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We should not be surprised that we perhaps still don't know the real reasons for invading Iraq. After all, there remains the deep historical mystery surrounding the American Revolution. Of course, the books fob us off with an unconvincing story about disputes over taxes, lands and the like, but an acquaintance was telling me recently of radical research that is set to overturn this perpetuated misinformation.

To understand the real cause, you need to go back to 1635 when Cardinal Richelieu founded L'Académie Française, which delivered the first official French dictionary in 1694 and ever since has maintained a vice-like grip over the language.

It took the English state and its institutions years to understand the importance of the lingua franca in an expanding empire. Even when they did, none could agree who should become the guardian of the mother tongue.

The first attempt at a monolingual wordlist of English was in 1604, but the development of a proper dictionary lagged the French by more than 50 years. Samuel Johnson saved the day, albeit belatedly in 1755, with the publication of his 42,000-word Dictionary of the English Language - the tool with which to take total command of the dominions.

In 1763 the American colonists, realising that linguistic control was upon them, started to revolt. Before the Boston Tea Party, the few precious official copies of Johnson's dictionary in the American lands were destroyed in commando-style raids, leading to open war in 1775. The rest is history.

Ever

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since, however special our relationship might have become, the US has kept its distance and dissonance through language: disparate spellings such as colour/color, variegated vocabulary such as trunk and sidewalk, and mutilated grammar. Other nations labouring under contrasting linguistic heritages have failed to overthrow the indomitable English, showing how standardised Spanish, formal French, even regulated German fell short of the mother tongue.

Meanwhile, we await thorough forensic linguistic analysis on the contents of the supposed British English dictionary. This though, is made the more difficult by its concealment: examination of Library/Dictionaries reveals the obviously phoney Oxford American English Dictionary - clearly a forgery emanating from the White House's covert Office of American Cultural Propaganda, an organ of which Richelieu would feel deviously proud.

I was therefore unsurprised when The Works' mailbox was only slightly less than inundated with your expressions of concern and frustration over this deep flaw in Mac OS X - its lack of core support for British English. Just when the cognoscenti have grokked how to get Mail to meet those pesky Californians in mid-Atlantic entente, the not-so-cordiale Pages ambushes us and destroys Johnson's great legacy in one fell dialogue/dialog.

My spirits were lifted by regular inquisitor Gail Everett's latest request for not just a British English dictionary, but a tool to check spellings à la mode de Charles II - a century before Johnson himself. The solution lies not in Mac OS X's strangely concealed spelling dictionaries, but in the Excalibur freeware from excalibur.sourceforge.net, which allows you to check against your own dictionary, whether Johnson's revolutionary or Jobs' ordinary.

Meanwhile, buoyed up by historical research and impossible coincidences, including the too-coincidental name Excalibur, my book-length account of this long-running conspiracy is nearing completion. I'm confident that it will be snapped up and turned into a blockbuster screenplay.