(In his weekly BBC News World Edition opinion column, A Point of View, Harold Evans reflects on how Hurricane Katrina has rescued the word "poor" from the American enthusiasm for euphemism.)

I spoke last week of the political consequences of the New Orleans hurricane. Today I want to draw attention to a somewhat happier fall-out — its effect on the English language.

With 250 million Americans speaking English, the centre of gravity has clearly shifted from Britain to America, so a change for the better in American usage, produced by Katrina, is a benevolence affecting us all.

When I first came to live in America I was struck by how "the poor" had vanished — vanished from the American lexicon. I discovered they were constantly being rescued by euphemism.

First they became needy, then deprived, then underprivileged or disadvantaged. In the politically correct 90s they were economically challenged, or referred to as though they had just been admitted to some exclusive club: they were now members of a differentiated income group.

A character in a Jules Feiffer cartoon once remarked that while he still didn't have a dime, he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

Well, all that's changed in the wake of the New Orleans hurricane. It is now permissible to speak and write of poverty and poor people; not only permissible but mandatory since the sights at the Superdome were too shocking to tolerate evasive gloss.

This week's Newsweek magazine cover story indeed features the words poverty and poor people under the banner "a matter of national shame".

It is a relief when a commonplace English word like "poor" comes back. It has been around for centuries so we know what it means, but it became an awkward, intrusive presence when we thought we had solved the problem of poverty in the 60s and found we hadn't at all. The political left considered it would at least confer some dignity on the poor to give them a new suit of nouns and adjectives every few years, and the right never liked talking about the poor anyway. Bureaucrats went along, inventing new ways of putting a shiny gloss on the unpalatable.

Of course, the military had this down to a T. Wounded soldiers denied any increase in compensation received a letter which said: "The non-compensable evaluation heretofore assigned certain veterans for their service-connected disability is hereby confirmed and continued." In short, a negative sugar-coated as a positive.

The Americans don't have a monopoly of circumlocution. I remember the British civil servant who asked a government department for a book, and was told he was "authorized to acquire the work in question by purchase through the ordinary trade channels" — ie: buy it. But Americans have a genius for mass production, so there's more of it to wade through here.

Rich pickings

Some television news people here like to refer to "precipitation situations" when they mean it is raining. I sometimes wonder if they speak like this off-screen, whether they actually go home and say they had just been caught without an umbrella in a heavy precipitation situation. The same people never tell us about bad weather, only adverse weather conditions.

Of course America has had to cope with millions of non-English speaking immigrants importing their own variations into American English. Mark Twain once complained: "Whenever a literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

Or rather, Mr Twain, . . . with the verb in his mouth emerges.

The multitudes of industrious German and Yiddish speaking immigrants enriched English — where would we without schmooze, angst, zeitgeist, noodle? But I also suspect that the influence of German has had something to with the American habit of never being able to leave a good verb alone.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once Americans got credit for facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. So it is with win out, consult with, check up on, divide up, test out. No-one is allowed to continue. They have to continue on. Honesty doesn't pay. It has to pay off.

Such parasites are excess baggage for a people always in a hurry. They are at odds with the vivid immediacy of the words the American people are relentlessly inventing.

Once Americans got credit for facing a problem; now problems have to be faced up to

I was told that BBC Radio 4 listeners have particularly acute antennae for new Americanisms, so I spoke with the guardians of the sacred flame of our language at the Oxford English dictionary. The editor in chief, Erin McKean, wants you to know that only one in 10 new words make it through the filter, but lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower says that the flow of new words, especially from film and television, is so strong and so vivid they can't suppress American inventiveness. Indeed, they've opened a special North American office to scour and sift. They already have included such made-in-the-USA terms as teenager, superpower, yuppie, weight watcher and unisex.

The brilliant linguistic curmudgeon HL Mencken was right in the 20s to taunt the prudish who objected to ornery, yesman, gabfest, doghouse, handout, slush fund, kickback, killjoy. Who would have wanted to lose the word "rubberneck", which so perfectly describes the celebrity gawker?

Of course some of the new words which Mencken loved have faded as life changes. The pin-up girl has been replaced by the centerfold, the bargain hunter by the discount tire kicker. The couch potato slumped in front of the box is more of a feature of our time than the barfly and the lounge lizard.

Sheidlower tells me the next edition of the OED will have "perp walk" to describe the procedure the cops have developed for parading a perpetrator, or at least a suspected perpetrator, in front of the station house cameras and the odd-sounding "videot" for a habitual user of video games.

Quite or very?

All this to my mind is good, but a multiplicity of misunderstandings arise from assuming that words survive transatlantic crossings with their meanings intact.

The most subtle are the misunderstandings we never realize are misunderstandings. It took me nearly 10 years to work out the American purport of the word quite. I brooded long when I was told that an article I had written was "quite good". To me, it meant that it wasn't really good enough, only approximately good, lacking in something or other. I had the same reaction when someone, loftily I thought, wrote that the movie Shakespeare in Love was quite good. The penny only dropped when he continued that it therefore deserved an Oscar. Quite was not a modifier, it was a superlative. It meant it was very, very good.

Now here's the curiosity. When I went to the bible of American English, Mencken's famous 1921 book The American Language, and looked up "quite", the master had written the very opposite definition.

"In England, quite means to the fullest extent, fullest sense, positively, absolutely," he said, in contrast with the American quite which is conditional and "means only nearly, or approximately". So over the intervening years the meanings have switched.

I can only think that the nascent English taste for reticence and understatement flowered in years of adversity — stiff upper lip and all that — while expansive America has always been in search of superlatives to express its boundless optimism whatever the facts may suggest.

So "quite" was expunged as a qualifier and got co-opted to mean very, and very, you understand, is the least approbation you can give and has to be tacked on to the chorus of terrific, splendid, awesome, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious by which everyday achievements are greeted.

As to achieving the end of poverty, one day the Americans really will succeed — and then you can be sure they will mint a word quite terrific for the occasion.