British Words 'n' Signs 'n' Stuff

Since I've gotten here, I've noticed some funny stuff, like the verbal idiosyncrasies of what seems like an entire nation. The first one I noticed before I even got over here, when I was on the phone with the guy who was guiding me through the visa process. I don't remember the exact content of his sentence, but he included the word "obvious" into it, when in fact what he was saying wasn't very obvious at all. It was the whole reason I was calling in the first place, which was to confirm that what I was about to send in as supplementary materials to my application was correct, since the appropriate websites in the US and UK are confusing and contradictory. Once I got here, I noticed this little habit in a lot of other people, too--marking obscure observations as obvious. I find it quite condescending and just wrong.

One that happens even more often, though, is marking things as literal in order to intensify an expression. Very occasionally, it so happens that the speaker says something literally--or LI'trally, as they say it here--but usually if you give the slightest second thought to what was said, it turns out to be fantastically incorrect. For example, "When she told me that, my head LI'trally exploded!" I complained about this to Ed recently, and then I started saying it to him in the way that his folk say it, and he HATES it. He LI'trally hates it. He told me yesterday he mentioned these two items to his coworkers (colleagues) and now everybody is super guilty when they say it. And well they should be, I said.

Of course, neither of these would be that big of a deal if the British weren't so high and mighty about the alleged "purity" of British English and how it's AMERICANS who are butchering the language. Just yesterday I was reading a book for my dissertation that mentioned a British author who got all pissed at Americans for changing the pronunciation from CONtroversy to conTROVersy, and somehow this got published in a work of his, when of course what the real story there is (at least in the vast majority of cases, presumably) that Americans not only don't pronounce it like that, but may have never heard that pronunciation. It's the British who have recently made that change, but because it's new, it's associated with American linguistic innovation, and therefore rejected.

On a lighter note, when I first got here, I would sometimes see this sign called DIVERSION, and my first thought would be, aren't diversions supposed to be secret in their nature? But then of course (I mean, obviously) I realized that DIVERSION meant DETOUR. Haha.

Another funny sign is HEAVY PLANT CROSSING, which took a long time of wondering about and Ed having to tell me twice what it meant before it stayed in my mind. What I was picturing initially was Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors dragging his giant pot across the street, with a little potbelly stem from drinking too much warm lager. What HEAVY PLANT really refers to is what we'd probably call heavy machinery--the kind on wheels. How disappointing.

One final thing to mention today is Hugh Grant. When I first got here, for some reason it felt like someone would talk about Hugh Grant pretty much every day. I think maybe it was because I was a new arrival, and they were all expressing their expectations that I would think they would all be exactly the same as him. It occurred to me that in assuming that all Americans are obsessed with Hugh Grant, and Brits not liking that, because they think he's a twat (which rhymes with brat in these parts), Hugh Grant has become an obsession of the British. Suckaaaas.