My bad...

Who knew that after all these years of living in England I can still make basic British-to-American translation mistakes. A good example happened this morning when the fine people at my veterinary surgery thought I was calling to have my dog shot.

In America we say shots instead of jabs, we say throw pillows instead of scatter cushions, and are rather fond of the term ‘bite me’. So maybe America is a bit more violent with its shots for infants and throwing of pillows but I still prefer to say pet instead of stroke. I don’t think I’ll ever get use to the fact that saying “You can pet my dog, he’s friendly.’ is thought of as odd.

I made apparently a bit of a confusion a few weeks ago when I was sick – you see what I said was “I’m sick” and then was confused as to why people would tell me “oh, throwing-up is horrible”. I had no idea that ‘sick’ in England means only that you are vomiting – I just meant I was ill with a cold. Being ill and my brain on slow mode this took me a few weeks to figure out that I was using the wrong phrase and lead to people thinking I was pregnant as I kept on saying how constantly sick I was. I must admit it does shed a new distressing light onto the phrase of someone being ‘sick in the head’.