Language
George Bernard Shaw once famously quipped that Britain and America were two countries separated by the same language and a cursory look into our newspapers or into the streets of any major town will soon leave you wondering if we talk English at all!
Of course there are the obvious differences, like lift for elevator or trousers for pants or tap for fawcet or high street for main street, but you are unlikely to use these words in normal conversation.
More difficult will be our pronunciations which were immortalised in the old song ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’. You are more likely to encounter phrases like, ‘ta, mate’ or ‘I’m going to the loo’,‘do you fancy a cuppa?’ or ‘pukka grub’. Otherwise we talk perfect English, although Americanisms are creeping in: nowadays calling flats 'apartments' makes them sound smarter to English ears.
London’s cockney rhyming slang with its ‘apples and pears’ (stairs), ‘frog and toad’ (road), ‘whistle and flute’ (suit: there is even a clothes chain called ‘Whistles’) designed to keep outsiders guessing has now been replaced with a mixture of black and Asian idioms (based partially on American street talk) amongst ‘the yoot’ where things are now ‘well good’ or ‘well bad, innit man’.
Elsewhere in Liverpool, Yorkshire, Newcastle or Birmingham, north in Glasgow or Edinburgh, west in the Welsh valleys or across the water in Northern Ireland, people have their own accents and dialects which are often difficult for southerners to understand . Try putting ‘nowt’, ‘nowse’, ‘ginnel’ or ‘the crack’ in a sentence!
Colloquial differences reflect our Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Viking origins. Then there those words that seem to emerge from nowhere and suddenly appear in the newspapers, such as ‘chavs’ for the white working-class who wear designer labels, who used to be called ‘oiks’ or ‘mingas’ for those who are physiologically challenged and so it goes.
Enjoy relearning the ‘Queen’s English’.