More on 'The Prodigal Tongue':

She gives many interesting examples of contrasts, including these:

‘Management-speak’ is often identified as originating in the U.S., but she points out that expressions such as ‘pro-active’, ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘blue-sky thinking’ are used on British websites more often than American ones, with the last of those appearing six times as often.  (p.60)

How about obituaries, which are written when someone has died? She sees British ones as eulogies and American ones as news. She is surprised to see British ones report that a person, “has sadly died,” as she is used to more ‘emotionally detached’ American ones.  (p.77)

Confusion can be caused, as in the example of the verb (to) table. In a wartime meeting, Winston Churchill described how the British interpreted this a “putting forward a plan”, while the Americans interpreted this as, “putting it aside.”   (p.215)

One which ‘hit home’ for me is the use of ‘quite’ and ‘very’, as in ‘quite worried’ or ‘very worried’. While in Britain, these are clearly distinguished, with ‘very’ indicating something stronger than ‘quite’. However, they can have equivalent meaning in American English, and ‘quite’ can even be seen as stronger as ‘very’.

Another one is the term ‘Asians’. In Britain, it is used as a term for South Asians (from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan) and other Asians have to be described in terms of ‘East Asian’ or ’South-east Asian’. In contrast, in the U.S., the term ‘Asian’ is usually used to describe East Asians.  (p.204)

She also looks at how attitudes have developed over time: She describes how Francis Moore, an English traveller described ‘bluff’, originally a Dutch word for a kind of cliff, as “barbarous English”, in 1735. She describes this word as, "the first known victim of anti-American-ism."  (p.80)  As she shows elsewhere, 'victims' have been frequent ever since.

Other interesting areas which she looks at include attitudes towards accents and the way that the mother tongue is taught, with more focus on grammar in the U.S.

Perhaps, finally, the most important point for the English language learner or teacher, is: a 2016 quotation from an intercultural communication trainer speaking to the BBC:
“often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”  (p.296)

Find out about other books which I have read.