Pardon me for having to get something off my chest, but Canadians seem to be the only nation on earth who literally cannot hear the difference between an English person and an Australian one. A day does not go by when I don't get mistaken for an Australian - occasionally a Kiwi but that's usually as a tentative second guess - and I must admit I'm long past being all British and apologetic about it ["I'm so sorry but I'm not, I know we really do sound similar, it's probably because I spent a year in New Zealand blah blah"]. It actually just pisses me off a bit now, though obviously I do still try not to be overly rude to people when they ask (seeing as it's usually when I'm at work). But I mean really? Who do I sound more like: the Queen or Crocodile Dundee?! Every day someone says something like 'Oh I bet you're missing the beaches back home!' To which I'll reply 'Well the beaches in London aren't all that impressive, so no, not particularly.' The other day at work a cocky sort of chap asked me what part of Oz I was from and when I said actually I am English, he said 'Oh. Well, you're close to each other though, aren't you?' A short and somewhat terse geography lesson ensued, in which he seemed totally uninterested.
And I think that's the crux for me. They just don't really care. A large number of North Americans - and yes, I'm lumping the Canadians in with the Americans for a moment - stay in North America, listen to North American music, watch North American telly and films and don't really pay any attention to the outside world. England might as well be next to Australia for all they know or care. And this goes even for the ones who ought to have a bit of a clue - I've had conversations that have started with 'Oh my dad is from England!' and ended with 'I'm not sure where, somewhere near Edinburgh.' It always reminds me of the line in Anchorman where Brian Fantana, while talking about a woman he may or may not have been in love with, claims that she was 'Brazilian, or Chinese, or something weird.'
And something weird is kind of how I feel most days. At work for example, although we all get on very well indeed and have a lot of fun, I'm often the butt of a few gentle jibes about my 'Englishisms'. Usually it's when I use a word or a phrase quite innocently over the radios that causes much hilarity because it's completely unknown here. For example, the other day I described people coming over to the Red Course as coming 'in dribs and drabs' - turns out this is not common parlance over here. When I told another guide that a customer was wearing a 'purple jumper' she looked at me in horror and asked what on earth a 'jumper' was. But the thing is, we've grown up with American telly and films so we already know that they call rubbish 'garbage', a boot a 'trunk', and a bum a 'fanny' (snigger) and so on. We indulge them when they come to England and say 'elevator' or 'flash-light' because we know what they really mean. They, however, may have seen Four Weddings and a Funeral but that hasn't taught them that we call such things a 'lift' and a 'torch' and so it seems to come as a bit of a surprise that we don't use the same words they do. In fact when I told a friend that I was just going to get a torch so we could walk next door, she got all excited that I was going to come back with a huge flaming piece of wood. Bless.
I do not however intend to give up my Englishisms. It is part of my heritage, it's what makes me me, and there's a little piece of me that resents saying I'm going to fill my car up with 'gas', just to make myself understood, because to me it isn't gas (and actually, it isn't a gas at all of course, so they're obviously just being silly). No, I'd rather face the blank looks and find myself having to explain that a saucepan is what we call a pot, and at least I'll be educating people one word at a time.
