Notes from a large continent

After a relaxing weekend in Los Angeles enjoying perfect weather and good company, I’ve just arrived in Ann Arbor, where I’ve got to do some work at the University of Michigan.

Apart from noticing a few more long words (see previous posting) – like ‘ground transportation’ for what we Brits would be more likely to call ‘buses’ – what immediate impressions so far?

One is that everyone I’ve come across so far is very positive about the Obama presidency in a way that harks back to the early days of the Blair premiership in 1997. This is particularly so among academics, who are getting quite excited by the fact that the new president’s economic stimulus package is going to pump a few billion extra dollars into research that they hadn’t been expecting.

Another is that the word ‘pandemic’ seems to be preferred to ‘epidemic’ in much the same way as in the UK, just as the news networks are spending a lot of time finding out that not a lot seems to be happening.

On the streets, the curious thing is that the only people I’ve seen wearing face masks seem to be the Japanese, which I find quite intriguing because there were quite a lot of Japanese wearing face masks on safari in Kenya when we were there in February. When I asked our Kenyan driver what they were worried about, he said that they seem think the air in places like the Masai Mara is seriously polluted, which it isn’t.

I can see that there might be more of a case for protecting yourself against pollution in LA or Detroit, but haven’t a clue whether it’s that or flu that’s worrying them and am, of course, far too polite to ask them.

Are there more longer words in American English than in British English?

One thing that's often struck me about American English is that long words quite often seem to be preferred to shorter alternatives that are more likely to be used by British speakers of English.

One example I've heard in the last half hour is 'elevator', when Brits would go in a 'lift'. Another is 'expiration', when we woild settle for the shorter 'expiry'.

Is there any evidence that longer options are more frequently used in American English, and, if so, why should this be?

Virgin mile-high poetry

Today, I’m going to the USA for a week and have deliberately chosen to fly with Virgin, rather than the other airlines that fly to Los Angeles.

It’s nearly 25 years since I first went across the Atlantic on a Virgin flight – at a time when the upstart airline only had one leased Boeing 747-200 that spent all its time going backwards and forwards between Gatwick and Newark.

The prohibitive cost of advertising throughout the whole of the USA also prompted the airline's founder to embark on a series of stunts, like crossing the Atlantic in a speed boat, that attracted huge amounts of (free) publicity on American TV news networks.

Right from the start, Richard Branson knew exactly how much it would cost him to hand the plane back to Boeing if the venture didn’t work out. He also had the benefit of a couple of top tips from Freddie Laker, whose transatlantic Skytrain business had only recently collapsed.

One was that the Boeing 747-200 would be a better bet than the DC10s used by Skytrain, because the Boeings were big enough to bring in extra revenue by carrying cargo as well as passengers.

The other was not to concentrate on the backpacker end of the market, as Skytrain had done, but to cater for business passengers too.

So the upstairs deck in the early Virgin flights to Newark were set aside for the cheekily named ‘Upper Class’, which was soon attracting enough customers for it to be extended into the front section of the main deck as well.

It was helped along by two neat marketing ploys. One was summed up in the slogan ‘fist class quality at business class prices’, and the other was that Upper Class passengers were handed a plain brown envelope during the flight, in which there was a free coach-class ticket for another flight across the Atlantic.

On one occasion, I sat next to an English stockbroker who was working in New York. As his company let him decide on which airline to use for his regular transatlantic trips, there was no contest – he always flew on Virgin because the free ticket meant that both his parents were flying with him (for nothing and not for the first time) in the back of the plane.

In those early days, Virgin made a real effort to run Upper Class like a club, with a games area and a bottomless bar where you could go and chat to the itinerant rock 'n roll groups for whom Virgin had already become the airline of choice.

As you’d expect in a club, there was also a visitors’ book, in which customers' comments heaped at least as much praise on Virgin as the scorn they poured on British Airways and other competitors.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, one of the entries is still stuck firmly in my mind, and confirms yet again how effective simple poetic techniques like rhythm, rhyme and/or assonance can be, whether you’re writing a speech, a presentation or a comment in Virgin Atlantic's visitors’ book.

It was at a time when Britain’s (then) second biggest airline, the long-since defunct British Caledonian, was running TV commercials that showed air hostesses in kilts dancing along the aisle to entertain passengers – which must have inspired one wag to compose the following ditty for the Upper Class visitors’ book:

'B-Cal girls are all very fine
But give me a virgin every time.'

(Until 8th May, Virgin permitting, I’ll be in the USA, from where I hope to be able to carry on putting posts on the blog – but don’t be surprised if there’s a slight reduction in output during the next week).