Saturday, July 10, 2010
migraine, Miss Marpleisms, and linguistic imperialism
Last week I had two emails from fans of the recent British-made television versions of Miss Marple mysteries, which are apparently playing in North America at the moment. As is often the case with British costume dramas and mysteries (those things that a certain class of American anglophiles like[s]), it is co-produced by British (ITV) and American (WGBH Boston) television companies. (In a reversal of the stereotype of the original-series-producing television channels in the two countries, the British ITV is a commercial channel, while WGBH is part of the US's Public Broadcasting System.) WGBH has a long history of Anglophilia; it is the home of Masterpiece Theatre (now just 'Masterpiece') and Mystery! (rebranded as 'Masterpiece Mystery!'). The former was originally introduced by 'Letter from America' broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and the latter by Vincent Price, and they are iconic program(me)s in the States to the extent that Sesame Street created a long-running parody, Monsterpiece Theatre (hosted by Alistair Cookie) and a parody mystery program(me) hosted by Vincent Twice Vincent Twice. Of course, the only reason I mention this is to have the excuse to post one:
But that has nothing to do with Miss Marple, does it? Both of my Miss Marple correspondents (American Judy and @mikcooke) have lived in the UK, but watched Miss Marple in North America and were surprised by apparent Americanisms and anachronisms in the script. Apparently these recent re-tellings of the Miss Marple stories are known for playing fast and loose with the original Agatha Christie texts. From Wikipedia:
The show has sparked controversy with some viewers for its adaptations of the novels. The first episode, The Body in the Library, changed the identity of one of the killers and introduced lesbianism into the plot; the second episode explored Miss Marple's earlier life; the third episode contained a motive change and the fourth episode cut several characters and added affairs into the story and emphasized a lesbian subplot that was quite discreet in the original novel. The second series also saw some changes. By the Pricking of My Thumbs was originally a Tommy and Tuppence story, while The Sittaford Mystery was also not originally a Miss Marple book and the identity of the killer was changed. The third series has two adaptations that were not originally Miss Marple books: Towards Zero and Ordeal by Innocence. The fourth series continues the trend with Murder is Easy and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?. The fifth series does the same, with The Secret of Chimneys and The Pale Horse.
@mikcooke points out the following:
And Judy queried the pronunciation of migraine, which was pronounced "in the American way" by one of the English characters. This is how the OED represents--and comments upon--it:
- Jane Marple phoned the local police station and asked for "Detective X" (AmE) and would have asked for "Inspector X" [This inspired a 'Difference of the Day' tweet last week--ed.]
- She spoke about a man who took the bus from the "train station" (AmE) instead of "station" (BrE)
- The village vicar was in traditional black attire but wore a grey trilby (inappropriate)
- Various characters used current casual parlance (if not outright Americanisms, sorry, AmE) "not to worry", "waste of space"
- A man lent another "half a million pounds (c. 1950)" which would be about a billion pounds c. 2010 (a foolish updating, which is never done in the Poirot series)
Brit. /'mi:greIn/, /'m^IgreIn/, U.S. /'maIgreIn/In other symbols, the BrE pronunciations are 'me grain' or 'my grain', whereas the AmE pronunciation is always 'my grain'. The symbols are a bit different for the 'my grain' pronuniciations because the OED represents the diphthong represented by the 'y' in 'my' differently for the two dialects--claiming a slight difference in where in the mouth the diphthong starts.But not everyone agrees that there's a distinction between the two pronunciations of my. For instance, this dialect coach represents the 'price' vowel (for that's what phoneticians tend to call it) as being the same in the two dialects. It's represented the same in this chart in Wikipedia, too. The OED uses a scheme developed by Clive Upton that makes this and a few other distinctions that aren't universally made. John Wells, writing about the advantages and disadvantages of Upton's system, says:
Price. The standard notation might seem to imply that the starting point of the price diphthong is the same as that of the mouth diphthong. In practice, speakers vary widely in how the two qualities compare. In mouth people in the southeast of England typically have a rather bat-like starting point, while in price their starting point is more like cart. In traditional RP the starting points are much the same. Upton's notation implicitly identifies the first element of price with the vowel quality of cut -- an identification that accords with the habits neither of RP nor of southeastern speech (Estuary English), and strikes me as bizarre.I'm going to go with Wells on this one. This means that American 'my grain' pronunciation is a known variant in BrE. And in fact I've heard 'my grain' so much in England that I was beginning to wonder whether 'mee-grain' was just a South Africanism (since that was where I was first introduced to the pronunciation).The OED also has a historical note on the pronunciation that first discusses whether the second vowel is pronounced as it would be in French (from which the word came to us--about 500 years ago) or whether it's "naturalized" to the English pronunciation of the spelling 'ai', as in grain. It also says that two American dictionaries from around the turn of the 20th century listed the pronunciation as if the first syllable had the vowel in mitt and the stress on the second syllable--but that it later turned to the 'my' pronunciation that we know today. It's unclear here whether the 'my' pronunciation started in the US and spread to the UK, or whether it might have been invented in both places. To me, it doesn't look like the most natural way to pronounce that spelling--if I saw the word for the first time, I'd probably go for the abandoned /mI'greIn/ (mih-GRAIN)--so, how it turned to 'my grain' I don't know...
At any rate, the English character in Miss Marple could have naturally come upon that pronunciation, but I'm betting that it's anachronistic, like many of the things that @mikcooke noted. So, has Miss Marple been updated or Americanized? Probably a little of both.
Now, I've been feeling a bit down about all of the anti-Americanism-ism that's been going on in the UK press these days--everything from The Economist to our local property-listings magazine seems to have a feature or a series that urges its readers to defend the Mother Tongue against (in the words of the latter example) "ghastly, overblown, crass, managerial Americanisms". It's not infrequent that the alleged Americanisms are (a) long-standing non-standard (or formerly standard) Briticisms, (b) management jargon that didn't necessarily start in the US and that is reviled in the US as much as in the UK, or (c) Australianisms.Why does all this make me uncomfortable? It's not that I think Americanisms should or shouldn't be imported, it's just the vehemence and bile with which the (often unresearched) claims are made--the apparent assumption that if it's American, then it's crass and unnecessary. (The Economist doesn't like gubernatorial because it "is an ugly word." Is that the best you can do, Economist?) One could point out many Americanisms that have found very comfy homes in BrE, and which no one complains about.
But the implicit anti-Americanism in the anti-Americanismism becomes more understandable when one thinks about the American resistance --at an institutional level-- to importing British voices and words. In addition to producing globali{z/s}ed versions of Miss Marple, British (pop-)cultural products tend to be remade (many would say [orig. AmE] "dumbed down") in some way or another for the American market--whereas the British take their American media mostly (AmE) straight-up. So, a generation of British youth spout the slang of Friends, while Americans watched re-planted American versions of Coupling and The Office (and lots more). In the case of The Office, the re-potting has been so successful that the American version is shown in the UK. In the case of Coupling, oh I feel embarrassed for my homeland. (See this wonderful compare-and-contrast video to see just how broad and--how can I say this? oh yeah!--terrible American comic acting can be.) But it's not just changing the situations of situation comedies. When I heard my American family talking about "Oprah Winfrey's Life on the Discovery Channel", I told them they should watch the David Attenborough series by the same name. Then I realized it was the David Attenborough series, re-voiced by Oprah. (You can read this discussion on which is better. Apparently Sigourney Weaver has re-voiced previous Attenborough series.) The American television programming that keeps British voices is on the channels that 'intellectuals' are supposed to watch: PBS, BBC America and some co-productions on premium cable channels (HBO, Showtime). And while there have recently been lots of British actors speaking in American accents on American television (American-columnist-for-UK-newspaper Tim Dowling rates them here), for British characters it's not uncommon to have a North American speaking with a non-authentic accent--see most of the "English" characters (save Giles) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example.
Of course, ask Americans, and they'll usually say that they love the English (the rest of the UK doesn't really get a look-in) and would love to see more of them. But that's not what they're getting--and for the most part, they don't seem to mind. And this is why there usually are ten times as many candidates for AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year as BrE-to-AmE candidates. And why many of its speakers feel that British English is 'under attack' from an imperialistic America. (But a country that prides itself on its sense of irony should eat that up, eh?)