English for Americans

And Germany?

Germany. Forget it. They'll give you two planes if you're lucky.

We all pretend that the other allies are on our side and pretty much they're just a waste of time. Who else is going to do the dirty work? And the wonderful thing about Britain is -- boy, is it there. The Brits are quite hardworking and on top of that they're stubborn. I really think the reason they managed to keep Hitler out of here during WWII was sheer unbridled, unadulterated stubbornness. They just said to themselves, We don't care if we're outnumbered. He is not coming in here. And he didn't.

You have a chapter about war in your book. What is the fundamental difference between how the two view war?

All over the world a lot of people think of Americans being a warlike people because they've got the ultimate nuclear deterrent, and because they're the strongest country in the world. In fact, most Americans really hate the idea of war. America still has a very strong isolation streak, and it really wants to pull the covers over its head and go back to bed.

Whereas Britain has seldom said no to a good war. If you look back over history, there isn't one that we've missed. It's not so much that they dislike the bomb, they just want them to be British bombs. But you know what's going to happen. We might not take the United Nations with us, but, you know, the tanks are booked for the 15th of February, and we're all going.

But Brits do resent being on the coattails of a superpower. They wonder why British boys have to be killed for this. I'd say a third of us are unconvinced that we should go to war in Iraq. [ Polls show that if the U.N. does not come in, only 22 percent of Britons support a war on Iraq.]

Americans think that Europeans hate us. Do the British think of us as slovenly and uneducated and boorish and all that?

Far from it. I don't think that's true at all. The Americans thought that was how we were perceived when things like "The Ugly American" were written in the '50s and '60s, when American tourists in Britain had so much more money than Europeans. Right now Europe has a lot of money and they travel too -- we see them at Disney World all the time.

But you do say that Americans are much more concerned with gadgets and certain conveniences. We couldn't, for example, live without a trash compactor.

Britain just got these things. They can remember when they got them. They got them, like, last February.

There were dishwashers and air conditioning in our house in America when I was growing up. My generation growing up in Britain -- a baby boomer, postwar generation -- they wouldn't have had those things. Not at all. And in the north of England, they wouldn't have had inside bathrooms.

Or closets, apparently.

I used to say to my husband, "How could they build an entire country with no closet space?" But they did. They forgot that we needed it. For most of the States that's not true. They have space. They have items.

Americans are the most equipped people in the world. They believe they need a lot of equipment. They believe that they need a Waterpik or otherwise something very bad will happen.

And Brits think that's weird?

Yes. They only have little bits of equipment. The types of equipment that you keep about your person. You know how health-conscious Americans are and that certainly distinguishes them from the rest of the world. The rest of the world thinks it's taking care of its health if it takes a multivitamin. Americans think that there's no end to the amount of personal fiddling you can do with yourself.

You say that the greatest difference between us is our sense of hot and cold? This has to do with air conditioning or how well we layer or what?

Even more fundamentally -- heating. I have been cold here for 25 years. I'm sitting in my office now with my business partner and I know that I cannot turn on the heat -- even though it's very cold here today -- because Brits get hot very quickly. Americans are cold in Britain from the minute their planes land. And they never warm up.

When you move to a different country, the last thing that you adjust to is the internal temperature in that country. That belongs to wherever you grow up and never changes. People who were born in Scotland where it's very cold, come south to London and are always hot. They throw the windows open in any room they walk into. They never adjust.

Brits will open the windows in every room because they need air. Americans call those drafts. Americans say, "But it's 25 below outside." They say, "Yes, but it's stuffy in here." And you think, "I was just getting comfortable."

One of my favorite passages was actually about how Americans need things to be "cute." It's so true.

Brits, on the other hand, are into coziness. It's not so much that they call things "cozy" in the way that Americans use the term "cute" to apply to almost everything. You know, Star Wars technology is really cute. Or, "Oh, look at that. I managed to do that little e-mail thing and I edited it and isn't that cute?" For Brits, that same idea is about coziness. Brits want life to be safe and cozy and comfortable and that really means that they want to conform with a certain perception that they have of how Britain should be. For Americans, in order to be really wonderful it has to be cute. For Brits, in order to be wonderful, something has to support their perception that things are absolutely right and all things British are wonderful. It's an attitude that's really postulated with every minute of airtime on the BBC.

We have that, too, of course. But ours is all tied up in the concept of being new rather than old and reassuring.

That's another thing. Americans believe that if it's new ergo it must be good. America really marches to the beat of a different drummer when you compare it to Europe. Nobody else believes that new is good. In fact, most of Europe believes that old and tried and tested is good because that's cozy.

Americans in some senses are fairly brave. They are not afraid to throw out something that clearly is not working and try something else. One of the reasons America has made such enormous progress in the last century by comparison with the rest of Europe is because they're not afraid to take a chance.

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