British Expatriate Network

One of the things I enjoying watching on CNN, quick fast news when you need it really, even though a lot of it is American stuff. Just now, he was talking to a british anchor person, and she used the word "bottle" in a sentence when she was talking about George Galloway, she said he has "got a lot of bottle"

Mr cooper didn't quite get it, and goes what do you mean he has got bottle? lol I think Oscar Wilde put it best, when he said "Atlantic.....two countries divided by the same language" lol

What other word or phrae do you find yourself explaining to the yanks or canadians? I once told some "you couldn't organize a piss in a brewery", piss being drink of course, but they mistook it for something else, and got all shirty with me lol

Simply, no. If they don’t get my specifically cultural references, then feck them.
I am expected, and quite rightly, to try and understand other cultures that I come in contact.

They use the term Cultural Competency ( :roll: apparently "sensitivity" is too passive), but its used, and Americans have none.
Because when I call them a cnut, they often to fail to place it within my cultural context.

It was always "couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery".
Maybe they would have understood that, rather than thinking they couldnt take a leak in a brewery. :o

That was a typo actually....I did put it that way, couldn't organize a piss up in the brewery :lol:

The Murrikan equivalent would probably be "cojones". I should make a career out of this English to Murrikan translation lark.

Is that right, but isn't that Spanish though for balls ?

I'd have understood it and would still probably have got all shirty with you. :D

Actually, some to think of it, "getting all shirty" with someone is also pretty wide open for misinterpretation too.

A pedant writes....
It was actually George Bernard Shaw and it was something like "England are America and divided by a common language".

Mark Twain subsequently quoted Shaw and consequently Americans sometimes attribute the quote to him :roll:

Less pedantically, this is a real issue for me sometimes because not only do the two nations use different words to mean the same thing, sometimes they can use the same word to mean different things - particularly in law where the common history provideds a common vocabulary but 200 years of legal evolution can lead to different definitions.

I had this discussion with an American collegue not long ago and he nodded sagely and started 'as Mark Twain once said.....'.
:roll: :D

A super-pedant writes

Actually it's considered a misquote. It's often attributed to Shaw but there's no evidence that he said it and it does not appear in any of his writings. Some think it may have been a verbal quip of Oscar Wilde's.

I personally don't know why people expect a version of English that has flourished independently for more than two centuries and has its roots in 18th century England, to retain identical links with Britain.

Ask Nigel Rees (BBC Radio Four's "Quote UnQuote")

His website says

(2) (Of England and America) ‘Two nations separated by a common language.’

Sometimes the inquirer asks, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ The answer appears to be both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942).

Much the same idea occurred to Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944) ‘It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language’, and in a radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954) - European writers and scholars in America were, he said, ‘up against the barrier of a common language’.

Inevitably this sort of dubious attribution has also been seen ‘Winston Churchill said our two countries were divided by a common language’ (The Times, 26 January 1987; The European, 22 November 1991.)

http//www1c.btwebworld.com/quote-unquote/

:lol: I actually have a book of quotes at home that attributes it to GBS, along withthe story about Twain.

That said, I found it attributed to GBS on several web-sites, but on the only one that offers citations/sources - it is curiously absent.

If it is a misquote, i guess it comes from this:
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Canterville Ghost, 1882

http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/language/

The same site offers this:
England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Note - no source.
http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/English/

As to the rest of what you say Lee, I couldn't agree more. :D

My source is the 'Oxford Dictionary of Quotations'. I had to research it once for an article I was writing. There seems to be a lot of confusion for sure.

I'm a work so can't say what ours is, its big full of words and designed to look authoratitive... who said never judge a book by its cover :roll: :D

I seem to have opened a whole new can or worms eh ? Am sticking to my original quote, and who said it D If you don't like it fellas, on yer bike 8)

Course the real question is was it George Bernard Shaw or George BuhrNAARRd Shaw? (Uhh, shivers.)