Overseas Brief

Everything I know and am is utterly false. This is what the British students at Oxford tell me. I cannot speak or spell or tell time. I cannot drive. I cannot even drink my tea the way I would like it, that is, without milk. This is incorrect, if you didn’t know. Civilization asks for milk in its tea. And I, being American, am not civilized.

There are some aspects to this barbarianism with which I can’t really argue. Multiple party political systems beat two-party governments any day. And I would kill for their national health care and their subsidized university system (though that’s under threat at the moment — Google “Browne Review”).

I would call life here eye-opening, but someone around me might object that there are better ways to phrase it, and I would feel sheepish. (There are many sheep here in England; therefore, I think they will be okay with this diction.)

When I decided to come to Oxford to study, people joked about the “difficulty” of the language I was going to face. And I took it all in good fun, realizing that, yes, going to an English-speaking country in Western Europe would engender less culture-shock then say, Dakar, Senegal. But this “special relationship” the U.K. and America supposedly hold only makesd the differences more acute and pointed. I have never been a very patriotic American, but with a defense ever at the ready (“Yes, Americans can read, thank you very much”), I have actually become more enlightened toward the beautiful complexity of my own homeland.

Last weekend, some British friends and I played a game, in which they tested me on English bits of slang. Some of it I plan to adopt and bring back to the U.S. Have you ever heard of a more delightful word than “more-ish”? It denotes a food so addictive you cannot resist eating more. We do not really have an American equivalent, and yet, this word seems so useful. Others, like “rubber” for “eraser,” I feel would effect some confusion in the United States. As the game progressed, they then began asking me to throw out American slang terms, but I found it difficult. Everywhere, even in a country as small as Britain, has its own regional dialects and accents, but in a nation the size of Europe, denoting what exactly was “national” slang was near to impossible. Minnesota might as well be France and Texas can be Spain, and I explained that trying to find a similar term between them would be like finding a slang word that crosses both Spanish and French.

But this is something I love about the United States. Our conception of distance will always be greater — to the Europeans, we must look like a country built from little countries. It takes me eight hours to get to Vermont from my home in Swarthmore, Penn., but my friend here from Liverpool receives looks of incredulousness when she talks about her three-hour trip to Oxford.
Despite all of these differences, I have found Oxford welcoming, seeking solace in those similarities that rise above all international barriers. No matter what country you’re in, I believe, the effects of intoxication will always stimulate belligerent debates about politics. The parties might be different, but the resounding disillusionment with the ineffective government overcomes the sometimes-unintelligibility of the accent. I get it, you’re pissed, in both the British and the American sense.