English ascent

Hat-trick is a rather British word that American speakers of the language that they both coincidentally call English actually understand, though they would contest the claim that its origins lay in cricket rather than ice hockey. Yet, at a time when the American avatar of the language is causing a kerfuffle in Old Blighty — with more and more Britons pronouncing schedule with a ‘k’ sound and rhyming garage with barrage rather than porridge according to a recent survey by the British Library — the US appears to have missed out on a significant battle won by its former colonial master. All three major American superheroes are now British, or at least the actors cast in those roles are. The Americans will now presumably have a new villain for their outsourcing nightmare — their own superheroes.

Though Christian Bale has been Batman for a while, newbies Andrew Garfield as Spiderman and Henry Cavill as Superman in the next installments of these supersagas will make it a triple crown for British thoroughbreds , to borrow a common phrase from the two countries’ horse-racing circuits. It would be sweet revenge for a former colonial power that is currently smarting from the Stateside linguistic invasion of the internet and the peremptory Americanisations of spellcheck applications that thoughtlessly turn centre into center, speciality into specialty, jewellery into jewelry and so on. There’s even a controversy over the pronunciation of the word controversy back in Britain, with apparently irreconcilable trans-Altantic differences over which syllable dominates.

Whether a Briton will be able, in truth, to do justice to the American way (with apologies to the original motto of the Man of Steel) or indeed whether all of them will realise that “with great power comes great responsibility” (as Spidey learnt at great cost), ultimately “it's not who he is underneath but what he does that (will) define him” as Batman began by saying....