Language Etiquette 101

Today, after I'd told him how much I missed him, how much I love him, how I can't wait to move countries for him and be his wife, Jeremy called me cute. CUTE! The cheek of it.

I'm guessing there's a wealth of Americans out there bemused at my outrage and wondering what 'cheek' is.

Well I'll tell you.

Cute is outrageous because over here it is what you call baby rabbits, kittens - everything diminutive and juvenile. It trivialises, belittles and essentially makes me feel like a child with dimples (got that Jeremy? Cute is out of the Love vocab). Basically, if anyone calls me cute when in my wedding dress they run the risk of getting punched in the face.

Cheek is what Jeremy had to call me cute. That's the best explanation I've got. Sorry.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to communicate a few more words / phrases that translate badly. Think of it as damage limitation so at the wedding all the guests don't start offending each other.


"What's up?" OK so we are fairly familiar with this customary greeting. Primarily because of the highly irritating Budweiser advert of the 90s where frogs imitated frat boys (just realised in some post-posting hyperlink searching that the frog one was a different irritating ad, and actually it was frat boys imitating frat boys). And yet when asked the question 'what's up?' most English people (note I'm not saying British here. We do not call ourselves British.) will give a look of bewilderment. It denotes something should be up. And before we compute that it's just Americans asking us how we are, we first think 'am I being asked if there's something wrong?' and then, when do we catch up and answer the inevitable "nothing (is up)", there's a sense of anti-climax, as if we should be able to have something be up and yet there is nothing of note. In England, instead, we say 'Alright?', which I'll accept is equally puzzling for Americans, but at least the end answer is 'yes thanks' and so ends on a polite affirmative.

"Sure" Now this one drives my mum (mUm) crazy. When asked 'would you like a cup of tea?' or 'can I get you a crumpet', or other such offers of food / assistance, Americans (Jeremy) often reply 'sure'. This is not acceptable. In fact, you're likely to cause serious and long lasting offence. Why? Because we British (I'm pretty sure the Welsh, Irish and Scottish are with me on this one) are a polite species and have had it drilled into us from an early age that when offered something, 'yes' is followed by 'thank you'. 'Sure' is a) bad grammar and b) rude.

"Biscuit" I feel the need to educate Americans and English alike on this one. Mainly because if English people were unfortunate enough to order Tea and Biscuits in the states, they'd be met with a nasty surprise. Biscuits in 'American', are basically bread-rolls. I find this staggering. Even the word 'biscuit' is onomatopoeically bound to be crunchy, and yet you Americans think of them as soft dough balls to be eaten with gravy. If you ever came face to face with a chocolate digestive you'd be ashamed of yourselves. Biscuits are actually essentially cookies, except for when they're not cookies, because we also have differing definitions of what constitutes a 'cookie'. I know I'm not explaining this particularly well. But basically you need to stop calling biscuits biscuits and start calling them lumps-of-bread. OK?

"Jumper" This is NOT, not matter what my future mother-in-law tells me, a dress worn by school-girls, it is a sweater - apart from when said sweater is made from the sort of fabric they make hoodies out of, then the sweater is a sweater. Got it? Good.

"College" / "School" Without going into the English school system at length, suffice to say that college and school are not synonymous with university. They are completely different stages in a person's education and if you ask an English person where they went to school, you'll get the same look of confusion as for 'what's up?' before they remember hearing it used differently on Friends once and catch up.

I hope this irons out some problems. These are the words that trouble me most of all - I'm not going near pronunciation, because, well, we're right, you're wrong and that's all there is to it.