Feeling competitive

Saw B today. She's all 'oooooh I go to the gym ALL the time I'm just so hardcore! I go every day! I HAVE to! I even turn down nights out to go to the gym! Ahhh I have to watch so carefully what I eat! I can't go over 1500 calories! Oh dear I better be thin soon!'

She can't even do 10 minutes on the treadmill. And she eats 1500 calories a day. Whatever.

Just because I'm eating normally at the moment... STOP TRYING TO BE BETTER THAN ME.

I'm too bloody competitive! I'm tempted to try and get back on to the 2 4 6 8 after this, but it'd be impossible to do 200 calories at home. I'll be back at uni on Thursday, though, so I'll try and do 200 then. And I can hit the gym on Thurs evening and Fri morning. No idea what the food will be like in Spain, but I'll see what I can do to restrict as much as I can.

I cooked today, for my mum - spaghetti with carrots and tomatoes and bacon and basil and other weird bits. It had a name, I've just forgotten it - it was all posh and Italian. Makes me think, though - I should really do this when I'm at uni, spend a good evening cooking, then stick the whole lot in a sandwich box and take a weeny bit with me to uni every day. I'd save so much money! I need to start making lunch my main meal of the day; or rather, my ONLY real meal of the day. I can pick at breakfast and dinner. If I workout every day and do that, I should stay skinny. I'll start practising now!

Ha, I LOVE the American/English differences. I love how we have a mix of British and American people on these blogs, too, so we can marvel at each other's! The biscuits thing is great. I think I explained it in a weird way, though. In England...

These are biscuits:


But only these are cookies:


And these are crackers! Well, these are cream crackers, which is one type. Generally I'd say crackers are anything you'd eat cheese with.


The book I've got is called 'Divided by a Common Language' by Christopher Davies. It's great.

I still think that baseball thing is hilarious! Did you know, baseball evolved from the British game called Rounders? We used to play that in school loads. I hated it. I wasn't any good.

RaeLynn, we really do say 'the loo' - more so than the toilet, or 'the bathroom', which is what Americans say I think! Literally, every time you need to, er, relieve yourself, it's normal to say 'I'm going to the loo.' Maybe 'the toilet' if you're posh, but generally the loo. I'd always say loo. And toilet paper is loo roll. And yep, snogging/pulling is when you kiss someone. I think pulling also applies to sex, but I'm not sure. A colloquial thing around London is 'mac' for sex, as well, so like - 'did you mac?'

Ariana, we do say mashed potato but you're right, it's generally mash! Bangers and mash. Nice. That's sausages and mashed potato. And fries are chips. I think of them differently, though - fries I think of as being quite thin, whereas chips are fat and very, er, potatoey.

I love all these food differences. If any of you Americans happen to be using a British recipe and see that you need a courgette - don't panic! That's what you'd call a zucchini. And eggplants - here we call them aubergines. Jell-o is called jelly to us. And what you'd call jelly, we call jam. Our sweets are your candy. Candyfloss is cotton candy.

Obviously there's all the clothes differences, too. What you'd call pants we call trousers. Pants to us are underwear. Women's underwear are called knickers, whereas you call them panties. What you'd call sweaters we call jumpers.

I've got the book - let's see some more...

There's a difference between the two billions, which I didn't realise. The English billion is a million million, whereas the American billion is a thousand million. So now the world has nearly 7 billion people, is that going by British or American measurement? I wonder...

Do Americans say brilliant? In the book it says 'UK - brilliant = US - great/cool'. I say brilliant loads! Surely everyone in Harry Potter says brilliant? Harry Potter's very British. We don't really have malls, either, we call them shopping centres, though they are sometimes referred to as malls. Normally we just have city centres to shop in, as the shops tend to be all over the place, outside and inside. Technically, in the city where I go to uni, there's three shopping malls in the city centre! And only a few of the shops are actually in them.

If I say someone's dishy, he's cute. We tend to say 'love' as a general nickname, too, like - 'you alright, love?' I think Americans would be more likely to say 'hun'. We also say 'mate'. You've probably heard me say that a lot. Here's a difference that I didn't know existed - do you not have pantomimes in America? They're these big, theatrical performances that happen at Christmas time, normally with celebrities, where classic stories like Peter Pan, Cinderella, Aladdin, etc. are re-worked so they're really comical and entertaining and involve lots of singing and dancing. There's all these stupid pantomime traditions, like having a pantomime dame (a man in drag - normally the main character's mum or something) and having stupid lines like 'he's behind you!!' (the audience shout that if a character can't find someone who's standing right behind them.) It's also traditional to boo and hiss when a bad guy's on the stage, and sometimes sweets get thrown into the audience, too. Ah, as a performer, the amount of pantomimes I've been in... I'm really reminiscing now!

There are differences in the word 'tramp' too - a woman you'd call a tramp we'd know as a slut or a slag, but a tramp to us is a homeless guy, so a bum or a hobo.

It also says in this book 'UK - wonky = US - unstable'. Ah, wonky! I think of wonky not so much unstable, more if, say, a picture on the wall is slightly offset... it's wonky. It's hard to explain!

Ahh! It really does go on!

I think English people tend to know more American words and idioms because of the vast American tv shows and films (or 'movies'!) that hit our screen. It's the same reason a lot of foreigners end up learning English with an American accent. Not many of the word differences were a surprise to me - I guess what I find more surprising is that so many English words I take for granted aren't even used in the US or in other countries! I never expect to go across the pond and say something like 'that picture's wonky' only for people to look at me blankly. The differences are amazing!

Tally ho, chums!

Q x