Spring ahead fall behind

Today we set our clocks back an hour and when discussing it with some Brits on Saturday night I recited the ’spring ahead fall behind’ rhyme to them as they were saying they could never remember which way the clocks went…I was met with blank stares as they dont call this season Fall here so falling behind didnt seem to make much sense.

Fall is something that leaves do off of trees or drunk people do to the tracks on the tube every so often (often enough that they have posters in the tube warning you of the dangers of falling on the tracks)   The season here is called Autumn which sounds more posh than fall – the more I think about it, fall is a bit of a weird word to use to describe a season. ‘Its a nice fall day’  – to those used to using the word autumn sound more like a pleasant day to hurt yourself versus a day to jump in a pile of leaves.

Above and beyond the use of Autumn for the season I have also heard the word autumnal (ah-tom-null) used more than I ever thought I would hear a word which means autumn like or has characteristics of autumn. This dish is made of autumnal vegetables  or the weather feels very autumnal.  When I needed something to explain fall characteristics I would just say fall-like ie ‘its a fall like day out there today’.  Which admittedly sounds like I am a teenager who over uses the word ‘like’ um like its cold and like fall-like outside.

Regardless, I successfully changed my clocks back and enjoyed a very autumnal day – although it was gorgeous and sunny here and warm enough to be out without a coat which felt more spring-like or springtumnal.

Numbers are like, haaard

So I mentioned the other day in one of my posts that the academic subject that involves numbers and the art of combing them to create other numbers here is referred to as Maths. In a sentence:  I am glad the VAT is included in prices here as I was never good at maths.  One of my wise friends here says it is because it is the short form for Mathematics which does indeed include an ’s’.  God knows why we dropped it and refer to it as Math but now I proudly add an ’s’ when talking to locals to make me sound smarter.

Anyhoo that reminded me of a few other ‘maths’ or at least number related terms I have learned here.

1) Trebled :  The hubby was telling me a story about how he was reading the Financial Times (the paper for people smart at maths) and he noticed a spelling error in the headline as it had said that profits trebled at a particular company  – he figured that they had meant tripled and we had a good chuckle at the error by the smart paper.  At which point a nice (eavesdropper) on the tube actually corrected us (yes, we are getting used to it) and said that trebled is actually a word and that it follows on naturally from the word double…ie doubled, trebled. I still think it sounds like someone is pronouncing tripled wrong.

2) Nought: A colleague was telling me how a particular industry had seen growth of naught point 5 percent.  At which point my American colleague called out, it had NOT percent increase doesnt’ that mean it didn’t have an increase.  Being a seasoned Brit I kept my mouth shut (for once, I know) and let it be explained to him that nought is equivalent to zero here and is often quoted in percentages below 1 .  Consequentially, it is also used in the game of tick tack toe which is actually named noughts and crosses as per today’s cartoon in the paper, see, I am not lying.

How do you draw with a pin?

Was at a comedy show the other day and the guy was talking about a drawing pin….wont even let you know what I thought he was talking about but it might have included a dual function pencil and pin which I thought was a great idea until I realised that if the pencil  bit got dull it probably wouldn’t hold much up…anyway I googled it and the internet saved me again.

Just to clarify, it means thumbtack, not 'Chiefly British'

Just when I thought I was getting a hang of the English vocabulary….

I am beginning to think that on job applications, when I say I am fluent in English that I should actually point out that it is Canadian English and put quotation marks around it so they don’t have their expectations up too high when they meet me.

Fluent in ‘Canadian English’.

What’s for pudding?

One of the ‘delicacies’ I often smuggle back to the UK with me after a is chocolate pudding (Jell-O brand, has to be Jell-O brand). The lost in translation moment came when I told a friend here that I made one of these puddings. The conversation went like this:

Me: I made pudding the other night
UK Friend: what did you make for pudding?
Me: for pudding?
UK Friend: Yes, what kind of pudding?
Me: Chocolate
UK Friend: Chocolate what?
Me: Pudding
UK Friend: hunh?

I finally remembered that someone had told me that pudding over here actually means ‘dessert’ (of course it does, why wouldn’t it?)

When you go to a restaurant there is often a ‘pudding’ section and the waiter will ask ‘can I get you something for pudding’ which sounds just ridiculous. Even better still,  I was watching a cooking show and they shortened it and said “…and for ‘pud’ we are making apple crumble”…as if pudding wasn’t a stupid enough word they had to shorten it to pud.

Amazing…I went to find an example online of a menu that used the word ‘Pudding’ and found one that uses ‘fortnightly‘ and ‘pudding’, too bad they couldn’t have thrown in penultimate somewhere and it would have been a perfectly English sentence.

It’s big and holds water

We are in our fourth day of consecutive sunny hot weather and I love it. It seems that, for the most part, Londoners expect crap weather here so when it is beautiful, everyone seems pleasantly surprised and heads to the nearest park to strip down to their bathing suits ignoring the fact there is no water around. There are queues for the ice cream trucks and the smell of charcoal BBQ’s in the air. I have to say (while sitting on my balcony baking in the sun) its not a bad week to be out of the workforce.

In my attempt to find fun cheap things to do when I am not shopping my CV around, a  friend suggested I head to my local lido (pronounced Lie – dough….not Lee-DO as I thought) – not surprisingly I pulled my foreigner confused face and asked him to explain.

Turns out a lido is an large outdoor pool that you can swim in or lie around  – from what I can tell they have a bit of a beachy feel to them.  Apparently south London has one of the biggest lidos in Europe and in their heydays of the 1930’s there were 169 built across the UK to encourage people to get active.

As enticing as a public pool sounds, I am more comfortable on top of the water in a big floaty chair  and a drink versus in it, and I am not sure that the other swimmers would appreciate that.  For now, my balcony with my wireless internet and easy access to the fridge is a pretty good option.

Here is today’s forecast for those of you whom think London is always cold and rainy.

What colour Care Bear was the bugbear?

I was introduced to yet another new word this week (I seriously must have missed some vocabulary classes growing up).  I am not sure it is a ‘British’ word per se but I can’t say I had heard it before. The word I am referring to is bugbear.

A bugbear by definition is like a bogeyman; an imaginary monster used to frighten children (although to me it sounds like one of the Care Bear’s arch nemesis).

However, in the context which I came across it (two times) this week it was used as a metaphor for something annoying or irritating.  ie Classic British bugbears include queue jumpers, traffic wardens, automated phone systems and noisy neighbours.

My personal bugbears are: words I don’t understand, words I can’t pronounce, slow internet, hangovers and cleaning toilets…just to name a few.

It’s probably not what you think….

So it turns out that they don’t use the word caulk or caulking here and to be honest the exact second the word came out of my mouth I knew this.  I didn’t even need to see the horrified look on my colleagues faces before realising that even if they did use that word it would sound posh as they probably pronounce the ‘L’ and say cal-k or something less dirty sounding.

To explain, a colleague asked me what I am up to this weekend and I said ‘I desperately need to caulk my bathroom so I might try my hand at caulking’ (I added that last bit as soon as I realised she did not know that word ergo I needed to repeat it again for comic relief).

To clarify I was talking about caulking as in sealing our shower to prevent leaks….and to be honest the more I say it the word more ridiculous it sounds (similar to that whole milk thing growing up) and I think I have to side with the English on this one and say sealant from now on….it won’t however prevent me from running the caulk joke to the ground in this post.

And yes, on top of how ridiculous the word sounds, I am aware of how pathetic the whole concept of spending my weekend ’sealing’ the bathroom actually is…because of that I now change my answer to said question and my new response is ‘I am going to lay in the park, get drunk and have a Sunday roast’ all which seem to get a better response from the colleagues. Bring on the weekend!

…Should I have put a disclaimer on this post? Surely you can’t get that worked up over a little caulk…hahah yes, I am 13 years old and the more I say/type it, the funnier it sounds.

How bout those odds?

We had a lovely weekend with P&C, our Canadian friends, whom are visiting for the weekend. One of the highlights was on Saturday when we headed to the pub to watch the Grand National horse race. As per my (fairly lengthily) post last year on this. It is the most bet-on race in the UK as it truly is a race that just about any horse can win as it is so unpredictable (as long as he has a jockey on his back which I learnt the hard way).

The race is fairly long (30 jumps) and the jumps are quite large, some with ditches on the other side causing horses to fall, riders to fall off and a bunch of jockey-less riders cluttering the track.

This year was one of those spectacular ones when the winner was truly unexpected. His odds were set at 100-1 meaning if you had the dumb luck to pick this guy…you did quite well. Chances of that were slim it seemed as we were in a packed bar and only one person had chosen the winner. Even the mother of the jockey only placed a bet of 50p on her own SON!! Hopefully she buys him something nice with her £50 (I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest new teeth as a BBC reporter is getting in some trouble for doing that already….I was just thinking a pint or two to say ’sorry for not believing in you’).

Anyway P&C seemed to thoroughly enjoy the (marginally inhumane) event and I think it added a little British-ness to the trip (as have the multiple pints of London Pride and John Smiths and trips to Primark).

Eating your words

I figured out fairly quickly after moving here that I don’t sound like everyone else. We were at the tower of London getting a group tour by a real live Beefeater. At one point he looked at me and said ‘Where are you from” to which I replied, “Toronno”, he said “Where?”, I repeated “Toronno, Canada”. At which point he said (very loudly in front of the group in his bellow-y English accent) “…oooooh you mean ToronTOE”…okay point taken I don’t enunciate, we, as a nation, fail to enunciate (ever been to Wadderloo?)

Since then I have been of the opinion that since the English invented the language, I don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to pronunciation. As such, I have adopted a terrible Eng-adian accent combining the two languages. There is one word however that drives me nuts and I want to drag that Beefeater around London with me and personally ridicule people who say this word….

The word is ‘et’ pronounced like bet without the ‘B’…and this word is used by the English when they mean to say ate (pronounced like the number eight) – the past tense of ‘to eat’. I was watching television last night and the announcer actually said ‘When you ‘et’ that, how did it taste?

Seriously….I can understand me being lazy and thus receiving an English lesson from a Beefeater but what is the excuse for bastardising one perfectly fine word, ate, and turning it into a short cough sounding word that certainly shouldn’t be regarded as being part of the English language..Come on people, can you please stop, I have taken the D’s out of Toronto, can you put the ‘eh’ back into ‘ate’?

Mothering Sunday

Today is Mothers Day/Mothering Sunday in the UK so, Happy Mothering Sunday to all you UK Mums. Canadian/American Mom’s you have to wait until May (must not forget, must not forget). This means that in theory I should be able to go out next week and get Mothers Day cards on sale however, I am quickly caught out on that trick as they spell Mom differently here…it’s Mum. I am not sure where Mum comes from as it’s not Muthering Sunday or Muthers Day.

I just don’t think you get the same dramatic effect withh the Mum pronunciation.  I have spent years perfecting the dragging out of the word Mom ‘…but Maaaaawwwwwmmmm or Please Maaaaawwwwwm’.  You just can’t do that with Mum, its too short and to the point.  I am sticking with Mom, I can’t let those years of practice go to waste.