language barrier
 

i know we all use english here but there are some
words that are different
a fag; is a cigarette
faggot; is a large meat ball
a rubber; is for eraseing pencil lines
these are the ones i know are there any others:confused:

SUSPENDERS are for holding a mans trousers up,:cool:
GARTERBELTS (or me:p ) are for holding up ladies silk stockings.:D

one of the funniest things I have heard at work was when our new manager explained that one of the engineers was not present at the meeting because "he stepped outside to pinch a fag"... the poor guy bumming the cigarette off his co-workers was in for some really interesting looks upon arriving a few minutes later.

I believe it was G.B. Shaw who said, "England & America are two great countries divided by a common language."
Can't remember the name of the guy, British singer, on his 1st visit to NYC, got on an elevator, pulled out a cigarette, and asked the other person, "Mind if I light up a fag on the lift?"
...got a very strange look...

"Americans say 'erb', and we say 'herb', because there's a fucking H in it."

well the pronounciation of oregeno usually confuses me watching american shows

they pronounce it or-egg-eno and it is pronounced or-ee-garno here and how does alu min ium become al oo minum ?????

or a water tap a fawcett. A roundabout on a road a circle drive?
(If you want to drive in circles go to Canberra, Australias National Capital our Washington DC, it is so bloody round you get dizzy LOL)

one things that cracks the brits up when they come to australia is what is sometimes called durex in Australia (sticky tape) apparently durex is a common term for condom in Britain

the bathroom is where you go to have a shower or bath. damned if I'll have anyone taking a leak in my bathroom!

how 'bout "color" and "colour"

or what we call TV, you call the telly
Panties are knickers

favorite...favourite



While we are at what do you call your meals?

here we have.......

Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner or Supper

plus snacks :D:D

lilith
breakfast
dinner
tea
altou this is because iam not posh
and that i live in manchester

"KNICKERS"????
 

:confused: Oh the denigration of the colonists. :rolleyes:

We "Posh" brits eat

Breakfast
Lunch
Tea
Dinner

Tea being, as the song goes "a drink with jam and bread" or rather cucumber sandwiches with the craust cut off!!

I suppose really posh people, have Luncheon, not lunch, but who'd want to be THAT posh?!


As for panties/ knickers. I just say G-string, baby!!!

How about ass and arse????

Where did the "r" come from??

I think "arse" came about because some sites filter out "ass" Just like on some sites or chats I used "secks" for "sex" or "phuck" for "fuck" LOL List goes on and on and on.

meals for me are either:
breakfast/brunch
lunch
sex
dinner

Sex has been missing from the menu for quite a while LOL.

A lot of commonly mistaken words could be "restroom", "water closet" and as stated "bathroom". To some, a restroom is somewhere like a lounge of sorts...a place to go rest. I have no clue why some calls the pisser a water closet though lol. I call it bathroom or toilet. A friend called it water closet in Germany and the lady gave him a weird look :) Was funny as hell LOL

Another is the word "pissed". Being american, this means angry to me. Say it in England and they think you mean drunk off yer ass. More England words... bisquit which is a cookie to us 'mericans. And I think their cookie is our bisquits lol. I have a british female friend, I swear, I think she makes up words as she goes roflmao!

If between breakfast and lunch you have "brunch" ...

Between lunch and supper do you have "lupper?" :D:D

yup LOL

Is it in England that the term "loo" is used for bathroom?

Yeppers, you got it :)

OMG....Now ya got me started!

Not only do I live in America...the land where the language is so screwed up that the Brits are confused and iffin you want to learn the language you have to be born somewhere else cause we (Americans) still don't understand all the slang............but.........I also reside in Pa. Dutch country..........bear with me here.....I am gonna try and explain!

In Pennsylvania Dutch country they make a statement such as......"Throw the cow over the fence.........some hay". I am assuming they want me to pick up the friggin cow and throw her over the fence on some hay...right?

OR..........

"Throw momma down the steps..........her purse"....Self explainitory, right?

Or..........

What does....."Yamma yea fadump" mean? I mean....I can barely hang on to the friggin cow and now you wanna dump it????? Dump her where??? What the hell is Yamma Yea???????

OK....If you can beat this in the language barrier category...I bow to you! And don't think this is the end of Pa. Dutch language......their questions are more like statements!!!!.....IE: Going to the store.= Are you going to the store? Coming with.= Are you coming with me?....I could go on and on .....as is the "Original Jersey Girl" in me.....but I yeild the floor to the next language problematic person!!!!!!

Mrs. Lix

love_2licku - i'm pretty sure it's a biscuit (as opposed to bisquit).

come to Australia, then you'll learn that some things we say mean the opposite to what it sounds like we're saying. hehe, we just like to confuse poor Americans.

Can i clarify the r in arse question?

It is nothing to do with what is permissible on certain sites. We have always spelt it like that. And that is because we pronounce it like that. Arse is a bottom - ass is a donkey!!!!!!

Biscuits are in deed what our Atlantic cousins call cookies, but i think what you lot call biscuits we call scones. However the word biscuits comes from the french meaning "cooked twice" - because apparently that's what you do with proper biscuits (never made anything other than cookies myself - you see we have those too!)

And i hate to get technical on you all, but as for making words up as we go along - i think you'll find that the Americans are the ones who do that!!! After all, it's called English, not American isn't it??!! Lol.

Vive la difference! That's what i say!:yellghst:

Oh I completely agree.....American ingenuity is alive and well. I think that by far, our language evolves more than any other. We basically speak different regional languages within our borders as well. example........ You - you all - ya'll - yous

The only twice baked cookie I make is biscotti, chocolate almond...So damn yummy!!!!

I am so glad we all are so different....we have so much to learn from eachother.....

oh and here a shag is an ugly carpet where in the UK it is down right yummy:D:D:p So basically we could shag on the shag;)

Australians having evolved from a british colony use a lot of the same expressions. A bum is an arse not an ass which is a donkey.

We have biscuits not cookies and call what north americans term candy, lollies or sweets. We call petroleum or gasolene, petrol not gas, we use the term gas for gaseous substances such as LPG (propane).

Its amazing how these differences have evolved. The term pissed in Australia means drunk not annoyed. If you are pissed off you are annoyed and if you have pissed off means you have left. How bloody confusing he he. American spelling has taken the letter u out of words like colour and honour.

The other thing that comes to mind is the last letter of the alphabet. English/Australian pronounciation is Zed. American is Zee. With kids seeing Sesame Street before going to school there is a bit of trouble getting the kids to conform to our pronounciation.

It is interesting and I agree - viva le differance !!!!

Can anybody of the americans give me advice how that works with million, billion, milliard and these other huge numbers? I always wonder where you have learned counting, aren´t your ancestors europeans?
European counting:
thousand million milliard billion billiard trillion trilliard.
Now you!

we use billiard. ask Minnesota Fats.

Stop That Rev!!!!!!!!....Steve is being serous, damn it!.....LOL!

Steve..............ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions.......and after that......Bill Gates!!!!!.......A money monger with a fortune more than a body has a right to! Oops.....another 10 seconds......Bill just made several million!

Mrs. Lix

Hehehe! ;)

Bill Gates is to money what Wayne Newton is to raw sex appeal-- they've both got a dangerous amount of it.

I always assumed that "arse" became "ass" from the Brit tendancy to soften the "r", which of course New Englanders still do...when the rest of America quit doing that, somehow the memory of hearing it pronounced "ahss" combined with seldom seeing it written led to confusing is with the term for a donkey...well, that's my idea, anyway, I can't prove it right, But you can't prove I'm wrong, either...

Mrs Lix, I know what you mean about the PA Dutch...used to know some guys from PA (German extaction) ...once one of them expressed surprise that down here we say, "push the door to," something he thought only the Dutch said...also had an ashtray w/ the words, "outen the smoke"...

LOL, GermanSteve, this was an invitation!
Would the Reverend not have taken it already, i couldn't have resisted to it,
melikes playing Billard with language, too! :)

(Serious now) British, Australian, NewZ folks, how is the proper wording for 10^6 (million),10^9, 10^12, 10^15, 10^18, 10^21, 10^24, etc.? I know American call 10^9 a billion, 10^12 and a trillion, but i have no idea how the British for example call it.

Length dimension units: 1 mil seems to a 1/1000 of an inch whereas 1 micron seems to be 1/1000 of a millimeter. Confusing. Well, don't ask engineer Bernhard about American style how to dimension components, tap pitch, gear pitch, whatever. Confusing.

In Germany it is meanwhile almost standard to have English skills, atleast basic level. Nevertheless the language barrier is high, a German person with good English skills often can judge from the choice of words and the weird, all too familiar looking grammar that the originator of those lines is "a bloody German". Mrs.Lix, to me the grammar of the examples from Dutch PA you posted looks very familiar, Dutch grammar and sentence contruction obvioulsy is very similar to German one.

Moreover, quite some terms exist completely ununderstable to native speakers.There are a few terms i hesitate to use as i have received blank stares from native speakers, using them. Do you know what a "handy" is? a mobile phone, a cell(ular) phone. And what is an "outing"? I am not sure what this term meaning in English; in German it is used as noun and as transitive verb and means that one person volunteers another person's slippery secrets, e.g. being homosexual or BDSM-oriented drug-addicted or being a snitch or whatever; part of the game is that either the pubilc or the "outed" person or both have not agreed to the "outing" and are ...hmmh... not particularly happy with it. The "outing" person however does not care. Of course, the person can "out" him/herself, again, not caring whether the others want to hear it.

native speakers,
Q1: How is this sort of behaviour called in English?
Q2: what other English terms were not understandable to you (from Dutch, German, Finnish, Japanese people etc., list is incomplete)? as i would like to add them to my list.

I had always been told that an "ass" was some kind of second grade donkey,

and an "Arse" is something the toothless one speaks from with very bad breath,

but then again how do you get "Fanny " to relate to the same meaning as "Arse" ?

dice 45

with the 1 mil, it is 1/1000 of a metre not an inch, unless your talking fluid, which it is then 1/1000 of a litre

but your right with the 1 micron

LOL scotz.....The Pa. Dutch outen the lite............and if you have your picture taken and it is a good shot........they say "The photo got good".........omggggg..........Someone take me away from all of this!!!!

When a storm is coming over the mountains....."Well now...looks like we are in fer a dunner wedder".

I am told that this is a slang form of "High German" and the Schwenkfelders and Mennonites have bastardized it so that the dialect differs as you get further and further north or west. Which means to me that the Pa. Dutch can't even understand each other depending on where they are from! ROFLMAO! And imagine the poor Amish. They must go nuts trying to communicate with the Pa. Dutch!

Yamma Yea Faddump.........I am still working on that one! LOL!!

Mrs. Lix

Bilbo,
actually in the US 1 mil = .001 inches

we also use millimeter for 1/1000 of a meter (notice that even the spelling of that unit of measure varies) as most other places... but in the States, when you say "one mil" you get "1/1000th of an inch".

"tis a fine barn, english, but tis no pool."

"d'oh-eth!"

We Pixieites meet here because of our common interests!
 

And some of our differences are very funny and interesting too.
My VERY limited understanding of my native and sole language is that it’s one of the few that arranges the verb and subjects in the order we do. I have to defer this topic to one of our wizard (black magic:confused: ) linguists like SugarFreeCandy for any reliable information.

I can share my limited insight with GermanSteve & Dice45 regarding the “names” of numbers. My grasp of the past is that it is not an American / European difference, but a German AND Great Britain / French AND American usage of the “names” of numeric magnitude. We all know and accept that language is a convention and illogical evolution of human verbal sounds. Fortunately mathematics isn’t:D .
Now we Americans should have some sort of award for STUPID CHOICES:o as we did decide to use the French verbal notation (instead of their METRIC SYSTEM of functional, quantifying measurements that the whole frigging planet uses, instead of the dysfunctional, cumbersome, senseless system that even the inventors have all but discarded!! (do I have a prejudice:mad:)).

As this forum does not lend itself to exponentual notation I want to thank Dice45 for his inventiveness. [and I will be happy to share the back-assward way we state thread pitches if you care to PM me]

So here’s what little I know:rolleyes: -
We seem to all be together on ones, tens, hundreds etc., up to millions, ten to the sixth power (10^6). After this, it becomes a “pick-a-name-out-your-ass-contest”. For G&GB it’s (10^9)=milliard, (10^12)=billion, (10^15)=billiard, (10^18)=trillion, (10^21)=trilliard. Now for us dumb-shit F&A it’s (10^9)=billion, (10^12)=trillion! That’s it:whiteghos! That’s all we officially have! We do use the arbitrary term “zillion” and “quadzillion” (?4?) to indicate a whole shit pot full, but it really has no known or agreed value. So there!

Now would one of our sweet Pixieites let me up under her skirt to that silky wet spot before I go nuts thinking about this stuff?:p

Re: We Pixieites meet here because of our common interests!
 

What's the problem with our system, PF? All it did was cost NASA a multi-million $ Mars lander, & embarrass US in front of the whole world...

Re: Re: We Pixieites meet here because of our common interests!
 

That doesn’t even count!
What we spend in calculations, conversions and errors E V E R Y D A Y could pay off the national debt in two years.:(



Ask me sometime about the WHOLE worlds “address” system and what it costs every hour of everyday:mad: !

(Irish, OldFart, will somebody take this soapbox away? …………… PLEASE!):rolleyes:

well since they seem to not want to use the SI units, I think it's NASA's own dumb fault for the wasted money and embarrassments

Legend, don't pound in the message.

Lixnlix69, think of the German "Donnerwetter".

As Bilbo said, a Fanny in the US is a bum, with us it's a Vagina.

Ass has it's derivation, I think, in the puritanic 1890's.

PF, you hired the box for a week, you're stuck with it.