British vs. American Renderings

[Beck31]

Pub (Public House)= Bar or tavern
Petrol=gasoline
braces=suspenders
moterway=road (highway)
shop=store
cuppa=cup (usually tea)
jar=glass (usually a bitter)

 

[sr71plt]

"Pub" is slowly taking over in the States too. Pretty close to deepsixing "tavern."

 

[Dream_Operator]

Bottle Shop = Liquor Store

Primary School = Elementary School

Brolly = Umbrella

Minced Beef = Ground Beef

Marrow = Squash

Aubergine = Eggplant

The Lot = The Works, Everything -- I'll have a kebab with the lot (with everything, all the toppings)

 

[Beck31]

knock up=wake up
ring up=call
knocking shop=brothel (wh*re house)
randy=horny
tart or trollop=hussy
candy floss=cotton candy
round-a-bout=traffic circle
off license=betting shop (otb)
bicy/biscuit=cracker
que=line

 

[NekoParks]

Happy Birthday!

I might be wrong here, but I think "manoeuvre" is the more common British spelling, with "manoeuver" being a rare variant.

Australian English spelling usually follows British English, with various exceptions - e.g. British English uses "programme" for everything except computer programs, while Australian English follows US English and prefers "program" everywhere. I think there's a very gradual shift towards US spellings where they are simpler, but I don't know how far that will take us.

Some more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_spelling#Spelling_and_grammar

Oddly, while "labour" is the standard Australian spelling, our largest political party is the "Labor Party" for historical reasons.

There are some minor regional variations in Australian dialects (e.g. "suitcase" vs "port"), but it's not nearly as pronounced as in the USA or UK, and it's not generally possible to localise somebody just by hearing them speak. The class-based variations are much stronger.

I'd have said more "wank - jerk off" here. "Masturbate" is used on both sides of the pond in a formal way; wank/JO are more casual.

"Fanny" and "jumper" are both significantly different from British/Australian English to US...

I don't know if it's still November 30th in Australia, but even if it isn't, I still wish you Happy Birthday and many happy returns of the day.

 

[NekoParks]

Love it. Phone the size of a loaf of bread.

Wouldn't that had made you an obvious target? I mean-- I know nothing about the spy business-- but I would be able to spot the boss or the leader that way. So was this person your phone lackey or was like having your own caddy?

 

[NekoParks]

Bottle Shop = Liquor Store

Primary School = Elementary School

Brolly = Umbrella

Minced Beef = Ground Beef

Marrow = Squash

Aubergine = Eggplant

The Lot = The Works, Everything -- I'll have a kebab with the lot (with everything, all the toppings)

I have heard the lot, the works, and all the way.

 

[sr71plt]

Wouldn't that had made you an obvious target? I mean-- I know nothing about the spy business-- but I would be able to spot the boss or the leader that way. So was this person your phone lackey or was like having your own caddy?

It was for all of the office chiefs in the embassy, not just the cloak and dagger ones. And sitting next to it in the car would be a bodyguard and when it would be sitting in the house, the house usually would be pretty secure. (I knew I'd displeased someone on the last post I went to, though, because they assigned me a house that was all windows and was on top of a hill--even the staircase was a glass block staircase.) As the person who was holding the phone was also the one I'd make do anything the phone call was about, guess you'd say he was a well-paid gofer.

 

[NekoParks]

Deadly Office Politics--huh?

It was for all of the office chiefs in the embassy, not just the cloak and dagger ones. And sitting next to it in the car would be a bodyguard and when it would be sitting in the house, the house usually would be pretty secure. (I knew I'd displeased someone on the last post I went to, though, because they assigned me a house that was all windows and was on top of a hill--even the staircase was a glass block staircase.) As the person who was holding the phone was also the one I'd make do anything the phone call was about, guess you'd say he was a well-paid gofer.

Not exactly an easily defendable position, is it? So "they" (or the powers that be) put you in a house like Phillip Johnson's? Um, okay. I am so glad that I have a job that allows me to stay out of office politics. If the troll that guards our supply cabinet gets angry at me, the most that can happen is that I have to buy my own pens and highlighters. ;-)

I hope you weren't in Beirut when all of those assassinations and kidnappings of reporters and faculty from American University were occurring. Really terrifying times and I was viewing it from stateside on the evening news. I was a junior in high school when the Iranian hostage crisis was happening. Like most spoiled, little suburban twits, it was the first time that I became aware of international events. I went from never watching the news and reading the newspaper, to reading and watching it every night. I will never forget how I felt. It was like the entire country was held hostage. The Iranian Hostage Crisis changed the entire way I viewed the world.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't know if it's still November 30th in Australia, but even if it isn't, I still wish you Happy Birthday and many happy returns of the day.

Thanks! I think Nov 30 is just the default that displays if I don't show my actual birthday, but the sentiment is appreciated anyway

Midway through December 1 here, and I'm not really looking forwards to the summer heat...

 

[sr71plt]

Not exactly an easily defendable position, is it? So "they" (or the powers that be) put you in a house like Phillip Johnson's? Um, okay. I am so glad that I have a job that allows me to stay out of office politics. If the troll that guards our supply cabinet gets angry at me, the most that can happen is that I have to buy my own pens and highlighters. ;-)

I hope you weren't in Beirut when all of those assassinations and kidnappings of reporters and faculty from American University were occurring. Really terrifying times and I was viewing it from stateside on the evening news. I was a junior in high school when the Iranian hostage crisis was happening. Like most spoiled, little suburban twits, it was the first time that I became aware of international events. I went from never watching the news and reading the newspaper, to reading and watching it every night. I will never forget how I felt. It was like the entire country was held hostage. The Iranian Hostage Crisis changed the entire way I viewed the world.

Let's just say that I wiped out the office drapery allowance for years to come. Couldn't do anything about that glass block stair tower, though. The scorcher was that they said they selected the house because it had to have a garage with automatic door openers so I could just zip in and lower the door without getting out of the (fortified) car. But then someone in the ravine below us (with the Green line between the armed Turks and Greeks running on the crest of next hill, which was also occupied by a UN base) got a garage door with the same frequency and kept raising and lowering our garage door. I got moved to a house with an eight-foot wall around it and interior six-foot walls around all the patios and window walls. They'd check all of the vehicles for bombs at the car entrance to the embassy but they wouldn't check them at our houses before we set off for the embassy.

I was in and out of Beirut during an early tour than this one, yes. And I covered both the Iran hostage crisis and the assassination of Sadat (and the Beirut civil war) from the region. Went to Israel on business/family vacation once and got flattened by a bomb at the Damascus gate in Jerusalem and got back home in Cyprus in time to be walking into the house that afternoon when a bomb went off in the Commerce Ministry across the street.

 

[NekoParks]

Sadat's Assassination

Let's just say that I wiped out the office drapery allowance for years to come. Couldn't do anything about that glass block stair tower, though. The scorcher was that they said they selected the house because it had to have a garage with automatic door openers so I could just zip in and lower the door without getting out of the (fortified) car. But then someone in the ravine below us (with the Green line between the armed Turks and Greeks running on the crest of next hill, which was also occupied by a UN base) got a garage door with the same frequency and kept raising and lowering our garage door. I got moved to a house with an eight-foot wall around it and interior six-foot walls around all the patios and window walls. They'd check all of the vehicles for bombs at the car entrance to the embassy but they wouldn't check them at our houses before we set off for the embassy.

I was in and out of Beirut during an early tour than this one, yes. And I covered both the Iran hostage crisis and the assassination of Sadat (and the Beirut civil war) from the region. Went to Israel on business/family vacation once and got flattened by a bomb at the Damascus gate in Jerusalem and got back home in Cyprus in time to be walking into the house that afternoon when a bomb went off in the Commerce Ministry across the street.

Unbelievable. I am in awe of people that willingly place themselve in danger to serve our country. I remember where I was when I heard about Sadat's assassination. I was sitting in a political science class my first semester in college. I had a brilliant professor that taught the entire class by using current events--no textbooks were used at all. We had to bring in newspaper and magazine articles into class to illustrate the terminology and ideas that we discussed in class. It's one of the most useful classes that I ever had.

 

[DeYaKen]

UK v US language and usage

Getting back to the U.K. v US English. There are so many differences, not just in words but in the way we use them. A famous quote is that the US and UK are two nations divided by a common language.

A prime example is the term "Built like a brick shit house" I was surprised to find this term being used in a US story to describe a woman with curves in all the right places. In the UK it would be used (usually) to describe a man and would mean that he was broad of shoulder and very solid. The sort of man you don't pick a fight with. If it were applied to a woman it would mean that she was somewhat butch.

We also have some derogatory terms for men (mainly) like Wanker, Tosser, Burke, Prat and more The nearest I've seen in U.S. stories is "jerk" You can usually tell what was meant by the context, but not always (back to irony again). A Brit might well introduce a friend like so: "This is my mate Paul, bit of a wanker but he's all right." The wanker bit is just teasing between friends and is taken to mean the opposite of what is said.

Slag & slapper are synonymous with slut which is also used in UK can't give definitive origin of slag but slapper comes from the idea that the woman's vagina would be so slack your prick would slap around in it. There is also the lovely phrase "had more pricks than a secondhand dartboard"

We go horse riding not horseback riding. It is assumed that the reader or listener knows what part of the horse you sit on.

All this is just scratching the surface and is the reason why I wanted a U.K. editor. However, Penn Lady is doing a great job so I may have been wrong on that. I have only written one story based in the US and tried to get the US English right, Hollywood makes this easier for Brits than it is for Americans. I still made two errors I said that a person trawled through her emails looking for something.
Trawled comes from the fishing term to trawl the sea bed dragging up everything and anything, discarding what you don't want.
It is in common use in the U.K. meaning to laboriously go through everything looking for something useful. Apparently not used in the US.
The other one I should have known it was frisson meaning :
A sudden strong feeling of excitement; a thrill
Apparently this is not used in the US.

 

[NekoParks]

US vs Brit-- Frisson and Trawled

Getting back to the U.K. v US English. There are so many differences, not just in words but in the way we use them. A famous quote is that the US and UK are two nations divided by a common language.

A prime example is the term "Built like a brick shit house" I was surprised to find this term being used in a US story to describe a woman with curves in all the right places. In the UK it would be used (usually) to describe a man and would mean that he was broad of shoulder and very solid. The sort of man you don't pick a fight with. If it were applied to a woman it would mean that she was somewhat butch.

We also have some derogatory terms for men (mainly) like Wanker, Tosser, Burke, Prat and more The nearest I've seen in U.S. stories is "jerk" You can usually tell what was meant by the context, but not always (back to irony again). A Brit might well introduce a friend like so: "This is my mate Paul, bit of a wanker but he's all right." The wanker bit is just teasing between friends and is taken to mean the opposite of what is said.

Slag & slapper are synonymous with slut which is also used in UK can't give definitive origin of slag but slapper comes from the idea that the woman's vagina would be so slack your prick would slap around in it. There is also the lovely phrase "had more pricks than a secondhand dartboard"

We go horse riding not horseback riding. It is assumed that the reader or listener knows what part of the horse you sit on.

All this is just scratching the surface and is the reason why I wanted a U.K. editor. However, Penn Lady is doing a great job so I may have been wrong on that. I have only written one story based in the US and tried to get the US English right, Hollywood makes this easier for Brits than it is for Americans. I still made two errors I said that a person trawled through her emails looking for something.
Trawled comes from the fishing term to trawl the sea bed dragging up everything and anything, discarding what you don't want.
It is in common use in the U.K. meaning to laboriously go through everything looking for something useful. Apparently not used in the US.
The other one I should have known it was frisson meaning :
A sudden strong feeling of excitement; a thrill
Apparently this is not used in the US.

According to Henry Higgins, "There even are places where English completely disappears; in America they haven't used it for years."

I have seen frisson used here in the US-- a frisson of fear. I really love the term trawled. It's the perfect description for searching through emails. I'm going to use it from now on.

 

[oggbashan]

Just how large were those phones? Sometimes when I see old movies or old episodes of the XFiles, I can't believe how large those phones are.

Back in the 1970s some of my colleagues had satellite phones. They were the size of briefcases and weighed about 15 lbs.

To use them, the briefcase was opened, the power was switched on and the satellite dish raised and pointed at the sky. The dish was moved around until a carrier signal was heard. Only then could a connection be made. The cost of the call was hundreds of dollars a minute.

Most of them were used to test the technology but one was very useful.

The person carrying the satellite phone had gone to a remote part of South America to act as a consultant on the installation of a radio telephony link to a new airstrip just built to service an oil exploration survey. The contractors were working for the country's government but had been trained by us.

When the light aircraft landed it burst a tyre. There were no replacements at the airstrip, nor any other aircraft. The next aircraft wasn't due for a month, and there was no working communication to anywhere. Trekking hundreds of miles through virgin rainforest wasn't an option. They didn't have the proper equipment.

Cue satellite phone. Out comes the briefcase, the dish is lined up, a call is made to the UK. The UK base calls the country's capital and explains the dilemma. The next day a spare tyre arrives by air.

My company sold a few dozen satellite phones to the exploration company.

 

[NekoParks]

Back in the 1970s some of my colleagues had satellite phones. They were the size of briefcases and weighed about 15 lbs.

To use them, the briefcase was opened, the power was switched on and the satellite dish raised and pointed at the sky. The dish was moved around until a carrier signal was heard. Only then could a connection be made. The cost of the call was hundreds of dollars a minute.

Most of them were used to test the technology but one was very useful.

The person carrying the satellite phone had gone to a remote part of South America to act as a consultant on the installation of a radio telephony link to a new airstrip just built to service an oil exploration survey. The contractors were working for the country's government but had been trained by us.

When the light aircraft landed it burst a tyre. There were no replacements at the airstrip, nor any other aircraft. The next aircraft wasn't due for a month, and there was no working communication to anywhere. Trekking hundreds of miles through virgin rainforest wasn't an option. They didn't have the proper equipment.

Cue satellite phone. Out comes the briefcase, the dish is lined up, a call is made to the UK. The UK base calls the country's capital and explains the dilemma. The next day a spare tyre arrives by air.

My company sold a few dozen satellite phones to the exploration company.

Fascinating story. Thank you for sharing it.

 

[Dream_Operator]

A related question (and I haven't researched if there's an "approved" way of doing this): If you are writing American style and you have a British character, do you use American or British renderings in that character's dialogue (and vice versa)? Any authority you can cite for the choice you make? It could be that it doesn't matter as long as the author remains consistent about it.

I faced this issue with the current story I am writing which is set in London. I decided to go full monty (with the exception of British Grammar). I had a British editor for the first chapter, but she went on holiday and apparently never returned.

If any of you Brits in this thread want beta-read my story for authenticity, send me a PM.

Here's the first two chapters I've posted:

The Rules of the Game Ch. 1

The Rules of the Game Ch. 2

---------------------------

A couple more:

Gutted = Devastated -- He was gutted.

Fancy = like, care for -- Fancy a drink? He fancies her

 

[uberundunter]

Middle ground

First of all, in addition to using different words that share a common definition, there is at least one word used by both Americans and Brits that has distinctly different meanings in the two cultures: "fanny." In the U.S., it means the back side. In the U.K., it means the front side (of a woman).

That may why is is very uncommon in the U.K. to hear or see references to one football playing patting another on the fanny.

Second, I once worked in the Middle East, at a facility with a multinational staff, but where the official business language was English and there were large contingents of Americans and Brits.

When are old Unix terminals were replaced with Windows PCs, we found that Word had been installed with the Canadian dictionary. The Canadian rules are a reasonable mix of the Queen's English and American English, and gave both the Americans and the Brits some things to grumble about.

 

[oggbashan]

...

Second, I once worked in the Middle East, at a facility with a multinational staff, but where the official business language was English and there were large contingents of Americans and Brits.

When are old Unix terminals were replaced with Windows PCs, we found that Word had been installed with the Canadian dictionary. The Canadian rules are a reasonable mix of the Queen's English and American English, and gave both the Americans and the Brits some things to grumble about.

Years ago I was running a help desk in a local government department. The typists and secretaries were using a stand-alone wordprocessing system. When installed it was set to British English.

But the original British company was taken over by a Norwegian one. The next upgrade defaulted to US English. Chaos ensued for a few hours before I reset it to British English.

For the next few months the system worked reasonably - until the next upgrade. Again it defaulted to US English to the annoyance of the typists. Again I reset it to British.

They had introduced a new level of the Help system. The previous issues had given error and fault messages in English. Since they only meant something to me, I didn't care whether they were British or US usage. I could cope with both. The new level of Help only produced messages when there was something major wrong with the system.

But those messages were no help at all. They were all in Norwegian!

 

[soflabbwlvr]

B: judgement . . . . . A: judgment

I have to disagree with this one. Both of these are used in American English. "Judgement" is an opinion based on or expressed as fact, while "judgment" is a legal decision of a court of law.

One more to add: "Clever" (British) and "intelligent" (American).

 

[Beck31]

Brilliant (UK)= Cool (US)

 

[Dream_Operator]

Brilliant (UK)= Cool (US)

Massive is also used in a similar manner.

"How was the concert?"

"It was massive."

----

Another:

Presenter = TV Host

A sports one:

Not in good form = playing like shit

One more:

Chav = White trash

A couple more:

A Rasher of Bacon = A slice of Bacon

Have a Lie in = Sleep in, Sleep Late

 

[sr71plt]

I have to disagree with this one. Both of these are used in American English. "Judgement" is an opinion based on or expressed as fact, while "judgment" is a legal decision of a court of law.

This is mentioned in the "How-To" of mine that should post tomorrow or the next day on how writers/editors should read the dictionary, which provides more help in decisions than most realize. U.S. publishing prefers the "judgment" spelling for all cases--it's the first-listed variation in the authority dictionary publishing recognizes, without the distinction you give it being noted.

Publishing is more interested in the buying reader than the author, so publishing simplifies a lot of concepts and holds to traditional, very clear punctuation, as well. Your distinction apparently isn't one publishing/the recommended dictionary thinks the buying reader wants to be made.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

I faced this issue with the current story I am writing which is set in London. I decided to go full monty (with the exception of British Grammar). I had a British editor for the first chapter, but she went on holiday and apparently never returned.

If any of you Brits in this thread want beta-read my story for authenticity, send me a PM.

Here's the first two chapters I've posted:

The Rules of the Game Ch. 1

The Rules of the Game Ch. 2

---------------------------

A couple more:

Gutted = Devastated -- He was gutted.

Fancy = like, care for -- Fancy a drink? He fancies her

fuckin' send it; i'll take a gander.

 

[Dream_Operator]

fuckin' send it; i'll take a gander.

Link sent.