Matters of mutual incomprehension can pass unnoticed. In the context which concerns me, for example,  English and American participants in e-discovery can fail to realise that one is talking about chalk and the other of cheese.

For example, American lawyers and litigation software are all geared around whether  documents are “responsive” or not. That seems the obvious word to use to refer to documents which are “in” as opposed to “out”. But the importance of responsiveness follows from an aspect of US discovery which is very different to that which obtains in the UK – under the US rules, discovery is given of documents which “respond to” a request from opponents. English disclosure does not work like that – each party self-starts on its disclosure, at least for the standard disclosure which initiates the process. The concept of being “responsive” is therefore meaningless save in the broader sense of finding a “response” to one’s own search.

The gap exists not so much because one is using terminology which the other does not understand, but that neither appreciates that the terminological difference exists at all. You can miss each other in the dark like that, whether talking of discovery or international politics.

I mentioned in a previous article (in several previous articles, actually) that there are minute differences in meaning between American and British English which help, almost unconsciously sometimes, to widen the gap between us. Americans, on the whole, are more tolerant than the British are of such differences. They are interested in them where we tend to be contemptuous. That matters to me because that contempt turns into a reason, or more usually an excuse, for ignoring American influences, and American influences matter.

I came across as an example at Washington Dulles airport on my way back from ILTA. There is a notice nailed to the lift (elevator, that is) down from the British Airways Club Lounge which says that it is not to be used “in case of fire”. In American English, or at least in the English of the sort of people who stick up notices, this presumably means “do not use this lift if the place is on fire”. “In case” seems to equate to “in the event of”. In English English, “in case of” generally means “against the possibility of” and the notice therefore means “do not use this lift on the off-chance that a fire might break out while you are in it”. In other words, it appears to amount to a bar on using the lift at all.

Words are funny things, of course. The curious spelling of Quentin Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds provoked this letter to the Times last week:

Sir, the producers should really spare a thought for the inglourious English teachers who have to teach the little “basterds” to spell.

It was not all bad for America in The Times that week. The paper reported that a university student had included in an essay the assertion that the US has much “highly developed powerful marital equipment”. If I had known that, I would have included it in my post Bigger in America.

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