This morning I discovered a loss, a word loss, and although it feels like theft it is more likely just erosion. What I have lost is the meaning and sense of a word that I’m sure I used correctly more than once whilst living in Oxford. The word is “graft”. It is one of those words that has dramatically different senses depending on which side of the Atlantic it is used.
There are many words that have distinct and potentially humorous transatlantic differences in meaning. “Pants” is a great one. It typically means trousers on this side of the Atlantic and underwear over in Britain. It has additional uses there since calling something “pants” is a way of saying that it is a bit rubbish.
“Graft” is both more dramatic and more subtle. In the UK it most often means hard work, diligence, effort. I’m certain that’s how I used to use it when I lived there. Here, it most typically refers to a kind of political corruption. Hard work versus corruption. You might be hard pressed to find such divergent meanings for a single word.
What is fascinating is how immersive word meaning is. I’m fairly certain that I never once thought about “graft” when I lived in the UK. I just used it the way everyone did. And I used it correctly. Unlike “pants” there was never a frisson of double meaning in its use. Returning to Canada and immersing myself in the sea of word use here I appear to have simply shifted my use of “graft” over to the standard North American use.
The shift would not have become apparent to me had it not been for a friend in the UK congratulating my wife on a recent career milestone. “She must feel fantastic after all those years of graft,” she wrote. I was, to put it mildly, surprised at the accusation. And even more surprised, and embarrassed, when I realized that I was simply reading that sentence wrong.
It is one of those words that is telling but subtly so. Other words like “lift” and “pavement” and even “answerphone” and yes “pants” seem to swim nearer the top of the sea of language and in doing so, perhaps, more obviously hint at their potential misuse. Whereas “graft” is a deep swimmer.
Deep swimming meanings, if I can continue that inelegant metaphor, can be exploited by crafty writers. They also risk leading them astray. In one of the opening scenes of Posy Simmonds’ fabulous graphic novel, Tamara Drewe, the American academic, Glen, reflects somewhat disparagingly on the character of Nicholas, his hostess’ husband. “Several times I’ve overheard him spouting on the hard graft, discipline and loneliness of writing.” Clearly this is the British use of “graft”. Glen, however, is most definitely the “American” in the story. Of course he has been living and working at a university in London for some time. Does Simmonds want us to appreciate Glen’s immersiveness in the sea of British word meanings by showing him using such a word even internally with the correct British sense? Is she hoping that her reader will nonetheless, perhaps even unawares, catch the deeper swimming double meaning (Nicholas, after all, is corrupt in a fairly unambiguous sense)? Or is this a case where the writer has been tripped up?
Probably it is just another example of me over-reading a text. But I like to think that the writers I admire are so crafty, so careful, that they would select a word like “graft” and put it in the head of a foreigner as a subtle means of displaying that character’s integration in the British linguistic community even though not British society.