Separated by a Common Language

this is Bath from a distance...i actually thought the photo would be much bigger. Oops.

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One of my professors likes the joke that UK and America are two nations separated by a common language. The funny thing about that is that it's a little bit true. The classic difference is that they call french fries 'chips'. So, what then do they call chips...as in potato chips? Crisps. Then they have fries which, as far as I know, are just really thin crisps (chips). Maybe fried?

The most confusing one is 'alright.' It's a greeting - 'Alright mate.' Sometimes it's a statement sometimes it's a question - 'Alright mate?' In either case the appropriate answer is 'Hi' or hey or something along those lines. The real way to answer would be to say 'alright' back. That seems easy enough and once you catch on it is. At first I wasn't sure whether or not to give an answer to let them know whether or not I'm alright. Then when someone asks 'are you alright?' it throws you off because you're not sure if they just added a few words to their greeting or if they really want to know your current state of alrightness. There is also 'Hi ya.' I'm used to that one though because I have an English friend in the States who says that...plus it doesn't require any interpretation.

Here's another one. The English love to 'queue' (pronounced like the letter 'Q'). I had a ridiculously long conversation tonight about queuing with some locals. One girl's explanation was that they try to take out the unnecessary words. So, instead of saying 'wait in line' they say queue. There's that.

Now, there's the normal ones: bloke=dude, lad=boy, mate=friend, quid=bucks($).

Chips (or crisps) aren't the only one that takes some getting used to. The one I haven't figured out is what to call crackers or cookies. The names range from crackers, cookies, biscuits, digestives, and there are a few I can't remember at the moment. Sometimes I go into the store to get some cheese crackers or something and ask one of the workers after my search through the aisles proves unsuccessful. I ask where the cheese crackers might be and the aisle he points me to has nothing but cookies -- well, what I would call cookies. Then i finally find something that is close to a cheese cracker. It looks basically like a Ritz cracker but apparently it's called a biscuit. And the messed up thing is that none of them are consistent. Among the cookies are biscuits that look just like the crackers, which look exactly like the digestives.

I'm sure more will pop up, but the only other ones I can think of at this point are sledging, which is sledding...that's easy enough. Then there's winging (sounds like win-j-ing)...it means whining.

Oh. The locals in the area I'm in call supper 'Tea' and they call lunch 'Dinner.'

My guess is that a lot of these things are local (maybe Southwest) things. So, I guess they don't apply to the whole of England. Nonetheless, it's still messed up.

Done and done.