Free That's Not English by Erin Moore Page A

in
Mary Poppins
, with too much enthusiasm. Itmust be delivered laconically.” Delivery does count. The English say “Chis” out of the sides of their mouths when they mean
thank you
or
good-bye
. Americans do not pick up on this, and say
cheers
the same—toothily, hitting the
r
a bit hard and implying an exclamation point—whether they mean it as a toast or a casual good-bye. Some Americans are just as irritated by their compatriots’ appropriation of
cheers
. One ranted, “Why is everyone saying
cheers
these days? . . . I am going to start saying . . . ‘Did I just have a drink and not know it?’”
    The backlash against Americans who borrow
cheers
may seem churlish, but it wouldn’t surprise a linguist. As M. Lynne Murphy wrote in her blog, “Separated by a Common Language,” “If you’re using words from a different place that you don’t have ‘birth rights’ to, you’re seen as ‘inauthentic’ in the use of those words . . . as aspiring to be associated with a group of people who may not always be positively stereotyped in the culture you’re in—and those stereotypes rub off on your word usage . . . So, taking on American words is seen as ‘sloppy’ and ‘lazy’ in the UK. Taking on British words is seen as ‘snobby’ and ‘pretentious’ in the US.”
    There is only one way this could end:Cheers.

Knackered
    In which our children arrive to collectively lobotomize us.
    E ven if you had no idea what
knackered
meant, you couldn’t miss it in context: “I’m absolutely
knackered.
” It is English slang for “exhausted,” and it usually comes with a certain sag of the shoulders and a little stagger in the voice. There is a particularly English way of saying it, too. Whereas an American might over-egg the
r
—thus sounding far too perky to be knackered—the English elide it. It’s pronounced
nnakk-uhd
: slow on the first syllable, swallowing the second.
    But
exhausted
doesn’t quite capture the full sense of
knackered
. The knacker’s yard is, literally, an abattoir for horses that have outlived their ability to stand, run, and carry. The
Oxford English Dictionary
puts an even finer point on it with this definition of the verb
to
knacker
: “to kill; to castrate; usu. in weakened sense, to exhaust, to wear out.” The examples that followare of athletes and soldiers. But in my experience, “I’m knackered” is the new parents’ refrain.
    Becoming a parent in an adopted country is one of the best assimilation exercises there is. The shared experiences of pregnancy and early parenthood give you the opportunity to meet, and get to know, people with whom you may have had little in common before you popped your sprogs. (That’s English English for before your babies arrived.) You end up on maternity wards, in baby classes and playgroups and Internet chat rooms, with people whose vocabulary for this phase of life is entirely foreign. You can’t help but learn almost as many new words as your
bub
(baby).
    First you are initiated into the medical system, with its acronyms and quirks. In England the NHS (National Health Service) assures every pregnant woman a good basic standard of care in a public hospital, free of charge (or at least covered by taxes). Beyond that, the NHS provides each woman with extra care as needed. In practice this means that if you have a problem, you get all the attention you need; otherwise, very little indeed. Anyone experiencing an uncomplicated pregnancy under the NHS feels lucky, if a bit neglected. The standard number of ultrasounds for an NHS pregnancy is two—not the half dozen that a well-insured American would expect. But on the other hand,
everyone
gets two. No one is left out of prenatal care entirely, which still happens in America. And even the best-insured Americans do not walk out of the hospital postdelivery owing nothing. During my entire NHS pregnancy and birth, I was asked to pay a grand total of £2.50. That was for the printout