British vs. American vocab

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Oh! One cool thing I forgot to mention...I've been watching Brit-coms and Doctor Who on PBS for so long, that some people I randomly meet think that I'm from England...because they think I talk with a Brit accent! I don't even notice it, but I think it's kinda neat that I can trick people like that. I guess all those shows' dialect rubbed off on me, heh.

A similar thing happened to me in reverse. I'm English and when I was a student at university I had an American girlfriend - she was in England on a student exchange scheme. I ended up with a slight American accent which others made fun of.

they have feeds off the BBC web site now, so I can listen. They still have some quirks; like having the 'voice over' for people speaking Caribbean English (voice overs are usually what they use for radio situations when someone is speaking another language...

The one time I got to go to England, I didn't worry with accents, but just used my own...

Same here. I ran into some people from England and they asked me if everyone in New England has a British accent. I had to explain no, and I had never even been there (like you, I absorbed brit-coms and dr who).

BBC america is one of my top channels I watch. The only one in my favourites too.

I recently bought the new Racounteurs album. There is a song on it called 'Top Yourself'. Now, in the UK, 'top yourself' means 'kill yourself'. 'Top' can be used to mean murder, but it's not used very often to mean killing other people. I found it very strange to listen to the song, because in the US, the meaning of 'top yourself' seems to be sexual, guessing from the song lyrics. Now that's odd - from suicide to sex!

As people are talking about racism on here, people in the UK find it very odd that people in the US talk about "African Americans". It confuses some people if the person they are referring to isn't from Africa. In the UK we just say Black people. Is this offensive in the US? We say 'Afro-Carribean' in formal situations, where you would call white people 'Caucasian'.
Also, when Americans say 'Asians', they mean from SE Asia eg. Japan, China; but when we say 'Asian' in the UK, we usually mean from South Asia, as there are lots of people from India and Bangladesh in the UK.

Remember, our history on the topic is a bit different: we had a slave trade that only ended in a civil war. Race riots. Why do you think Obama being elected was such a big deal here?

"America and England are two countries separated by a common language”
- someone

In Canada, "top yourself" would seem to mean that one is filling a drink for oneself.

It can be, yeah. You really never know whose going to get pissed off so "African American" is the least offensive term.



Its weird .. like one time in school a mexican girl was talking to another mexican girl about some kids that she saw outside and she said "They were white! Like white white!!" and then she turned to me and said "Oh.. no offense." I replied "I didn't know it was an insult."

We think Obama being president is a pretty big deal over here as well.
I don't think the civil war and race riots fully expains why you call them 'African Americans'. It offers some explanation, as the slaves were African.

mitharatowen - Personally, I don't like it when people call me Caucasian. It's such a weird term, in my opinion. I mean the equivilants for other races are 'Afro-Caribbean' and 'Asian' and stuff, which makes sense as it's where they come from (Afro-Caribbean = descended from people from Africa or the Caribbean), but Caucasian? Since when are we all from Caucasia? Who even says Caucasia, or knows where it is?
Why was the girl so suprised to see white kids? Or by 'white white' did she mean they were unusually pale?

Xelebes - I find this language difference really weird, I suppose because it refers to something so sinister over here.

BadMachine - Google said it was said by George Bernard Shaw. I'm adding that to my book of quotable things.

The term African American is fairly recent (about 30 years ago) and was began by the African American community itself. Perhaps to some extent this has to do with the idea of trying to ground themselves in the traditions of Africa which seems to have become quite popular maybe a few decades before that, although the term can be seen as simply an analog to other ethnic identifiers used commonly in the United States (e.g., Irish American, German American, Italian American, &c). Wikipedia has a brief and completely unsourced discussion of the term.


Again, with Wikipedia as my guide, it seems that this term originated in the 1800s and seems to have originated with the racial classification of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who wrote

The fact that we still use a term originating with that kind of reason boggles the imagination.

Well she was talking about how she and they got in a little fight, I think. So I assume she was just describing them in that they were very .. non gangster? Stereotypically white?

That's the meaning I took anyway.

The term 'African American' for any black person is inaccurate though. Some black people are from the Caribbean, for example.

Yeah, I agree, Greyhound. I think we're just not supposed to describe anyone in ways that indicates that they are different.

Desribing someone as 'red' or 'brown' or 'yellow' is viewed as offensive as well. It can be offensive to say someone's nationality (eg Mexican) as well. I personally don't see anything wrong with such terms because they are simply descriptive. However, there has been much history of opression and racism so I can see how such terms could easily become an insult when employed by a bigot.

I have had friends ask me what it's like to be white. When I expressed confusion they said to me that they are raised to believe that white people are superior so as a result they feel inferior so that might account for the hyper-sensitivity.

*EDIT* Btw I didn't mean the term 'mexican' above to be an example of a type of person who takes offense, I meant it as an example of what I meant when I said 'say someone's nationality' because I thought it sounded a bit obscure. Hope that makes sense. Don't mean to offend anyone

Last edited by mitharatowen on 04 Feb 2009, 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.