Do we give a hoot?

‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between the languages and manners of nations.’ The manners of the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United States are very different, although not always in the way that received prejudices have it: any English visitor to America must be struck by how much politer most Americans are than the average run of his compatriots.

But The American Language, as H.L. Mencken called his great book, has developed in a way that isn’t always dainty. It has a vigor and color of its own, and a rich vocabulary which has combined with the central advantages English already possessed. Apart from its flexible syntax and rudimentary grammar, it has long had, to a degree quite unmatched by other European languages, two vocabularies, as Jacques Barzun observed, nearly parallel — formal and vernacular — which make it ideally suited to be the global lingua franca.

Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus, he reveals the truth about Julian Assange’s appalling table-manners:

Most popular

Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

Here in our damp little island we have mixed feelings about this. English is our language, the gift to the world by which, along with football, cricket and some other sports, we may well be remembered when otherwise we’re one with Nineveh and Tyre. And yet it’s American English that has conquered the world — and us. As Matthew Engel says in his highly entertaining That’s the Way it Crumbles, we are often uneasy or plain resentful about this Americanisation, and have been for the best part of 200 years.

Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality.