alphabetically as much as it is a dictionary about the English of the British. It was written for American readers and viewers of British books and television programs to answer questions that the typical American will not even be aware need to be asked. The author is a man ofletters—a playwright and magazine editor who has also written books on drama and an earlier work of this general kind, Common Knowledge: A Reader's Guide to Literary Allusions. He has a good eye for the kind ofBritish item that deserves comment for Americans, and Britkh Englkh therefore includes helpful entries of several kinds. Many of the entries are informal dictionary ones distinguishing British from American vocabulary. The entry for moonshine observes that the British use is only for the "dreamy and unrealistic," not for illegal whiskey, an American sense. That for nick points to four British senses: to steal, to arrest , ajail, and condition or health, as in "in good nick." Swot as a verb is the equivalent of American cram or bone up and as a noun is the equivalent of greasy grind, or bookworm. Such entries are the stuff of a basic BritishAmerican glossary. It is the nature of British-American glossaries that some terms are used more frequently in one national variety than in the other, so are Briticisms or Americanisms statistically, though not absolutely. Instances are Messrs as the plural of Mr; it may be used more often in Britain, but it is not clear what other term is available in America. In speech, "misters" will do nicely, but as a written title, Messrs is all there is. The British-American difference is not so much that specific form as it is the greater British use of social titles in general. Other terms differ in range of referent. In British, porch is often used for the covered exterior entry in front of a public building such as a church; in American, it is more often used of domestic architecture for what could also be called a veranda. Boiler is said to be "a hot-water tank, usually much smaller" than something of that name in America. That is true, but it leaves unstated the fact that Britons typically talk about a boiler whereas Americans talk about a furnace as the heating equipment in a house. As a British colleague , Sylvia Chalker, once informed me, for her,furnace (which has no entry in this book) evokes images of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Differences of this kind are poorly represented in general dictionaries, but contribute significandy to the contrast between the national varieties. Reviews161 Many entries are encyclopedic rather than lexical, for example, abdication , abortion, address, marriage, newspaper, paper hats, pea, plug, prison, pajamas , regiment. Such terms do not differ in lexical meaning between British and American, but their realia are culturally different. Thus under plug, the reader is told that British electric sockets were standardized late and incompletely , so more than one shape and size of plug are needed, that therefore appliances are sold without plugs attached to their wires, and also that British plugs have a fuse in them and that wall sockets have a switch to activate or deactivate them. Under abdication the reader is told that the only one since Richard II was Edward VIII's for Wallis Simpson. Some encyclopedic entries are chiefly historical, even for British society . Thus, that for pinafore is a condensed history of the garment, equally applicable to British and American use. That for rushes treats their early use as a floor covering, which would be as exotic to present-day Britons as it is to Americans. Such entries are compatible with the purpose of this volume to explain things that American readers encounter in British literature, but they refer to antique rather than British use. A fair number of...