A British person wrote “There is no such thing as American English. There is English. And there are mistakes." An American wrote “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England!”

More Trouble In the Colonies

That Americans call bacon “ham” and ham “bacon” is enough to make the more chauvinistic sort of Brit turn the color of those foodstuffs. Henry Hitchings reviews “The Prodigal Tongue” by Lynne Murphy.

THE PRODIGAL TONGUE
By Lynne Murphy
Penguin, 360 pages, $17

By Henry Hitchings April 12, 2018 21 COMMENTS

Who said that America and Britain are two countries separated by a common language? Credit usually goes to George Bernard Shaw, but the line is sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill. No Briton or American will struggle to produce pungent examples of this linguistic division, and while there are differences in grammar, spelling and pronunciation, it is the variations in vocabulary that most exercise pundits and pedants.

An American arriving in Britain for the first time is likely to be puzzled that “getting pissed” is a twice-weekly recreation, and even a seasoned visitor might be nonplussed by the following: “Feeling peckish, I put on my trainers and a khaki jumper and left my flat, only to find that some tosser had parked his lorry right across the pavement.” There is even a curious subspecies of Brit who conveys the wish to be woken after a night’s sleep with the words: “Will you knock me up in the morning?”

Lynne Murphy is an American-born professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex on Britain’s south coast. She has had plenty of exposure to the discrepancies between the language of her birthplace and that of her adopted home, and since 2006 has written a blog exploring them. In “The Prodigal Tongue” she draws on extensive research to sink some of the myths kept afloat by this trans-Atlantic love-hate relationship, and she carefully investigates its psychology.

Ms. Murphy begins by noticing how much British commentary on American usage eschews expertise in favor of vitriol. Never mind that American usage tends to be more consistent than its British counterpart—its spellings a little leaner, its grammar a bit less leaky. No, what matters is that Americans call bacon “ham” and ham “bacon,” the mere thought of which is enough to make the more chauvinistic sort of Brit turn the color of those foodstuffs and declare, “Were it not for us, you’d all be speaking French!”

Such porcine bluster can seem, in Ms. Murphy’s phrase, “pathologically unhinged,” and she has a name for it: “Amerilexicosis.” Even when the critique is intended to be humorous, it comes across as snooty. Thus the assessment of the parody royal Twitter account @Queen_UK: “There is no such thing as American English. There is English. And there are mistakes.” Respectable British publications are happy to carry stories about the so-called curse of Americanisms, labeling them “ugly” or “vile.” The irony, of course, is that many of the words impugned in this way, such as “oftentimes” and “soccer,” originated in Britain. As “The Prodigal Tongue” repeatedly makes clear, there is a special kind of British purist who aches with nostalgia for a linguistic Eden that never existed.

The practice of disparaging American English satisfies two British enthusiasms—for complaining and for “being right.” I enclose “being right” in queasy quotation marks because the enthusiasm isn’t so much a matter of putting forward cogent arguments as a delight in marshaling disdain and indignation at a volume sufficient to cow all adversaries. Underlying this impulse, however, is a dark suspicion that Ms. Murphy identifies—that American English is “an invasive species that will choke and supplant the native wordlife.”

In reality, specimens move in both directions, as Ms. Murphy notes. British items such as “kerfuffle,” “sell-by date” and “queue” are finding their way into the American vocabulary. She makes the case for further adoptions, such as “bumf” (tedious printed material of the kind that clogs one’s mailbox) and “plonk” (cheap but serviceable wine). Yet if there’s a British stereotype of American English as twangy and slangy, there’s a corresponding American stereotype of British English as quaint and feather-brained. When James Corden, who grew up in Buckinghamshire, started hosting “The Late Late Show” on CBS, he was apparently encouraged to use words such as “willy” and “squiffy” in order to sound more charmingly archaic.

“The Prodigal Tongue” is acute about the more subtle differences between America and Britain, not least in perspectives on class and race. For instance, Americans refer to “the middle class” five times as often as Britons do, and Britons refer five times as often to “the middle classes”—one of many small but telling signs of Brits’ addiction to precisely placing one another socially. Another intriguing detail: Americans add “please” to requests only half as frequently as Brits do, because in American English this use of “please” is a marker of urgency—suggesting bossiness or desperation, not solicitude.

Yet the book’s chief pleasure is a simple one: Instead of sending the language to school, it savors a great many words and phrases that are staples on one side of the pond and unfamiliar on the other. Ms. Murphy has an amusing facility for zapping tired language myths, and she peppers her lively chapters with snippets from latter-day Bernard Shaws —such as Homer Simpson, with his deathless line: “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England!” But the most striking feature of her writing is a fascination with the quirks of usage. She succeeds in her ambition to increase “our enjoyment of our common language and our pride in it,” and her essential argument is that the plurality of English, a result of the riotous drama of history, is something to extol: “What if instead of tutting, we marveled?”

Mr. Hitchings is the author of “Sorry! The English and Their Manners” and “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English.”