“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”

When Polonius gave this advice to his son Laertes, he clearly didn’t foresee the arrival of modernity.

I don’t think many modern banks would put that phrase at the top of their mission statement. You know, next to the requisite assurance that “our people are our most valuable resource”.

Nor are these the words that any governments and most families live by. Every modern economy I know floats on an ocean of debt, with many drowning in it.

And modern people like their gratification the way they like their coffee: instant. That’s why so many families happily borrow vast sums that are almost guaranteed to enslave them for ever, or even push them into bankruptcy.

When I was researching my 2010 book, The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I found out that over the decade preceding the 2008 crisis personal indebtedness in America had been three times greater than personal income. What do you think of that, Mr Polonius?

(As an unrelated aside, Shakespeare based that character on William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth and perhaps the second most powerful figure during her reign. The list of instructions Polonius issued to Laertes was based on a widely publicised letter Burghley wrote to his son Robert, who later succeeded him as Elizabeth’s Lord Privy Seal.

Polonius was seen at the time as a bitter satire on Burghley, which many proponents of an alternative William Shakespeare have since used as an argument. After all, a mere actor from Stratford wouldn’t have dared to make fun of an all-powerful statesman. Only a social equal, which is to say an aristocrat, could afford such audacity.)

However, what interests me today isn’t finance but culture. For our age is known not only for gluttonous borrowing of money but also for rapacious borrowing of culture, especially its more popular strata.

The two tendencies aren’t completely unrelated, for both owe much to globalisation. A worldwide financial system produces piles of virtual money and then shuffles the pack and deals virtual banknotes to various recipients. America leads the way there because she is in the unique position of having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Thus the Fed can inflate the money supply with reckless abandon, serene in the knowledge that the debt will be denominated in dollars, the currency it controls. What would happen should the dollar lose its exalted status doesn’t bear thinking about – and the Fed doesn’t.

Yet America also exerts a powerful gravitational pull in culture, especially the popular variety. This is felt particularly, though far from exclusively, in the Anglophone countries. Yet it’s hard not to notice that most Europeans who speak English as their second language do so in vaguely American accents and generally American idiom.

The geographic proximity of Britain is trumped by the pulling power of American films and TV shows, acting as tutors to aspiring employees of global financial institutions. Now, I don’t suffer from that popular affliction of European literati, knee-jerk Americanism.

My problem isn’t with America but with modernity, of which the US is one of the founders and the proud flagbearer. In fact, I think Britons have much to learn from Americans: their affable civility, entrepreneurial nature, relative lack of class envy.

I don’t even mind many Americanisms making their way into the English language… Well, I shouldn’t dissemble. I do mind it, but these days that’s like minding spells of extreme heat or cold. They are going to happen, so we might as well grin and bear it, pretending we don’t really mind.

As a general principle, all great languages have largely been formed by borrowings. English wouldn’t be English without its Germanic, French, Celtic and Scandinavian implants, and one could make similar statements about all modern languages.

The French created their Academy largely to combat that tendency, but that has proved to be like trying to keep the cork in a champagne bottle with its muselet removed.  However, people who love their language should indeed fight tooth and nail against some borrowings, while welcoming some others.

Unfortunately, most cultural trends are these days reductive, as opposed to expansive. Language is no different.

Thus some Americanisms add nothing to British English because they try to push out some perfectly good words that already exist. Thus, a shopping cart adds nothing to a shopping trolley, candy to sweets, period to full stop and so forth.

Yet some Americanisms are useful, especially when they introduce concepts borrowed from America, such as a drive-through restaurant. Other Americanisms expand British English by adding a useful distinction where none exists.

Thus an English friend of mine didn’t understand the word ‘gurney’ when I used it. “Do you mean a stretcher?” he asked. I did and I didn’t. A stretcher to me, after many years in America, is only a contraption on which patients are carried, whereas a gurney is one on which they are wheeled. Thus it was a gurney, not a stretcher, that I once spent several hours on in an NHS hospital.

Yet we all have our linguistic bugbears, and mine is the word ‘student’. The way it’s increasingly used in Britain, especially in the media, doesn’t add any new nuances. It destroys an existing one.

To a Briton, a student goes to university or some other higher educational institution, whereas a pupil goes to school. That distinction doesn’t exist in America, where both groups are known as students. Yet the frequency at which our TV presenters mention ‘school students’ suggests that before long the important word ‘pupil’ will become extinct.

Borrowed Americanisms aren’t the only, nor even the principal, culprits there: the British shrink their own language perfectly well on their own with no outside help necessary. This is what I wrote in an earlier book, How the West Was Lost:

“The warning signals are ringing throughout the English-speaking world. Kevin says ‘masterful’ when he means ‘masterly’ – beware! A good word is on its way to perdition. Jill is ‘disinterested’ in classical music – woebetide ‘uninterested’ (not to mention classical music). Gavin thinks ‘simplistic’ is a more elegant way of saying ‘simple’, ‘fulsome’ is a sophisticated version of ‘full’ or ‘naturalistic’ of ‘natural’ – English is coming down to a size where Modmen can handle it comfortably. Trish thinks ‘innocuous’ means ‘innocent’ – in a few years it will. And it is not just words; whole grammatical categories bite the dust. Present Indefinite, where is your brother Subjunctive? Trampled underfoot by Modman and the education he has spawned.”

Whenever one objects against such linguistic impoverishment, a modern ignoramus will utter a platitude like “Language develops”. It no doubt does. But in the past languages developed to become bigger and richer, whereas nowadays the vector is pointing towards smaller and poorer.

We could analyse this degeneration in the terms of general cultural decline. But that would take some effort. Blaming Americans is so much easier, and we know it has always worked in the past.