The Prodigal Tongue - The Love-Hate Relationship Between British & American English (Paperback)

The Economist, Books of the Year

Only an American would call autumn fall or refer to a perfectly good pavement as a sidewalk… Not so, says Lynne Murphy. The English invented sidewalk in the seventeenth century and in 1693 John Dryden wrote the line, ‘Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.’

Perhaps we don’t know our own language quite as well as we thought.

Murphy, an American linguist in Britain, dissects the myths surrounding British and American English in a laugh-out-loud exploration of how language works and where it’s going.

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