50 Americanisms That Brits Apparently Hate

[buhee]

I fucking hate Americans calling petrol 'gas' it drives me fucking insane

Really? How many wars is your government involved in (that you know of)? How many of the textile plants/electronics factories that build the clothes you're wearing and the PC you're posting on use slave wages and have high suicide rates? How many of your friends can't get a job, or won't be going "to uni" because their parents aren't filthy rich?

The above are things that drive reasonable people "fucking insane." Not dialectical differences that offend you for purely arbitrary reasons.

And I know a few Brits. Y'all aren't as prim and proper as YOU would have us believe. "Petrol." We don't call petroleum "petrol" because we aren't fucking twats. Perhaps if you ever have to defend yourself in a fist fight you'll drop this illusion that you're a monacle-wearing intellectual.

I think you're being slightly out of order :S.
If someone says something drives them insane, then fine. Whats wrong with that? They are allowed to strongly dislike something, just because you believe their strong dislike should be directed at more hate worthy things, does not mean their dislike is not allowed to exist or that it is highly unreasonable of them to dislike it.

And why are you insulting the british over this? Who said anything about being prim and proper? And why say that the people who call petroleum petrol are twats (yes i read your later post that said you didn't call anyone a twat, you said people who don't call petroleum petrol aren't twats, but really thats the same thing ).
And what has any of this got to do with fist fights or monocles? You do realise that modern day british people don't wear monocles, and that very statement kind of made you seem a bit silly?

Not the mention, have you ever considered that they don't like calling petrol 'gas' because what we put in our cars is quite clearly a liquid?

Stop getting so worked up.

Hmm. Why not say the same thing to your hothead countryman who, like you, is apparently unaware of abbreviations and words with multiple meanings (and irony)? Oh my, I've gone and answered my own question! I'd hate to say something I didn't absolutely mean word for word; that would make me seem just a wee bit silly!

my 'hot headed country man' didn't feel the need to call people 'fucking twats' or insult a nationality. They simply said that they strongly dislike (aka 'fucking hate') people using the term 'gas' for petrol. You however, felt the need to reply to them with insults based on the people behind the terminology rather than the terminology itself. And i assure you I am aware of abbreviations and words with multiple meanings, the point of my post was not to discuss the word 'gas' and all its possible meanings; the point of my post was to point out that you are being unnecessarily not very nice. Admittedly you may have interpreted the original post as them hating the people who use the term (rather than hate towards the use of the the term, which is how i read it), but if that were the case you still shouldn't go around throwing insults back.

I have nothing against either word 'petrol' or 'gas', although i personally say neither. I say 'fuel'. But you won't catch me insulting you or your country for your choice of wording, I may perhaps voice my distaste about the choice of wording in question, but never about the person who uses said words. I can only hope that you remember to do that as well.

 

[buhee]

Some of those are pretty petty. And does anyone actually say "that'll learn you" un-ironically?

There are actually parts of Englands where saying learn instead of teach is actually the norm. I vaguely remember studying about it in my english language class a few years back. The logic behind it being that teachers teach, but unless the student learns it, it hasn't gone through. Or something like that.

As for the 'zed' 'zee' thing, pronunciation differs widely across the whole of england, let alone english speaking countries. Just take the northern england 'bah-th' and the southern 'bar-th' for example. Neither of them are wrong, they are just different. Oh the joys of accents and dialects.

I remember my english teacher used to loathe us students who said 'pron-ounce-iation' instead of 'pron-unce-iation'.

 

[Acting like a FOOL]

To the respective Brits, I have this to say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSNREtboX3s

 

[asam92]

Deplane?

I have never heard someone say deplane ever, anywhere.

Yep, never heard this one either.
The rest of them are just whiners, Seriously, they are just words, chill the fuck out.
Apart from "Touch Base" I really hate that too. Are you a baseball player? No? then Shut up.
Management at work all use it for some reason, can't we just 'talk' or 'discuss', do we have to "Touch Base"

 

[MegaManOfNumbers]

I'm Canadian, and I must say, the Brits AND Americans are incredibly weird; Which is exactly why we stole their language!

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

Dare I ask what's so wrong about a "train station"? It's a place where trains are stationed... for all of half a minute when it's not night time but hey!

 

[^=ash=^]

I'm really freaked out by a lot of responses here. Judging all British by such a short list of individuals. Seriously do you think all Muslims are terrorists? No? So why do you think all Brits are all the same as these petty twats? Except 50, he has a point, but I know not all Americans say "I could care less".

xxx

 

[minus_273c]

As a Brit maybe 5 or 6 of those (if that) 'Americanisms' actually bother me.

In several cases I actively deplore the 'Britsh' view expressed.

 

[Craazhy]

Pretty much all of these are things I was not aware other people even had the ability to notice. I barely realized they were things until now. Well, at least the English have that: extraordinary attention to detail.

 

[IronicBeet]

I've got a list of British-isms that I hate.

1. When the British nitpick about stupid shit like "Going forward" and "Shopping cart".

That's about all I've got so far.

 

[Kevin Maccaull]

Who the hell says "deplane"?

 

[Janusz Urbanski]

None of those actually bother me as such, but I'm all for using my country's language rather than co-opting america's... just my sense of cultural identity I guess.

But yeah, some of the responses in that list are a bit over the top

 

[Trippy Turtle]

Half the people quoted live in the US. Also some of there complaints are stupid; "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you?"
You don't say you got it $2.50 do you, "You got it free" sounds more like a bad way of saying you released something.

 

[pulse2]

I don't care about the list nor do I spend time thinking about words Americans use, that has no interest to me because I don't live in America, what annoys me though is when an American corrects my language, F U, don't correct me, its 'English' for a reason and for a small country, our language has spread out more places than I can fathom, countries from the East want to learn the language, so you have no right to tell me vapour is vapor or colour is color or vapourise is in fact vaporize, sorry, I didn't get As in English for spelling words the American way -_-

 

[YunikoYokai5]

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

No one knows what a fortnight actually is. I'm vaguely suspicious the British don't know either, it's just a general time for a "few days from now".

Fortnight = 14 days/ 2 weeks. I use it all the time, my dentist/orthodontist/doctor uses it, my friends use it, 90% of my uni class use it. Some people use a fortnight generally, others don't. (I also know people who say 'Just over a fortnight ago' ). Bi-Weekly (which is what I think some Americans use? ) sounds like 'Twice a week' to me.


Op/ My biggest American annoyance (I'm Scottish so you know) is the strange anomaly of missing 'u's in words. Colour is my most annoying one because every time I use colour in html, I need to remember to remove the u. Although my absolute hate is how they spell Sulphur. Who misspelled Sulphur to 'Sulfur'? (shudders) I hate it...

One more spelling hate: Lustre (British) -> Luster (American) ....As a geologist, I'm insulted XD

Also, no idea why some people have a problem with us saying Maths. We can use it for singular and plural, so we kill two birds with one stone XD

Ah well, languages change and develop. For better or worse? Who knows

 

[Nexus4]

MATHSSSSSSSSSS!

One of my friends calls it 'math' and we give him a lot of shit for it. Dammit man, this is Australia not the fucking USA.

 

[wilted_orchid]

Funny thing; while a lot of Brits and Australians and other English-speaking nations like to think that American has bastardised English and changed it to their own means, their actually the only ones who use the spellings and other such things from 300 years ago. Since the revolution the rest of the English speaking world slowly evolved it, while the Americans didn't.

So really, the Americans are just holding onto tradition.

Not entirely. When we see them spelling "eight" as "eyght" then maybe I could accept that hypothesis but until then, it seems like sheer laziness to abandon the letter 'u' in such a fashion.

To be honest, I was relatively uninterested in the whole thing until Chemistry A-level this year where the paper tried to convince me to start spelling 'sulphur' as 'sulfur'. I don't think I will, thanks.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

It's a joke.

Browsing the thread, so many Americans have said we're "Overreacting". These people need to understand that a staple of British humour is to over/under react. It's just how we are.

The list is hilarious, by the by - And I'm sure most sensible Brits/Americans will take it in jest.

On a more serious note, can we please stop arguing over who the language belongs to? It belongs to the long dead Anglo-Saxon/Norman aristocracy that ruled the native Briton Celts from the post-Roman to Tudor period.

Also, can you guys stop saying stuff about tea and crumpets? We don't see it as charming or quaint. The majority of English people fit the bill of 'Rough, working-class, cynical, drunk' similar to our Scottish, Welsh and Irish neighbours (No offense to you guys, you know we love you.)rather than 'Preppy, Upper-class chinless twit, crumpets.'

while there are some i've never heard, i realize i probably shouldn't go to the uk anytime soon.

also, whats the other pronunciation of z besides zee? 'cause i've only heard it one way,

'Zed'.

1) most people did take it as a joke, but they are just filling in their two cents on it anyways afterwards, and as always, sarcasm/jokes don't translate well over into text over the internet.

2) Tea and crumpets? that is part of the jokes, which is extremely hypocritical of you right there, considering what you JUST got done talking about.

3) please, go eat your tea and crumpets because clearly you forgot to this morning.

 

[Kenny Kondom]

http://youtu.be/om7O0MFkmpw

Win =]
And just so i dont get screwed for low content post, i will put this entirely pointless sentance at the end too!

 

[Alon Shechter]

"14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow"

MERLIN'S BEARD, this man is corrupted!