You Say Tomato, I say Potato…

Look! The zed that stands for Zorro!

My friends, I’ll get to today’s “5 a.m. Story” in just a minute, but first I need to hit the loo, and then I’m running out to grab some crisps and biscuits from my boot. I’ll be back straightaway.

Let me clarify this, for you Americans out there. In British English, a loo is a bathroom. Crisps are potato chips. Biscuits are cookies. A boot is a car trunk. And straightaway just means very soon, it doesn’t refer to that long, straight stretch at the racetrack.

Oh, and in this cartoon, the round-headed boy wants a lift, because he has a flat and his paint is chipped.

My first job at the beginning of a long career with the Reuters News Agency was as a translator on a very demanding editing desk in New York City, changing English to English.

Yes. I had to take stories written by our mostly British journalists around the world and re-edit them in New York so that American newspaper readers would know what the hell they were about.

When I finished with that task, I had to reverse it. I took stories that were written by mostly American journalists in the U.S. and translated them into something that speakers of British English in other countries could comprehend.

This was more complicated than it might sound.

Let me go back to the very beginning. I started my Reuters career on 9/1/78. No, that isn’t quite right. The Brits would say I began it on 1/9/78, since they put the day first and the month second, as much of the rest of the world does.

If you travel internationally this can get confusing. Unless you are my wife, who was clever enough to have been born on 8/8. She never gets it wrong.

We’ve all read our Agatha Christie novels and watched British mysteries on Britbox, and we know that an apartment is a flat and an elevator is a lift and a vacation is a holiday. But just being aware of a few basics like that is barely even a beginning.

                                          (Let the chips fall where they may)

A few days into my new job, a British reporter was dictating a story to me over the telephone. After a few words, he said, “full stop,” so that’s what I typed. Next sentence, same thing. And the next. I slowly noticed the story was making less and less sense. I asked him about it and was told that a “full stop” was what the Brits called a period. He was simply telling me where to end each sentence.

I later learned that British folks are very amused that we silly Americans use the same word for both an important punctuation mark like the period, and a woman’s time of the month. They wonder, with that level of ambiguity, how the hell did we manage to win a revolution?

As if they have any room to talk. If a British guy ‘knocks up” a woman, he’s simply waking her up by pounding on her door. If I, as an American, knock her up, I’m getting her pregnant, which of course she will discover soon enough when her, uh, period, fails to arrive.

In Britain, if you get your arm caught in a meat-slicer you aren’t taken to THE hospital, you are taken to hospital. This difference is simple enough, but It goes downhill quickly from there. Some words and phrases actually mean the exact opposite in the two languages.

If the U.S. Congress tables a bill, it means it is setting it aside, most likely never to be seen again. If Parliament tables a bill, it is introducing it for debate. Are you starting to see the potential for confusion?

As a boy growing up in the U.S., I went to a “public school,” meaning a place where any bozo could go if his parents paid their taxes. In England, a “public school” is a place like Eton or Harrow, where almost nobody gets to go, taxes or no taxes.

The Brits often sidestep confusion here by wearing neckties with patterns that indicate to others where they were educated. In my country, we barely wear ties at all, anymore. Baseball caps could probably serve the same purpose, except instead of revealing our alma mater,  we use them to show that we are Red Sox fans.

Sometimes guessing at a word’s meaning worked, other times, forget it. I was editing a story from London that said this guy used a “pocket torch” to find his way in the dark. I changed that to cigarette lighter for Americans, because, you know, that seemed like a good guess.

I wasn’t even close.  A pocket torch wasn’t a lighter, it was a flashlight, even though there was no flame, and most flashlights wouldn’t fit in your pocket back then, before we had smart phones.

                                 (To row, rhymes with hoe, American style)

Even short, simple words can cause huge problems. Two Americans might get into a small boat and row, soon finding themselves across the pond. If two Brits get into a small boat and row, chances are they are sitting in one spot and calling each other names. I suppose It’s possible for them to row and row at the same time, but that makes my head hurt.

I should make clear that this particular problem only exists in the written language. If you are speaking, the distinction between words that rhyme with no and wow is pretty simple, so only put it in writing if you absolutely must.

                                 (To row, rhymes with wow, British style)

Every now and then, Reuters dreamed that it could automate this translation process with a computer program. Or programme, if you prefer. They even test-drove such a thing back in the 1990s, and to show their arrogance, the changes this program made couldn’t be manually over-ridden by a human being.

This experiment didn’t last long. It ended when celebrated British actress Joan Plowright was up for some award in Hollywood, and the robotic translator kept changing her name to Joan Ploughright, because to the Brits, plow is spelled plough. The next day, amid a heated row, someone mercifully unplugged the robot.

One problem is that language is fluid. It morphs. The Brits abandoned  “gotten” as a past participle for “get” about 300 years ago, opting for “got,” instead. But they didn’t spread the word because the Colonists had got increasingly pissed off at them by that point.

Thus, today you will commonly hear an American say, “I haven’t gotten a chance to spray for cockroaches,” while a Brit will say, “I haven’t GOT a chance to spray for cockroaches.” Btw, I have seen Brits snicker at Americans over this difference, more than once. It’s a real distinction for them.

I need to end this story straightaway, but to illustrate the enormity of these differences, let me just say one more thing. The Brits and the Americans can’t even agree on how to pronounce all the letters of their alphabet. If you go to a bookshop in London and ask for the popular guidebook, “London, A to Z,” the clerk may appear befuddled, until it dawns on her.

“Oh! You mean, ‘London, A to ZED!’”

Right. They don’t say Z, they say Zed. That’s really all you need to know about those people. Maybe you should just stay at home. That’s what I do.