One summer while I was in college I worked on a blacktop crew paving streets in Marion, Ohio. Imagine our surprise when an irate woman emerged from her house one day and, in an unmistakably British accent, accused us of “knocking (her) up at 6:30 in the morning.”
This was my first experience with differences between British and American English, and what follows are personal observations supporting George Bernard Shaw’s contention that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”
My first visit to the United Kingdom revealed linguistic curiosities that showed me how much Shaw knew of the differences between British and American usage. People walk on the pavement, not on the sidewalk, and they park their cars in a car park.
A very cultivated Welsh woman told me to “keep my pecker up,” referring to my upper lip, and hence used an expression not much different in meaning from that used in the United States.
Not only can British terms shock Americans, but some American terms can shock the British. One will not find a “fanny pack” in Britain, since, as was so delicately explained to me, “the fanny isn’t the back part of a woman’s anatomy; rather, it’s the front.”
I watched the shock on the face of a friend’s 19-year-old daughter in Leeds when an American referred to a “fanny pack.” I suppressed a laugh when her mother, who had visited the U.S., calmly said, “That’s a bum bag, dear.”
Some interesting differences between British and American English involve names for items of clothing. If the weather’s a bit chilly, someone in the U.K. might suggest taking a jumper, not a sweater. A vest in the U.K. is a man’s undershirt; the American vest is a waistcoat. Men in the U.K. don’t wear suspenders; women wear them to keep their stockings up. The British wear braces.
A term that perhaps causes the most misunderstandings between the British and Americans is “pants.” In the U.K., pants are what one wears under one’s trousers –– “underpants” in the U.S. The son of an American friend I met at Heathrow Airport apologized because his pants were dirty. The British were astonished that anybody would admit such a thing.
The British buy petrol, but use gas in their barbecues and sometimes in their furnaces at home. They use spanners rather than crescent wrenches. They put suitcases in the boots of their cars and check their oil by raising the bonnets.
They look out from behind the windscreens of their cars and not the windshields. The American truck is a lorry and the tractor-trailer, or semi, is an articulated lorry. Oddly enough, the British are now using “pick-up truck.”
When the British say that they’re buying “a new motor,” they don’t mean a new engine; they are buying a (whole) new car. They have punctures, not flats, and get reports from the police, rather than tickets. Their traffic lights turn amber, not yellow.
The British get their prescriptions filled at the chemist’s shop. They use plasters instead of Band-Aids, and they buy cotton wool rather than cotton. While Americans might use paraffin for canning vegetables and fruits, the British do not; that is their term for kerosene.
To get to the top floor of a building in the U.K., you take the lift, and ride the underground in London. A subway in the U.K. is a sort of tunnel one walks through at, for example, a railway station. The British live in flats, not apartments. Americans buy a round trip ticket, while the British buy a return ticket and purchase a single, rather than a one-way ticket.
Some interesting differences between British and American English involve names for states of inebriation. While Americans might be sloshed, trashed, blitzed, hammered, torn up, bombed and so on, British terms are different. To be drunk is to be “pissed,” which doesn’t mean “angry.”
“Pissed off,” on the other hand, means the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. If the British are even drunker than pissed, they might be legless, bladdered or trollied. In Newcastle, in the northeast of the country, one can actually be mortaled.
There are many differences between British and American usage that I’ve not covered. So, on your next visit to the U.K., be sure and enjoy some bangers and even some aubergine. Have a cornet after dinner. And, if you happen to drive by a construction site, please watch out for the tipper lorries.
