Say What?!

A few days before Christmas my husband received an invite to attend a movie with a friend, in the email he requested that he not be left "Billy no mates" two days before Christmas. Now deductive reasoning allowed me to conclude that he was asking not to be left alone in the theater on Christmas Eve Eve but it was a blatant reminder of how often I am left feeling a little clueless when being spoken to here. My daughter has had similar issues and recently told me of a school mate that referred to being "On her Larry", meaning of course on her own. Billy, Larry, why are the men in this country always so lonely? I am left so often feeling just a bit dim as I have to either ask a person several times to repeat themselves until I finally defeated tell them I don't know what they mean, or I have to pause for much longer than is comfortable while I work out in my head the correct response. Once they see the glazed look of someone slightly slow on the uptake cross your eyes they will slow down and try to use small words you are likely to understand, although this does very little to help you feel clever especially when they end the sentence with, "Now-Where-Are-You-From?". They insist that we in fact speak the same language but I find myself constantly asking, eh? Tea instead of dinner, pudding instead of dessert, lorries rather than trucks, mate not friends, crisps in place of chips because of course chips are what I would call fries. My very Canadian brain still answers their standard greeting of, "Hiya, all alright there?" with "fine" which I know is wrong but I am still very much expecting "Hi, How are you?".  When someone tells me they are chuffed my knee jerk response is to ask what is wrong, chuffed sounds like an annoyed word to me, it's not. Someone is chuffed when things are going smoothly, in fact my husband tells me that his coworkers are 'chuffed as nuts' when things work and run well on a projects. I have never really thought of a nut as being happy or sad but on the other hand we Canadians use nuts to refer to someone who's gone a bit crazy. Perhaps it is some strange mash up of the two idioms and what it means is that the speaker is as happy as a person who has lost their mind?

Don't get me wrong, so much of the slang and differences in our languages I find charming. There is something so much more welcoming about a sales clerk leaning over the till and calls out, "can I help?", rather than the much more aggressive sounding "Next" we would use across the pond. I still can't help but smile when I hear someone ask, 'Are you having a laugh?'. Seems more fun to say than 'are you joking?'. I have adopted the extremely common 'cheers' but still can't shake the Canadian habit of using thanks as well and end up mashing the two together in quick succession which probably leaves those helping me with a sense that I am very very grateful. So I guess my point is that there is absolutely no doobt aboot it, I am Canadian, eh?! On the other hand I am chuffed as nuts to be here and I am most definitely not having a laugh.

Happy New Years Everyone!