The Prodigal TongueBy: Lynne Murphy The first and perhaps only book on the relative merits of American and British English that is dominated by facts and analysis rather than nationalistic prejudice. For all its scholarship, this is also a funny and rollicking read. The Economist, Books of the Year Only an American would call autumn fall or refer to a perfectly good pavement as a sidewalk Not so, says Lynne Murphy. The English invented sidewalk in the seventeenth