My Mum tells a hilarious story from when she and my Dad first came to America in the mid-sixties, before I was born. She went out to buy Dad some vests (you can tell it was the sixties), and to buy herself a pinafore type dress that you wore over a jumper, that was all the rage at the time. She recalls getting sent from pillar to post in the department store by increasingly confused sales assistants, to whom a vest was a waistcoat and a pinafore dress was a jumper.
Maybe because American culture is now so familiar to us in Britain and Ireland, I haven’t found much of that. I know that trousers are ‘pants’, and no one here has looked at me quizzically when I talk about the ‘bin’ or ‘pavement’. But never-the-less, there is constant translation going on. In some ways it’s the same type of translation I employ in Northern Ireland. My conversation there is peppered with ‘wee’ and ‘grand’ because ‘small’ and ‘fine’ just don’t seem quite accurate. But if I say ‘wee’ and ‘grand’ here, there’s the potential I will be misunderstood.
I stood in a queue in a shop (or line in a store!) the other day and listened to a Eurasian woman on the till talking to a Spanish customer – both of them clearly speaking a foreign language – but both talking in English. It’s not like those amazing waiters in Spanish resorts who can switch between English, Spanish or German at will – all New York requires of you is English.
In the office, like I was at the BBC World Service, I am surrounded by foreign languages. I hear my colleagues in the Russian service speaking their beautiful gutteral tongue – further down the corridor is the Portugeuse section – next to us the French. But at the morning meetings everyone speaks in English. And at home there is multi-lingual Queen of Manhattan – singing along in Italian with Pavarotti on the TV, chatting to friends on the phone in Romanian, lapsing into French when she wants to make a point.
In this city of immigrants, everyone can converse in English, but everyone is speaking their own version.