Across the Pond Read Free

to her husband. It seemed imprudent to appear before the Judgement seat with hatred in my heart.
    I ended by signing my name with a flourish for the last time, put on my jacket with the obscure sense that one should die with a certain formality rather than in shirtsleeves, and awaited a sickening thud. I briefly considered ordering a double whisky, but decided that it was in the best British tradition to go down with a clear head. I would raise my chin high, but not in order to pour liquor down my throat. It then occurred to me to add a postscript to my note, assuring the recipient of my unwavering devotion in the few seconds of life still granted to me, and pointing out on a more practical note that if the public ever got fed up with her and she found it hard to obtain work, I had a little money stashed away in the top drawer of my desk that she was welcome to have. If she did make use of it, a modest statue in my memory would not, I intimated, come amiss.
    It was only then that I realised that my fellow passengers seemed to be greeting the flight attendant’s apocalyptic announcement with remarkable sang froid . They were still sipping their coffees, fiddling with their headsets, and allowing their children to sport sick bags on their noses, for all the world as though they were not about to perish. When the attendant repeated his announcement, I realised that he had said they were turning off the entertainment, not the engines. His American accent had deceived me. For some of the more media-dependent passengers on the plane, this news was no doubt almost as devastating as being told that they had only four minutes to live. But at least we were going to make JFK Airport in one piece, with or without the accompaniment of Johnny Depp.
    The same misunderstandings can happen the other way round. An American friend of mine was driving rather too vigorously in the west of Ireland, and was pulled over by a Gard (police officer). “What would happen if you were to run into Mr. Fog?” the Gard inquired gruffly in his thick Connaught accent. Stung by this patronising query, my friend replied with heavy sarcasm, “Well, I guess I’d put Mr. Foot on Mr. Brake.” Whereupon the officer stared at him rather strangely and growled, “I said mist or fog .” My friend, as it happens, is an anthropologist. For one enthralling moment he thought he had stumbled upon a tribe in the west of Ireland which personified aspects of the weather, speaking of Mrs. Hailstorm, Master Sunshine, and so on. Other misunderstandings are possible, too. Some years ago, an American student I taught was surprised to see British road signs reading “Way Out.” I told him that they were left over from the 1960s, when there were also road signs reading “Cool,” “Groovy,” “Peace and Love,” and the like.
    I once rang an American colleague and reached his voice mail, which announced: “Hi, this is Mike and Marie. We do not reply to silly questions.” Perhaps they had been besieged by callers asking them how many triangular pink objects they had in the house, or how much it cost to rent a lawn mower in Kuala Lumpur. Later I realised he had said “survey questions.” Americans who are asked by immigration officers to state the purpose of their visit on arriving in the United Kingdom should be advised that some American pronunciations of “tourism” can sound quite like “terrorism.” In fact, the public speeches of George W. Bush seemed to many of the British to be constantly warning against the evils of tourism. Since Bush was scarcely the most cosmopolitan president to grace the White House, this might have reflected his true opinion. Perhaps he was running the words “tourism” and “terrorism” together for reasons of economy. There can also be problems when travelling from Europe to America, since prospective visitors to the United States are now required to complete a form declaring whether they have ever been involved in committing