OK, so you hate Americanisms. Blame Kipling and Wodehouse!

THAT’S THE WAY IT CRUMBLES By Matthew Engel (Profile £16.99)

IS IT OK for a journalist to be a fan? I think many of us go into the business because there are certain writers we truly esteem and, for me, one of those is Matthew Engel.

I first read him in the Eighties, when he was a cricket correspondent. Since then, he has written a series of books, most on the subject of Englishness in one form or another.

This book, which has taken him seven years to write, is subtitled The American Conquest Of English. Everyone complains about the profusion of Americanisms in British English, but Engel’s research shows just how deep the problem has become.

Look at my first sentence. See anything wrong? The British English version should be ‘Is it all right for a journalist to be a fan?’.

‘OK’ is an Americanism, although no one knows its precise origin. It might come from the Choctaw word ‘okeh’, from an early telegraphic term Open Key, from Orrin Kendall biscuits (popular in the Civil War), from an Indian chief called Old Keokuk, or from an early railway freight agent, Obadiah Kelly, who initialled bills of lading.

Oh, and the word ‘fan’, as in football fan, came over the water in the 1910s.

Engel reveals, among many other things, that the writers most responsible for importing Americanisms were those most British of writers, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy L. Sayers and, above all, P. G. Wodehouse, who alone was responsible for several hundred, including ‘call it a day’ (1919), ‘fiftyfifty’ (1913) and ‘on the blink’ (1912).

On the blink! I would have sworn on all that’s holy that was British.

People used to get very upset by all this. In the late 19th century, the British literary elite raged against the seemingly innocuous word ‘reliable’. It was widely denounced as American, ‘argued with a vehemence that now beggars belief. In the language wars, the Battle of Reliable ranks with Balaclava and The Somme for bloodthirsty pointlessness’.

But it’s in the second half of the book, where Engel describes what is happening today, that his writing really takes flight.

‘Britain’s major problem was not . . . that it had ceded control of its politics to Brussels, but that it had handed over control of its culture and vocabulary to Washington, New York and Los Angeles . . . A nation that outsources the development of its own language is a nation that has lost the will to live.’

As always with Engel, though, there’s room for jokes. The England cricketer Darren ‘Rhino’ Gough (pictured) was asked why he had chosen that as his nickname. ‘Because I’m as strong as an ox,’ he replied.

Australians are ‘the most fluent of all ironists, being the nation who turned b*****d into a term of endearment’.

Everyone thinks ‘burglarize’ is a horrible modern American way of saying ‘burgle’. In fact, burglarize came first, while the British were apparently managing without a verb at all. Burgle only arrived in 1874, and was popularised by W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates Of Penzance. ‘Fizzle’, in Tudor times, meant a silent fart.

There’s stuff this good on every page.