You learn something new every day. Every now and then you learn something you already knew but didn’t know you already knew.
Looking through some old Aidan Turner interviews in preparation for my own encounter with the Irish actor – don't miss next week's soaraway Irish Times – I happened upon an episode of The Graham Norton Show from 2018. Turner was about to appear in a production of Martin McDonagh's play The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
The question is whether we should care about creeping Americanisms
“For British people watching, I’m not being an idiot. We say ‘loo-tenant’,” Norton footnoted after pronouncing that word with no “f”.
Wait. What? Do we? No, we don’t.
“We do in Ireland,” Turner replied. “It was something me and Martin and the rest of the cast had to have a chat about. It is ‘lef-tenant’ over here. But in American and Ireland it’s ‘loo-tenant’.”
Since when? Have we also taken up “to-may-to” and “vite-a-min”?
Informal prodding on Twitter and elsewhere produces a reasonably definitive answer to the core question. The formal pronunciation of the word in Ireland takes an imagined “f”.
“Having served 28 years as both lieutenant and lieutenant colonel, it is ‘left. . .’ here and wherever rank structure evolved from the British”, a former Irish military pilot tells me. “It is an Americanism to pronounce it ‘lieu. . .’. I presume they’re not similarly suggesting it’s pronounced ‘colonel’ rather than ‘kernel’?”
Further unreliable researches reveal, however, that “loo-tenant” really does seem to be more commonly used in Irish speech. So, McDonagh, Turner and the rest of the team were probably correct in having the characters refer to the officer in that fashion. There are few things less reliable than a Twitter poll, but, for what it’s worth, 70 per cent of domestic respondents to such a beast told us they went with “loo”.
The exhausting bore who invariably pops up to explain that “language changes, you know” is not exactly wrong. Though the distinction is rarely noted in pronunciation guides, we should probably accept that the Americanism is now standard informal usage in this country.
I sense a few bristles at that last sentence. Is the word really an Americanism or have the Irish unilaterally decided to adopt a pronunciation that is closer to the suggested phonetics and the French derivation? This is not an easy argument to settle. Tracing pronunciation is more difficult than tracing spelling. It is, however, hard to think of another word that, without an American model, has, in Ireland, but not in the UK, drifted away from its original, arguably eccentric pronunciation.
It does seem likely that, more in touch with American telly than their own subalterns, Irish citizens have lent towards the examples of Lieutenant Columbo and Lieutenant Frank Drebin. We are, to be fair, not the only nation where this has happened. In the midst of last week’s conversation, a Canadian confidently told me that his nation, like its southern neighbours, also implied no “f” in the first syllable. Cursory research confirms that the Canadian army does not agree. As in most other Commonwealth nations, the British pronunciation is there the “correct” one. (I got a headache trying to make sense of the equivocal Australian position. So I will leave you to look that up yourself.)
The question is whether we should care about creeping Americanisms. The liberal decent fellow, comfortable with constant shifts in usage, will pull the leh-ver on his lee-sure recliner, chew on a to-may-to and bay-sil sandwich and explain that such objections should be left to pay-tronising clicks (that last one was “cliques” if you didn’t get it). He will further explain that, on balance, American spellings and pronunciations are more logical than their Hiberno-English equivalents. Should we all not just relax?
There are a lot of things we should just do, hypothetical pal. The distinction remains useful because it gives us an opportunity to feel morally superior without doing anything to earn that privilege. Americans gave us rock’n’roll, jazz, the western, blue jeans, film noir and the electric guitar. They also gave us the opportunity to look down on them while wearing blue jeans, listening to rock’n’roll and watching westerns. For many decades greybeards have been even more superior about compatriots who appear to be aping American language and attitudes. The practice is seen as simultaneously vulgar and pretentious. It is now hilarious to look back at snooty, broadsheet swipes at The Beatles for daring to include the word “yeah” in their lyrics.
The conflict goes on. I regret to inform you that Generation Z regularly pronounces its cohort to rhyme with “bee”. The phrase “do the math” is becoming harder to avoid. Many are now surprised to hear that we really shouldn’t rhyme the first syllable of “privacy” with “hive” in these islands. The war against “movie” long ago reached its Stalingrad stage. And then there is the poor, f-less lieutenant.
Thank heavens we have such trivial squabbles to divert us. Life would be unbearable if we all agreed with one another.
