Whatever the nom de guerre implies, Petite Anglaise, as Catherine Sanderson is better known to her extended world family, is no Little Englander. Nor, as a Yorkshire lass, is she an especially staunch champion of the Queen's English.
But as the long awaited launch of her book approaches, she has posted a delicious item at her site about trying as best she can to stick up for her first language against the more irritating demands of her American publishers.
More of that in a minute.
For the benefit of new Salut! readers, Catherine and I first met electronically. We both blogged from Paris, though my efforts (despite being backed by the resources of a big national newspaper) were somewhat less successful than hers.
Those pre-Salut! ramblings of mine were widely enough seen to keep me at or near the top of the Telegraph's internal blogging charts. But even before I wrote the stories that spread Catherine's fame to a vast new public and hastened the book deal she deserved and would have got anyway, her following was on an entirely different scale.
Now she is on the brink of publication. It will, if I am right, raise her to a new level of celebrity and prosperity. There will be some backbiting - the newspapers that miss out on serialisation, magazines denied the big interview, lowlier bloggers envious of her impressive march into the mainstream.
But provided she can keep her nerve and remain as perky in her private life as she is just now, Catherine will emerge from the process as a fully established author with every chance of enduring success (the second book, part of that six-figure Penguin deal that I also wrote about before anyone else, is on the way).
And I now award Catherine the highest honour of all. Had she not chosen to become a bilingual secretary, blogging phenomenon and publisher's dream, she might have been an excellent recruit for my new newspaper adventure in the Middle East.
She'd make a first class hackette, with broadsheet rather than tabloid instincts. What is more, as her legion of readers has been discovering, she sings loudly and clearly from sheet music approved by Salut!. Catherine prefers British English to the American variation.
In her new blog posting, headlined I say pyjama......., she describes having to plough through the proofs of her book in its modified version for the American market.
Listen to Catherine's lament (and read it in full, of course, over at her place):
It’s a surreal experience reading my book translated into American. I mean, I knew that you people over the Atlantic say diaper instead of nappy, stroller instead of pushchair, sidewalk instead of pavement and elevator instead of lift, but until I started reading the copy edits for the US manuscript, I hadn’t really noticed all the other spelling variations, or the slightly different punctuation rules for speech. The copy editor has been scarily meticulous, converting metric measurements back into Imperial, substituting millions of s’s for z’s and assiduously removing the unwanted u’s from colour, flavour, or humour. There are double l’s which have become single, ph’s which have become f’s (drafty? really?), fringes which have morphed into bangs (ahem)…
But when it came to mommy for mummy, the Petite heels started digging in. However much she is grudgingly prepared to go along with in the interests of sparing Americans the feeling they are being asked to read a foreign language book, she hopes mummy is capable of being understood without translation.
The resulting discussion has attracted, at the last count, nearly 150 replies. That's the sort of statistic I haven't enjoyed since the time I went on holiday from the Telegraph, posted a brief Gone Fishing notice and sat in the Mediterranean sun as scores of comments accumulated on topics ranging from to the competing charms of different corners of France to the clubbing of baby seals in Newfoundland.
Go over to Petite's site and browse them for yourselves. There are far too many to repeat here.
But you'll find some Americans who feel mildly ashamed at being thought unable to read English English and plenty of Brits who urge Catherine to hold firm.
Another American resents "the rants of self-hating USians on the net", but agrees the book should be sold as written because it otherwise risks losing its flavoUr.
I loved this, from "Sprite": "Wait, what do you say instead of 'gotten?'.”
Kerry, having "never been a Brit", invented a new word. "Briticisms," (s)he wrote, "may be a touch more jarring to Americans than Americanisms are to Brits."
And "Philip", who appears to be British though I cannot open the link in his signature, says simply: "To translate a British book into American English is idiotic. It caters to American provincialism and ignorance. I personally think Americans that read would not find British English so mystifying."
It's a fascinating read, as I am sure Petite's book will be. But for my last word, I return to my scrupulously even-handed approach to Two Nations Divided By a Common Language, the phrase I have borrowed from George Bernard Shaw to entitle a short American/English glossary I have compiled for my new colleagues.
Let me remind you not only of my admiration for the cover of the American edition (left, which is witty and sexy and vastly superior to the slightly twee English effort, but also that a straw poll here suggested that Salut! readers overwhelmingly endorsed my preference.
*See also: Cover Girl, where Catherine shows off her impeccable French.
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