Re: United States vs. United Kingdom
I thought it quite amusing to test the waters by using Gobsmacked in my post above. Nice to see you noticed it's inclusion.
And there is another difference in that example. In the UK we generally get all of the US centric sayings and understand most things spoken in the US. Much of this can be put down to all of the US programs and films we watch in the UK I suppose. However American's are completely lost when it comes to English. They can't understand real English accents, local dialects, or local regional slang.
The US surely has just as wide, if not wider range of accents than the UK, so why do they find it so hard to understand a clearly spoken Englishman in the US? Obviously if they were confronted with a Glaswegian or a Brummy this might be a tall order (it is for many living in the UK after all), however, they get stuck on clear well pronounced Queens English. Why?
Regardless of how big and mighty the US thinks it is, as a country they are quite insular. What was the recent statistic? Only 10% of Americans even own a passport, let alone leave the country. This is obviously to some extent down to the size of the country as a whole, compared to how small the UK is by comparison. But I don't think that is really the true reason. Many British people state they prefer the UK to anywhere else, however most still enjoy visiting lots of other countries to see the different landscape, culture, food etc... Why isn't this the case in the US?
I thought it quite amusing to test the waters by using Gobsmacked in my post above. Nice to see you noticed it's inclusion.
And there is another difference in that example. In the UK we generally get all of the US centric sayings and understand most things spoken in the US. Much of this can be put down to all of the US programs and films we watch in the UK I suppose. However American's are completely lost when it comes to English. They can't understand real English accents, local dialects, or local regional slang.
The US surely has just as wide, if not wider range of accents than the UK, so why do they find it so hard to understand a clearly spoken Englishman in the US? Obviously if they were confronted with a Glaswegian or a Brummy this might be a tall order (it is for many living in the UK after all), however, they get stuck on clear well pronounced Queens English. Why?
Regardless of how big and mighty the US thinks it is, as a country they are quite insular. What was the recent statistic? Only 10% of Americans even own a passport, let alone leave the country. This is obviously to some extent down to the size of the country as a whole, compared to how small the UK is by comparison. But I don't think that is really the true reason. Many British people state they prefer the UK to anywhere else, however most still enjoy visiting lots of other countries to see the different landscape, culture, food etc... Why isn't this the case in the US?
