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contrast, it is impossible to say “Hey!” or “Wow!” without the aid of an autocue. Hamlet’s dying words were “Absent thee from felicity awhile/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story. . . . The rest is silence.” Steve Jobs’s last words were “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!” Perhaps he did not do quite as much for human communication as his fans imagine. Some U.S. academics deliver their papers at conferences as though they are translating from the Sanskrit as they go along. Columns in up-market British newspapers can be intricate and inventive, whereas equivalent pieces in the States tend to be sparse, thinly textured and lexically challenged. An editorial in a British newspaper can be a literary tour de force , which is hardly ever true across the Atlantic. Some of the most revered national commentators in the United States write a basic, colourless, crudely utilitarian prose. No decent piece of writing simply tells it like it is, without a sensual delight in the way of telling it.
    Generally speaking, American students are a delight to teach. Yet they are not always able to voice a coherent English sentence, even at graduate level. Some of them are easy to mistake for Turks or Albanians who have only just arrived in the country, and are still struggling with the language. Only later does one realise that they grew up in Boston. They tend to tie themselves up in great chains of unwieldy syntax, overlain with a liberal layer of jargon. Dishevelled syntax is true of both genders, but jargon is confined largely to the men. This is part of the painful demise of the spoken word in the United States. Another sign of linguistic decline is the existence of an organisation known as Scientology, a name which is in fact a tautology. It means the knowledge of knowledge. Names, however, are not always rigorously logical. It is only quite recently that a London hospital stopped calling itself the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, a title which contains one word too many.
    Perhaps the real threat to freedom of speech in the United States is not one to freedom but to speech. Perhaps the nation will end up free to say anything it likes while being incapable of saying it. Nor is logical precision a strength of American students. Many of them have had their brains severely addled by an overdose of media. Perhaps they should all have a compulsory first year in which they learn nothing but how to think and speak straight, ridding themselves of the language of texting as a clinic purges its patients of cocaine. Despite all this, no more generous, open-minded and enthusiastic group of students can be found in the world. American students tend to be courteous, responsive, cooperative, eager to acquire ideas and ready to criticise anything whatsoever, not least themselves. They are also the last group of students on the planet who are prepared to speak up in class.
    Irony
    I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that included a few mild touches of irony, only to be informed by a startled journalist on the paper that irony was unacceptable in its columns. One should be as wary of writing for a journal which bans irony as one should for one which seeks to ban immigrants. There are English journals, by contrast, in which the use of irony is almost as compulsory as the use of commas. Pieces can be sent back for being insufficiently insincere.
    It is a mistake to think that Americans do not understand irony. Yet though they may respond to it, they rarely initiate it. They also occasionally blunt its edge by too blatantly sarcastic a tone. For a puritan civilisation, irony is too close to lying for comfort. A renowned American philosopher once told me of a discomforting time he had spent at an Oxford High Table. Throughout the entire evening, he had no idea whether a single word that was said to him was meant to be serious or not. “Dammit!” he exploded to me, “I’m an American!” And this was