"It has been common over the last century to see the United States as the dominant cultural exporter, shaping the global palette with blue jeans, rock'n'roll and the American idiom," said Dennis Duncan in The Washington Post.
Reminding us that the process can also work in the opposite direction, Ben Yagoda's new book sets out to analyse the "British invasion of American English". Yagoda, a professor emeritus of English, maintains that for most of the 20th century, the American "appetite for Britishisms" was small. But in the 1990s, this began to change, and British phrases such as "book a table", "spot-on" and "own goal" increasingly filtered into American usage.
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