1y ago

Have you replaced any British words with their American versions?

For example, switching out the word 'boot' for 'trunk', or ditching the word 'rubbish' for 'garbage'.

This is something I've noticed my 6 year old does pretty regularly. We went through a stage where 'sweets' became 'candy', 'holiday' became 'vacation' and 'courgette' became 'zucchini'.

That last one didn't happen but if you're still reading you've got my respect, or as the Americans might say '...mad props'.

111 comments

I like "garbage" when insulting something, it just has a nice guttural sound.
- Yes, but British English has superior insults like cockwomble.
  
  "cockwomble" just sounds like you're trying too hard, like a yank LARPing as a brit they read about on the internet
  
  Honestly, bellend is a wonderful insult in my opinion. I used to watch a lot of sovietwomble and similar youtubers in the past so that and using cunt like a more colorful version of calling someone a dick were something i heard a lot and have a lot more behind them when said. That being said, I live in the US and would have to explain Bellend which would cause it to lose the impact. And cunt is far more negatively received here so you will likely be regarded as a mysoginist and/or get clocked here.
- Garbage and trash are excellent American words. Much better than "rubbish"
I'm hellbent on being a relic. Currently railing against the proliferation of "store". SHOP ffs. I look forward to everyone going storing.
- "Shop" seems to mean buy. "Shop affordable easter instore" = "buy cheap chocolate in our shop".
  
  Do your shopping at the shops.
I said "gen zed" the other day and everybody frowned and said "Don't you mean gen zee?". NO I FUCKING DON'T. Still fighting the good fight in pronouncing schedule with a soft sh but I think I'm in a small minority these days. I've given up trying to call it an aubergine emoji, we may as well accept it's an eggplant now 🍆
- English is my second language and I despise zee, it gets confused with cee. Zed is objectively superior
- You know, I don't think I've ever heard an American say "Gen Z" before, and it literally never occured to me that they were pronouncing it "Gen Zee". Obvious now you mention it, but I've just been assuming that every time I see it written down it's "Gen Zed" by default.
  
  My friends were the opposite, they accepted that Z is pronounced Zed, but they said that gen zee was different, because "it's like ZZ Top". I argued back that it's not like ZZ Top, it's just a letter assigned to a generation. They were so used to hearing it said by Americans on TikTok, they refused to even accept that a normal person would say gen zed. "It's just gen zee though! Nobody says gen zed!". I'm angry again thinking about it!
- Expat in the US. I met a guy called "Z" the other day - I didn't want to be a cunt and pronounce his name wrong, so I went along with it.
  I do pronounce Aaron correctly and not call them "Erin" though.
  
  Yeah it really isn't hard to double up on the a sound.
  Aaron
- Schedule, yes! We're very much in the minority on that one, but I'll keep on using it the right way, even if it doesn't seem to make sense when looking at other words like school.
- It's never occurred to me it could be pronounced "gen zee".
I make an effort to speak British English, and not let any American into my vocabulary. Not really sure what the point is, but I'm sure I had a reason at some point.
However, I do like saying "hood" instead of "bonnet", mainly because it's easier to say "under the hood" than "under the bonnet" when talking tech.
- Do you use hood for actual cars or is it strictly when you are talking about non-car things?
  
  Just for non-car stuff. I *would * use hood for everything, but the people I would talk to about cars would get pissy for using the wrong car words.
Become Canadian. We have poutine.
- Any nation who makes cheesy chips and gravy their national dish is a friend and ally in my book
- I'm already half way there being a big NHL fan.
I'm American but would really appreciate it if aubergine caught on here across the pond. I know it's French (and from prior languages) but I commend the UK for sticking with it. In contrast, eggplant sounds so crude and unappetizing. If you've Americanized this one, please stop.
Also, we should all bring back a few Old English terms.
- What I hate about "eggplant" is that none of the varieties that anybody actually eats look even remotely like an egg. It's a massive purple banana-shape. They also don't taste like eggs, smell like eggs, or get used like eggs.
  It'd be like calling cucumbers "cheesefruit" or something. It's just destined to baffle.
  
  It looks like eggs in an early stage of development, but aubergine is a way better word nonetheless
- Call it what you like, it's an F tier veggie
  
  No way man, it's a great vehicle for flavor. Soak the slices in a basil balsamic garlic marinade a for an hour then roast them in the oven, simple and delicious.
I use often use "movies" and "TV shows" instead of "films" and "telly series" and I am mildily disappointed with myself.
I feel I should use the Old English Fall instead of the French Autumn but it seems a step too far. Perhaps I could use Harvest.
- I seem to use movie when describing the blockbuster/B-movie end of the scale, and film when talking about a quality bit of cinema. But I also am more likely to call a US flick a movie and a Brit one a film.
  I like the sound of the word autumn, and particularly autumnal. I can see those reds and browns and feel the crisp air. Fall does give more opportunity for puns and easier rhymes, I guess.
American here, I tend to spell words the British way because they make more sense, and I've done it since I was a teenager, for some reason it pisses off my older brother lol.
Examples:
Grey
Defence
Offence
Theatre
Customisation
Analyse
Flavour
etc. etc.
- Cancelled has 2 Ls and I will die on this hill
  
  I’ve always spelt it with two Ls and just found after your comment that American English doesn’t 🤢
- Gray is the superior grey.
  
  Funny... in my head, "grey" refers to a light gray (e.g., dove gray) whereas "gray" is more like when it's overcast.
I've gone the opposite way - I've been replacing my American pronunciations with the British ones, like leverage starts with lee, like in lever, and that (software) patent starts with pat not pait.
I think it's in response to my younger friends and colleagues sounding, to my ears, increasing American - they say gotten, zee, and on accident (things that are often more consistent, but just not ~~cricket~~ British). I'm old enough to remember the sound of dial up, so I probably wasn't as exposed to US media growing up.
I'm old enough to mostly have a British vocabulary. And, although I did live in Yanklandia for a year I seem to have come out relatively unscathed.
My kids (who watch too much Youtube) use a lot of American words and pronunciations. It's an ongoing struggle to get my daughter to say tom-ah-to.
- Tomato, tom-ah-to. Potato, poh-ta-to.
- Just wait till she's having taters
I'm not even sure if I'm honest. NW England, my shits a mix of English, Cumbrian, Yorkshire, Scottish, Madeupish .. No doubt some American words in there that have snuck in like a bad smell.
I was gonna say, no self-respecting six-year-old wants to even consider zucchini.
- That's pure bullshit, my three boys all like them. 8, 5 & 2
  
  Teach me!
I quite like shop in the sense of workshop, and I also rather like y'all.
I also often refer to whisky as scotch, though I feel like that is as much about making myself understood.
- Y'all is great, but I can't use it without sounding like I'm taking the piss.
- Aren't scotch and whiskey two different things? In a rectangle/square sense
  
  Scotch is whisky from Scotland (shockingly).
  That's not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It's just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don't really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.
  The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using "bourbon" more than Americans because of the need to specify.
  Personally I'm not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it's a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they're indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.
  
  Whisky and whiskey are two different things.
  "Scotch" is American for whisky but not for whiskey.
How do you pronounce courgette?
Is it a hard g like get or a soft g like giraffe?
This is one British word I had no idea existed.
- It's the /ʒ/ sound like the s in measure, vision, or the J in the French Jack. So the word is /koːʒɛ́t/ It's from the French word courge.
  
  Well the word itself does look french when looking at it so just by that going with the french way of pronouncing it makes a lot of sense.
- Here you go: https://youtu.be/py11JV8mLh4
Biscuits for the win
switching out the word ‘boot’ for ‘trunk’
What's the context of trunk there? Tree trunk? Car trunk?
- Car trunk
- What's a tree boot?
  
  Makes as little sense to me as a car boot, but tree boot existing wouldn't surprise me given how little sense english makes anyway
"Are you in a rental?" That turns up so much that I'm struggling with the proper way. Do you rent? Are you a tenant? Do you have a landlord?
- "Do you rent?" is usually the way people say it in the US.
I’m American. I couldn’t come up with trunk so I called it a boot. Thanks to all those episodes of Top Gear I’m sure. Bonus is that my wife and I watch enough Dr. Who so that she knew what I was referring to.
- I've picked up "bloody" - as in "bloody hell" or "you're a bloody idiot."
  
  I love this one. It has a great cursing sort of feel, but nobody gets on your case about language.
I don't speak Bastardized English
- It's "bastardised"
  
  Oxford spelling is "bastardized", actually.
- English (modern)
I use loads of americanisms and their spelling for words like color, the way I see it most the world is using English so least we can do is meet them 0 001% of the way on cresting a global odious language
Please correct your child. Next thing you know he'll be defending the second ammendment and voting for trump
- Don't worry. If she's anything like her Father she'll be more interested in Eugene Debs than Donald Trump.
I’m in Australia now and it’s zucchini and eggplant here, though in general words are much more like British English. No idea what’s going on with the pronunciation of “cache” here though - I work in tech and it’s mental how they say that. Like, Brits and Yanks are in full agreement about that word.
- I'm Australian and it's always been zucchini and eggplant.
  I don't know what's wrong with the way we say cache though. How do you pronounce it?
  
  It's supposed to be pronounced as "cash" or "kaysh". Americans often pronounce it as cachet (ie. "ka-SHAY"), which is a different word with a different meaning. Needless homophone that introduces confusion.
  I'm guessing that's been picked up by Australia in recent years, but not when I still lived there.
Does your wee one watch a lot of American-voiced videos on YouTube or similar?
- She used to. We've put a stop to YouTube though because she turns into a little demon after watching it.
I'm all for Canola being the replacement for R@peseed but in just checking there does seem to be a difference between them (Canola is GM R@peseed)
https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-between-canola-and-rapeseed-206047
- You can say rapeseed on the internet, friend.
  
  I can also choose not to, never sure about filters.
- I went to school in a rather rural part of the country. One of my school friends was a tad concerned when he came across a folder named "Rape Photos" on his dad's computer.
  Thankfully it was just a record of their field crop
okay, using the words listed at the start of this wikipedia article, here's where i place myself:
analyze/center/defense/labour/organize/program
or, British 1, American 5, Canadian 4, Australian 2
it's a nice litmus test to see where you're at. i knew i used to skew NA in writing style, but i didn't think by that much

111 comments