I have a problem with pants. Not pants per se, but the word. It tends to slip out when I don’t intend it. I’ve tried, but there’s something so ingrained in me, something that either refuses or cannot learn to say “trousers” when I mean those fabric things that cover your legs, that aren’t skirts. Where I come from, they’re called “pants”. (Did you just snicker? Everyone does.)
I arrived for a semi-permanent life as an international PhD student just before Covid hit and the shops closed. The first three years, I had a terrible time buying underwear. I simply couldn’t find it online. I’d managed to visit the UK for extended periods over several years prior, without learning the word “knickers”, and once I heard it, it didn’t occur to me for ages that it was an actual product rather than a charming (and to my North American ear, hilarious) colloquialism. I guess I find knickers as amusing as you find pants.
Once I found my way to the virtual pants aisle, the plethora of pants and the complexity of sorting by fibre, colour and styles available were overwhelming. In researching this article, I dashed into H&M’s online store and found the first category sorts women’s underwear into “Knickers and Briefs”. I thought briefs were a subtype of knickers, but H&M seems to make a finer distinction between the two.
Once inside ‘Knickers and Briefs’, we find a smorgasbord of gluteal-covering or merely enhancing items: hipsters, boxer briefs, Brazilians (which seem to have replaced bikinis), shorties, thongs, and highly specialist items resembling half-corsets for the lower body, called “firm shape sculpting thong briefs”.Thong-briefs – the most paralysing oxymoron of all lingerie terms! Imagine, if you can, high-waisted, painted-on granny pants in front and practically nothing in the back and “firm shape pushup bikers”, which mash you in around the tummy and thighs, whilst pushing up the bum. These last two, as far as I can tell, make you look (or feel) tighter and smaller and, in these troubling times, one might say sexier, whilst preventing any sort of sexual activity below the waist, because it takes three close friends and a carrot peeler to get out of them.
And risking that you will think of me only as someone fascinated by all things knickerly, I should take a moment to also say that the word “bum” in North America almost never refers to the back of your front. It’s a derogatory name for someone who begs (“panhandles”), an archaic term used in the Great Depression for alcoholic men (never women) who were out of work and living in the shelters and on the streets of big cities; more currently it’s an insult applied to someone who’s done something rotten to someone else.
If you’re “bummin’ around”, you’re just hanging around (“loitering’”, according to one online dictionary) not doing much, but bummin’ around (yep, the “g” disappears) does not refer to begging or being out of work or homeless. To “bum” a cigarette or a drink off someone, is, in American parlance, to “mooch” (which in British English, means to sponge).
And I’m reminded here of my father, who was born in the deep south of the USA (Mississippi) and spent the last 25 years of his life in the UK. Dad lost his freaky, unintelligible deep-south accent long before I was born (I guess the Navy whupped it out of him): it returned full-force only when he said the word “bomb”. It came out sounding like “bum”.
So, when my dad (who lived to talk about wars) spoke of bombs (“bums”) falling on some far country, I saw sad, hungry-eyed men dressed in 30’s-style, worn and rumpled suits, being ejected unprotestingly from airplanes over, say, the French countryside. An English-tuned ear would receive an even weirder picture: arses of varied shapes plunging from the sky, some perhaps attached to parachutes, plopping into rivers, or caught up in the branches of trees, amazing the birds. Either way, it’s an oddly satisfying transmutation of what was once an act of war.
This began as an article about what I call “Britishisms”. I collect British words and phrases that amuse and tantalise me. As a colonial, I am fascinated by the original version of my birth language (’Mer’cn). I thought and was told, as I grew up that I spoke English, but it turns out not to be the case. I’m frequently told (or told frequently) that English is definitely not my first language. Earlier in my life in the UK, I felt baffled, occasionally indignant, even sorrowful, and I disagreed. But, having been here more than six years in a row (and intermittently, four years before that), I can but nod.
When people ask me why I chose to live here, I have often said that I find English culture appeals to me (I say English, not British, as I see England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales as vastly distinctive cultures, and I live in England). Looking at it more closely, I’m not really keen on pubs and quizzes, the appealof a Sunday roast eludes me and I detest long country walks with dogs. Furthermore, I haven’t yet become a BBC Radio 4 listener (although it’s on the list).
In fact, it is the language of the people – you – that charms, intrigues and often delights me. I am fascinated not only by the actual words, but the euphemism, nuance and irony of English. I fret about the incursions on English made by Hollywood, and I mourn the loss of older English words and sayings as they move inevitably from one century into the next. I’ve read in various places that English has more words than other languages, allowing for more precision. I am mesmerised by the slouchily elegant actor Bill Nighy, who uses words with precision and who refuses to use some words from a purely personal aesthetic. We hate some of the same words, Bill and I. Won’t even say them, leave the room when they are uttered. Don’t ask me what they are—no, don’t. Ok. One of mine is “stakeholders”. (Ick). Another is “ick”.
We can mark the subtleties of our experiences in our language, if we choose, and if we’ve been given the vocabulary. Is your favourite colour sapphire, aquamarine, midnight or turquoise? If you tell me “blue,” are you taking the easy way out, telling me it’s none of my business to ask; are you simply linguistically impoverished? Or are you a bloke whose boyhood was aesthetically deprived because of cultural stereotypes and prohibitions around what “real men” are supposed to know—and not know? Our language, to some extent tells us who we are.
As a word-lover, therapist and writer, I resonate with E.M. Forster’s famous, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ In therapy, I often see people working out what they think by looking closely at what they just said to me. We sometimes astonish ourselves by hearing what we really, truly think but have been stopped somehow by saying elsewhere. People in therapy can have conversations that can’t exist in other places, and the words they hear themselves say can become ways of being; once unthinkable, now new approaches to get (In Adam Phillips’ words) the life they want.
When we can’t say what we think, feel or mean, we are frustrated in our sense-making; we need to express our ideas in words, then interrogate, reject or refine the words to get at our truth, our meaning. It’s a recursive process, turning ideas into words which, when we consider them thoughtfully, then further inform the ideas. And change the words. As the great essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips says, “Thought Is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible.”
It takes time to become really fluent, and this isn’t my first bite at the apple. I spent a year in Newfoundland, a massive, isolated and magical Canadian island in the north Atlantic, on a counselling internship. The first few weeks of doing therapy with Newfoundlander university students were revelatory—it turns out that English, the primary language of Newfoundland, wasn’t English as I understood it, at all. It was very much its own language, with regional variations in accent between north and south, city and country. If you were from ‘round the bay, or (derogatorily, a Bayman), you were discriminated against by the city folk, and felt it keenly. (If you’ve ever heard Bill Bailey saying, “Stand back! I’m a doctor,” in his strongest Cornish accent, you know what I’m talking about.)
At the counselling centre, my clients kept telling me they “got dragged off” last weekend. But they didn’t seem to mind, in general. All around me, people were getting dragged off (by whom? Aliens? Police? Soldiers?) and accepting it with equanimity, even delight. It was doing my head in ( one of my all-time favourite Britishisms, or, in “Mer’cn”, it was ‘making me crazy’.)
It took me a couple of weeks of listening to people to get through the accent to even spell out the words, and when I did, they didn’t make sense to me. Thank goodness for a dictionary of Newfoundland terms that told me being “dragged off” means going to bed with someone. I wanted to write “to pull”, but then I thought that (from what I understand), to go to bed (have sex) with someone may be to pull, but to pull doesn’t necessarily mean getting your knickers off. Or, (to put it in the way I once heard a Scotsman say it), getting your laughing knickers on. Or getting your leg over—which still baffles and distracts me. Over what?
I still don’t really understand the full meanings of the verb “to snog”. It sounds like a combination of “snot”, and “smog”. I hear it with a sort of erotic horror. And, in the same way that I don’t read travel guides before visiting a new place, I refuse to look it up. I want to find out from context, or ask a close friend, or suddenly become enlightened watching a film. One day, I’ll know. And when I do…watch out.
And then I wonder, I really do, if one isn’t entirely fluent in this English, how does that affect your sex life? I remember travelling in Crete many years ago, and meeting a handsome, friendly English fellow who was interested in me. At some point, he said to me something along the lines that he’d like to go to bed with me that night, but if I didn’t feel the same, “just tell me to piss off.” I liked him a lot, but I wasn’t ready to leap into the nearest bed, and, not truly understanding the phrase, I took him at his word. I said, “Ok, piss off.” And was bewildered and a bit hurt when he did, not just that night, but forever. Oops.
Many years later, I can’t help but wonder, what else have I gotten wrong? Are there offers (not necessarily sexual) that I’m missing out on or rejecting – or accepting (!) – that I don’t recognise? What impressions are being formed in others from my inaccurate, sometimes archaic (I watch a lot of ancient British TV shows), even eccentric use of the language? (And when you say, “that’s absolutely fine,” do you mean it, or just the opposite?)
It can be frustrating, but it’s often good fun, figuring out what people mean when they speak to me and how to say back to them what I mean in ways they can understand. When it works, it’s a brilliant connection, a triumph of intercultural communication; and when it fails—well, it’s kinda pants.
