The Great British English vs US English Playoff

I haven’t read every pages, so forgive me if we’ve done this one:

UK: Colleague
US: Coworker

Win for the UK here. A colleague sounds vastly more professional and successful than a coworker, who’s clearly stacking shelves.

In a similar vein

UK: Curriculum Vitae
US: Resumé

UK win, because Latin must always trump French, non?

By that reasoning, UK wins. My car wants to go someplace nice to spend time with its friends!

… if the longest note is a semishort, how long is a reallong one? And damn but now I want to hug whomever called the two biggest notes “white” and “black” in Spanish (blanca, negra, corchea, semicorchea, fusa, semifusa).

Ocean City, Maryland - not NJ.

I always thought the US version of naff was either useless or sh*tty.

Long Island NY Route 24 also known as Sunrise Highway. Businesses on it typically use Sunrise Hwy as an address.

Also on Long Island we have limited access roads where commercial vehicles are prohibited, called parkways. Not sure if that’s what freeways are. Our “expressways” are effectively interstates, complete with commercial vehicles.

Not so. In the US a shutout is a victory where the losing side is held scoreless. A scoreless draw would be a 0-0 tie, only once possible in hockey, but no longer due to overtime rule changes.

Not really, naff means more, sort of, unfashionable or uncool. I think ‘lame’ might work?

Yes, I know. It was just a lame attempt at a joke based on th… never mind.

UK: Are you mad?
US: Are you crazy?

I prefer the UK version because it sounds more contemptuous and refers to an aberrant state of mind. “Crazy” is more like “excited” or “out of control,” and indicates a state of action, not mind.

UK: Knickers
US: Panties

UK version sounds naughty. US version sounds stalkerish. “I pulled off her knickers” sounds less rapey than “I pulled off her panties.”

UK: Stuffing birds
US: F*cking women

Alfred Hitchcock used this double meaning in Psycho, when Norman Bates was talking about his love for taxidermy. It depends on the context, proper or dirty, so I call this a tie.

UK: The tube
US: The subway

When I was in London, I asked directions to the subway, and wound up going under a bridge to a dead end. Subway wins for that reason.

Though, the US version, as seen here, has the advantage of being fucked with, to wit, “cow-orker”.

In fact, I have been seeing an increase in the American usage “CV”, so it has become almost a draw – the US might have a slight advantage in having two terms in common usage, one of which they mugged UK English for.

can I give a mention for the Australian “daggy”?

Ha, well, in the UK, subway means something different. Like fanny. So it doesn’t work for an underground railway.

Anyhow, can we even allow the Tube? It’s slang for a very specific underground railway (just the London one - proper name ‘London Underground’). Doesn’t apply to others. I’d go with the Continentals and favour Metro - sounds cool and urban.

In the US academic circles I was in, CV was used all the time. So I saw an incredible number of CVs and rarely had any reason to look at a resumé.

So when I asked for directions to the subway, why didn’t they point to my butt/bum?

Ha, no, I was making an analogy. Both subway and fanny are words that my Italian teacher would call false friends - words you think you know the meaning of because they sounds familiar, but actually mean something else. A subway in UK English is an underpass - a walkway that goes underneath a road. It’s not an underground railway.

Well, here in Perú we use “Primer Piso” for the ground floor. The word “Planta Baja” exists, but it sounds odd and it is also a full synonym of “Primer Piso”.

Fun fact: In Calcutta if you’re speaking English, the “first floor” is as in the U.K. But if you’re speaking Bengali, এক তলা (literally, “level one”) is as in the U.S.

In NZ English I’d suggest that dag or daggy means something more like quirky and amusing, with a generally positive tone. Naff on the other hand is (mildly) negative.

UK: treacle
US: molasses

Point to the US, definitely. Treacle is a word with a long and fairly bizarre history, that has been applied to several disparate things, none of which have to do with boiled-down sugarcane juice. Lewis Carroll had some fun with the word’s weird history in the Mad Tea-Party. While molasses very simply means exactly what it is. The Indian English name for the stuff is “liquid jaggery.” While that’s reasonably descriptive, molasses is still clearly the best word for it.