In the spirit of Britishness, you bloody knobheads for quoting my spelling mistake so I can't pretend I never made it
We only tend to use dummy in the UK. I think we're generally aware of pacifier and soother as alternatives.
Origins: Scandi '71? UK duvet = US filthy comforter, needs a wash somehow. UK three lifetime duvet covers = US 3000 covers held in the top shed/barn.
This one is unfathomable. A Canadian man talking in 1967. He sounds very English. Previously, different clips, GG sounded more America:
Is it. Thanks for sharing. I'll remember that. Which of those is ruder? Just messing, I am genuinely impressed by anyone who can speak American, English and Australian.
"Navi" might be confused with another Britishism (transplanted to Canada) for workers on canals (they were originally "navigation labourers") and later railroads. Now, it's identified with tall, blue aborigines of a distant planet, thanks to James Cameron.
And yesterday I came across a British publication that referred to a certain electronic component as a "valve" ... which we in the US (and maybe Canada, too) call a "vacuum tube" or just "tube." After solid state components like diodes and transistors took over, the electronics crowd started to call them "firebottles" in jest; it's an apt description. That got me thinking: any other differences in electronics terms? The fact that electronics was a twentieth-century innovation, the industry was too closely tied together on both sides of the Atlantic for vocabularies to develop separately, as they did with automobiles and trains. My copy of the New Hacker's Dictionary relates some differences between "Commonwealth hackish" and "American hackish," mostly in humorous contexts.
The "navi" thing I saw in a manga translation, so it could be local slang. Thought of a few more (again, US/UK): Ground/floor (what do they call the floor?) The letter "Z"/Zed (also applied, I think, to "Zero" and "zombie"). Line/Queue (used as a verb and a noun - e.g., "Queue up" and "get in the queue") Not sure if this is relevant, but I'll put it here anyway: Americans refer to themselves as being Americans, but they're from "the US" or "the United States" - never "America" (that's what everyone else calls it). Americans abroad generally call it "the States" or "the US" ("I'm going back to the States next year."); the term "stateside" is usually used by military and government workers ("I"m going stateside for my next leave.").
And not everybody knows that while Europeans don't like people from the US calling themselves "Americans" on the grounds that that title could apply to anybody living in the Western Hemisphere, it was the Europeans themselves, particularly the British, that used the term to describe British subjects in the New World. And you're right about "the States" or "stateside." I grew up in the bosom of the US military in Germany, and I almost never heard "America" used by American citizens, except when they were talking to Germans.
That's not true. Perhaps Helmut the nerd raised this point on a technicality once upon a time - in your memories? Americans are American, Bolivians are South American. Canadians are North American/and loyal subjects mostly.
If they used the term to describe all British subjects in the New World, wouldn't they have been describing people who don't match the modern meaning of "American"? Like, Canadians, etc.?
That's Navvy (and they were generally irish labourers imported specially because they were cheap rather than locals) Incidentally in Britain they are railways , not railroads. Although we do use the verb to be railroaded as in to be forced into action you'd rather not take
No, this was personal experience, from a number of my British friends, and a few German and French friends. Perhaps "don't like" is a bit strong ... it was rather that they thought the term "American" was presumptuous, but accepted that usage as a fact of life. Good point. Before the War of Independence, there was no distinction, of course; we were all "British Americans." After that event, it's my impression that the newly independent people continued to be called "Americans" while the area that stayed loyal to the Crown became "Canadians." But I could be wrong about that. (In fact, I'm not sure when Canadians became Canadians. Was it a term used first for the French settlements that were later conquered by the British, and later became applied to non-US America?) Thanks for correcting me. I first heard the term from Gordon Lightfoot, who sang of the "navvies, who work upon the railway." Interestingly, the song is not the "Canadian Railway Trilogy" but the "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," which points out the kind of hybrid English to be found in Canada, where you buy tires for your car not at a "tire center" or "tyre centre" but a "tire centre." And I'd wager that to be "railroaded" is a usage imported from the US.
Where I am in Canada we generally say manual/stick shift vehicles have a standard transmission for some reason.
In the US, that used to be the case once. Now, "automatic" transmissions are the "standard" ones in the sense that the overwhelming majority of cars have them here. I think it's different in Europe, though. I usually hear "manual" or "stick" to describe the non-automatic setups.
