Martin Fone talks about one of the great quirks of language which divide Britain and America.
Unerringly, Oscar Wilde pointed out in a short story, The Canterville Ghost (1887), that ‘we really have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language’; while George Bernard Shaw is often quoted as having said that Britain and America ‘are two nations separated by a common language’. The good people at Quote Investigator can’t actually…
