I mentioned a few posts back that upon first arriving to England, nothing really seems dissimilar from the United States. I also mentioned that many people thought living in England might not be much of a cultural experience, because the English and Americans seem similar. We share a language, a history somewhat, and our close relations over the past several decades has spawned a great degree of cultural exchange.
In a lot of regards, this judgment might be right. Of course, it might be just as correct if I were living in France or Italy. Really, how different are people, anyways? We eat 3 meals a day (typically), shower (I hope), read books, drive cars, get married and have children. It wasn’t until last night when someone was pointing at how truly dissimilar the cultures are that it really stuck me how true that is.When you get past the basest basics, and dismiss all those things that we do share, you realize how much we don’t.
This point became clear when I was out at the pub last night. Mainly, the topic of conversation centred on language. The fellow I was speaking with taught Physics for a year in a school in podunk Virginia. He compared the experience to going to Twin Earth. Looks the same, but hey, it really ain’t. The US is a smorgasbord of different cultures, accents, religious beliefs, and more. If asked, it’s really impossible to give a generic Amerian accent or favorite meal, because there are just too many to choose from. The thing that really got him, though, is how the same words and phrases can mean different things in each country. For example, to ‘knock someone up’ in England means to call on them, (i.e. to stop by), but in the US…well, we all know what it means there. To say you’re pissed in the States means that you’re angry, to say it here means you’re drunk. Needless to say, it causes quite a bit of confusion. And don’t get me started on the fact that they say ‘zed’ to mean the letter ‘z’, I still don’t get that one!
Then, of course, there are all the different ways of describing the same thing. They call the elevator the lift, their ground floor is floor 0, not floor 1. They have car parks, not parking garages. I’ve been searching for 2 weeks to find corn starch and baking soda, only to find that here it’s called corn flour and bicarbonate soda (huh?). They call drinks tipples, pronounce the city Leicester like Lester (whereas I think it should be pronounced Lie-Chester). And they say ‘al-you-min-yum’ instead of ‘aloominum’ (aluminum). Oh, and folks, it's pronounced YorkSHER, not Yorkshire as it's spelled (I won't make that mistake again!).
Really, folks, the list could go on. For the most part, it’s really fun exploring these differences (until the English get all haughty and pull that ‘this is our language and we speak it correctly’ crap, at which point I have to remind them to stop being bitter about losing the colonies, as that was ages ago; we’re just trying to set ourselves apart, that’s all). But really, even though they look like us and behave like us (and in many ways are much more civil), the longer I’m here the more it feels like I’m living in a corner of the Twilight Zone.
P.S.
I forgot a few. The English call cookies, biscuits, and what we would call biscuits, scones. Figured that one out after I tried to follow a recipe from here to make biscuits, and realized that the recipe did not mean what I considered biscuits. O.o
Also, they call costume parties fancy-dress parties, which is confusing to me because I think fancy-dress implies formal.
