Of course, in France, a translated book by a U.S. author is said to be
translated 'from the American.' I haven't seen any books by Margaret Atwood or
other Canucks in French translation.

Anybody have anything to say about the differences between "American" & the
English spoken in Canuckistan?

April 30, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Of Loos and Language
By ROGER COHEN, N.Y. Times

A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me
with a twinkle in his eye if I was "knackered." Katz came to poetry via rock 'n
roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked
up some English vernacular.

"Knackered?"

The word — meaning more than tired, beat — transported me to the England of my
youth, a place of hissing gas fires, metered hot water, contempt for "the
Continent," schoolboys in corduroy shorts, crows over the rubbish dumps,
skinheads on the tube, Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, soggy leaves and solid fog.

Aging is like that. The memories pile up. More things are done for the last time
than the first. It doesn't take much to be transported.

Yes, I was knackered — and suddenly nostalgic for the churning clouds of London,
the damp mustiness of pre-prosperous England, and the mist hovering in an Oxford
dawn.

I dug out a diary I kept at university in the early '70s and found this: "Sunday
morning: the allotments dotted with stooping figures. Steaming water poured over
gleaming cars. The papers. This England."

And this:

Loose summer dresses catching in the crotch
The leather boys stick together
With coffee on the benches.
Tulips dying gape open-mouthed
At the fruit rotting after lunch.

That England's gone, of course, it's had its glossy makeover like everywhere
else. Gastropubs shun bangers and lumpy mash and even Leeds is trendy.

But language is another story. Katz told me how uncomfortable he felt saying
"loo" for the first time. The unthinkable alternative was to ask some bloke for
the "bathroom."

What for, mate?

Katz read classics at St. John's College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of
sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this
way: "I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living
in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would
have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak
the same language, but we really don't."

Yes, the illusion is there. The United States freed itself from Britain in a
revolution but had to opt for subtler forms of sedition when it came to the
language.

I remember getting in a row with an editor and friend, Richard Berry, after
writing "car park." No such thing in American, Berry said. Come on! It's where
you put your car, Richard. Nope, he insisted, parking lot.

I was miffed. I was gutted. (Look that up, Richard.)

"Well done, love," I told my 14-year-old son the other day. "Well done, love!"
he parroted in that scorn-dripping tone teenagers reserve for their Paleolithic
parents, weaving an English patter into his Brooklynese. "You mean: Good job!"

Quite.

Jobs, the work ethic — no escape from them in the United States, where finishing
a meal in a restaurant prompts the death-penalty-meriting: "Are you still
working on that?" When I took an English test to become a U.S. citizen a few
years back, one of the three sentences in my dictation was: "I plan to work very
hard every day."

Quite.

America works, every day, its youthful ambition still boundless. England, having
seen everything go pear-shaped, relieved of the burden of running a ropey world,
boozes and says it's sorry and prefers a lie-in.

"Oxford was the only place I've heard someone use `mayn't' completely casually,"
Katz wrote. "I began to long for those usages — grammatically unimpeachable and
stylistically extravagant — and be on the lookout for them. I had a friend who
used `Crumbs!' as an exclamation, something I'd only ever read in books or seen
in movies."

Crumbs! It's been yonks since I heard that or peered through the windscreen over
the bonnet at lorries on the motorway. I thought I'd left England behind — its
rucksacks and trousers and chemists and fortnights — you know, the full Anglo
monty — until I got too knackered to resist.

Katz continued: "After a year or so of tuning into the subtleties of the English
language, something quite remarkable occurred — I began to perceive many
different layers of expression in ways the British communicate. Where they are
often criticized by Americans for being cold, I began to see endless expressions
of warmth. Where they might be considered narrow-minded, I found instead some of
the most open, progressive minds I have encountered."

English tolerance can be as uplifting as American idealism, that many-faceted
and quizzical "quite" seeing U.S. "hope."

Since my student walks to the Isis past the wet autumn leaves smoking rather
than burning, English has gone global. In fact, the world's lingua franca is now
bad English. It's strange then that a U.S. president who speaks good English,
far better than his predecessor, seems able to communicate with that world. This
may even be Barack Obama's biggest achievement in his first 100 days.

Brilliant!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/opinion/30iht-edcohen.html?em=&pagewanted=prin\
t