What happens when an American teaches linguistics at a British university? Controversy—that’s what. “It’s ‘lift’—not ‘elevator.’” “It’s ‘mashed potato’—not ‘mashed potatoes.’” “‘Colour’ is spelled with an ‘ou’—not just an ‘o.’” “It’s ‘the government are’—not ‘the government is.’” Britons will joke that England and America are separated by a common language. Linguist Lynne Murphy endeavo(u)rs to separate fact from fiction and debunk some stubborn stereotypes and assumptions about our common language.

Queen Elizabeth II, whom we can surely rely upon to speak the Queen’s English, has supposedly quipped that, “There is no such thing as ‘American English’. There is English and there are mistakes.” Not just royalty, but the media in Britain go out of their way to knock American English. Open letters and op-eds denounce it as ugly, vulgar, vapid—even destructive. This appears to be the consensus in England. The author (an American expatriate in England) reports that Britons take great pains to inform her which side of the pond speaks the better English. The idea that an American would teach linguistics at a UK university usually registers somewhere between laughable and offensive.

There are a lot of cultural generalizations that are simply no longer true, were never true, are far less true than they were in previous eras, or that do injustice to a thing as complex as the English language. How often have you heard, for example, that one strain of English is “purer” or “clearer,” that the differences between American and British English are negligible beyond different spellings, that British English precedes its American counterpart, or that the English language is “damaged” when it’s spoken incorrectly?

The BBC ran a headline claiming British children were “turning to” American English. The phrase “turning to” implies a new life trajectory, but insinuates a change for the worse. People usually don’t “turn to” something good: they turn to drugs or gambling or alcohol, but not to healthy food or exercise. Interestingly, the news story itself ended up devoting only two sentences to the subject of American English, even though it was the title of the article; the majority of the piece discussed other aspects of child development.

So why mention it? It seems lambasting American English gets clicks and “likes.”

With the tech boom and globalization, language has morphed and become more casual. Business and tech jargon thrive in the United States and abroad, leading (some believe) to the recession of imagination and clarity. Maybe they’re right. After all, think of all the words that have come from social media alone: “unlike,” “unfriend,” and so on. In business there’s plenty of gobbledygook thrown around like “leveraging,” “reaching out,” “synergy”—does anyone know what these words actually mean?

Oscar Wilde might have been on to something with his cheeky assessment that, “The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.” The United States has been on the outs with Europe for a long time now. Suspicion of America’s cultural imperialism, past and present, coupled with America’s strident rejection of its European roots rubbed many in the Old World the wrong way. Europe still views America the same way a bemused parent would a strong-willed toddler. America is, after all, quite young. It must have seemed like youthful arrogance to sever ties in such a revolutionary manner. Maybe to the irritation of some Europeans—particularly, the British—the Declaration of Independence has become more than finger painting in the art museum of human history and the precocious invention of the United States has not yet folded.

While British opinion of America usually fluctuates with the Oval Office occupant, it tends to be mildly positive. In 2014, two in every three Britons surveyed had a “favourable” opinion of the United States. These results stood markedly higher than the results of surveys conducted in Germany (51 percent), Greece (34 percent), and Turkey (19 percent).

Still, Britain remains the epicenter of “anti-Americanism-ism,” an abhorrence of English words considered “American.” Loan words from other countries, like France, India, Italy, or Ireland aren’t greeted with grimaces. To substitute the Persian word pashmina for scarf is trendy, exotic. But call a fairy cake a “cupcake,” and the British baker who has to endure the utterance will have your guts for garters and write an open letter to the press.

Anti-Americanism-ism doesn’t fall within the scope of handle-with-care rhetoric that many other subjects receive; it’s open season on the hapless American English-speaker. British magazine Time Out ran a piece about the top five worst sounds in London. American accents had the honour of second place on that list. The author, with a lack of reserve reserved for American English, describes American voices as “ear-violating, soul-piercing, knob-shrivelling shrillness.”

As with any other bias, beneath this unrelenting aversion is a deep fear. We can call this fear amerilexicophobia. What fuels the fear is that American English is taking over and corrupting “proper English.” It’s what happens when a new species comes to an island: it disrupts the local environment. In this case, the malaise is coming for the British Isles, and their inhabitants find it distressing.

While we’re making up words, here’s another: amerilexicosis. This is the conditioned response to the fear of American English. Despite the stiff-upper-lip, keep-calm-and-carry-on disposition of most Brits, they pathologically fall to pieces. They manage to panic with greater composure than Americans, but, as with any panic episode, reason promptly departs at amerilexicosis’s onset.

The symptoms of this pathological condition are paranoia and delusion. For example, a BBC article describes radio listener complaints about hosts using American slang terms. The delicious irony was that half of the items listed were not actually American English words or phrases. “It’s a big ask,” for instance, is from Australia. The grievance is less the radio listener complaints than the poor vetting process at a major news syndicate.

People from the United States are often perceived as loud and cocky. A study indicates that there are people from the UK who view Americans as so far-gone down the self-esteem-seeking path that all Americans suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Apparently, we have been the people that need to get over themselves since we decided to reject England’s patronage centuries ago. Despite this confidence that many believe characterizes Americans, they are rather deferential about their American English—especially around the British.

It might surprise British and American alike that the majority of culture critics during the colonial days (on both sides of the pond) considered Americans the better English speakers. Things are different now. If Brits have a pathological superiority complex and fear of Americans perverting their precious tongue, Americans have capitulated with what we could call AVIC, or American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

We see signs of this acceptance of inferiority in commonly-voiced sentiments. “Everything sounds better with a British accent,” people often say. Educated Americans are shier about holding to their arguments in the face of a Briton’s rebuttal. The author herself confesses to feeling complimented when a Briton describes her American accent as softer or milder than most Americans’. British tourists in the United States report better luck at bars, more parking tickets rescinded, and better pay than their American colleagues. Advertisements for Las Vegas in British subways appeal to the intrigue of the British accent with taglines like, “Visit a place where your accent is an aphrodisiac.” Many Americans will servilely agree to whatever a Brit thinks good or proper English.

It’s interesting to take a second look at colloquial expressions we use reflexively. Sports culture is wonderfully illustrative. You can imagine someone at the bar proudly talking about last week’s landslide victory. “We scored four goals!” “Our defense was excellent.” Or, when speaking to fans of the rival team, “You’re going down! We’re going to wipe the floor with you!” The man at the bar downing his fourth beer as he screams at the television contributed zero (or nil, if you like) to the victory, but his language makes it sound like he’s scored the game-winner, that he’d taken an active role in destroying the opposing team.

The British talk about their contributions to the English language in a manner very similar to the sports fanatic who details his contributions to Manchester United’s win last week. But unlike the fan, who was alive when Manchester United won, the English that people learn and use emerged generations before they were even born. The language is not housed in anyone’s genes or surrounding vegetation or rock formations. The strain of language you soak in is usually whatever your grandparents spoke. No one’s English extends back more than four generations.

This means that the British have no more claim to Chaucer’s English, for example, than English speakers in the United States—or Nigeria or India. Our “Englishes” are not related as a parent and child are related. It’s more accurate to think of the various Englishes as adult siblings.

Moreover, many “American innovations” that the British love to hate are actually British in origin. On the BBC’s list of 50 “most noted” Americanisms, 17 were created and then forgotten by the Brits. The author is only too happy to point this out to the dismissive Brit. It comes up often.

Here are a few examples with their earliest known dates of use:

-Using “learn” to mean “teach” as in, “That’ll learn you!” (1382)

-To wait on instead of wait for (1390)

-oftentimes (1393)

-expiration (1562) before the noun “expiry,” a recent development dating back to 1790.

-train station (1852)

No one “invented” English nor is anyone irrevocably perverting it—so let’s just keep calm and carry on.

Cultural commonplaces surrounding the British-American relationship have changed over the past century. The common beliefs that British English is more cultured, that Americans respect it implicitly, or that the “language barrier” is impermeable are not as true as they used to be.

Consider the Marshall Plan of 1948. The United States played a central role in in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, offering loans to European nations to support the redevelopment of its infrastructure. Part of Great Britain’s paying back its loans to the United States meant allowing more US goods into Great Britain. The gentle infiltration was new for Britain, a country that had mostly foisted its culture on other places was now itself subject to a cultural invasion.

The advent of the internet has changed the landscape of transatlantic communication. British shows and films air on American Netflix, and vice versa. British TV personalities like Piers Morgan and John Oliver are well-known to the American public. The British newspaper The Guardian has a US audience in the millions.

What has been the outcome of this exposure? Will it upset the Brits? Will a greater overlap in vocabulary result, or will differences remain? One American journalist working in England joked that upon hearing a British accent, the American will unconsciously add about 20 points to the speaker’s IQ. But this is actually less true than ever before. One 1985 study found that Americans who heard voice recordings of American and British English assumed the British English speakers to be more sophisticated and intelligent. A more recent study in 2001 found that the results of the same experiment were not so lopsided. American subjects considered the people with American voices to be no less intelligent than those with British accents.

A 2005 study found that Americans often described the British accent as “cultured.” The adjectives describing the Brit’s interpersonal allure were far less complementary, however, with three negative comments for every positive comment. Words like “stuffy” and “conceited” were commonly invoked. In the United States, being cultured is not necessarily an advantage in a culture that trusts street smarts and hard-knocks varieties of intelligence over book smarts. And if the word “cultured” connotes stuffiness or conceit, it’s less likely to be received well where friendliness and equality in exchanges are highly valued.

Americans might have a lingering admiration for the British, but that doesn’t mean Americans trust the British or are ready to befriend them. Hollywood’s casting proclivities illustrate this. Characters with British accents are either bad guys or good guys from distant planets, like Middle Earth or a galaxy far, far away.

Even the belief that British accents are sexy is no longer as widespread. Irish and Australian accents are now ahead of British accents on the sexiness scale, according to surveys of Americans. Perhaps the allure of the Australian and Irish accents is that they feel exotic without the associations of stuffiness and belittlement.

The discussion of British English versus American English is one of “nationlects.” The word “dialect” connotes a smaller region than what we have in mind. We are talking about patterns of speech that are more widespread. Nationlect obviously overlooks certain distinctions, but identifies a general flavor of a nation. We can’t get too granular here. In fact, in a world where there are more people who speak English as a second (or third or fourth) language than those who speak it as a first, the discussion loses import. The American versus British nationlect debate becomes comparably petty in a larger, increasingly globalized world.

It does raise questions of what an official spelling system would look like. It’s a debate in schools and governments throughout the world as to which “English” is better to teach or take as standard. Test organizations stress consistency over a particular nationlect.

However things play out with the English language, it is comforting to bear in mind that the English language does not need saving, and it is beyond the power of any one person or government to save it. Moreover, with all the horror in our world, perhaps there are better uses of our time and energy than being linguistic busybodies. The English that our children and grandchildren use will be different than the English with which we are familiar. In a world of rapid interchange, it’s very possible that the English we now consider “American” will be labeled “British” by our grandchildren—or vice versa.

As long as Americans and Britons see their nationlect as a badge of honor and a source of identity, the distinctions will likely remain. In any event, there’s no need for either group to be arrogant about their preferred English.  We don’t know the future, but let’s behave.