2005-02-08

The Process of Assimilation

…continues apace. Along with my accent, my vocabulary is becoming Anglicized, due in part to a desire to be understood and in part to blatant Anglophilia. In addition to the expected ‘flat’, ‘lift’, ‘crisps’, ‘queue’ and so forth, I find my speech peppered with the following expressions:

Mate: The standard equivalent to ‘dude’ or ‘friend’. “Alright mate?” means “Can I help you?” (Correctly pronounced by dropping the Ts.)

Love: “Thanks ever so much, my love” – once said to me by a bus driver. Everybody is everybody’s ‘love’ in this country! What a lovely bunch! Very warm and affectionate, when they’re not drunkenly punching bashing each other’s faces to mush!

Trolley: Instead of ‘shopping cart’. I don’t know why I find the word ‘trolley’ funny, but I do. ‘Off your trolley’ means ‘drunk’. TROLLEY!

Piece of piss: Typically scatological variant of ‘piece of cake’. As in: “This job is a piece of piss.” How or why one might come across a ‘piece’ of piss is, as yet, a mystery to me.

Taking the piss: It’s like a country of urinologists! In this case, the excreta in question indicates that one is ‘having someone on’.

Arseholed: Moving along a few inches from piss territory – means ‘drunk’, of course, along with ‘wankered’, ‘bolloxed’ and the classic ‘pissed’. Why the genital fixation in conjunction with inebriation? We can only speculate.

Trainers: Makes more sense than ‘sneakers’, doesn’t it?

Jumper: Makes less sense than ‘sweater’, but is more fun to say.

I’m also very proud of my budding English elitism, by way of accent snobbery. These days, when I hear someone choke up an unintelligible string of glottal stops, instead of thinking “Oh, what a charming regional dialect,” as I once would have done, I think “Fucking Chav.”