For non-American Dopers: Do American idioms on TV confuse you?

[An_Gadai]

@Koxinga

Do non-Americans (or non-Texans, for that matter) have trouble understanding Boomhauer on King of the Hill? I can understand 90%, FWIW, but I’ve been away from home for a while.

Not really. I remember when KOTH first came out my American cousin warned me I probably wouldn’t like it because it had too much “Texan humour”. At times I’ve thought it was one of the best shows on telly.

[Koxinga]

The only genuine puzzlement I ever saw among Brit acquaintances at an Americanism was when some US guy used the phrase "decadent chocolate.’

[Aeris]

@John_Mace

Try watching The Wire. I’m an American, and I had to put on closed captioning to make sure I was getting everything.

Seconded. What the heck are they saying?
I’m from one state over and I have no clue. That was one of the things that turned me off of that show.

Just throwing this out there so many of the other posters don’t feel bad about not being able to understand American accents…

I can’t either. At work I deal with lots of people from all over the country and the ones I have the most trouble with are from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. What the heck are they saying? Ugh.

[Frostillicus]

@An_Gadai

There are plenty of American cultural references that are lost on me, even though I’m exposed to plenty of US telly. I find myself asking my GF a lot of questions about this or that facet of American culture. The Wire is the only US show where I’ve ever had to carefully pay attention to what characters have been saying, after a while though the lingo becomes second nature. I find myself even using some of the terms from the show. Reup etc.

WTF is a telly?

[EllisDee]

@Bosstone

He says “punch it back and forth steps to kind of boil it all down.” It’s not the full sentence, there’s a lot of rambling before that, so it looks like a mishmash of words here but theoretically makes sense.

I agree though, in that case it’s diction. He’s just bouncing from clause to clause and talking very quickly. I found it kind of hard to follow.

He says “bunch”, not “punch.” The full context is that he first lists a bunch of back-and-forth steps, then after listing several of them he cuts off in mid-ramble to summarize with “…a bunch of back-and-forth steps…”