How precise are these translations? I would (in UK) use ‘trousers’ to refer to any two leg cloth things, but more specifically to something a bit more formal than jeans or jogging bottoms. I would use ‘fanny’ (and for that matter most of the other slang) to refer to the general area, and ‘vagina’ to mean the tube inside, as it were. Are these distinctions only in my mind? Does ‘pants’ in the US refer to all trousers equally?
OK…jeans are jeans, never are they trousers. Jogging trousers, on the other hand, do exist, but are uncommon.
Fanny is something of a playground term, we adults have a whole range of better and more descriptive words 
…and vagina can refer to, ummmm, either the city or the metropolitan area 
, depending on context.
Fanny:
Fanny - noun - A ladies front bottom.
Fanny - verb - to bumble around ineffectually - ie “fanny about”
Fanny - god knows - Similar to “pants”. eg, “Have you seen the Saatchi Modern Art collection at County Hall featuring Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst?” “yes, don’t waste your time, it’s a load of old fanny”
It is also a Girl’s name - Fanny Craddock was a famous TV cook, and once made doughnuts and her fellow presenter (her husband) said “I hope all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s”.
I managed to find one or two relevant hits (enough to convince myself that I didn’t just imagine the word, anyway), including this one (!unpleasant language warning!)
A knacker’s yard is a place where old horses are slaughtered.
My dictionary defines a knacker as " a person who buys and slaughters useless horses , selling the meat and hide.
Knackered ( slang ) exhausted , worn out
The phrase popular with my Son’s generation (10 yo) for poor kids is “Primes” as in all their clothes come from Primark.
I can’t recall where, but I once saw a definition of knackered that read
exhausted, worn out * after sexual activity*
Google ‘knacker tinker’ and you’ll see the explanations for its Irish derogatory usage - both were common occupations of travellers.
Fair enough 
Yeah, well, teenage brits ought to be** a lot** more careful about using chippy in polite company. 
It amuses me especially to see that as a pet or messageboard screenname. Yikes!
Personally, I like the UK use of the word “dead”. It’s used the same way as “wicked” is around here, so it’s very easy to translate mentally.
But, where else are you supposed to buy your fish and chips from?
And who else is going to put up your shelves?
Dublin anyway not 100% about the rest of the country.
Knackered=tired. Grand to use and lots of people do. Refers to the knackers yard where horses etc. were killed and turned to glue etc.
As far as I can see the term then crossed over to be an offensive term for traveler. eg. Those knackers are parked by the road again. For knackers think niggers for strength. However anger and discrimination against travelers is very much accepted by a large section of society :o
In Dublin it also is used just to refer to a scumbag. eg. look at that knacker over there. The person isn’t a traveler but can still be called a knacker. This is obviously just an extension of the traveler thing. Like being “gypped”
Does anyone know what “chunnering” means? I came across it this week in one of Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, and I’d never seen it before. From the context, I figured it means something along the lines of “muttering,” but since this thread came up, I thought I’d ask.
Do you buy fish hooks from a hooker? If not, I’m sure there’s another name you could come up with in this case too
You’re right. It’s a dropped-T version of ‘chuntering’.
Pants are any “bottoms” longer than shorts. And most Americans refer to the entire area “down there” as the “vagina”, while the more pendantic remind them that the vagina is just the tube.
As for me, I sometimes wonder how authentic the American actors in This is Spinal Tap sound to a British ear. (Said actors being: Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer.) They fooled me anyway, first time I saw the movie, but then again I’m not British.
(By “fooled me” I don’t mean that I thought Spinal Tap was a real band. I just mean that I could have sworn those actors were English, before I saw them later in other works. (And apologies for not putting an umlaut on the ‘n’, but my keyboard input tool doesn’t seem to allow it.))
Gwyneth Paltrow is alleged to speak like a native. Do the natives agree?
Hoskins is certainly a bad example. I saw both those films and, while he’s a likeable guy and played the roles just fine, they should have just let him be English. Would have been much less distracting.
The Monty Python troupe — excluding Terry Gilliam of course — are completely hopeless at it.
Michael Caine, also not so good. Might be because he’s from Bob Hoskins’s neighborhood, and the cockney just can’t be shaken.
Generally though, most British actors either make pretty authentic Americans (Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Tracy Ullman), or maybe make the occasional slip-up (Tim Roth, Sam Neil, Nigel Hawthorne). Nothing that provokes “gawd 'elp us” ridicule though, at least not from me.
Can I just add that I know plenty of people who have been fooled by Gwyneth Paltrow (in Sliding Doors)? Even seeing it while ‘knowledgeable’, she was hard to fault as an annoying home-counties public-school idiot
There have been plenty of threads about this in the past. I’m not griping, just saying that if you’re interested in this subject there’s plenty of Doper opinion for you to peruse.
The Spinal Tap guys are generally considered to have done a very good job indeed. It helps that British rock stars of the 1960s and 70s tended to pick up a slightly transatlantic twang, but they fooled plenty of Brits too.
Gwyneth Paltrow is really good, at southern British accents at least (I haven’t heard her attempt at a Birmingham accent yet). She’s got the glottal stops and the vowel sounds that you don’t hear in American English, everything. Perhaps sometimes she overdoes it and sounds almost hyper-British - her accent in Shakespeare in Love sounded stilted to me, but in Sliding Doors she was spot-on. I wouldn’t have known that she wasn’t British.
Ah, the luminous Ms Paltrow can indeed do the Brit quite well (e.g. in “Sliding Doors”). But she could be speaking Swahili for all I care.
And, yep, the geezers in “Spinal Tap” were indeed consistently believable. Of course, there’s always Ms Streep. So on reflection I’m probably blinded by the atrociousness of Dick Van Dyke. And Anthony La Paglia as Daphne’s “Mancunian” (tee hee) brother in “Frasier” - but he’s from Adelaide.
Nigel Hawthorne was, by the way, actually South African…