One of the more startling surprises for many Americans when they first arrive in Britain is the discovery that their mother tongue, which has been serving them faithfully all these years, is suddenly not up to dealing with the intricacies of the English language as practiced in the British Isles.

It is an unsettling experience to arrive in the UK and find oneself uttering vocal noises-speech is probably too strong a word for it-that are received nearly everywhere as at best quaint and imprecise, at worst as misleading and vaguely obstreperous. Even the most innocuous encounters suddenly become charged with the possibility of confusion.

I recall once, when I was still new to the country, arriving at a country pub at lunchtime and asking what sandwiches they had. "We have roast beef," said the man behind the bar, bending over to consult a small glass case full of sandwiches, "and we have ham and cheese."

"I'll have ham and cheese," I decided.

The man looked at me as if I had misunderstood him. "We have roast beef and we have ham and cheese," he repeated but more slowly.

"Yes," I agreed. I was with him this far.

"So which will it be?"

"Ham and cheese," I replied with a small sense of foreboding.

He looked at me as if wondering if I was a wise guy. "You want one of each?"

"No, just the one."

His face, I noticed, was growing slightly red around the edges. "Yes, but which one?"

"The one I just said," I replied with the uneasy steadiness of someone forced unexpectedly to stand his ground.

Eventually, he brought me a plate with two sandwiches, one ham and one cheese. Only later did I discover that it was unknown, at least in those days, to combine ham and cheese in a single English sandwich. (Too tasty, probably.)

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "The English have really everything in common with the Americans, except, of course, language," and he couldn't have been more right. And the fault, if I may say so, is entirely theirs.

The British, you see, have always taken a quiet-sometimes practically unwitting-pleasure in perplexing foreigners, as anyone who has ever tried to follow a cricket match will know. It's why they take such delight in nonsense and off-the-wall humor, why they have a constitutional form of government but no written constitution, why they celebrate the Queen's birthday in June when she was actually born in April, and why, above all, they created a language as ineffably illogical and idiosyncratic as English-a tongue in which, need I remind you, "ough" can be pronounced in any of half a dozen ways (as in bough, thought, through, trough, though, and hiccough), God-be-with-you somehow has mutated into good-bye, and colonel is pronounced, without the faintest hint of self-consciousness or embarrassment, as if it had an "r" in it.

Now you might think that as native speakers of the same language we would have a certain advantage in interpreting English English, but no. As soon as the British realized, to their presumed horror, that they had spawned a nation across the sea where the inhabitants could also speak English, they immediately began doing all they could to distance themselves linguistically from their colonial offspring. They started pronouncing lieutenant as "lefftenant," tomato as "tomahto," and waistcoat as "wesskit," among much else. (Most Britons think they have been talking like that forever, but in fact many, perhaps most, of the distinguishing characteristics of British English date only from the late 1700s and early 1800s. If you were to resurrect say, King George III, he would almost certainly sound more American than British.)

They started calling the upstairs floor the first floor rather than the second floor, thus ensuring that North American visitors would spend long, bewildered hours hunting for their hotel room, and pretended not to understand what we meant when we referred to the autumn as fall or used words like gotten, skillet, and restroom. They made sure that when we asked for pants or a vest in a clothing store we would be given unexpected items (namely underwear), just as a request for a biscuit or lemonade would summon forth respectively, a cookie and a kind of warm, fizzy linctus that has never seen a lemon in its life (and which, with the best will in the world, only a Briton could find refreshing).

Then, to make sure that our confusion was complete, they took to doing odd and unexpected things with their vowels and consonants, lopping whole syllables off words like library and necessary (making them "libree" and "nessasree"), dispensing with r's in a whimsical and inconsistent way, and speaking sometimes without moving their lips and sometimes through their nasal passages. In consequence, even the most attentive and experienced foreign listener will often find himself at least half a beat behind in almost any conversation. Only recently I had a long, confused, and ultimately surreal discussion with my English wife of 20 years in which, it turned out, she believed I was saying "khaki" while I was equally certain she was saying "car key." This would not have happened, as I pointed out to her, had I married a girl from Peoria.