See ya, poppet

The difficulties of writing dialogue for characters who share an idiom foreign to the writer – specifically, UKnians writing Yank and Yanks writing UKnian.

[I]t’s fairly common for British writers to create ostensibly American characters who give themselves away in dialogue. The writer need not even be British, necessarily: Lionel Shriver is an American writer who has lived in the U.K. for many years. Her most recent novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” imagines a financial apocalypse set entirely in the United States, albeit in the future. All of the major characters are American. And yet a father assures his son that a set of silverware “could come in useful.” A woman signs off a telephone conversation with her sister by deploying a British term of endearment: “Bye, puppet.”

Wot? The British term of endearment is “poppet,” not “puppet.” Puppet is just weird. Maybe Shriver’s character was accusing her sister of being a mindless automaton.

A woman tells a child, “You’re a bit young to send into the fields. I could be done for violating child labor laws.” (The lingering Britishisms are especially curious because other aspects of the text and dialogue are Americanized—even the novel’s British edition uses “z” rather than “s” in words like “apologize” and “publicized.”)

“My publishers think I have become some kind of linguistic moron,” Shriver told me. “In truth, I am one of the better sources for what is and is not British or American usage.”

And modest, too.

(It’s odd to be uncertain about that phrase – it’s really not American usage. It’s not ambiguous.)

The inverse situation—American-created British characters with off-sounding diction—appears to be less prevalent, everyone agreed, perhaps because many American writers are too unfamiliar with, or intimidated by, British usage and slang to even try. (They may also have less occasion to do so.) Shriver, in any case, has been criticized from this direction as well: some British reviewers of her novel “The Post-Birthday World,” from 2007, attacked the Cockney slang of one of its characters—a charge Shriver labels “ludicrous.”

There’s that modesty again. Wouldn’t they be more likely to know than she is?

Viner happens to be married to an American professor of linguistics, Lynne Murphy, who teaches at the University of Sussex and writes a blog called Separated by a Common Language. Next year, she will publish a book, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.” Novelists, Murphy told me, tend to put their energy into crafting things that a character would say—it’s a less intuitive exercise to try and weed out what a character wouldn’t say. “It’s like trying to prove a negative,” she said.

MyaR (who comments here and is a linguist) tells me Murphy’s blog is excellent.

What’s more, making an extra effort to perfect American dialogue may have risks, Hornby suggested. “Paying American characters special attention can backfire—you spend too much time shoehorning words like ‘sidewalk’ and ‘diaper’ into places where they don’t properly belong, just to show you’re thinking about it,” he explained.

Baby carriage. Dish soap. Trunk. Faucet.

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