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Today, I suddenly received my very first impression of how unorthodox British spellings must look to Americans, when I learned that the word "font" used to be spelled as "fount", and that the current spelling of it was a surrender to Americanization at some point in the 1970s. The older spelling just looks completely wrong and unnatural to me, and for the first time, it came into my head how strange words like 'favourite', 'colour', 'favour' and 'doughnut' might conceivably appear if you've spent all your life with a language that robbed them of their Us. And in one case their Gs and Hs as well.
Of course, language has always been a problem of mine here, and it's largely because most of American seems to be this sort of code that was invented to personally wind me up. Not the word differences - it's not difficult to imagine that post-Webster concepts just had separate names applied to them, for example, a chopping board can equally legitimately be called a cutting board, and a pavement is logically referred to as a side-walk. But it wears on you a bit when you're continually finding more of them after four and a half years, such as it being considered an absurd image for a man to be wearing a 'dressing gown' in favour/favor of a 'bathrobe', and it can make communication difficult when some words have such disparate meanings.
It's not just words as a whole, but the sound of letters in general are slightly different - the (thankfully largely untrue) usual stereotype of Boston is that it dropped the letter R from the alphabet some time ago, but throughout America, the letter A has slightly more of an E flavour/flavor to it in places, and T is softened to something more D-like - I still remember when we were going around the shops for moving in just after getting married, and when any female assistant learned of this fact they would always enthusiastically offer their "congradul[high pitched squeak]tions". American is... shorter than British - street names in speech do not have the qualifying "- Street" or "- Avenue" appended to them, unless they're over three syllables, in which case a different abbreviation will be used, such as "Commonwealth Avenue" and "Massachusetts Turnpike" being shortened to "Com-Av" and "Mass-Pike" respectively.
The most noticeable differences are the simple things that you hear all the time in daily speech like that, the things that you just couldn't imagine could be different. By far the one that has got to me the most has been the word "herb" - which is pronounced the way we say it in Britain for this reason, and yet here the pronunciation is something closer to "'urb", with no H and a more nondescript E. I was subjected to a lot of mockery (by Whitney) when I happened to mention the novel 'Dune' and she found out that I said it with some sort of inflection I can't quite describe on the D, making it sound homophonous to 'June'. In American, whether talking about the heap of sand or the novel, it is invariably pronounced without that inflection, making it simply 'Doon' (presumably by Frank 'Urbert). I can't offer a reason for pronouncing "du" or "tu" with a J between the two letters, and can only offer that to my ears the plain version just sounds a bit stoopid.
By the way, if somebody could explain what the hell a 'raincheck' might be, I would be very grateful.
Of course, language has always been a problem of mine here, and it's largely because most of American seems to be this sort of code that was invented to personally wind me up. Not the word differences - it's not difficult to imagine that post-Webster concepts just had separate names applied to them, for example, a chopping board can equally legitimately be called a cutting board, and a pavement is logically referred to as a side-walk. But it wears on you a bit when you're continually finding more of them after four and a half years, such as it being considered an absurd image for a man to be wearing a 'dressing gown' in favour/favor of a 'bathrobe', and it can make communication difficult when some words have such disparate meanings.
It's not just words as a whole, but the sound of letters in general are slightly different - the (thankfully largely untrue) usual stereotype of Boston is that it dropped the letter R from the alphabet some time ago, but throughout America, the letter A has slightly more of an E flavour/flavor to it in places, and T is softened to something more D-like - I still remember when we were going around the shops for moving in just after getting married, and when any female assistant learned of this fact they would always enthusiastically offer their "congradul[high pitched squeak]tions". American is... shorter than British - street names in speech do not have the qualifying "- Street" or "- Avenue" appended to them, unless they're over three syllables, in which case a different abbreviation will be used, such as "Commonwealth Avenue" and "Massachusetts Turnpike" being shortened to "Com-Av" and "Mass-Pike" respectively.
The most noticeable differences are the simple things that you hear all the time in daily speech like that, the things that you just couldn't imagine could be different. By far the one that has got to me the most has been the word "herb" - which is pronounced the way we say it in Britain for this reason, and yet here the pronunciation is something closer to "'urb", with no H and a more nondescript E. I was subjected to a lot of mockery (by Whitney) when I happened to mention the novel 'Dune' and she found out that I said it with some sort of inflection I can't quite describe on the D, making it sound homophonous to 'June'. In American, whether talking about the heap of sand or the novel, it is invariably pronounced without that inflection, making it simply 'Doon' (presumably by Frank 'Urbert). I can't offer a reason for pronouncing "du" or "tu" with a J between the two letters, and can only offer that to my ears the plain version just sounds a bit stoopid.
By the way, if somebody could explain what the hell a 'raincheck' might be, I would be very grateful.
