Owzat, you say?

Nevertheless, Davies does cover differences between the two that are not so obvious. In both countries, for example, a dumbwaiter–dumb waiter in Britain–is a device for transporting food between floors, but on British dining tables a dumb waiter can also mean a revolving food server, which in America is known as a Lazy Susan. (It is interesting to note that Dim Sum restaurants in New York’s Chinatown also refer to these food servers as dumb waiters.) Could the expression have been introduced to the Chinese by the Irish diplomat Lord Macartney, the first ambassador to the court of Peking in 1792-94? Possibly. The Oxford English Dictionary states that dumb waiter, in the sense of “an upright pole with revolving trays or shelves for holding dishes, cruets, etc.,” entered the language in 1755.

Although born and raised in England and now a resident of Florida, Davies appears to have acquired his interest in amateur philology while living in New Zealand, which produced two of the greatest lexicographers: Eric Partridge, whose Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English still holds the field, and Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the OED, who made a point of making room in the mammoth 20-volume second edition for words in Maori, the Oceanic language spoken by the indigenous people of New Zealand.

The brief section Davies includes covering New Zealand, Canadian, Australian, and South African English shows that, of all the varieties of British English, ‘Stralian or Strine remains the liveliest. He cites a number of amusing examples: bushwacker (country bumpkin); bludger (parasite); larrikin (hooligan); home and hosed (safely completed); stickybeak (nosy person); screw (prison guard); over the fence (unreasonable); ear bash (harangue).

The down-to-earth realism of Australian English, its jaunty acknowledgment of the villainy of man, and its contempt for the abstract and pretentious, might have something to do with how Australians differ from pommies (Britishers) in their approach to Islamic terrorism. Where the British tend to see abstract problems of assimilation, the Australians see only homicidal larrikins, who need to be stopped, not regarded as fodder for the debates of multiculturalists.

What the reader will not get from Davies is any analysis of how British and American English have changed in recent years. There is no mention of the predominance in current American English of like, you know, and I mean, those inescapable nonsense utterances that have turned the American young, and indeed many of their elders, into such inarticulate bores. Nor is there any mention of the sea change that has occurred in the social perceptions governing British English. Davies quotes Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1956)–“An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him”–to suggest that, in Britain, this age-old classification still obtains. But does it?

In a brilliant piece called “Uncouth Chic” (1998), Theodore Dalrymple agrees that “Diction in Britain has always been an important marker . . . even a determinant, of a person’s place in the social hierarchy.” In the past, most Britons associated received English with high intelligence, good education, and a cultured way of life. But now, the very people in Britain who would be most inclined to use received English, by dint of background and upbringing, go out of their way to avoid it. They don’t want to appear elitist. So where once the socially ambitious aped the speech of their social superiors, now the upper classes ape the speech of their inferiors.

The career of Rex Harrison and the theater that succeeded him confirm this. Harrison came from a working-class background in Lancashire, but by the time he was given the nod to play Henry Higgins, he had entirely reinvented himself as an urbane patrician. In this sense, in real life he was very much less a Henry Higgins than an Eliza Doolittle. Now, no working-class British actor would dream of exchanging his working-class for a posh accent: It would be professional suicide. Yobs are in, like never before, and their English has significantly changed the character of British English as a whole.

Davies does not delve into these contentious matters. Divided by a Common Language is a genial guide for tourists and makes no claims to be in any way prescriptive or critical about the American and British English it describes. We must go to other sources for an understanding of the factors that are vitiating both British and American English. The Belgian Elias Canetti was on to something when he said that “the smashers of language are looking for a new justice among words. It does not exist. Words are unequal and unjust.” What Ben Jonson jotted down in his commonplace book four centuries ago is even more apposite: “Wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted, language is. It imitates the public riot.”

Still, even on his own limited ground, Davies is shaky. He claims that Americans call beggars panhandlers. No self-respecting American would use such a grotesque euphemism: Only the signs above the seats in New York subway cars, put up by municipal socialists, call beggars panhandlers. Elsewhere, he says that Americans call summer time daylight-saving time. It is a good thing that Ira Gershwin never realized that: “Daylight-saving time and the livin’ is easy” wouldn’t have worked.

In another entry, he claims that what the English call court shoes are what the Americans call pumps, or dress shoes for ladies. It is true that pumps are worn by American ladies, but they are casual shoes or flats; pumps worn by American men are formal shoes. And Americans do not call lollipops suckers; they call them lollipops. A sucker in American English is a greenhorn, a hayseed, a rube, a chump, a patsy, a pigeon.

Davies is more reliable on British English. Considering how well-behaved the British tend to be, it is odd how many words they have for irritable or ill-mannered. In his brief lexicon, Davies lists stroppy, shirty, bolshy, ratty. (British ratty means snappish or touchy. American ratty has the same meaning as British tatty: tattered, shabby, tawdry.) Madness has also inspired a rich variety of words in British English, as barmy, dotty, nutter, batty, and crackers attest.

Davies points out that some of the first American words to be adopted by the British were lasso, moccasin, outlandish, and widget. When it came to American English, the great Fowler was intransigent. He conceded that American fall might be superior to British autumn, but he urged his British readers to take a “very firm stand” against placate, transpire, and antagonize. “The English and the American language are both good things,” he declared, “but they are better apart than mixed.” Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, P.G. Wodehouse, and Kingsley Amis thought otherwise.

In The American Language, H.L. Mencken cited among the many British words adopted by Americans: headmaster, varsity, chapel, housemaster, monitor, honors, prefect, preceptor, and quad. Apropos the American attitude to British English, he argued that the influence of the Episcopal church was decisive: “It was the center of Loyalism during the Revolution, and it has fostered a passionate and often excessive Anglomania ever since.” This may account for the fact that Americans still regularly use such English phrases as not my cup of tea, in your neck of the woods, it cost a pretty penny, and penny wise, pound foolish. What neither Mencken nor Davies touches on is the profound influence that Shakespeare had on American English.

In his preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which last year celebrated its 250th anniversary, Samuel Johnson observed that, “Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been granted to very few.” If this is true of lexicographers, whom Johnson famously defined as “harmless drudges,” it is doubly so of amateur philologists.

Edward Short is at work on a study of John Henry Newman and his contemporaries.