Is the UK turning American?

Even middle-of-the-road liberals in Britain live in a world of Daily Show clips and piled-up copies of the New Yorker. This wasn’t happening a generation ago. And the photo negative of it is a serene incuriousness about the mental life of their own continent. When did something European last penetrate the British cognoscenti? Prime-era Michel Houellebecq? Or the Scandinavian TV dramas? This is a Brexit of the mind.

And of the tongue. “Elton John is living his best life and I’m here for it!” How lost do you have to be as a British adult, how impressionable, to speak like this? Or to say “oftentimes”, “at this point”, “not OK”? There was a fine essay (as it happens, in the New Yorker) about the protean richness of multicultural London slang. How odd that some people in the same city prefer to converse, and tweet, in the register of an Amherst common room.

Janan Ganesh over at FT might be competing with Matt Levine as my most admired columnist. Both of them have the great quality of they’re always joking but you’re not sure how much. “An Amherst common room” so specific! really funny to complain London is sinking to the level of kids at a famously wonderful and hard to get into US college.

Perhaps a great power’s cultural influence, like an ageing gigolo’s charm, is the last thing to go. Long after Britain lost its might, there were people in Hong Kong and Zimbabwe moaning about their servants and describing things as “just not cricket” in a way no one in England had done since 1913. Plus anglais que les anglais, was the phrase for these tragicomic people and their affectations. How things come round. Don’t be more American than the Americans.