You say jelly, we say jam.
You call it jello, we call it jelly. You say “Hang a left at the rotary” and we
say “Aaaargh”.
The Cochranes often
holiday on the east coast of the USA . Let me state here and
now we always have a fantastic time and are made to feel incredibly welcome
wherever we go. (Although note to those of you across the Atlantic – the UK is a big place, full of
people. If we say we’re from England , it isn’t likely that
we’ll know your friend in London or Manchester or Edinburgh . Just sayin’.)
The fun and games start
with the subtle differences in the language, which make everyday life and
adventure and spice up our holidays no end – if you live in Massachusetts and
ever see a family in your local supermarket, scratching their heads and
wondering whether what was in the package was what they actually wanted, that
could be us. You see, chips are chips, they’re not crisps. Likewise, chips are
chips, they’re not fries.
Shall I start that again?
What you call fries we call chips
and what you call chips we call crisps. What you call cookies we call biscuits
and what you call biscuits we call scones. Your muffins are not our
muffins and your cheese is what we’d call plastic (that’s not a linguistic
difference so much as one of taste).
Driving cars is fun. We have
bonnets and boots – you have hoods and trunks. Our cars don’t run on gas (we
use that for heating and cooking), they run on petrol. And we drive around
roundabouts, not rotaries. As for sports, football is football and always will
be. Not soccer. And hockey is played on grass, not ice. That’s ice hockey. And
toilets are toilets, not restrooms. Am I sounding too grouchy? Sorry, I’ll
behave myself.
In all seriousness, an
appreciation of the finer differences in language can avoid all sorts of
embarrassment, particularly if you travel east over the Atlantic and visit us. You see, if
you say someone’s pissed, over here that doesn’t mean they’re angry. It means
they’re drunk or might have wet themselves. And here, ‘period’ is more likely
to be used as a noun for a menstrual bleed rather than a full stop. Don’t even
think about the word ‘fanny’ – that’s not your backside, that’s…well just don’t
use that word in polite company.
Promises Made Under Fire
by Charlie Cochrane
Available from Carina Press
Lieutenant Tom Donald envies everything
about fellow officer Frank Foden--his confidence, his easy manner with the men
in the trenches, the affectionate letters from his wife. Frank shares these
letters happily, drawing Tom into a vicarious friendship with a woman he's
never met. Although the bonds of friendship forged under fire are strong, Tom
can't be so open with Frank--he's attracted to men and could never confess that
to anyone.
When Frank is killed in no-man's-land, he
leaves behind a mysterious request for Tom: to deliver a sealed letter to a man
named Palmer. Tom undertakes the commission while on leave--and discovers that
almost everything he thought he knew about Frank is a lie...
Excerpt:
First light. A distant sound
of something heavy being moved. A thin curtain of rain—the sort of misty,
drizzly rain that soaked us through to the skin. Prospect of something for
breakfast that might just pretend to be bacon and bread.
Good morning, France . An identical morning to yesterday and
bound to be the same tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow, world without end, amen.
I looked up and down the
trench. The small world I’d become bound in was now starting to rouse,
stretching and facing a grey dawn. The men were stirring, so I had to get out
my best stiff upper lip. If I showed how forlorn I felt, then what chance had I
of inspiring them?
“Morning, sir.” Bentham,
nominally my officer’s servant but in reality a cross between a nursemaid and a
housemaster, popped up, smiling. “Breakfast won’t be that long. You and
Lieutenant Foden need something solid in your stomachs on a day like this.”
“Aye.” I nodded, not trusting
myself to say anything else until I’d got my head on straight.
“Tea’s ready, though.” He
thrust a steaming mug into my hands. Add telepathist to the list of his
qualities. Maybe when I’d got some hot tea into me then the world might seem a
slightly better place. “Quiet, last night.”
“It was.” I was going to have
to enter into conversation whether I wanted to or not. “I don’t like it when
they’re quiet. Always feel that Jerry’s plotting something.”
“He’s probably plotting even
when he’s kicking up Bob’s a dying.”
“Bob’s a dying?”
“Dancing and frolicking, sir.
Not that I think Jerry has much time for fun.” Bentham nodded, turned on his
heels and went off, no doubt to make whatever we had in store for breakfast at
least vaguely appetising. I took a swig of tea.
“Is it that bad?” Foden’s
voice sounded over my shoulder.
“Do you mean the tea or the
day? You’ll find out soon enough about the first and maybe sooner than we want
about the second.”
“The perennial ray of
sunshine.” He laughed. Only Frank Foden could find something to laugh about on
mornings like these, when the damp towel of mist swaddled us.
“Try as I might, I can’t
quite summon up the enthusiasm to be a music-hall turn at this unearthly hour.”
I tried another mouthful of tea but even that didn’t seem to be hitting the
spot.
“If you’re going to be all
doom and gloom, can you hide the fact for a while? The colonel’s coming today.
He’ll want to see ‘everything jolly.’” The impersonation of Colonel Johnson’s
haughty, and slightly ridiculous, tones was uncanny. Trust Foden to hit the voice,
spot on, even though his normal, chirpy London accent was nothing like Johnson’s
cut-glass drawl.
“Oh, he’ll see it. So long as
he doesn’t arrive before I’ve had breakfast.”
Foden slapped my back.
“That’s the ticket. Don’t shatter the old man’s illusions.” He smiled, that
smile potentially the only bright spot in a cold grey day. In a cold grey life.
Frank kept me going, even on days when the casualty count or the cold or the
wet made nothing seem worth living for anymore.
“How the hell can you always
be so cheerful?”
“Because the alternative
isn’t worth thinking about. Why make things more miserable when there’s a joke
to crack?” They weren’t empty words—that was how he seemed to live, always
making the best of things. He wasn’t like a lot of the other officers, plums in
their mouths and no bloody use, really. The men loved him.
i thought i was pretty aware of US English from my reading and infrequent visits, but somehow I've never come across "rotary" for "roundabout" before. I thought they were called something to do with circle - circular, maybe? Could it be an East coast usage?
ReplyDeleteI thought a rotary was a type of club.... I'll just stay on the pavement/sidewalk, if I can find one.
Fun post, thanks!
Rotary is a sort of club, as well. It may well be an East Coast-ism - there must be as much dialectal difference as in the UK.
DeleteI have trouble with the things that just don't translate. There is no US word for a garage forecourt. Much confusion on both sides of the pond when I tried to use it.
ReplyDelete