quite nice

One night in my first week of my junior year abroad in London, I prepared to go to School Disco. School Disco is a peculiarly British institution. Held at a few clubs (including the bar on my university’s campus), School Disco is a dance night where everyone goes in their old school uniforms, a feat made possible by the fact that almost every school in England has uniforms. As a product of American public schools, I had no such uniform and was thus forced to improvise. The best I could do was a (rather short) navy blue shirt-dress. Stepping out from my bedroom into the hallway, I asked one of my flatmates if I looked okay. Although his facial expression was flatteringly gaping, the only thing he said was “Yeah. You look quite alright.”

In the United States, “quite alright” means “I’ll be polite, but really you look like you fell off the back of a truck.” Disheartened, I went back to my room to look for a better clothing alternative.

I needn’t have worried. As I would learn over the next nine months, the British have their own version of the English language: one in which “quite alright” means “you look hot.” I knew part of this before arriving in London, of course. I’d watched enough episodes of Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous to know that a lorry is a truck, the loo is the bathroom and rubbers don’t have quite the scatological connotation in the United Kingdom as they do in the United States.

What I didn’t realize is that the differences between British and American English don’t stop with simply using different words for the same thing. The mentality with which the British use language is simply vastly different from that of Americans. Both approbative and disapproving comments are phrased in almost maddeningly moderate ways. In all my time in England, I never once heard a Brit say that they loved or hated anything. Such extreme language almost seemed to be taboo, or at least in poor taste. Instead of loving X, the British “quite like” it. Instead of hating Y, the British “don’t much fancy” or “aren’t too fussed about” it. Something that you or I might describe as “so wicked awesome” (provided, of course, that you are also from Boston) becomes “quite nice.”

This moderation of language was at first baffling to me. Both my parents are potty-mouthed artists prone to grandiose statements (“I will never see another show as goddamn amazing as the one I saw tonight” – a statement that would have more credibility if I hadn’t heard it dozens of times). I was a total theatre geek in high school and have retained (in social situations, at least) the hyperbolic vernacular and projecting voice characteristic of insecure adolescent dramatists. In the American world that I’m used to, the words “love” and “hate” rarely indicate truly intense feelings. When I say that I “hate” something, for example, my actual meaning runs the gamut from mild dislike to severe annoyance. Similarly, the list of things that I “love” includes such trivial entries as a Britney Spears song and hot dog day in the dining rooms.

My biggest fear in studying abroad was that I would fulfill the stereotype of the ugly American. I had nightmares of taking pictures of Big Ben with a disposable camera pulled out of my fanny pack while being horribly rude to native Londoners. I’m not actually the disposable camera or the fanny pack type, and shortly after arrival, I realized that Londoners, like residents of United States cities, are plenty rude themselves. A new dimension to my fears of being an ugly American, however, soon emerged. Americans, I realized, are really, really loud. For the most part, the British students I met spoke quietly, even after the third pint of the night. The American students, on the other hand, yelled in the flat’s hallways, the pubs and the streets. Almost immediately after arriving, I started to become extremely self-conscious every time I opened my mouth. My voice was too loud, and the things I said were embarrassingly overenthusiastic.

I didn’t want to be so conspicuously American, but neither did I want to be the kind of person who comes back from a year abroad saying things like “Cheers!” in a phony British accent. I have a clear memory of a pretentious theatre intern at my high school returning from a semester abroad.
“Kate! You’re back!”
“Oh! Hullo!”
“Oh. You have…an accent?”
(small, affected laugh) “Oh, do I? I guess I must have picked it up at RADA.”

I met many Americans who had lived in London for upwards of twenty years and even they did not have actual British accents. Rather, they spoke very softly with a British cadence and crispness, but not an actual accent. There is no way to develop an accent in nine months.

In nine months, however, one can develop a British vocabulary, and even, to some extent, a British sensibility. The changes came slowly. I began to refer to the place where I lived as my flat rather than my apartment. I giggled with my British friends about “pulling” on a night out dancing. When my computer malfunctioned, I found myself responding with a simple “Bloody hell” rather than my customary string of shouted expletives. I knew the transformation was complete, however, when I turned to a friend one day in February and asked, very quietly, “Do you have any of that chocolate left? I quite fancy a wee snacky thing.” Excitingly, he did have some chocolate. It was quite nice.