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Having grown up in the US with what I would consider a higher than average exposure to the early 2000s internet, at least compared to other peers my age, much of my ability to read and write actually came directly from social media, instant messengers and online games rather than books. This meant I often found myself struggling with spelling errors in English class which sadly resulted in deducted points from my essays.
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
> Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
I can see the teacher's perspective here. I don't think it's unreasonable for teachers to mark this down, though I don't think your request to get back the points was unreasonable either.
Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you. Using language constructs that are unnatural for your audience can distract them and disrupt their flow. You don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point. This friction gets in the way of your point, thus ultimately hurting your own cause in addition to wasting their time. So when you keep doing that on your assignments and exams, you're effectively showing that you haven't mastered this skill -- and so it's not unreasonable for your grade to reflect that.
> Communicating effectively with your particular audience (the local American audience one in this case) is arguably a skill they're trying to teach you
Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
> don't want your reader to see "enrol" and spend the next 5-10 seconds pondering if you're illiterate or unable to run a spellchecker instead of spending that time digesting your actual point
Fair point. At the very least, one should be aware of the different usages.
> Please find me the numpty who can't distinguish colour from color.
Not sure what you mean by "distinguish". But just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way.
> just because you understand something that doesn't mean it can't slow you down, distract you, or be detrimental some other way
Sure. I'm just sceptical that errant signal isn't lost in the background of the American dialect's regional heterogeneity.
If I ask someone in San Francisco "what colour pop" they want, the friction won't come from the "u."
A better example for why regionality matters: what does "pants" refer to?
For what it’s worth, although this is often considered an Americanism, a lot of regions of the UK (particularly in the North) have consistently used “pants” to mean trousers.
That's what a tired dog does.
No, they only pant. -----------------
OK, at this point I really need to explain what on earth is going on here:
"what does "pants" refer to?" - pants refers to trousers and pants refers to underpants and of course pants refers to pants as a noun. Pants also refers to heavy breathing as a verb.
I have absolutely no idea how we ended up with this situation, where pant(s) is a noun and a verb and really odd. I'm going to blame Britain, US and Italy (via Latin) and not necessarily in that order.
"A dog pants when they are hot but they only pant when they are hot."
Note how I end up slapping an extra s in for no apparent reason - actually, it is when I don't put a verb in front of that word. So: "a dog will pant" ... "a dog pants". The extra s on the word seems to make it a verballish thing.
On the bright side this is why phishing emails always look a bit wank.
> how we ended up with this situation, where pant(s) is a noun and a verb and really odd. I'm going to blame Britain, US and Italy (via Latin) and not necessarily in that order.
Because (in English) adding -s(/-es) makes plurals of (most regular) nouns, and also makes 3rd person singular declension of (most regular) verbs.
Other examples of noun+verb collocations: books, shows, scents, raises, views, votes, comments, dates, dogs, aims, bugs, ends, grades, hunts, launches, lifts, marks, moves, posts, rains, rates, records, rows, sets, signals, tracks... Examples with -es: searches, watches, punches
(This is going to be much more common in English than Italian/Spanish/Latin because English uses -s/-es for both nouns and verbs.)
Eats, shoots and leaves?
"will pant" uses the infinitive, it's not conjugated at all. "He/she/it pants" is the third person singular conjugation.
Rubbish / nonsense / drivel / twaddle / claptrap etc. Virtually unknown outside the UK.
All of these are common in NZ ("twaddle" is a bit old-fashioned). I had no idea "nonsense" was supposedly regional, and four dictionaries I just checked make no mention of that (and include American sources of quotes).
twaddle is word I haven't heard for a long time (I moved from the UK to Australia 27 years ago). It's a great word!
It is a lovely word, indeed, and it is undeservedly heavily underutilised, hands down.
I find myself using it nowadays rather sparingly and mostly in just one phrase (and its semantic derivatives): «all that twaddle […]».
Rubbish, nonsense, drivel, and claptrap all recognizable to me, a Yankee. Twaddle is a new one tho!
I would say nonsense was quite common in the US. Otherwise agree (although I would get the meaning).
It is all pants to me (I was actually «translating» pants into Universal English).
Guy from jerkcity.
Colour and realise I suspect most American readers would be able to understand just fine. But you start writing tyre, kerb, and gaol, and there will be real reading comprehension issues that start arising. We have standardized spellings for a reason and that's what schools are there to teach.
And this is just spelling, not even going into words that have different meanings in the US vs UK like pants and lemonade.
Interestingly, recently there is a push in the US to normalize African-American (for the lack of a better name) grammar and spelling, e.g. using "do" in place of "does". Wonder if this includes normalizing the usage of British spelling as well.
> normalize African-American (for the lack of a better name) grammar and spelling
The name is “Ebonics.” It’s had its own name since the seventies, although the push to “normalize” it peaked in the nineties.
> Wonder if this includes normalizing the usage of British spelling as well.
No.
Thanks, I haven't heard of Ebonics before. Looks like at this point in time its usage is becoming discouraged (the term, not the phenomenon it describes).
Like so many things that become objects of policy argument in the United States, the term describing it became overloaded to the point where it was rendered less useful. You don't hear the term so much now.
The term reached peak use around the time (I'm going from memory here as far as timeline) some educators began exploring the concept of teaching kids who spoke Ebonics at home with some of the same techniques they would use to teach English as a second language students. America reacted with the focus, intelligence, and empathy it always does when issues of education and race are brought up.
Yeah I am starting to notice that (not from the US originally) re: how America reacts to this topic. Also, it looks like even the term "ebony" itself in the context of African-American culture is considered archaic.
I love this example. I felt ick at realise but yeah, still understood it. Tyre I thought no way, that can't be tire. Kerb, wait, like curb?? And then gaol I think my tongue tied itself in knots and gave up trying to imagine what it might actually mean lol.
Archaic spelling of "jail". Read it with a soft g and a long a and it makes a little more sense. There's also the derivative "gaoler".
(American here, but that's one I've come across before.)
My goodness, I never would have guessed. Thank you for sharing.
Also, if gaol can have a soft g, then so can gif? :-)
Yes, but like a lot of minor regional spelling or pronunciation differences, some people say it with a hard g. It may be the improper pronunciation when compared to the origin, but that’s how words work, grating as it may be to our enlightened sensibilities.
Lots of soft Gs around, like gentleman… though Gif isn't one of them!! :)
In Germany, I wouldn't get marked down for using the wrong spelling, because it just didn't matter. Behavior? Behaviour? Who gives a fuck, it's all the same. It's ridiculous that these regional variations are somehow significant that it warrants points being taken away.
I think native speakers of a language have a more visceral reaction to things being spelled wrong or the wrong word order. So in Germany, people may not care so much. I grew up in the US but near Canada so I have maybe more exposure to written British English than most in the US (center vs centre). And I lived in Tanzania where I myself became very confused on how to spell words (grey vs gray?).
But there are probably still some words that will make me think the person is not American, like organisation with an s. I read it and it viscerally feels off.
As a Brit, I resent the "authorized_keys" in my .ssh directory.
Due to the large number of U.S. internet residents, I don't tend to really notice many "Americanisms", though one thing that bugs me is when the U.S. doesn't seem to recognise that "America" is a a large continent and only one area is the U.S. However, even Canadians will refuse to admit that they are American, as in living within the american continent.
I'm not sure if you did it intentionally but I saw "recognise" and felt a slight electric shock :-)
Perhaps the solution is to just unite all of the states of America, because I at least think the original idea was that the USA was a supranational government uniting little nation-states (precursor to the EU?), but maybe these more established nation-states won't want to join the union and become a "state" (even though I think political science would already refer to them as states).
German spelling is ridiculously easy, whereas English spelling is quite hard. I guess the equivalent inverse would be comma use in German.
If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Unless you are writing International Standards. ISO requires British English spellings in documents.
Also if you’re invited to tea with the Queen
I hear conversations with her are not as lively anymore
They absolutely are! She just looks a little different.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
> In Europe, British English is used as a reference point
Anecdotal counterpoint, but… I’m a British English speaker, but many of my colleagues are Continental Europeans, for whom English is their second language. Part of my job involves copy editing and, almost without exception, their output is written in American English.
Is it because Microsoft Word default spellchecker settings?
No, it's due to the ovewhelming exposure to media from the U.S., mere spellcheckers oughtn't interfere with 'underground' vs 'subway', 'film' vs 'movie', 'flat' vs 'apartment', and so on and so forth.
My teachers only commented/deducted if I mixed spellings in a single essay. If a teacher can't teach someone who uses either variant they probably have a stark educational deficit themselves.
when i was an exchange student i was told that some students would have problems coming back because their english teachers would not accept the american english they would learn during the exchange year and that might reflect on their grades. fortunately i had an understanding teacher who didn't do that, but who was happy to see my english dramatically improved.
Which is why as European, I have my English dictionary set to UK English.
> If you live in the US, I agree that you must use American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
As a computer science student in England we were told we should use ‘program’ rather than ‘programme’ since that was the convention in our subject.
If I remember correctly BBC Basic accepted COLOUR as well as COLOR keywords to be more approachable to primary school children who were native English speakers.
Dictionaries have also accepted the shorter spelling when talking about computer programs: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/program && https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
Surely for the BBC Minor COLOUR was always the correct way.
It was a bad show that they allowed COLOR as well.
As each keyword was saved as a code - did COLOR and COLOUR really map to two different codes?
According to https://www.ncus.org.uk/dsbbcoms.htm, they both map to &FB
So it was always shown as COLOUR (or was there an American version>)
To me, a program is on a computer, a programme is broadcast on TV.
I personally don't care much for small misspellings and they add zero friction to my reading, I'm more interested in the message and how it is delivered to some extent. What adds friction are some styles of writing which diverge too much away from the essential.
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its also entirely inconsequential after school, so do your job and follow the district mandates
but for the rest of us, the point of language is to convey a shared concept, and if the sender and receiver are doing that then mission accomplished
Don't blame Webster. For a lot of the well-known differences, he actually preserved the original.
In particular, the British added the "u" when French was in fashion, and likewise for "-ise" (in fact, "-ize" dates all the way back to Ancient Greek!)
One thing that Americans do get wrong is misspelling "-lyse" which comes from a different Greek root, so should not follow the same pattern as "-ize". But even then, Webster didn't invent the error.
To me it's about consistency. I don't really care what is or isn't "correct", I care that the spelling can sometimes be different depending on the region. It would be one thing if there was some unified body for English, like the French have, but we don't, so it's just another competing standard.
Ultimately I think changes like this should be more grassroots than top down whims of private dictionary publishers. Not to mention that all this focus on the phonetics fundamentally misunderstands that the phonetics of English spelling are closer to a mnemonic than a rule. I suspect this will become gradually more obvious as languages world wide evolve to be more keyboard friendly in the coming century.
But this all just my take on the situation.
I can never remember if I should use grey or gray
The first vowel tells you from which country it comes.
Grey is UK English, so think "e" for England. Gray is American English, so think "a" for America.
Somewhat oddly, "grey" has ended up pretty normalized in the US so either works. There are a few other examples; theatre comes to mind. In a way that lots of other British spellings really have not.
> I can never remember if I should use grey or gray
Become a web/CSS developer and it won't matter anymore.
I prefer #666
I find it fascinating that anyone in the US has this issue, as a Brit this was an issue for anyone with early internet exposure, but I hadn't considered the volume of British/Canadian/Aussie English to have an impact the other way round!
I remember in the 1980s entering a computer program into my BBC Micro after watching The Computer Programme[1] and finding out that it had dual spellings of key words like COLOUR/COLOR in its BASIC.
So even before the internet was widely used people in the UK we’re aware of the problem.
1. See how I slipped that one in there?
> as a Brit this was an issue for anyone with early internet exposure
Same here as a Swedish person who grew up with American media + eventually getting into Internet communities. English exams felt great when I took them, I knew all the answers after all.
But then getting the results back was always disappointing, as Swedish schools teach "British English", not "American English", so you better use the British spelling and pronunciation, otherwise it's completely wrong obviously and you deserve punishment.
Companies, for example, have very detailed style guides about usage to enforce consistency. Obviously we don't "punish" people for doing things differently but we do correct them and, by implication, ask them to do it differently next time.
> I eventually came to realize ...
At least you use the "ize" suffix, so all else should have been forgiven!
I prefer the "u" in colour/behaviour as I find it more aesthetically pleasing. But I absolutely despise the "ise" spelling of realize (realise) and am not entirely sure why. Though, I vaguely remember spelling all words with "ise" and getting some wrong some right and not understanding why (I'd learn later I'm dyslexic so I chalked it up to that and called it a day)
I once was talking wit some british people whilst in california and said "oh you can throw that garbage in the trash". They laughed and said it sounded really coarse, what did you do with it after? "It goes into a truck which takes it to the dump. Why, what do you say?" "We say you put your rubbish in the bin and the lorry takes it to the tip" which did sound more pleasant.
I'm fairly certain "dump" is the more commonly used word in the UK. There's the classic children's novel "Stig of the Dump" published in 1963.
There's definitely cases where UK English has adopted a new word but American English hasn't. I was surprised to see the word "coupon" used in old UK literature. "Voucher" is the more common word nowadays. People would accuse you of being Americanised if you said coupon.
Tip is definitely more common everywhere I've lived in the UK.
Stig of the Dump is set in an informal place people dump rubbish, if I remember correctly, which is where people are more likely to use the term (e.g: "what a dump"), but if you are talking about a managed place it is taken to be disposed of properly, tip is by far the more common term I hear used.
I’ve never met a fellow Brit who would say ‘dump’ instead of ‘tip’ in this context.
I also call my discount-loving fellow Brit friend ‘coupon boy’ rather than ‘voucher boy’!
I use both. I believe "dump" was more common but, for some reason, has been superseded by "tip". Or it may be regional.
> I’ve never met a fellow Brit who would say ‘dump’ instead of ‘tip’ in this context.
It was always the dump when I was growing up (mid 70s, northwest.)
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Dump and tip have different connotations. The tip is where one deposits refuse/rubbish. Whilst a dump and is a pile/collection of unwanted things, not necessarily rubbish. It’s a small but often important distinction.
Not always. Fly tipping is an unwanted problem. Most people would prefer you take it to the dump.
I suspect might be one of those regional things like scone/scone[1].
1. It’s pronounced “scone” and I will fight anyone that says otherwise!
As a less confrontational reply: from my point of view “unwanted fly tipping” is talking about rubbish. The concept of depositing unwanted, yet usable, not rubbish, things somewhere is not something that would happen (outside of the rather recent disposable culture context). As to your sentence (which is perfectly fine), the use of words avoids possibly confusing repetition. Atypical use would be preferred to “no fly tipping, take it to the tip”.
Challenge accepted - “scon” is the only way! Why? Absolutely no logical reason, but it is, how it is.
"Scon" is, of course, how "scone" is pronounced by all right thinking people but it does somewhat ruin the joke. ;)
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I love Stig of the Dump. I read it at school and whilst I have very memories of my childhood I do remember reading it. I can quite imagine living in a dump/tip with old jam jars as my window!
That reminds me of a phrase I've seen on signs in both the UK and in Aus/NZ (IIRC): "No fly tipping".
I'm not sure if this is actually correct usage in those countries, or slang, but it certainly feels much more like slang, and felt virtually impenetrable, even to someone who's been exposed to a fair but of UK-isms in his life.
I don't think it is slang. I think it is a tad old fashioned, but any native speaker would understand it.
I wouldn't call it slang, it is the common way to refer to the act in media, and the government uses it, e.g: https://www.gov.uk/report-flytipping (they do define it, however, as you say, it would be unclear if you aren't familiar).
I don’t think Aus/NZ would use it in this manner. It would be more likely to see “no dumping”.
I remember going on a walk in London with my dad when I was little and we ended up in Hyde Park (this is late 1970s). There was a sign that said 'no dumping" which he chuckled at and explained to me the slang term 'dump', as in 'to defecate'.
I consume a lot of American media and say "garbage" and "trash" often. My wife constantly chastises me for it and says I should say "rubbish"!
Hmm, lorry takes it to the tip sounds dirty to me.
It is very dirty, and they just dump load after load right on the tip.
As a Brit, I feel the cultural traffic is more from the US to the UK. But that is hardly surprising given the larger American population and outsize influence of Hollywood.
Ps/ Americans, please keep saying "bummed". It is a constant source of amusement for immature Brits like myself.
I'd rather Americans start using fags instead of cigarettes, aluminum instead of aluminum and kilometers per hour instead of bald eagles per freedom.
Royal society of chemistry has since gone with the American pronunciation of Aluminium, they won this one apparently.
We use miles per hour in the UK though
Whoosh!
I often feel bummed after a fag break.
I've heard a few Americans say "wanker" recently. It just doesn't sound right in their accent.
I know several people in the US who use the verb and noun forms of "wank" synonymously with "whine" (perhaps because they both have the same starting consonant sound) without realizing how vulgar it is. I've gently pointed out to them what it means in British English and none seem to care.
"Twat" is another one that sounds weird. Americans sound like they're replacing the a with an o
Interestingly, both twat and cunt are far more severe (and aimed at women) in US English than they are in UK/Aus/NZ English.
'The c word' is still pretty offensive in the UK. Except, perhaps, in places like Glasgow.
Interestingly c*t and quaint have the same etymological roots.
>c*t and quaint have the same etymological roots
that is bizarre, if true, since my internal monologue cant chose the q word to replace the c
Southern England seems to have more American sensibilities with respect to those words - but in Scotland "cunt" is pretty common and 99% of the time not gendered.
Yeah I was saying in UK/NZ/Aus (plus I guess Ireland too come to think of it) it's ungendered and not necessarily a severe swear word. I didn't think it was that harsh anywhere in UK but maybe I can't speak for England.
I’m in my 50s and a Brit from London . For me ‘cubt’ has always been the absolute nuclear option- probably used 2 or 3 times in my life
I'm sure Peg's character's maiden name in "Married...with Children" ("Wanker", from "Wanker County") was chosen deliberately.
Please Americans, continue to also use the word "fanny pack" especially when you are a tourist in London.
Am I going insane? I've seen this posted before in the last week and some of the comments here are identical to the comments from last time.
In fact algolia search shows this was first posted 3 days ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Clicking the link to the comments on that post takes you to this comment section, so I think there's some by-hand deduping/merging going on
Dang has been resurfacing threads that got limited engagement, but that either have a second posting that's doing better or that he simply manually resets the timer on. The process by which he does this also resets the time on comments, too, for some reason; I don't really know except that I've noticed it happen to threads I had open or threads I had commented on.
I read this exact reply N days ago... okay exact is stretching it but you get the point ;)
Yeah, the reply about the garbage lorry is word for word, isn't it? Did this get a second chance and it moved all the other comments with it, or...?
>Did this get a second chance and it moved all the other comments with it, or...?
Probably. When that happens the comments don't get moved, their timestamps get adjusted to match the repost timestamp.
Meta but that seems like a pretty dishonest and confusing system.
Don't get your knickers in a twist.
As an American, I still get hung up when hearing about a government "scheme" [0] in Britain without any negative connotation whatsoever.
It’s so good hearing about a “bike to work scheme” and trying to imagine what the evil part is.
That it provides greater benefit to the better paid employees and is inaccessible to the people trying to find work?
An excuse to pay less cash to employees?
That’s really not how it works
Healthcare providers getting fat paychecks from all the treatment from accidents, or in later age prolonged lung cancer treatment? Funeral services?
Or maybe just bike sellers being happy to sell junky overpriced fashionate ebikes that will drop embedded non-replaceable battery's capacity significantly within few years (or replace them for exorbitant costs).
With the right mind the world is there to screw over, just look at the politicians and other high functioning sociopaths.
The article didn't mention what is by far my favorite British lingo: "faffing about". It's just so damn useful! I know that there are other phrases which work, but for whatever reason none of them really hit for me like "faffing about" does.
I feel like my role in the comments here is to add a Scottish flavour - what we'd say where I grew up (South Aberdeenshire) rather than "faffing about" is "footering about"
It's nice lingo, but is it commonly used in the US now? I've never heard it in the US except from Brits.
The sound of the word just seems to capture the action, or lack of action, so well.
I like using it to say something is a waste of time or too much trouble; it’s a faff…
Now, I’d say the really correct usage would be “a bit of a faff” but if you find saying that too much faff it’s all the same to me mate.
Anyway, I’m on the drag getting to the shops. I need to fix a picture thas on the huh. ;)
A good example of 'faff' is when you join a queue, get to the teller and they tell you a) you needed to take a number and/or b) you're in the wrong line.
Oh, no. A faff is an activity, rather than a scenario. Going to the bank could be a faff, but your example is just a bloody nuisance...
It’s too British sounding. It would sound corny coming from anyone else.
Someone who's actively engaging in faffing about: faffer.
Brit living in the US here. Despite being here 7 years now i'll every so often have an American point out how odd something I say is. Recently it was me saying "I'll need to head home and get my swimming costume before heading to the pool". To which the response was "wow wow wow, "swimming costume"? Really? A costume. Not a uniform but a costume; something you wear for halloween? OMG that's adorable" Turns out Americans say "swim suite" :).
On holiday in Whistler back in 2019, I had a brief conversation with an Englishman in the hotel elevator.
A few days later, he recognizes me outside the hotel but I am noticeably slow to recognize back and he mentions "we chatted on the lift". I fake remembering while desperately searching my memory for the event of riding the chairlift with this English guy.
An hour later I remember that in the UK, "lift" == "elevator". Me, being North American and having spent plenty of time in ski towns, always associates "lift" with "chairlift".
Hah! But if you say “on holiday,” I would have expected you to know “lift.”
(or is there a region in the US where this is common? Everyone I know would say “on vacation,” but the US is very regional.)
Yeah, but in a ski town I could see making the same mistake.
in warehouse/trucking situations, lift is pretty common in the US
I'm not sure about other Americans, but I'll sometimes say "swim[ming] trunks" if I'm specifically referring to male swimming attire. Otherwise, yeah, it's often "swim[ming] suit" or "bathing suit" here.
The Australian term "budgie smugglers" is really the best to use in this specific situation.
Surely that refers specifically to the "brief" style, whereas I'd expect "trunks" to have a bit of thigh coverage.
Budgie smugglers does indeed only apply to the brief style, but those who like banter and wordplay will try to work it into any conversation involving male swimwear. E.g. "Fetch your budgie smugglers fellas, we're going to the beach", or "sorry ladies, my budgie smuggling days are over. It's boardies for me."
Since male swimming attire comes in different shapes (ahem designs), I hear people use «swimmers» more and more.
Save for one singular design which, it would seem, distinguishes itself with such remarkable uniqueness as to warrant the bestowal of its very own appellation: «budgie smugglers» (AusE).
Okay, now that last one is just hilarious.
Ireland: Swimming togs (!)
Yeah that works in the UK too, although my family’s Irish so I may have picked it up from there.
As a kid I found the Irish usage of “press” for cupboard and “runners” for trainers/sneakers confusing as hell.
Turns out they actually say swim suit ;)
A swim suite sounds even more fancy than a costume
>swimming costume
when i was a lad, my mother always said "swimming togs"
I’ve lived in Australia for nearly 15 years and still say “swimming costume” - the locals ridicule me and call me for posh for not saying “bathers”.
You mean your budgie smugglers?
> Turns out Americans say "swim suite"
Maybe "swim suit"? "Suite" is something else, no?
I never say: swimming costume. I call it a: swimming cozzie. Wonder what you American friends would make of that?
I was disappointed that your friend wasn't assuming skinny dipping to be honest
Personally I hate swimming wearing clothes, feels so unnatural, and then you're dripping wet when you get out
As an Aussie I get a kick out of seeing Australianisms get picked up in the global vernacular. No worries seems to be increasing common outside of Australia, and cooked (to describe something that's fucked up) also seems to be prolific on social media these days.
Somehow the fact you chose word "vernacular" comes across as amazingly Australian to me. It's like Australians instinctively know that you need to sprinkle your sentences with some interesting vocabulary every so often. I'm probably making no sense to anyone but myself but I find the Australian manner of speaking to be sharp swings between the most basic brutish, often vulgar, english to the complete opposite. Like, you'll hear someone blurt out "Slow down you cunt, These pills they've got me taking take are praying bloody murder on my fucking knees" and then effortlessly it just flows into something like "That said it's not worth grieving or shedding too many a tear over. They've done a marvelous job at alleviating my various ailments. My wife's taking them to and it's all but cured her rheumatism".
As an American, I always find it kind of ironic that Aussie colloquialisms and colloquialisms my Texan grandparents used overlap, likely because of being drawn from a similar pool of British & Irish expats some 100-150 years ago. "I reckon" is one that comes to mind first.
It's not occurred to me in ages that "no worries" could be Aussie in origin, thought it was just a degradation of "don't worry about it" here in Canada, or picked up from the Lion King, but we do have a ton of aussies here, at least on the West Coast, so it seems plausible enough. I guess we just don't add "mate" as commonly.
I would guess it was popularised by "Crocodile Dundee" in the 80s, so that's long enough to feel native to a lot of people.
Yep, that could very well have been my first exposure to that saying.
On top of Outback Steakhouse’s (fake-Australian U.S. restaurant chain) old tag line: “no worries, just right.”
It was actually “no rules, just right”
Yeah, I sure got that one wrong. I blame a lack of watching commercial television these past few years.
There's an amusing short story from Douglas Adams, who visited Australia back in the day where 'No worries' featured prominently.
https://douglasadams.com/dna/980707-08-a.html
"and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island - staff who don't just say "No worries" when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say "No worries at all". They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don't even despise you. Really. No worries at all."
Juice Media's "honest government ads" are a goldmine for Aussie-speak, "colossal shitfuckery" so perfectly nails the dank machinations of Australian tech and politics.
Now with added US colossal shitfuckery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHuMjIhS6t0
Unfortunately "not here to fuck spiders" hasn't really caught on, despite my best efforts.
For real life?
(Bluey. The single greatest contribution to exporting Australian culture.)
No wuckers, coming soon?
I'm finna grab that phrase with glee, and stow it in my tucker bag.
I think more Aussie way to say that would be:
'I'm heaps keen to chuck that saying into the old tucker bag'...
That's heaps more Aussie, eh
Yeah nah.
"No worries" is the main phrase I brought back from visiting Australia in 2013. "no worries m8" is a common response from me on $CORPORATE_CHAT when a coworker thanks me. The other one I use occasionally is "yonks".
If you want to take your 'fair dinkum'-ness to the next level, I offer you the equivalent phrase 'No Wokkas'
My favourite thing that Americans say that means something very different in the UK is: fanny.
"Fanny pack" makes me smile every time I hear it. One of my favourite Scottish colloquialisms is: fannybaws.
Similarly (originating in linux circles in the 90s, revived recently by cryptobros) the acronym "FUD" always makes me smile. For our friends across the pond, both "fanny" and "fud" are Scots slang for the female genitalia.
There's so many of these - recently a startup called "boby" appeared ("boaby" is a less harsh form of "dick"). You can encounter characters in Stardew Valley for the switch called "Rocket" (West Coast Scots for a crazy person) and "Bam" (Scots for a usually sketchy guy who is up to trouble).
I love them, they're like a little hidden treat for a tiny minority of the planet.
Somewhat related. Some US people came to visit our UK office back in about 2001, amongst them "Randy Bush". That entertained us. Also, there used to be a guy at Novell called "Randy Bender".
For many people of my rough age and hobbies (cars/motorsport), Top Gear and other British motoring shows and podcasts have had a massive impact. We had virtually nothing good in the way of TV shows about cars in the 90s/2000s, which meant that anyone watching World Rally Championship and F1 were downloading clips or torrents of them. That, in turn, led straight into finalgear.com in the mid 2000s, before the BBC finally had the sense to bring Top Gear to BBC America, which led to another huge uptick in popularity.
Likewise. I didn't even know that several phrases I picked up from Top Gear were distinctively British, until my wife pointed one out recently. There are a few figures of speech I never adopted from the show, though. Ex: Is "oh cock" a British-ism, or just a James May-ism? I don't think I've ever heard that anywhere else.
There's also the simple nature of being online at 6 AM. What other English-speaking country is awake at that time of day?
I think it's a May-ism. I was going to say it could be a "posh public schoolboy"-ism, but it turns out he went to comprehensive school ("public high school" for the Yanks out there).
> Children who in the US would be deemed “smart” or “bright” or “gifted” are called clever in the UK.
It's interesting the way that words sometimes seem to have nuance that doesn't seem to be strictly within the definition.
For no reason I can remotely explain, I'd divide these into clever/bright and smart/gifted.
I've met several autists that I would readily describe as smart or even gifted, but I wouldn't describe as clever or bright.
(Although the distinction might just be that I'm an arsehole.)
In the US, the word is generally "asshole", although not, for example, in my grandfather's rural West Texas dialect.
I know that - the only time I use the American spelling is when I use it as a suffix.
(I often consider it shorthand for "I'm not an American".)
but, in certain quarters in Great Britain, arse is pronounced as if it had no R
An inherited Americanism in itself.
While non-rhotic accents are common in parts of America, the dominant theory among linguists is that this was a result of Americans copying a trend in England, not the other way around, as you seem to be asserting:
> By the 1770s, postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation was becoming common around London even in formal educated speech. The English actor and linguist John Walker used the spelling ar to indicate the long vowel of aunt in his 1775 rhyming dictionary.[4] In his influential Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), Walker reported, with a strong tone of disapproval, that "the r in lard, bard,... is pronounced so much in the throat as to be little more than the middle or Italian a, lengthened into baa, baad...."[8] Americans returning to England after the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, reported surprise at the significant changes in the fashionable pronunciation that had taken place.[16]
...
> The loss of postvocalic /r/ in the British prestige standard in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries influenced the American port cities with close connections to Britain, which caused upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic in many Eastern and Southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah.[9] Like regional dialects in England, however, the accents of other areas in the United States remained rhotic in a display of linguistic "lag", which preserved the original pronunciation of /r/.[9]
How curious! (I feel that I've observed the Britishization of the word "curious" in my lifetime. As a child, it meant only interested, intrigued. Now it also means strange or bizarre.)
This might be my fault. I was in Charlottesville for a few months about 16 years ago doing some work for a startup, hanging out in my off hours with a group of sorority girls who had worked for me in London when I’d been an impresario.
I say (or rather, said, as this episode made me very conscious of it) “hmm, curious” almost reflexively when working on something. They aped me. They partied, they spread the meme. Within a week I was suddenly overhearing people in cafes and gas stations going “hmm, curious” and by the time I left town I felt like I was living in a poorly written Monty Python sketch (or perhaps a Lovecraft bit), as an epidemic of “mmm, curious” had taken over the townspeople and the UVA student body. The latter all then went home at the end of the year, towards the end of my stay there, and spread it to every corner of the U.S.
When I went back a year later, they were all still at it.
I guess this ties in with the whole “teenage girls introduce new language” piece a few weeks back.
Huh. Curiouser and curiouser.
I think the default understanding here (UK) would still be the same. I wonder if it’s Sherlock making the other understanding more popular.
The meaning of strange-comedic-unusual-interested is... curiously... conflated in several languages (even being a false friend in some to others).
Could it be due to "The curious case of Benjamin Button"?
A word of warning as a Brit in Australia. You'll get funny looks when talking about routers and root!
(Note that my HN name is the same as my real name, without the space).
On my first (and only) visit to Australia I got stopped at passport control. The security bloke took my passport and looked at it. Then kept looking at it, in silence. His face was straight and sour, but his shoulders were ... twitching. This went on for more than a couple of minutes until, finally, he looked up from the passport, stared into my eyes and asked: "Is that your real name?" Confused, I nodded. He handed me back my passport and waved me through - to his credit, the man never smiled or laughed at me, but I could see it had taken him a lot of effort to maintain his control.
A day later I learned about the Wombat Joke. I grew to hate the Wombat Joke. I'd love to visit Australia again, but I'll probably use a false passport next time.
> the Wombat Joke
The search engines tell me that there are lots of wombat jokes, but don't seem to know any that stand out enough to deserve a "the" in front.
Just makes me think of the acronym for "Waste Of Money, Brains And Time".
"He's a bit of a wombat, that one: eats, roots and leaves."
... Yeah. I don't get Aussie humour either.
Haha, thank you for sharing that, great story.
I'm embarrassed to admit I'm not aware of the Wombat Joke. I'm assuming you were warned about the danger of Drop Bears though :-)
When I lived with an Australian in London, he'd say you can beat an egg, but you can't beat a root (pronounced like beetroot) – I think it was a type of joke.
There's two I like in particular as an American, but mostly because their counterparts are ruined.
'Good on you' is the biggest one. 'Good for you', especially in text, to me comes across as bitter or sarcastic because of how often it's used that way, whereas the other doesn't.
'Mate', while I don't use it, is a solid word. We have buddy, pal, guy, etc, but again, they can each have their own negative connotation. Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
> Maybe 'mate' does too, but it always seemed like a neutral, friendly word.
It can be negative, definitely, if said with the right intonation.
I think in both British and Australian English, it's what you call someone when you are a hair's breadth away from walloping them.
The word mate can be used both positively and negatively, but is predominately used positively. One of Australia's core values is 'mateship'.
You will be surprised to find that Champ is the word Aussies will use when unimpressed. For instance, "You alright there Champ?" means " You absolute idiot, what in the hell are you thinking?"
Mate can be used in the same negative diminutive way "buddy" or "pal" might be used in the US.
An interesting one is "bread" to refer to money; I believe it comes from cockney rhyming slang. Bread and Honey = Money.
> "In the future" refers to a general or specific time that has yet to occur, and "in future" is used to mean "from now on". (The recent business jargon, on both sides of the Atlantic, is "going forward".)
Funnily enough, I think 'going forward'/'going forwards' is a transatlantic difference?
An interesting one working in tech is "routers" (the network devices that route traffic) and "routers" (the machine that cuts wood).
In British English the pronunciation is swapped. A "rooter" is the network device, and the "rahowter" is the woodworking machine.
An interesting article, somewhat let down by an inaccurate and overstated headline. No-one is getting 'conquered'. As it says at the end of the article:
"But in the grand scheme of things, the traffic both ways has been modest. That is, American English and British English remain distinct dialects, with little danger of being homogenised."
The most interesting part of this article is the incendiary language in the headline.
Nobody would click otherwise because it doesn't take a genius to know that the internet has caused Brits and Americans to interact more regularly and thus adopt more of each other's language.
How about the spelling of the word aluminium?
Fascinating story behind the origins of the naming of that element. Davey, the British scientist who first isolated it, originally suggested it be called alumium. Somewhat ironically, he referred to it as aluminum in his papers, while it was a Swede writing in a French journal that spelled it aluminium.
Can you say that out loud in a sentence please?
Yeah, they at least pronounce aluminium like they spell it. It's not a "Leicester" piss take.
Hopefully Map Men might help with this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4
TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.
The video helps it makes sense.
> It's not a "Leicester" piss take.
It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.
We say it how we spell it and so do americans.
Officially we do, but lots of people make it sound more like 'aluminyum", still distinctly British rather than American, but not said in a way that someone unfamiliar with the spelling could guess it was 'ium' at the end.
I've got a fairly plain accent, fairly close to Received Pronunciation or BBC/Oxford English, Americans never have a hard time understanding my pronunciation, and even I sound closer to 'aluminyum' or maybe 'aluminiyum' more than a clean 'aluminium', though it still sounds much closer to correctly pronounced British word than to the American version.
Spell it however you like, just don't make your tyres out of it.
The article starts off with "run-up." What's the origin of that? I have heard of run-up in cricket.
According to the O.E.D. it's been used in the US in a stock market context since 1935.
As an example of how seriously the British take their language, here's a shortened entry for the phrase "run-up".
1.The act of running up to a certain point; esp.
1.a Coursing. The race between two greyhounds up to the first turn or wrench of the hare.
1834 Thacker Courser's Comp. I. 134 One dog is sometimes behind the other in the first run up to the hare
1.b The act of taking or sending a ball up to the goal or into a position for final play. Also attrib. Chiefly in Golf.
1897 Outing XXX. 484/1 Foster‥, after a clean run from 'way down the field, puts the ball through the uprights.‥ The excitement of the run-up has been intense.
1.c A run made in preparation for jumping, throwing, etc., in Athletics; in Cricket, the bowler's approach to the bowling crease before delivery.
1897 Encycl. Sport I. 52/2 Pace in the run-up supplies the impetus; spring enables the jumper to lift himself into the air.
1.d = run-in | RAF lingo.
1942 R.A.F. Jrnl. 27 June 8 Another Stirling and a Wellington adopted almost identically the same run-up as ourselves.
1.e A period of time or series of occurrences leading up to some important (freq. political) event; an action which prepares the way for one on a larger scale.
1966 Sunday Times 20 Nov. 48/2 The Petit Palais show offers, also, invaluable evidence in its drawing section of the ways in which Picasso manoeuvred during the crucial run-up to the ‘Demoiselles d'Avignon’.
1968 Listener 5 Dec. 761/1 The run-up to the election of Oxford's new Poetry Professor has aroused a good deal of mirthful interest
2 Bookbinding. (See quot. 1875.) Also attrib.
1875 Knight Dict. Mech. 2004/2 Run-up, a fillet-mark which runs from head to tail on the back, without mitering with the horizontal cross fillets on the panels.
1880 J. W. Zaehnsdorf Bookbinding 131 With a ‘run-up’ back, the edge of the leather round the end papers is to‥have a roll run round it in gold.
3 On the U.S. Stock Market, a rapid increase in the price or value of a commodity. Now also in gen. use.
1935 Sun (Baltimore) 13 Apr. 17/8 Corn advanced to 1 to 13/4 cents a bushel, but cotton was reactionary after Thursday's run-up.
1942 Ibid. 1 Oct. 21 Laclede gas preferred had a runup of 6½ points.As an Aussie cricket comes to mind, you run-up from a standing start before releasing the ball.
I think equivalent for US would be "Wind-up" (at least I think pitchers in Baseball performs a wind-up before releasing the ball)
It's when you put your bike on your shoulder and run up the too steep/muddy to ride hill/stairs/obstacle.
My favourite UK/US words are the ones we share but have different meanings - e.g. nonplussed
How much of this can be attributed to the internet? I have been exposed to a lot of British figures of speech because I get up early in the morning and interact with people on HN and other sites. The other folks active at that time of day tend to be Brits.
One I've noticed increasing is "cheers". Not the typical use (for my American mind) as a toast when drinking, but as "thanks" or "you're welcome".
I have my PC set to UK English.
But realistically in my day to day life I speak English with people who are not from any historically English speaking territory. It's not owned by anyone.
He's the author of two books I really enjoyed and recommend: "The Sound on the Page" and "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It".
I've never been so chuffed to read an article...
Nothing sounds as unnatural to my British-attuned ear than North Americans saying "mate" or "mates".
Because they imported "mate" but forgot the crucial "oi!" part
"Twat" is worse, it comes out sounding like "twot" for some reason.
As an American patriot who mists up when I hear The Star-Spangled Banner...
UK slang, like their humor, is just objectively better.
iunno, the last time I asked if I could bum a fag, it was made very clear to me that UK lingo has NOT conquered the US
Same when I asked my neighbor to “knock me up in the morning.”
That was a very weird morning…
> It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. “Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
See also: "ejaculation" used to be synonymous with "exclamation" and it's used heavily all across the Sherlock stories eg
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
For a list see https://thetaleofsirbob.blogspot.com/2013/07/watson-and-othe...
If you mentally insert some commas some of them are really funny.
> "The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
Makes the "romance" books my grandmother would read sound like they were lifted from the Sherlock stories
Whenever I read Dickens or whatever and there's a sentence like:
"Stop!" he ejaculated
I can't help adding a mental full stop to make 2 sentences. Childish I know :D Makes for some strange additions to the story
Comment was deleted :(
Word of warning then - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsfzJXGAo8
I’m down for that in the US.
I’m up for it, in the UK.
Let's meet in the middle and use "I'm game" - neither up nor down!
Yeah I don’t think UK lingo has conquered anything here in the US. I find most UK lingo rather dorky and quaint. To me it’s like talking to cousins you like from a quaint town that’s woefully behind the times. It’s not their fault though and it’s kind of endearing.
However, Americans who use British lingo are the absolute worst; they remind me of a Will Farrell character except they are not funny.
At some point after the 1950s, en-gb speakers had to resign themselves to the dominance (if not prestige) of en-us; might the same process happen with en-us and en-in?
(and then there's en-gb vs en-eu...)
The first non-shite thing I’ve seen from the Graun in years.
Brilliant!
Now time to conquer CSS.
background-colour: gainsborough;
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