The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy

As a US-born linguistics professor who has spent most of her adult life in Britain, Lynne Murphy is often on the receiving end of complaints from Brits about “Americans ruining the language”, said Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times. In The Prodigal Tongue, she puts this experience to good use, offering a “witty and erudite account of the relationship between these two anglophone tribes”. On the whole, Murphy is sceptical of the claim that American English is, as Prince Charles once said, “very corrupting”. She points out that most Brits who complain about phrases such as “singing from the same hymn sheet”, “360-degree thinking” and “flag it up” are unaware that they originated in Britain. American English, she says, often “hugs tradition more closely” than the British version does: Americans, for instance, still use the past participle “gotten” (long since abandoned here) and often “employ the subjunctive” (ditto). Murphy’s “deep learning”, which is always “lightly worn”, ensures that her book is more than just another addition to the groaning library of “British-American moans and quirks”.

The Prodigal Tongue is full of detail and colour, and its discussion of food is especially illuminating, said Rose Wild in The Times. Soup, in America, is apparently “broth”; a sandwich can mean “something savoury shoved between all sorts of bready-type things”; while “burger” only ever refers to the chopped meat between a bun, not the “meat and bun combined”. Yet entertaining as her book is, Murphy faces a problem: it’s fair to assume that most of her potential readers “fondly” subscribe to the myth that she sets out to debunk. She attacks the myth quite hard, exposing it as a tissue of “snobbery and prejudice” – and thus runs the risk of leaving her readers feeling “battered and abused”.