That’s the Way it Crumbles

by Matthew Engel Profile 288pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99

That’s the Way it Crumbles is an “acerbically witty and entertaining survey” of the Americanisation of British English, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. While insisting that he isn’t anti-american, ex-guardian journalist Matthew Engel laments the American takeover of our language, which he claims has left us “linguistically impoverished and increasingly cut off from our roots”. As an example, he cites a “bizarre” newspaper interview given by George Osborne in which the former chancellor “gushed” about being an “ordinary Joe” who likes to spend weekends cooking “beer-butt chicken” and helping his “kids” to bake “rainbow cakes”. These kinds of anxieties certainly aren’t new, said Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator. As long ago as 1785, commentators fulminated against Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “belittle”. “Reliable”, another US import, prompted similar outrage in the 1860s. Indeed, so entwined have the two languages become that today we use all manner of phrases – “sex appeal”, “blue collar”, “down and out”, “stiff upper lip” – without realising that they were originally American. But that said, Engel is surely right to bridle at some of the more “superfluous imports”, such as “ballpark figure” and “step up to the plate”.

Funny and fascinating as this book is, it does stray at times into “old-duffer territory”, said Rose Wild in The Times. When Engel records that “tuxedo” appeared 75 times in 2016 in “THE TIMES OF LONDON!”, you can “almost hear his monocle hitting the soup”. It may be “short-tempered”, said John Sutherland in the New Statesman, but the book also performs a useful service. By urging us to listen to “what is coming out of our mouths”, it makes us think seriously about the intimate connection between language and national identity.