Between you and I, there is no bore quite like a grammar bore. Droning on about hanging participles, campaigns are mounted against the sourcing of new words, or the prepositions that sentences sometimes end in. Yet the best books in this new genre, from fierce polemics like Don Watson's Gobbledygook to more light-hearted linguistic guides like the recently published Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense, make a point that is more important than mere linguistic etiquette. In Philip Roth's words, "Language is always a lie, above all public language." When meaning is eroded, we had all better beware.Contributing to the debate with a book called Lost for Words, John Humphrys has pointed up the way words contain unspoken connotations by referring to "boo words" and "hurrah words".

But it also depends (given America's permanent, not just Bushian, self-absorption) on Britain's having another, European, card to play. Hence, Mr Blair's on-off and now "on again" love affair with European defence and security policy, which is inevitably - given relative military spending - mostly a Franco-British game.There are some practical, military and commercial arguments for an EU defence policy but there are also unspoken missions They are not to destroy Nato. They are to create a core of unity within the new, looser, sprawling EU (a core of unity to which, unlike the euro, Britain can happily belong). Chirac's vision of a "multi-polar" world is usually presented in Britain as a challenge to US supremacy. It is seen in France as a refusal to accept that America must always be right, just because America is America, no matter how dubious the views of those in power.Blair believes that Europe (by which he usually means Britain) can draw the US towards a more collegial attitude to foreign affairs, the world economy, the environment.

Chirac believes that only a strong and united Europe (by which he usually means one that agrees with France) can hope to do that.Chirac knows that an influential Europe cannot exist without Britain and its special connection with the US; Blair knows that his influence in America (if any) is partly personal and partly historic. Polite Franco-British relations are not.The celebration of the centenary of the Entente Cordiale this year obliged the two governments to put on a happy face. Beyond that, President Chirac needs Tony Blair as a connection to Washington; Tony Blair needs a repaired relationship with Chirac to prove that he is still a Great European.All of this is true, but it is not the whole truth. Chirac and Blair may not be friends; they may not agree on everything; but, stripped of the domestically-shaped rhetoric, their objectives and ideas converge.

The Franco-German axis may yet become a Franco-German-British three-wheeler.Mr Blair has pushed ahead with the Franco-British-led plans for an EU defence policy, semi-detached from Nato. Detailed plans are being negotiated for Franco-British co-operation in the construction of a new generation of aircraft carriers (two British and one French). (So much so that the constitution is now seen by the British right as a statist French conspiracy and by the French left as a Thatcherist Anglo-Saxon plot.)On one level, the new Chirac-Blair cosiness can be dismissed as the inevitable, cynical, surface accommodation of governments and countries that are doomed by geography and history to associate with one another Polite Franco-American relations are, in a sense, optional. In negotiations on the new European constitution, there were surprisingly few fundamentals on which France and Britain disagreed. The Rumsfeldian - and maybe briefly Blairist - fantasy of a "New Europe" controlled from a Polish-Spanish-British periphery have collapsed.Although still divided by some old favourites, such as farming and budget rebates and taxation policy, Britain and France take a broadly similar view of how the EU should develop.