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BRITPICKER'S GUIDE This is intended as a sort of FAQ sheet to aid American (usually) fan-writers trying to give their stories a convincing British setting. It lists common (and some less common) differences which seem to pull a lot of writers up. More will be added as I think of them. Note that these are for the most part mainstream usages common in London and Edinburgh and in "BBC English" - there are also regional variants not all of which I know. Why does it matter? To begin with, it causes a certain amount of distress and resentment in Britain when the U.S. media apparently can't even show a generic British commedy like The Office without re-writing it in an American setting - and a whole lot more serious distress and resentment when American film and T.V. companies re-write our real-life military victories as if they had been won by Americans. It must be horribly difficult to write stories in a convincing foreign setting - personally I wouldn't even know where to start writing a story set in the U.S. - but it's good manners to at least make the attempt, instead of just pinching the whole thing and re-working it for an American setting. And that's what this page is for - to make the attempt easier. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, at least from the author's point of view, having too many Britpicks is a good way of alienating a large part of your audience and losing about a quarter of your potential readership. When one is reading a story, one wants to feel as if the world of the story is real, to sink into it and believe it; but a glaring cultural anomaly, such as a casual robbery with guns, or somebody talking as if the age of consent was eighteen, or children playing baseball, brings British or Australian or European readers up short and makes them go "Eh??" That ruins the flow of the story and stops it from feeling convincing, and if it doesn't feel convincing to a large part of your potential audience, they probably won't bother to come back for the next chapter. Readers might also be interested in the Separated by a Common Language blog, which examines linguistic differences between British and American English. Be warned though that this is a serious academic site which uses a lot of linguists' jargon.
This is intended as a sort of FAQ sheet to aid American (usually) fan-writers trying to give their stories a convincing British setting. It lists common (and some less common) differences which seem to pull a lot of writers up. More will be added as I think of them.
Note that these are for the most part mainstream usages common in London and Edinburgh and in "BBC English" - there are also regional variants not all of which I know.
Why does it matter? To begin with, it causes a certain amount of distress and resentment in Britain when the U.S. media apparently can't even show a generic British commedy like The Office without re-writing it in an American setting - and a whole lot more serious distress and resentment when American film and T.V. companies re-write our real-life military victories as if they had been won by Americans.
It must be horribly difficult to write stories in a convincing foreign setting - personally I wouldn't even know where to start writing a story set in the U.S. - but it's good manners to at least make the attempt, instead of just pinching the whole thing and re-working it for an American setting. And that's what this page is for - to make the attempt easier.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, at least from the author's point of view, having too many Britpicks is a good way of alienating a large part of your audience and losing about a quarter of your potential readership. When one is reading a story, one wants to feel as if the world of the story is real, to sink into it and believe it; but a glaring cultural anomaly, such as a casual robbery with guns, or somebody talking as if the age of consent was eighteen, or children playing baseball, brings British or Australian or European readers up short and makes them go "Eh??" That ruins the flow of the story and stops it from feeling convincing, and if it doesn't feel convincing to a large part of your potential audience, they probably won't bother to come back for the next chapter.
Readers might also be interested in the Separated by a Common Language blog, which examines linguistic differences between British and American English. Be warned though that this is a serious academic site which uses a lot of linguists' jargon.
Food (which seems to be an absolute cultural minefield) Things Britons eat at breakfast:- Hot or cold cereal of all kinds. We are rather less fond of heavily-sweetened fancy cereals than seems to be the case in the U.S., and rather more fond of things like All-Bran and meusli. Porridge (or porage) may be taken with milk or cream, or plain, but is usually salted in Scotland and sugared elsewhere. Bread or toast with marmalade, jam or honey or sometimes (especially in poorer areas) chocolate spread. Bread, fried bread or toast with one or more of the following: bacon, sausages, egg (boiled, fried, poached or scrambled), black pudding, mushrooms, baked beans. In Scotland also white or red pudding, sliced haggis and/or Lorne sausage (which is a flat, skinless square of beef sausage-meat).
Things Britons eat at breakfast:-
Hot or cold cereal of all kinds. We are rather less fond of heavily-sweetened fancy cereals than seems to be the case in the U.S., and rather more fond of things like All-Bran and meusli. Porridge (or porage) may be taken with milk or cream, or plain, but is usually salted in Scotland and sugared elsewhere.
Bread or toast with marmalade, jam or honey or sometimes (especially in poorer areas) chocolate spread.
Bread, fried bread or toast with one or more of the following: bacon, sausages, egg (boiled, fried, poached or scrambled), black pudding, mushrooms, baked beans. In Scotland also white or red pudding, sliced haggis and/or Lorne sausage (which is a flat, skinless square of beef sausage-meat).
N.B. Black pudding is basically a thick sausage made from meat-fat and congealed blood, either mutton or pork: it may sound awful, but a good one is slightly chewy and has a pleasant, nutty taste (a bad one is sticky and gritty and tastes like the burnt bits in the bottom of the pan). Red pudding and white pudding are similar but contain increasing proportions of oatmeal. White pudding is basically just a slightly meat-flavoured, chewy white stodge; sometimes with raisins added to make it fruit pudding, which is even worse. Black, red, white and fruit pudding is always cut into thick slices when eaten at breakfast.
Haggis, which is eaten sliced at breakfast, or whole as an evening meal with "neeps and tatties" (swede/turnip and potato), is a rugby ball-shaped sausage made from a sheep's stomach (or nowadays often an artificial sausage skin) stuffed with minced mutton-offal, oatmeal and pepper. Kosher (made with offcuts of muscle-meat rather than offal) and vegetarian (made with nuts) versions exist. A bad haggis just tastes of pepper; a good one is quite pleasant, but it's never exactly a gem of world cusine and is often eaten just so people can "feel Scottish".
Be aware that there is a tradition in Scotland of winding up innocent Americans by trying to convince them that the haggis is an actual animal. It isn't.
All of these peculiarly British sausages may also be eaten whole, with or without batter but nearly always with chips, as a fast-food. [Fast-food haggis is generally sausage-shaped rather than rugby-ball shaped.] Other than haggis, they are rarely eaten at a sit-down dinner.
Kippers (smoked herring fillets). These are now uncommon, and are not generally taken with anything else except bread and butter. They are usually either grilled, or poached in hot water or milk. However, I am assured that some people cook and serve them with home-made savoury custard: I can't even begin to imagine what this tastes like. Traditionally-smoked kippers are slightly orange. Most modern, mass-produced kippers are virulently orange, and are dyed.
Kidneys or kedgeree, but usually only in old-fashioned aristocratic houses or in very posh hotels.
French-style croissants with jam.
Half a grapefruit, served in its skin and scooped out with a spoon.
Tea, coffee and/or whole fruit-juice (usually orange). Note that tea is nearly always taken with milk. Lemon tea is known but very uncommon, and milkless black tea is rare. I don't know anybody here who takes tea with cream. British coffee is usually horrible, sickly instant stuff, taken black or with milk: cream though known is uncommon. Powdered coffee-whitener is likewise known but uncommon.
Leftovers from last night's dinner.
Nothing. Many Britons don't eat breakfast at all.
Things Britons don't eat at breakfast (but Americans apparently do):-
Waffles. Nor do we eat them at any other time, except as an Americanized affectation - except for potato waffles, which are sometimes eaten at dinner. [By an "affectation", I mean something which is eaten primarily because the eater wants to "feel American", in the same way that people eat haggis to feel Scots. There are plenty of American foods - hamburgers, American-style pizzas, Boston Bay sandwiches, Coke, chowder, Ben & Jerry's etc. - which people in Britain eat just because they are nice.]
Pancakes. We often eat pancakes as a dessert (generally with sugar, lemon and cream - not with chocolate chips). Wraps (pre-packaged savoury pancakes wrapped around a filling such as chicken-tikka) are a common snack and there's a fleet of fast-food vans which sell French-style pancakes with sweet or savoury fillings which are also sometimes eaten as a snack lunch: but no-one that I've ever met or heard of eats pancakes for breakfast. You could find Brits who ate sushi or cold leftover macaroni-cheese for breakfast, but not pancakes.
Strawberries, except when diced up small on cereal, or in the specific instance of the champagne breakfast. This is a university tradition whereby a group of young, probably upper-class students stay up the whole night and then have strawberries-and-cream and champagne for breakfast at about 5am. Other than that, Britons do not usually eat fruit at breakfast (fruit tends to be a lunchtime or evening thing), except sometimes a half-grapefruit, or small pieces of fruit (banana, apple, strawberries or whatever) chopped up as a garnish on meusli or other cereal.
Pop-tarts (usually - although I'm told there was a craze for them recently among teens and twenties, and some people have retained a taste for them).
Scones (these are afternoon-tea food).
Ham - again, this is seen as a lunch or afternoon-tea food.
Different nomenclature:-
The things Americans call muffins, we call American muffins. What we call muffins are a sort of round, thick disc of batter with little holes in the surface, similar to a crumpet or drop-scone and served hot with melted butter.
The things Americans call cookies, we call biscuits. "Cookie" here is generally used only of a sort of soft, moist biscuit which is called a chocolate-chip cookie as a consciously American affectation. And we take biscuits with tea or coffee, not milk. Some people like to dunk their biscuits in their tea or coffee; there is a thin, hard, sweet oblong plain biscuit called a Rich Tea Biscuit which is produced expressly for that purpose.
The sticks of fried potato which Americans call French Fries, we call chips. "French Fries" in Britain refers only to a specialized type of chip, short, thin and crunchy and generally only served by American-owned burger bars.
The thin, flat, crunchy ovals of fried potato which Americans call chips, we call crisps.
"Candyfloss", not "cotton candy".
What Americans call candy, we call sweets. "Candy" is here mainly reserved for certain types of sweets made of almost pure sugar, such as candyfloss, or for a type of caramelly near-chocolate, or for candied peel (fruit-rinds chopped up small and preserved in sugar, used when baking fruit-cakes).
The shop which sells sweets is usually called a "sweetshop" or (at least in Scotland) a "sweetie shop". A very upmarket sweetshop, of the kind that sells homemade champagne truffles, is called a "confectioner's".
The sort of fruit preserve which Americans call jelly, we call jam - except in old-fashioned Glaswegian dialect where "jeely" is sometimes heard. When most Britons (except some Glaswegians) say "jelly" they mean the rubbery, wobbly dessert which Americans call Jello, or a semi-solid sauce such as cranberry jelly. You do occasionally see "jelly" used of a jam which has no lumpy bits in it, but this is unusual; especially since nearly all British jam does have lumpy bits.
"Spring onions", not "scallions".
"Gherkins", not "dill pickles". "Pickle" used on its own here usually refers to a sweetish savoury relish.
"Courgette", not "zucchini".
"Rocket", not "arugula".
"Aubergine", not "eggplant".
The things Americans call "bell peppers" are here more often called salad peppers, sweet peppers or red, green and yellow peppers.
"Corn" in Britain is a general collective term for cereals such as wheat, barley and rye. The plant which Americans call corn may be called corn here too, but is more often called sweetcorn or (especially when found in pet-food) maize.
I've been told that what we call by the Turkish word "kebab" - a Near-Eastern dish involving reconstituted meat-paste which is spit-roasted, sliced and served with salad in a sort of purse made of unleavened bread - is in the U.S. more commonly known by the Greek term "gyro". Here a "Giro", thus spelled, is a sort of cheque which you cash through the Post Office - usually, a Benefit cheque from Social Services.
"Mince" is meat, usually beef, which has been mashed up by being forced through little holes: I think Americans call it ground meat. Confusingly mincemeat, however, is a rich mixture of candied fruit and nuts and often brandy, mixed with suet. [In the Middle Ages mincemeat was a mixture of meat and fruit, and the meat got dropped.] Mince pies are usually small, sweet pastry cases filled with the fruit sort of mincemeat and eaten at Christmas; but in Scotland, at least, a mince pie may also be a large savoury pastry crust filled with minced beef. Also note that in Scotland "mince" is also a slang term for something hopelessly incompetent, such as a very bad football team.
The nomenclature of mealtimes themselves can be a social minefield. Some people call the midday meal "dinner" and the evening meal "tea": some call the midday meal "lunch" and the evening one "dinner". Some people call the main evening meal "supper", some use "supper" to refer to a snack eaten at bed-time. It used to be the case, although it is less clearcut now, that calling the midday meal "dinner" marked you out as working-class: it also tends to be a northern thing.
The kind of "tea" which is a main evening meal should not be confused with "afternoon tea" or "high tea", which are formal, rather posh snack-meals with tea and little cakes and sandwiches, eaten mid-afternoon. A snack eaten mid-morning may be called "elevenses" although this term is now rather old-fashioned.
A sweet course eaten after a main meal may be called "dessert", "sweet", "pudding" or "afters". Calling it "afters" is always a bit common, often self-consciously and deliberately so. "Pudding" is sometimes seen as a bit common and is near-universal in the north of England but it is also, perversely, what they usually call it at posh public schools.
Popular tastes:-
Fish-and-chips, and its almost equally popular relative chicken-and-chips, comes from a Fish Shop when in the south of England (not to be confused with a Fishmonger's, which sells fresh, raw fish), a Fish-and-Chip Shop in the north of England and from a Chip Shop or Chippie in Scotland. This reflects cultural differences in the menu. English Fish Shops sell several varieties of battered fish, chicken plus a few other items. Scottish Chippies sell only one or two varieties of fish but a whole list of different types of battered sausage, black, red and white pudding and haggis (all usually in batter), pies, king ribs (a sort of spicy, oblong burger, likewise battered), burgers, quite probably pizza and pasta as well and in some cases (mostly in Glasgow) deep-fried Mars Bars. I don't know what they call Chip Shops in Wales.
Whatever you get from a Scottish Chippie, on the West Coast it is likely to be served with vinegar, and on the East Coast with brown sauce (usually diluted with vinegar), just referred to generically as "salt-'n-sauce". I don't know how far north the practice of serving brown sauce extends.
Food which you buy from any sort of fast-food outlet, or have delivered ready to eat, is called a Take-Away in the south of England, a Take-Out in the middle of England and a Carry-Out in the north of England and Scotland.
Curry is at least as popular a fast-food meal as fish-and-chips. Pizza runs them a close third. For home delivery, pizza is not quite as big a thing here as it is in the U.S.; people who send out for a home-delivered meal usually send for a full Indian or Chinese dinner.
Chips (our sort of chips) are quite often eaten in a soft bread-roll, often with mayonnaise or tomato sauce. This is called a chip butty. Crisps are also sometimes eaten as a sandwich filling.
Non-Jews in Britain rarely eat bagels, except as an Americanized affectation - though they are available from larger supermarkets. Ditto peanut butter is available here but not particularly popular - and doughnuts, although quite well-liked, are nowhere near as big a thing as in some parts of the U.S..
Italian and French fancy breads such as ciabatta and baguettes, however, are widely available and very popular.
Indian, Italian and Chinese restaurants are extremely common; Turkish (usually in the form of kebab shops) and Thai food is also popular. Other regional cuisines are less so; you might get one Mexican or Moroccan or Greek restaurant to every hundred Indian. And for some reason even the most authentic ethnic restaurants usually serve standard British desserts such as ice-cream, rather than anything more exotic.
As far as I can gather hash-browns are potato patties, which are uncommon here, and grits are some kind of oatmeal thing which we don't eat at all.
Note that in Britain the word "hash" on its own refers to cannabis, not a foodstuff. If you say "hash-browns" to most Britons over about forty-five they will probably think you mean Sixties-style chocolate brownies laced with cannabis.
Bologna sausage does not exist in Britain. The terms "liver sausage" and "liver paté" refer to a pre-cooked, usually pork-based pink object superficially resembling bologna, but it comes in an inedible plastic skin rather than a sausage skin, is fairly soft and is eaten spread, not sliced.
The pork-derived British sausage-meat product which most closely resembles bologna is probably spam, a pink, rubbery block of low-grade processed ham which comes in an oblong tin.
Another pre-cooked luncheon-meat which comes in oblong or slightly pyramidal tins is corned beef (as beloved of Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter books), which is only vaguely related to the dish called corned beef in the U.S.. I'm told it may in fact be what in the U.S. is called corned-beef hash. At any rate it's darker but even more violently pink than spam, and coarse and fibrous where spam is smooth. Corned beef is laden with fat and salt, and both smells and tastes like cheap dog-food: it bears about the same relationship to American corned beef as rubbery American processed cheese bears to a nice bit of Stilton. Neither spam nor corned-beef is even particularly cheap. Their only advantage is that they are very quick to prepare, since all you need do is tip them out of the tin and slice them. Spam is slightly less obnoxious than corned beef, as it is less aggressively salty and is at least tolerable if you put a lot of pickle on it.
Minced beef is popular, especially in Scotland, and beef sausage-meat is popular in Scotland although uncommon elsewhere. Nevertheless, and despite what you may have heard about the Roast Beef of Old England, beef in Britain is very expensive and so comparatively rare - a treat meat rather than a staple. The staple meat of Britain is pork (closely followed by chicken) - just as beef seems to be the staple in the U.S., and mutton in some parts of Australia. Indeed, earning a good salary (itself derived from the word for salt, from a time when salt was a rare and expensive spice) is sometimes referred to as "bringing home the bacon". Chicken is in fact probably the most common meat eaten just as unprocessed roast or grilled or fried meat, but pork is commonest in processed meats, and the standard default pie-meat is pork.
Veal is almost never eaten outside of certain restaurants, because of the humanitarian issues it raises. It would be easier to find venison, or even ostrich, in the average British supermarket than veal.
Sweetcorn (maize) is eaten as niblets, either frozen or from a tin, or as whole corn-on-the-cob; creamed corn and polenta are more-or-less unknown here. Peas are usually eaten as whole seeds from frozen, as few people now have the time or patience to shell fresh peas from the pod, or in the form of whole edible pds (mange tout or Sugarsnap peas); but some people, especially from the north of England, prefer processed or mushy peas, which you get in a can.
Most people in Britain now eat good-quality margarine, often olive oil-based, rather than butter. Where butter is used, the block it comes in is called a "pat" or a "block", not a "stick".
I came across a reference in a fan story to somebody eating beignets and I actually had to look them up on the internet to find out what they were. They apparently exist in France, and I wouldn't rule out some fancy French patisserie in London selling them, but they really aren't a British thing.
Root beer is not drunk here. I don't even know what it is.
In Scotland there is a whole class of locally-produced, slightly fizzy (and usually violently-coloured and sickly-sweet) soft drinks which are known generically as "cola", and soft drinks in general, including colas, are often just called "juice", at least in Edinburgh. Scots are very fond of a sweet, bright-orange fizzy drink called Irn Bru. This is similar to the English Tizer, but much more popular.
Some common British snack foods:-
Pasty. This is a circle of pastry folded in half over a filling and then pinched together to form a crinkly ridge along the top. A true Cornish pasty is about the same shape as a Portuguese Man o' War jellyfish and contains mutton or beef with potatoes and other vegetables, but you can get pasties with almost any filling, such as cheese and onion or chicken and mushroom. Some mass-produced, machine-made pasties are folded over flat with the crinkly bit along the edge rather than across the top, because they're easier to pack that way. Flat packets of flaky pastry containing any savoury filling are also sometimes called pasties, at least in Scotland.
[N.B. Cornish pasties were originally designed as a sort of edible lunch box for tin-miners. There are cases on record of large pasties being made with a pastry barrier inside, with a savoury course at one end and a dessert at the other.]
Scotch pie. This is a purely Scottish delicacy which is eaten nowhere else (no-one else would want it). It consists of a circular, palm-sized, high-walled case made of a strange, greyish, rubbery, slightly translucent pastry. Inside, right at the bottom, is a dollop of greyish-white filling (theoretically mutton, but can be anything - macaroni cheese is a favourite) covered by a lid of the same translucent, rubbery pastry. Often implicated in incidents of food-poisoning.
Take-away pies - usually a square of pastry folded over a filling. Similar to the flat, flaky, Scottish sort of pasty, but generally much better quality.
Samosas, spring-rolls, bhajees and other Indian snack-foods. In Scotland you can actually get haggis samosa.
Kebabs - especially when eaten by rough youths as an accompaniment to cans of lager.
Pizza - often in the form of a burnt, rubbery orange triangle which bears little resemblance to anything an American or an Italian would be prepared to eat.
Sandwiches, rolls and wraps (savoury pancakes) - if bought in supermarkets, often come with exotic fillings such as Thai crispy-fried duck.
In Scotland, baked potatoes with a savoury filling, such as prawn curry or chicken and sweetcorn (maize) in mayonaisse.
Note that popcorn is not all that popular in Britain, and when it is eaten it is usually cold, heavily sweetened, wrapped in a sealed plastic bag and was made days or even months ago.
Differing tastes in sweets and desserts:-
British chocolate tends to be milky and sickly, made mostly with generic vegetable fats rather than cocoa, and is in fact not recognized as chocolate in continental Europe - although there are a few brands of good-quality organic chocolate (most notably Green & Black's) which are made with proper cocoa-solids. Hershey Bars and a few other common American sweets are available here, but are neither common nor popular.
Traditional Scots go in for some very sickly sweets - especially tablet, which is basically a big slab of crunchy fondant icing. The sweet called "rock" in Scotland is a small stick of semi-hard fondant, about as thick as your little finger, ribbed lengthwise and generally pink or green. In England "rock" is a much bigger stick of white sugar-paste, about an inch in diameter, hard enough to chip teeth, generally tinted pink on the outside, and always with words ("A present from Blackpool" or some such) or pictures running right through the centre.
We do not put marshmallows in cocoa, unless it was being done consciously as an American affectation.
In the U.S., celebratory cakes made to mark birthdays, weddings etc. seem to be always sponge cakes. In the U.K. they are traditionally fruit-cakes, often iced with fancy scenes: although supermarkets now sell sponge birthday cakes, presumably because they are cheaper to make and store.
Americans seem to be very fond of cinnamon as a general flavouring. We aren't. I've vague memories of coming across cinnamon-flavoured sweets a couple of times in my forty-eight years, and of course I've heard of cinnamon sticks and cinnamon buns - but that's about it. Here it's mainly a cooking-spice - for sprinkling on melon, for example.
Ice-cream in England tends to be from one of the big chains - Walls, Lyons Maid or one of the American ones such as Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's. Scotland, however, has a larger Italian community and this has raised the bar for quality ice-cream, so that there are many small firms, both Scots an Italian in origin, producing individual top-quality brands.
In Britain "sherbet" is not a drink but a white, sweet, fizzy powder which pops and crackles in the mouth. When I was a kid you could buy flying-saucer-shaped sweets about an inch and a half across, made of pastel-coloured, edible rice paper and filled with sherbet, or liquorice sticks (or hollow liquorice straws) with tubs of sherbet to dip them in (called a Sherbet Dab) - I don't know if these are still made. In the U.K. editions of the Harry Potter books the lemon sweets which Dumbledore eats are not lemon drops but sherbet lemons. These are yellow, rugby-ball-shaped, semi-translucent sweets made of a hard lemon-flavoured sugar-paste, hollow inside and filled with sherbet.
Treacle, which is used as a cake-ingredient and sometimes as a spread, is very similar to what Americans call molasses, except it can be obtained from either sugar cane or sugar beet (a type of turnip), and according to Delia Smith the flavour of treacle isn't as rich as molasses (I've never eaten molasses so I can't comment). It's near-black and not nearly as sweet or as runny as golden syrup (which Americans don't have either, and which is a pale gold form of molasses obtained when sugar-cane is first refined), but not as bitter or as stiff as black-strap molasses.
Alcohol:-
Britons tend to drink far more alcohol than Americans. Nearly every restaurant or formal dinner includes wine, or sometimes a jug of margharita.
A place where you go to drink alcohol is often called a "bar" in Scotland, the same as in America (although pub quizzes are still called pub quizzes). In England, however, it is usually a "pub" (short for public house). In England, a bar is a counter from which drinks are served, and by extension the room in which it is sited - there will usually be two or three bars (sometimes also called lounges) making up one pub. A shop which concentrates on selling bottles of alcohol to take home is an "Off-Licence" - generally known in Scotland as an Offie. You can also buy alcohol to take home from supermarkets and convenience stores which have an off-licence - but these are not referred to as Off-Licenses in the same way.
Pubs in England are social hubs where people go to chat. Bars in Scotland tend more towards mere drinking dens: they have improved over the last twenty years or so, but I can still think of at least one well-known Edinburgh bar where it's difficult to walk about because the floor is so sticky. Most pubs have juke boxes, but a substantial minority have live musicians: actual silence is rare. Pub quiz nights and karaoke evenings are common. Many modern pubs are based around a theme - although actual theme parks on the American model are rare.
Beer is generally drunk at room temperature. Real Ale, which is rich in flavour and not fizzy and usually comes in glass bottles, is very popular, and any decent off-licence or supermarket will sell a dozen or more types of Real Ale, as well as the more mass-produced canned beers and lagers such as Tennants.
Scots whisky and Irish whiskey are much drunk, but American whisky (bourbon) is much less popular. Whisky is divided into Single Malts, which are made from single varieties of grain, and blends: Single Malts are generally both much smoother, much stronger and much more expensive. Gin and tonic is very popular, as is vodka.
Please note that the American distinction between "hard" and "soft" cider does not exist here. ALL CIDER SOLD IN THE U.K. IS HIGHLY ALCOHOLIC. Be aware that in some areas, especially in the English South-West (the home of cider-making), conning innocent American tourists into getting blinded on what they think is just apple-juice is a local sport. Scots tend not to drink cider as much as the English do, and sometimes get into trouble through not realizing how lethal it can be. The strongest of all is the raw, locally-made West Country cider called scrumpy - there is actually a folk-song about this, to the tune Morning Has Broken, which begins "I bin drinkin' scrumpy//Although it were lumpy...." After scrumpy, the worst offender is probably White Lightning, which comes in cans.
The unhealthy practice of binge-drinking - getting so drunk you are staggering and puking in the gutter - is fairly common among middle-aged men, and teens and twenties of both sexes.
There are very, very stringent laws against drinking and driving. If people are planning to get home by car, therefore, one person in the party will be designated as the driver, and restricted to no more than one moderate-sized alcoholic drink in the course of the evening.
All age-related restrictions on drinking alcohol are lifted at eighteen, except that Britons may not own a business which sells alcohol until they are twenty-one. Britons aged sixteen and seventeen may legally drink beer, cider or wine with food in a restaurant, or in a pub or hotel so long as they are in a room used to serve food.
Environment, housing and transport Major geographical and national boundaries:- Americans (and others) sometimes get confused about the structure of the British Isles and of the United Kingdom. Geographically, the British Isles consist of the mainland of Great Britain plus Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and a variety of smaller islands around the coast. Great Britain is so-called not because it is important but because it is big, to distinguish it from Little Britain (a.k.a. Brittany or Bretagne), a coastal province of western France with which Great Britain has close historical ties, although it does not count as part of the British Isles. Politically, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland includes Great Britain itself, the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and most but not all of the surrounding smaller islands. Great Britain itself is divided into the countries of England, Scotland and Wales plus Cornwall, which is considered to be part of England for most political purposes but is largely a separate entity culturally. The outline of Great Britain has been compared to an old witch riding a pig. If you look at it that way, the witch's head, down to the chin, is Scotland; the pig's trotter at bottom left is Cornwall and the rest of its foreleg the English counties of Devon, Somerset and Dorset; the pig's head and ear is Wales and all the rest is England. Please remember that the terms "England" and "Britain" are not interchangeable. England, although only marginally bigger than Scotland in terms of area, is by far the biggest in terms of population but it is still a separate country, not just a synonym for Britain. Also note that the adjectival form of Scotland is "Scots" or "Scottish" - "Scotch" is another word for Scottish-made whisky. Wales was annexed by England during the Middle Ages, and then in the late 15th C the Welsh Tudor family conquered England and married into the English Royal line. Following the childless death of Elizabeth Tudor (a.k.a. Elizabeth I), Queen of England, the English throne passed to her cousin James VI of Scotland, who then became also James I of England. England and Scotland were politically united in the early 18th C, but it is often forgotten that Scotland is the senior partner, and that the King of Scotland inherited the English throne, not vice versa. Within the U.K., Scotland has always had a separate legal system, and since 1998 it has had its own parliament at Holyrood (in Edinburgh) which deals with purely Scottish issues, although the parliament at Westminster (in London) still deals with international issues even if they include Scotland. Northern Ireland and Wales have Assemblies, although these have less independent power than a parliament, and Northern Ireland to some extent has its own legal system although this is less distinctive than the Scottish one. The internal affairs of England are decided in Westminster. This leads to a certain amount of ill-feeling over the "West Lothian question" - that is, the fact that a Scottish MSP can vote on the internal affairs of England, but an English MP may not vote in the Scottish Parliament. Cornwall used to have its own parliament, the Stannery, which could not make laws but did have the right to veto laws made in Westminster. The Stannery has not sat for centuries, but theoretically it could still do so. The southern two-thirds of Ireland are a completely separate country, called Southern Ireland or Eire. Although it has cultural ties to the rest of the British Isles it is politically entirely distinct. The Isle of Man, and the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (the Channel Islands) are Crown Dependencies, which means they are technically possessions of the British Crown but they are politically separate, are not part of the United Kingdom, and make a tidy living as tax havens. The Bailiwick of Guernsey has its own smaller Dependencies on the islands of Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou, Brecqhou and Lihou, as well as Guernsey itself. Culturally, the Channel Islands are as much French as they are British. You do not need, and never have needed, a passport to pass between the different countries which make up the United Kingdom - nowadays, you don't even need one to travel to the countries of the European Union, either. So far as I know you've never needed one to pass between Northern Ireland and Eire, either, although at the height of the Troubles there were border checks. The countries of Great Britain and Ireland are sub-divided into counties, shires and districts many of which are themselves the remnants of small independent countries. You may hear references, for example, to the Kingdom of Fife - or to the Yorkshire Separatist Movement. Much ill-feeling was caused in the 1970s when the Ted Heath government abolished many of the the ancient boundaries for administrative reasons - though many have since been reinstated after furious local protests. Everywhere in the British Isles people now understand English (which was once described as being the result of the efforts of a Norman man-at-arms to get off with a Saxon barmaid). However, there are several other native languages spoken in Britain. In Scotland we have Lallans (Lowland Scots) and Doric (in the Aberdeen area) - both Anglo-Saxon-derived tongues closely related to standard English and collectively described as Scots, but usually considered to be sufficiently distinct from English and from each other as to qualify as separate languages rather than mere dialects. Doric, for example, is about as close to mainstream English as Dutch is to German. There are also five Celtic languages spoken here, divided into two linguistic families. Scots Gaelic (pronounced Gallic), Irish Gaelic (pronounced Gaylic) and Manx form the q-Celtic or Goidelic family, and Welsh, Cornish and Breton (spoken in Brittany) form the p-Celtic or Brythonic family. The Gaelics are also sometimes collectively called Erse, a Scots corruption of the word "Irish". Irish Gaelic is mainly spoken in the south and west of Ireland, and Scots Gaelic mainly in the far north and west of Scotland. There is nobody left who speaks only a Celtic language and no English, but there are plenty of people for whom Welsh, or Irish or Scots Gaelic, is their first and main language. In theory the last native speaker of Cornish (that is, the last person who was raised in a continuous Cornish linguistic tradition and for whom Cornish was their main or only language) died in the 1790s and the last native Manx speaker in the 1970s, but there are flourishing Manx and Cornish revival movements and a new generation of children are being raised to be bilingual in English and Cornish or Manx. All of these languages, including mainstream English but with the possible exceptions of Cornish and Manx, are further subdivided into many dialects. Some Channel Islanders also speak their own local dialects of French. Romany is spoken by British true gypsies, and "traveller's cant" by traditional travelling communities of (usually) Scots or Irish origin. Some communities or trades also speak, or have spoken in the past, deliberately obscure private languages such as rhyming slang, back-slang (a language especially favoured by butchers between the wars, in which a tuppeny bone for the dog becomes "owt ynnep enob rof eht gody") or Polari (used by gays when being gay was illegal, and still preserved as a cultural curiosity). Everybody in Britain, apart from some recent immigrants, understands the "received standard" form of English spoken on the TV - but not everybody can speak it. There are still a lot of people who speak using accents or dialect words which render them unintelligible to anybody who comes from more than about fifteen miles away. Some people speak in accents and dialects which make them unintelligible to people from three streets away (I'm thinking particularly of the Granton schemes in Edinburgh, or the fisher community in Aberdeen). Speakers of Celtic languages, however, generally also speak a very pure, clear form of English, and indeed standard "BBC English" was modelled on the English spoken as a second language by Gaelic-speakers living in Inverness. If you want to get an idea of some of the major dialects spoken in various regions of Britain, incidentally, you can play around with the dialect-translation facility at whoohoo!. The idea that Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Man and Cornwall are Celtic countries and England isn't is something of a myth. There are only a very few and tiny almost-pure Celtic populations, mainly in the far west of Ireland, and the whole of the rest of Britain, recent immigrants aside, is populated by a mixture of Celtic and Norse (with Celtic blood predominating), although it's different Norse in different areas; Vikings in Ireland and Yorkshire; Danes and Saxons in middle England; Angles in Kent and so on. Genetically, the English are just as Celtic as the Welsh or the Irish - it's just that they lost their Celtic language (which was similar to Welsh) and the more outlying areas kept theirs. Not only do the different countries which make up the U.K. have rather different cultures, but so do the major cities. For examply, Glasgow has a lot of knife crime, but Glaswegians still tend to think it's wrong to comment on someone else's appearance, and even very rough types generally do not do so; Edinburgh has less violent crime but has more thieves to the square yard than any other place I've ever lived, and many of the young people openly jeer at or even stone anybody they consider to be in any way funny-looking. Liverpool in particular is strikingly different from the northern English towns around it (so much so that there is a joke in the north that you need a passport to get through the Mersey tunnel), probably because it is to a large extent an expatriot Irish rather than an English city.
Major geographical and national boundaries:-
Americans (and others) sometimes get confused about the structure of the British Isles and of the United Kingdom. Geographically, the British Isles consist of the mainland of Great Britain plus Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and a variety of smaller islands around the coast. Great Britain is so-called not because it is important but because it is big, to distinguish it from Little Britain (a.k.a. Brittany or Bretagne), a coastal province of western France with which Great Britain has close historical ties, although it does not count as part of the British Isles.
Politically, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland includes Great Britain itself, the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and most but not all of the surrounding smaller islands. Great Britain itself is divided into the countries of England, Scotland and Wales plus Cornwall, which is considered to be part of England for most political purposes but is largely a separate entity culturally.
The outline of Great Britain has been compared to an old witch riding a pig. If you look at it that way, the witch's head, down to the chin, is Scotland; the pig's trotter at bottom left is Cornwall and the rest of its foreleg the English counties of Devon, Somerset and Dorset; the pig's head and ear is Wales and all the rest is England.
Please remember that the terms "England" and "Britain" are not interchangeable. England, although only marginally bigger than Scotland in terms of area, is by far the biggest in terms of population but it is still a separate country, not just a synonym for Britain.
Also note that the adjectival form of Scotland is "Scots" or "Scottish" - "Scotch" is another word for Scottish-made whisky.
Wales was annexed by England during the Middle Ages, and then in the late 15th C the Welsh Tudor family conquered England and married into the English Royal line. Following the childless death of Elizabeth Tudor (a.k.a. Elizabeth I), Queen of England, the English throne passed to her cousin James VI of Scotland, who then became also James I of England. England and Scotland were politically united in the early 18th C, but it is often forgotten that Scotland is the senior partner, and that the King of Scotland inherited the English throne, not vice versa.
Within the U.K., Scotland has always had a separate legal system, and since 1998 it has had its own parliament at Holyrood (in Edinburgh) which deals with purely Scottish issues, although the parliament at Westminster (in London) still deals with international issues even if they include Scotland. Northern Ireland and Wales have Assemblies, although these have less independent power than a parliament, and Northern Ireland to some extent has its own legal system although this is less distinctive than the Scottish one. The internal affairs of England are decided in Westminster. This leads to a certain amount of ill-feeling over the "West Lothian question" - that is, the fact that a Scottish MSP can vote on the internal affairs of England, but an English MP may not vote in the Scottish Parliament. Cornwall used to have its own parliament, the Stannery, which could not make laws but did have the right to veto laws made in Westminster. The Stannery has not sat for centuries, but theoretically it could still do so.
The southern two-thirds of Ireland are a completely separate country, called Southern Ireland or Eire. Although it has cultural ties to the rest of the British Isles it is politically entirely distinct. The Isle of Man, and the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (the Channel Islands) are Crown Dependencies, which means they are technically possessions of the British Crown but they are politically separate, are not part of the United Kingdom, and make a tidy living as tax havens. The Bailiwick of Guernsey has its own smaller Dependencies on the islands of Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou, Brecqhou and Lihou, as well as Guernsey itself. Culturally, the Channel Islands are as much French as they are British.
You do not need, and never have needed, a passport to pass between the different countries which make up the United Kingdom - nowadays, you don't even need one to travel to the countries of the European Union, either. So far as I know you've never needed one to pass between Northern Ireland and Eire, either, although at the height of the Troubles there were border checks.
The countries of Great Britain and Ireland are sub-divided into counties, shires and districts many of which are themselves the remnants of small independent countries. You may hear references, for example, to the Kingdom of Fife - or to the Yorkshire Separatist Movement. Much ill-feeling was caused in the 1970s when the Ted Heath government abolished many of the the ancient boundaries for administrative reasons - though many have since been reinstated after furious local protests.
Everywhere in the British Isles people now understand English (which was once described as being the result of the efforts of a Norman man-at-arms to get off with a Saxon barmaid). However, there are several other native languages spoken in Britain. In Scotland we have Lallans (Lowland Scots) and Doric (in the Aberdeen area) - both Anglo-Saxon-derived tongues closely related to standard English and collectively described as Scots, but usually considered to be sufficiently distinct from English and from each other as to qualify as separate languages rather than mere dialects. Doric, for example, is about as close to mainstream English as Dutch is to German.
There are also five Celtic languages spoken here, divided into two linguistic families. Scots Gaelic (pronounced Gallic), Irish Gaelic (pronounced Gaylic) and Manx form the q-Celtic or Goidelic family, and Welsh, Cornish and Breton (spoken in Brittany) form the p-Celtic or Brythonic family. The Gaelics are also sometimes collectively called Erse, a Scots corruption of the word "Irish". Irish Gaelic is mainly spoken in the south and west of Ireland, and Scots Gaelic mainly in the far north and west of Scotland.
There is nobody left who speaks only a Celtic language and no English, but there are plenty of people for whom Welsh, or Irish or Scots Gaelic, is their first and main language. In theory the last native speaker of Cornish (that is, the last person who was raised in a continuous Cornish linguistic tradition and for whom Cornish was their main or only language) died in the 1790s and the last native Manx speaker in the 1970s, but there are flourishing Manx and Cornish revival movements and a new generation of children are being raised to be bilingual in English and Cornish or Manx.
All of these languages, including mainstream English but with the possible exceptions of Cornish and Manx, are further subdivided into many dialects. Some Channel Islanders also speak their own local dialects of French. Romany is spoken by British true gypsies, and "traveller's cant" by traditional travelling communities of (usually) Scots or Irish origin. Some communities or trades also speak, or have spoken in the past, deliberately obscure private languages such as rhyming slang, back-slang (a language especially favoured by butchers between the wars, in which a tuppeny bone for the dog becomes "owt ynnep enob rof eht gody") or Polari (used by gays when being gay was illegal, and still preserved as a cultural curiosity).
Everybody in Britain, apart from some recent immigrants, understands the "received standard" form of English spoken on the TV - but not everybody can speak it. There are still a lot of people who speak using accents or dialect words which render them unintelligible to anybody who comes from more than about fifteen miles away. Some people speak in accents and dialects which make them unintelligible to people from three streets away (I'm thinking particularly of the Granton schemes in Edinburgh, or the fisher community in Aberdeen). Speakers of Celtic languages, however, generally also speak a very pure, clear form of English, and indeed standard "BBC English" was modelled on the English spoken as a second language by Gaelic-speakers living in Inverness.
If you want to get an idea of some of the major dialects spoken in various regions of Britain, incidentally, you can play around with the dialect-translation facility at whoohoo!.
The idea that Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Man and Cornwall are Celtic countries and England isn't is something of a myth. There are only a very few and tiny almost-pure Celtic populations, mainly in the far west of Ireland, and the whole of the rest of Britain, recent immigrants aside, is populated by a mixture of Celtic and Norse (with Celtic blood predominating), although it's different Norse in different areas; Vikings in Ireland and Yorkshire; Danes and Saxons in middle England; Angles in Kent and so on. Genetically, the English are just as Celtic as the Welsh or the Irish - it's just that they lost their Celtic language (which was similar to Welsh) and the more outlying areas kept theirs.
Not only do the different countries which make up the U.K. have rather different cultures, but so do the major cities. For examply, Glasgow has a lot of knife crime, but Glaswegians still tend to think it's wrong to comment on someone else's appearance, and even very rough types generally do not do so; Edinburgh has less violent crime but has more thieves to the square yard than any other place I've ever lived, and many of the young people openly jeer at or even stone anybody they consider to be in any way funny-looking. Liverpool in particular is strikingly different from the northern English towns around it (so much so that there is a joke in the north that you need a passport to get through the Mersey tunnel), probably because it is to a large extent an expatriot Irish rather than an English city.
Climate:-
Perhaps the oddest thing about Britain is that if you start in the south of England and then travel north, you begin in lush green countryside, and then the further you go north through England the more "northerly" the countryside gets; high moorland and bare, lowering, rolling hills covered with purple heather. Then you cross over the border into Scotland, still travelling north, and suddenly it's all lush and green again, and except that the mix of trees is slightly different you might be back in the south of England. The landscape doesn't turn "northerly" again until you hit the Highlands.
Some people seem to think the north of England is a sort of European Canada, covered in forests. There are forests nearly everywhere in the UK - including artificial, planted coniferous ones all over Scotland, and a natural, deciduous one just north of London - and there are some in the north of England (including some recent artificial planting) as well. But most of the wooded areas in northern England are concentrated into a few large forests without much in between, whereas southern England and Scotland are scattered almost everywhere with woodland. The "typical" northern English scene is sheep country - all bare, rolling hills, scree, heather and bracken - and far from being dull, the play of light and the shape of the hills are so interesting that this area is one of the greatest glories of the British landscape.
Britain, including Scotland, has a fairly equitable climate. The north of Scotland is very windy but it isn't too cold, except Perth, and right up in Orkney and Shetland. Spring in Scotland is bright and breezy, summers are if anything uncomfortably hot (and usually soggy), and autumn is full of golden light. Late summer and autumn in the north-west is also full of midges.
Since the mid-1980s England has been increasingly dry in summer, and there is now a hosepipe ban every year, even when Scotland is virtually swimming. Nowhere in Britain is ever very dry, though, and nowhere is much over fifty miles from the sea. Instead of deserts we have marshes and bogs - places where the ground is semi-liquid, so that grass and bushes can grow on it and it looks just like normal dry land, and will hold your weight just long enough for you to have walked too far out to be able to save yourself when the earth suddenly gives way beneath you. We also have quicksand - areas of beach where the sand contains so much water that you sink into it, sometimes fatally.
It has been said that "Other countries have climate: Britain has weather". This is especially true in Scotland, where there is a saying "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes".
Note that the further north you go, the darker it is in winter - and the lighter in summer. In Edinburgh in high summer you can often read in the street by natural light at midnight, and further north you can sometimes see the aurora borealis in winter.
On the whole, the further north you go the colder it gets, but Edinburgh has its own temperate micro-climate, Tiree in the Inner Hebrides grows bulbs commercially and there's a patch near Oban which is effectively sub-tropical.
In England, the area around Ely and Cambridge tends to be bitterly cold, but the rest is quite mild. The Perth area in Scotland is also very bitter.
Snow at Christmas is extremely rare. Snow in January and February is common, and there are occasionally freak snowstorms in June.
Britain is said to be one of the least tectonically active places in the world. Recently (April 2007) we had what by our standards was one of the biggest quakes on record, in the sea just off Kent, and it resulted in five streets being evacuated due to structural damage, and one woman having to go to hospital with minor injuries. There are occasional mild earth-tremors along the great fault-line which runs through Loch Ness and separates the Highlands from the rest of Britain, and also sometimes tremors due to old mine-workings collapsing; but these rarely do more than break the occasional teacup. We have some extinct volcanoes - Holyrood Park in Edinburgh is one - but so far as I know we haven't had a live volcano since before humans came down from the trees.
On the other hand there are areas of Britain - especially north Cornwall and north-east England - where the sea is eating the land at an alarming rate (as much as 40ft a year), and if you live near the coast you are liable to wake up and find your front garden has fallen into the sea overnight. People have been killed when the coastal path they were walking on simply broke away. In some places, especially in north Cornwall, the sea cuts in under the cliffs and excavates underground caverns quite a long way inland, the roofs of which may suddenly collapse to form a boiling cauldron of water thirty feet deep and fifty feet across.
There are places around the coast of Britain where the beach goes out a long way, very shallow and flat - with the result that when the tide comes in it comes in much faster than you can run. There are places in Cornwall where it is reputed to come in faster than a horse can run, and a few years ago there was a terrible tragedy when a large party of Chinese migrant shellfish-diggers were overtaken by the tide in Morecombe Bay, and twenty-three people drowned. The Wash in Norfolk is especially dangerous, and the Bristol Channel is said to be one of the most dangerous shipping lanes in the world (the most dangerous being in Newfoundland). The Severn Estuary in the same area has the third-highest difference between high and low tide in the world - up to 50ft (the only higher ones are the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, which once reached 70ft, and Ungava Bay, also in Canada, at 55ft). The River Severn is famous for the Severn Bore, which occurs several times a month when a combination of wind and high tides causes a wall of water up to 9½ feet high (although usually less than 6ft) to be punched several miles up the course of the river.
I am told that American rivers are usually set flush into the surrounding scenery. British ones tend to be set between more-or-less steep riverbanks, so that you have to scramble up or down between the normal ground level and the waterside. I imagine this is because nowhere in Britain is much over fifty miles from the sea: of course rivers meander about a bit but the longest river in Great Britain, the Severn, is only 220 miles long (the Shannon in Eire is 240 miles), and most are much shorter. This means that British rivers are always fairly close to their source and moving with some force, and they tend to carve their way into the landscape.
British townscapes:-
"Tarmac", not "asphalt". [It's short for tar-Macadam - a tough, flexible mixture for surfacing roads, invented by a guy call Macadam.]
"Pavement", not "sidewalk". The term "footpath", which most commonly means a narrow, earth- or tarmac-floored track for pedestrians only, is also sometimes applied to a pavement: especially one which is tarmac-ed rather than paved.
In towns such as Edinburgh where many of the roads are sloping, you often find pavements which are quite far above the road-level and have to have steps down. Usually in these cases the pavement is only about 18" above the road - but I know of one pavement in the fishing village of Padstow in Cornwall which is about four foot above road-level.
Wider pavements, especially in residential or rural areas, often include a strip of grass, called a grass verge, between the walking surface and the road. Many roads in rural areas still don't have a pavement at all, just a fringe of grass (if you're lucky).
"Earth" or "ground", not "dirt". Dirt is something nasty you wash off; what you walk on is earth or the ground, and it is unusual for it to be referred to as dirt (although JK Rowling does it). The only common exception is the phrase "dirt track", meaning a pathway of bare earth.
"Rubbish bin" or "dustbin", not "trash can" - which contains "rubbish", not "trash" or "garbage". Very large, wheeled, plastic rubbish bins which stand outside in the street are called wheelie-bins. Large, cylindrical outdoor bins made of ribbed metal or plastic are called dustbins. The bags used to line the smaller bins, or to contain the rubbish within larger ones, are called black bags or bin-bags or bin-liners or refuse sacks.
"Letter-box", not "mail slot". And we don't use those little private mail-box things, except as American-themed garden ornaments; post is delivered to your door, unless it is too big to go through the slot (or requires to be signed for) and you are out, in which case a card is put through the door telling you to either arrange for re-delivery or collect it from a post depot. And it's "post", not "mail", although you may well be on some company's "mailing list" to receive a "mail-shot".
"Messages", on the other hand, is a Scottish term for one's household shopping, although we do also use it for information passed on.
"Porch", not "stoop".
"Verandah", not "porch"! A porch here is a sort of roofed, enclosed box in front of the front door, often itself having a door. A roofed but open-fronted wooden strip along the front or side of a building is a verandah.
"Skirting board", not "baseboard".
"Lift", not "elevator".
"Skip", not "dumpster".
Usually "shop", not "store". "Store" tends to be reserved for "convenience stores" (small local shops which sell a little bit of everything - food, hardware, stationery etc.); "department stores" (great big multi-storey non-local shops which sell a lot of everything, arranged in different sections); and things like really enormous hardware suppliers.
Private gardens in Britain almost without exception have walls, fences or hedges. I'm forty-eight as I write this, I've lived all over Britain all my life, and only once have I seen a group of houses which had the sort of open-to-the-street, unfenced front gardens which appear to be common in the U.S..
The term "yard" or "back yard" here generally refers to an area which is paved or concreted, not grassed. If it has grass it's a garden, even if it has no flowers - except in Scotland, where a small, grass-only garden shared between the flats of one or more tenements (see below) is called a drying-green. A garden or part of a garden used to grow edible produce is called a vegetable patch, a kitchen garden or vegetable garden.
Many towns have allotments - that is, a nearby field divided into strips which householders can rent for an annual "peppercorn rent" (that is, a token payment) of a few pounds a year, usually with a communal water-supply. Allotments are used to house garden sheds and grow vegetables etc. and are a major social focus of the community, although the demand for land for new housing has caused many allotments to be closed down in recent years.
American-style white picket fences are almost completely unknown in the U.K., except as a sort of theme-parkish garden ornament. Wooden fences are common but they are either left a natural grey-brown or stained in a dark colour, brown or tan or green. The uprights of the fence would usually be flat planks placed only a few inches apart - it's unusual to find a British wooden fence where the slats are far enough apart to allow a cat to pass between them.
In Britain, the storey of a house which is at ground-level is called the Ground Floor. The First Floor is the first level above the ground.
With the exception of a few "new towns", which are widely disliked, British cities are not laid out on a grid pattern; and even new towns tend to have only small areas of unbroken grid. British streets in general are curving, organic and tangled, and those towns which have been city-sized for a long time - such as London, Edinburgh and York - are riddled with little alleyways or "wynds" which emerge in improbable places. In Scotland, incidentally, an alley which passes through a building, so that there are rooms and a roof above it, is called a "pend".
In fact, even the larger and more successful "new towns" have complex, curving street-maps. The two largest (so far as I know), Livingston and Milton Keynes, have a poor reputation but are actually quite nice and make an effort to present an interesting townscape, although they both suffer from too much centralization - it is difficult to live there if you don't drive, as there are few local shops, pubs, doctors etc., nearly everything being concentrated in the town centre.
Because we do not go in for straight-line grids, British streets, especially streets of shops, are rarely very long. Streatham High Street, famous for being the longest continuous stretch of shops in Britain, is only a mile and a half long, and the norm for a "high street" (the central shopping street of a town) is probably about 500 yards.
The old Roman road called Watling Street, however, stretches all the way from Dover on the south coast to Edinburgh - although its modern name changes every few miles.
We do not go in for trailer-park homes on the American model. Immediately following World War Two the government did erect many housing-estates of "pre-fabs" - pre-fabricated, assemble-on-site cottages about the size and shape of trailer homes. Only a handful of these now survive - which is a pity, because they were actually rather nice. Trailers used for going on holiday in are here usually called caravans.
British inner cities are full of ugly, crime-riddled high-rise blocks of flats, although the worst ones are gradually being pulled down. The large areas of devastation left by the Second World War meant that most cities also include a high proportion of post-war buildings in the concrete-brutalist style of the Fifties and Sixties.
Houses are described as "terraced", (several properties joined together side by side - I think Americans call them "row homes"), "detached" (with space between it and neighbouring houses to either side) or "semi-detached" (joined to the neighbouring house on one side but separate on the other). The house at the end of a terrace is usually described as "end-terrace" rather than "semi-detached".
Houses in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh, are often tenements - a communal block generally three to five storeys high, with a shared stair opening on the street, and two to four flats on each floor. Some of the older Edinburgh ones, along the ridge of the Royal Mile, are much higher. In the 16th/17th C there were tenements on the Royal Mile fourteen storeys high. There's at least one eleven storey example still surviving, and there are several that are nine storeys (with spiral staircases and no lifts, and nowhere to install a lift). Tenements are often called "stairs", and people who live in the same tenement are said to live "on our stair". Some tenements date all the way back to the 16th C and some are modern, but the majority are 19th C.
[N.B. historically a "flat" in Scotland was a floor or storey divided into several "apartments" - but the English habit of using "flat" to mean a single-storey apartment, and "floor" to mean a level on a stair which contains a group of such apartments, is now the norm in Scotland too. Large tenements in Scotland were historically called "lands" and named after their owner but this is no longer heard, although on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh there is an ancient tenement called Gladstone's Land which has been converted into a museum.]
The reason for these early high-rises is that old Edinburgh was confined to a narrow stone ridgeway by surrounding lochs and marshes (drained during the 18thC), which forced it to build up, not out. It also built down, and many Edinburgh tenements have a basement level. Because Edinburgh is draped over the top of seven hills there are also many "garden flats" which are built on such steep slopes that they are ground-level at the back, and a storey below ground at the front. These below-ground flats usually have an "area" - a sort of narrow, sunken, stone-floored yard - along the front of the house, to allow light to get into the basement windows: there will be a railing around the top of the area, and steep steps up to pavement level.
Edinburgh also has large numbers of what are called "colonies" - Victorian housing-estates designed to hold poor workers in a more comfortable environment than the tenements. Although they were designed for the very poor, and are tiny, the colonies are so pretty that they are now very up-market and much sought-after. A colony consists of a gridwork of little streets - generally a central spine with a series of short streets at right-angles to it - containing small but attractive two-storey houses with a garden at front and back. Each storey is actually a separate flat, with the garden on one side belonging to the ground floor and that on the other side to the top floor. Often, the top floor has an external staircase sloping down into the middle of the garden.
More modern housing-estates in Scotland, especially council-owned ones, are called "schemes" and the people who live in them are called "schemies". This is not a compliment. Although there are undoubtedly many nice people living in Scottish housing-schemes, the ones around the outskirts of Edinburgh tend to be places where even police cars only venture in pairs, and where the local sport is setting fire to a building and then stoning the fire-brigade.
Single-storey houses, often called bungalows, are fairly rare. In most towns the norm is two storeys but London houses are often three or more storeys, and in Edinburgh (despite the Craigleith area, which is mostly bungalows) the norm is four storeys and up.
You may come across the term "maisonette". This generally means a home which spreads over more than one storey in a multi-storey building, but does not occupy the whole building.
The names of the main rooms in a property vary from area to area and class to class. A dining room is a room, usually quite small, which has a large table in it and is reserved for eating: most houses are too small to have one. As I would use the terms, a living room is a room which is used for general purposes - dressmaking, watching the telly, kids playing, just general living stuff - while a sitting room is a slightly more formal room where you would have a nice sofa and so on and would entertain guests or set up the Christmas tree. If you only have room for one large room it will be called a living room.
Some people, however, would call the smarter room the lounge (a very middle-class term, especially southern English middle class), and they might call the general-purpose room either a living room or a sitting room. A very formal small room which is only used for entertaining guests and for special occasions would be a parlour or a front room, but these are now rare: few houses are big enough and few Brits formal enough to have one.
In Edinburgh you sometimes see older flats so large that even the central hallway is about forty foot by twelve: but a very high proportion of Edinburgh flats are so small that they have no separate living room at all and instead have what's called a kitchen/living room: one medium-sized room where you have the cooker, the fridge, your telly, your sofa etc. all crammed in together. You sometimes see, especially in London, properties called bedsits (short for bed-sitting-rooms) which are a combined bedroom and living room with a shared communal bathroom and either a communal kitchen or just a hob in the bedsit itself. These are usually temporary, rented homes rather than long-term, bought ones.
Air-conditioning is rare in Britain, except in high-tech. offices with no natural ventilation. I personally only consciously know of one private household which has air-conditioning, which they have as a medical necessity because the father has severe ME which makes it difficult for him to control his own body temperature.
I gather from the comments of an American friend that American houses don't have a distinction between drinking- and non-drinking water. Here direct mains water, such as you would get in a kitchen sink, is considered drinkable. The water that feeds the bathroom basin may be from the mains, which is OK, or it may be coming from a cold-water tank, in which case it's not considered drinkable (is "non-potable") because of the risk that there may be things growing in it. [At my secondary school we used to drink water which came from a cold-water tank, and then somebody went up in the roof and found that the lid was off and there was a very dead pigeon floating in it.]
On the subject of plumbing, note that many flats in Edinburgh (I can't really speak for elsewhere) are too small to fit a bath in, and only have a shower. When I left London in 1989 there were still some houses near us, in Crystal Palace, which had only an outdoor lavatory and no bathroom: I'm not sure if this is still the case. It is certainly likely that Snape's house in Spinner's End, in 1996 in a run-down area, only had an outdoor lavvy and no bath.
House prices are very high in most areas of Britain; it's very rare nowadays to see a flat for less than £80,000 (about $150,000) or a house for less than £120,000, and prices are rising all the time. The sort of house you might want to buy as a starter home in your early twenties will cost you eight to ten times the annual salary you are likely to be earning in your early twenties. This causes problems in rural and inner-city communities where the less well-off are no longer able to buy a house in their own village, and locals are progressively forced out by wealthy commuters.
I gather that utility companies (gas, electricity etc.) in the U.S. usually require a deposit before setting up a new account. British ones don't, although there is generally a fee for connecting a new 'phone-line.
Spinner's End:-
In the specific instance of the house at Spinner's End, as described in the Harry Potter books, this is a particular type of working-men's cottage, built by factory-owners to house their workers cheaply, and common in the north of England, Northern Ireland and some areas of Scotland.
The houses in Spinner's End are almost certainly what's called two-up-and-two-down: that is, two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs. These houses are often built back-to-back: that is, they are two rooms wide and one room deep and there is no space at the back, the houses simply backing straight on to the ones in the next street over.
However, the fact that the street door at Spinner's End opens directly into the living room suggests that Snape's house is one room wide and two deep. This means that there will be some sort of yard or small garden at the back, to allow light into the rear rooms. The yard could be shared with the house behind, or there could be two yards backing on to each other - but most likely there will be a narrow alleyway between the yards of one row and the yards of the row behind them, and each yard will have a door onto that alley. Unless the houses have been modernized, there will be an outdoor lavatory in the yard, and no bathroom.
The streets would be narrow and cobbled. If it is the north of England, as it appears to be, there would definitely be no front gardens, except just possibly a narrow strip literally only about 3ft wide (although I am assured that similar houses in Wales do sometimes have small front gardens): but there might be a small back garden or yard and there might well be allotments.
Former mill-towns and workmen's cottages of the type of Spinner's End are common throughout Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in England, the Dundee, Fife and Lanarkshire areas of Scotland, and Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland. Although it would be nice to think of Snape as a Yorkshireman Yorkshire is the least likely of the English possibilities, because Yorkshire is a very popular tourist destination, and by 1996 (when The Half-Blood Prince opens) most of the little mill-towns in Yorkshire had been renovated and Yuppified, although Huddersfield and parts of Bradford are still scruffy enough to be possible. The most probable location of Spinner's End is probably somewhere close to Manchester, i.e. in south Lancashire or north Derbyshire - but probably not right in Manchester itself, simply because if it was in a major city it seems unlikely Bellatrix would suggest that she and Narcissa might be the first pure-bloods ever to set foot there.
Transport:-
"Railway", not "railroad".
"Goods wagon", not "boxcar".
"Carriage" (as a passenger-carrying part of a train), not "car".
"Motorway" (of a major, high-speed road), not "highway", although we use the term highway in other contexts.
We do not have motels, as such. Motorway service stations, however, often include a small cheap hotel.
"Petrol", not "gas", and "garage", not "gas station" - although a garage is also a sort of shed you park a car in, or a depot which repairs cars.
"Car park", not "parking lot".
"Car", not "automobile" (and remember we drive on the left).
"Bonnet", not "hood" (of a car).
"Boot", not "trunk" (of a car).
"Hooter", not "horn" (of a car).
"Windscreen", not "windshield".
"Wing", not "side" (of a car).
I'm not 100% sure what a "gas pedal" is, but I imagine it's what we call an "accelerator".
The traditional, bow-fronted small Volkswagon car which in the U.S. is called a Bug is here called a Beetle. The similarly-shaped but more angular Citroen 2CV or Deux Cheval is sometimes called a Tin Snail.
We tend to prefer relatively small and understated cars here; not big things with fins, which are seen as garish.
"Motorbike", not "motorcycle".
Most commonly and colloquially "biker", not "motorcyclist".
Bicycles are often called bikes - or pushbikes, to distinguish them from motorbikes. The phrase "On yer bike" means "Hurry up" - often "Hurry up and go away".
Note that it has been compulsory since 1973 for British motorcyclists to wear crash helmets. It has been compulsory for adults in the front seats of cars to wear seatbelts since 1983, and in the back seats since 1991, although these laws are often flouted. Children aged 12 or more, or who are 5ft tall or more, must also wear adult seatbelts. Younger/smaller children aged 3-11 must wear a special child restraint if available, an adult belt if not. Children under 3 must use a specialized child restraint (usually a little seat with a harness) if one is available; if no child-restraint is available they must be carried only in the back of the car. Coach, bus and taxi passengers, however, do not have to wear seatbelts.
Also note that we have very, very stringent rules on drink-driving, which are rigorously enforced. Since January 1966 the legal limit has been 80mg of alcohol in 100cc of blood, which effectively limits drivers to one small drink in the course of an evening, and there are frequent calls to reduce the limit to 50mg. It is normal, therefore, that when a group of friends go out for a drink they either leave their cars behind and take a taxi, or one person in the group is the designated driver and does not drink. In major cities, it often happens that on New Year's Eve one of the big breweries will actually pay to provide free buses all night, so that punters can drink as much as they like and then get home safely.
Wildlife I don't care how romantic they make your latest slash epic seem - we do not have fireflies in Britain. Indeed, fireflies are sometimes used in British writing as an icon of foreignness, an obvious signal that a story is set anywhere other than here. We do have bioluminescent beetles called glowworms (or glow worms), which are closely related to fireflies, but they do not produce a flying light and are quite rare (I've lived in various different places in Britain for forty-eight years, much of it in the countryside, and I've never seen one). There are actual flying fireflies in some places in continental Europe - the nearest being in Belgium - so if you want a romantic scene with actual flying, dancing fireflies your characters will just have to go for a weekend break on the continent. Glowworms are in fact very occasionally refered to as fireflies or as fire beetles, but "glowworm" is very much the commonest term and whatever they are called they do not behave like the creatures which are elsewhere called fireflies, since they never produce a flying fire. The eggs sometimes have a faint glow and the crawling larvae can also produce a brief, dim twinkle, but the really bright lights belong to the flightless adult females, which produce a steady (not flashing), brilliant light about as big and bright as a Christmas Tree fairy-light. But they are flightless, and so the lights glimmer in the bushes and crawl to the tips of the long grass - the glow never dances or moves through the air. The adult males do fly to seek a mate; but the males produce no fire at all. Glowworm lights are seen only on warm, dry nights in summer. I've seen one source say they are active from May to August - another, only for a few weeks around midsummer, so you're probably safest to assume June and July. They occur mainly in the south and middle of England and in Wales. They are occasionally seen in the north of England, but are almost unknown in Scotland and not found at all in Man or in Ireland.We do not have packrats here, and therefore people who hoard things are not called packrats. They are called magpies, or sometimes squirrels - saving things up is sometimes referred to as "squirreling them away". Curiously enough, we do however have wallabies. There are at least two substantial colonies which have gone native, one in Wiltshire near Whipsnade Zoo, and one on the shores of Loch Lomond. There are also flocks of parrakeets living wild in the south of England. There are also persistent and fairly well-attested rumours of small colonies of big cats, especially pumas and black leopards, living wild in Britain, descended from individuals which were dumped some decades ago when we introduced legislation preventing people from keeping dangerous wild animals without proper secure facilities. Note that all species of bat are extremely heavily protected in the U.K.. It's illegal even knowingly to disturb one, let alone to kill one. If you have bats in the loft, you just have to put up with them. The U.K. is effectively rabies-free. Very occasionally bats are found to have rabies, and in 2002 a Scot died after being bitten by a rabied bat, but this was the first and only case of a human contracting rabies in Britain for over a hundred years. IIRC there was one case of rabies in a dog - about forty years ago. Rabies does occur on continental Europe but is exceedingly rare. Other nasties sometimes found in the U.S. and elsewhere, such as bubonic plague and Hanta virus, are also unknown here. We also have no poisonous snakes except the adder, which is only mildly toxic, though it can occasionally be dangerous to small children or the very frail. In fact, we only have three species of snake - the adder, the grass snake and the smooth snake (which is very very rare and only lives in a few areas in the south of England) - plus the slow-worm, which is a legless lizard. Britain has no native poisonous spiders (although we do have wolf spiders, which can give you a nasty nip and are quite aggressive about it). In the south of England there are a few colonies of a foreign spider (believed to have hitched a lift on some imported fruit in the late 19th C) called the false widow, which resembles, and is related to, the black widow; but its bite is only about as bad as a bad wasp sting, and is not dangerous unless you are unusually sensitive to it, or already frail. We do have native scorpions in the south of England - but they are rare, tiny, off-white, almost transparent - and not poisonous. About the only halfway dangerous wildlife in Britain is hornets (sort of souped-up wasps), which have a very nasty sting - but you can go your whole life and never see one. Oh, and Scottish wild cats. The Scottish wild cat looks like a large domestic tabby the size of a Maine Coon, with a wide flat head and a tail which is thicker at the tip than at the base - and a really bad attitude, somewhat reminiscent of a Tasmanian Devil. It is traditionally said that a Scottish wild cat once killed an armoured knight, and this is quite possible. However, they have mostly been diluted by interbreeding with domestic cats. The pureblooded, perpetually angry traditional wild cat is now found only in a few remote areas, and isn't likely to bother you unless you are mad enough to interfere with a nest. We don't have contact-poisonous plants such as poison-ivy, either, except for stinging nettles - and Giant Hogweed. Giant Hogweed, a fairly recent invader of our shores, can blister your skin and even blind you, usually but not always temporarily. It is difficult to get mixed up with a full-grown Giant Hogweed by accident because it looks like an eighteen-foot triffid; but young ones can be dangerous because they can be mistaken for ordinary-sized hogweed, which is a common, harmless hedgerow plant about 3ft tall. We do have plenty of things which are deadly poisonous to eat, and plenty of spiky things - 6ft thistles, fields of nettles and thickets of brambles etc.. About 70% of the plants in a typical British hedgerow will either acratch you or sting you. Our woodlands may seem tame and domestic compared with the vast forests of North America - but they have dense undergrowth which means that it is difficult to walk 20ft into an established British deciduous wood without getting spiked, scratched, stung and twisting your ankle.
I don't care how romantic they make your latest slash epic seem - we do not have fireflies in Britain. Indeed, fireflies are sometimes used in British writing as an icon of foreignness, an obvious signal that a story is set anywhere other than here. We do have bioluminescent beetles called glowworms (or glow worms), which are closely related to fireflies, but they do not produce a flying light and are quite rare (I've lived in various different places in Britain for forty-eight years, much of it in the countryside, and I've never seen one). There are actual flying fireflies in some places in continental Europe - the nearest being in Belgium - so if you want a romantic scene with actual flying, dancing fireflies your characters will just have to go for a weekend break on the continent.
Glowworms are in fact very occasionally refered to as fireflies or as fire beetles, but "glowworm" is very much the commonest term and whatever they are called they do not behave like the creatures which are elsewhere called fireflies, since they never produce a flying fire. The eggs sometimes have a faint glow and the crawling larvae can also produce a brief, dim twinkle, but the really bright lights belong to the flightless adult females, which produce a steady (not flashing), brilliant light about as big and bright as a Christmas Tree fairy-light. But they are flightless, and so the lights glimmer in the bushes and crawl to the tips of the long grass - the glow never dances or moves through the air. The adult males do fly to seek a mate; but the males produce no fire at all.
Glowworm lights are seen only on warm, dry nights in summer. I've seen one source say they are active from May to August - another, only for a few weeks around midsummer, so you're probably safest to assume June and July. They occur mainly in the south and middle of England and in Wales. They are occasionally seen in the north of England, but are almost unknown in Scotland and not found at all in Man or in Ireland.
We do not have packrats here, and therefore people who hoard things are not called packrats. They are called magpies, or sometimes squirrels - saving things up is sometimes referred to as "squirreling them away".
Curiously enough, we do however have wallabies. There are at least two substantial colonies which have gone native, one in Wiltshire near Whipsnade Zoo, and one on the shores of Loch Lomond. There are also flocks of parrakeets living wild in the south of England. There are also persistent and fairly well-attested rumours of small colonies of big cats, especially pumas and black leopards, living wild in Britain, descended from individuals which were dumped some decades ago when we introduced legislation preventing people from keeping dangerous wild animals without proper secure facilities.
Note that all species of bat are extremely heavily protected in the U.K.. It's illegal even knowingly to disturb one, let alone to kill one. If you have bats in the loft, you just have to put up with them.
The U.K. is effectively rabies-free. Very occasionally bats are found to have rabies, and in 2002 a Scot died after being bitten by a rabied bat, but this was the first and only case of a human contracting rabies in Britain for over a hundred years. IIRC there was one case of rabies in a dog - about forty years ago. Rabies does occur on continental Europe but is exceedingly rare. Other nasties sometimes found in the U.S. and elsewhere, such as bubonic plague and Hanta virus, are also unknown here.
We also have no poisonous snakes except the adder, which is only mildly toxic, though it can occasionally be dangerous to small children or the very frail. In fact, we only have three species of snake - the adder, the grass snake and the smooth snake (which is very very rare and only lives in a few areas in the south of England) - plus the slow-worm, which is a legless lizard.
Britain has no native poisonous spiders (although we do have wolf spiders, which can give you a nasty nip and are quite aggressive about it). In the south of England there are a few colonies of a foreign spider (believed to have hitched a lift on some imported fruit in the late 19th C) called the false widow, which resembles, and is related to, the black widow; but its bite is only about as bad as a bad wasp sting, and is not dangerous unless you are unusually sensitive to it, or already frail. We do have native scorpions in the south of England - but they are rare, tiny, off-white, almost transparent - and not poisonous. About the only halfway dangerous wildlife in Britain is hornets (sort of souped-up wasps), which have a very nasty sting - but you can go your whole life and never see one.
Oh, and Scottish wild cats. The Scottish wild cat looks like a large domestic tabby the size of a Maine Coon, with a wide flat head and a tail which is thicker at the tip than at the base - and a really bad attitude, somewhat reminiscent of a Tasmanian Devil. It is traditionally said that a Scottish wild cat once killed an armoured knight, and this is quite possible. However, they have mostly been diluted by interbreeding with domestic cats. The pureblooded, perpetually angry traditional wild cat is now found only in a few remote areas, and isn't likely to bother you unless you are mad enough to interfere with a nest.
We don't have contact-poisonous plants such as poison-ivy, either, except for stinging nettles - and Giant Hogweed. Giant Hogweed, a fairly recent invader of our shores, can blister your skin and even blind you, usually but not always temporarily. It is difficult to get mixed up with a full-grown Giant Hogweed by accident because it looks like an eighteen-foot triffid; but young ones can be dangerous because they can be mistaken for ordinary-sized hogweed, which is a common, harmless hedgerow plant about 3ft tall.
We do have plenty of things which are deadly poisonous to eat, and plenty of spiky things - 6ft thistles, fields of nettles and thickets of brambles etc.. About 70% of the plants in a typical British hedgerow will either acratch you or sting you. Our woodlands may seem tame and domestic compared with the vast forests of North America - but they have dense undergrowth which means that it is difficult to walk 20ft into an established British deciduous wood without getting spiked, scratched, stung and twisting your ankle.
Sports We do not play baseball in Britain, except as a deliberately American affectation. We do have a nearly-identical game called rounders, but it is regarded as a lightweight sport for primary-school children. Cricket is not nearly as popular as it used to be. The main sport is football - what Americans call soccer. American football is known but again played only as an American affectation. Rugby is also common: this is similar to American football but played without any sort of protective kit (and yes, it's dangerous). For some reason football attracts a fairly high incident of violent or sectarian supporters while rugby, although superficially similar, does not. In certain towns which have a high proportion of residents of Irish Catholic origin, support for football teams used to be very much divided along sectarian grounds, and to an extent it still is. In Scotland, Celtic in Glasgow and Hibernian (Hibs) in Edinburgh are Catholic-supported sides, and Rangers in Glasgow and Heart of Midlothian (Hearts) in Edinburgh are Protestant. The Protestant team supporters tend to be somewhat the more violent, and in recent years at least one Celtic fan was murdered just for supporting a Catholic side. Ice-hockey is rare and only really played here as a Canadian affectation, although ordinary hockey is popular in girls' schools. Hurling and shinty, which are similar to ice-hockey except without the ice, are popular in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, respectively. Curling, which is rather like lawn-bowling on ice, is also quite popular in Scotland. Tennis, pool and snooker are also popular spectator and participation sports. Tennis, netball and hockey are very much played at girls' schools, but to play tennis as an adult is less common because of the limited availability of courts. Lacrosse used to be popular at posh girls' schools - I'm not sure if it still is. We do not go in for cheer-leaders in Britain, although there are probably a few groups scattered around; instead, teams often have strange mascots, such as people dressed as eight-foot chickens. Certain areas, especially Kent for some reason, suffer extensively from drum majorettes.
We do not play baseball in Britain, except as a deliberately American affectation. We do have a nearly-identical game called rounders, but it is regarded as a lightweight sport for primary-school children.
Cricket is not nearly as popular as it used to be. The main sport is football - what Americans call soccer. American football is known but again played only as an American affectation. Rugby is also common: this is similar to American football but played without any sort of protective kit (and yes, it's dangerous).
For some reason football attracts a fairly high incident of violent or sectarian supporters while rugby, although superficially similar, does not. In certain towns which have a high proportion of residents of Irish Catholic origin, support for football teams used to be very much divided along sectarian grounds, and to an extent it still is. In Scotland, Celtic in Glasgow and Hibernian (Hibs) in Edinburgh are Catholic-supported sides, and Rangers in Glasgow and Heart of Midlothian (Hearts) in Edinburgh are Protestant. The Protestant team supporters tend to be somewhat the more violent, and in recent years at least one Celtic fan was murdered just for supporting a Catholic side.
Ice-hockey is rare and only really played here as a Canadian affectation, although ordinary hockey is popular in girls' schools. Hurling and shinty, which are similar to ice-hockey except without the ice, are popular in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, respectively. Curling, which is rather like lawn-bowling on ice, is also quite popular in Scotland.
Tennis, pool and snooker are also popular spectator and participation sports. Tennis, netball and hockey are very much played at girls' schools, but to play tennis as an adult is less common because of the limited availability of courts. Lacrosse used to be popular at posh girls' schools - I'm not sure if it still is.
We do not go in for cheer-leaders in Britain, although there are probably a few groups scattered around; instead, teams often have strange mascots, such as people dressed as eight-foot chickens. Certain areas, especially Kent for some reason, suffer extensively from drum majorettes.
Clothes "Dressing-gown", not (usually) "bathrobe". A bathrobe here would usually be a shortish towelling thing to wear while drying your hair etc., and is uncommon; a dressing-gown (sometimes also called a house-coat) is a long floppy thing, usually fastened with ties or a soft belt, which you wear over sleepwear. The robes worn by students and staff in the Harry Potter books are probably similar to academic gowns. "Pyjamas", sometimes also colloquially called "jimjams", not "pajamas". Girls may wear pyjamas or may sleep in a nightdress, a.k.a. a "nightie". "Waistcoat", not "vest". "Vest", not "undershirt" or "singlet" - except in the west of Scotland where it may be called a singlet or sometimes a "semmit". A vest in this sense is often worn underneath another garment and is usually white and made of much thinner fabric than a T-shirt; a "string vest" is made of an open-weave material with perforations right through it. Usually "dinner suit" or "dinner jacket" or "tail-coat", not "tuxedo". Smart clothes for special occasions are called "formal dress" or "evening dress" or similar. "Fancy-dress" in Britain is the sort of thing you'd wear on a carnival float - gorilla suits and fairy-wings and so-on. Usually "swimming costume" for a woman and "swimming trunks" for a man, rather than "swim suit", which is known but less common. "Trousers" (or jeans or slacks etc.), not (usually) "pants". As far as I know we do not use the terms "khakis" or "chinos" - they would just be called casual slacks. Slacks generally are soft trousers which do not require to be pressed and creased; but jeans and sweat-suit, track-suit and shell-suit bottoms do not count as slacks. [A shell-suit is like a track-suit but made of a very lightweight, crisp, slighly waterproof fabric, usually in very bright colours. They were very popular in the early 1990s.] "Pants" are (usually) undergarments, also called "knickers" or "panties" for women and "underpants" (or boxers or Y-fronts) for men. Male undergarments are never knickers (except in transvestites and drag queens). Male pants are not usually called briefs - briefs are pants women wear which stop at the hip. Garments for the upper body are collectively called "tops", especially for women. Underwear in general, including not only pants/knickers but also petticoats, bras and maybe vests, is often collectively called "smalls", as well as "lingerie" (especially in shop displays), "undergarments", "underwear" and sometimes "underthings". "Sweater" is only normally used of a knitted top which is quite thick and heavy. Traditional kinds of sweaters include cable-knit (often associated with the island of Arran in the west of Scotland), in which plain-coloured, usually natural off-white wool is bunched together into a complex pattern of raised, criss-crossing ridges; and Fair Isle, where the garment is made up of bands of small, repeated geometric patterns. A lighter-weight knitted top which does not open down the front is called a "jumper", or sometimes a "pullover". For some reason, a closed knitted top with a high neck, usually one which sort-of rolls over on itself (similar to a turtle-neck but less floppy), is usually called a "polo-necked sweater" rather than a jumper, even if it is quite lightweight. Crew-necks and v-necks are the same as in the U.S.. A knitted top which opens right out all the way down the front and fastens with buttons or a zip is called a "cardigan" or "cardie". I don't think that the sleeveless dress which Americans call a jumper has any specific name here; if it does, I don't know it. A T-shirt with long sleeves is often called a sweatshirt. A sweat-suit top, however, is a one-sided fleece, as in the U.S.. Ties are no longer common here, except in very formal situations. A ready-made bow-tie which you don't have to tie yourself is called a "clip-on". An ordinary tie which is very wide is nicknamed a "kipper tie". In the Liverpool area sandals are sometimes called "Jesus boots". The sort of sandals which are held on by a strap passing between the first and second toe, and which Australians call "thongs", are here called "flipflops". A "thong" in Britain is a G-string, especially a leather one. "Clogs" in Britain are shoes with a wooden sole, often backless - but the term is also sometimes used for a traditional shoe which used to be worn in the Netherlands and was entirely carved from wood. The kind of running shoes which Americans call sneakers or tennis shoes, we call trainers. Up to about 1980, before trainers became a fashion item, the simplest rubber-soled running shoes were known as plimsolls or gym shoes. I believe we do have the expression "high top" for a long-tongued trainer which covers the ankle, although British trainers generally seem to be quite padded and high-sided. We might use "tennis shoe" of a lightweight trainer actually worn for tennis, but not of one worn as a fashion statement. Since about 1980 Dr Marten's lace-up boots, known as "Doc Martens" or "Docs", which fit the leg tightly and come well above the ankle, have also become very popular with the under-25s - and in some areas they are now possibly more so than trainers. "Flies", not "placket" (of trousers). "Bra", not "brassiere". "Nappy", not "diaper". Facial hair is rarely worn, other than by devout Moslems, Orthodox Jews, bikers and ageing hippies.
"Dressing-gown", not (usually) "bathrobe". A bathrobe here would usually be a shortish towelling thing to wear while drying your hair etc., and is uncommon; a dressing-gown (sometimes also called a house-coat) is a long floppy thing, usually fastened with ties or a soft belt, which you wear over sleepwear.
The robes worn by students and staff in the Harry Potter books are probably similar to academic gowns.
"Pyjamas", sometimes also colloquially called "jimjams", not "pajamas".
Girls may wear pyjamas or may sleep in a nightdress, a.k.a. a "nightie".
"Waistcoat", not "vest".
"Vest", not "undershirt" or "singlet" - except in the west of Scotland where it may be called a singlet or sometimes a "semmit". A vest in this sense is often worn underneath another garment and is usually white and made of much thinner fabric than a T-shirt; a "string vest" is made of an open-weave material with perforations right through it.
Usually "dinner suit" or "dinner jacket" or "tail-coat", not "tuxedo".
Smart clothes for special occasions are called "formal dress" or "evening dress" or similar. "Fancy-dress" in Britain is the sort of thing you'd wear on a carnival float - gorilla suits and fairy-wings and so-on.
Usually "swimming costume" for a woman and "swimming trunks" for a man, rather than "swim suit", which is known but less common.
"Trousers" (or jeans or slacks etc.), not (usually) "pants". As far as I know we do not use the terms "khakis" or "chinos" - they would just be called casual slacks. Slacks generally are soft trousers which do not require to be pressed and creased; but jeans and sweat-suit, track-suit and shell-suit bottoms do not count as slacks. [A shell-suit is like a track-suit but made of a very lightweight, crisp, slighly waterproof fabric, usually in very bright colours. They were very popular in the early 1990s.]
"Pants" are (usually) undergarments, also called "knickers" or "panties" for women and "underpants" (or boxers or Y-fronts) for men. Male undergarments are never knickers (except in transvestites and drag queens). Male pants are not usually called briefs - briefs are pants women wear which stop at the hip.
Garments for the upper body are collectively called "tops", especially for women.
Underwear in general, including not only pants/knickers but also petticoats, bras and maybe vests, is often collectively called "smalls", as well as "lingerie" (especially in shop displays), "undergarments", "underwear" and sometimes "underthings".
"Sweater" is only normally used of a knitted top which is quite thick and heavy. Traditional kinds of sweaters include cable-knit (often associated with the island of Arran in the west of Scotland), in which plain-coloured, usually natural off-white wool is bunched together into a complex pattern of raised, criss-crossing ridges; and Fair Isle, where the garment is made up of bands of small, repeated geometric patterns. A lighter-weight knitted top which does not open down the front is called a "jumper", or sometimes a "pullover".
For some reason, a closed knitted top with a high neck, usually one which sort-of rolls over on itself (similar to a turtle-neck but less floppy), is usually called a "polo-necked sweater" rather than a jumper, even if it is quite lightweight. Crew-necks and v-necks are the same as in the U.S..
A knitted top which opens right out all the way down the front and fastens with buttons or a zip is called a "cardigan" or "cardie".
I don't think that the sleeveless dress which Americans call a jumper has any specific name here; if it does, I don't know it.
A T-shirt with long sleeves is often called a sweatshirt. A sweat-suit top, however, is a one-sided fleece, as in the U.S..
Ties are no longer common here, except in very formal situations. A ready-made bow-tie which you don't have to tie yourself is called a "clip-on". An ordinary tie which is very wide is nicknamed a "kipper tie".
In the Liverpool area sandals are sometimes called "Jesus boots".
The sort of sandals which are held on by a strap passing between the first and second toe, and which Australians call "thongs", are here called "flipflops". A "thong" in Britain is a G-string, especially a leather one.
"Clogs" in Britain are shoes with a wooden sole, often backless - but the term is also sometimes used for a traditional shoe which used to be worn in the Netherlands and was entirely carved from wood.
The kind of running shoes which Americans call sneakers or tennis shoes, we call trainers. Up to about 1980, before trainers became a fashion item, the simplest rubber-soled running shoes were known as plimsolls or gym shoes. I believe we do have the expression "high top" for a long-tongued trainer which covers the ankle, although British trainers generally seem to be quite padded and high-sided. We might use "tennis shoe" of a lightweight trainer actually worn for tennis, but not of one worn as a fashion statement.
Since about 1980 Dr Marten's lace-up boots, known as "Doc Martens" or "Docs", which fit the leg tightly and come well above the ankle, have also become very popular with the under-25s - and in some areas they are now possibly more so than trainers.
"Flies", not "placket" (of trousers).
"Bra", not "brassiere".
"Nappy", not "diaper".
Facial hair is rarely worn, other than by devout Moslems, Orthodox Jews, bikers and ageing hippies.
Descriptions of people There are some ways of describing people which are simply not used in the U.K.. These terms are perfectly legitimate if the author, as narrator, is using them - but they should not be credited to the thoughts or speech of a British character unless that character is known to be somewhat Americanized.
There are some ways of describing people which are simply not used in the U.K.. These terms are perfectly legitimate if the author, as narrator, is using them - but they should not be credited to the thoughts or speech of a British character unless that character is known to be somewhat Americanized.
"Snarky" and its variants - this Dutch-derived word, commonly used to describe Snape, and which I understand means short-tempered and/or nagging, is common in Australia but fairly rare in the U.S., and absolutely unknown in British English, outside of fandom. Here, "snark" is a thing in a Lewis Carroll poem, or an obscure piece of naval equipment, or a type of graph, or a sub-atomic particle (which is named after the thing in the Lewis Carroll poem). It's not even as if it's a common Americanism which a British person might have picked up, since even a lot of Americans haven't heard of it. One of the most popular newspapers in Britain has a column for readers to ask questions, and in 2004 or 2005 someone actually asked whether the word "snark" had any meaning or was it just something Lewis Carroll made up, and out of their entire readership nobody suggested the "short-tempered" interpretation, or anything vaguely like it. It is quite possible that there is nobody in Britain, at all, outside the realms of Harry Potter fan-fiction, who has heard of this meaning of the word: it is, in effect, a dialect word almost exclusively peculiar to Harry Potter fandom, with little currency anywhere in the outside world except Australia, and none whatsoever in Britain. As such, it's culturally fascinating, and it's fine if you use it as part of the narrator's overview - but it shouldn't be attributed to the thoughts or speech of a British character unless you've established that they have an Australian cultural influence..
Possible substitutes for snarky would be snappish, snippy, stroppy, sarcy (short for sarcastic), shirty, catty, carping etc.. One very good substitute (thanks to Elsa2 for the suggestion) is the word "narky", meaning irritable. This should be treated with a certain amount of caution as so far as I know it is almost purely a London word, unlikely to be used by anybody from outside the Home Counties, but it is wonderfully apt for Snape, because although the adjective "narky" means irritable, the noun "nark" means an informer - most often heard in the phrase "copper's nark", a police informer. Although this too is a London expression it is one which is widely known, because it is often heard in TV cop-shows.
The words "feisty", "sassy" or "sass" and "wussy" are also almost completely unknown in Britain. The nearest equivalents would probably be "fiery", "bolshy" and "sissy".
Although the use of "smart" to mean "clever" is known in Britain it is comparatively uncommon. The main meaning of "smart" here is well-dressed or in a good, fresh state of repair - such as "a smart coat of paint". Possible substitutes would be clever or bright.
The expression "punk" as used in the U.S. to mean something like "brat" or "yob" (in fact I'm not even sure what it means) is totally unknown here. A Punk in Britain is somebody who plays or listens to Punk Rock, or who dresses in a Punk style (purple hair, bondage gear, safety-pins etc.). Or it's rotted wood.
People in Britain do not usually "stomp" - which is a pity because it's a useful little word. The nearest equivalents would be stamp or storm. However, although it's an uncommon word here, it's an uncommon word which JK Rowling herself uses, so you can get away with it in a Harry Potter fic.
Nor do they "holler": I've heard the word used here precisely once, and never seen it in anything written by a Brit. Possible alternatives would be "yell", "shout" or "bellow".
To be "pissed off" in Britain is to be annoyed. To be "pissed" is to be drunk. The American expression "pissy" has no meaning here - except possibly "covered in urine".
To be "mad with" someone can mean to be angry, as it does in the U.S., although it is rather slangy and Americanized; but in Britain "mad" on its own - as in "Are you mad?" - usually means to be insane, not angry. Try "angry" itself, or "cross" - "Are you cross with me?" rather than "Are you mad at me?" To be "mad about" someone or something can sometimes mean to be angry but it more often means to be very keen on them, to the point of obsession - see e.g. Noel Coward's song Mad About the Boy which emphatically did not mean angry with him..
Americans on the other hand are sometimes puzzled by the British expression "barking", short for "barking mad". Again this definitely means insane, rather than angry, and is a stronger expression than "mad" on its own. A person may be said to be "mad" when one just means that they are behaving very foolishly, as if they were insane - but "barking" tends more to imply genuine psychosis. It is generally applied to people who are delusional or excessively eccentric, rather than violent.
To be "mean" in Britain is usually to be excesively frugal, not nasty - although a mean-spirited person is one who is very petty and ungenerous.
The expression "potty mouth" for someone who swears a lot is almost never used in Britain. We say the person is "foul-mouthed", or that he or she "swears like a trooper" or "swears like a fishwife" - or sometimes just that he/she is "a bit of a fishwife". [Fishwives were famously rough and foul-mouthed women who used to buy fresh fish directly off the boats and then hawk it through the streets.]
"Scared shitless", not "scared spitless". I know it's crude, but there it is.
In Glasgow it is common to address young women as "doll", and older women as "hen". Men in Glasgow may be addressed as "Jimmy" (but this is often aggressive) or as "wee man" or "big man". In the north of England it is quite comon to address people of either sex affectionately as "duck" or (especially in Derbyshire) "miduck". However, the London habit of calling someone "ducky" is usually teasing and, if male, carries slight implications that either you or they are effeminate. North Derbyshire people also say "me owd" - probably derived from "me old mate". "Mate" itself is common - although also slightly common in the other sense. In many areas of Britain people of either sex to whom one is kindly-disposed are often addressed as "pet" or "love" without implying a deep and meaningful relationship: there are even areas in rural England where people may be addressed as "my lover", in the same casual way. In Liverpool and some areas in Ireland people of either sex may also be jokingly addressed as "petal". People in Newcastle are habitially addressed as "man" - even if they are female.
Some of the above expressions are definitely affectionate - pet, petal, love, lover, duck, miduck, mi owd - and are used much the same way as "dear;" except that "dear" is sometimes used in a perfunctory or even a sarcastic way, and these regional variants rarely are.
It is common to address somebody (usually but not always a male somebody) as "mate", "man" (especially in Newcastle) or, less commonly, as "mush". These expressions do not really mean anything; they're just a friendlier way of saying "Hey you".
The American endearment "honey" is very rarely used here (although I have heard it used a few times in southern Scotland, as a general form of address to a stranger of the opposite sex). British equivalents would be "sweetheart", "sweetie" or "dear".
Children may address an adult man whose name they don't know as "Mister, but for an adult to call somebody "Lady", "Missus" or "Mister" without adding an actual name is potentially offensive - often a challenge or an insult. Rough men on building-sites call women "Lady" when they want to annoy them. Male and female officers in the army or police-force are "Sir" and "Ma'am", and teachers at very formal, old-fashioned schools may be "Sir" and "Miss". "Sir" and "Madam" are sometimes heard outside schools/the Forces, but are terrifically formal to the point of self-parody, and "Madam" is in any case a bit of a minefield, because it can mean the proprietor of a brothel. "Madam" is sometimes used aggressively - "And just what do you think you're looking at, Madam?" - and "a right little Madam" is a stroppy, bossy, affected young girl. The norm is to call people Mr, Mrs, Miss followed by their surname if you are being markedly formal, and to call them by their first-name if you are not. First names are often used even in quite formal conversations with strangers. The exception is persons whose job carries a specific form of address - "Doctor", "Sister", "Sergeant", "Vicar" or whatever - who are normally addressed by that job-title unless you know them very well.
"Sprog" is an affectionate word for a child.
The expression "breed", used as an insult, is not so far as I know ever used here. If you say "breed" to somebody here they'll think you mean a King Charles Spaniel, or a very formal injunction to "fuck off". The commonest, equivalent generic racist insult here is probably "wog".
"Disrespect" is not used as verb here ("He disrespected me") except by young persons trying too hard to sound cool. We say somebody "showed disrespect" to someone, rather than that they "disrespected" them.
Note that in Harry Potter fanon there is a tendency to have students call Snape "an overgrown bat", the great bat of the dungeons" etc.. In fact this is almost entirely unsupported. In the first book the Quirrel/Voldemort hybrid entity does call Snape "an overgrown bat", in the fourth book Hary and Ron speculate that he might be able to turn into a bat and there are two instances, one each in the second and sixth books, where the narrator/Harry's point of view thinks of him as bat-like because of his swooping dark robes; but no student ever actually calls him that. Ron calls Professor Trelawney an "old bat", and Mundungus says the same to Mrs Figg - and in fact, in Britain "bat" or more commonly "old bat" is a term for an annoying older woman.
Profanity The mildest insulting terms applied to males are probably "git" and "arse", which basically just mean "adult male whom I find annoying:" similar to the American "jerk" but only about a third as strong. The female equivalent is "bint". These terms express only a very weak disapproval: in fact "git" is probably derived from "get", which just means "offspring", and can be seen as the adult male equivalent of "brat", except that it is if anything milder; the sort of word you would use of a friend who wouldn't share his peanuts A "chit" likewise is just a youngish girl, with slight implications of brattishness. "Old coot" and "old biddy" are similar mild expressions used of elderly men and women, respectively; they carry slight implications of silliness. "Geezer" or "old geezer" is another very mild term for a male - it's really just a slang word for "man", but tends to be used in situations where you are expressing irritation. The next layer up would be "bugger" and "bleeder", both of which suggest the person is a nuisance in some way. Then "bastard" or "sod", which suggest they are unpleasant. All four are generally applied only to males. The female equivalent of "bastard" would be "bitch" or "cow", both of which imply spiteful nastiness. A "cat" would make snide remarks about you; a "bitch" would seriously damage you for personal gain; a "cow" would seriously damage you for fun. "Cow" does not imply ugliness or stupidity, as it does in the U.S., unless linked with a modifier - "fat cow", "dozy cow" etc. - "dozy mare" is also heard, but is generally said quite affectionately. For some reason "fat cow" or "dozy cow" do not imply viciousness, even though "cow" on its own does. A "bat" or "old bat" is an annoying older woman. None of these animal terms is applied directly to a male (unless he is a camp gay) but a male may be "catty" or "bitchy". "Arse" or "arsehole", not "ass". An ass is a donkey or a fool, and nothing else, and is seldom or never heard as an insult on its own, although "silly ass" is quite common for a foolish person ("silly arse" is also heard). But "bum" is your buttocks, not a tramp! It can also mean scrounge, as in "She bummed some cigarettes off him". A "fag" btw is either a cigarette or a young boy at a boarding school who fetches and carries for an older boy in return for patronage - it does not usually mean a gay man, here, although "faggot" does, and we do have the expression "fag-hag" for a straight woman with lots of gay male friends. Beware of the word "fanny" - as I understand it, in the U.S. it refers mainly to buttocks, but here it's the female genital mound. The belt-mounted, zipped bag which in the U.S. is called a "fanny pack" is here called a "bum bag". "Jerk" is sometimes used in Britain, although "prick", "wanker", "tosser", "dick" or "dickhead" are commoner. "Wazzock" and "berk" are heard but are less common. "Jackass" and "jerk-off" are not used. "Toerag" and "scumbag" are both used of somebody who has behaved despicably, usually in a particularly underhand way - somebody who lies about you to the boss to get you into trouble, for example, or burgles your home while they're supposed to be babysitting. The alternative spelling "eejit" for "idiot" is sometimes used, especially in Ireland. "Pillock" and "prat" both suggest an idiot who is also uptight, self-righteous and annoying. A "dog" is an ugly woman. In Scotland a "minger" (to rhyme with "ringer") is an ugly, unappealing or dirty person of either sex. The word "bloody" (and its slightly old-fashioned variants "bleeding" and "ruddy"), is used to add emphasis - "bloody Hell, what's that bloody fool think he's doing?" - so casually and so commonly that it has lost all ability to shock. "Fucking" is going the same way, as are all variants of the f-word. "Fuck off" used to be shocking, but is now hardly stronger than "Piss off" (in the sense of "go away" rather than "make angry"). "Piss" - or in Scotland "pish" - can also be an expression for something useless or rubbishy - "It wis pure pish, man". "Sodding" and "buggering" are used as emphatics in the same manner as "bloody" and "fucking", but are rarer and somewhat stronger (and are not seen as homophobic, since few people think about what they mean, any more than they think about "bloody" meaning "By Our Lady"). "Blasted", "damned" and "flaming" are also used, and are all slightly milder than "bloody". These expressions are sometimes doubled up e.g. "bleeding, buggering Hell". "Frigging" is sometimes heard as a milder alternative to "fucking". "Shit!" (or its variant "shite", which is more common in Scotland) used as a general expression of surprize or digust has also lost all power to shock, and almost ceased to count as a swear. You can also say "This is a load of shit" (or shite) to mean that something is rubbish. And note that the past-tense of shit, when used as a verb, is usually "shat", as in the expression "shat on from a great height", which means someone or something (often, fate itself) pulled a very nasty trick on you. Some old-fashioned or consciously refined people still use "Sugar!" as a euphemistic alternative to "shit". However, this useage has so far been corrupted that some people now use it as a double-emphatic, and say "Shit with sugar on". In Scotland a thing which is rubbish, no good etc. can also be described as "mince", and a person who is useless may be called a "tube" - usually coupled with the Scots "ya" instead of "you", e.g. "Wotcha do that for, ya tube?" "Cunt" is still shocking, and interestingly although it is a female genital reference it is rarely used of women, and almost never by women. "Twat", which has exactly the same meaning but is slightly less emphatic, is used of and by both sexes. Both words mean that the person is highly unpleasant or a major fool, but they do not have the sexual implications they have in America. A sexually-promiscuous female would be a "slapper", a "scrubber", an "old bag" or a plain "tart". Or a "bike" (everybody rides it) - although that last isn't common. "Twit", on the other hand, is just a word for somebody silly - often seen in the phrase "pompous twit". To "cock it up" means to fail badly at doing something. A "cock up" or "balls up" is a confusing, untidy failure at something. To say something is "balls" or "bollocks" means you think it is nonsense or rubbish. The specifically Glaswegian term "radge" (and all variant spellings thereof) means a nutter, a crazy person - again, usually coupled with the Scots "ya" for "you". It is common for British men of all ages to use insults as terms of endearment, addressing close male friends quite amicably as "cunt", "bastard" etc. - e.g., "How are you, yah mangy cunt?" etc.. Women sometimes address men this way as well. Men and women born before about 1975 do not address women in this amiably-insulting fashion; younger than that, the habit is pretty unisex. Despite all this, some very refined Scots still use nothing stronger than the exclamations "Gosh!" and "Jings!" Glaswegians, although they can be rough in other ways, often have a very firm belief that one should never make unkind personal remarks about other people's appearance, and do not do so. I gather that some American's use "bubbies" as a slang, rather coarse term for breasts. The closest British equivalent would be "boobies" or more commonly "boobs", but these are both now rather old-fashioned. The modern equivalent would be "tits". The expression "dunderhead", which Snape uses in the Harry Potter books and which means an idiot, is extremely rare in most parts of Britain but is common in the Peak District - a group of small towns in north Derbyshire including Buxton, Cromford, Matlock Bath and Leek. I'm guessing it may be current in Nottingham as well, since the guy on whom JK Rowling based much of Snape is from Nottingham. There are some other insults which are very localized, including "radge", as described above, and the south-west English word "emmet", which strictly-speaking means an ant but is used disparagingly of tourists. The projecting middle-finger gesture and "fuck you" comment, with its implied threat of rape, is uncommon here. The usual equivalent here is "fuck off" (that is, "go away and have sex"), often accompanied by sticking up the first and second fingers, opened into a V in imitation of a woman's spread legs, with the back of the hand towards the target. Sticking up the first two fingers in a V with the palm towards the target is the famous wartime V-for-Victory sign, and the "fuck off" gesture is sometimes also jokingly referred to as "the old V-sign". The hand signal may also be used on its own, and may be made more emphatic by waggling the hand back and forth or up and down. You also occasionally hear the expression "Away and poke yourself".
The mildest insulting terms applied to males are probably "git" and "arse", which basically just mean "adult male whom I find annoying:" similar to the American "jerk" but only about a third as strong. The female equivalent is "bint". These terms express only a very weak disapproval: in fact "git" is probably derived from "get", which just means "offspring", and can be seen as the adult male equivalent of "brat", except that it is if anything milder; the sort of word you would use of a friend who wouldn't share his peanuts A "chit" likewise is just a youngish girl, with slight implications of brattishness.
"Old coot" and "old biddy" are similar mild expressions used of elderly men and women, respectively; they carry slight implications of silliness. "Geezer" or "old geezer" is another very mild term for a male - it's really just a slang word for "man", but tends to be used in situations where you are expressing irritation.
The next layer up would be "bugger" and "bleeder", both of which suggest the person is a nuisance in some way. Then "bastard" or "sod", which suggest they are unpleasant. All four are generally applied only to males. The female equivalent of "bastard" would be "bitch" or "cow", both of which imply spiteful nastiness. A "cat" would make snide remarks about you; a "bitch" would seriously damage you for personal gain; a "cow" would seriously damage you for fun. "Cow" does not imply ugliness or stupidity, as it does in the U.S., unless linked with a modifier - "fat cow", "dozy cow" etc. - "dozy mare" is also heard, but is generally said quite affectionately. For some reason "fat cow" or "dozy cow" do not imply viciousness, even though "cow" on its own does. A "bat" or "old bat" is an annoying older woman. None of these animal terms is applied directly to a male (unless he is a camp gay) but a male may be "catty" or "bitchy".
"Arse" or "arsehole", not "ass". An ass is a donkey or a fool, and nothing else, and is seldom or never heard as an insult on its own, although "silly ass" is quite common for a foolish person ("silly arse" is also heard). But "bum" is your buttocks, not a tramp! It can also mean scrounge, as in "She bummed some cigarettes off him".
A "fag" btw is either a cigarette or a young boy at a boarding school who fetches and carries for an older boy in return for patronage - it does not usually mean a gay man, here, although "faggot" does, and we do have the expression "fag-hag" for a straight woman with lots of gay male friends.
Beware of the word "fanny" - as I understand it, in the U.S. it refers mainly to buttocks, but here it's the female genital mound. The belt-mounted, zipped bag which in the U.S. is called a "fanny pack" is here called a "bum bag".
"Jerk" is sometimes used in Britain, although "prick", "wanker", "tosser", "dick" or "dickhead" are commoner. "Wazzock" and "berk" are heard but are less common. "Jackass" and "jerk-off" are not used.
"Toerag" and "scumbag" are both used of somebody who has behaved despicably, usually in a particularly underhand way - somebody who lies about you to the boss to get you into trouble, for example, or burgles your home while they're supposed to be babysitting.
The alternative spelling "eejit" for "idiot" is sometimes used, especially in Ireland. "Pillock" and "prat" both suggest an idiot who is also uptight, self-righteous and annoying.
A "dog" is an ugly woman. In Scotland a "minger" (to rhyme with "ringer") is an ugly, unappealing or dirty person of either sex.
The word "bloody" (and its slightly old-fashioned variants "bleeding" and "ruddy"), is used to add emphasis - "bloody Hell, what's that bloody fool think he's doing?" - so casually and so commonly that it has lost all ability to shock. "Fucking" is going the same way, as are all variants of the f-word. "Fuck off" used to be shocking, but is now hardly stronger than "Piss off" (in the sense of "go away" rather than "make angry").
"Piss" - or in Scotland "pish" - can also be an expression for something useless or rubbishy - "It wis pure pish, man".
"Sodding" and "buggering" are used as emphatics in the same manner as "bloody" and "fucking", but are rarer and somewhat stronger (and are not seen as homophobic, since few people think about what they mean, any more than they think about "bloody" meaning "By Our Lady"). "Blasted", "damned" and "flaming" are also used, and are all slightly milder than "bloody". These expressions are sometimes doubled up e.g. "bleeding, buggering Hell".
"Frigging" is sometimes heard as a milder alternative to "fucking".
"Shit!" (or its variant "shite", which is more common in Scotland) used as a general expression of surprize or digust has also lost all power to shock, and almost ceased to count as a swear. You can also say "This is a load of shit" (or shite) to mean that something is rubbish. And note that the past-tense of shit, when used as a verb, is usually "shat", as in the expression "shat on from a great height", which means someone or something (often, fate itself) pulled a very nasty trick on you.
Some old-fashioned or consciously refined people still use "Sugar!" as a euphemistic alternative to "shit". However, this useage has so far been corrupted that some people now use it as a double-emphatic, and say "Shit with sugar on".
In Scotland a thing which is rubbish, no good etc. can also be described as "mince", and a person who is useless may be called a "tube" - usually coupled with the Scots "ya" instead of "you", e.g. "Wotcha do that for, ya tube?"
"Cunt" is still shocking, and interestingly although it is a female genital reference it is rarely used of women, and almost never by women. "Twat", which has exactly the same meaning but is slightly less emphatic, is used of and by both sexes. Both words mean that the person is highly unpleasant or a major fool, but they do not have the sexual implications they have in America. A sexually-promiscuous female would be a "slapper", a "scrubber", an "old bag" or a plain "tart". Or a "bike" (everybody rides it) - although that last isn't common.
"Twit", on the other hand, is just a word for somebody silly - often seen in the phrase "pompous twit".
To "cock it up" means to fail badly at doing something. A "cock up" or "balls up" is a confusing, untidy failure at something.
To say something is "balls" or "bollocks" means you think it is nonsense or rubbish.
The specifically Glaswegian term "radge" (and all variant spellings thereof) means a nutter, a crazy person - again, usually coupled with the Scots "ya" for "you".
It is common for British men of all ages to use insults as terms of endearment, addressing close male friends quite amicably as "cunt", "bastard" etc. - e.g., "How are you, yah mangy cunt?" etc.. Women sometimes address men this way as well. Men and women born before about 1975 do not address women in this amiably-insulting fashion; younger than that, the habit is pretty unisex.
Despite all this, some very refined Scots still use nothing stronger than the exclamations "Gosh!" and "Jings!"
Glaswegians, although they can be rough in other ways, often have a very firm belief that one should never make unkind personal remarks about other people's appearance, and do not do so.
I gather that some American's use "bubbies" as a slang, rather coarse term for breasts. The closest British equivalent would be "boobies" or more commonly "boobs", but these are both now rather old-fashioned. The modern equivalent would be "tits".
The expression "dunderhead", which Snape uses in the Harry Potter books and which means an idiot, is extremely rare in most parts of Britain but is common in the Peak District - a group of small towns in north Derbyshire including Buxton, Cromford, Matlock Bath and Leek. I'm guessing it may be current in Nottingham as well, since the guy on whom JK Rowling based much of Snape is from Nottingham. There are some other insults which are very localized, including "radge", as described above, and the south-west English word "emmet", which strictly-speaking means an ant but is used disparagingly of tourists.
The projecting middle-finger gesture and "fuck you" comment, with its implied threat of rape, is uncommon here. The usual equivalent here is "fuck off" (that is, "go away and have sex"), often accompanied by sticking up the first and second fingers, opened into a V in imitation of a woman's spread legs, with the back of the hand towards the target. Sticking up the first two fingers in a V with the palm towards the target is the famous wartime V-for-Victory sign, and the "fuck off" gesture is sometimes also jokingly referred to as "the old V-sign". The hand signal may also be used on its own, and may be made more emphatic by waggling the hand back and forth or up and down. You also occasionally hear the expression "Away and poke yourself".
Social structures Health and wealth:- I gather that banks in the U.S. try to provide some sort of personal service. British banks are run largely by machine and exist to soak the customer with as many charges as possible; few banks provide either private or business customers with an individual bank manager with whom you have any sort of ongoing connection, unless you are very rich. Individual bank staff are usually friendly and helpful but they are often under-trained (seriously: the daughter of a friend of a friend ended up filling in for someone else in a bank job which involved processing millions of pounds, and the bank said "If you end up doing this job for more than a month, we'll train you how to do it"), and frequently are unable to contact their own head office, or any other branch of the same bank, except by fax - which often goes unanswered. The cost of living in Britain, proportionate to wages, is generally high: food, petrol and computer supplies in particular are far more expensive than in the States, and people generally have less disposable income. Housing costs and heating bills are astronomical. Medicines and medical equipment, however, rarely cost above half of what they would be in the U.S., and often much less. An American friend told me that the exact same medicine which she bought here for £5 (about $8.50) would have cost her $50 back home. I was recently able to buy my assistant (who has a twisted spine) a state-of-the-art, professional-quality Tens machine for £44 (about $75), although the going rate is somewhat higher. Prescription medicines cost £6.65 (about $12) (since summer 2006 - up to about 2004 I think it was £6.25, then £6.50), but if you need a lot then for £33.90 (about $60) you can get a pre-paid prescription pass which pays for all your prescription medicines for four months. People who are on certain types of Social Security benefits, or over sixty, or under sixteen (twenty-five, in Wales), or full-time students under nineteen, or suffering from certain types of lifelong illness, get their prescriptions free. Glasses and dental care have to be paid for, but are subsidized for those over sixty or on benefits etc., as for prescriptions, and are in any case not very dear. I recently paid my NHS dentist £32 (about $55) for a complete descaling and the replacement of a large and very awkward lost filling. However, NHS dentists are fairly hard to find and tend to have long queues of patients waiting to join them: private dentists are dearer, though probably not as much so as in the States. "Renew your prescription", not "re-fill your scrip". On the subject of dental care, note that in Britain overlarge front teeth, called "buck teeth", or teeth which splay outwards all round, called "foof teeth", are corrected by braces in childhood - but other than that we tend to let our teeth do their own thing. The fact that Snape's teeth are crooked and yellow is not nearly as remarkable a thing in the U.K. as it would be in the U.S.. If your character is seriously sick, they will be admitted to hospital free of charge, although a bill will be sent to their local Health Board if they have one. The National Health Service is over-stretched and a bit scruffy, and waiting-times for non-urgent appointments tend to be measured in months: but on the whole it does a good job, especially as regards emergencies - teams of superfast paramedics will usually be at a crash scene or heart-attack in a few minutes, and no faffing about asking about medical insurance. Bear in mind however that if you want to have a wizard or a stray elf being admitted to an NHS hospital, admin. staff will quite soon want to know their name, address, date of birth and National Health Service number and the name and address of their G.P., for record-keeping purposes. Note that Snape will certainly have a National Health Service number, since he was born and raised in a Muggle town. There are complaints that certain expensive medicines and treatments are only available in certain areas - this is known as the "post-code lottery", but at least it isn't dependent on wealth or class. The British press is obsessed with the idea that the NHS is overstuffed with administrators, and that in the early to mid Nineties the NHS sacked vast numbers of saintly nurses and replaced then with wicked administrators: this is because at that time large numbers of senior nurses were re-classified as administrators. Public sector pay is nearly always poor compared with the private sector, but despite what the press would have us believe British nurses are moderately well-paid (it took me ten years of seniority as a junior NHS administrator to reach the level nurses start at) and they enjoy considerable independence, responsibility and power. Senior Nurse Practitioners have the same sort of authority as junior to middle-rank doctors. Private hospitals do exist, paid for either directly or through private health insurance. You may get seen faster by going private, and will almost certainly get more luxurious accommodation and nicer food: but it is unwise to go to a private hospital for a major operation and/or if your condition is likely to deteriorate rapidly. Private hospitals rarely have Intensive Care facilities anything like as good as those in large NHS hospitals, so in emergencies private patients have to be ferried by ambulance to an NHS facility, and the delay can be fatal. Hospital theatre gowns here are leaf-green - I gather they're blue in the U.S.. The ward which admits and processes severely injured or sick patients is not called an ER (Emergency Room), as it is in the U.S.. It's called an A&E (Accident and Emergency) Department if it takes accident victims of all levels of severity, or an ARU (Acute Receiving Unit) if it only admits patients whose condition is very serious. One which only processes walking, self-referring accident victims, whose condition is not dangerous, is called a Minor Injuries Unit (but I've never heard it called an MIU). A ward which deals with acutely sick and fragile patients who probably require high-tech. machinery to keep them alive is called an ITU (Intensive Therapy Unit) or ICU (Intensive Care Unit) - or a CCU (Coronary Care Unit) if it specializes in heart-disease. A ward which takes patients whose condition is slightly less precarious, but still more fragile than the norm, is called an HDU (High Dependency Unit). Some common over-the-counter medicines which I gather aren't known in the U.S., or at least not under these names, include Ralgex and Radian B, which are warming, anaesthetic creams which come in a metal tube like a giant toothpaste tube and can be rubbed into the skin to ease muscular and joint pains; Arret and Immodium, which are both small capsules taken by mouth to combat diarrhoea; and Lemsip. Lemsip is a range of powders of dried lemon or blackcurrant, paracetamol and a decongestant, and sometimes caffeine to combat the drowsiness caused by the decongestant. You make it up with hot water and sweeten it to taste - very pleasant and warming, and it soothes away your aches, clears your head and to a limited extent settles your stomach. Beecham's Powder is similar to Lemsip but usually without the flavouring.
Health and wealth:-
I gather that banks in the U.S. try to provide some sort of personal service. British banks are run largely by machine and exist to soak the customer with as many charges as possible; few banks provide either private or business customers with an individual bank manager with whom you have any sort of ongoing connection, unless you are very rich. Individual bank staff are usually friendly and helpful but they are often under-trained (seriously: the daughter of a friend of a friend ended up filling in for someone else in a bank job which involved processing millions of pounds, and the bank said "If you end up doing this job for more than a month, we'll train you how to do it"), and frequently are unable to contact their own head office, or any other branch of the same bank, except by fax - which often goes unanswered.
The cost of living in Britain, proportionate to wages, is generally high: food, petrol and computer supplies in particular are far more expensive than in the States, and people generally have less disposable income. Housing costs and heating bills are astronomical. Medicines and medical equipment, however, rarely cost above half of what they would be in the U.S., and often much less. An American friend told me that the exact same medicine which she bought here for £5 (about $8.50) would have cost her $50 back home. I was recently able to buy my assistant (who has a twisted spine) a state-of-the-art, professional-quality Tens machine for £44 (about $75), although the going rate is somewhat higher.
Prescription medicines cost £6.65 (about $12) (since summer 2006 - up to about 2004 I think it was £6.25, then £6.50), but if you need a lot then for £33.90 (about $60) you can get a pre-paid prescription pass which pays for all your prescription medicines for four months. People who are on certain types of Social Security benefits, or over sixty, or under sixteen (twenty-five, in Wales), or full-time students under nineteen, or suffering from certain types of lifelong illness, get their prescriptions free. Glasses and dental care have to be paid for, but are subsidized for those over sixty or on benefits etc., as for prescriptions, and are in any case not very dear. I recently paid my NHS dentist £32 (about $55) for a complete descaling and the replacement of a large and very awkward lost filling. However, NHS dentists are fairly hard to find and tend to have long queues of patients waiting to join them: private dentists are dearer, though probably not as much so as in the States.
"Renew your prescription", not "re-fill your scrip".
On the subject of dental care, note that in Britain overlarge front teeth, called "buck teeth", or teeth which splay outwards all round, called "foof teeth", are corrected by braces in childhood - but other than that we tend to let our teeth do their own thing. The fact that Snape's teeth are crooked and yellow is not nearly as remarkable a thing in the U.K. as it would be in the U.S..
If your character is seriously sick, they will be admitted to hospital free of charge, although a bill will be sent to their local Health Board if they have one. The National Health Service is over-stretched and a bit scruffy, and waiting-times for non-urgent appointments tend to be measured in months: but on the whole it does a good job, especially as regards emergencies - teams of superfast paramedics will usually be at a crash scene or heart-attack in a few minutes, and no faffing about asking about medical insurance. Bear in mind however that if you want to have a wizard or a stray elf being admitted to an NHS hospital, admin. staff will quite soon want to know their name, address, date of birth and National Health Service number and the name and address of their G.P., for record-keeping purposes. Note that Snape will certainly have a National Health Service number, since he was born and raised in a Muggle town.
There are complaints that certain expensive medicines and treatments are only available in certain areas - this is known as the "post-code lottery", but at least it isn't dependent on wealth or class.
The British press is obsessed with the idea that the NHS is overstuffed with administrators, and that in the early to mid Nineties the NHS sacked vast numbers of saintly nurses and replaced then with wicked administrators: this is because at that time large numbers of senior nurses were re-classified as administrators. Public sector pay is nearly always poor compared with the private sector, but despite what the press would have us believe British nurses are moderately well-paid (it took me ten years of seniority as a junior NHS administrator to reach the level nurses start at) and they enjoy considerable independence, responsibility and power. Senior Nurse Practitioners have the same sort of authority as junior to middle-rank doctors.
Private hospitals do exist, paid for either directly or through private health insurance. You may get seen faster by going private, and will almost certainly get more luxurious accommodation and nicer food: but it is unwise to go to a private hospital for a major operation and/or if your condition is likely to deteriorate rapidly. Private hospitals rarely have Intensive Care facilities anything like as good as those in large NHS hospitals, so in emergencies private patients have to be ferried by ambulance to an NHS facility, and the delay can be fatal.
Hospital theatre gowns here are leaf-green - I gather they're blue in the U.S..
The ward which admits and processes severely injured or sick patients is not called an ER (Emergency Room), as it is in the U.S.. It's called an A&E (Accident and Emergency) Department if it takes accident victims of all levels of severity, or an ARU (Acute Receiving Unit) if it only admits patients whose condition is very serious. One which only processes walking, self-referring accident victims, whose condition is not dangerous, is called a Minor Injuries Unit (but I've never heard it called an MIU).
A ward which deals with acutely sick and fragile patients who probably require high-tech. machinery to keep them alive is called an ITU (Intensive Therapy Unit) or ICU (Intensive Care Unit) - or a CCU (Coronary Care Unit) if it specializes in heart-disease. A ward which takes patients whose condition is slightly less precarious, but still more fragile than the norm, is called an HDU (High Dependency Unit).
Some common over-the-counter medicines which I gather aren't known in the U.S., or at least not under these names, include Ralgex and Radian B, which are warming, anaesthetic creams which come in a metal tube like a giant toothpaste tube and can be rubbed into the skin to ease muscular and joint pains; Arret and Immodium, which are both small capsules taken by mouth to combat diarrhoea; and Lemsip. Lemsip is a range of powders of dried lemon or blackcurrant, paracetamol and a decongestant, and sometimes caffeine to combat the drowsiness caused by the decongestant. You make it up with hot water and sweeten it to taste - very pleasant and warming, and it soothes away your aches, clears your head and to a limited extent settles your stomach. Beecham's Powder is similar to Lemsip but usually without the flavouring.
Psychiatry:-
British psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors do not, on the whole, invent new conditions and pathologize normal behaviours in the way so beloved of American practitioners, in order to keep patients in therapy. British mental health workers are usually paid a flat rate per year, or by the clinic, not per patient, so extra patients just mean extra work for no extra money. We in fact sometimes have the reverse problem, whereby patients are pronounced cured and shoved back out into the world before they are ready, to reduce the therapist's workload.
In particular, the Care in the Community fad in the Eighties meant that many psychiatric hospitals were closed down and patients were pushed back into the general community, which it was genuinely believed would be better for them. Unfortunately nothing like enough resources were put into supporting them once they were in the community, and many ended up homeless and sleeping rough
Places in psychiatric care are still in very short supply, and there have been a number of tragedies when violent or suicidal patients were left in the community because no bed was available for them. Consigning a violent or suicidal patient to psychiatric in-patient care without their consent, for their own or others' protection, is known as "Sectioning" them. This is a reference to some article of the Mental Health Act.
Welfare:-
British Social Services are far from perfect, but they do exist and they do try. Charities and churches also distribute food to the homeless, in fixed cafeteria called "soup-kitchens" (although the food on offer is more likely to be surplus sandwiches donated by a local baker) or from mobile vans. If you want your character to be starving on the streets, or neglected and dying from some awful disease, you need to think up a plausible reason why they haven't simply been picked up by Social Services. Anybody living rough is certainly likely to have a Social Services Case Worker trying to get them a flat, and your character will be in receipt of fortnightly benefit payments, although processing their initial claim may take several weeks.
There are quite a lot of beds provided for the homeless in special hostels, but many people prefer to sleep rough because Britain has a major drugs-problem and hostels tend to be full of junkies and dealers and the displaced mentally-ill, and there are rarely enough staff on-site to keep order. Homeless people who can raise enough money, often by begging or by selling The Big Issue, are more likely to go into a cheap backpackers' hostel than into a shelter for the homeless.
Bear in mind that the Welfare State isn't "charity" - it's a compulsory, government-owned insurance firm which is, on the dow
