American vs British English

I'm English and have an American pen pal from Ohio. I always videochat her but have never met her, it's crazy how much she rubs off on me. Formally, I use English words but when it comes to slang etc I'm so American. I say things like Rachet, Kill Em, I'm Weak etc. It's the funniest thing because my friends just look at me with one of them "wtf are you talking about" faces :')

America is like the adopted-son who's trying so hard to impress the family.

Whenever I read a an American book i.e. Stephen Kings, I glance at my Wiki page to gain some equanimity .



Whats irritating is the fact that the software's (Windows OS, Mac OS, IOS, Microsoft Office etc.) we implement in our daily routines use 'American English' and we rely on them so heavily. If countries like Japan and Russia were to use English as their main languages, America would be another China.

Try writing some code in English and you will notice the 's' turn into 'z' the 'e;' being dropped. So zad .

I just don't understand why it is such a huge deal. Americans literally don't care (in fact, the majority think it's cool) when you say or write something in a "British" way [Experience: I live in America]. It just seems strange that you take such offence at such an insignificant thing. Just embrace the difference and get over it

What if I'm an international student and uses British words and American words at the same time?
I say Aluminium but I say tomato with American accent lol

It sounds revoltingly wrong. 'Soccer' is vomit-inducing too.

Because why use second rate American English words when you can use the proper English words?

Things sound strange and annoying when they are in the wrong context. So for example, thoroughly British pubs that use 'fries' on the menu instead of 'chips'. People trying to sound cool by saying things like 'freeway' instead of 'motorway', or 'way too cool' instead of 'nice', or 'awesome' instead of 'splendid'.

Getting precious about language is fairly natural, but in the case of English it's like trying to breed a pedigree mutt.

A small selection of words we've nicked:

'Angst' - German
'Restaurant' - French
'Vigilante' - Spanish
'Ombudsman' - Swedish
'Ketchup' - Chinese
'Mammoth' - Russian
'Dinghy' - Sanskrit
'Commando' - Afrikaans
'Tycoon' - Japanese
'Algebra' - Arabic
'Cot' - Hindi
'Shawl' - Persian
'Barbecue' - Carib
'Robot' - Czech
'Cookie' - Dutch

Even some of the most English of words - 'tea' and 'polo' - are loan words from other languages.

The only person who can get away with saying 'splendid' is David Attenborough.

Things sound strange and annoying when they are in the wrong context. So for example, thoroughly British pubs that use 'fries' on the menu instead of 'chips'. People trying to sound cool by saying things like 'freeway' instead of 'motorway', or 'way too cool' instead of 'nice', or 'awesome' instead of 'splendid'.

Well, quite a few of those languages have a common origin with English in the Indo-European group anyway, so we kind of just borrowed them from the lending library.

'Indo-European' is a pretty broad label. I'm fairly sure that the concept of a restaurant, for example, came about after the division of Germanic from Romance languages, and after the subdivision of Germanic languages between Old German, Old English, Old Dutch etc. I tried to give relatively modern examples where possible to highlight their origins as loanwords, loanwords being distinct from older words with common roots, such as house/haus in modern English/German.

way to go hun