According to Marcus Cunliffe, in The Literature of the United States, a chauvinistic delegate to the Continental Congress moved that the new nation drop the use of the English language entirely; William Morris, in Newsbreak (Stackpole, New York, 1975), reports that the more violently anti-British leaders moved to reject English as the national language in favor of Hebrew, until it was pointed out that very few Americans could speak it; and another delegate proposed an amendment providing that the United States retain English and make the British learn Greek!

American claims to the English language are far from being left unanswered. In April 1974, Jacques Chastenet of the Académie française, suggesting Latin as the most suitable official tongue for the European Economic Community, expressed the concern that "English, or more exactly American, might otherwise take over." He characterized "American" as "not a very precise idiom." Frederick Wood's attempt at consolation in his preface to Current English Usage (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1962) might seem even more offensive: "Certain words and constructions have been described as Americanisms. This does not necessarily mean that they are bad English." In "An Open Letter to the Honorable Mrs. Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) On A Very Serious Subject," Evelyn Waugh, discussing the American influence, writes: "... American polite vocabulary is different from ours. ... [It] is pulverized between two stones, refinement and overstatement." Cyril Connolly went pretty far in The Sunday Times (London) of December 11, 1966: "... the American language is in a state of flux based on the survival of the unfittest."

Whatever the relationship may be, and however strongly opinions are voiced, it seems clear that in the jet age, what with the movies (the cinema), TV (the telly), and radio (the wireless still, to many Britons), linguistic parochialism is bound to diminish. In Words in Sheep's Clothing (Hawthorn Books, Inc., New York, 1969), Mario Pei, after referring to the different meanings given to the same word in the two countries, writes: "... In these days of rapid communication and easy interchange, such differences are less important than you would think." The latest edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary includes a fair number of American terms not found in earlier editions: teen-age, paper-back, T-shirt, supermarket, sacred cow, sick joke, and many others. And in their recorded dialogue, published under the title A Common Language, British and American English in 1964 by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, Professors Randolph Quirk of University College, London, and Albert H. Marckwardt, of Princeton University, agreed, according to the Foreword, that "... the two varieties of English have never been so different as people have imagined, and the dominant tendency, for several decades now, has been clearly that of convergence and even greater similarity." And in a similarly optimistic mood, Ronald Mansbridge, manager emeritus of the American branch of the Cambridge University Press, in his foreword to Longitude 30 West (a confidential report to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press by Lord Acton), refers to the two countries as "strongly linked together — let us reject the old joke 'divided' — by the English language."

Welcome or not, the process of convergence is slow, and the differences linger. Herbert R. Mayes, in his London Letter in the Saturday Review of November 14, 1970, wrote: "... There are enough archaisms here to keep an American off balance. ... The British are stubborn. ..." And Suzanne Haire (Lady Haire of Whiteabbey, formerly with the BBC, then living in New York), writing in The New York Times of January 11, 1972, of her "Study of 'American-English' at its source," mentioned the "bizarre misunderstandings [which] can result from expressions which have different meanings on the two sides of the Atlantic." The example she selected was the informal noun tube, meaning subway in Britain and television in the United States.

When we get away from standard English and are faced with the ephemeralness of slang and informal terms, the division widens. In a letter to The Times published July 12, 1974, the literary critic and translator Nicholas Bethell, answering objections to his review of an English translation of The Gulag Archipelago, wrote: "... What I was objecting to was the use of words like 'bums' and 'broads' in a translation. They are too American. 'Yobbos' and 'birds' would be equally inappropriate. They are too British. It is a problem that translators are often faced with, how to render slang without adding confusing overtones. One has to try to find a middle way." To a Briton, a bum is a behind, and a broad a riverwidening. To an American, yobbo (an extension of yob, backslang — reverse spelling — for boy, meaning lout or bum) would be unintelligible, as would bird, in its slang sense, a 'character,' in the sense of an...