The first counter-blows have been struck!

Those who know me will immediately recognise how pleasing I find this story from the Beeb today. I complain fairly frequently about our complicity in the Americanisation of our language, and my workmates take great delight in trying to get a rise out of me by using American words and American pronunciations at every possible opportunity.

It's an old joke that the UK and US are two nations divided by a common language, but for a long time it's felt that the weight of change was very, very heavily in America's favour, an inevitable consequence of the widespread British consumption of US mass media. So it's nice to know there are a few little counter-jabs scoring in our favour at the moment.

Number one target should be the execrable word 'tuxedo'. If we can get them calling those 'dinner jackets' then we really will have landed one right on their linguistic solar plexus, and perhaps have done something to hold back its apparently unstoppable infiltration of our spoken and, worse, written language. I'm not holding my breath though.