Posted on by qscrisp

Joss Stone – She’s Bad

I don't know much about Joss Stone. I think if I initially noticed her at all it's because she was a Devon lass, at least for some of her upbringing, and it's rare for anything famous to come from Devon (apart from the fact that the entire United States could have been said to 'come from' Devon, of course). Anyway, I've never liked the little of her music that I've heard. It reminds me of Charlie Brooker's bewilderment at the winners on Simon Cowell's dreadful cultural vandalism project (I forget its name) – singers who are, in Brooker's words "apparently good". I've never really understood what was ever meant to be good about Joss Stone or any of her ilk. However, there is now apparently supposed to be something bad about her. My attention was caught by this article. In particular it caught my attention because I had seen some list of 2007's most annoying people (or some such thing) on television, and she was amongst them. The gist of the backlash against her seems to be that she went to America and picked up an American accent (plus various assorted American idioms). I find this in some ways curious.

Please allow me to explain. From late 2000 to early 2003 I spent time away from Britain in Taiwan and Japan. I noticed a number of things about Britain when I returned. Obsession with the property ladder. Increased marketing everywhere you turned your eye. And a new wave of Americanisation of the English language. This is nothing new. It has been occurring at least since the Sixties and probably long before then. One small example is the fact that before I went to Taiwan most people in Britain favoured the word 'film' over the word 'movie'. After I got back from Japan the situation was reversed. Ever since the onset of the nineties I have noticed wave after wave of Americanisms. Before we had Seinfeld here no one used the word 'wuss'. Before The Simpsons no one used the word 'butt'. Now these are in common use. Even our grammar has changed. Where once people would have said "I have", they now say "I do" (can't give a good example right now), they tend to use the present perfect tense less often, and so on. The extent of this is such that I picked up a British book of linguistic cliches recently and, flicking through its pages discovered that not only were well over half of the cliches American in origin, but this fact was so taken for granted, or so invisible to the authors, that it was at no point even commented on.

To a certain extent I think this is inevitable. I'm not going to neurotically weed out the Americanisms from my speech patterns. What I find strange is that I seem to be far more aware than those around me of what are Americanisms and what are not. For me to use the word 'movie' would actually take an effort on my part, as if I were deliberately slipping a French word into conversation for effect. This makes me suspect that people are actually watching American films and taking notes and adopting the idioms. I see no other explanation. Why? Because they want to be American. And yet there is a broad public rejection of Joss Stone because she picked up some Americanisms after actually going to America. Americanisation is so general here that I do not believe all former Joss Stone fans were remarkably uninfected. There must be at least a ninety per cent hypocrisy rate there.

It's not merely linguistic hypocrisy, either. Why do the British believe themselves to have any less blood on their hands than the Americans over Iraq, for instance? Who voted the mass-murderer Blair back into Number 10? You – the great, morally superior British public. When you condemn Joss Stone, you protest too much. Increasingly, Britain disgusts me.

11 Replies to “Joss Stone – She’s Bad”

  1. Americanisms I use in speech, that I am aware of, are:”Guys”, as a gender-neutral way of addressing a group; I can’t think of an alternative that I feel comfortable using.”Movie”, interchangeably, to refer to American films.”Bookstore”, interchangeably. Shops have actually started referring to themselves as “stores”, and it has filtered into my vocabulary.More upsetting, I find, is the newsreader’s habit of replacing t’s with d’s, subjecting us to statements like “Briddon is gedding ready for the Olympics”, and so on. I want to perform acts on these people that aren’t permitted by the laws of physics.

  2. Yeah, the ‘dd’ instead of ‘t’ thing is one of the worst. I don’t know why they do it, or how these things spread. I’ve noticed that I find it easier to write Americanisms than to speak them. That might be some indication of the mental compartment they have for me. I think I’ve used a few on this blog fairly unselfconsciously that I would feel strange speaking aloud.I notice I’ve started this with ‘yeah’, but apparently that’s not an Americanism. Apparently that particular variation of ‘yes’ – if memory serves me well – originated in Kent.But I notice that British people on the Internet often seem to take a deliberate policy of using American English, probably in order to be better understood by a wider readership. You know, writing “ass” instead of “arse”, “color” instead of “colour” and so on. This is something that happens a lot with languages. Those who go from the provinces to the capital stop using their dialect in order to be understood – I know of a number of people in Japan who have lost the use of their own dialect because they’ve gone to Tokyo, for instance. Of course, the humiliating thing for the British is that we are yeilding to a regional dialect – the regional dialect of North America. It’s as if the French all decided to adopt whatever version of their language is spoken in Quebec. A curious phenomenon.I suppose one reason I’m sensitive to this kind of thing is my experience of teaching English in a school in Taiwan, founded by an American lady and her Taiwanese husband. Anyway, it was the fast-food version of education, really, but what I most hated was having to teach pronunciation. The lessons for each class were strictly scheduled, so there wasn’t much room for creativity. You just had to go by the book and by the rules. I had to teach the children pronunciations that were not natural to me. Moreover, I found myself raising an eyebrow on occasion at my classroom assistant telling me that my pronunciation was wrong. It’s the same kind of humiliation as that American football player recently who expressed surprise that people spoke English in London. It’s laughable, but it’s also depressing.

  3. Justin Isis writes:

    The other extreme or opposite side of this post is U.S. Anglophiles who try to sound British – a significant portion of them are teenage girls who listen to Radiohead, read Neil Gaiman, like the Pythons, etc. They consider anything English more sophisticated or witty. I had to take the piss out of some of them in high school – the level of affectation was unbearable. For example, no one who isn`t really from England can get away with saying `I should` or `I shall` anymore.

    But on the whole, I think it`s more a question of picking and choosing what sounds most elegant, or what works in a particular context. I mean, I don`t like the word `movie`, even though I`m ostensibly American – `film` just sounds better. Similarly, I don`t like using the term `CDs`; even if what I`m looking at is clearly a digital compact disc, I still refer to it as a record – as in `He showed me his record collection` (this could apply to mp3s on a hard drive as well; I would still call that a `record collection.`). I use the term `wanker`, or the phrase `take the piss` (as I did in the previous paragraph), because they`re useful and don`t have convenient American equivalents, but I pronounce them in my regular accent and don`t try to sound `English` (or `Australian`, for that matter). This extends to things like spelling – I like `colour` more than `color`, but I like `armor` more than `armour`. Also, `grey` just sounds more GREY than `gray` does. Anyway, this kind of thing should just be left up to personal preference, I think.

    I do get disgusted with standard-American pronunciations in Asian countries, though. For example, I met a Japanese girl a few days ago who kept pronouncing `Really?` as `Rilly?` and I had to leave the table it was pissing me off so much. I`d prefer to try to teach foreigners some kind of neutral accent (probably not possible, but…)

  4. Justin Isis writes:

    Another great thing about British English is the way it has influenced former colonies. For example Singapore, Singaporean Chinese use words like `bloody`, `fellow`, etc. that aren`t used or known in America. They also have names like `Clarence`, `Edmund`, and `Eunice.` These names make me think of an Edwardian garden party or the Bloomsbury group or something, but young Singaporean Chinese don`t find anything strange about them. I used to go to class and hear them talking, and I`d start laughing and saying things like

    `Tally ho, Edmund! Good day, Clarence!`

    , although I was the only one who saw anything funny about it. It`s good that the SCAP Occupation in Japan didn`t extend to trying to give Japanese people English (i.e., American) names, or else there would be young Japanese called Bobbie Jo, Jack, Steve, Sally, etc. And the world would be a worse place to live.

    I`ll stop leaving comments now.

  5. Justin Isis writes:

    I like `center` more than `centre`, too. `Centre` sounds too French.

    …which leads onto the related theme of people dropping foreign phrases into English text to try to sound sophisticated, so they`re talking about ne plus ultra and mutatis mutandis and whatever the hell else all the time. If writers do this in fiction it usually makes me want to read it less. If I was reading a book in a foreign language and the writer inserted an untranslated English phrase, I would probably just consider him an asshole.

  6. Hello Justin.I wonder if there’s a kind of political point in what I’m saying. I suppose there is, though it’s difficult to pin down unless you do a great deal of research, probably. But it’s something to do with cultural imperialism, and the way that nations who have the ‘lower hand’ in a power relationship often, in weird ways, actually dynamically take on a lot of the signifiers of the ‘upper hand’ culture that they ostensibly resent. I suppose it’s the “What have the Romans ever done for us?” syndrome.But apart from that, I think language is largely a question of personal taste. I would hate to see the word ‘shall’ disappear, by the way. It’s a good word. Observe it in action here:http://www.mp3lyrics.org/m/morrissey/i-can-have-both/Staring in the window of theshop that never opensplanning my selection fromall the treats insideshould I take as I desire ohshall I oh shall Ior should I hang around to be enticed inside.’Will’ just won’t do here.Anyway, I think basically there’s a lot of miscegenation in language. Sleeping with the enemy, you might call it. That’s probably good.

  8. I think there’s an extreme love-hate attitude towards America, in the Americas. For example, a year or so after 9/11, it was reported that at a football match somewhere in Mexico, people in the stands were making fun of the tragedy. But these are the same people who travel to the US to buy clothes, computers, and cars. The language fundamentally doesn’t change from let’s say Chili to Guatemala. The formal tense will still apply, the gender application to nouns will be the same, but what does change is the slight difference in culture, that affects the language. As well as street slag, dude.The thing with America is that it’s still a pimple faced hormonally driven adolescent. It’s the big kid on the block with all the cool toys, who needs to learn to share. Lotza lessons still to learn. Agreed, more research on this point. ‘Games Without Frontiers’ by PG just came to mind. The survival level in the US is pretty comfortable, compared to a good majority of the world. Better? By what standard.

  9. “I think there’s an extreme love-hate attitude towards America, in the Americas.”I suppose I feel like all these things depend on your history and relationship (as with individuals, so with cultures). Like most non-Americans, I think the Bush administration is one of the worst things to happen to the world, but I find it hard to be what is called ‘anti-American’. In fact, I don’t even really know what that means, except that it’s often used as an answer to any complaints about US foreign policy. However, since I am English, I feel like rather than complaining with some legitimate passion, as many people round the world have a right to do, I can only moan in an effete sort of way, which the Americans with whom I am friendly are indulgent of. I’m well aware of Britain’s imperialist history. Personally, I think I would have been a ‘Little Englander’ at the time of the Empire (I mean in the original, rather than the current meaning of the word). However, like it or not, I think I have in some way benefited from the Empire’s blood money.I don’t really know where I’m going with this.Recently, at a pub, I was witness to a rather prolonged and magnificent rant about the British political support of America. I was pretty drunk, but you’ll have to take my word for it that it was a heady and rousing peroration. But the one thing that sticks in my mind is the end of this rant, which was, more or less, as follows: “I wouldn’t mind if we were backing the winning horse, but we’re not. If we were backing a Red Rum, that would be fine. But we’re backing a knackered old donkey.”I was also reminded of a conversation I had with an American while in America. Anecdotal, but, to me, telling. We were passing some building with the word ‘summit’ written on it, and I went on in my pontificating way about Churchill and how he had actually coined many famous political phrases, such as ‘summit’ in the political sense, and ‘Iron Curtain’. These phrases were, of course, familiar to the person I was speaking to. Then I said, “‘Special relationship’ was also one of his.” She didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained that it referred to the special relationship between Britain and America. She still didn’t know what I was talking about.

  10. “Like most non-Americans, I think the Bush administration is one of the worst things to happen to the world”There are countless Americans who feel the same way, even conservatives who voted for him, have for some time wondered if his administration truly cares about doing the right thing. This next election year is going to be very tricky. Civic education is seriously lacking in this country, we need to be reminded, of how to part of a democracy. I suppose a ‘Little Englander’ would have opposed the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire? ‘Special relationship’I want to say I’ve heard Blair use that phrase in a speech or two. And I guess Bush too for that matter. Just the other night, I watched a documentary that showed British Air force troops during WWII, being trained in the US. They interviewed an elderly gentleman who had come over to train years ago. He said something that was in direct relation to that ‘special relationship’ ideology, he said, “People don’t fully realize what American-British cooperation means to the world”.The first thing that came to mind after reading the last entry was this phrase, ‘The Anglo-American Cosa Nostra’. Ancestry, common language, and trade. I challenge any American to name Churchill’s US counterpart during WWII, and every US president since then in succession. And…and, without referencing wikipedia.Cheers, and keep warm.

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