British English editing for Yanks

I seem to be under the impression that American English is being 'globalised' because American multi-national companies use AE in whatever nominally English speaking country they operate in. From fast food outlets to whatever. Plus the inundation of American situated tv series and Hollywood films...

Or is that me being paranoid?
 
StuartBurchell said:
American multi-national companies use AE in whatever nominally English speaking country they operate in.
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Ah the "Cultural Imperialism". I've had fun with that in my SF.
It's not entirely true at all. Very many do make an attempt at "Localisation".
It's people and the smaller companies doing it. TV/Cinema doesn't have much text.
People setting up Windows, Mac, Linux often have default settings on Region/Language/Dictionaries, thus getting American rather than British /South African/Australian spelling.

Jo Zebedee said:
We still spake broad Norn Iron
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Pass me the Tawal to wipe my keyboard!

(Towel)
 
Another American phrase is 'in back of' which I came across years ago in Stephen King and other US writers' works and which in BE would be 'out the back'.
 
I almost caused apoplexy on one US site by referring to the SNP logo as, "The Clootie Dumpling," - they had absolutely no idea what I meant.

What they'd make of;

With nothing to do for the next ten minutes, I bummed a fag and sat on a nearby wall.":ROFLMAO:
 
Not heard of cludgies (is Tod/tod with or without a capital? Heard it said often, but never written down).

It's grotty today :(

Ace, in a similar thread elsewhere I cited the 'bummed a fag' example. The Americans were quite bamboozled.

[For those unaware, fag = cigarette, bum = borrow/cadge].
 
J Riff said:
And I just ran into 'cludgies' and 'off on me Tod,' which are two I hadn't seen before.
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In case you aren't aware, and as it hasn't been explained above, 'on me tod' just means 'on my own', i.e alone.
 
Both from 2000 A.D. comics. Cludgies seemed to be the warshroom... and on me Tod was self-evident because of the usage. There may be more. *
 
It's from Nemesis the Warlock, a really gungho SFF series... the robot cleaning the 'cludgies' has a few complaints.
 
According to my deep delvings into the writings of PG Wodehouse, I understand the Brit (archaic?) term "Rotter" to refer to a shiftless person who fails to be productive. A rotter may be careless, negligent, lack empathy or be deliberately deceptive.

Thus I found it to be amusing that the term had resurfaced among the ca thirty-year-old denizens of the Emerald Triangle; half a globe,and decades away.

A "Rotter" is someone who smokes so much Marijuana that they can't remember what they were supposed to be doing. Thus, a failure to perform a promise might elicit, "You are such a Rotter."

"I am so rotted" might mean "I am so stoned that I can't think," or "How could I have forgotten?"

"I rotted" is an apology for forgetting an appointment.

A person who learns to use "Rot" as an excuse to make promises that he has no intentions of fulfilling is definitely a Rotter, by anyone's definition.
 
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Eat Shoots and Leaves is one of the few UK / British books not edited to be American for the American edition.
Don't ask me where the commas go. The book will explain it. Some people, esp. Americans, think it's too prescriptive.
 
Brian Turner said:
You also have to be careful with some expressions.

For example, in ordinary conversation, I might say "I walked into the empty room and sat at the table."

However, so far as I understand it, an American audience understands "sat" as "was seated (by someone)".
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That's not correct. I read that sentence as saying that you walked into an empty room and sat at the table. Nobody else was involved.

We'd say this if someone seated you: "I walked into an empty room, and then suddenly a ghost appeared and sat me at the table."

I think the confusion is with "we were seated at the table." That could mean two things - a waitress seated you, or you just "were seated there" - as in, you hadn't immediately sat down; you'd been sitting for a period of time.
 
Vertigo said:
I know Gaiman produced two versions of Neverwhere, in which he not only changed spelling and terminology (by no means always correctly incidentally) but he also actually added additional material to explain, for example, aspects of London that he considered all Brits would be familiar with but Americans wouldn't.

I would say your biggest problem is always going to be slang. Yes I could reel off loads of words used differently as has already been done here (pants and suspenders haven't been mentioned yet which are two that always make me smile :)) but slang is always going to be a problem; not only the differences (fanny versus arse (not ass!) or bum) but also I suspect it is much easier to find yourself using slang that in the other country is universally considered dated.
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Authors do this a lot, actually.

See for example, "Belgium" being a euphemism for "f*ck" in The Hitchhiker's Guide. Honestly, I think Belgium made for a much funnier joke. There were also BE vs AE versions of Harry Potter.
 
thaddeus6th said:
The pants reminds me of Back To The Future. As a child, I thought the scene where his 'pants' have been taken off by the girl who turns out to be his mother was dirtier than it actually was.
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See also the BE vs AE confusion over "Fanny."
 
The sat thing and the was sat are typically this way as I recall from my reading.

I might read the British author::

He was sat at the table.

And what they would, in all likelihood, mean is that he was sitting at the table already and continuing to do so; but in my twisted American English I would immediately picture someone taking him to the table and forcing him to sit or perhaps just leading him there to sit. Worst case scenario; he was a bad boy and he was sat in the corner.

So it only has the mentioned affect when the two words are used together 'was sat' and not when sat is used alone.
He sat at the table is more universally accepted as actually sitting at the table.

Either way we are more used to seeing that he was sitting.

Don't get me started on he was stood though.
 
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