I talk to people from the UK pretty regularly, I watch a lot of BBC programming, I read a lot of books by authors from the UK, but sometimes they will suddenly use a word I've never heard in my life, and I'm beginning to think they are pranking us, and every other person from the UK is in on the joke, and just validates whatever the other person says!
@RickiTarr imagine us, people with English being third or more language, taught outdated British in school, seeing and interacting mostly with ‘international’(i.e., American) English daily, watching US and UK folks arguing about correct word usage. Sometimes I want a bucket of popcorn. Sometimes I want to cry.
@olena LOL I imagine, one of my friends who grew up speaking Spanish told me that it's easy to tell non-native speakers of most languages, because they don't know all the slang, and a good amount of most languages are slang
@RickiTarr@olena My mum married an Italian chef. She went to night school to learn Italian. When they went to Enrico's home town, San Remo, nobody understood her as they didn't speak "Italian", but "dialect,". She did learn that soon enough though.
@RickiTarr@olena There is a story of a Spanish speaker TV announcer moving to another Spanish speaking country using not quite the right slang and getting into... considerable trouble.
@RickiTarr@olena Our French teacher did try to teach us some slang, but of course by the time we got to France on our exchange visits the slang he'd learned twenty (or more!) years earlier was somewhat out or date.
@RickiTarr@olena My German prof was fond of saying that German was a language of idioms and compound words that make no sense. He made no mention of slang.
When I retired from ZF, a manager at Koblenz wanted me to move there. I told him that my German was schoolbook and barroom. He said, I probably would only need to use it in town. At the facility, everyone spoke far better English than I spoke German.
Slang phrases from other countries don't make any sense and sound weird, while slang phrases from my country don't make any sense but don't sound weird.
@RickiTarr it’s worse than that. The UK is not one country, our vocabulary in Scotland differs to that in England as does that in NI and Wales. People in England often look confused when a person from Scotland speaks to them - not just the accent, but our vocabulary
@RickiTarr I once had to explain to an American colleague what I meant by "squeaky bum time" when I used it without thinking on a Zoom call, because they felt I was being very inappropriate with that turn of phrase. 😂
@rothko@trechnex@RickiTarr IT'S THE TIME OF DAY WHEN BRITISH PEOPLE SOAP THEIR BUTTS AND THEN RUB THEIR BUTTS ON THINGS UNTIL THEY MAKE LOUD SQUEAKING NOISES. AND THEN THEY CHUCKLE AND GO BACK TO WHATEVER THEY WERE DOING.
@RickiTarr
🥥 Sometimes it's worse than feeling pranked, Ricki.
Eye often hie to The Guardian for news, and it's rarely a day goes by that they don't introduce me to an English word Eye've never heard before -- often of only a single syllable.
Since Eye've been around the Sun so many times, Eye'm left wondering just how advanced is my mental decline rather than just noting a cultural difference in our mother tongues due to geography.
Drives me bonkers.🥥
@RickiTarr there are loads of different dialects, and you can drive just 100km and there are new words. For instance the same bread roll has multiple different names depending where you are in the country (especially as you go further up North).
@vfrmedia@RickiTarr Oh and just wait until you encounter the regional battle in France over "pain au chocolat" vs "chocolatine". Say the wrong name at the local bakery and you're going to get some dirty looks
@vfrmedia@RickiTarr come to Bavaria. Words and dialects could change every 5km.
Example: a bucket. Can be "Eimer", "Ehmer"(same word, different pronunciation), or "Kübel".
@RickiTarr I took a while getting the word in the New York Times Spelling Bee yesterday. It was a word invented by Lewis Carrol- "galumph". So now you guys are pranking us back...
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