We know the whole to-may-to to-mah-to thing (and really, no one says po-tah-to although it’s fun to say it just to wind people up), but that’s also a north/south divide. But you know what’s really terrible? When a fucking English person corrects my pronunciation of my last name.

See, I have a non-English surname as in it’s not English, Scottish, Welsh, but foreign. When an English person has to pronounce my surname, it goes one of two ways:

1. They see it and go “Uh, Miss, Miss, uhh, [start bumbling my name"] and then I interject and say it for them OR
2. I am asked what my surname is and give it. While the person hunts for whatever it is by my surname, they come to it and go “AH [says my last name with huge emphasis on my mispronunciation of the first syllable of my surname]“. Sometimes I get snarky and say “No, it’s [my pronunciation]“.

Fucking English thinking they are the masters of pronunciation. Have you ever heard an English person ask for a tortilla (chip or flat bread)? It’s tore-till-uh. No jokes. Also, they don’t really know the difference between a tortilla like you’d wrap a burrito in or a tortilla chip. I have heard the chips referred to as a tortilla and the wraps as pancakes. PANCAKES, people. That’s because they don’t really know what pancakes are (how come the Scottish and Irish got this right?).

I’m going off on a tangent there. The moral of the story is, NEVER, EVER correct someone’s pronunciation OF THEIR OWN NAME — it just means you’re asking for a beat down.

-Betty Crocker

Just as in every country, there is a particular number you dial to dial between area codes. (They aren’t called area codes in the UK, but I’m not sure what people tend to call them — calling or dialling codes, I think). In the UK that number is 0. In the US if I want to give someone my phone number I say simply say “(8-0-5) 1-2-3-4-5-6-7″ because every body freakin’ knows they have to dial the 1 if they are outside the area code. Now here in the UK it goes two ways generally.

The first involves simply giving your number as 0-2-0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 stating the leading 0. The other way involves saying where you are followed by the above as in “Southampton 0-2-3-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8″ which is completely 1910s. Why say “Southampton”? Sometimes people will say “Southampton 1-2-3-4-5-6″ which is annoying if you don’t know what the code is for Southampton.

When I first got here and went to give out my phone number, I left out the leading 0 since, you know, everyone knows this and this confused the shit out of a few people. I had one person say “Do you mean OH-ONE-TWO-THREE?” Well yes, I do because I’m in the UK, I’ve given you a UK number, and get this, the whole of the UK requires you dial a ZERO if you are calling between different areas.

After I figured out that I had to actually say that leading OH/ZERO, I started saying ZERO-ONE-TWO-THREE… and this also caused confusion since for whatever reason people like to refer to it as an OH (like the letter that comes between N and P) in phone numbers but naught when it’s the numeral any other time. The person said “Do you mean OH”? No, I mean the numeral zero.

-Betty Crocker

A few months ago my not so neat husband managed to splash some balsamic vinegar on his very expensive Paul Smith button down Oxford shirt. Being the laundry mistress I didn’t notice until after I washed it and I was furious, mad at my husband for being an untidy eater and mad at myself for not noticing before running it through the washing machine. So I went to the internets to find a way to remove the stain. I found an entry saying that hydrogen peroxide was the solution to removing pesky stains like vinegar. Off to Boots I went. See, here in Britain you have to ask someone behind the pharmacy counter for just about everything… so I asked the clerk who didn’t look a day over 16 if I could purchase a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

lethal liquid…

He informed me that major drug store retailers were no longer selling hydrogen peroxide. I was stunned, I mean you pour the shit on cuts and it bubbles and kills germs, and if you ever get water in your ear you dump a cap full in your ear and hey presto it’s gone. But now I couldn’t buy hydrogen peroxide cause as the nice 16 year old explained people were using it for making bombs. He did tell me I could go to a private chemist and get all the hydrogen peroxide I wanted (don’t tell the terrorisists!); I guess Boots doesn’t want the liability of selling such a dangerous liquid, but give me a f*cking break! Don’t even get my started on rubbing alcohol.

And FYI, as far as stain removing goes, it does the trick, the shirt was saved from the ugly balsamic vinegar stain and now I force my husband to eat his dinner in his pants.

–Yankee Doodle

We are two American ex-pats now living and working in England (once of us even married an Englishman). We’ll write about a variety of things here in England that are different to the US that drive us bat shit crazy some days. We know they’re trivial; we know there’s things about the US that drive foreigners bat shit crazy like people being friendly and helpful.

This blog is tongue-in-cheek.

Don’t go getting your panties in a bundle over what we post here; it’s all in good fun. And if we really hated things so much, we’d leave, but we know the US ain’t all it’s cracked up to be either.