Young Nation, My Foot

I was getting upset about the Americanisation of Britain this week after someone of a similar background to my own misspelled the medical term anaemic in the American way, ‘anemic’.  This sort of thing seems to be happening at an alarming rate.  As part of the fallout from the same incident, it was even mentioned that I was 'stuck in the Dark Ages' and that this is progress don't you know; that we ought to bring Britain kicking and screaming into the future, with this young, hip superpower by our side.

He doesn't look so young and hip to me.

America is almost universally supposed to be a young, forward-thinking country, lacking our medieval vestiges because in the Middle Ages it wasn’t even there yet.  It was only in 1776 that the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain occurred, so the little darlings are only 236 years old.  To hell with Gangnam; let's celebrate it George Washington style and have a double ration of rum.  (Take it from me, Washington wasn’t the first British colonel to go mad in the wilderness, and he certainly won’t be the last.)

However, it has recently come to my attention that America is lying about his age.

If you ignore the Vikings, which I admit is often a hard thing to do around my house, John Cabot, the Anglo-Italian navigator and explorer, discovered North America on 24 June 1497 under the commission of Henry VII of England.

Most people forget this happened.  True, Cabot did not advance 'beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow', made no contact with the natives, took on fresh water, raised the Venetian and Papal banners, claimed the land for the King of England (whilst, of course, recognising the religious authority of the Roman Catholic Church – Protestantism would not get invented for another twenty years) and buggered off to explore the coast on his way home to Bristol.

Then, he was horribly overshadowed by someone else.

I'd imagine you've all heard of Christopher Columbus, who completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1503 under the sponsorship of the Crown of Castile.  During his first voyage in 1492, Colón (as his name was actually spelled) landed in the Bahamas archipelago, and then over the course of three more voyages he visited the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, and Central America, claiming them for the Spanish Empire.

Apparently, for the emerging United States, John Cabot’s English and (posthumously) Canadian connections made him a poor national hero, and so the veneration of Columbus in America took wing from colonial times onwards.  His adoption as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word 'Columbia', or even simply 'Columbus', spread rapidly after the American Revolution.  Numerous cities, towns, counties, streets and plazas are named after him.  He was a candidate for sainthood in 1866, and on the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas, in 1892, monuments to Columbus were erected throughout the United States and Latin America.

But Cabot's got the hero stance
and EVERYTHING.

Poor show, America.  How can you claim to be a Young Country when you are praising the chap who found your bottom and Colón-ised it in the late 1400s?

So, perhaps America isn't really that young, and the 1490s still certainly qualify as the Middle Ages round my neck of the woods.  But it's still ‘forward-thinking’, surely?  Well…

Because the typical American lived on an isolated farmstead as recently as 1910, most American dialects changed far more slowly than English did in Britain, which was densely urbanised by 1850.  One of the effects of this is that many words, spellings, and punctuation marks now in use in the USA were actually fairly normal for the England of the early 1700s (but not since).

Yea, Verily!

Before 1755, most people used future 'British', future 'American', and future 'incorrect' spellings interchangeably – or according to what language the word was borrowed from, i.e. '-our' for French and '-or' for Latin.  But after Dr Johnson came down firmly on the side of '-our' for all such words, and his US counterpart Noah Webster equally firmly on the side of '-or', this became a new type of national distinction, where before it had just been academic or random.  The spellings 'honor' and 'realize' and the like were commonly used in England in the 17th century when the majority of the Thirteen Colonies were founded.

Today, opinions in Britain, the Commonwealth, and the EU vary on whether '-ize' and '-yze' endings are American Imperialism, or just very, very old-fashioned.  But of course, they are both.  The University of Oxford (in contrast even to Cambridge) does not help the situation, in that it supports the ancient spellings out of respect for ancientness; and its popular dictionaries can be pointed to by Americans to 'prove' that their preferred i.e. 17th-century spelling is more right than ours even in our own country.

It is clearly time for Oxford to put a sock in it and realise that they should spell realise realise.

Even as I write this on my computer, I am faced by those damned red squiggly lines under 'recognising' and 'realise', even though I set it to ‘UK-English’ some time ago.  Even Mr Gates's famous software is subliminally brainwashing us (but I won't tell him that, right now, I've also got a squiggly line under 'honor'.  Surely we can’t all be wrong?).

Mind you, as a personal favour, if he could stop automatically correcting the word 'wellies' to 'willies', I'd be most appreciative.

While we’re on the subject of language, here's another thing I'd like to point out to our younger brother.  The 'county sheriff' riding down the 'highway' with his 'posse' – short for the Latin posse comitatus, 'power of the count(y)' – was a common occurrence in England in the Middle Ages.  The US is rather special for the persistence into recent times of highways and posses, as well as county sheriffs with the equivalent power, and equivalent bad attitude, of our semi-legendary twelfth-century Sheriff of Nottingham.

Speaking of posses and such, England last hanged a man in 1964 and abolished hanging in 1969.  The US, meanwhile, is seemingly not even capable of abolishing it, due to that country's bizarre patchwork of more than fifty different competing systems of law, education, and taxation: an arrangement that makes Mr Colón’s medieval Italy look tightly organised in comparison.  And as to this 'Commander-in-Chief' business, the British head of state last commanded an army in war in 1743 or possibly 1746, and (without meaning any disrespect to Their Majesties) our win/loss ratio has been improving steadily ever since.

At best, America is not younger, but about the same age: we remain strangely susceptible to Patty Duke Show-like visions of the Atlantic Alliance, England and America as each other’s Bizarro World, driving down opposite sides of the road but in the same direction forever, my Laurel to their Hardy, their Heckle to my Jeckle.

But facts are facts.  Our flag and name 'United Kingdom' only date back to New Year's Day 1801, making us younger than America by 24 years, 5 months, and 28 days.

We're also much, much cuter.