Whatever Happened to Spoken English?

Recently I returned to Israel after a visit to the U.S. It was my first in four or five years—and the previous visit had come a similar number of years after the one before that. The less frequently you return to the land you grew up in, the more you notice the changes in its speech. It’s the same as with people. When you encounter them on a regular basis, they tend to seem the same from year to year. Let the years go by between meetings, and the differences are striking.

Some of the changes that I’ve observed in American English each time I’ve been back have been minor ones, involving a single word or phrase. When I moved to Israel in 1970, for example, “awesome” meant inspiring awe. One day I returned to find that it now meant wonderful or impressive. The gradual process by which this happened had passed me by, so that it seemed to have taken place all at once. Suddenly, the only way to say awe-inspiring was “awe-inspiring.”

When one has left a country for good, such seemingly abrupt shifts in one’s native tongue leave one in a kind of time warp. One never quite adjusts to them. My English is stuck in 1970. If I live to be as old as Methuselah, I’ll never be able to use “awesome” to mean wonderful. The person saying that wouldn’t be me, as it might have been had I lived through the transition with the rest of America rather than had it occurred, as it were, behind my back. By the same token, I’ll never say “Have a good one” instead of “Have a good day”—an elocution, now apparently spread to all 50 states of the Union, that may have originated in the Yiddish “A gutn!”