Please, please, please don't ever send us marmite. <BR><BR>This is an entertaining thread. You can't know Ameri-speak by watching movies. I definitely don't say "butt-ox" or "a awkward situation," but i do say "budder" and "boddle." <BR><BR>What cracks me up about British English is their penchant for saying stuff like "and for yourself" as opposed to "and for you" and the way English people say "England are." In the U.S. it's "England is." Would British people object if we just said we speak American? Let's face it. It's its own language.

"England are" and "and for yourself" are both unfortunately very bad grammar, the latter disappointingly common (in both senses of the word)<BR><BR>Dimwits, usually working in banks and call centres, assume they are being formal when they say yourself, myself etc. The reflexive suffix "-self" should only be used when the subject and object of the sentence agree.<BR><BR>"He's washing himself"<BR><BR>"I talk to myself"<BR><BR>"I will be writing to yourself" is about as stupid as saying "She was washing himself"<BR><BR>Sorry, it is the same language, there is more difference between varieties of English English than between standard English and US English. I like the expression "the English Languages" to express the diversity.<BR><BR>Mmmm....off to get some marmite toast.

I recently saw a book in a French bookshop that said it was "traduit de l'americain". They obviously think that it is a separate language.

Give me five examples of differences in grammar and I'll concede the point.

Can you US folk solve a puzzle for me - what exactly is a 'turnpike'? Thanks!

LOL - I've lived near turnpikes, driven on turnpikes, driven under turnpikes, and driven over turnpikes. I have not a clue what the name means. I just know turnpikes cost money when you exit unlike a toll road that charges you money along the way.

Why is it that you park on your driveway and drive on a parkway?<BR><BR>US

so from what I can gather, a turnpike is a toll area to pay before you get onto the road. Thanks (hope I got that right!)

A turnpike...at one time many roads were toll roads, maintained by farmers or other land owners. When the toll was paid, the owner "turned the pike"...the pole that blocked entry (or exit) and the traveler proceeded. (Or so I dreamed I read.)<BR>Bill

Thanks Bill

Puzzled:<BR>Actually NO---you generally pay when you get OFF because the cost is determined by how many miles you drove on the turnpike.

I have just had a meeting with an American graduate student who we are helping with his research. <BR><BR>He's from Idaho (wherever that is).<BR><BR>I wrote the word "buttocks" on a piece of paper and asked him to say it. He said butt-ox.<BR><BR>Quite what he's going to tell his professor about our meeting I don't know.<BR><BR>I might be expecting a call from the police soon. <BR><BR>But he definately said butt-ox.

David - I'd love your job mate! : )

David, that was mean...giving the guy a test without telling him why!!<BR><BR>And,as my old English teacher would say, "Write out 100 times <BR><BR>"One definitely spells "definitely" with an "i" unless one is a Scottish footballer"<BR><BR>DEFINATELY a game of two halves

I love the bit in the Robin Hood film with Kevin Costner where he says, "Led us raad to Naadding-haam".<BR>(We need some kind of phonemic transcription for this thread!)

Nothing will ever top the 'mockney-cockney/australian' accent as perfected by Dick Van Dyke will it? always good for a chuckle that one!!

I also loved the way Kevin is on a beach in Dover, and decides they can walk to Nottingham and be there by nightfall. I could barely walk into Dover town centre from there and be there by nightfall.

It was a scientific experiment and any scientist will tell you that in observing a phenomenon one may alter the observed state, ie the uncertainty principle.<BR><BR>In any case he was getting on my nerves and had been foisted on me by my boss.<BR><BR>I think me going "A HA!" and laughing didn't help his equilibrium.<BR><BR>Butt-ox; tee hee.

Kate - to further discuss the distance phenomenon, I can never understand why a guy who gets mauled by a werewolf on the Yorkshire Moors in 'American werewolf in london' ends up in a hospital in London! He would have been dead from his bites by the time he got there!

The best distance thingy in a movie was the von Trapp family appearing to just walk over the next mountain from Salzburg to freedom in Switzerland in the Sound of Music.<BR><BR>US