Englishness

I just spell-checked an article, and since my spell-check is set to 'US' -- in fact, there's a little American flag in the top right corner -- it caught my new dirty secret: sometimes I use British spellings without even noticing it. It's not gone so far as to make "colour" look okay; I can't imagine it ever will. Nor have I started wearing shorts with tights, which seems to be all the rage here. (Ladies, this is not ok!) But in any case, slowly the letter "s" is creeping in in place of "z," so I'll write "analyse." In fact, right now Blogger has underlined the word in red, so there you go.

Spelling is the tip of the assimilation iceberg. It's tricky, this business of assimilating, because England does and does not seem like a foreign country. Unlike Germany, where I don't even get the gender of bratwurst right -- I mistakenly ordered ein Bratwurst instead of eine Bratwurst; I had no inkling it was feminine, and was gruffly corrected by the sausage seller -- here I can get around no problem, and certain things, for instance the NHS, seem to run more smoothly (knock wood) than their American equivalents. Nevertheless, an American inevitably experiences occasional, or even frequent, puzzlement in the face of English traditions and ways. As Bill Bryson chronicles so well in Notes from a Small Island, which I was given as a (very appropriate) Christmas present, there's a long list of English things that stand out to an American. The variety of radio programming, for instance -- who's heard of a radio soap? or a show all about gardening questions? -- not to mention the ritualization of tea, the obsession with sparkly Saturday-night outfits, the fear of being overheard in public, and the tremendous population of urban foxes (and yes, I do mean the variety with four legs, not two, for any of you who are wondering...). There are nicer oddities, too, like the warmth of English families and the pub-to-pub walking you can do, in the countryside, or, if you like, in the city; plus Simon Schama's history programs, and any recipe by Nigel Slater. But for a nation that speaks English, it is a pretty different country. Even the word "pretty" means something different here: "pretty different" is the equivalent of "very different"; the meanings of "pretty" and "quite" are switched in British English.

That said, I think the pluses outweigh the minuses. I mean, flaming Christmas pudding? Pretty awesome. Lots of crazy tweed sold by old hat shops? Also nice. A general sense of community whenever it snows? Not so bad. Cadbury (soon to be Kraft) eggs, available from January through April, expressly designed to fatten us all up? A win. Debit cards with chips in them? Convenient. Everyone dressed in navy, grey, and brown? Easy to blend in.