When I first came to England, I was 22 and believed I had a good command of English, as my school grades seemed to attest. I quickly discovered, however, that Shakespeare, Elizabeth Gaskell and Yeats were hardly representative of everyday British speech. Ten years later, although I can understand people perfectly well and hold a conversation, I still would not claim to understand the English language entirely.
When a cashier calls me “lovely”; when people part with “we must have tea soon”, yet that cup of tea never materialises; or when someone says “that’s fine” and appears to mean quite the opposite, I cannot help feeling that the British possess a secret code, one that allows them to decipher what lies beneath the words themselves. Yet for someone who studies literature, it is a constant delight. Everything seems to be built upon understatement, ambiguity, irony and nuance.
