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language, incidentally, is called Irish, not Gaelic, since the latter term covers a whole family of languages. To say you speak Gaelic would be a bit like an Englishman saying he spoke Indo-European. Extensive brain surgery is required in order to learn Irish. The language most Irish people speak is known as Hiberno-English, and includes such imaginative terms of abuse as “gobshite” and “fecking.” The latter word, overseas visitors will be surprised to hear, is not a sanitised version of a somewhat stronger oath. The Irish version of that is “fugghan,” repeated by some of the population every six seconds or so except during the more solemn parts of the Mass.
    There are, then, a number of linguistic and geopolitical traps in Ireland to catch the unwary. But the same could be said of the United States. Why do its inhabitants call themselves Americans? Why are Mexicans and Canadians not Americans as well? Isn’t this rather like the Chinese being allowed to call themselves Asians, but not Indians or Koreans? Is a certain land grabbing built into the very way its citizens designate themselves? I was once treated to a fine example of U.S. linguistic imperialism when an American editor changed the phrase The Times , which I had written in a reference to the London newspaper of that name, to The London Times. My efforts to point out that there is no such periodical were dismally ineffective. According to U.S. journalistic practice, so I was advised, The Times of London is indeed called The London Times , even though it is not. It is up to the United States to decide what the names of other people’s newspapers are. One can imagine other such alterations. “We know your prime minister is actually called David Cameron, but we like to call him Billy Badger.” “Your correspondent spent an interesting afternoon in Popesville, known to the natives as Vatican City.” “After viewing the Finger, or the Eiffel Tower as the inhabitants quaintly call it, we spent an instructive morning strolling around Main Street, known to the locals as the Champs Elysées.”
    This is not as improbable as it sounds. The American golfer Bubba Watson once caused an uproar in France by announcing that he had seen “that big tower” (the Eiffel Tower), the “building starting with a L” (the Louvre), and “this arch I drove around in a circle” (the Arc de Triomphe). He later excused his ignorance on the grounds that he “wasn’t a history major.” Perhaps he had trouble distinguishing history from geography. He also declared that he felt “uncomfortable” (indispensable American word) with being criticised for these faux pas .
    At a Loss for Words
    There is a great tradition of American writing, epitomised in the modern age by the burnished masterpieces of Saul Bellow, in which a luminous poetry is plucked from the prose of everyday life, and the patois of hucksters and dockers invested with epic grandeur. Such writing, at once mundane and magnificent, transcends the commonplace without leaving it behind. It preserves the feel and texture of everyday existence while disclosing a depth within it. Behind this literary heritage, as behind so much in the United States, lies the culture of Puritanism, with its conviction that daily life is the arena of salvation and damnation. The everyday is the place where the most momentous questions are to be confronted. It is a belief that lends itself naturally to the novel.
    There have been too many tales of literary decline, too many premature obituary notices for the novel, too much traditionalist nostalgia for a golden age of letters. Even so, it is hard not to feel that the culture of the word has taken something of a nose dive in today’s United States. The same is true of Britain, though to a lesser degree. There is a British television show in which panellists engage in superbly witty exchanges and surreal flights of comic fantasy without a single word being scripted. On American TV, by