My boyfriend makes me speak UK English!

"It really is difficult to credit that people living in the infinitely different Britain of the 21st century could ever begin to imagine what it was like to have been around at that time in our history considering the social, economic and material conditions".

I think we may be about to find out, for all the troubles in the 1930s they didn't have a near complete collapse of the banking system, but that's matter for another forum.

"Anyway, each and every Yank stepping setting foot on British soil was issued with a booklet entitled: "Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942"

I remember reading in one of Bill Bryson's books, a quote taken from the Daily Mail in about 1946 where they listed Americanisms which British people may have trouble with. Two of the examples were 'dirt track' and 'seafood'.

What a good idea....learn Cockney rhyming slang.....start with rolling your mince pies at him as you come down the dancing bears wearing a pair of his barack obamas for some weird reason and if he happens to be on the old dog and bone and holding an alistair darling in the other hand at the same time just go into the kitchen and make him a nice cup of rosie lee as you listen to some cool music to which you can tap your plates of meat in rhythm and if he then comes into the kitchen and gives you a funny butcher's hook and doesn't adam and eve what he sees you can always give him a bit of a kick in his albert halls and if he retaliates in any way you can report him as a result of which he would lose his job teaching (British) English to the Czechs and end up on the adrian mole. which would leave you no option but to seek out that nice Czech bloke I mentioned earlier who may well love your American accent to bits.

Seafood is in very coomon use here in the UK now....dirttrack certainly isn't.

Bill Bryson had great fun getting acquainted with British terminology and customs, when he first landed here way back in 1973....like the Romans over 2k years ago, on the Kent coast.....not to mention our sense of humour camouflaged by irony and apparent sarcasm. Nowadays he is a master of it all himself and latest reports indicate that he is now fluent in Norfolkspeak and swede bashes with the best of them. He's also pretty conversant with pure Yorkiespeak too.....so he should be..he lived in the Yorkshire dales for yonks before going back "over there" for a while with his trouble and strife and two sproglets before coming back "over here" again and settling down in Norfolk...or "Nahrf*k" as he and all the other local yokels call it.

The Brits of 1942 hadn't a bloody clue what the Yanks were talking about when they heard "streetcars" (all cars drive on streets for heaven's sake!) or "railroad station" - well, no idea at all until they guessed; a "freight car" meant nothing at all, "automobiles" sounded not only weird but also slighty posh; Brits then never realised that cars had hoods and ran on gas; they used spanners while the Yanks used wrenches; guys in Britain had braces to hold up their trousers while the Yanks used suspenders to hold up their pants as in Britain only women wore pants under their skirts and suspenders to hold up their stockings and as rationing became more severe in wartime Britain the Brits wondered what the hell the Yanks were on about when they asked why they were standing in line outside a store when all they were doing was waiting in a queue to buy spuds and caulies at the veggie shop to go towards their Woolton pie and mash for their tea that evening which baffled the Yanks big time.

Just a few of the many linguistic difficulties encountered at the time by two nationalities divided by a common Language and a mighty big ocean.

"The Brits of 1942 hadn't a bloody clue what the Yanks were talking about when they heard "streetcars" (all cars drive on streets for heaven's sake!) or "railroad station" - well, no idea at all until they guessed; a "freight car" meant nothing at all, "automobiles" sounded not only weird but also slighty posh".

Cool. A bit off Topic, Damian, but I used to come on this forum regularly about 3 or 4 years ago. There was a guy called Adam from Bolton, does he ever come on anymore?

I was told by a British person that some British actually understand Americans better than they do some of their own countrymen (Mitbürger)! Is this true? The teachers in Germany learnt us that there is a very big difference between american and british English.

@Daniel,

Isn't the same true in Switzerland? Don't many Swiss find Standard German as spoken by someone from Germany easier to understand than some Swiss German dialects?

@WK I am not Swiss, but I definitely have problems understanding some of them. I am quite sure that a German speaking Swiss would understand a German better than they would and Italian speaking Swiss.

Rick:

Adam was a wee bit of a thorn in the flesh of many people in here.....most of his postings were ranting ramblings of either an extremist right wing political nature or extracts from the joint manifestos of the British National Party and the UK Independence Party. I don't think he ever posted anything that complied with the rightful purpose of this Forum, but it was fun to extract the urine out of him.

As for some Brits understanding many Americans more than they do some of their fellow countrymen then that may well be true - it all depends on their location in the UK and the location of the "difficult" accents.

I can imagine a person from sedate Chipping Sodbury would find it easier to understand a reasonably educated speaker of General American English than some old bloke from Cambuslang who spends most of his leisure time in the Fanny By Gaslight in Kilmarnock or a regular at the Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn in Stalybridge.

I was told by a British person that some British actually understand Americans better than they do some of their own countrymen (Mitbürger)! Is this true? The teachers in Germany learnt us that there is a very big difference between american and british English.

The differences between standard British English And General American aren't that great. Someone from Chicago speaking GA would probably find it much easier to talk to me (Manchester, England) than a hillbilly from West Virginia.

Apart from a few different nouns (most of which it would seem are transport related e.g. truck, windshield, hood, trunk, gasoline, street car, dirt track, single track etc) and some spellings, the two are remarkably similar. I subscribe to a lot of American magazines, as a test I went through an issue picking out words that were distinctly American, I couldn't find any - the only word that stood out was drywall where Uk magazines may refer to it more frequently as plasterboard. However, drywall is a used term in the UK and vice versa.

On the subject of 'pants', the word is well used in Manchester in casual conversation to mean trousers. This doesn't seem to be true in other parts of the UK.

As I discussed on here a few years ago, many American spellings were variant British spellings and most appear in 17th Century dictionaries. 'center', 'theater', 'rigor', 'plow' and many others appear in Cockerams dictionary (1648 edition), the spelling 'analyze' appears in Johnson's dictionary (1755).

Some other spellings and grammar appear in parts of the UK today, for example the spelling 'mom' is popular in the west midlands and appears in some newspapers in that region, the word 'gotten' generally extinct in most of the UK can occasionally be heard in the East Midlands.

I have realised as I've got (or gotten) older that most so called expert are imbeciles who often hold views that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Rick Johnson,

That was probably one of the most intelligent posts I have read in this forum.

Wow, it's amazing how few true American innovations there actually are.

I don't understand the rhyming slang at all. Why is it so hard for people to say "stairs," but they can say "apples and pears" with no problem? I know it's code, but why would you need to encode "stairs" or anything trivial like that?

I've wondered that myself. Not about your particular example, but it seems to happen quite often in many languages. People seem to get tonguetied with some words but just adding a Sybille or two causes them problems. Does anyone know why this is?

Of course you don't understand the Cockney rhyming slang...you're not meant to unless you were born within hearing range of the great bells of St Mary le Bow, figuratively speaking. True Cockneys ranged over a slightly wider area of London than that....Whitechapel, Stepney, Hackney, Clerkenwell, Poplar, Bethnal Green etc..all Cockney land.

Rhyming slang evolved from the speech of the sailors and mariners and dockers of the area along the north banks of the river (the Thames of course)....from the 15th century onwards right up to the present day...using well known phrases or word combinations to refer to various things, with the words rhyming with the subject of the expression...as in "apples and pears" (stairs); "dog and bone" (phone); "mince pies" (eyes); "plates of meat" (feet); "Barnet Fair" (hair) and "my old china plate" (my old mate, pal, friend) - but this last one sort of became simply became condensed to "my old china" - to mean the same thing.

That's how it all came about......typical Londoner word play. Maybe it isn't used quite as much as it used to be in ages past - I rarely heard people use a great deal of rhyming slang when I've been working in London as I never really mixed with "true Cockneys as such - as they exist today, but even so if some bloke in the office yelled out to me: "Damian - you're wanted on the old dog and bone!" or "Fancy a cup of the old rosie, Damian?" I'd know exacly what he meant, and I'm a Scotsman sufficiently versed in it all, and in any case, if you said the same things in an office in Exeter or Cardiff (<--in Wales btw) or Wolverhampton or York or Motherwell (<--in Scotland btw) everyone would know precisely what they meant, too.

http://www.phespirit.info/cockney/english_to_slang.htm

What I meant was that I don't understand the point of rhyming slang. I understand that I won't understand the actual slang, but I don't understand the point of it either. I am guessing that it has about as much point as Pig Latin did in its day.

I wonder if the OP is still with her boyfriend......well, whatever....perhaps she recognises/recognised traits in him which coincided with those indicated by the German guy in the YT clip below. He spent a year in England...mostly in Bath and partly in Birmingham - so he summed up the English quite well - more or less....but you can never really generalise about people can you? Basically his perceptions are fair ones even though, as a Scot, I'm not sure sure we really share every single characteristic with the English...we do differ in *some* ways but there you go! Perhaps we too (or shall we say most of us in Scotland) do tend to apologise when you collide with someone in a crowded place even though the other person was responsible for barging into you in the first place, and, yes, people here in Edinburgh, too, are known to thank the driver of the bus as they alight from it....I never do though..it may drive the drivers a wee bit doited in the rush hour or by the end of their shifts.

He's dead right about the going out on winter evenings in sub zero temperatures and dressed like you would on a beach in Mallorca at +30C! The Brits are immune to frostbite. ;-)

It's also true when he says that the first thing the English do on a day when lightning blows the roof of the house at the same time as the gas heating system explodes at the precise moment an articulated lorry skids off the road and crashes through the wall of the lounge just as a family member is told over the phone that the man of the house will be two hours late coming home from work because two successive trains have been cancelled due to frozen points and a derailment...is to put the kettle on to make a pot of tea and dig into some delicious almond tarts from Marks and Spencer's Food Hall.

He says he's German - I believe him even though he doesn't sound as if he is...in fact his accent is a wee bit odd....like it has English undertones to it mixed in with fairly strong American undercurrent but at the same time he's neither English nor American....definitely "foreign" though....from the British perspective.

He pronounces "Edinburgh" much like many Americans do though but without checking back didn't he say he's spent some time in America too? I will have to check it out again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6EY6ihHjqU&feature=related