NORMAL LIFE: What Is A Natter?

Sometimes I am amazed at just how different they are. They share the same language, but the logic they apply to sentence formation is as dazzling as their paranoia at getting sued. I work for an American company and, today, I made a conscious effort to make contact with a US-based colleague of mine who is recovering from cancer.

In my email, I told her I was in the office for another hour in case she fancied a natter. In her response, she admitted to having checked 'natter' in the dictionary because she didn't know what t meant. The Oxford Dictionary defines natter as a lengthy chat or to chat casually and at length. I started to think how could they not know what natter means? To be sure, I called another American colleague to ask if he knew what natter meant. He too confessed to not knowing the meaning of the word.

I was reminded by an email I sent to yet another colleague a few weeks back. He had just moved into a new place so I asked if anyone had 'hijacked' the place yet. He reacted with urgency, as if I had suggested that it had been bombed or overrun by extremists of some kind. No, mate, I meant has someone left their toothbrush, then some underwear and, by the end of the week, taken over? Oh, he exlaimed, totally unimpressed.

Sometimes I feel I am stuck in the middle. I have Finns asking me to read emails from their Ameican colleagues to help them read between the lines, but how can we even begin to read between the lines when we don't even understand th various context in which words can be used?

What differentiates English-English from American-English is that English-English is relatively versatile; this versatility stems from an imaginative folk who, over the centuries, have adopted many phrases which might seem puzzling to a foreigner (indeed, even those whose native language is based on English itself) yet be so rich in detail. Meanwhile, American-English is the byproduct of an immigrant country's scramble for a common language. Amidst all the different nationalities flooding into the New World, meaning of words (even spellings) became twisted by the non-native English folk.

To give you an example, when you pay a bill in a restaurant, an American gives you a cheque. However, a cheque, in English-English, would be something you pay the bill with. Meanwhile, an American might pay for his dinner with a $50 bill whereas a British person would pay with a £50 note. How could the meaning of such simple words have lost such clarity - it must have been through the mass of foreigners watering down the sophistication of the comparitively 'pure' language of the English.

My boss and I had a very interesting discussion about Americans recently. I mean, what is Americanism? Who is an American? What makes an American an American? We both deduced that there's no easy answer to this due to the influx of Irish, Italians, Greeks and Turks. This gives weight to my earlier thought that English-English was watered down. What a shame!

American-English, officially referred to as a dialect of English-English, is the greatest legacy of the English. It's expansion has somehow overcome the tribality which must have existed at one point among an unedudated Europe. We can all now communicate. In the 21st Century, however, there's that little bit further to go before we truly understand eachother.