Isn’t the phrase more often “hiring” a car or van rather than renting in the U.K.? We don’t (or at least my North American dialect doesn’t) use “hire” in that sense.
When I started spending a lot of time with people who grew up in Spanish-speaking households, I noticed a weird quirk: they’ll often use “barely” to mean “recently.”
So “I barely started reading that book” doesn’t mean you haven’t made much progress; it means you started reading it recently. “I barely got to work” means you haven’t been at work long, not that you had a lot of trouble getting there.
I’m convinced that this stems from the fact that “barely” and “recently” are both synonyms for “just,” but there isn’t a similar single word in Spanish (AFAIK) that means “just” in both senses.
I think it’s also exacerbated by the fact that when you’ve “barely” started a process you’ve often also “recently” started it. This is a translation issue that often doesn’t get corrected, in other words, because the misunderstood meaning often also makes sense in context (and may often be somewhat accurate – if I am talking about how I “barely” got to work, it’s not unusual for me to have gotten there “recently,” too)
I just read an Agatha Christie book (They Do It With Mirrors) in which she tries to write a character who speaks with a “Middle Western” American dialect. She gets it all wrong. Subtle examples include having him say “perhaps” instead of “maybe”, and inserting too many of those useless English intensifiers: quite, really, a bit. What he does say is often from completely the wrong decade. While the story was published and presumably set in 1952, the character uses a lot of 1920s gangster-era slang.
The one moment when I felt she really hit the nail on the head was when he described the door between the hallway at the kitchen: “it’s covered with a kind of felt.” Lots of English people and practically no American person would have called it “the baize door”.
Another few that I’ve noticed:
My British friends (at least the ones from the more middle class areas of London) tend to use the construction “I would have thought so” in places where in my English dialect, I would use a simple “I think so.” Now, I know there is a subtle difference between the two phrases, but I constantly hear it from these two particular individuals, where I almost never hear in it American English in casual. I don’t know if this is typical or just a particular regional or class dialect of theirs. Or perhaps just some idiosyncracy. I may have noticed this in other British friends, but there are two in particular that stick out to me.
There is also the Northern Wisconsin (and perhaps parts of Minnesota) use of “yet” to mean “still.” Like, “Are you eating yet?” not to mean “have you started eating,” but rather “are you still continuing to eat, or are you finished?” I noticed this with my mother-in-law, and I remember it tripping me up the first few times she used it that way, but now I find myself sometimes using it myself and can’t distinguish whether I’m using my normal dialect usage of “yet” or adopting hers without thinking about it.
I see the Pittsburghese “needs washing” type constructions have been mentioned. Lately, like in the past decade, I’ve noticed the phrase “Where [do] you stay at?” to be somewhat replacing the usual form of the question “Where do you live?” I’m not quite sure how common it is yet, but it’s used in the Chicago area, at least, among various social groups. I think it originates in African-American slang, but my experiences with it were as much with white and Latino people.
There’s also the distinction between “college” and “university,” which is not a big distinction in the US, but is elsewhere. Here in the US, the phrase “I go to college” can mean “I’m attending university” (and, most often, universities are colloquially just called “college.” I found out years ago on this board that the phrase “I go to university” is not a N.A. English phrase. I had thought it was, but it turned out to be the influence of UK English on my own English, as I had been living abroad for several years at that time.)
It’s “needs washed.” And it makes me feel all homesick. All we need are some multiple modals and I’ll feel right at home.
And I was dumbfounded the first time I encountered someone who was surprised by the “needs washed” construction. I had grown up thinking that was standard.
Sorry, I meant “need washed.” Not sure if I brain farted or it somehow autocorrected. “Needs washing” is standard. (Or at least sounds normal to my ears.)
Yes! Hire is what I was thinking! Thank you.
I have to say, I use it sometimes as a colorful dialect twist, but I have noticed a bit of an uptick in its general usage. Still pretty uncommon, but I wonder if it’s making inroads into general American English, or perhaps I’m just meeting more people from that dialect area.
Many years back a speaker at a conference related her embarrassment when introducing herself to a group of Englishwomen of similar profession. Her name was usually given as “Dotty”.
She just didn’t understand the strange looks she received when she said “Hello. I’m Dotty.”
She may as well have said nutty. :eek:
In my neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, it “needs warshed”.
At least it wasn’t “Randy.”
Or Fanny. 
I saw a TV series years ago about an American woman in the UK, and whenever she introduced herself as, “Hi, I’m Randy,” she was met by peals of laughter.
As someone from California, whenever I hear someone use the word “Californian” as an adjective, I immediately know they ain’t from around here. “Californian” is a noun. Nobody in California would ever refer to a “Californian wine”.
The number of syllables in aluminum/aluminium. It takes me a moment to figure it out, when I hear someone add the extra “I”.
Fag (homosexual in the US, cigarette elsewhere)
Pissed (mad in the US, drunk elsewhere)
Gray vs grey (the first is most common in the US. I’ve been told the second is more common outside the US)
And the ultimate test of if you are from Minnesota - Is the children’s game “Duck Duck Goose” or “Duck Duck Gray Duck”?
Not really a subtle difference, but I was a bit blindsided when a British friend of mine casually said he “could murder a fag.” Then I was relieved to find this one big difference in dialects.
Everyone here knows it’s “Californinian wine”.
And the verb form is, of course, Californication.
I’m not sure if this is universal in Britain, or just in some areas, but it seems ubiquitous, and every time I hear it my brain does that “record skip/scratch” sound: the word “crowd”.
In the US, a crowd is just one thing; there’s only one crowd, singular. So, in the US, you would say, “The crowd is going wild!”
In the UK, a crowd is a collection of people. The word is plural. So, in the UK, you would say, “The crowd are going wild!”
What’s the deal with UK driving under the influence?
In the US they are Drunk Driving, which makes sense.
Across the pond they say Drink Driving. WTF?
This happens a lot with collective nouns in UK usage, where the US typically takes the singular. Like you might hear “The team are doing well” whereas in the US, you’d typically hear, “The team is doing well.”