The slow corruption
This is what my fellow ex-pat Americans accuse me of whenever I use words such as "loo" and "trainers". It is the influence of listening to non-American English in regular doses from the BF. Not only in choice of words, he has managed to replace beloved NPR with BBC4 radio. Today I caught myself singing along to the credits music with one of the shows we like on Sundays.
Although I have to say some of those throwing the accusations are themselves picking up habits from their partners. It is an interesting evolution that the group of ladies I hang with are now all quite coupled. Some couples have moved here from their home country, but a lot of us have met other foreigners here. For one, I have lots of incriminating photos of a certain American friend dating an Italian where there is a lot of suspicious hand gesturing going on.
6 comments:
No not hand gesturing! Don't let her start driving a car!
I think you're picking up a lot more British vocab than I am, probably because the proportion of British to American English you hear is much higher. I've only adopted a few - trousers and facecloths. Oh, and we have periodic fry ups.
hmmm I thought "loo" predated the bf. I remember you were visiting and asked to go to the loo and I was like "huh?" lol.
Funny though because I have definitely picked up my share of vocabulary from Paul. Not as cool of course ;)
BBC4? What happened to BBC1-3??
We have the word "trainers" here. It means people who train. I think you're ok with that one.
I use the word loo, and I don't think my one year in Australia over 10 years ago really counts as an excuse. Sometimes the words are just really better!
Definitely said "X, Y, and Zed" once in class when I was in Oz and all the Americans were like "loser!" But I really liked the new slang! Could never bring myself to say "duvet" (pronounced with 't') instead of comforter, though. Is that a kiwi thing?
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