Y’all Come Back Now, Y’hear?: Speaking Yankee to the Brits

It was a college—ahem, “university”—experience unlike I’d yet had at the time. For starters, I could honestly claim friends. Something about the feeling of that town, in that country, and both being precisely where I needed to be—maybe even where I’d long been headed—let me climb down out of my comfort zone and into a different level of immersion, particularly socially.

In the Eleanor Rathbone dormitory, we were the Rathboners. (At some point there were even shirts made up); we gathered in the common room (we had a common room!) to eat small mountains of candy from the pick n’ mix counter manned nightly by a Sri Lankan boy who shared my love of pink chocolate pigs; we chirruped “Hiya” in the halls and “Ta!” when someone held the door; we got take-away curries and late night kebabs made of something only vaguely attempting to resemble meat but not caring one jot; our stiletto-ed feet clacked roundly off the cobbles late into the wee hours of raucous pub crawls. Even the automated female voice that rang out overhead in the trains and train stations sounded endearing for its very Englishness.

What surprised me was not how novel it all felt (I had gone there only expecting to deepen a love affair), but how equally novel my very Americanness was to the English. Over a cup of tea (because, what else?) a boy tellingly self-christened “Colin Denton, No Need to Mention,” confessed, “I do buzz off yer accent though.”

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I’d had no idea that being a Yank could seem exotic. We Americans went around trying on English phrases, saying “I can’t be asked” and “Imnotbovered.” We learned to call cigarettes fags and girlfriends birds and anyone wearing a track suit and a gold chain was disparagingly dubbed a chav or a scally. British English seemed all at once highbrow, spirited and playful.

That American English or Americanisms could be all those things came as news to me. When I jocularly shouted “Y’all come back now, y’hear!?” over my shoulder all the English kids asked first what exactly I’d just said, then for me to do it again and again. And everyone laughed when they tried (and failed) to superimpose the same twang onto their own tumbling vowels.