Were it not for occasional events like a 17th century tea party at Boston harbour or the more recent au pair court trial in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, the rest of the world could be forgiven for believing Britain and America are but one nation partitioned by a large ocean.Both have white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majorities who share a centuries-old history and speak the same language albeit with a few peculiar variations.Their political preferences too seem to run parallel: Ronald Reagan matched Margaret Thatcher in his zeal to further a conservative system in the right-wing Eighties. As if on cue, the next decade has brought to the fore the 40-something Bill Clinton and Tony Blair from just a little left of the ideological spectrum's midline.If you visualize the western world as one large family (which it readily becomes when inconvenient dictators in the Gulf threaten its oil interests), Britain would be its suave, ageing patriarch and America the family's country cousin of dubiously mixed extraction who made it big on foreign soil.The Brits quietly envy the Yanks their capacity for adventure and their resultant prosperity, and the Yanks in turn are open in their admiration for the high culture that emanates from the other side of the Atlantic. And eager to idolise a royalty of their own, the Americans have invented Hollywood and the Kennedy mystique.Part of this attitude can be attributed to the American complex about being a relatively young nation. The Yanks are suckers for history, ever willing to deify any object that smells remotely antique. An Irish-American landlady of mine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had managed to extract a hefty upkeep subsidy from the city council after convincing its members that her house - a dank, nondescript, two-storeyed structure - was located on a field in which George Washington's troops once camped during the War of Independence.You can decipher the American mind also from the country's place names. Several American cities and towns - particularly on the eastern and northeastern seaboards where the European settlers first landed - retain British names, with a significant prefix: New York, New Jersey, New England, New Malden, New Haven.They speak of a people whose gung-ho spirit of exploration and entrepreneurship is tinged with fond memories of their origin.In less cosy times, however, the street-smart mongrel and the pedigreed thoroughbred bare their fangs. The Americans are quick to dismiss the British as dowdy, old-fashioned and stiffly formal, while the latter are equally contemptuous of the Americans for their loud obsession with crass trivia and their proneness to convert serious issues into media spectacle.British critics of the American legal system have long derided its practice of electing judges and its emphasis on the jury verdict as absurd extensions of democratic principles. Their consternation peaked when au pair Louise Woodward's trial was beamed worldwide through live television, tempting attorneys into more melodrama than meaningful argument.The Americans look upon cricket a precursor of their own baseball as a quaint 19th century curiosity and a waste of time. The British view baseball as a coarse corruption of cricket. And if the latter are often genuinely outraged that the American impulse to commercialize services hasn't spared public health, the Americans are no less astonished that the money-making potential of health professionals in Britain goes underutilised by the country's welfare system.Perhaps their biggest difference lies in the way they use the same language. Besides abbreviating spellings, American English has also given new meanings to old words. And it's forged new words out of old as well, often making for serious communications problems across the Atlantic.
