American, British, & Australian Expressions/Differences

Americans drive automobiles ,,, brits drive motor cars. then there is gasoline vs petroleum. americans walk along sidewalks, brits walk along pavements


try these sites -------- ignore the 404 on the first link

http://www.effingpot.com/

http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/errors/404.html

A few that I note....Americans use got and gotten a lot more...one was enjoined never to use got if at all possible in one's youth here.


"Smack upside the head"....I had never heard that until I heard Craven use it.


Ditto with "bully pulpit".


You guys add "of" in places where we wouldn't...but right now I cannot think of an example.


Math instead of maths.


Fanny has an interesting variant here.......it can mean vagina, or vulva....makes fanny pack very amusing to lots of us...

Plus you have those annoying accents. Everyboy sounds like Benny Hill or Paul Hogan.


In SW US , when somebody sez that "youre about half smart"--Thats high praise

you guys talk about "sport", we say "sports", and we only use "mate" if we're playing chess.

In the US we say, she is in the hospital. I have heard the British say, "in hospital", without the "the". Sounds very strange.

"Smack upside the head" is a regionalism. You wouldn't hear a NYer say it.

I'm sure that's true of many expressions in all three countries!

Yes, local terminology is still very evident in the UK. Even over short distances different words are used for the same thing. At the same time according to Bill Bryson in his book Mother Tongue, there are many words still in use in the States from when the original settlers arrived that have long since vanished in the UK.
www.BBCAmerica.com has a good insight into the language differences

We have a Britisher in the apartments. The other day, he said something we could not understand, about his kitchen range. The surface element, or burner, he called something strange. Wish I could recall the word he used.

Edgar, did he call it the -- "Hot Plate" ?

When I hear someone saying "in the hospital" I would wait that the name of it is mentioned ...

The use - here - without article is the same in German, French, Dutch ...

bookmarking with interest.

The word for the burners/electric elements on which pans are heated is known in the UK as a "hob". Was that the word he used?

KP

It could have been the "ring", KP.


Dlowan reminded me of my old English Teacher, Mr Burns.

"There is NO such word as "got" in the English language", was one of his favourite outbursts.

"I've got a dog" = "I have a dog"....etc etc.

When I saw the recent thread title "What's the worst present you've ever gotten?"....I felt like jumping in and saying "RECEIVED!!....THE WORD IS RECEIVED!!". Then I realised that it is an everyday word over in the USA, and decided to keep my nose out. I'm now quite used to most of these differences, but now and again, a word or phrase will cause me to scratch my head.

Some Americans are funny, with silly accents.
And some are silly, with funny accents.

Then there's the Aussies.....

Fortnight = Two weeks.

Quarter = Fourth.

Find a countryman in rural England, and tell him the population of the United States is nearly one third of a billion, and that the corn grows twelve feet high.


He'll call you a liar . . .

swimming costume-Brit
bathing suit-American

flannel-Brit
wash cloth(wash rag)-American

I occasionally read The Age to catch up with Australian Rules Football news. Sports terminology definitely needs to be translated:

Australian: ladder
American: standings
(the Brits would call it a "table")

Australian: fixture
American: schedule

Australian: pitch
American: field

Australian: guernsey
American: jersey

That last one has me puzzled. How did it happen that two Channel Islands lent their names to the same article of sports apparel in two different countries?

Perhaps the item of apparel was first seen by English-speakers in those channel islands, and both terms were used at one time, but have now been selectively discarded. It is worth noting that the channel islands have at various times been occupied by the French and the Germans--the inhabitants are technically English-speakers, but whether or not that were literally true depended upon the era in which one would have made a survey. I don't suggest that they were ever German-speakers, though, although a knowledge of German might have been useful in the 1940s.