WHEN I first came to America as a graduate student in 1975 — fresh from a post-colonial Indian education that taught me to assume that English was meant to be spoken the way it was on the BBC — I discovered that saying "tom-ah-to" and "claahs" wouldn't get me very far in America.

A kindly waitress in the college cafeteria switched me early on to "tom-ay-to" — the alternative, she pointed out, sounded affected as well as incomprehensible, and as a vegetarian I needed to be understood when I wanted my tomatoes. (My "claahs struggle" lasted longer.) My objection to the American variant of the English language was its lack of aural precision — in the United States, unlike in India, for instance, you couldn't tell the difference between "parity" and "parody", and "can't do it" could be misheard for "can do it" (impossible to confuse with the English "cahn't").

But matters get worse when you move from issues of pronunciation to vocabulary. An English friend of mine swears he nearly had a heart attack on an American flight when the pilot announced the plane would be airborne "momentarily". In English, the language my friend the passenger speaks, "momentarily" means "for a moment", and he thought the pilot was suggesting an imminent crash soon after takeoff. In American English, however, "momentarily" means "in a moment", and the pilot was merely appeasing the impatient masses on board. The plane took off and stayed aloft, my English friend's heart stopped thudding, and he lived to tell the tale. But he understood better than ever before the old saw that England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

Anecdotes abound about the misunderstandings that arise when foreigners come to America thinking they know the language, and stories like this have enlivened many a dinner table over the years. My own favourites find the English hoist by their own petard, if not by their own pedantry. One young man, in the course of a passionate courtship, told his American girlfriend, "I'll give you a ring tomorrow." All he meant was that he would call her by telephone. But she understood him to have offered betrothal, and the relationship didn't survive the misunderstanding. That story is probably bettered by the hoary tale about the English girl who asked an American hotel clerk to "knock me up in the morning". She merely wanted to be woken up; the horrified American understood her to be soliciting a pregnancy.

It must have been the same hotel that failed to understand an English guest who called to say he had left his "trousers in the wardrobe".

Translators had to be summoned before the hotel staff finally cottoned on: "Oh, you've left your pants in the closet. Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

Sometimes you can get the right word but the wrong concept. Our former Foreign Minister M.C. Chagla once ruefully recounted the time he wanted to order a modest bite from room-service in a New York hotel and asked about sandwiches. "How many do you want?" he was asked. Imagining delicate little triangles of thinly-sliced bread, he replied, "oh, half-a-dozen should be enough." Six sandwiches duly arrived, each about a foot long and four inches high.

In my first week on campus and in need of directions, I asked an American where I could post a letter to my parents. "There's a bulletin board at the Student Center," he replied, "but are you sure you want to post something so personal?" I soon learned I needed to "mail" letters, not "post" them (even though you mail them at the "post office").

In English, one concludes a restaurant meal by asking for the bill, and conceivably paying by cheque; in America, one asks for the check and pays with bills. "Do you have a five-dollar bill?" I once asked a recent arrival from the Commonwealth near the end of a meal. "Good grief, no, it's considerably more than that," he replied, gesturing at his $55 check.

Foreigners aren't the only victims of linguistic misunderstandings in America. At the height of the debate in this country about high schools offering contraception to their students without parental consent, an American friend dropped in on an Indian diplomatic family living here. "I didn't realise how liberal you Indians are," she told me afterwards in shocked disapproval. "I couldn't believe it when the lady told her 12-year-old son, `don't forget to take your rubber to school.'" I couldn't help laughing. "She wasn't telling the kid to pack a condom," I explained, "merely an eraser."

The language of politics is also not exempt from the politics of language. I once told a lengthy story about an "MP" and discovered from the increasingly puzzled expressions of my listeners that whereas I had been referring to a Member of Parliament, my American audience had assumed I was talking about a military policeman. When the Indian MP "tables" a resolution, he puts it up for debate and passage; when an American Congressman tables a resolution, he kills it off. A "moot" point is one the Indian wants to argue; but if it's moot, the American considers it null and void.

But then these differences of usage reveal something of the nature of American society. It is no wonder, after all, that while we Indians "stand" for election, Americans "run" for office. American statesmen from Haig to Rumsfeld have delighted global audiences with their own variants of the Queen's tongue. The American form is usually the more vigorous, and American usage stretches the possibility of the language in more inventive ways. A British linguist once told a New York audience that whereas a double negative could make a positive, there was no language in the world in which a double positive made a negative. A heckler put paid to his thesis in forthright American: "Yeah, right".

Yeah, right, indeed. With the universality of English largely a result of America's global dominance, it's time for other English speakers to stop quibbling about whether the American usage is right or wrong. It simply is. And as the Americans have taught the rest of us to say: that's OK.