It's groovy man, groovy!:

American English creeps into our homes

by Lionel Wijesiri

"Just got some new skins," says one young man to another. "Lotsa bread?" asks his friend. The reply comes. "Like nothing, man!" The second boy comments. "Groovy, man groovy."

I heard this brief conversation recently at a wedding reception. Believe it or not, these two young men were speaking the same language, or at least a dialect of the same language - commonly known as 'American English.' The first young man was telling his friend that he had got a bargain on a set of drums. Both had been educated in the US, I came to know later.

Whether Americans are speaking English correctly is a question that has had teachers, linguists, editors, writers and experts on the English language at one another's throats. Often, such authorities denounce some of the commonest words and phrases currently used by Americans.

Personally, I disagree. I believe, English language is in rather good shape. It just happens to be going through several absurd-sounding phases.

But, this should hardly trigger an alarm, as it is just another in a long series of lunges into the unorthodox, that have kept English language, the marvellous, unpredictable and absolutely useful language, that it is.

History

Americans have always mauled, twisted, improvised upon and innovated, in the language they brought from England. The first settlers did it because they had to. Confronted with birds, animals and landscapes for which there were no English names, they took terms directly from the American Indian languages, e.g. chipmunk, pecan, raccoon, skunk, moose, opossum, caribou, squash, etc.

At the same time, Indian expressions were translated into English. The first Euro-Americans referred to themselves as 'pale-faces,' talked of going on the 'warpath' and 'burying the hatchet.'

The next expansion of American English came with the waves of immigrants to the New World. From Mexican Spanish came the words, chocolate, tomato and avocado. Dutch settlers contributed, boss, cookie and spook, while German Americans gave the Americans, sauerkraut, noodle and so on.

By the beginning of the 19th century, a whole new spoken dialect had emerged - reflecting Americans' westward, wilderness-taming, melting-pot experience. If in 1800, an American had told an Englishman that he had 'cleared the underbrush, built a log cabin in the backwoods and breakfasted on johnnycake before hunting muskrats and bullfrogs down near the rapids', the Englishman wouldn't have had the slightest idea of what his American friend was talking about.

Wonderful phrases

American parents in the 1930s were equally bewildered when their jazz-age kids erupted with expressions such as 'That's the cat's pajamas' (meaning, excellent person).

Today's parents gape when they phone their kids: "Hi son, what are you doing?" The reply: "Nothing much, mom, just hanging out with Sally." Yet, such fanciful flights away from the loose standards of American English all convey a good deal of insight about the Americans, individually and as a nation.

In the meantime, some wonderfully articulate phrases are swirling into the American language. What better describes the tension we all experience than the phrase 'up tight'? We had no precise word for 'lively, direct communication' until 'rapping' appeared.

If something is simply too splendid to describe, it is, truly, 'awesome' or 'groovy,' as today's kids tell us, and when several people leave a group, they are, literally, 'splitting.'

Black English is itself in evolution. The word 'funky', quite popular with today's young, used to mean smoky or smelly. Now, it means 'down-to-earth' or 'real'. 'Cop-out' originally meant, to be 'arrested'. Now, it means you are disassociating yourself from something.

Americans say 'pants' while Englishmen say 'trousers'. For the Englishman 'pants' are things worn underneath. 'Pavement' is 'sidewalk' to the Americans, and, 'sneakers' to Americans are 'trainers' to the British.

In the US, it's the 'trunk' whereas, the English say the 'boot' of the car and, 'gas' for Americans is 'petrol' for the English. It's 'toilet' in the UK, but 'bathroom', 'washroom' or 'John', in the USA!

Changes

Some ordinary words are also vanishing from the daily dialect. 'Home' has replaced 'house'. The guy who constructs them is now called a 'home builder'. (I fearfully await the day when our dog, Jackie's backyard shed becomes his 'dog home', with an assessment number, and all.)

Now, 'cemeteries' have become 'memorial parks', 'prisons' are 'houses of detention' and 'slums to the inner city'. One 84-year-old friend of mine blew up recently, when someone applied a new euphemism to him. "Damn it, boy!" he roared, "1'm not a senior citizen, I am an old man!"

There are those phrases that are the same, but have totally different meanings, resulting in severe misunderstandings. Take for instance, the phrase 'knock up'. In the USA it means make a girl pregnant, while in the UK it means, to knock on someone's door! Imagine someone from Britain at a conference in America. On meeting in the hotel lobby for breakfast, the American asks the Englishman if a fellow female delegate had come down for breakfast, yet. It would be quite natural for the Englishman to reply: "No, but I did knock her up this morning."

Someone from England came to visit one of my friends at Phoenix. On their way to the car they got into the elevator. There were two rough looking guys there already, and one was smoking. The Englishman gasped in amazement and asked, "Are you allowed to smoke a fag in here?" the two rough guys looked really confused and my friend burst out laughing. (Fag is a gay person in the US, and to 'smoke someone' means to kill him with a gun) Anyway, they took the next elevator.

Groovy

None of the interesting things Americans are doing to their language really matter as long as we get the message across. For all its oddities, American English is, without doubt, increasingly influential around the world, to all of us in our homes.

An American would say: Guess what? That's groovy news, man, real groovy.