When I was in journalism school some 10 years ago, the professors spent a good deal of time conditioning students: Training them to look like, sound like and act like every other journalist around. This is one reason most newspapers today suck (television and radio news productions, with a few exceptions, have never been particularly good), but that's not what I want to talk about. Rather, I'm more interested in the notion that increasingly, there is one English spoken.

My wife Barbara was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., and grew up in North Carolina and Tennessee. You'd think she would have a conspicuous accent, but she doesn't. At times she lets some flat hick tones fly, but generally, she sounds like an average American. Me, well, I grew up mostly in the midwest, the homeland of average American speech. So my accent is dead solid perfect as far as the arbiters go.

We spent last week in England, where people are supposed to talk funny and use works like telly and petrol. Except that English papers have "TV listings" and television ads and billboards talk about "gas." As for the accents, some people in the countryside are a bit broader in their speech patterns, but in London, it can be difficult to tell an Englishperson from an American.

This might be just a personal observation. I grew up with Monty Python, the Young Ones and Merchant Ivory. Those Scottish brogues in Trainspotting didn't confuse me in the slightest. An English accent is no different than a western U.S. accent to my ear, merely simply something different than the way I speak. So I may not be the best judge of these things. Bolstering this personal bias notion is the fact that most English folks thought that I was Canadian. Now, I can tell yer average Canadian from yer average English person, but I guess across the pond, we all sound alike. And yet...

We don't, really. And my point is not that English and American patterns of speech are altogether similar. You wouldn't catch any American male uttering the words "lovely" or "cheers" with the frequency they are spoken over the sea. And there are also many other idiosyncrasies that haven't quite been ironed out.

Still, the interaction of cultures, particularly in the entertainment realm, has resulted in a blurring of language distinctions. Indeed, Winston Churchill's famous phrase about the U.S. and the U.K. being one country divided by a single language just doesn't hold much water any more. There is more difference between the English spoken in New York City and anywhere west of the Mississippi than there is between the English spoken in New York and London.

Idioms have been shared and assimilated. I'm sure that much of what the Monty Python boys said on their TV show made no sense to the Americans who first watched it on PBS back in the mid 70s. But now, after a steady diet of everything from Black Adder to Four Weddings and a Funeral to Ab Fab, well, the phrasebooks just aren't that dissimilar. On the other side of the ocean, the Brits have been watching American TV and movies for years. British kids today are more likely to be able to quote from Pulp Fiction than the speeches of Disraeli. A car is a car, gas is gas and the trunk is the trunk. I didn't hear one mention of motorcars, petrol or boots during my entire stay.

Going back to my college days for a moment. I remember a comment by a guest speaker about the once-distinctive American dialects. He focused on a certain section of Vermont, whose people once had a very specific way of talking. In the 20 years or so since television had become available, the kids had learned to speak in a more generic American fashion. A linguist would be hard put to pinpoint the origins of those kids, whereas their parents still retained more unique patterns of speech. I can attest to this. When my future mother-in-law first called my parents, my mother needed a translator. Barbara, my wife, inspires no such consternation when she speaks.

Indeed, as the world shifts faster and faster to English as the primary language of trade and culture (this is an undeniable fact), even the once-obvious divisions within that language are falling. Indigenous languages are dying out every day, and it wouldn't be too surprising if in 100 years there are only some 10 or so languages regularly spoken on the earth. The Tower of Babel is once again rising; it is a television transmitter, and this time, I'm not sure it can be stopped.

The first "Britishism" Jon Worley heard in London was "Mind the gap," the phrase uttered before the subway doors open. He thought this was quaint and might even make for a good band name. Then he saw all the "Mind the gap" t-shirts at the tourist stalls and realized that Brits today are quaint only when there's a profit involved.