Friday, February 17, 2023

About American English

Even as the American Empire follows its British equivalent towards irrelevance, it refuses to go down without a fight, on the linguistic front. I’ve noticed an increasing tendency on London menus to describe a key component of eggs Benedict as an English muffin; of course, a generation ago we would have called it a muffin.

And this, found in a recent crime novel. It reads at first like a bold assertion of cultural independence but really it’s just a desperate plea to have one’s strange Limey peccadillos indulged, and not to get punched in the process.

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