A Shared Language – or Perhaps Not!

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When I was a child an American girl came to live nearby fingor a year or two while her father was working in England. She told me that her favourite sandwiches were made with peanut butter and jelly, I was mystified, I couldn’t understand how you could possibly put jelly in a sandwich. I recall going home and asking my grandmother about it, she didn’t know either; it was years later that I found out that the girl meant jam. When she used the word jelly I thought of the wobbly stuff that you eat with ice cream at children’s birthday parties!

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I will never forget my shock when I saw a description of a Mickey Mouse bean bag toy wearing red suspenders, Surely Mickey Mouse was not a cross dresser! An American friend reassured me that in USA they use the word suspenders to describe what we call braces, the elastic attachments that hold trousers up. In England suspenders are worn by women to hold up stockings.

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My children watched a lot of American television series when they were kids, one of their favourites was Sabrina the Teenage Witch. One day I almost died of shock when I became aware that Sabrina was singing a song entitled shake your fanny; that word would not be mentioned even on most adult shows in UK. I believe in USA it refers to that part of your rear end that you sit on, in England it refers to a more private area of a woman.

In English when we use the term pants we mean underwear, a purse is the container that a woman keeps money in and it is kept inside a handbag. I believe that in America a purse is a handbag, they also use the term pocket book, I think that may mean a small handbag. I often come across the term dumpster, but I have never have understood what a dumpster is, perhaps it is what we call a skip in UK or perhaps it is just a wheelie bin.

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What we call a courgette in England is a zucchini in USA and I believe the round yellow root vegetable that we call a swede has a completely different name in USA too. What we call a biscuit in England would be a cookie in USA, chips would be fries America, and what they call chips we call crisps.

Since we can’t agree on the meaning of words, it is hardly surprising that we disagree about spelling and grammar. Americans do strange things with verbs, in English we would say sneaked but in USA it would be snuck, dived in UK becomes dove across the Atlantic and the most annoying of all is the horrible term gotten which has started to creep into British English instead of got. When it comes to spelling American English is less likely to have double letters in e.g. traveled or travelled. The British English our as in colour or humour becomes or in American English, words such as centre and theatre that end in re in UK have an er ending in USA and as marlenerami26 pointed out in her article the other day Americans use the ize ending instead of the British ise.

It is interesting that our shared language has developed differently, and in some cases such as that horrible word gotten, it is American English that has remained more faithful to old English.