Across the Pond Read Online Free PDF Page B

dullness.
    Americans can indeed be loud. Most American men have a “Yoo-hoo!” buried somewhere inside them. But the loudness is a matter of timbre as well as volume. There is a particular kind of American voice, common to both men and women, which is peculiarly piercing and resonant, so that whole conversations conducted in normal tones are audible from a couple of hundred yards away without the slightest strain on the speaker’s part. People with voices like this might be usefully employed as human foghorns, stationed around the coast to warn shipping of treacherous rocks. They are also, however, especially suited to TV news networks. Whereas European television journalists address their audiences in normal conversational tones, American reporters are clearly selected for the bat-like shrillness or stentorian loudness of their delivery. Even when they are standing in the middle of a tranquil Indiana corn field, they sound as though they are trying to make themselves heard through a tornado. The truth is that they are actually trying to make themselves heard in noisy American living rooms, and that if they fail to grab the viewer’s attention, so will the advertisements. In this sense, there is a connection between pitch and the profit motive. One may contrast these tones with the soothing, earnest, measured, concerned, deep-throated voice of U.S. public broadcasting. There is a liberal-Democratic American voice as well as a right-wing Republican one.
    Language and the Irish
    When it comes to verbal matters, there are particular pitfalls lying in wait for Americans who visit Ireland. Many of them may be unaware that though Northern Ireland is officially part of Britain, it is not part of Great Britain. It is, however, part of the United Kingdom, just to compound the confusion. Many Irish republicans find the term “Northern Ireland” objectionable, since it seems to legitimate the political status quo. They might speak of “the six counties” instead (or the “sick counties,” as the Irish novelist Flann O’Brien has it). Some people in Northern Ireland regard themselves as British, some as Irish, and some as both. Some of those who see themselves as British would regard the Irish Catholic population in the North as being as much alien interlopers in their land as Kenyans or Cambodians.
    Most of the Irish do not regard themselves as part of the British Isles, since most of Ireland is no longer British. Apart from “these islands,” however, there is no convenient phrase to describe the two places as a whole. Since most of Ireland is not part of Britain, it would be both offensive and incorrect in Ireland to refer to Britain as “the mainland,” though Northern Unionists would use the phrase. It would be as unacceptable as New Zealanders calling Australia the mainland. For Irish republicans, calling the Northern Irish city of Derry Londonderry would be as heinous an offence as calling Native Americans redskins.
    American tourists should know that there is a Northern Ireland but not a southern one. The term “southern Ireland” is rarely used by the Irish themselves, since they regard themselves simply as Irish, and perhaps because it implies acceptance of the partition of the country. (Though Dublin has now in fact officially accepted it.) “Ireland” or “the Irish Republic” will do instead—though to compound the complications, some Irish republicans would reserve the latter phrase for a nation which does not yet exist, namely, an Ireland completely independent of Britain. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sees itself as deriving its authority from a future it has yet to create. In any case, some bits of so-called southern Ireland are geographically to the north of some bits of Northern Ireland. The preposterous word “Eire” should be avoided at all costs, for reasons too tedious to recount. It is probably best to forget about these geopolitical puzzles and simply enjoy the scenery.
    The Irish