As I was crossing the street, I overheard a woman talking on her cellphone, as she was sitting at the light on her motorbike. Normally public cellphone conversations are full of needless banter, and hers was no different, from what little I heard.

But she spoke with a British accent. And it was good. I wanted to strike up a little conversation just to get me some of that dialect, but alas, she was on the phone.

This biker is a part of my current British fascination. I did spend months reading British literature — that helped stoke the fire. But outside of that, British novels, Monty Python (especially when it’s pronounced PAHY-thin), Love Actually when it shows up on HBO, new music…

…to a certain extent this ‘nu-wave’ music is old hat, reviving a mode popular in the 1980′s…but that’s not all bad, since The Futureheads, Bloc Party, and Kaiser Chiefs are doing what The Proclaimers (of “500 Miles” 15-minute fame) could not – keep good UK pronunciation in American ears…

…it’s the intelligence of it, the British language I mean; the willingness and at times necessity to use extra syllables — even ones that, to our ears, sound misplaced — to communicate a certain idea. Even their slang is plentiful: There are a myriad of ways to express discontent with a person’s character. In America, there seem to be three or four overused ones at most, often body parts.

In the US, we’re all reductive modern poets who transmit meaning thru text messages and IMs with a language that’s as direct and flowerless as possible, utilitarian rather than luxurious, that fits snugly within our ever-shrinking attention spans and brains and vocabularies but is not, in its simplicity, able to address more elusive subjects or stimulate our dormant, even vestigial poetic sensibilities.

Y’know?