It's only words

The more contact I have with Americans and the more I plan this trip the more I realise I am going to have language difficulties and for that reason I have found myself an English/American dictionary. The potential pitfalls are just too great to take the risk of travelling to the States (I've been told they only call it America in a formal sense!) unarmed with the correct words and phrases as you will see.

Through the wonderful media of films and television there are plenty of words that we can translate automatically, thus a tap becomes a faucet, pavement is a sidewalk, a nappy is a diaper and, more recently, we have all learned that our A&E is their ER. But I have discovered that my previous job before becoming a train driver - sorry, train engineer - would be heard as Laurie Driver and therefore presumably a man's name. There is not one lorry in the USofA just thousands of trucks, including semis, eighteen wheelers or, to us Brits, artics.

Two paragraphs in and we're already starting to drift apart in a linguisitc sense. Food is a perilous subject to get into and I am starting to feel I would do well to buy food from a supermarket (grocery store) just because I can pick it up without calling it by the wrong name. I mean, our jam is jelly to the Americans. I could live with that if it wasn't for our jelly becoming their jell-o. Say what! An iced lolly is a popsicle - how cute - spring onions become scallions, mange touts are snow peas, chips, as we all know are fries to Americans but, and I cannot believe I am saying this, they have absolutely no equivalent of chip butties. The world's best ever comfort food and they have no knowledge it exists. If I wasn't so selfish I'd spend the whole of my fortnight out there setting up a stall in as many towns as possible and handing out "fries" between two slices of white bread possibly with tomato ketchup (I've seen that written as catsup - can that be right??). Any Britons living in the States really ought to start converting the locals - I'm afraid to use the word "natives" here - to chip butties as a matter of some priority, really they should.

The English can't afford to be smug about the language differences, a lot of the American equivalents sound more logical than the words we use. Fish sticks make a lot more sense than fish fingers, ante natal sounds all wrong compared to pre-natal (and yet they use antebellum to mean before the Civil War), I can understand them preferring dead end to cul-de-sac and, bless them, they ignore our word bungalow and replace it with stunningly self-explanatory single storey house.

Of the words I've listed so far most, if not all, would be met by a deep frown, possibly a "Huh?", but no harm would be done. But for some reason words that begin with the letter f provide a potential minefield out there. Smokers, I implore you, do not use the word fag in reference to your habit, nor fag end! In some places you will be liable to some very strange propositions, in others you might well be run out of town. And Americans do not have fairy cakes or fairy lights. In fact the word fairy might well be best removed from your vocabulary completely for the duration of your visit. One more f word which can be fraught is fanny which is a couple of inches further rearward in America than the part referred to in the UK, hence our bum bag is their fanny pack. I dread to think what you'd end up with if you asked for a fanny pack in a British store . . .

One thing has to be said for the American language, though. They manage to come up with some excellent words which are sadly missing from our version of English. What we call potholing or caving they call spelunking. How great is that? That sounds ten times more fun to do. In my dictionary Swede - and I have no idea whether that is the vegetable or a Scandinavian person - is a ratabaga. A hair slide is, it seems, a barette - how did they arrive at that?

They don't have the monopoly on strange words by any means, try explaining to an American why we call it a "dustcart"!

Lastly our balaclava is their ski mask. It kinda begs the question do they think the Battle of Balaclava was a downhill slalom?

I think my approach will be to keep schtum, nods as good as a wink to a blind horse, mum's the word, say no more, know what I mean!