"SEPARATED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE..." Idioms of English Speaking Countries

- Churchill
Who u callin an idiom, moron!!
Same in Oz. Queensland tends to be more British in its language as we have had less migration impact in the last 30 years. But we used to call a school bag a port and peanut butter was peanut paste. I say used to because the south are taking over and they are increasingly USA-ised. A rubber here is an eraser. A pregnancy prophylactic is a condom. A shrimp is a prawn here. Cook out is a Bar be que here, like in the south of the US.

Ill start with the word "toff". Its a mildly deragatory term in UK that aims to be a "put down" of folks with affectations of "Upper class leanings" especially , it appears that the "Toffee" has no chance to achieve upper class status.

In the US , we have several terms that describe the concept of "phoney airs", words like "Mainline Lockjaw" . However, it s as if, the very reference (to an upper class) has no real meaning to AMerican .ENglish

. WE have several slang words for condom that seem to be regional.
We distinguish prawns from shrimp , (to us prawns are the larger "not quite langustini sized" shrimps)
Spendi often overuses the word "posh" . I dont see that in much US communication. ALl we know is that its a term for "port out , starboard home" accomodations on an old liner.
Todays equivalent would be "First class, upper lounge, forward window"

Prawns and shrimp are not the same creature. It seems that in southeast Asia, a large shrimp is called a prawn.

However, the prawns i saw in Ireland looked like a cross between a crayfish and a lobster--they didn't look "shrimp-like" at all.



Here's a Dublin Bay prawn hanging out on the bottom of the Irish Sea. I couldn't find a good image of a Galway Bay prawn, but the ones i saw in fish markets had the almost transparent carapace one associates with crayfish. Either type, they ran six to twelve inches in length. Both the Dublin Bay prawn and the Galway Bay prawn are nephrops norvegicus. Shrimp are a part of the "sub-order" caridea.

In many parts of the United States, crayfish are called crawdaddies. Bar-b-que is the term commonly used throughout the United States, not just the South.

When an Australian is pissed, that Australian is drunk. (As in "pissed as a newt".)
When a US-ian is pissed, they're annoyed/angry. (have I got that right?)
However, when an Australian is annoyed/angry, they are pissed off.

Some things are obvious. In the United States, fag means a gay boy. In much of the rest of the English speaking world, it means a cigarette. I particularly find Canada interesting, because they are a mongrel cross of the Americanisms and "Briticisms." It's not just language, either. Some clown cut me off in traffic in Windsor once, just after i had crossed from the U.S., and was trying desperately to get out of the traffic and onto the expressway. First he flashed the "V" sign at me (I don't know, maybe he thought i had not right to be in the lane he wished to be in)--which i happen to understand. Then, apparently, he saw the U.S. license plate, because he changed that the the middle finger--"the bird" in common American usage.

There are odd pronunciations in Canadia, too. They say "shed-yule" rather than the American "sked-jewel." (That's how i spotted Peter Jennings for a Canadian more than 40 years ago when he was a newbie at NBC News.) But they say controversy as the Americans do, rather than controversy as the Brits do.

Americans say pissed or pissed-off.

This US-ian crap is annoying bullshit. Americans call themselves Americans, and the Brits call us Americans, too. What Americans call the War of 1812, the Brits call the American War. During the Second World War, our allies consistently referred to the American army and navy--they didn't come up with some tortured crap like US-ian. It's very silly stuff.

Well pardon me!
The problems with "Americans" is that it could any number of different people on both nth & south American continents.
What word (if any) word describes USA citizens exclusively?
Tell me & I'll use it in future.

Also, the term "bar-b-cue" is the low heat, slow , over-a-fire, type of cooking that imparts a special smoky taste and an otherwise unattainable tenderness to the meat.
When we do it on a "Cahrcoal grill" or "hibachi" we are "Grilling", not bar b cuing.

I (((((drooool)))) love bar b cued pork ribs.

"Spanner" is a tool that, in Canada and UK, is what Im used to calling a "wrench"


I always am amused at the several interpretations of "pissed". Id never use the word do describe a state of being other than very angry.
"Taking a piss" in the US also means "relieving oneself"

The other Americans call us Norte Americanos--but that isn't precise, either. Canadians live in North America, but they would resent being called Americans. At the same time, Mexico, Guatamala, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama are all a part of North America. So perhaps you could just accept the fact that the terms are imprecise, and acknowledge that the majority of people in the world, when they say Americans, are referring to citizens of the United States.

Or, you could continue that US-ian nonsense. And don't get your back up, it's not something which upsets me, it's just silly.

Many little annoyances with CAnadian English includes the implied article in front of many objects of a sentence.
Like
"Afetr the deadly crash involving several autos on the 2, the survivors were taken TO HOSPITAL"

or
"I went to University in Halifax"

Then there's "taking the piss":

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=taking%20the%20piss

i grew up on a steady diet of british tv shows (thank you CBC, TVO & PBS), so i tend to use a mix of north american and british idioms, i'll say something is posh, or call someone a git

growing up a couch or sofa was a chesterfield, it was pop not soda, (or they were called by there actual names, coke, pepsi, etc), running shoes and sneakers, not tennis shoes

The Canadians say spanner or wrench, as the spirit moves them. There's a lot of terms which they have doubles for, in that manner.

By the way, hibachis were originally used by the Japanese to heat a room, not to cook food--they used it the way Europeans would use a brazier to heat a room. It was Europeans who first used them to cook on, and then the Japanese took up the habit, too.

Mocking someone in the rest of the English-speaking world is taking the piss. By the way, i've found that Americans have no problem understanding you when you say "piss-off," i've been using it all my life.

Many people in the Midwest of the United States refer to a sofa as a davenport. I don't know, but i suspect that at one time a lot of sofas were manufactured in Davenport, Iowa. Just a guess.

Well, Setanta, it's a commonly-used silly A2K term. Much like "Ozzians", which is another silly, very commonly-used A2K term to describe Australians. Which doesn't upset me in the least.
I'll try and use a more precise term for US citizens in future.

and then there's the act of actually taking a piss, friends i know so taking a slash, my scottish grandmother said she had to "drain the potatoes"

Davenport is the name of a series of sofas manufactured by the now-defunct A.H. Davenport Company. Due to the popularity of the furniture at the time, the name "Davenport" has become a genericized trademark like "Kleenex" or "Band-Aid." It is often used as a synonym for "sofa", especially in the

Midwestern United States and in northern New York state. Specifically, it is used in the Adirondack Region and the Tug Hill Plateau, especially amongst those born there before World War II. The so-called Davenports of the northern New York region are often locally made sofa versions of the locally manufactured convertible Adirondack Chair.

Among the younger generations, the word has come to mean a more formal sofa. In the Tughill and Adirondack regions in New York, a Davenport may refer especially to a couch which, like a modern futon lounge, converts on pivoting hinges from a sofa to a bed.
In other areas of North America, the word Davenport is used for a Futon-style sofa with storage under the seat area.

A similar word, Daveno, also refers to a sofa or couch. The term was more widely used in the 50s and 60s, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

There are also couches known by genericized trademarked names, such as a davenport or Chesterfield (named for the Earl of Chesterfield).

The term chesterfield is a North American term equivalent to couch or sofa. The use of the term 'chesterfield' has been found to be widespread among older Canadians, but is quickly vanishing from Canadian English according to one survey done in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario in 1992. In the United Kingdom it refers to a particular style of sofa featuring a low rolled back and deep buttoning.